E53: How Great Leaders Are Built, Not Born

Who were you before you were in the workforce? Who were you before an authority figure, such as a leader, global leader, or a local leader, had an opinion about your core strengths, what you were capable of? So, when you actually go back and you look at who you were before you were even in the workforce, you start to find the, I guess, the things that light you up and the things that actually make you excelled. So I did a little bit of research as part of my own journey of writing this professional arc, and there's 2 pieces of research, it's like psychological research, that I think is worthwhile mentioning that was super, super impactful for me. One of them is the Pygmalion effect, and the Pygmalion effect is this whole study that talks about that if you consistently label somebody, even as a child, You consistently label that person as, you know, you're so amazing, you're so smart, keep going. That motivates that human, that individual, and they tend to become that person. The same way, that same effect happens when you label somebody as the naughty kid, the child who's sporty. Oh, you're so brilliant at sport.

Welcome to the High Performance Sales Leader Podcast, and my guest today is Wendy Comadina. Wendy is a 3-time VP and has worked for some incredible companies like Amazon, Cloudflare, Cisco, and she is the chief strategist and founder at TechMeForward, which has been a passion project to help others move forward in the industry with their leadership skills. So today I'm gonna talk to her about how leaders are not born, they have built. Wendy, thank you so much for joining me.

Oh, it's so exciting to be here and listening to my intro. Oh my gosh, I've done so much, but at the same time, I feel like I just know so little. So I'm actually really honored to be invited to your podcast and really thrilled to be chatting to you, Pri.

Fantastic. Thank you so much. Well, I know a number of leaders. I was actually at CyberCon, and I was talking to them, and they said, you've got to get Wendy on your podcast. So thank you for making the time. Because it definitely helps a lot of people. I meet people through the year who've seen someone, someone said something that was useful. So, thank you.

You know, how strange is that? I was at CyberCon. I was in Melbourne the entire week. I cannot believe that I didn't walk past you and we didn't get a chance to meet face-to-face. So, we'll definitely make sure we coordinate better next time.

Absolutely. All right. Well, now, you started Tech Me Forward. Tell me a little bit about what inspired you to do that. And I can see you've got an amazing website. You've run sessions. You've had significant impact. Tell me a little bit more about it.

Oh, gosh. Where do I start? I think one of the things that I don't want to start with— so I want to talk about where it's at now. I want to start with what it was meant to be. Because a good friend of mine who was a lawyer, Julianne, super, super great friend. She left her career as a lawyer and started a few different businesses. And she gave me some really great advice. She said, whatever you think you're going to be doing, it will evolve and it will evolve based on feedback from clients, customers, from your audience. So I think that's good advice for not just for myself, but probably And hopefully for your listeners. So, Tech Me Forward was born because when I joined, I've been in the tech sector for 27 years, but about maybe about 5 years ago, I joined a cybersecurity company. And although it was, you know, in the tech sector, cybersecurity is a niche, and it was a niche where I just felt extremely uncomfortable. And I thought, gosh, I have to reinvent myself again. I have to learn. New acronyms, a new talk track. I just felt like I needed to upskill myself. So Tech Me Forward was initially born of this idea that I wanted to create a community to build cybersecurity awareness. And the minute I started doing it, it just felt unnatural. It just felt like, actually, that's not what I wanna do. I think I thought I wanted to do that. Who am I to teach other people cyber awareness. I just felt like fraud. So it started off as a bit of a non-for-profit, like a side hustle. And I put it on ice for a few months to stop and think about what is it that I'm trying to achieve here? And what I realized is I needed to step back and think about what am I good at? When people think of me, when people think of Wendy, what do they see? You know, what is my brand? What am I good at and what can I bring? to the industry, to clients, to people. And I realized at the time that what I'm really good at is I'm very good at strategy, helping global companies, tech companies in particular, expand across Asia Pacific. So, it evolved to become consulting, strategy, planning, execution to help global tech companies expand into Asia Pacific. So, one of the clients who I can name because I've got their permission to talk about them, publicly is a company called Whitehawk. So, cybersecurity company based out of Washington, D.C. They're listed on the ASX, and they contacted me and said, hey, look, Wendy, we've heard a lot about you. We'd really love your help to expand our footprint in Australia and New Zealand specifically, and then potentially out into other parts of Asia. So, it started to morph. It started to morph. And so, as time has carried on, It's now morphed into individual leaders saying, how did you become a VP? I wanna know how you did that. How do I build a go-to-market strategy? And I don't want others to know that I don't know how to do it. So the summary of answering your question is it has continued to evolve. And what it is today is I still do the consulting and strategy around how to break into Asia Pacific. It's my core value and what I know how to do best. But at the same time, I've got a new demand from senior leaders who are either first-time leaders or have been directors for a long time. They want to know how to become an MD or a VP. And they're asking me questions like, how do I go from being, you know, the channel leader or the BDR leader and be across the entire business?

That's good. That's amazing. And I think that most importantly, you said something really interesting, is that whether you call it humility or imposter syndrome, I think every time people start a new arc in their career, maybe there's also a place because it really sets you up to be open, to be coachable, to learning. Because if you come with the other way around. Sometimes overconfidence can come across as arrogance and not willing to learn. So what would you say to somebody who is wanting to go to the next level, whether it's an account executive who wants to be a sales leader, a sales leader who wants to be a VP, MD, or even a second-line leader? What are some of the things that you need in terms of working on yourself at step 1 before you do something else?

Yeah, I'm gonna answer your question in 2 parts. The first one is I'm gonna just address something that you said about the humility and, and all of that and imposter syndrome. Um, I still have it. I still never feel like I have enough information, knowledge, and I've had one particular mentor say to me, Wendy, you are the most confident, not confident person I've ever met. And I think that's probably a good description of me. I can't say that it's a good description of others. Because I do have a lot of confidence, you know, in putting myself out there, but at the same time, I always feel like I'm just so far behind in what I need to know. So I think that's actually really important for people to be comfortable knowing that you're never gonna know it all.

Yeah.

In terms of answering your core question, you said the word arc there. So As I evolved Tech Me Forward from focusing predominantly on helping global tech companies expand into Asia Pacific, this kind of parallel demand started emerging that I resisted for a little while, if I'm very honest. People kept saying to me, you should be a coach. I'm like, who am I to be a coach? I don't know anything. You know, I'm like, oh, you should be a coach. Like, I want you to coach me. And I'd get people reaching out to me asking me for time to, you know, for a chat, for a coffee. And interestingly, I only saw myself as a coach for other females, but the most interesting thing is it's actually mostly men that come to me. And I realized there was a bit of a gap. The gap was that we have a lot of women in tech communities, a lot of communities to support women, you know, having, you know, diverse workforces, finding their path into leadership. But then I realized that the pattern and the gap in the market were men who were in their first-time leadership roles or who had risen up to become VPs or MDs, but they were really struggling to gain the support and credibility of their peer leadership because they were missing the fundamental— Mm-hmm. I guess, core component of building a go-to-market strategy, getting that team culture moving in the same direction, how to performance manage when you've got a team of people who are doing okay, one or two top performers, and then a few that are, I guess, dragging the entire team down from a performance perspective. So that gap, I filled it with something that I like to call the professional arc. And the reason I created the professional arc was because when I started observing what the actual gap was, and then I started looking at other coaches and mentors, there's a lot of coaches and mentors out in the market. There's tons. You type in the word mentor, coach on Instagram, LinkedIn, you'll get thousands of pages of people. But when I started looking into it, a lot of those coaches and mentors have actually never been managing directors, VPs, directors, people leaders themselves. In fact, a lot of them are coaches who've done coaching courses. And I sat there and I thought, look, I don't want to disregard the learnings that they have, but I come from a place of I've done the work myself. Like, I know what it's like to be discredited, what it's like to work my butt off and feel like I'm doing something that, you know, building a strategy and then realizing it's not landing, it's not delivering results. I've actually done the work. I've failed myself. I've been in the corner crying many times and woken up at 3:00 AM going, I'm lost. So all of those things are only things that another leader who has experienced that would know. So I decided to create this professional arc. And so the professional arc is 4 components and it's super intentional. You know, the professional arc starts on what most people don't focus on, which is work on yourself first. So in fact, I was doing a coffee professional arc one yesterday morning before I started work and The professional arc goes through step 1, which is know yourself. And who were you before you were in the workforce? Who were you before an authority figure, such as a leader, global leader, or a local leader, had an opinion about your core strengths, what you were capable of? So when you actually go back and you look at who you were before you were even in the workforce, you start to find the, um, I guess the things that light you up and the things that actually make you excel. So I did a little bit of research as part of my, you know, my own journey of writing this professional arc. And there's 2 pieces of research, it's like psychological research that I think is worthwhile mentioning that was super, super impactful for me. One of them is the Pygmalion effect. And the Pygmalion effect is this whole study that talks about that if you consistently label somebody, even as a child, you consistently label that person as, you know, you're so amazing, you're so smart, keep going, that motivates that human, that individual, and they tend to become that person. The same way, that same effect happens when you Label somebody as the naughty kid, the child who's sporty. Oh, you're so brilliant at sport. Was that you?

