WashingtonExec: Tell me about a time in your life when you had to really stretch yourself in order to learn and grow.
Kelly: I was working in Bell Labs as an engineering senior manager supporting a U.S. government customer when a sales director position opened and the vice president who was leading that group began encouraging me to apply. The year was 1999, and the telecommunications market was red hot! We were in the middle of the largest telecommunications and internet expansion in history. While I was somewhat isolated from all of that, we all were hearing stories of commercial customers buying $200 million worth of optical networking equipment and building out nationwide networks to serve the ever-expanding dot-com market. This opportunity was both exciting and terrifying to think about. At that time in my career I had only worked as an engineer and had yet to have any customer responsibilities, had never managed people or budgets, knew very little about marketing and selling … I could go on.
After speaking with a close mentor of mine, I was convinced to take the job and make the move from engineering to sales, and from individual contributor to people manager. Very quickly, I found myself wrestling with sales forecasts, deployment schedules, performance reviews, marketing plans, manufacturing projections, and the like. It was then that I also discovered the seven-day workweek.
While I found the first few months to be quite daunting, I did manage to learn a lot about myself and a great deal about the business world during those next two years. I learned the importance of caring for the customers you have versus focusing too much attention on the customers you want. I was once told that it would cost me 10 times more time and money to acquire a new customer than it would to keep my current customers happy. I’m not sure if I ever proved that thesis, but it sure feels about right to me. I learned that every employee was a unique organism and that there was no one-size-fits-all solution for managing people. I learned that determining what my customers weren’t saying was more valuable than merely focusing on what they were saying because their words are far less likely to surprise you than their actions. I learned that people might forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. I learned that parents were right; honesty, loyalty, passion and dedication will see you through most problems in life. I learned not to take myself so seriously and to find the fun no matter how difficult it may be to do so. I also learned that open, honest and effective communications between two people can usually solve most issues and serve as a foundation upon which to build trust and some pretty valuable relationships.
In the end, I returned to the defense and intelligence market because that’s where my passion lies. I am a technologist at heart, but one who discovered the value of a broader perspective on the human side of the technology business. My experiences in the commercial market dealing with selling, marketing, accounting, forecasting and strategic planning helped prepare this electrical engineer for life beyond the testbed, and for that, I am forever grateful.