What experiences in life helped you grow the most?

Personal growth is unique to everyone. What one person learns from a situation or experience is likely different from someone else, either as an entirely different lesson or sheer impact/value.

I don’t know that I can recall a specific situation that I could unequivocally say helped me grow the most, but I do have something that comes to mind every so often.

This was nearly eight years ago now, way back when we were all still office workers and nobody worked from home. I was 28 and the only other guy on my small team was probably 23. A few months in I was still fairly new at my job, but they had more or less taken off the training wheels, and I was participating in projects on my own. I ran into a situation of being double booked on my calendar and had to make a decision to attend one or the other. I felt like I had an okay understanding of the dynamics of the role and my working relationship with one particular Project Manager, so I picked one meeting and sent an email with my project updates to that PM. They responded to the email, so I knew they got the message. Come time for the meetings and I could hear over the cubicle walls my name being called by that same PM I had emailed earlier. They were asking for my update! Well, I couldn’t jump to that call and it was too late to answer. The meetings end, and maybe a minute or two later my manager comes over and asks me to come to her office to discuss something. I follow her and see the younger guy on my team waiting in her office. He happened to sit closer to that one PM, and had overheard that I had been called out on the meeting and didn’t respond, so he told our manager! Well, I was chided for the incident and told that it reflected poorly on our teams reputation. I apologized for the incident and explained what I had done and that I didn’t think it would be a problem. From then on I was more careful about meeting attendance and information sharing, but unfortunately I also didn’t trust the other guy on the team.

Over the course of that year (I had started in January) the entire original team I started with had progressively left the team. The two ladies had gone to another department, and the younger guy left the company altogether. We had new people join the team in their places as the spots opened up. The entire dynamic of the team, the collective mentality of our group, changed so much (for the better) that we are so much more flexible and nimble. My manager is more understanding now, and even occasionally encourages us to do something similar to what I did that first time. Strategically, of course.

Suffice to say, I may have been the catalyst of change on the whole team. Eight years later our team’s reputation has never been stronger.