I was the naughty kid.

Was that you?

I was the naughty kid.

You were the naughty kid. And so what happens is that you almost give yourself permission to go, you know what? They're not expecting much from me. So I'm just going to kind of cruise along. So the same happens that like when you look into that as a, you know, who were you before somebody had an opinion on you and that Pygmalion effect, it actually starts to take effect when you work in your professional life. And then it comes through as a leader. So as a leader, you start to become— hang on, let me rewind back. It's not that you start to become, you have to be very careful not to label your team. So if you're labeling, you look at your sales team, you look at your marketing organization, your sales development team, whoever it is, engineers, As soon as you start labeling people, you're actually pinning them down. So I'll give you a really good example. I started working in an organization that I won't name, and before I even joined, I had 2 managers, 2 separate leaders come to me and say, oh, that person over there, watch them, they're a poor performer. That person over there, watch them, they never do what they say they're going to do. So before I even had a chance to make up my own mind, Before I had the opportunity to get a lay of the land and assess it for myself, those leaders were already labeling their own staff members. And so as a leader, it's actually really important to be very conscious of not labeling people. And that Pygmalion effect is something that I work on on the professional arc in phase 1.

Yep.

Yeah. So I'll pause in case you have any questions because I want to talk about the other one, which is Milgram's work.

Look, I love everything that you've said about Pygmalion. And I'll just say this because I ended up doing a lot of coaching on the job search side, especially for country managers and VPs, which wasn't my side hustle. But I ended up writing a book just around COVID. And when COVID struck, I knew over 70 leaders who were looking. It was actually pretty bad back then. And the one thing I said, in terms of step 1, just like self-awareness is a superpower. You've got to be self-aware because then you know where to work on from then. So please go ahead. I love what you're saying. We're super aligned.

Yeah. Yeah, no, no, that's great. And I mean, this is partly as well, like my own journey. So with arc 1 of that professional arc, I go into the Pygmalion effect, which is labeling. What labels were you given as a child, just to recap? And then as a leader, being careful not to label team members to motivate and demotivate. The second study that I focus on in Arc 1 is there's a psychologist called Stanley Milgram, and he wrote a book, or there was this study done in the 1960s. And again, I'm not a psychologist, so all the psychologists, if there's anyone listening, thank you for listening, firstly. And secondly, don't chase me down if I get this wrong. Milgram did this study, which was highly controversial in the 1960s, and in this study, they had a group of students and teachers, and some of them were paid actors, but they didn't know that they were paid actors. The summary of the study was trying to understand the behaviors of people when authority— when there was authority. So they had this questionnaire with some of them intending to be incorrect answers, and every single time the students got the question wrong, which was formulated that it would intentionally be wrong, they would get zapped with like a voltage. Every time they got another question wrong, the voltage would be turned up and the student would get this, you know, high voltage zap again. Now it was fake, but the teachers didn't know this. The students didn't know this. It was all kind of, this experiment was made intentionally so they didn't each know what was really happening. But anyway, the summary was that it's really incredible that people will do things that are against their core values when they believe that an authority figure is instructing them to do that. And so what happens is that as you progress in your career, and particularly when you become a leader, a lot of leaders, including myself, and I'm gonna say I've definitely become better at it because I've become conscious of it, but when I was an early Earlier in career manager, if my manager said, I need you to do this, I would just do it because they were an authority figure. If I had a peer tell me that something that I was working on was on the wrong path, I looked at them and I thought, oh my gosh, I'm an imposter. They know what they're talking about. So I would just follow their instructions and listen to their feedback and redirect or repivot. So part of the professional arc of knowing yourself is actually becoming confident in, you know what, I respect the authority figure, but this is against my core values, or this is actually, I've done my research, I know what I'm talking about, I've got the experience, you've hired me as a leader because of my experience, so don't come and tell me, give me prescriptive steps. On how to do stuff. Like, let me fail and let me define the strategy for this business and let me execute that through my team. So the Arc 1 talks a lot about, again, I'm, this is not something that somebody else has created. I've created this myself through my own research is who were you when you were a child? What labels were you given? Be conscious of that and don't do that as a leader labeling others. Because there's diamonds sitting there in your team that need time to be nurtured and have potentially been mislabeled. And then as an authority figure yourself, allow your team the space to make mistakes and build a plan. Give them the confidence that, you know, provide feedback, but allow them to execute on their plan. And coach them along the way. But equally, as a leader, you always have authority figures, and it could be your manager. It may even be your customer. Your customer could be your authority figure. You know, what does the customer want? What do they need? Sometimes what they say they want and then they need is not always what they actually need because they may not have the full awareness.

