We recently connected with Ellen Kim and have shared our conversation below.

Ellen, appreciate you joining us today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you in your professional career?

In my prior role as a corporate deal attorney, I supported a robust sales organization in the final stage of closing their deals. I negotiated terms of the contract so that their deal was signed, sealed, and delivered! These were customer relationships that had been cultivated over months, even years. When that deal was signed, that meant that seller was then entitled to their commission. For many sellers, they never closed a deal. For the fortunate ones, that commission was the highlight of their year.

I learned a few very important lessons from the experience of observing these sellers. Their role entailed cultivating relationships down to mapping the internal hierarchies of customer organizations to identify key decisionmakers, triaging technical questions to the requisite subject matter experts, and doing all of this at scale. In other words, each seller had close to 100 accounts where they were outreaching to cold leads, keeping warm leads warm, and closing in on deals where the customer indicated a clear intent to buy. The clear guiding principal in all their workstreams was who did they know? Was it a decisionmaker, the right SME, the right influencer or advocate within the prospective company?

This translated well to the mindset I need as an entrepreneur which includes the reality that building new leads and partnerships takes time and perseverance. Similarly, I ought to have a high expectation of constant rejection, just like my sellers did when selling enterprise software to companies. I’ve also learned that it is impossible for me to know everything, so to scale and not get bogged down in logistics of running my own business, I need to have the subject matter experts I can readily call on, just like the sellers I supported where I was their legal subject matter expert. This was a huge mental shift initially in that prior to becoming an entrepreneur, my main function and identity was to be an expert in one thing. I had to quickly learned to let go of that tendency to want to learn something deeply myself before trying it, and instead reach out to talk to someone to learn from them.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

My background is as a deal attorney negotiating contract terms for tech companies. I came to a point where I wondered if there was an end to the taxing corporate meetings and found myself in search of a job that was a “meeting fixer upper.” That is when I (re)discovered facilitation and mediation. I had been a student mediator in law school and enjoyed my experience tremendously, but career wise, it was not an avenue that made sense for me personally right after graduation. In parallel, I have been serving as a career/ executive coach for MBA students at Santa Clara University’s Graduate School of Business.

The negotiating and coaching background converged in the alternative dispute resolution space where resolving conflict requires skills I had been honing in the deal attorney and executive coaching contexts. In other words, whether you are navigating a high-stakes litigated dispute or an internal battle over your next career move, you got yourself a conflict. As a mediator, arbitrator, and executive coach, I help professionals and organizations resolve conflict at every level. My work is built on the belief that most “external” disputes are rooted in unresolved “internal” negotiations—the ones we have with our personal values, expectations, and hesitations.

More specifically, this is how I partner with individuals and organizations: With organizations, I serve as a neutral mediator and arbitrator for litigated disputes and workplace conflicts. I facilitate and resolve the difficult conversations and negotiations required to move past impasse, saving time, reputation, and resources. With leaders and professionals, I provide 1:1 executive coaching for those at a crossroad. I facilitate the inflection point conversations around your career design, leadership style, and professional development. The proverbial “what next” and “what does growth look like for you” centers many client conversations, as we work to align your internal narrative with your external goals. I also lead workshops for leadership development, with particular emphasis on conflict fluency skills. With cofounders, I facilitate the decision making process and ensure co-founder alignment, so conflict debt does not hinder the build.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

A lesson I had to unlearn was to measure success in terms of an external achievement or something to show for efforts. As an entrepreneur building something new, a business necessarily takes time to build and there is absolutely such a thing as a build stage where the measure of success is actually in how quickly you are learning. This later gets manifest in terms of building a product or service that resonates well with a target demographic.
However, the process for this actually looks like failing as fast as possible to erode as many assumptions as possible. What you have to “show” for your efforts is in fact, the long series of “misses.” This has come has a tremendous paradigm shift for me because I was wired to get the A in class and collect the “gold stars.” So, shifting to getting as many Fs as possible, as quickly as possible, required a true unlearning!

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I don’t think I would say I’ve built a strong audience on social media, but I can share how I learned to be more comfortable with a social media presence. It started with a few thank you posts with a short event summary following a conference or two. Even that required exercising a new muscle to “put myself out there” and shine some attention on myself in a way I was not initially comfortable with. It then evolved to sharing some published pieces I wrote, experiencing new people engaging with it, and then meeting people in person, who let me know they’ve seen my activity online (even though they did not engage with the post). For further context, I have no social media aside from LinkedIn. But, that level of engagement, affirmation from others that they’d seen it even if they didn’t engage, and their clear curiosity, interest, and encouragement about what I was building live helped me have a paradigm shift. It’s not only a means of keeping in touch with my existing network (people who would be supporters because they are mostly people I have an in person relationship with), but to easily introduce myself to new networks, and get some immediate feedback on what new markets or client profiles I might have traction with. It sounds simple, but I just had to try it and experience some positive results to encourage and embolden me to try it a little more in new ways!

Contact Info:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimellen/