INBOUND 2021 - Day 3

Below, Imarcians Tori Roche and Alex Canning share their take on INBOUND day three from their perspective as project managers.

Tori: How to better support your project team

That’s a wrap on INBOUND 2021! I built my agenda for the last day of INBOUND around customer success and women in leadership.

As an operations professional, I’m always looking for ways to increase productivity. One session that resonated with me was “The Work You Don’t See: How Operations Professionals Fight the Fires, Clean the Data, and Work To Keep Things Running” with Lindsay Rothlisberger, Sr Manager at Zapier. Lindsay taught the audience how to transition away from being a reactive problem solver. After all, we project managers love to solve problems.

The major takeaway from this session: Rank the value of each task! Deprioritize low value, high complexity items – people tend to get stuck on these tasks while not seeing the rewards or results. By moving these tasks down, you can make your way from a reactive operations professional to a strategic operations professional.

I related to Lindsay when she said that operations professionals are firefighters and love to help. I need to make sure my team has what they need to stay productive and focused on large impact projects while I listen to clients, understand issues, and help put out fires

After all the great sessions today, here are three things that have really stuck with me:

• LISTEN: Listen to your team and your clients. This builds rapport and allows you to be a liaison between the client and your team.

• ASK QUESTIONS: If you want to understand issues and build connections, you need to ask questions. Like Lindsay Rothlisberger said, GO DEEP! Learn your team’s and client’s pain points.

• PAY ATTENTION TO DETAIL: This will reduce errors and extra work. Your clients and team will thank you later.

Alex: How to grow as a leader

This was my first ever INBOUND, and I am thrilled to share with you what I learned. Today, I chose to attend sessions that focused on leadership to push myself to become a better manager and leader. Two sessions, in particular, stuck out to me the most:

The first was “Sitting on the Same Side of the Table: Guide to Speaking Persuasively” with Hubspot Support Manager Molly Gilson. This session really spoke to me as a manager. How am I supposed to talk to my team members about items we may not agree on? How do I start a difficult conversation? I like to think my emotional intelligence (the capacity to be aware of someone else’s emotions) is high, but I realized I’ve never addressed it with anyone else. It would be a great team activity to discuss in what ways we communicate well and where we fall apart. It can be really stressful to have difficult conversations with clients or team members to address something that’s going wrong. Molly shared the following questions to ask yourself before you start these conversations:

• What are your key goals?

• Have you done your research?

• Are you actively listening?

Don’t forget to be positive, and leave your fear at the door!

The second session that resonated with me was “Why Marketers Need to Listen to Black Voices” with Efua Obeng Ph.D. This session reminds us all to be aware of the table we are sitting at. It is a privilege to be where you are, but remember to take a moment to acknowledge who is not there, and consider how you can strategically get them there.

I am honored to be able to participate in today’s event and to know that I am privileged to be able to speak for the company and spend my day learning. As a manager and a team lead, it is up to me to use these new skills to have difficult conversations to acknowledge all the voices around me and include the ones that might be missing. It is up to me and my company to lean into perspectives that are different from our own and to cherish what we hear. As a team lead, I am determined to look around me to identify any lack of equity, and then be strategic in how to approach injustice and elevate the individuals around me.