About Amy Kay Watson
If you look at my resume, you might see a zig-zag. I see a straight line.
I began my career in ministry, earning my M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary. But I realized early on that while the church wasn’t the right container for me at the time, the calling was undeniable: I was here to facilitate transformation.
The Journey: From “Doing” to “Designing”
Some of my most useful lessons about performance management came from working the floor at Borders Books. I learned them the hard way.
My first management job was running the café at Borders in 1997. My boss didn’t know what running a café involved, so after training, I was mostly on my own. I kept a list of everything I had to do and made sure I did it. I visited other cafés, listened to staff and customers, and called my trainer when I had questions. That year the café grew sales 12% and became the fifth most profitable in the country for food sales.
Three years later, I was fired.
In between, I took on scheduling for the store. I couldn’t reconcile the company’s overnight shelving shifts with staff who didn’t want to be kept up all night. I couldn’t see a path that would make people happy and protect me, so the controlling side of me stepped forward more and more. In July 2000, I was let go for a laundry list of things, mostly mistakes nobody had helped me learn my way through. I didn’t have the perspective to get myself through them either.
In essence, I got a snapshot of everything I’d done wrong, and no chance to fix it.
At Ohio State, I was working in the President’s Office when I was recruited to facilitate a culture change initiative. A few months in, I knew I wanted to do that work full time. I went on to facilitate for Senn Delaney, traveling 75% of the time to lead retreats for companies like Hertz Global Holdings.
After a few years, I could feel my growth leveling off. Coaching certification changed that. Learning the theory underneath what I was already doing made my facilitation better, and my live coaching too. Today I’m a Master Certified Coach with more than 4,000 coaching hours, working with leaders in high tech, food service, the military, and NGOs.
Somewhere along the way, Yoda became a role model for me. He was no-nonsense. He didn’t take sass and he didn’t coddle. He had a sense of humor but he was supportive, and he didn’t want Luke to give up on himself. I think that’s an approach all of us need to learn if we’re going to lead people well.
