Charlotte Ward: 0:13
Hello and welcome to episode 280 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I’m Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome back Cat Gains for the final part in a six-part series on incident management. I’d like to welcome back to the podcast today, Kat Gains. Kat, thank you so much for joining me. Um, we’re here still talking about incident management. It’s been a wild ride of uh, I think this is our seventh conversation now, but we’re we’re on the home stretch, aren’t we? Welcome back and uh looking forward to this one.
Kat Gaines: 0:54
Yeah, I believe it’s seven. Thank you so much for having me back. I’m excited to chat a little bit more, give our listeners even more to think about, but hopefully not overwhelm them too much. We just want to kind of recap where we’ve been so far and have some parting thoughts.
Charlotte Ward: 1:09
Yeah, exactly. I mean, parting thoughts. There’s there’s been a lot of food for thought and a lot to digest over these episodes. I think we’ve been um uh I I hope a helpful mix of, you know, the theory and the why, as well as like super practically actually what you can take away from this conversation today. Just go and do this little thing, you know. Um, I hope that uh everyone listening to this series has had those moments of like, maybe I’m not ready for the whole thing yet, but I can do this little thing. And that takes me a step closer to to the full program, right? Which is where we hope to get everybody at the end of the day. So, so maybe we begin then with a recap of what what the structure is that we’ve talked about. Like, so I’m not gonna ask you to uh retell all of the all of the last six episodes, but ultimately, ultimately, like I think it’s worth casting our mind back, for instance, to the first episode where we talked about why we even why Kat did we even sit down and have this conversation over seven episodes? Why are we here? What why is this important? And and why I suppose uh episode seven would I encourage everybody to go back and listen to it all again.
Kat Gaines: 2:24
Yeah, I I think the thing for folks just to remember is that whether what whatever perspective you’re listening to this from, whether you’re in support or engineering or another function in your company, there’s a good chance that you haven’t thought as deeply about how your customer-facing teams get involved when something happens as you have the opportunity to. And it sounds a little silly and almost counterintuitive to say that that could even be true for support people. But when we’re thinking about what it means to think about it deeply, we’re thinking about stepping back, taking stock of the whole process of beginning to end, even the pieces where support may not be directly involved or have as much stake in what’s happening. But we are really thinking about what is good incident manage look like from beginning to end, from we think something might be happening, to we’re sending out the final incident review status update, letting folks know what happened and how we’re preventing it going forward. That we sometimes get in a rush to just solve and find the solution to the problem. And so through no one’s fault, we end up accidentally leaving out the people who will talk to our customers, who will help insure them through those times of instability, who will help them make sure that they understand that the business does have their back, so to speak. It is really often on support and other customer-facing teams, but very heavily on support to hold that responsibility and that messaging. And so uh, why would you think about this? This would really just be ensuring that those people have every piece of the process completely internalized, that they know what’s happening, that they’re not themselves flailing in a moment when your customers are going to initially feel like they may be flailing a little bit, that they can be that image of stability.
Charlotte Ward: 4:18
Yeah. And you used a word in episode one, I think, which we we touched on again and again in the series, which is calm. And I think I think that it’s, you know, I think it’s the thing that we’re encouraging people to strive for in an incident, however formalized, however mature their incident management process. Because I think one thing that we learned over the course of these discussions is you don’t need to implement the whole thing straight away from the get-go. You know, you you start and you iterate, you just get started. And if what you do in your next incident is calmer than what you did in your last incident, you’re already winning, right? That is a win. That’s an improvement. Exactly. Exactly, exactly. And you said something else there which I just thought was really interesting, and um, I think it’s worth uh us exploring a little bit, you know. Um when we have talked about incident management, um, particularly in the early episode or two in this series, um, we talked about how much of a stakeholder support was in this process, and we talked about how important it is that support and your customer-facing teams in general are stakeholders in this process. But I think that um something that you just said then was really interesting, which is that support people, we kind of began this conversation all those episodes ago with the assumption that your customer-facing teams are crying out for this, that they know this is a problem, that this is a a thing they recognize is like a situation they don’t want to be in, and that this is the solution that they just need. But but actually it occurs to me that not all customer take not all customer-facing teams necessarily recognize that there is a problem because partly because you got what you partly because of what you touched on about we get into the incident and then all we want to do is solve. And that’s particularly true of engineering and support type teams, you know. But also if you really are way downstream in your organization, you can feel a little bit kind of a a bit disconnected and a bit disenfranchised almost, can’t you? That you have no say, that you have no vote, that you have no influence, and that this experience you are having of incidents is all it will ever be. And I I think that’s worth just calling out. Like if you’re feeling that, say something.
