Melody Wilding 1:09

How do you become fully confident and in control of your emotions and experience at work? It's by mastering your own psychology and that of others. On this show, we decode the science of success, exploring how to get out of your own way and advance your career to new levels without becoming someone you're not. I'm Melody Wilding, best-selling author, human behavior professor, and award-winning executive coach. Get ready and let's put psychology to work for you. Have you ever noticed how there are certain stretches that seem to define your career? And the ironic thing is they seem to come out of nowhere when you are already juggling a lot. And because of that, they can rattle you, at least to start, because you wonder how the heck am I going to do this and do it well? Maybe it's a grant application that will define your program for the next three years or a pitch to the biggest client your firm has ever chased. Maybe it's a regulatory or due diligence process that your function has now been chosen to lead. And during these times, the stakes are compressed. At any other ordinary moment, your career is built in slower increments. One project builds on the other, you are earning credibility, you're building relationships just day after day in these steady doses. But in those high stakes stretches, it's the opposite. The reputation you would normally build over months of just consistently delivering, it can get decided in a matter of weeks. And a good outcome can prove you have senior level judgment, even with incomplete information, that you can manage perceptions of powerful external stakeholders, of people two to three levels above you. These types of skills, they decide who is ready for the next role. And they are revealed when you have to act quickly under pressure. So navigate this time well, and it can open doors that would have taken such a long time otherwise. But if you handle it poorly or even just okay adequately, and you don't just stall your advancement, you may inadvertently hand others a data point they will use against you when your name comes up for the bigger scope or the higher comp. They'll say, you know, they did fine, but I'm not sure they're ready for that next level yet. Today you will hear from a guest who has turned a pressure cooker situation into an accelerator. Alejandro is an engineering manager at a big tech company, leading a team through the launch of a first of its kind product with a lot of money and a lot of eyes on it. He joined our Lead From Within program, my career premiere accelerator for mid and senior level professionals. At the exact moment, his product was hitting its highest stakes stretch. They had expanded testing much more broadly, and they had hit some unexpected setbacks. And now he had to ramp up to meeting pretty consistently with executives he rarely had to interface with before. So suddenly every interaction, every decision was being watched as a preview of whether he was ready for the next role. Alejandro shares how he turned executive meetings that weren't going so well into a weekly opportunity to project his ability to convey a vision, to execute something much bigger, how he learned to disagree and share tough news while building credibility and respect, how he turned his manager into an amplifier for the work they were doing, and what he did to motivate his team to focus, even with all the stress and distractions. Just a quick note before we dive in, I had some issues with my mic during this recording. So my audio quality won't be quite what you are used to, and I apologize for that. But this was such a great discussion. There was so much great insight and teachable moments in this episode for you. I didn't want to hold it back. I wanted to share it. So if you are heading into one of those crunch moments, a pitch, a launch, a grant, a board update, a conference, a promotion cycle, whatever it is, if it is any stretch where more people than usual are about to be evaluating if you are ready for what's next, this episode is for you. Let's get into it. Alejandro, welcome. I am so excited to have you on the podcast. Uh, it's gonna be a great conversation. So thank you for being here.

Alejandro Troccoli 5:54

Thank you. Thank you for having me, Melody.

Melody Wilding 5:57

Yes, yes. You you and I have worked together a very long time in a number of my programs. And most recently, you were in Lead From Within. We're gonna get into talking about that and some of the results and things you were working on over the past couple of months. But before we get there, for the person listening, tell them just a little bit about yourself so they can get to know you or the person on the other side.

Alejandro Troccoli 6:21

Yeah, so I I'm an engineering manager at a tech company. I lead a team of about uh seven engineers, and my organization is building a new communication device that enables telepresence. So this is a first-of-a-kind product, it's a zero to one, and with that, there are a lot of challenges in order to get this ready for production.

Melody Wilding 6:45

I was in the very fortunate position to see a prototype or a demo of what you have been working on. It is remarkable, and so it has been quite a feat for you and your team, really across the organization, to get to this point of having the technology ready to ship. Now you're getting out there. So going back to um Lead from Within, when you joined, it was about six-ish months ago. Well, what was what was going on for you in your role in the organization at that time that made you say, I'm gonna take the leap and join this program because I I know this is a time I need a bit more guidance.

Alejandro Troccoli 7:28

I had been working in this organization for about two and a half years. I joined the program about six months ago in December, and at that time we were in a prototype phase and delivering the first units to internal users. I had been delivering consistently towards the pre-production devices, and now we were getting ready for the big launch, which meant we would have more units in hands of users and start to get feedback.

