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 05 | Calling All Control Connoisseurs
Authority, Accountability and Influence
“...Owner’s mindset... if I was the biggest boss in the biggest room, what decision would I make? ...and if it goes sideways I am comfortable with the fact that the buck stops here.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“...what allows people to feel a sense of accountability is sometimes allowing them to feel the pain of failure.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“...what happens to leaders in the moment where they recognize that their named accountability, their felt accountability, their sense of influence, their actual influence - when none of those things line up?”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“What are the ways we create the space for people to step up and grab accountability? Often as leaders we get super frustrated that nobody was picking it up. Why aren't they taking this on? And it finally hit me, ‘oh friends, they can't pick it up until we put it down.’”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“ ...in a world where reporting lines are flexible, where people are getting redeployed to work, where accountability is shared …one of the most critical things a leader can do is to influence a sense of felt accountability out, down, and up in a system.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
Ep 04 | It's Time for Sense-Breaking
Narrating Organizational Swings
“ ...sometimes a leader’s most critical step is to actually first break sense, help people realize that the world has so fundamentally changed that all they know is no longer real and that you have to truly start over.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“Often we say a brand is a promise. A certain leadership approach or style could be perceived as a brand promise. ... whether it’s culture, whether it’s their approach to teaming, whether it’s how decisions get made... and so when that changes, it is experienced as something got broken.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“A lot of the narration that I hear is ‘Things are chaos, things are uncertain, things are unknown, so everything’s gonna change. You can’t count on anything.’ That’s not meaning-making. That’s narrating the news.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“ ...there can be this sense that my leadership style is not a set of clothes that I put on, I can take off, I can change, I can augment, but sort of like it becomes my full identity. It’s something that I will tattoo it on, and it will never be removed.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“When you see high flex in ways of working, culture, leadership styles in an organization’s attempt to meet a moment, it can spike a real fear of, would they actually flex into something that I’m not okay with, that I’m not okay following, that I’m not okay being a part of?”
-Megan Alexa Watson
Ep 03 | Interesting, But Not Important
Prioritizing Emergent Problems
“I think enough organizations have gotten very comfortable with recognizing and rewarding individuals for deliverables, for the win, for the launch, for the big moment. And not as much on what experiment... what did provide more information to the system about what works and what doesn't work.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“Often we look at individuals and team members who ask, ‘How important is this?’ as a sense of ego, because they only wanna’ be working on the most important things, when really it's become a survival tactic. How do you protect yourself from being randomized on things that aren't of high value?”
-Megan Alexa Watson
“Many of us have been in the organizations where it's like, ‘Ooh, so-and-so got put on a special project. We know what that means. Tick-tock.’ Right? And we haven't really done the work to reframe that in a lot of organizations where these sorts of side quests... are rewarded regardless of the outcome.”
-Megan Alexa Watson
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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“… 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