Lesley Ronaldson
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Lesley Ronaldson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to do this podcast.
Congratulations. And also, I love that I think work-life balance is gone now. We call it work-life harmony here.
It's not a balance anymore. I mean, sometimes it's just it is what it is. There's days where I leave at three o'clock to go to maybe a school show. And there's days where I maybe have to work till nine or ten at night and I make it work. It's the nine to five is out.
Yeah, one of us should have a good time.
Well, there's a lot going on. I suppose I'll stick with work for this one. I'm just back from a trip from the US. We had a new CRO join Gong last September, and there's been a couple of changes on the leadership team. And he has a huge belief that sometimes I'll talk about my team and my team is my directs, as in my managers, my directors, my reps.
But he wants us to focus on the first team and my first team should be my peers. So we went to the US for three days and I have to really commend him. He kind of left us to our own devices a lot. There was a lot of downtime, a lot of meals, a lot of activities and sports and quite a loose agenda. So what happened was there was a lot of conversations that weren't about work.
I would say I came back from that trip and there was 10 of us plus him. And I can tell you a personal story about every single one of those leaders. And I had a lot of aha moments of aha. That is why often you come across on a call the way you do or that is why we had maybe that bit of friction last year over an account.
He also talked about the five dysfunctions of a team, which was really important. And actually, we all read the book before we got there and The biggest one, the foundation is trust. And I left that trip with way more trust, way more understanding. You know, we talked about kids and partners and the age that we're at, the age profile. A lot of us have sick parents.
So talking about that and kind of where we are in our lives. And honestly, it was a brilliant trip. I love the no agenda piece. And I'm actually going to mirror it here in EMEA because I think although my leaders are close, it's really important to step away from the number, the data and the drive and just breathe and be and let them get to know each other.
Because again, you build that trust, then conflict is easy. You can debate, then commit. And that's what we want to do here.
Three days and actually at the end of the three days, like, you know, there was hugs, personal numbers exchanged and we've all agreed I'm going to go back over it. And usually I wouldn't go to the US more than once a quarter, but we got so much out of it. We now want to go to the next level. We now want to go to kind of commitment, action,
results and start to plan for next year usually we have those conversations in October but we want to start them early I mean you know it's a global conversation now as opposed to my region my segment my team they're my first team it was brilliant he's a genius our CRO I'm curious how would you think you'll take your lessons learned from that trip and cascade that into the team is there anything you're thinking that's going to help you
There was one thing. So there's these, they're called value cards. You get them on Amazon. So he had 12 decks of those cards and all of us were given the cards and you had to open the value, the deck of values, put them into three piles. Important, middle important, not really important. Then you'd take the ones that were really important and pick the top two and go around the table.
And it was chill. We were eating lunch. It was casual, feet up on desks. It wasn't formal. And then you all had to say why those two values were your top two values. My top two is fairness and commitment. Others were different, but you all had to say why. And I will say there was not one person around that room that didn't talk about their childhood, which was very interesting.
Your family of origin is so, so important. And a lot of aha moments for me, that is why you'll have Sometimes sharp elbows in a conversation because you were perhaps brought up in a different home than I was. A single mom. That's why you're so driven. That's why you will win at all costs. It was really good, really deep.
A lot of bonds made and he's created a team that will run through walls for him.
I think some personalities have a work. Like there's a work Leslie and a home Leslie. They're very similar, right? I'm really direct. I'm high energy, high excite, no surprises there. But there's definitely people who I would have, when there's a work version of them and I saw a completely different version of them. They're very polished in work and
They're very driven, but actually when you kind of rip it back, one of them was probably the most entertaining person I've ever met in my life. The stories he told, I was like, what kind of life have you lived? But in work, he's so buttoned up. I never saw that side of him. So yeah, it's super important to focus on your first team.
Yeah, one of our engineers here just opened up a comedy club and he's a stand-up comedian and I was like, what? But you're so quiet. Everybody has lives outside of work. Never, ever, ever judge a book by its cover. Ever.
I'll give you the whistle stop tour. So I've just come into my 101st quarter in sales. So just over 25 years. I started my career in the late 90s in Dell. Bottom of the rung, bottom of the ladder, BDOR, SDR. And I have to say I was absolutely hooked. Dell was a massive multinational in Ireland in those days. And we had one of the manufacturing plants in Limerick.
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