Pressure Testing Your Organization, and Finding Light Through Darkness 🌒

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Dear Reader, At the end of June, I decided to do something I had never done before. I left the company for 3 weeks without letting anyone know how to contact me. My virtual assistant had my personal email for emergencies, and I dismantled WhatsApp and all email access from my phone.   What this allowed me to see was all the areas of the business that flourished without me. I identified roughly 8 hours per day of CEO work that was now being handled by someone else. I was able to pressure test each team to know whether they were capable of making healthy decisions in uncertainty and whether they thrived in that environment. In my departure, we had our best month of sales since starting the company, and our team thrived. While we were reaping some rewards of past efforts, we brought in sizable new business while I was gone. My reaction to this was two-fold: I felt a little disheartened that I had not done this sooner and totally delighted that I could now work differently.   This pressure testing helped us make a large leap towards decentralization. I started studying starfish organizations and imagining a future of work that would be wildly fun to build.   More to come, Katharine Monthly Spotlight: Data Research and Organizational Mapping Sales is often limited to smart Boolean search, and most data still requires last mile validation. For instance, one of our clients asked us to map U.S. hospitals across the US with a particular type of cancer center. The only way to get this data was going to each hospital website and verifying their services. For selected hospital cancer centers, we had to find the purchase decision makers.   Once we collected this data, our team needed to map and identify who on the client’s board could make warm introductions. We used 1st degrees on Linkedin to identify the possible warm introductions, and set up the outreach email, and let the magic begin. We saved our client more than fifty hours of work. Explore Odetta Founder Lesson Learned: Finding Your Light Through Darkness When I was an aspiring founder without an idea, a lot of people said, “just find something you believe in and build that company.” While I think it is helpful to follow your values, this advice landed on deaf ears. At that time, I had no idea what I believed in. It was a dark time in my life where I was struggling to make sense of who I was. What helped me most was realizing that all darkness brings light, and the darker you go, the more light you have around the corner and the more whole you can become. If anyone is struggling to find their light, please do reach out. Client Testimonials "I truly enjoy working with the Odetta team and love referring Odetta to others/my network!"  —Paul Strachman, Partner, Red Sea Ventures Odettian Quote "Odetta understands. Whatever your situation may be, they accommodate you and make it easy on you. I have the flexibility of working how much I want and whenever I want. The pay increase was the cherry on top. There is transparent communication between the leadership and workers. Everyone wants to help you. It's the most peaceful job on the planet. I am so glad I found Odetta while doing my master's." —Haadia Amjad from our June Happiness Survey Quote of the Month “I’ve always known I was gallant.” —Toni Morrison in an interview with Oprah Winfrey Copyright © 2022 Odetta, Inc., All rights reserved. San Francisco, CA subscribe here