Kat Gaines: 6:54
Yeah. I think that’s part of there’s a lot of of this actually, but that’s a component of the common trauma of support people. I think to feel like that lack of agency and to feel as though you may even recognize a problem, or you may recognize that you want things to get a little better and feel calmer, but you don’t know how to ask for it, or you don’t feel empowered to ask for it. And so I think that’s a lot of what we’ve discussed. And going back to what you were saying, we want to get to a state of incident calm and stability where you’re not only projecting that calm and stability for your customers, but you’re also instilling it in your team as part of the process. And the way that you do that is to make sure that everyone impacted feels involved. You cannot be calm if you don’t feel involved and if you don’t feel like you have a good grasp of what’s going on, or if you don’t feel like you have good agency of what happens to you and your job, you’re the one who’s sitting there getting hammered in the queue, having all of these folks just asking you, what’s going on? I need an update, what are you people doing over there, potentially getting abusive, right? All of those things. And so if you have agency of that process itself and you’re you’re involved in that process, it’s the same thing that we were talking about with uh executives or leaders coming in and trying to insert themselves where they’re not needed. It’s anxiety and the removal of that anxiety and the feeling that you are being given what you need to do the job. That is the common factor in what everyone needs to succeed in these processes.
Charlotte Ward: 8:27
And and I think you begin to feel agency when you are involved in the process as it is, but but most particularly when you are involved in what we discussed in our last episode, I think, uh, retrospectives, right? When you have the opportunity to be involved in those retrospectives and give feedback.
Kat Gaines: 8:47
Yeah, absolutely. Those that’s your opportunity to say, hey, this didn’t work for us. We uh we’re missing crucial pieces of information. We didn’t get timely enough updates, we didn’t get someone to approve the messaging that we want to send out to customers in a timely manner. Here’s a downstream effect that those gaps in the process had. Or it’s the moment to celebrate good process too, to say, you know what, this person partnered with us really well. This happened really fast and really efficiently. Look how far we’ve come. It’s also a good opportunity to have that kind of reflection too, to say, you know, we used to not be able to get a status update out within our goal of let’s say five minutes. And now, because we’ve been focusing on these process improvements, we can do that. And isn’t that great? Because that instills calm for everyone impacted. So all of those things during your incident review, you want to touch on and you want to try to call them out. And that is just a tool that’s going to help you gain that agency more and more.
Charlotte Ward: 9:46
And I think that there’s there’s two things that really grease the wheels of that. Um, one is is the retrospective gives you that opportunity for everyone to feel heard and to iterate, right? And I think that iteration is something we’ve touched on again and again in this series. Um but the other thing I think is uh it’s a point of culture, right? That everyone feels heard in the retrospective. That but it’s also in some ways having a process where everyone knows what their role is and what the expectations are, what what their what their remit is, what their you know, what their deliverables are inside that incident process and when they’re supposed to turn up and how they’re supposed to turn up. Um that is something that your incident management process can go a long way to helping uh define and set the stage for everyone, which means that even the incident manager, even though they’re responsible for the incident in the moment, they’re not responsible for every single thing that every person is doing. And and it’s set it sets a stage, the it sets a stage of trust, actually. I think um you know that things are happening, even though they’re outside of your earshot or eye shot, right? Um, or eyesight even. Um, that that stuff will happen that you need to happen, and everyone feels, I think, I think this comes back to that calm because you don’t have to be in everything, even the incident manager doesn’t have to be in every room. That um that it builds trust and and it it allows anyone in that incident to say you’ve got that, I’ve got this. And I think that’s that’s goes a long way to feeling calm, don’t you?
