ScienceLogic's Rita Wharton on What It Means to Be a Servant-Leader
Rita Wharton defines her leadership style as “servant-leader.” According to her, “being a servant-leader means not only being able to lead but also making an effort to relate to the people you're asking to follow you.”
She does so in both her leadership positions at work and in her community.
“I'm a Girl Scout leader working with young women, encouraging them to be in touch with their community and helping them achieve what they can through the Girl Scout experience,” Rita shares.
When she’s not guiding young minds, she’s focused on leading her team as a Director of Enterprise Applications and Business Intelligence at ScienceLogic.
We sat down with Rita to learn what it means to be a servant-leader in practice and how this type of leadership style has shaped her career.
The People Behind the Solutions
Rita believed that pursuing an engineering degree would lead to endless career possibilities. Once she completed her degree in electrical engineering, she realized her connection was working with the people behind the solutions, and less on being “the” engineer.
“I love putting things together and taking things apart but soon realized through my studies, I didn’t want to be an engineer,” she explains. “My summer internships helped me realize I enjoyed working with technical people–hearing how they think, seeing how they build solutions to solve business problems.”
Through networking with college alumni, Rita landed a role as a product marketing engineer where she was the liaison between the customers who buy the product, the people who sell the product, and the engineers who build it.
“I found that my passion was being that conduit between the technical community, sales team, and our customers, and being able to simply translate how our technology was used to solve business problems,” she says.
Within this role, she was able to experience both the business and marketing side of technology early in her career, and continued to grow and develop her skills, primarily in the networking and IT industry. When she joined ScienceLogic, she expanded her capabilities.
Developing Her Leadership Skills at ScienceLogic
Rita began working at ScienceLogic as a consultant. When the company started to grow, she saw an opportunity to explore a new career path.
“I decided to transition to a full-time position as a project manager,” she says. “Two ladies and I came together to form the charter project management organization (PMO) at ScienceLogic.”
With a permanent position, Rita began to take advantage of available career opportunities.
“I managed customer deployments with the project team,” she recounts. “I took my experience and worked with the project managers to lead the transition of our disparate project management ‘tools’ into a single application. This helped us gain efficiencies and real-time visibility into project status information and access to executive dashboards.”
Rita was also involved in the SL1 deployments for large, strategic accounts.
“Sometimes you have an atypical problem because of the size and complexity of the deployment, and the answers aren’t necessarily in the product manual,” she points out.
When there is no obvious solution, it takes a leader to bring people together in order to solve the problem.
“I’ve been able to successfully communicate and collaborate with customers and internal technical teams,” she highlights. “Bringing all stakeholders together to assess, evaluate, present, and implement solutions to business problems is what I believe leadership is all about.”
This led to her governing the service delivery methodology for the global service delivery team.
“There are certain tasks we want to make sure we do consistently,” she explains. “So, we'd have checks and balances in place in order to achieve certain goals every single time we do a deployment for our customers.”
Becoming more comfortable with overseeing the global project delivery governance, she continued to seize opportunities to demonstrate her leadership skills.
“My manager encourages our leadership team to pick a few things to do well that will have the biggest impact on the business and not boil the ocean. I was in a position where I was able to constantly evaluate and verbalize the things I observed and highlight areas where we could improve,” she shares. “The governance role, more than any other role, allowed me to find my voice and be heard in a way that I hadn’t experienced before in my career. And when an opportunity presented itself to take on a leadership role, I was considered for it.”
Becoming a Servant-Leader
The more roles and responsibilities Rita took on, the more she shaped her style of leadership.
“I'm a doer, so I won’t drop an idea on the table and walk away,” she says. “I want to talk with the project team about their deployment strategies and the technical team about solution development. In that vein of wanting to be in the trenches with the team, I make myself available to brainstorm ideas as much or as little as needed.”
Rita sees her leadership role as someone whose job it is to listen to and unite people on different fronts.
“I make sure I'm listening to the customer and providing that feedback to the technical team,” she shares. “That way, I can bring the project stakeholders together and make sure all parties are prepared and no one is blindsided. By the time we all come together, everybody's in agreement and we have a path for success to meet the expected business outcomes.”
Now as a director, Rita’s leadership style has taken a more hands-on approach.
“With my leadership style, I’m able to both lead and work alongside my team to create core values and structure, encourage cross-team collaboration, and foster a foundation of trust and support. For me, it's important that I show that I'm willing to help team members get started if needed. I'm willing to be a sounding board and offer ideas. At the end of the day, it’s all about helping each team member see the role they play in realizing the vision.”