Melody Wilding 8:05

Yeah, which I can imagine having other clients who are doing launches of different types and who work at tech companies, and even those who don't, right? Any any sort of launch, getting any sort of new product out there or or service for that matter, you're talking about it's more visibility, the timelines are starting to speed up. There are maybe uh more uh meetings starting to happen, more feedback coming from different directions. So, for you though, I know this was also an important inflection point. Before Lead from Within, how are you thinking about your path to the next level? And what had you been told so far about what you needed to demonstrate to actually get there and advance?

Alejandro Troccoli 8:55

I knew that the scope and impact of my area of work could bring me to the next level. My organization is very impact-triguant when it comes to promotions and yearly assessments. And I was gearing towards launch, and I was saying to myself, hey, if there's a time I should try to get to the next level, is when we launch the product.

Melody Wilding 9:19

Absolutely. As you are going or approaching this very high pressure moment with your team, with your product, right? This is something you've been working toward for years. And so getting your team on board, something we talk about in Meet from Within very often, is how we one of our one of our main pillars is growing your people. Because if we are not getting our team moving in the right direction, then we're going to become a bottleneck. That's going to also hinder the results we can get. So for you going into this time, how did you move your team from even research mode or even crisis mode to execution mode to get them out of the weed? Because when we're talking about a technical team, right, it's very easy to get caught in the feature requests or uh we really need to optimize this feature before we get it in front of people for a demo. So, what did you have to do to get them moving and out of the lead?

Alejandro Troccoli 10:28

At the time I joined Lead with From Within, we had been aggressively expanding our device testing. The team had been focused on execution mode, but at the same time, as we were receiving feedback with the expanded tested, we realized that there were some things that my team owned where the metrics were not coming as we wanted them to come. And this was impacting some of the next development. So we went from execution mode to sort of crisis mode because of the feedback that we were receiving. And my biggest challenge was how do we turn crisis mode back into execution mode so that we can focus instead of focus on a solution instead of fighting fires. So the first thing I did there was to talk to my manager and say, hey, these things are coming up. I think we need the larger team aligned that this is a problem that we all need to address together so that I can focus my team on solving the particular technical difficulties, and I need your help in running the larger organization around this so that we can shield the team from the crisis mode.

Melody Wilding 11:57

What a great way to practice greater influence. So for you, how how was that a demonstration of some of the skills? Like we were talking about you demonstrating higher level skills in order to be able to put yourself in a position to advance. How was that an example of that for you?

Alejandro Troccoli 12:18

As a result, communication with senior leadership increased to a weekly cadence. I had to present updates to my manager, and together with my manager to the senior leadership. Questions that would come up were things like: why is this happening? What are we doing about it? Initially, I was excited. I mean, this was a great opportunity for me to show leadership and visibility. And I would prepare myself to these meetings in a way that I would draft a document with very technical details and say, okay, I'm ready to handle this. This was the first time I did this, came into the meeting, and a few minutes into the my presentation, questions started to come up. Questions that I was not prepared to answer. And I remember that at least from within I had brought this up, and you told me, hey, leaders want to speak and ask questions, so be prepared to answer those questions. This day I was probably not as ready as I would have liked to be, but we made it through. I took this opportunity to learn and then to rinse and repeat. Since the meetings were with uh weekly cadence, I did have the opportunity to, okay, this didn't work today. Let's try something new differently. And with feedback from you within, leads from within, feedback from my manager, and some uh creative ideas that I brought into, I don't want to discredit myself. I brought a new structure where we would focus on some swim lanes. I give a high-level report on where each of these swim lanes was heading. And then once we had the high level out of the way, if we had to dig deeper into other questions and more on technical details, we would do that. So I had my presentations were divided in high-level updates. And well, if we want to follow through, here is the technical detail that I have compiled based on previous questions or follow-ups from the previous week.

Melody Wilding 14:44

What I love about this, and what I what I hear in your story, and of course, which I have seen you do, is um moving from really just talking insularly to other technical people, right? Whether that is your team, your direct boss, your direct partners, to you've had to expand the scope of who you are in the ecosystem or who you are communicating to, because now there's all these other stakeholders involved in the visibility and the demos and the rollout of this product. And so as you were saying, being able to translate some of the technical pieces to the business imperative of it. And also, what I love about what you said is is you actually conveying more of that senior level sophisticated posture of talking about the vision and the end result of what we're trying to achieve, the why behind this, before ever getting to, well, this is where this is at, and this is how many units we need for this and that, because you'll lose them. And what a what a great example of being able to not only get a better, well, and I want to hear from you what outcomes that produced, but for you to feel more confident going in and to demonstrate in real time how you are operating at a higher level. So once you started to make some of those changes, what did you notice in the responses you were getting? Maybe even how quickly things were moving. What changed for you from there?