Kat Gaines: 11:45
There really is. And I think this is the thing that we not because anyone wants to, but we we unintentionally forget about sometimes when we’re designing incident management process or designing honestly any collaborative process internally, that the culture is as critical a component to the success of the overall process as any of those individual parts that you might be writing down on paper. And so I’d almost say you need to write that part down on paper too. You need to write down the principles by which you operate in this process. We talked in our uh conversation about incident reviews and postmortems around the concept of blameless postmortems. And so documenting those types of things and making it very clear that at this company, we believe in approaching this in this manner. And here is why that’s important. And looking for ways to inject that clarity in any part of documenting the process, in the training for new folks coming into the process, in your reviews and iterations of the process, really being clear that that culture and that trust is very, very important to the success of the overall process. It cannot be an afterthought or a byproduct, it doesn’t happen naturally. Culture is intentional and that making clear that you work at that as a team.
Charlotte Ward: 13:04
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that I think that those reminders inside things like an incident management process are worth having because um incidents can get heated and it’s easy to lose, it’s easy, it’s easy to lose sight of that. You know, it’s easy to lose sight. Everybody has a moment in an incident where they just want to rage, like, why? Why did you do that? Why did that happen? Why, you know, but if it’s you know, if it’s if it’s in the you know, your peripheral vision somewhere on a document, you’re gonna remember that there’s gonna be a moment where at some point you’re gonna dig into that why. And you don’t need to, you can defer it. It’s not that you’re deferring the blame, but you’re deferring the answer. Um, and the art and the answer is more complex than that person just was an idiot. Exactly. There’s gonna be something that you just don’t see at that moment, and I think that uh yeah, I I think building going back to my point earlier about like you don’t have line of sight of every everyone, everyone and everything in an incident. Um trust, right? I mean, it all comes back to building a culture that allows your people to trust each other, and it’s worth documenting, absolutely.
Kat Gaines: 14:25
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Having just intentional and dare I say, even radical trust in your teammates to be able to know that, okay, they’re trained on this process, they’re trained on this role in the incident response process. Until it’s time for our next within the bounds of the process check-in. I can trust them to go do those things and work on those things. I don’t have to hover over their shoulders, I don’t have to poke them every few minutes going, hey, what are you doing? You can, as incident commander, ask for status updates on tasks in progress. That’s a different thing. But again, it’s built into the process itself. And yeah, just having that amount of trust, it again, it’s something that we kind of think, oh, trust and empathy, all these things come naturally to people who are just good at them. But no, you do have to train folks on them. You do have to educate your team on what good looks like in that sense. And that does, like I was saying before, it takes work and it takes intentional placement of that training and those conversations. But you’re exactly right that if you’re in a moment where your blood is boiling and you will still have that moment, no matter how hard you’ve worked toward a state of calm during incident management, those moments are gonna get you. Uh, so that you even, like you’re saying, you have that in your peripheral vision so that you can cut yourself off from blaming someone, cut yourself off from interacting with someone in a way that makes them feel like, man, this person really just doesn’t care about me as a human being, and make sure that that’s still the forefront of the conversation, even in or especially in these tough moments.
Charlotte Ward: 15:56
The the other thing that um I I see as a it is a it is kind of an unintentional, I think, byproduct. But what I’ve witnessed, let’s say, is you get to a point where most of your team, most of your response teams, and they’ll rotate in and out because they’re in different time zones, different expertise, or whatever. You have a critical mass of people who are trained in how your instant process works. Um, but newcomers arrive, you know, you get a new support engineer, you get a new, you know, engineering manager over there, or you get a new customer success manager. Um, so new people need to slot into it all the time as well. Um, and I think there is training, there is documentation, but what I’ve observed as well, which is fantastic, is that when everyone else lives and breathes the incident management process and culture, they’re really supportive of new people arriving into it. So a new CSM or a new support engineer acting as their first, you know, their first run as incident manager. I’ve seen people say, actually, I think that’s my role and you take that, you know? And like just reinforcing the process and guiding people through, which is amazing to be able to do in the middle of an incident. That just shows how much you’ve de-escalated the situation if you get to that state, right?
