8 Lessons from my Mentors at Google

After 6 years at Google, here are 8 things I’ve learned that make me a better person, manager, and contributor.

I started at Google just over five years ago. A year before that, I was a TVC. Nothing ever really stays the same at a place like Google. People come and go, priorities change, and culture evolves. That hit home for me this year especially. In just the first half of this year, two of my closest mentors left my immediate orbit to go do other things. First off, how dare they? Second, It got me thinking — and that thinking lead me to a deep feeling of appreciation and gratitude that I wanted to reflect on.

Even though I’ve been an Engineering Program Manager the whole time, I’ve been lucky to work on some wildly different stuff. I managed Google+’s content and community management team before helping the platform find an enterprise fit as Currents. I had a crisis of imposter syndrome and worked on account infrastructure for Family Link. (Note: this did not help my imposter syndrome and was probably a big mistake.) I had a stint on an Area 120 project. Most recently, I started Google’s Internal Community Management Team.

Reentering the office and seeing people face to face again, I’m feeling drawn back to the grounding advice from people who’ve spent, frankly, a lot of time molding me into a better person and manager. There’s honestly something about being back in the halls that inspires me to think back to what I’ve learned in them.

I hope that the the lessons offered to me help as we enter the second half of 2022, wherever that might take you. Here they are:

Say, “I don’t know. I have to think about it.”

I asked a close mentor of mine for their “genius parting wisdom” once. Like, straight up: “Give me some genius parting wisdom that will make me better if you’re going to move orgs.” The answer I got surprised me.

They told me that they had never heard me say, “I don’t know. I have to think about it.”

In my career, I was so focused on asserting that I could do what was asked of me that I was on the precipice of accidentally freaking people out with my confidence. No one has…