Amid leadership changes and broader industry upheaval, former Darktrace vice president sales Australia and New Zealand Wendy Komadina decided to rethink how she wanted to contribute to the technology industry.
In August this year she left her full-time role with the vendor to launch her book The Spark, the Flame and the Glow.
Which looks at the factors that shape people’s beliefs about themselves, their career paths and how to identify the parts of the work they enjoy.
As well as continuing her work in coaching and fractional services for leaders and businesses, under own brand Tech Me Forward.
For the past 30 years Komadina has followed a traditional corporate path through the technology industry.
However, as she reflected on the current technology landscape, Komadina found herself surrounded by experienced professionals whose careers were disrupted by certain factors.
As well as the thought that a single moment or decision can dramatically alter someone’s professional trajectory.
“During the COVID period there was an enormous spike in demand. So of course, what happened was a lot of hiring…great sales attainment,” she told ARN in an interview. “When we all started re-emerging back out of out of COVID, there was a readjustment in terms of headcount first and foremost.
“But it took a little bit longer for sales targets to readjust.”
Off the back of that came conversations with colleagues and peers who had been in the technology sector for 20 plus years. They were finding themselves being made redundant, explained Komadina.
They were also no longer achieving their sales targets because the targets had not been readjusted in terms of new market.
“There were a lot of unhappy people and people complaining, but there wasn’t anybody who had the secret formula or had a path to reinvent themselves,” she said. “I found myself in a [similar] situation at a large global technology company.
It wasn’t until new leadership made her reassess whether or not she was in the right place.
“In terms of that reassessment, I sat back and I thought more deeply about what I wanted for my career,” she said. “When I attended a lot of industry events, I found myself surrounded by people who were feeling the same, disillusioned, unattainable sales targets, a lot of redundancies and headcount reduction.
“What happened to me internally is I think I went through what I would define as a career identity crisis.”
That initiated her to dive into research around careers, as well as start writing – personally — notes and short little stories.
“I started researching career identity and trying to understand the psychology behind why people change direction in their career or why they even choose a career in the first place,” Komadina said. “Then at that point, there was a lot of media around that Coldplay concert and the two executives who were caught on the kiss cam.
“It made me stop and think — one single mistake or error in judgement by a human, whether it’s a relationship error or a decision, can actually derail somebody’s entire career.”
This snowballed into her questioning why she had chosen a career in IT and whether the path had been shaped by her own decisions or by others. This ultimately led her to write her book.
Which explores the psychology behind who people were before authority figures labelled them or determined what they were capable of.
Being labelled
Reflecting on her own career, Komadina realised that pivotal moves were often influenced by others’ confidence in her abilities. While opportunities were closed off when managers or authority figures deemed her not capable.
“When people label you, you want to live up to that label, so you tend to lean into,” she explained. “What happens is that label — coming from somebody that you respect — you believe it.
“Sometimes those labels are positive, and other times those labels are negative. What happens is that you shrink.
“When I was what I define as a toxic environment, where I could see changes in leadership, and [they] had negative opinions of myself, my team, or the business unit. The confidence in my team diminished.”
Those labels and other people’s perceptions shape people’s identity, confidence and career choices from an early age.
“I actually talk about examples of labels given during childhood. As well as the labels you give as a parent,” Komadina added. “What happens is, as an adult, you also carry those labels into the workplace.”
Those issues become particularly relevant during periods of change in the technology channel ecosystem.
Komadina believes that MSPs can navigate these changes if they focused on the customers and verticals they want to serve. Then aligning that with their vendor portfolios accordingly.
“Some of the work that I’m doing, I can’t name the companies, but some of the work that I’m doing under Tech Me Forward [her coaching brand] is with these MSPs.
“These customers have grown an enormous portfolio of vendors in their books. What happens is it creates a huge amount of strain on their profit and loss. They’ve got multiple vendors that they’re trying to get certifications for.
“They need to hire talent, and real deep technical talent is expensive. That talent is spread so thin because they need to do certifications for maybe 10 to 15 vendors.”
Komadina’s advice to MSPs is to review their portfolio of customers first, which sounds backwards.
“You need to think about who the verticals that you want to target first,” she pointed out. “What are the customers that we want to add value to and also want to differentiate ourselves as being expert in.
“Be very narrow in our value proposition and then work backwards from there. Stop and review your portfolio of vendors and say, “Okay, what are the solutions, and which vendors are going to help support and build the right solutions for these customers that we are targeting?”
Profit and scale
Komadina felt that when an opportunity is presented to an MSP, they say yes to it because they have secured a lead and feel compelled to respond with a proposal.
The challenges faced by MSPs goes to the wider theme of the technology industry needing to ensure they don’t sacrifice deep expertise and institutional knowledge in the pursuit of growth.
“I think one of the trends that I’ve seen, probably more in the last 10 years than my entire career, you’ve got a lot of pressure from the global executive leadership teams,” Komadina observed. “Particularly if you’re working in private equity as well. The pressure is different and it’s tougher.
“They obviously want to grow the business, they want to be profitable, but to do that, they want to scale.
“The challenge is that when they scale, the decisions have been made in Silicon Valley and they’re making decisions about how much investment they’re going to put into Asia Pacific.”
For a lot of these organisations, they don’t understand that Asia Pacific, it’s diverse — both culturally, financially, the way governments are runs, the business taxes, and the laws, Komadina said.
“Even the people and how we work with customers and partners. It’s very diverse… I put up on LinkedIn last week. Australia is not Singapore, and Singapore is not Japan, and Japan is not India…we’re so different.”
Komadina believes the challenge organisations are “not investing enough” in people and are “squeezing the lemon so hard” to get as much as possible out of a small number of resources while expecting big results.
“That lack of understanding of how Asia Pacific works means that they don’t properly invest. What they should be doing is they should be very picky about which markets they’re going to invest in and go really narrow and go deep.
“Rather than peanut butter spreading, headcount and resources, and spreading a lot of talent so thin that people burn out, become unhappy, and really, I guess undervalued.”