Dear Kobe & Magic, Thank you.
Dear Kobe and Magic, thank you for teaching me to be a Team Player at Microsoft
Growing up in Los Angeles, I was fortunate enough to witness two dynasties in NBA Basketball. I call them the ‘Magic’ and ‘Kobe’ dynasties. They were a period of years in which these two basketball legends led their teams to dominate the NBA. I remember, Magic usually led or was at the top of the NBA statistics in ‘Assists’ which are defined as the measurement of how many times a player passes the ball to a teammate that converts into a score. Both of these players, if they wanted to, and sometimes they would, could turn into scoring machines, but usually did not. They instead chose to lift the rest of their team to win.
Kobe Bryant was once quoted as saying:
“I'll do whatever it takes to win games, whether it's sitting on a bench, waving a towel, handing a cup of water to a teammate, or hitting the game-winning shot.”
That quote always resonated with me and I’ll never forget when I saw it in action during my first weeks at Microsoft. I was asked to go onsite and help a customer who was experiencing a SharePoint issue I, quite frankly, had never seen before. Lucky for me, I had someone on my team who was widely known as a SharePoint Support superstar. He had spent 12 years as a support engineer and had recently transition to the same position I was, a Premier Field Engineer. Support Engineers work break/fix issues all day every day. So now I had two forms of anxiety: 1) How was I going to help the customer? 2) Would this person help me?
I finally, but reluctantly, asked for help. He broke down what he thought may be the issue and turned out he was spot on. I went on site, I resolved the issue with the customer and in turn, gained confidence and gained the trust of my customer.
Looking back, and now, I am never reluctant to admit I do not know something and ask for help because of the welcoming culture here at Microsoft. That is the only way I have survived and remained relevant at Microsoft. Our CEO Satya Nadella said "Don't be a know-it-all; be a learn-it-all."
So now I will say…
“I’ll do whatever it takes to lift the team, whether its backing up a colleague while they are away, telling their managers about how they helped me, guiding them to the best resource to resolve their issue, or hitting the game-winning shot.”