Alejandro Troccoli 16:26

A few things changed. One, I was feeling more confident going into these meetings. I also felt that I had a grasp on how to put together the pieces of information that we wanted to convey. I also found that it's not just me working on this, it's me, my manager, and my program manager together. So we would pre-wire, make sure that the narrative was solid. I think one of the things that I learned about this whole process is what is the information that we want to share? And how confident are we about this information that we have? Sometimes we did have signals of things that could be promising, but you don't want to show early results if you're not confident because that would bring up new expectations that we are not ready to back up. At the same time, if we had some results that were not were not so positive, we wouldn't like to hide those under the rug either. We would say, hey, we had received this feedback or we have seen this happening, and this is this is what we are doing to understand what's going on in that case. I I learned that good results are good, and bad outcomes are also good if you make the conscious effort of bringing them up and everyone is aligned, because then people know what to expect. It what you don't want to happen is have a picture that is painting one thing and having a reality that is different, which in a way was what led us to this situation. I I think I felt overconfident on the initial results, so I did learn that hey, let's paint reality as it is and um have a discussion about what we can do about it.

Melody Wilding 18:21

There's so much wisdom there and such maturity in that. Executives, powerful people don't like being surprised. And uh if if we can, as you were saying, if we can get ahead of some of the okay, we thought it was going to turn out one way, it's actually turning it out another way. Here's how we're handling it, or here's the process we've already put in place to make sure this doesn't happen in the future. That shows so much more command and senior leadership than trying to say, yep, every everything's going well. But then you have to circle back later and say, uh, actually we need more time or we need more money, or this didn't hit its targets, which really detracts from your credibility. This all actually leads me to another question, which is you have been leading through this very high pressure time where, again, the team has been under a lot of stress. You have these deadlines, you have just a higher volume of work going on at a faster speed. And for you just mentioned it now, for a lot of leaders, some of the inevitable hiccups or setbacks that happen along the way, that really starts to work against them and the perception that gets created of them or their own uh opportunities for advancement because they don't handle it well. But I have really seen you use this whole time period to show you can step up as a leader. What else have you learned about framing progress, risks that's been important for you and your own trajectory, your own being seen as operating at the next level?

Alejandro Troccoli 20:06

I can give you an example that comes to mind. Sometimes when you have these meetings with leadership, they have an opinion of what things or the way things should be done. They would say, Hey, I thought we were doing this in this and such a way, aren't we doing this as everyone else does it? And I would start feeling my fear of saying, I know that we are not doing this. And I initially I would just say no, we are not doing that. And that's although it is the true answer, I learned that a simple no is not what we want to say. In these cases, we had considered these options that this person probably has is suggesting. So it does help bring context to the answers. I remember saying no, we're not doing this. We did consider it, but we didn't take this path because of this and these other reasons. That paints you in a different perspective or puts you in a different perspective where yes, you have thought about this, but you didn't do it because of something else. Another thing I learned about going into these meetings is to let people digest or intake the information I was presenting. I would start with my highlights for the week, saying things like, Okay, this week we've done this, we have done this, we have discovered this, and keep them brief and then say, Okay, I will pause here. What questions do you have? And that would devolve in a larger conversation or would move the conversation forward. I learned that, especially when talking to my senior leadership, I don't need to drive the entire conversation, or I don't need to be speaking the entire time and going through every point I had in my agenda. My goal is to provide reassurance that things are moving forward. So by giving highlights and letting the other people ask questions, I felt I was satisfying that need for information. That's what the senior leadership is looking for need information because they are not very close to the actual day-to-day work. They need to understand what you're doing, and they have questions, and maybe sometimes you don't know what they are going to ask. But just giving them the opportunity to ask and then respond in a I would like to say truthful way, saying, Yes, this we are doing, or no, I don't know about that. We don't have any information, but we'll take an action and we'll come next week back and answer this question. That's the kind of answers that I think may These meetings move in a smooth way.

Melody Wilding 23:12

Absolutely. Having that willingness to be transparent but also diplomatic, something else you've done is really be more aware of the dynamic and the politics going on. That a meeting is never just the meeting in the room, right? It's never just the live time you are spending with those people. There is a whole surround sound campaign you have had where even outside of these sessions where you are debriefing executives, you've been having side conversations, you've been sending other sorts of updates. You have been making sure your manager is armed with information so that when he's talking to certain people, he can have a certain narrative. And you're all syncing up about how you're talking about the team's work and progress. And so I just want to point that out to anyone listening because it's very easy to think and put a lot of pressure on ourselves that I have to say the perfect thing in these meetings. But I think yours is a great story of there's a broader advancement and visibility strategy that's been going on here that far exceed what you're doing in any individual one meeting in terms of building relationships and managing perceptions. Would you say that's true? Is there anything you want to say there?