Advice for Being a Servant-Leader
Rita recognizes that an important aspect of being a servant-leader is having a vision. However, vision execution doesn’t always go according to plan.
“You always need a vision or a mission,” she says. “The challenge is making sure I don’t make a hard right turn when I don't see the vision coming together the way I initially planned. That’s when I have to work through the challenges and not lose faith in the vision. I remind myself if a plan doesn’t work, change the plan, not the goal.
For those looking to build their leadership skills, Rita offers the following advice:
- Know your strengths. “Allow your strengths to be part of how you lead the team,” Rita advises. “When taking on a leadership role it’s common to have self-doubt, however, when you understand what your strengths are, utilize and build on them to help you lead with confidence.”
- Give yourself grace. “You're going to make mistakes,” she says. “You're never going to know it all, and that's where you ask questions to fill your knowledge gap until you get to the point of knowing enough to move forward or make a decision.”
- Carry out the vision of the company as a team. “Allow the team to be part of defining the vision and you’ll have a much easier time leading. A secondary benefit of this approach is when you experience a challenge or roadblock, the team will be proactively invested in finding solutions because they were part of the vision.”
- Take time to mentor others. “Offer yourself up as a mentor to team members or colleagues to help them tap into their core strengths in their roles and align to the vision and their career goals,” she explains. “I’ve been encouraged by my mentor to define stretch goals to grow and develop my strengths. It’s been a great benefit for me and I feel it’s important as a leader that I pay it forward by mentoring others to help pave the way for future leaders.”
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How Francesca Van Oss went from Customer Success Manager to Director of Partnerships and Alliances at Workiva
During the lockdown, Francesca Van Oss, accompanied by her husband and dog, moved away from the chaotic London lifestyle to the calm English countryside.
“It's not necessarily everyone's idea of heaven, but I'm surrounded by fields and cows and that's how I switch off and relax,” she shares.
Yet this calmness doesn’t stop her and her husband from keeping busy with activities like walking their dog and renovating an 18th-century farmhouse.
“Everyone thought we were just doing a bathroom but we gutted the entire house,” she says laughing. “Our project makes everyone feel better about their own renovations!”
When she’s not busy with farm life and remodels, she’s deeply involved in her work as the Director of Partnerships and Alliances at Workiva. We sat down with Francesca who shared how she made a career out of building relationships.
A New Beginning in Customer Success
At school, Francesca excelled in languages and imagined herself working as an ambassador or for the consulate. When she arrived at university she contemplated studying Italian but also felt drawn to studying Dutch because of her family roots.
“My family is originally Dutch, but no one in my family speaks it, '' she explains. “So I think growing up, I always felt like I wanted to explore that Dutch side.”
Her focus on languages eventually led her to study abroad.
“I did my Erasmus year in the Netherlands at the university that my great grandfather had gone to,” she shares.
After her year abroad, she came back to the UK, finished her degree, and contemplated her next career move.
“I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do in the UK,” she confesses. “So I moved over to Amsterdam on a whim and I gave myself six months to find a job.”
Five months into living in the Netherlands, she got an interview with Workiva.
“They were looking for a native English speaker who would be one of two to start in Europe,” Francesca explains.
In the middle of a snowy winter, she interviewed for the customer success role. A position that, at the time, was new to her and not too common within the industry.
“Customer Success wasn't a common term at the time," Francesa shares. “It was just coming to the market for Fintech and SaaS companies.”
Nonetheless, Francesca was drawn in by Workiva’s culture and was ready to embark on a new endeavor.
“They were such a lovely welcoming company," she explains. "I agreed to do customer support initially, and that's how it started.”
Growing with Workiva
Workiva is a global company based in Iowa that supports businesses and people all over the world by managing and reporting their business data.
From the moment Francesca started, she was embraced by the supportive culture.
“They'd come over to Europe looking for people they could trust," she says. “And so you give that trust back.”
Francesca did a four-week training in the middle of a cold Iowa winter, where her spirits were warmed by the connections she built with her colleagues.
"It was amazing getting to know everyone and the company," she shares. “You come back with this amazing energy and you feel so supported. You're on a mission knowing that you're the first boots on the ground in Europe.”
As the company began to expand, so did more opportunities for different roles.
“I was fortunate to be given lots of responsibility from a young age, and my age didn't matter in software and at Workiva," she explains. “It's about hiring the correct people. When I joined, there was only customer success and now there are a plethora of roles that exist.”
