The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 14, Part 1 - Driving Career Growth & Wellness: Lessons in Impact from Damien Davis
Fri, 28 Feb 2025
In this episode, Damien Davis, a customer success leader at ServiceNow, shares his insights on balancing career growth with personal wellness. He discusses his journey of maintaining healthy habits while managing a demanding executive role, emphasising the importance of sustainable routines and mindset shifts. Damien also highlights how building strong relationships, focusing on personal branding, and leveraging AI-driven solutions to drive impact for both businesses and customers. With a people-first approach, he explains how ServiceNow measures success through NPS, CSAT, and customer value realisation, reinforcing the link between employee engagement and client impact.
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts of the Growth Workshop Podcast?
Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with your hosts, me, Matt Best and Jonny Adams. In this podcast, we'll be sharing insights from our combined 30 plus years experience and hearing from other industry leaders to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business.
We'll cover all aspects of leadership, sales, account development and customer success, alongside other critical elements required to build an effective growth engine for your business. This podcast is aimed at leaders from exec all the way down to line managers. Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop podcast. We're thrilled to have Damien Davies from ServiceNow joining us today.
Damien, welcome and thank you for coming along. Thanks for having me. Brilliant. Damien, we'd love to kind of get into hearing more about your career, your personal life. I know you've got lots of things kind of going on in your world and some really kind of incredible challenges as well, which we want to sort of dive into. But maybe before that...
Chapter 2: Who is Damien Davis and what is his role at ServiceNow?
Johnny and I were debating this morning, actually, that a fun question to ask might be, if you had to select two people to be in your personal advisory board, so this could be anyone, work, outsider work, personal, somebody that doesn't even exist anymore, who would those people be and why? Oh, that's a good way to start. Punch it. Look, we're on the growth podcast here, right?
We're talking about growth and I'm a big fan of growth and learning. And someone that really inspires me is Stephen Bartlett, you know, from Dragon's Den, Diary of a CEO, follow his content all the time on LinkedIn. And often it's almost like a daily feed to read. If I could have him in my corner, he's always advertising, isn't he? He's, you know, he's always saying, oh, come and join my companies.
And I'm like, yeah. I'll have you as my board advisor. And then the second one will be my wife. Just keep feet on the ground, right? I've enjoyed a very successful career with ServiceNow, and I know we'll dive deeper into that. And while I'm on this trajectory of growth and learning, I think having the mantra of hungry but humble and keeping feet on the ground, Mrs. D definitely keeps me grounded.
Hungry and humble. Yeah. That's fantastic. And, Dame, you talk about your career so far, and obviously ServiceNow are a global enterprise business solution provider, and you probably do a much better job of introducing them than I just have. But maybe tell us a little bit about your role there and what it is that you do. Yeah, well, I kind of feel like I'm on my third career within ServiceNow.
I've actually been there nearly 14 years. They were a pre-IPO startup when I joined back in 2011. You know, we had about 300 employees globally, and we've now got 26,500 full-time employees. That's quite some growth. I did my first six years working in the customer support organization, working in tech support.
I did another seven years working in our IT service management business unit as a product management leader. And now I'm on my third wave of career and I now work in what's called our Customer Excellence Group, or internally we call it CEG. And my role is really to help ServiceNow customers unlock the value of their investment in our solutions. Amazing.
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Chapter 3: What personal goals does Damien Davis have for wellness?
And I know that has you traveling around the world as well. And I guess trying to balance that can be pretty tricky. I know as well, you told us previously that you've got this personal objective of losing 50 pounds by the time that you're 50. That's right. Talk to us a little bit about that. And I think what I think is really interesting for our audience as we think about growth is...
So often looking at that, what that requires in terms of mindset, well-being, both inside and outside of work. So how are you juggling that and how are you helping yourself get to that goal? Well, if I dial back first, my next birthday does start with a five. There's going to be a round number. And I've had this moment of realization and said, you know what? Look, I'm late 40s.
I'm not in great shape. I've got a successful career. I've got a young family. I have an older daughter as well. I'm like, look, if I'm going to be successful both in and outside of work, I really need to pay a bit more attention to how I look after my body.
And, you know, again, been following lots of podcasts, various posts from, you know, inspirational individuals and decided, you know what, if I'm going to be in the best shape of my life, I need to change habits and processes. I've lost weight and gained weight several times in the past, and I've been too focused on the goal and the outcome of hitting a target weight.
