In the fall of 2021, I found myself burnt out both professionally and personally. I was ready for a change. At NCR I was proud of what our team had accomplished - we built a group of over seventy people across four timezones, leading the journey to the cloud, and adopting better incident response and observability. The pandemic, however, had taken a great toll on me and my family. I spent much of it working long hours making sure restaurants could continue to conduct business and survive, at the expense of my personal health and the health of my family.

So it was quite fortunate that I was introduced to Splunk, a software company that had a great product, with smart people who really cared about doing things the right way. There was a Senior Engineering Manager position that was open there, which was a step back title-wise from my Executive Director role at NCR, but the opportunity to work at a high growth tech company with top talent intrigued me. I spoke to multiple people during that process who talked about how easy the promotion process was and that I didn’t need to worry. So I jumped in.

Almost three years later, I was still a Senior Manager. What happened? Well, I chalk a lot of it up to mistakes I made in the onboarding process.

Define Success

In retrospect, the first big mistake I made was that I took what I heard in the interview and what people told me as the criteria for success in my company. Splunk seemed to me to be very culture-driven (and to its credit helped me numerous times put my family first as I came out of my burnout from my previous role), and so I doubled down on ensuring that my burnt-out initial team was healthy and thriving. I also made it clear that I wanted to be on that path for promotion to ensure that we were all on the same page.

What I should have done was ask: who has gone from Senior Manager to Director in the last 12 months, and what were the things that they did that got them there? What kinds of impact did they have? If I would have asked those questions I would have seen that I was nowhere near a position that would have warranted a Director title at Splunk. We all later admitted that to each other but only after about a year of working hard toward something that didn’t fit my goals.

So when people onboard, I recommend to define success based on actual facts rather than what people say. The U.S. culture especially is very positive and encouraging, and one has to be intentional about getting to the real facts.

Limited Window

The second big mistake I made was that I had a limited window for onboarding to certain responsibilities and I didn’t respect the size of that window. After a year of my first role owning the metrics for Splunk’s Enterprise Cloud, leadership expanded my role to include their entire logs solution, and in addition another observability-oriented team. This was coming off an unexpected layoff in February 2023 and what, in retrospect, was the beginning of Splunk’s journey to acquisition by Cisco.

In the book The First 90 Days they talk about as a leader spending the first 30-60 days listening then really providing your opinion to a team. But I didn't follow this advice and was in the mentality that I had a limited time to make a good impression, and therefore aggressively sought to showcase my leadership within the first few weeks. The third observability-oriented team had ambitious, smart people on it, and, without first establishing a foundation of trust with them, I shared with them candidly that I thought they were off track of an important project. This, to me, was all in the spirit of getting them to where they wanted to go, but they took it differently.

In my enthusiasm to quickly show the company what I was capable of, I didn’t respect Splunk’s culture that change is to be done free of drama and led by technical leadership primarily. That sent senior leadership the signal that I wasn’t doing the basics as a manager, which disqualified me from being on a director track.

At NCR the culture was different; leaders were rewarded for being disruptive in this way. I didn't take the time to let the subtle cultural differences sink in, and my rush to create results created the exact opposite of that in the eyes of my own leadership.

What took me about a month to do in this whole experience in April 2023, took me another year to undo. I didn't truly get back onto the promotion track until May 2024 when I took on a several team organization of 40-50 people after a lot of work building back trust.

Onboarding is such a pivotal time. You have a short time to lay the concrete, and then it settles. After that, it will take heavy construction to undo it, not impossible, just very difficult. So be intentional about it, be calm through it, and I, as I say above, notice what people are doing more than what they are saying.

Align Stakeholders

A third mistake I made onboarding to my position at Splunk was with stakeholder alignment. Yes, I found early advocates for my work and people who were hungry for change. In my initial position, my team was burnt out with alert fatigue, and we systematically worked through that. In my second role as the head of Observability for Splunk Enterprise Cloud, there were stakeholders throughout the company who needed more out of our internal Splunk instance, and we were able deliver that with better processes and operations. I am especially proud of building a better relationship with our GovCloud team who wanted more out of our products in those environments.

I neglected, however, to educate my own leadership about what I was doing in a systematic way. And so in the same quarter that I was enacting such positive change for Splunk’s observability story in the cloud, the conflict that I shared with the team above is what got my Sr. Director’s attention. This, in his mind, is what settled in the concrete.

While this made me angry at the time, it really was my fault. I had failed to align with my own Sr. Director, educate him early and often about what I was doing and what I needed help on, and seek to understand what he defined as success. If I would have done that, I would have known that my role was to lower the drama and create a solid foundation upon which other changes could be made in his organization. I didn’t know that because I didn’t have a process for aligning with him.

Another Director at Splunk told me his process: he wrote down everything good that his teams did in a doc, and then every Friday sent that out on Slack celebrating their achievements. Implied in the whole exercise was "and I am leading this group of people", but he never said that because he didn't need to. This person got promoted to Sr. Director. He had a process that he regularly followed to a T that was borne out of a deep understanding of the culture around him.

Conclusion

Three years after I started at Splunk, I had grown tremendously but struggled to get the promotion I had started out wanting. In retrospect, I should have never put Getting Promoted on my priority list, but instead I should have focused on the fundamentals of onboarding to my position.

As Annie and I discussed that more over the dinner table in numerous frustrating conversations, we realized that the industry was missing a tool that could really help people positions like mine. We have spent the last year or so developing that tool and are delighted to see it help people who are onboarding to new roles. If that’s you too, we’d love for you to sign up for our 45-day free trial and start making your onboarding journey help you reach your goals.