Kat Gaines: 17:19
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s one of the things too, where you know, if you start a new job and you’re in your first few weeks and you’re trying to gauge, okay, was everything I was told during the interview process actually true? Or was I really misled into, you know, I’ve had so many friends do it where they found out that they just started a new role and they’ve landed themselves in a really toxic company and culture, and then they’re scrambling to get out of there as fast as they can. But I think that’s one of the key things to look for when you join a new organization is how does the incident management process work? And what does what does that nature of supportive, empathetic, trusting communication look like? Does it actually surface during those most difficult moments? Does it only show up when everything is going easily? Does it never show up at all? Uh and that’s one of those key things to help you understand okay, am I in the right place? Is this a company and a culture that’s going to work for me? And you can you can tell really easily if you can see some of the incident management process early on in your tenure.
Charlotte Ward: 18:24
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s it’s one of those things, isn’t it? You hope it never happens, but actually it’s a really good thing to see because I mean it exposes the cracks if there are any.
Kat Gaines: 18:33
And it’s one of those things that I, you know, like I I hit 10 years at pager duty yesterday as of the day that we’re relationships. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. It’s it’s a long time, but uh it’s been a wonderful time. And uh I remember that what that was one of the first things I noticed. I wasn’t terribly familiar 10 years ago with the concept of incident management and what good looked like. A lot of my training and that has come on the job at this company, but that was one of the very first things I noticed that when something did go sideways uh in my first couple of weeks, the way people handled it was phenomenal. There was so much calm around it. There was chaos around it too. But there were people in the business who just said, okay, we have our process laid out, we know what to do, we know how to handle it. And that came through a lot of really hard work that was hard won, right? And that is one of the reasons why we have so much documentation out there for folks on how to do it right and how to do it in a healthy manner. But uh, it’s something that I’ve just continued to see iteration on year over year over year. And I think that’s also if you’re gauging, if you’re gonna stay in a job that you’re in at a company you’re in, are things net positive improving from a culture perspective? And again, how emergencies are handled is a great way to gauge that. It’s a really weird barometer to say that you you have a Especially if you’re maybe in a role that’s not even involved in that process as much. But it is one that is a very clear indicator, no matter who you are in the organization or no matter what your organization is doing.
Charlotte Ward: 20:11
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn’t agree more. Um, so 10 years at PagerDuty. Congratulations. Um that’s quite a career. And I know that um you mentioned that you wanted to talk about careers in this uh in this line of work as well. So that seems like an enormously uh fortuitous segue into that conversation.
Kat Gaines: 20:35
Uh yeah, and you know what? I’m glad that we didn’t record this a week earlier because now we have that segue. And who knew? There we go. There we go.
Charlotte Ward: 20:45
So aside from turning up as uh so aside from turning up and doing 10 years at PagerDuty, the incident management company, um I I’m I I’m sorry I interrupted you there. I I feel like you were about to give us the uh give us the give us the rundown on you know what what opportunities can this whole um exposure to this whole process, exposure to these scenarios. Um whether you’re involved as a SME or a customer-facing person, or you know, your bread and butter, like default incident manager at your at your current at your current place, what what can this do for you from a career progression point of view?