After working in customer success, she became a solutions architect and then moved to a pre-sales and post-sales role in London, which allowed her to travel throughout Europe and Asia and taught her the skills necessary for her next role.
“It helped me get to where I am now because I got to understand multiple regions and continents and the cultural etiquette,” she explains.
This exposure to other companies and their business structures helped her see how Workiva’s business could expand.
Building the Partnership and Alliances Team
“I saw the US had started exploring partnerships and alliances, and how other software companies had a very heavy partnerships and alliances model, which was successful in helping them to grow,” she points out.
Following the success of others in the industry, she approached her leadership team with the idea of starting a partnership and alliances team.
With approval from the higher-ups, Francesca started in a strategic initiatives role. “I was given the flexibility and the trust to be able to explore something that I felt would be revenue generating," she shares.
Eventually, the partnerships department grew from two people into a larger team, and little by little Francesca prepared herself for the Director’s role.
“You can't just become a Director overnight,” she admits. “Stepping into the role was a transition. It took time.”
Once Francesca stepped into a management role, she took initiative to make the most of her new position. “Sometimes you have to take initiative and not be afraid to go for it, "she encourages. “I think too often, we're waiting to be asked to do something.”
Francesca explains how she would put this advice to practice. “If there wasn’t a partnership voice in a leadership meeting, determining X, Y, Z strategy, I’d find a way to engage and collaborate with the right people.”
As a result of her active participation, the Partnership and Alliances team has developed into a type of ecosystem where she creates bi-lateral relationships that accelerate business growth.
“We partner with consulting firms and technology implementation companies so that we can ultimately provide the best software to their clients, our customers,” she explains. “These partnerships help drive business growth broader and faster because we're able to reach into new markets or new solution areas.”
Thus building reciprocal relationships has been a key part of their success.
The Importance of Relationship Building
From the moment Francesca started in customer success, building strong relationships has been her overall objective.
“Internal relationships initially were key because when you are the first person in a role, you are not going to be successful on your own,” she explains. “So my relationships have always been super important with peers and there are people I've spoken to for nine years now that I've never met and it doesn't necessarily matter because you can still build those relationships virtually.”
Once these foundational relationships with colleagues were built, Fransesca began building relationships with her customers.
“In the end, if our customers aren't happy, then we are not successful,” she explains.
“Customer success and trust are two of Workiva’s values,” she points out. “Whenever you are with customers, you're always thinking what's best for them and you build strong relationships with them, not because you have to, but because you care about them as well.”
Having genuine empathy and concern for her customers is just one relationship-building skill, another crucial component of relationship-building is emotional intelligence, EQ.
“Emotional intelligence will help you to pick up on the nuances that are often missed and can take you from having a good relationship to a really strong, deep, and lasting relationship,” Francesca notes.
She further explains how having EQ supports business development especially when primary communication is virtual.
“I hired half our team in lockdown and hadn't ever met them,” she shares. “Supporting a team through lockdown where it's super stressful, it's quite a pressure cooker sometimes and you need to be able to pick up on that through your keyboard or a screen.”
Career Advice on Transitioning Into Leadership Roles
Relationship building is an important skill in order to make customers happy and advance in your career. For those looking to grow into leadership roles, Francesca offers the following advice.
1. Be inquisitive: “Because that's how you keep growing,“ she explains. “Keep asking questions, keep exploring, keep learning. It's not always about rising upwards in a company. But if you keep learning, you are naturally going to rise because of your breadth of knowledge.”
2. Be open to feedback: “Don't ever be so protective that you can't see the faults or that you can't take feedback,” she advises. “One of the hardest, most important things to remember is that it's okay to not be right or for things to go wrong. Ask for advice, take on the feedback, move on and bounce back quickly."
3. Kindness is not a weakness: Early in Francesca's career, she was advised not to be too nice. “It could be seen as a weakness or naivety,” she shares. “Having been told that I then always worried in the back of my mind that it’s going to derail my career or I wouldn’t be taken seriously.” She grew up with the message of women needing to be fearless to succeed in the workplace, and being kind would make you appear soft. However, Francesca learned the contrary. “Being kind doesn't mean being soft. You can be firm when you need to be and strong when you need to be, and still lead with kindness and empathy. So don't ever feel that you have to fit a stereotype of what a leader is. Be yourself.”
If you are looking for your next job opportunity, check out these openings at Workiva.
