In various organizations where I have facilitated talent management and employee training sessions, I started those classes with personal best stories because I feel employees can only be motivated if they share a common purpose and choose to be directed or managed/led. Often times, people are reluctant to share their personal best stories for fear someone will find them corny. One of my personal best stories in high school was when I was playing Varsity Basketball for the West Covina Spartans. We were playing a team from Los Altos and the game changed leads throughout the last half. At less than 9 seconds to go, they scored and were up by 1 point. We drove the ball to the half court and called time out with 4 seconds to play. During the huddle the coach outlined a play where I should take the last shot. This was a home game which added to the pressure. As the ball was inbounded, I received the 2nd pass and started to dribble toward the basket. All of a sudden a second player came over to stop my progression. Dare I shoot a 30 footer with two defenders on me?
Another time I experienced a personal best story was when I worked for Sprint in the Houston launch. At the time we were within 5 months of launching our market and still were lacking about 50 cell sites to get leased, zoned and constructed so we could launch the Houston market. As the Finance and Staff Operations Manager, I wasn't supposed to be involved in the construction activities in the market, but in my spare time, I volunteered as one of the 10 project managers to project manage 40 cellsites to construction. Because I was successful in driving this process, Eldon Prax, the Director of Engineering, gave me the remaining 50 sites that were the slowest and hardest to complete. We picked a tiger team of a leasing agent, a telco representative, and an RF engineer to, if necessary, double process sites until we got one to succeed. We spent a little extra money in the effort but within 45 days got the 50 sites ready to build. That was a time in my career where I worked 60 hours a week. I wasn't even exhausted coming in early and staying late 5-6 days a week. We launched the largest Nortel market in US history, 2 months before the scheduled launch date and had over 50,000 customers signed up before the network was turned on. Even today, the Dallas, Houston and San Antonio markets are Sprint's best markets with highest customer satisfaction. As a result of that effort, Eldon recommended me for a promotion to work as a Site Development Manager in the NorthEast region. It was easy to stay motivated because we had a purpose, a challenge, a great team that was excited about success and a Director who recognized and rewarded his team.
Another time I had a personal best story was when I managed Sprint's affiliate construction program. I started out as a construction compliance auditor which within 6 months morphed into an Operations Manager, developing over 50 guidelines and templates for construction, for partnering, for model pricing/build to suit, for risk management and preventive maintenance, for best practice customer service and branding. We had weekly conference calls to develop benchmarking programs and twice annually hosted best practice conferences. My job was quasi consultant and quasi operations/compliance manager ensuring that the sites were built to Sprint's specifications when Sprint decided to buy back the markets. This experience taught me how to project manage, to get sites built 25% cheaper and faster than Sprint's build took. Being in the rural areas, the Affiliate's zoning challenges weren't as great, but other financial challenges were greater because they couldn't expect as many customers to make the ROI successful. The experience also helped me train two great employees to provide extraordinary customer service and new databases and operational project plans. I employed my risk management, project management and talent management skills to help these start up companies succeed.
Another time I had a personal best story was in my analysis of a training need in Pueblo for both the IT and the Finance departments. I assessed the problem, designed a teamwork and talent management training program, assessed the cooperation and engagement of staff before and after training. Much of that training was adapted from Sprint's University of Excellence training I had in Sprint; other facets were adaptations of training material we developed from our business intelligence/benchmaring exploration. It was training that was well received and applicable to other departments. We also challenged employees to provide personal best story examples so they could try and replicate the feeling of excitement that came with working with purpose, with creativity and passion. If those events were not on the job, what about the event caused them excitement and passion or a feeling of being in the flow?
Oh, by the way I didn't shoot that last shot with 2 seconds to play but passed the ball to an open player - Sandy Durko. Had he made the shot, he might have had a second career but as it was, he was our star quarterback on our undefeated West Covina Varsity Football team and had a short but successful career with the Cincinnati Bengals. Would you have forced the shot with another player open? Sometimes motivating yourself and having those best stories requires a team effort.
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