Kat Gaines: 21:29
I think there is so much. So we were we were just talking about that that culture piece, and that is one of the key pieces that comes right to mind for me immediately. That if you participate in a healthy incident management process and you help shape it and you help work through it, and you’re you’re part of it, and you understand how it works, you have an understanding of what a healthy working culture looks like more than a lot of people out there. We all have fabulous HR teams who work very hard to implement programs in our companies and show us what good looks like. You might have leadership training programs, things for individual contributors, right? But there is again, there is no clearer in the field, I guess I would say, example of what healthy collaboration looks like. And you can take that in so many directions. So if you are, for example, someone in support, not always, but there tends to be a high percentage of junior in their career support folks in our organizations, right? Especially in tech, I feel like that tends to be the case. Uh, and there is a lot of opportunity there to say, okay, how do I want to grow in this role? You might grow within your current organization, you might grow to leadership. If your support organization owns it part or all of incident management, you might become part of the team running that process internally. Or you’re probably going to make connections with other parts of the business during incident management. You’re going to be working collaboratively a lot with product and engineering. You may be working collaboratively as well with marketing, external communications, other folks involved in these moments. And so if there are career paths within those organizations that you’re interested in, you have a couple of things. You have a foothold and a reputation with people in those teams, which nine times out of 10 is a huge piece of advancing internally or moving parallel internally in other roles.
SPEAKER_00: 23:32
Yeah. Yeah.
Kat Gaines: 23:33
That can be massive, right? We have to, I think those of us in leadership have had to be creative in multiple ways around how we move our people around to different roles, if there’s something that they’re excited about pursuing. And that’s something you can do to help your manager make those connections participate in a process that either might be part of your day job or it might be something you can volunteer and raise a hand for and make those connections collaborate with people so that, you know, if uh you know, your junior-ish support engineer Kat, who has been doing the role for a few years, but is now interested in exploring a role over on the other side of the organization, has been working with them a lot. They know her skills, they know what she’s been up to, they know that she’s easy to work with. They’re more likely to say, okay, yeah, we can figure out how to interview her, see if she is potentially a good fit for any open roles we have, or if there’s a need we have that we don’t have an open role for. That kind of creativity opens up through connection a lot. And then I mentioned folks in leadership too. Again, that skill that you gain from coordinating incident management, running those types of process, or just being involved in that process and knowing how to mitigate emergency in that calm and focused manner, that is one of the core skills of leadership. And so if you are looking into roles as a leader, whether it’s in your current team or another team or another organization, that’s something that you should be writing down on your resume. And I think it might not be immediately clear that, ah, yes, this is a skill on my resume that I should tell people about, but it absolutely is because you can have just a wealth of stories to bring up in interviews and conversations that will bolster anyone’s confidence in the fact that when something isn’t going right, you’re going to be the person on the job. And it’s true, you gain this expertise through being part of this process that is really rare to have. You can’t you can train to do it, but the actual practice of doing it is what builds the skill itself.
Charlotte Ward: 25:41
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The uh the practice is is critical, isn’t it? Um because it’s through the practice that all of that um all of that iteration that we just talked about and have been talking about for six weeks now is uh is is actually where you find the stories that you are going to tell your next employer.
SPEAKER_00: 26:08
Yes.
Charlotte Ward: 26:09
Because there are no stories to be had from training.
Kat Gaines: 26:13
No, not many.
Charlotte Ward: 26:15
Not many.
Kat Gaines: 26:16
Unless the training really off, yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 26:21
Um, and the other thing that um, and I think this is true of support in general, but and I think support people are also aren’t terribly good at recognizing this. Um, but I think it is doubly so true of although we are aiming for calm, um, I think it is doubly true of situations that are a bit hotter, like incidents. Um and that is that support people, as you just said, have exposure or have the opportunity for exposure to a lot of the business. And if you go into it with your eyes open, and I think that is something that I think support people are a little scared to do in some ways because they feel so out on a limb, they feel so far downstream, they can feel that imposter syndrome really easily. And I think if you go into any conversation, particularly if you’re running incident management or you know, or you’re the the customer liaison or whatever your role is in that moment, but but frankly, uh in any part of your working day and support, if you can go into a into you know a new conversation, a new part of the business, a new a new process with your eyes open and willing to kind of bring your experience because you do have experience, even if you’ve only been doing support a year, you’ve got some really, really good skills to bring to any situation in the business. And I think if you can do that, you you gain exposure and and reputation, as you as you said, which are critical to finding creative ways out of support, if you want to get out of support, um, or or you know, to uh um uh you know to advance in inside support, but um that also I guess I guess what I’m trying to say is that the skills are just so much more transferable than you than you would ever imagine them to be if you if you only approach any of these situations thinking I’m just here to answer the Zendes ticket. Does that make sense? That was a really long meandering point, but I think it’s like go in there and be willing to engage, you know.