4 Ways to Foster Mental Health Awareness in the Workplace
Since the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a dramatic increase in mental health awareness. While you will find a lot of articles focusing on the damaging effect the pandemic had on mental health, you could argue that the pandemic merely highlighted the severity of the issue across the world.
As a result, we have seen an increase in mental health awareness and a surge in support for people of all ages, from those in school to those in offices. Mental health awareness at work has been particularly impactful and is helping drive positive change for individuals and their families.
Let’s take a look at the importance of mental health awareness in the workplace and how we can equip the leaders for the future.
The Importance of Mental Health Awareness in the Workplace
Did you know that we spend one third of our lives at work? That equates to over 90,000 hours spent at work over a lifetime!
If your staff doesn’t feel supported at work, this can have a direct impact on their mental health and wellbeing. One of the most important things to remember about mental health conditions is that they don’t stop and start. You take them with you wherever you go. So, whether your employees are at home or in the office, they could be struggling.
As a business leader, whether you’re a director, a manager, or the leader of a team, you have a duty of care to your employees. Just as you should prioritize creating a safe work environment, the mental wellbeing of your employees should be at the top of your list, too.
Let’s take a look at how we can equip leaders effectively in mental health awareness.
1. Provide Mental Health Training Days and Workshops
Just as you would train your staff on how to use new softwares or speak to clients effectively, you should train them in mental health awareness. Although mental health training in the workplace is still a relatively new concept, it is an invaluable tool that provides leaders with the skills they need to better support their staff, create a safe and happy work environment, and provide people-oriented solutions in the workplace.
Mental health training should be offered on a regular basis to help refresh leaders on company policies. Providing mental health training days and workshops can go a long way towards reducing the stigma surrounding the topic of mental health and help promote a company culture of care and support for those who may be struggling.
2. Encourage Leaders to be Drivers of Change
Leadership isn’t just in the job title. Leaders are chosen to lead by example. Organizations of all sizes will have employees who are silently struggling in one way or another. Business leaders need to be aware of this, as awareness is the first step in driving positive change.
Many employees don’t feel the permission from leadership to take a lunch break, enjoy an afternoon off, or partake in flexible work arrangements. Sometimes it’s because they feel judged, other times they feel it’s just not permitted, and it could be because organization leaders are not leading by example.
Encourage your leaders to take regular breaks, step away from their desks at lunch time, widely advertize flexible working, and encourage employees who are prioritizing their mental health.
Letting your team know that it’s okay — healthy, even — to take regular breaks and enjoy time for themselves, gives employees permission to take back some control. So, whether they want to go on a walk at lunch or take time out to visit their therapist, the culture you create should encourage this, not convict it.
3. Promote the Benefits of Taking Time Off
Did you know that more than half of Americans are concerned their employers will judge them if they request leave on the grounds of mental health? This is a huge problem and is causing hundreds and thousands of employees to suffer from worsening symptoms of depression, anxiety, and burnout.
Promoting the benefits of taking time off is a great way to breach this delicate topic and let your team know that it’s okay to take time off when needed. According to Olivia Marcellino, VP of research at LuxuryRehabs.com, “many employers are sympathetic and understanding, especially because you’re actively seeking treatment. Public stigma around treatment-seeking has decreased as our knowledge [around] mental health has progressed.”
Whether your team works predominantly from the office, from home, or are split between the two, it’s important to let them know that taking time off is encouraged. Time off for therapy appointments or even a duvet day is a great way to promote better mental health awareness in the workplace and equip leaders of the future.
4. Equip Leaders with Better Communication Skills
According to Indeed, “effective communication plays an important part in maintaining a healthy workplace culture [...] A culture of open communication fosters a healthy and accepting environment where all employees feel equal and understood.”
Equipping leaders with better communication skills, through training sessions, is essential for a happy, healthy workplace. When your leaders know how to communicate properly, they can build trust with their employees and provide effective support for those who may be struggling with their mental health.
Many people with mental health conditions struggle to open up, particularly with their work colleagues — let alone their managers! However, fostering open and honest communication within the workplace and taking the time to listen to the needs of individuals can go a long way towards building relationships and providing support when it’s needed most.
Final Words
Equipping leaders with the skills, training, and know-how they need is essential for the promotion of mental health awareness at work. We hope the above points have provided encouragement on how you can equip your leaders for the future and transform your organization for the better.
Are you interested in learning more about how to create healthy work environments for individuals with mental health issues? Check out our Chat & Learn here!
