Amy Salcido

In year four, if the teacher had to leave the room, it was Amy they asked to watch the class. 

“I think everyone probably hated me a little.”

I loved school. I loved class, I loved learning, I loved reading. Success meant good grades and the teacher liking me. That same teacher eventually told me to stop raising my hand, because my question was almost always the same: “Did I do it right?” 

Ask me back then for three words to describe myself, and I’d have said adventurous, brave and insecure. I liked to climb trees and cause trouble. Brave and insecure don’t seem like they should go together, but you can be brave about some things and still be insecure in yourself. I could feel the insecurity underneath, but I raised my hand anyway. 

Today, I lead 20,000 people, and no one is there to tell me whether I’ve done it right. 

I never studied technology. After university, I had an opportunity to work for a technology company, but not the kind of job with my hands on the keyboards. Mine was a business role, working with customers. Early on, the industry was very male-dominated, and for a very long time, I was often the only woman in the room. That came with its own insecurities, and I felt I had to think about my behavior more than I would have liked. It has gotten much better. 

The opportunities hidden on a blank page 

I had spent most of my career at IBM when the company decided to spin off 25% of itself as a new, independent company. It came with a lot of challenges: keeping employees energized about the change, making customers excited about it, and explaining it to the marketplace. I was given the challenge of being Chief Customer Officer, which meant asking what customers would think of us and how we show up in front of them as a new company. It felt gigantic. 

I was already quite senior in my career, and the question was how to come up with fresh ideas that give a company a new identity. It was the year-four question all over again, “Did I do it right?”, except that this time there was no answer key to check against. 

“It was about starting over with a blank piece of paper and not taking what we had and changing it. That made all the difference.”

At first, it seemed overwhelming and even scary. Then it became liberating. I would have taken the next job and the one after that, and it would have been a bit like what I’d been doing. This was blowing everything up and starting over, and it re-energized me. Quickly, I was not scared anymore, and it gave me confidence for what came next: running a large business. I knew the design because I had designed it, so taking it on felt very natural. It was the biggest job I had ever had, probably bigger than it would have been if I had never taken that risk. 

On being a strong but vulnerable leader 

Along the way, my definition of success flipped. Early in my career I put a lot of emphasis on whoever my boss was, almost like I would a teacher. I looked for their approval. As I became a team leader, instead of asking what the person above me thought of me, I cared about what the people underneath me thought about their jobs and what it was like to work at our company. 

When I was leading a big part of the business, with 20,000 people working for me, we had to do really hard things, and we still had best-in-industry engagement scores. People understood what we were trying to do and were along for the ride. As a leader, that mattered so much more as a definition of success than what my boss thought of me. 

The number one rule I chose to live by was authenticity. Your people know if you’re not being open and transparent with them about the hard work that must be done. They see through that, and then they don’t trust you. But you have to define vulnerability in the workplace. 

“Vulnerability does not mean you get on a call, and you cry in front of people. Your job as the leader is to lead. Vulnerability is really rooted in honesty.”

Sometimes I had to tell the whole organization, “I know this is going to negatively impact some of you,” and ask everyone else to be empathetic. I also hosted open calls, sometimes every week, until people had gotten their anxiety out. I had no prepared answers, and you don’t know what question is coming. That is a form of vulnerability: come to me, bring it all. For the girl who needed to know she’d done it right, it is an odd kind of bravery, standing in front of 20,000 people without every answer. 

Turning uncertainty into strength 

If you tell me that you’re terrified of picking the wrong job, the wrong school, the wrong major, I’ll tell you that I don’t believe there is right or wrong. It’s just different, and what you make of that path is what matters. If I could go back, I’d try to help my younger self understand that, because I had a lot of anxiety over decisions that felt almost fatal, and they aren’t. I don’t know if my younger self would have believed me, but I would have liked to try. 

Ask me for three words today and I’d still say adventurous. Still brave, because I make hard decisions every day. The third one is different: now I’m confident, not insecure. Time and experience have given me that. I still hear the old feelings sometimes, but I move through them now instead of letting them drive my decisions. 

My hand still goes up. I’m just not asking for permission anymore.