Kat Gaines: 28:42
Meandering. Welcome to how I make points 90% of the time. But no, it makes perfect sense. And I think you also hit on something there that I really want people to internalize listening to this. The goal is not get out of support. That is not the goal. The goal is grow in your career, and that can mean advancing within support, and it can also mean advancing outside of support, and both are extremely valid career paths. And I it’s something that I’m actually giving a talk on this in the fall at um the Elevate CX conference in Denver. But um, the the talk’s gonna be called CX Careers Don’t Have to Suck. Um they just required. Yeah. Uh and I think that’s the thing I really want folks to internalize from this conversation and for folks going to that event from that talk as well, that support is as valid of a career path as any other career path. You may feel devalued by the industry, you may feel devalued by your organization and just kind of like an afterthought. But that is an opportunity to either change jobs because there are companies out there that will value you just as much as any other employee, uh, or push your business business, your organization to get better at what they’re doing. Uh, those are both opportunities that you can bring out there. And one of the ways that you can advance the way support is viewed within your business as not just a cost center and something that should be low cost and something that we’re you know, continually just saying, ah, these folks, we don’t know if they’re gonna stick around for a long time or this is all they’re ever going to do, is to show the progress that people have made in their careers. So if you’re a leader, for example, keep a running document of people whose careers you’re you’re moving along, whether it’s advancing in support or going to other roles, document the stories around how those roles happened. I mentioned earlier that a lot of creativity has to happen often. And uh, I’ve seen some really wild cases of that creativity. And so document how that happens so that whether it’s later down the line when you need to prove the value and worth of your team, yet again, for some reason, you have that documentation out there, or for the next person who comes along, they have an understanding of how to do it and what good looks like. Uh, don’t leave your future colleagues or you know, your future replacement even hanging, so to speak. Um, and just yeah, using that to show the value of the team and to help uplift the team’s status in your organization can be a bigger tool than you realize.
Charlotte Ward: 31:17
It really can. And actually, I think one thing that um is really important here is that you, and you said it, it’s it’s growth, and growth doesn’t just happen upwards and it doesn’t just happen outwards.
Kat Gaines: 31:31
Yes.
Charlotte Ward: 31:31
Um, support actually can be so much more, even as a frontline support agent, can be so much more than answering calls or answering tickets. Yeah. Um and and that’s what I was kind of trying. The point, one of the many points I was trying to make in my meander earlier on, my little walk around the garden earlier on was that um, you know, particularly if you’re trying and you’re you’re willing to step outside of a ticket and willing to step outside of the queue, as in in uh every opportunity, and that includes in in instant management, that um you really even in an employment market that’s as crazy as it is right now, um you stand a good chance of crafting a role for yourself in in a creative manner, potentially, that is not just you, you know, it’s not just what you were hired to do. It’s not the it’s not just the job title, it’s actually growing your skills, growing your your responsibilities, growing your experience, um, in ways that uh obviously your current organization is going to benefit massively from. But if you can tell those stories as well, it’s gonna it’s gonna accelerate you on to the next place, whether that’s a support role in your current organization or not a support role, another organization. The breadth is something we just miss so often.
Kat Gaines: 33:02
Yeah, and and looking for those opportunities, I think this is something to realize, especially, you know, you you hit the nail on the head with you need to look for opportunities to grow, you need to grab those, you need to go after them, and you need to tell those stories. I feel like in the past, when I’ve had folks who reported to me who just come in and say, I want to get promoted. How do I do that?
Charlotte Ward: 33:25
Yeah.
