Joe Sabado – Higher Education & Technology Leadership

There have been several moments in my career that I could call defining moments. These are moments that led to personal and professional growth, or just helped me shape my perspectives.  What I am about to share is one of them. It was a reminder that looks do matter, my skin color matter. It was and still is a reminder that for better or worse, perceptions shaped by society do matter.

Years ago, I had personally invited a vendor to do a presentation of their product to our campus.  The moment he entered the room,  it immediately struck me that he clearly did not make any effort to paying attention to me. He wouldn’t look at me, just focusing and being friendly to my colleague and my boss, both white males.  Throughout the hour presentation, he barely looked at me, seemed to favor the questions posed by my two co-workers. When I did ask, he was very abrupt in his answers and very dismissive. At the conclusion of his presentation, he asked my boss who was leading the project and if we were to choose his product, who would he be working with. My boss told him it would be me. At that second, the vendor immediately focused his attention to me and completely changed his attitude. All of a sudden, I mattered. We went to lunch after the presentation and he spent the whole time trying to gain my favor back. We ended not choosing his product.

I am left to this day thinking why the vendor acted the way he did.  I can only guess, but who knows. Here’s what I do know, to this day, I feel the need to work harder, prove myself more than those around me. I have the need to be always presentable in how I dress, how I act, just to be considered to be at the same level as those around me.  How I look and dress shouldn’t matter right? I wish that was the case. For those privileged enough to not have to worry whether their skin color, their look don’t matter, this obviously isn’t an issue for them. Maybe I’m wrong, what do you think?

My lack of brutal honesty when dealing with others are interpreted by some as being dishonest, but I am not going to tell another person “You’re wrong” and be dismissive without some understanding of their perspective. There’s always a chance that I maybe just the one who’s wrong. Yes, it takes more time to probe, to reserve judgment, to diplomatically state my opinions, but there’s one thought that comes to my mind when engaging with others, especially when involving conflicts – “How will they feel after our conversation?”

credit – image by Lifehacker.com

One of the most memorable mistakes I ever made professionally happened while I was coding at 3 in the morning a few years ago. It was a mistake I took lessons from as someone who is constantly experimenting with new ideas and technologies.  It is also a mistake I draw upon as someone who is now in a position of leadership.  I suppose it is not the mistake itself that is valuable but rather what one learns from it and the idea that innovation and progress can be gained by allowing ourselves and co-workers the freedom to experiment, accepting the fact that in the process of experimentation, we will make mistakes along the way.

It was one of my typical workday years ago when I used to spend nights in my office trying to complete projects.  There was no remote access back then and so I had to drive to my workplace and work from there.  I was learning how to code and I was in a rush to complete the project. The particular project I was working on involved emailing a couple of thousands of customers about a satisfaction survey for one of the departments I supported. It involved writing a program that would loop through a list of emails and sending an email one at a time. I came across an email component on the web I had never used before but decided to use it on this project.  Although I tested my program using a few of my personal emails, apparently I did not test it wide enough to notice what could go wrong, and ultimately, what actually happened. The error went something like this –  the first email on the list received one email, the second email received  two copies of the same, the third email received three and so thousandth email received thousand copies. What I failed to do is to include a command that erases previous emails in the program’s memory, one line of code.

I was very lucky because there were some systems in place on our email system that prevented most of the emails from being sent out. When I came back to work a few hours that morning, I was informed of what had happened and what was still going on. I went on a panic mode, thinking I will be fired for what I had done. I had to contact our email administrator to delete the emails that had not been delivered. I also had to go talk to my supervisor at that time to inform her of the mistake I had made. While I was in her office, she patiently listened to me describe the situation and while I knew she was upset, she was calm and offered to make a phone call to the head of the organization affected. She calmly said “it happened, let’s learn something from this and let’s move on.” While she was on the phone, another colleague of mine came into her office and told her about another situation involving another system that had accidentally authorized the transfer  of thousands of dollars. At that point, she looked at me and excused me from her office so she could deal with the seemingly bigger problem. When we reviewed the situation a couple of days later, I found out the head of the organization was not really too upset about it. As a matter of fact, her response was “These things happen. My husband also works in the tech industry and I’ve seen this happen before.”