Alejandro Troccoli 24:37

Oh, that's certainly true. There's just a lot more going on than the meeting. The meeting is the end result of a whole week of preparation. I I would come out of these weekly meetings and say, okay, what are the key answers that we need to bring back next week? And then the next meeting, two days ahead, I would start thinking and pinging my manager and my program manager also, hey, these were the topics that came back from last week. This is what I think we should say. What do you think? And then it is important that the three of us, my manager, myself, and my program manager, and all align on the message. Because before we did this pre-wiring, sometimes we would go to the meeting without a sync. And the thing that you don't want is to have different voices that are saying different things because that shows that you're not organized. So the pre-wiring became kind of a requirement for this to having the success of this meeting. So yeah, the meeting is the conclusion of a whole week of gathering information, pre-wiring with others, and getting the narrative that we wanted to share.

Melody Wilding 25:53

Yes. I'd also love to hear about your experience and read from within as a program. What did you find most useful about having a trusted advisory to bring these day-to-day real situations that you were facing as they would come up or as you were anticipating them? What was most helpful about that for you?

Alejandro Troccoli 26:15

What I really found useful of Lead From With Thing and having the opportunity to bring real situations as they were happening is receiving an external assessment of the situation. I like how you did not jump to answers on the spot and you started digging in with questions, asking me what did this other person think about this, or you triggered and made me think out of the circle or the box that I was confined to, and this allowed me to get a perspective that I might not have received otherwise.

Melody Wilding 26:58

Yes, there is so much value in getting out of your own bubble. And I think some people will come to us and say, I really only want one-on-one coaching. But I think your example is a great situation that proves that sometimes one-on-one coaching can also be limited and only give you one perspective, which is your own, right? You're in this echo chamber of your own situation. And what I really saw you do so effectively in me from within was yes, bring your own questions, raise your hand for coaching, submit questions. But you also were so attentive and absorbing all the other coaching that we were giving others. And so if we were talking to someone else about how do you advocate for head count or uh how how do you deal with a situation where you have to take yourself out of the middle of being a bottleneck between two teams, you would take that and you would run with them in your situation. And I think that's such a great example of a multiplier effect of being in a in a very high-performing cohort environment where the others there share so many similarities with the level you are operating at, the situation you are facing.

Alejandro Troccoli 28:19

I love that the fact that you you really wanted to understand the situation. Maybe when I submit a question, I give a very small brief description, and then you follow up with multiple questions to get the whole picture. What I love about that also is that also that enabled me also to ask myself those questions. I learned from the questions you were posing okay, I need to understand other people's perspective, and what questions should I be making, asking them to get a better understanding of where they are. We sometimes talk about conflict in Lead from Within. I think that's one of the topics that comes very frequently. And one thing that I have learned through the program is how to de-escalate conflict. Conflict is something that I sometimes I think it can be in your head. You are conflicted. It doesn't mean that everyone else is conflicted. Some other people are in a different state of mind. One learning I took is not to take things personally. If someone tells you no, or if someone doesn't agree with your position or cannot help you achieve your goal, doesn't mean they are against you. The light bulb lighted the moment I realized, oh, they are doing their job. It's not that they are against me, they're doing their job. Their job is to deliver that and they cannot accommodate me, and they will say no. So that helped me understand. Okay, I need to understand what their job is, and how can the job that they need to do accommodate my request?

Melody Wilding 30:10

That is all such wise and fantastic perspective, I think, for anyone right now who finds themselves butting heads, or like you were saying, so much, so much of the conflict we anticipate. It's anticipatory. And sorting through, I also loved what you said about how you learning from the question myself or the coaching team was posing to you, because our goal is to help you think more like an executive, to help you analyze the invisible dynamics that may be happening. Of all right, tell me about your history with this person. When you when you've talked with them before, what do you feel is the level of trust, or how have they responded? Or all of those questions are things we're we, yes, we're trying to instill in you so that you are able to analyze the politics, the dynamics in a clear-eyed way, because at your level, competence is table stakes, right? The competence is table stakes. It's the ability to navigate the people, the personalities, the different priorities that people have. And as you said, most people, when we understand the underlying psychology, is most people are trying to work towards their goal and protect their own status and ego and their own standing. And when we can understand that, as you said, it it frees up so much our emotional and mental bandwidth to then act at these more strategic and higher levels. So Alejandro, thank you so much because I know this is going to be insightful for anyone who is listening. So I really appreciate you sharing and taking the time to join me today.

Alejandro Troccoli 31:54

Thank you. Thank you, Melody. It was great being with you.

Melody Wilding 31:59

Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of Psychology at Work. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be so grateful if you could take just a minute to rate and review wherever you are listening. It's how we reach more professionals just like you. And if you'd like to see even more content on how to feel more self assured, grounded, and in control of your emotions and reactions at work, follow me on LinkedIn or head to the links in the show notes.