Kat Gaines: 33:26
And it’s like, okay, well, yes, we do have some outline career architecture, those types of things, but also let’s talk about what you enjoy doing. Let’s talk about what you’ve been doing, let’s talk about which direction to go. You can’t rely on your manager to shape those things for you. And that just gets more the more you advance in your career, the more present that need becomes to be able to tell your own stories and also define your own scope of what your role is beyond what’s on paper as the job description. Because yeah, if it’s answer tickets and answer phone calls, it’s gonna get boring pretty fast. And even today, if I was just doing the things that are on paper in my job description today, I don’t actually think I would know what to do every day. I think I would be a little stuck. Most of what I’m doing every day isn’t written in those couple of lines around what does a senior manager of developer advocacy and community do? Most of the things I’m doing are in the service of how do I help my team? How do I help our users, our developers in this instance? Uh and basically in service of those two goals, what can I come up with? What are the activities that advance those two groups of people for the business? Um, and so whatever it is that you are doing, you need to you need to define those categories for yourself. What are the end goals that you want? And then what are the activities that contribute to that, whether it’s in your career growth or whether it’s anything adjacent.
Charlotte Ward: 34:58
And and and think about adjacency as well in that in that scenario, I think, because I it’s really easy to be stuck on the straight line, you know?
SPEAKER_00: 35:07
Yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 35:07
I I I want that’s the thing I want to do five years from now. And that’s only one line between here and there. And um I I know there isn’t, and you know there isn’t. And uh, I think all these all these kind of uh all these kind of gems of experience that things like instant management give us along the way, these these jewels that we magpie away kind of build you over the years and build exactly as you described, build a role that is you rather than something that doesn’t feel like it fits.
Kat Gaines: 35:40
Yes, exactly. You can’t just sit there and look at the role and say, well, this is all you expected to do. So whether or not this fits me, I’m stuck. You have to figure out what’s gonna bring some joy or I I hesitate to say passion because I don’t strictly believe that everyone just needs to be super passionate about their jobs all the time. It’s okay. We have lives outside of work. Be passionate about that, please. Uh, but what’s going to bring just some inspiration and some joy to your everyday? What’s going to make you go to work every day and say, even if I don’t really feel like doing this today, I understand why I’m doing it and how it fits into my life. That even if you’re not excited waking up in the morning every single day, which you can’t be. You can be excited and happy about it most of the time, but you are going to have days where you wake up and you’re just like, oh, this again. You at least want to have that driving factor of being able to say, I know why I’m doing it and I know how it fits into how I run my life as a whole.
Charlotte Ward: 36:41
And I think, I think I completely agree about passion. You know, I I don’t seek passion. It’s it’s a weird concept, I think, in a in a professional, in a professional setting. I think what I look for is fulfillment.
unknown: 36:55
Yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 36:56
You know, and and some you’re not gonna you’re not gonna be, you know, spiritually fulfilled 24-7 in a role or intellectually fulfilled. Some sometimes you’ve just got to carry one number from one spreadsheet to another for two for two hours that day. There’s no passion then. No, not a bit. But but ultimately it’s it’s the you know, over the course of a week, how are you feeling? And I think that’s a good, you know, we can look at long-term goals and everything, but I think actually just did I did I do something this week that made me feel like I achieved something? Um, and sometimes, sometimes that is well, I ran a good incident, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, Kat, I think, I think we finished.
Kat Gaines: 37:46
I think we’ve somehow covered it all. I I’m sure I’ll come back in a week or two saying, oh, hang on, Charlotte, there are some things we forgot.
Charlotte Ward: 37:54
Well, you know what? I would happily take that call.
unknown: 37:58
Yeah.
Charlotte Ward: 37:59
Thank you so much for spending so much time with me over the last couple of months. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Um, and it’s been so fun. And and congratulations again on the 10 years, which I know full well means you’ve got other experiences that I want to talk to you about. So um when you’ve when you’ve had a a bit of downtime and uh a little bit of headspace, maybe will you come back and have another conversation about it? Of course, it can be about more incident management stuff. I’m sure there’s more in there, but but about anything else that you’d like to have a conversation about. Um, I would love to tell some of your stories. Would you come back?
Kat Gaines: 38:34
Absolutely. I enjoy chatting with you a lot. And I think there is plenty of ground we could cover.
Charlotte Ward: 38:39
Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks again, Kat. And uh, I will talk to you soon. That’s it for today. Go to