And so often people come up to me, oh yeah, what's your target? And I went, well, my target is building better habits and changing my mindset so that I try and do it semi-automatically. the weight will come off and it will be a byproduct of changing those habits.
But at the same token, you know, if you're going to track and measure anything, so I did the initial measurements and, you know, the scales, if it was one of those talking scales, would have said one at a time, please. And I realized that, look, realistically, if I was going to be in optimal shape, body fat percentage was a big number.
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Chapter 4: How does Damien Davis balance career growth with personal wellness?
But how that translated into weight was around about 50 pounds in US, three and a half stone, 23 kilos. And I don't profess to be a nutritionist or a personal trainer, but I'm following, you know, a really good program. And, you know, I'm working out three times a week in the gym. I'm doing my cardio, getting my steps in, and I've completely changed my relationship with food.
But I've already started to see some initial successes. And while it's still very intentional and very focused, I feel like I'm getting into the rhythm of building some of those better habits. Just curious, thinking about growth and that story, what's the thing that sort of triggered you to do this? Because I'm hearing a few things that might have been the trigger.
I'm going to be brutally honest, right? You know, it'd be lovely to use some inspirational quote, say, I just want to be there for my children and be in the best shape of my life. Look, I'm a man and my voice is vanity, right? I looked in the mirror and I didn't like what I saw. And I'm still not completely in love with what I see because I'm in the early stages of that journey.
You know, and I was like, look, I want to be like Ronaldo. I want to have that body. And I thought if I want to have that one, I'm going to have to work bloody hard to get there. And then I sort of did a bit of a balancing act and said, is that sustainable? And I thought, you know what? I know what's sustainable.
Eating healthily, avoiding junk, and making sure that I build a workout routine that I can sustain. Can I do six days a week in the gym for the rest of my life? No. Can I do every other day? Probably. It sounds like, you know, you've got this very, like you said, habits focused and someone who's clearly good and experienced at making those kind of changes.
And we talk about this a lot in the context of sales and business development and establishing those productive habits and that regular track and that cadence and having access to those data points, be that data point, a photo of you in the mirror shows it applies in so many different contexts. It's the same process, right?
You think about if you're working in sales with a customer and you've agreed on a mutual close plan, Every day you're tracking that mutual close plan working out, right, what actions and next steps do I need to take today? I've just applied that same methodology to my body transformation.
And ultimately, my mutual close plan is building better habits, eating healthier, working out, and the byproduct will be me being in much better shape in the same way that we want to go and close a deal. I can almost hear the people screaming at this podcast thinking, but I don't have the time. And you're a senior leader in a large, significant business with lots of priorities.
How have you found the time to not only start to focus on these habits, but actually follow through with that? Yeah, so, well, time is a commodity that we could all use more of, right? Time is not going away. And probably I'm going to continue to be busy until I reach retirement age. So do I want to put it off until then? Or do I want to start now?
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Chapter 5: What advice does Damien Davis have for aspiring leaders?
And thinking about that as a sort of personal goal, I'd love to dive in a little bit to your career, the journey that you've been on with ServiceNow. And I think a lot of the time on the podcast, we talk about what are those frameworks? What are those things that can help our listeners?
And a lot of our listeners are leaders in some sort of shape or form, senior leaders, middle management, or just aspiring leaders, right? What are the things, what's the advice that you would give to some of those leaders listening here as they embark on their journey from the career that you've, the illustrious career that you've had so far?
Well, my number one giveaway or takeaway is it's all about the people. Nothing in business happens without relationships. You know, even in the tech world, we use technology in the service of people to make people's lives and certainly their work lives better. That's what enterprise software does.
It automates stuff and it makes jobs better, makes companies more efficient, but it's all about the people. And as you build your grow, grow your career, you know, make relationships, find champions, open opportunities and open doors, both inside and outside of your organization with your customers, with your
Business partners, stakeholders and your internal colleagues, senior leaders, peers, even juniors with like reverse mentoring. You know, I've spent the last decade expanding my network, really working and focusing on my personal brand because obviously our brand is what people see us as, right? Or what people will talk about us when we're not in the room.
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Chapter 6: How does personal branding impact career growth?
And I think actually every single one of us has the opportunity to control the narrative of our personal brand. Certainly in the last two years, I've invested very heavily in my personal brand. What do I want to be known for? What do I want to be famous for? How can I be seen as someone that can enable and help others to learn and grow?