Absolutely.

So it's just super important, and that's arc number 1. There's a lot there, I know.

Wendy, I could talk to you for hours on this topic that you've just opened because in my own journey from being an account executive to then a first-line, then a second-line manager with Fortune 100 companies, that was my life before recruiting or actually owning my own recruitment company. I have seen so many great examples and Poor examples of people who've come undone because of what's actually happening in here, where we've had very successful salespeople become leaders who should have never been leaders. We've had people who have stayed and would've been amazing leaders, but didn't believe that they had the capacity to be upwardly mobile because of their background. And I've seen I think a square peg in a round hole is a tragedy regardless of— and so to what you've said, I would— anyone who's listened to that, I think Wendy has dropped an absolute gem about both the Pygmalion effect, the Milgrams. Go and look it up. Do the work because this could be the best free coaching session that you're getting.

Right?

Uh, you know, and it's amazing. Sometimes you just don't realize what you stumbled onto. And I would say, uh, do the work, you know, look up concepts like ikigai because you'll find that super useful. And the second bonus point that I'm going to make is look up Ken Blanchard's Situational Leadership, going from S1 to S4 leadership, because those were incredible. I worked for one of the FedEx businesses and I had access to really good sales university, leadership university, and Situational leadership through 4 stages was absolutely life-changing as a 26-year-old first-time manager who was managing reps older than me and didn't know what I was doing. So thank you. That was amazing.

Yeah. So, so to quickly wrap up on the, 'cause I only talked about 1, but then I've got the professional arc 2, 3, and 4. Once you've got the good baseline, what I find is a lot of leaders come to, not just to me, but I've also done the same. Like, I've gone to a leader who I trust, I believe is somebody I aspire to learn from and so on. And I'll say, like, how do you build a great strategy? How do you become respected? How do you become a visionary? Or how do you become inspirational? Like, all those things. And so, a lot of the time, people want to skip the steps and they want to go straight to the end. So, the professional arc is all about that first part that I just spent a ton of time on. The second one is around, okay, so now you have to learn to hire really, really well. And this is something that you just talked about. Now, in your business, it's something that I'm sure is so close to your heart is helping to, number one, remove bias and look through bias and be able to ask really intelligent questions to understand the depth of knowledge of a candidate, the depth of knowledge of a new person coming into the business, and what that injection of new knowledge will do for the rest of the team. So building a really strong team, but also recognizing one of the things that I find I've become better at, and I still see a lot of leaders failing in, is making fast, decisions when somebody's not the right fit for a team because they feel sorry for them, they like them. There is a way to mutually part when you know it's just not working, and it can be respectful. And I see a lot of non-respectful ways of people departing organizations, which I think are unnecessary.

Hmm.

But I do believe that the Arc 2 focuses on making sure you're very, very focused on asking the right questions. You're getting good examples that are not generic examples. This is what I would've done. This is what I would do. No, no, no. What did you actually do when you were in a role, you know, signing up a new prospect?

