Megan Alexa Watson
A leadership development and talent management executive with deep experience helping leaders navigate complex organizational challenges. Megan is currently focused on stewarding senior leaders through the individual change required to drive strategic and AI transformation at scale and speed.
Megan Alexa Watson leads Microsoft’s Executive + Partner Development organization managing a team of HR professionals who steward senior leaders through the individual change required to drive Microsoft’s AI transformation at scale and speed. Her work focuses on helping executives build critical leadership capabilities and evolve needed leadership mindsets for success. She crafted a talent development strategy grounded in organizational psychology, talent management, leadership development, and change leadership. Together her team is accountable for senior leader onboarding, talent assessments, success profiles, executive coaching, and customer development offerings that enable executive excellence.
Prior to this role, Megan was Chief of Staff to Microsoft’s Chief Diversity Officer where she supported the leader in setting strategy and reimaging her function; she led executive communications for the CVP of Consumer Device Sales; and she supported HR and senior leadership by driving communications and storytelling for the company’s industry-defining culture transformation. Prior to Microsoft, Megan worked at a public affairs agency in Washington, D.C.
Megan holds a graduate degree in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University, a graduate degree in Public Relations from the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications, and an undergraduate degree in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.
Ep 02 | The Pivot Is The Point
Leading In Uncertainty
“Planning by fiscal years is completely done. Planning by quarters is pretty much done. Months are nice... but now we have leaders asking people, ‘Yeah... what have you done for me in days and hours?’”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“These organizational pivots feel personal, but they are not personal. It is not a sign of failure. I think so many of us have been raised in workplaces where being able to deliver on the thing you originally contracted for is the gauge of success or failure.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“In today's day and age, as things are shifting, new data is coming in, people are iterating and testing things and finding out, 'oh, that thing actually doesn't work the way we thought it was gonna work'. The need to embrace and get comfortable with those pivots, that is a mindset challenge if I ever heard of one.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“It feels like this moment may actually spark a renaissance in data-driven leadership because it is all about, what new information do you have? What new insight do you have? What new signal do you have?”
-Megan Alexa Watson
Ep 01 | We’re Squading Wrong
Getting Flexible Deployments Right
“It goes wrong when it turns into a forum for everyone trying to convince one person that their ideas are right, and that person's sitting there with their arms crossed in the corner, judging the hell out of everybody. It just becomes like a Shark Tank session, versus a true space for co-creative ideation, and innovation on new things.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“If you walk in one of these rooms or join one of these squads and it's clear that others aren't seeing ‘Why are they here?' You owe it to yourself to actually share that, and to articulate that, so that there's space for your voice, but also so that the work can be influenced by you in a meaningful way.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“In some cases, the 'thousand flowers bloom, a bunch of different people deployed on a similar challenge', to me, can often feel like avoidance of having to create the conditions for different perspectives to be heard and seen and valued in one work group.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“… getting deployed into something different when potentially you've cultivated an identity of self that is centered on certain types of work, it can be pretty jarring. It can disrupt what you've come to understand about yourself and your value to the organization.”
-Megan Alexa Watson