And I like to think that I've done a reasonable job of it because I get approached with questions and, you know, asking for advice. And I feel very humbled that people are coming to me to ask for that career advice. And I can only talk through my own personal experiences, which has been my growth journey with ServiceNow. I mean, it all comes down to the people.
I resonate with what you're saying, you know, massive impact on myself, you know, the people around me. Who on that journey, who's been the person that's given you the most impact? There's a few and it's interesting to use the word impact. Impact is a very important word for me for two reasons. Firstly, it's my personal mantra.
If you look up my LinkedIn, I mean, my tagline is making an impact and it's something that really resonates deeply with me. And secondly, ServiceNow's flagship product for our customer success is also called Impact. So it's something that just resonates deeply every day.
And when I go to my career journey about people that have made an impact, honestly, there's been so many as I've built this network up. I've been very fortunate and very lucky to travel the world working in my various roles at ServiceNow. And in every city and every country that I've gone to, I've made new acquaintances, some of which have become really close personal friends.
And that network expands and then it opens opportunities and then someone will make another connection. And it's like a spider web. There's people of all worlds. walks of life. You know, once on a flight, I made friends with a CEO of a company. He actually boarded the plane late, was sweating profusely, sat down next to me.
We started chatting for the flight and we've become friends and he now messages and comments on my LinkedIn posts and invites me back to...
his place and stuff and it's like look you know there's all these lovely serendipity moments that I couldn't really in this length of this podcast name too many individuals because I've been humbled to have met so many great people that have had an impact on my life We talk about impact at SBR. It's our mantra, I guess.
Impact can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, but I love the way that you talk about impact in the context of relationships. And I guess part of that is being impacted and also, as you said, making an impact on the individuals that you meet. How does that translate at ServiceNow? How does that translate to you in a corporate way? How do you deliver impact to your clients?
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Chapter 7: Who has had the most impact on Damien Davis's career?
It's part of the core platform where there are various tools and applications and modules on the platform that help customers realize value, adopt the technical products faster, and maintain their platform health. But what it also gives them is that human layer, and that's where it comes to relationships, where they get access to expertise.
Governance, assurance, subject matter experts, product ninjas, as we like to call them. I think about Apple, iPhone. If you've got something wrong with your iPhone, you want to go to the product ninjas, and that's the genius bar in the Apple store. What impact is the genius bar for service now? That's obviously not brand endorsed or market endorsed.
That's my personal analogy of how I would describe it to friends and family. I think there's probably some copywriter around that terminology. So I'm just caveating that. But like, I mean, it makes sense. If something's wrong with your iPhone, go see the Genius Bar. If something's wrong with your ServiceNow or you want it to work better, go and see the Impact folks.
And is there a way that you measure impact at ServiceNow? It seems to be a question that we're working with our clients on, you know, is there metrics that you use? Is there certain things that you do to ensure that you're tracking impact? Of course. I mean, Corporate metrics, right? NPS scores, net promoter scores, CSAT, customer satisfaction. Internally, we have a metric of undeployed backlog.
You know, we'll look at, right, customer A has bought service now. They are licensed and entitled to X amount of modules. We look at, right, what if they actually switched on? What are they using? Again, we've got this great platform with an abundance of data.
We can actually see what's been turned on, what's being used, and we can then identify gaps and we can make recommendations based on that data on how they can get more value. So yeah, undeployed backlog is an internal metric. Yeah, CSAT and net promoter score are really sort of some of the driving metrics.
We've had someone on this podcast before, a great gentleman called Mike, who talked about the leading way to retain clients is about having great employee engagement. So how are you impacting your employees to create engagement from them? Because as a byproduct, if you get great employee engagement, in theory, your customers are taken care of.
Have you got any sort of ways in which you do that as servers now? Absolutely. So one person that comes to mind is Richard Branson. He made the famous quote, if you take care of your employees, they'll take care of your customers. And I think that's been quoted a billion times. It's in his books. At ServiceNow, we have what we call our People Pact.
And our chief people officer launched this People Pact a few years ago during the pandemic years. And it was really about employee engagement. I'm very fortunate, you know, we have a huge culture of employee well-being. We get allocated a number of well-being days each year, which is giving people time off in addition to their personal time off holiday allowance and corporate public holidays.
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