What—

talk me through the actual steps. Give me an example of a time that you had a customer that decided not to renew their business with you? How did you manage that conversation? You may have lost the customer, or you may have, you know, changed their mind. So, give me an example of how you changed their mind. What value message did you share with them? What did you present? What data points? So, when you start going a little bit deeper, you realize that there's a shy person there who's maybe not great at interviewing. But as soon as you start asking those very deep, questions, their, I guess, their strengths start to come through because naturally when you know something very, very well, you can't help but your body language changes and you become excited about it. So building that core knowledge into a leader in arc 2 is super important. And equally recognizing that this person is never going to make it in this role Because no amount of coaching is going to make them more, you know, technical or whatever it is that that core role needs. It's just not the right fit.

So true.

It's not the right company for them. Doesn't mean that they're not a great employee. And so, that's something that's super important. They're not somebody that is not unemployable. They're just not the right fit for that role in that company at that time. So, and that happens a lot when you have a company that's growing super fast. You put somebody in a role, The company grows up around them, and all of a sudden, they just don't have the core experience to lead a very large, complex business. That doesn't mean that that employee is not valuable experience. They're made for startups, or they're made for mid-sized business. So, that's something that is really important to recognize.

Really good. I think what you're saying that it, and I will say this because I am walking a growth hiring path with a lot of leaders who have just taken on, and often they've either taken on a dysfunctional team or a team that, for example, hasn't performed in the last 3 to 4 quarters, which is why they were put into the new role. And the number one thing that I actually ask them to do is to make a 2x2 on culture versus performance. Who are your high culture fit, high-performance people, and so on and so forth, right down to low-culture, low-performance people. And then ask the question, is this the right person, right seat? Because if you've got the right person in the wrong seat, you can actually help them from a place of care, but from a place of leadership, help them to either rediscover what they should do. Because otherwise, I've seen people who— and I'll say this as I hand this back to you, is that you have 6 months to build or rebuild your team. Because that's the problem you inherited. And if you don't do that, then you become the problem. I've seen people in the second 6 months, unfortunately, great leaders who were either too compassionate or thought they left people in roles. And they got let go in quarter 3 or quarter 4, because they didn't make difficult choices in quarter 1 and quarter 2 of their stint. So yeah. You said something really important there.

Yeah. And it's very uncomfortable and it's very scary because naturally we wanna be liked. Naturally, we want to walk into an organization and everybody looks to you as a leader and says, you know, I like Wendy. I like her personality and I like her strategy and I'm just gonna follow suit. Now that's never gonna happen. It's just never gonna happen, and it's a very hard thing to accept. But as a leader, it's some— and not even just as a leader, as an individual contributor, it's something that we all need to accept that our job when we're working for somebody else or even for ourselves is to do our job, to be very clear on what is the outcome we're trying to drive, what is the best way to reach that outcome, And that's arc 3, actually, is business mastery. So being very clear on what is your go-to-market strategy? What is your plan, the steps to achieve that strategy? There should always be, you know, maybe 3 to 5. I wouldn't do more than 5. Some, I've seen people do 6. I think too many is too much strategic priorities. And you have to be very, very careful and thoughtful and surgical almost about which ones you prioritize first. If you walk into the business and you talked about how you've seen it before, leaders come into the business, they're very compassionate. They want to firstly get a lay of the land. And so what happens is that after the first quarter or after the second quarter in any business, you start to make excuses for things that are not working. You start to accept processes that don't exist. You start to accept sales numbers or underperformance metrics. So, it's very, very important that at the very beginning, you define what is the strategy.

So, Wendy, you've just made some really good points around the psychology and how to build a team. Tell me a little bit more about how do you guide leaders from an operational focus to really becoming GTM-oriented, commercially astute leaders?