I have never forgotten this incident and I use it to this  day as one of my reminders with my projects.  After that project, I took testing a lot more seriously by taking the extra steps to double check my work. In addition, I became more critical of new components I am using for the first time.  I also share this story to my staff in making a point that it is okay to make mistakes from time to time as long as they learn from them.  I also shared the fact that my supervisor did not punish me to a point that I stopped experimenting. The last thing I want them to do is to stop improving themselves for the fear of being punished from the mistakes they make.  As a developer, I was constantly learning and applying new techniques and that was how I developed my skills. I also think we put more significance to the mistakes we make than what they really are. I certainly felt as if it was the end of my career when the mistake above happened until my other co-worker had a bigger problem than mine.

How do you view mistakes in your organization and your career?

My dad used to work as a janitor for a mall when I was younger.  I remember him bringing home books that had been thrown away by bookstores.  I especially loved those big books about jet planes, ships, tanks. I think that’s when I developed my love for learning, especially trivia, which I still have today. For years when bookstores were still open where I live, I spent countless of hours reading computer and psychology books. I had this urge to read every book in those sections, an obsession which was probably not healthy and not financially sound as I regularly spent $150-200 dollars a month for years. A few years ago, I donated more than 100 computer books to Salvation Army.

These days, social media is now the equivalent of those big books that I used to read when I was younger and those books I used to read at bookstores.  Without exaggeration, I probably spend at least 3 to 4 hours every day just learning about topics like social media, mobile web, technology, leadership, social business and higher education. Looking at my twitter favorites, I did not realize I have favorited thousands of tweets, most of them are links to blogs, articles and I can honestly say, I have read the majority of them. There are so many good presentations on slideshare, youtube, prezi and other sites. I  Social media has certainly become my personal learning network.

I work in higher education technology field and given the rapid pace of how technologies are introduced, learning and keeping up with current/future trends really are not options. Learning is part of my  job requirement and that’s why I spend so much time learning. But I think that even without learning as part of my job, there are so much fascinating things to learn and I’m just thankful social media is around to satisfy my curiosity.

How do use social media for learning?

““The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.” – Henry Ford

Do you ever have people in your life that no matter what you do, it’s never good enough?  These are people that no matter what your accomplishments are, they always find some flaws and they’re quick to point them out. I call them “negative farmers”. There is this story by Joel Osteen, a pastor I watch on t.v. and the story goes something like this:

There are these two farmers and one day, one of the farmers invited his buddy to show him something remarkable about his new dog. He invited him to go goose hunting at a lake. When they get to the lake, the farmer shoots a goose and commands his dog to retrieve the duck which had landed on the water. The dog starts to run on the water towards the goose and brings it back to the farmer. The farmer excitedly asks his buddy what he thinks. His buddy shakes his head and says “Just what I thought,  that dog can’t even swim.”

Fortunately, I’ve only had a few negative farmers in my life,  but it used to bother me a lot when I heard criticisms about me.  I have to admit, it still bothers me from time to time, but no to the extent they used to. I used to spend my time and energy trying to prove myself to them but not matter what I did, I wasn’t good enough. I even felt like I had to get their approval to move on. It’s funny how I used to take to heart that one criticism I received and disregard the praises when I accomplished something. One of the important things I have learned (and still learning) during my career was to learn how to ignore these criticisms, distractions and stay focused towards my goals.

I found out about the death of a former co-worker today and it’s a sobering reminder of how fickle life can be. He was relatively young. It’s a reminder that life’s too short not to focus on what matters in life – my family, friends, doing the right things, helping others succeed and working on life’s goals. Forget the naysayers, the critics. Ignore them as they’ll only distract you from your goals.