Yeah, so definitely, I've talked about Arc 1 and 2 in the professional arc. So with Tech Me Forward, again, as I found that little wedge, I found that one of the other gaps with leaders were finding and establishing credibility. So Arc 3 is about business mastery. And there's a few interpretations of business mastery. Business mastery can be becoming, you know, the go-to expert on AI or the go-to expert on, you know, security practices. But for me, it means if you're in a leadership role, the expectation is that you need to provide a very clear vision to your team, very clear go-to-market strategy with strategic pillars and actual steps A lot of leaders that I've worked with, the mistakes that I've observed or the things that I would change that I have observed is that they tend to focus on just the sales. They'll build a strategy and the sales strategy might be, we're gonna work in this territory, we're gonna go after these customers, these are our top 10, you know, accounts that we're going to focus all of our energy. But I believe as a leader and as you go higher in your career, you need to stop and not think about just the sales strategy, but all of the cross-functional collaborators and stakeholders that actually contribute to a successful organization, including, you know, what's your marketing strategy? What is your SDR strategy? How do you recruit and hire? What's your public relations strategy? So a good example is If, let's just say a random example, if my focus is going to be government and let's just say I'm gonna inject 60% of my sales efforts into government, that helps inform the marketing team to start thinking about how do I create thought leadership into government? Where in government? Where specifically? Is it AI? Is it security? Is it migrations? Is it, you know, our storage? Whatever it may be. It helps inform public relations. The public relations team then know where to point their energy. The SDR team then know where to point their energy. So having that go-to-market that thinks about the end-to-end business is critical. And I cover that in Business Mastery number 3.

Understood.

And the last one is where everybody aspires to be, which is Being inspirational, motivational, and leading, leading, like truly leading. And what I think about is I think about legacy. If I were to leave tomorrow and I looked back, would I be proud of what I achieved? And I normally know in my heart and in my pit of my stomach when it's time to move to the next challenge, because I'm suddenly just going through the motions and I'm not I'm not myself inspired. I've lost that ability to motivate my team. So finding new ways to motivate your team is also a lot about finding ways to motivate yourself. What's that next challenge? Now, for some people, it may be a lateral move in the same organization. It could be an international move. It could be getting deeper into the areas that you haven't had an opportunity to focus on. For some, it's leaving the organization altogether or starting your own business. So leading and motivating and influencing has a lot to do with, from my experience, in being very honest with yourself and recognizing I've created a really strong strategy, I've executed, I've left a really strong legacy that I'm proud of. I haven't left a trail of destruction behind me. And it's now time to challenge myself. And people find that naturally motivating without trying to be, you know, the punchy motivational speaker. People look to you and go, wow, Pri, you've got this podcast. That's so cool. And you're not trying to be motivational, but just naturally because you're doing the thing that motivates you, motivates others, inspires others, and people want to follow that path. So, I guess the finish of that arc is all about now that you've done all the things, you know yourself, you know how to build a strong team, you know how to lead a strong team, be the person that motivates yourself and then others will just follow naturally. So that's a little bit about Technic Forward. Very long answer, Free, but I'm so passionate about it. I love I really love this journey that I'm taking myself on. It's uncomfortable. I feel like a failure every day. And at the same time, I wake up in the morning and I'm like, oh my gosh, I've got something that I want to add to, you know, my Tech Me Forward, my website, the Instagram page, the conversations that I have with people. And plus I work full-time. So it's something that I'm super passionate about. I just cannot let it go because I really believe in it and I love it so much.

This has been amazing. Number one, because you yourself are authentic, down to earth, and a student of building yourself, and you are living what you are teaching. And I think that that's what makes it so attractive and appealing and easy to understand. And I think that whether it's a half an hour podcast episode, Or a TEDx speech or a book. I think what you've got is hard-earned. That's what I'll say. I think that's what comes through.

Yeah.

Because not a lot of people have access to conversations, and sometimes they can be stuck. And that's at each level, whether they're account executives or whether they are level 1 managers, because they are They get what they need to do what they do, but nobody's talking about the road ahead and how to build that. So I just wanna say thank you. Um, you've been very generous with your time, your thoughts, your authenticity. And I know for a fact, uh, it's one of those things you're never gonna hear. Somebody may not walk up on the street and say, I heard you do that, but I can tell you there will be double-digit, if not more, people who will find this extremely useful. So thank you.

Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you, Pri. So awesome. And let's catch up for that coffee so we can continue the conversation. I definitely would love to learn more about some of the success you've had and the people you've met as well, so we can all keep learning together.

Thank you so much. And I'll just say this because you mentioned it earlier, follow the energy. You know, I think if something energizes you, you should do more of it. And that's for— I say that to leaders. I say that to people who reach out and say, what do you think? Should I go left? Should I go right? And it's like, follow the energy because you need energy to deliver at a high level. And if you don't have the energy, you're in the wrong role. So thank you, and I appreciate you so much.

Thanks, Pri.