Natalie Lee - Senior Executive Assistant and EA Manager at Atlassian

Natalie · 0:00

Hi, my name is Natalie Lee. Everybody calls me Nat. The leadership quote of the day is from Babe Ruth, and it has never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.

Speaker 3 · 0:14

The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident, game-changing leader assistants.

Jeremy · 0:21

Thank you Are you tasked with ordering food for your office? Let me tell you about Easy Cater. With over 100,000 restaurants to choose from nationwide and 24-7 customer support, Easy Cater helps assistants like you and me succeed at work and makes our lives easier. Visit easycater.com/leaderassistant to find out more. Hey everyone, welcome to episode 245 of The Leader Assistant Podcast with your host, Jeremy Burrows. And I'm very excited to be speaking with my friend, Natalie, or Nat Lee. And she is in Denver, Colorado. Is that right, Natalie?

Natalie · 1:09

It is, yes.

Jeremy · 1:11

Awesome. And we met a couple years ago, part of the Leader Assistant community. And we went for, I think we did a little happy hour or something. And then we went for like a walk around a park in Colorado. Just did a little meetup and that was pretty fun. So, but a lot's happened since then. And so I just wanted to jump in. And before we get into your career, tell us maybe two things about yourself personally that at least you find interesting.

Natalie · 1:45

Oh, gosh. Oh, I think I'll switch from interesting to things people might not know about me, or people would be surprised to know. People would be surprised to know that I'm very shy in person. I get very, very nervous around crowds or people that I don't know. So I'm very proud that I was able to handle the group walk. And then fun fact about me, I'm a student at Arizona State and I'm pursuing my bachelor's degree in religious studies.

Jeremy · 2:13

Nice. That is a fun fact. My, let's see, my degree was in, I guess technically religious education was my major and then I minored in music. But, oh, that's awesome. Good times. So do you have any pets or kids?

Natalie · 2:31

I do. I have both. So my 11 year old is my stepdaughter. Her name is Jaylin. So she's been part of my life since she was tiny, tiny thing. So she's my human baby. I have three fur babies, two of which are in the room with me. So I have three cats, Griffin, Pierre and Norman. They're all named after former NFL players.

Jeremy · 2:55

Oh, nice. And speaking of NFL, who's your favorite NFL team?

Natalie · 2:59

Washington Commanders. Die Hard, Gutter Brad.

Jeremy · 3:02

Nice. Are you from that area? Is that why?

Natalie · 3:05

No, I am not. I'm from the Denver area. My parents are very upset that I'm not a Denver Broncos fan, but my husband is former military, so he spent some time in Washington, DC. Had a really incredible experience with Robert Griffin III, who used to be their quarterback and the rest is history.

Jeremy · 3:24

Great. Well, I'm glad you're not a Broncos fan because I'm a Chiefs fan. And, you know, as of recently, they just finally lost to the Broncos after like 16 times in a row. So I was really bummed about that, but it'll be all right. I'm hoping it'll be all right. Okay, so let's dive into your career then. How did you end up becoming an assistant? Take us through your career journey.

Natalie · 3:49

Yeah, I am a huge proponent of the fact that 90% of the assistants I know never thought of this career path as themselves. And that was my journey. I worked at a large financial institution, thought I wanted to be in sales. Very quickly learned when I was younger that sports journalism and sports broadcasting was not a heavily female dominated field. I decided it wasn't for me. Thought I wanted to be in sales. Had a really bad experience at the financial institution that I worked for and decided like I was going to go change the world with HR. I was going to make sure that employees everywhere had the best HR experience. So I did some certification through Coursera and the University of Minnesota. Became certified in HR with my APHR and thought that that was going to be my journey. I did some external payrolling, external onboarding, external hiring. Got a role with a series C startup in Denver as their HR specialist focused specifically on onboarding. So that was my journey to HR. I really wanted to be the person that was approachable, that people felt like they could bring questions and problems to. I just wanted to help. I went on medical leave for an extended amount of time and the CEO calls me one day and he says, I don't need an assistant, but the rest of the C-suite does. What do you think? And for me, I am proud to admit this. I had no idea what an assistant did. I had no idea. My parents are now in their 60s and so I think I had this very antiquated version of a secretary, what an assistant used to do. So I called my head of HR at the time. Again, I'm out on medical leave. So his first question was like, why are you calling me? And I just asked him, I said, hey, do you think I should do this? And I will never forget his response to me was, you would be dumb not to do this. And I tend to be somebody who is fearless for better or for worse, both personally and professionally. And so I decided, what the heck, like, let's do it. So I came back and first day was the executive assistant to RC, chief technology officer, our chief revenue officer, our chief financial officer, our chief operating officer and our chief revenue officer. So we talk about, like, throwing people to wolves or drinking from the fire hose. That was what I did.

Jeremy · 6:02

So I lost count. Is that five or six executives?

Natalie · 6:06

Five.

Jeremy · 6:07

Yes.

Natalie · 6:09

Yes.

Jeremy · 6:09

Well, I just actually spoke with an assistant who supports eight executives. And I was like, okay, this is interesting. This is a lot of executives. And so I want to ask you what I asked her. What's your top tip for supporting multiple executives?

Natalie · 6:30

Yes, expectations and boundaries. Expectations go two ways. I think for the CFO at the time in particular, he was like, I actually don't need much. I really don't. And I think every executive leader will tell you that. So we actually had a deeper dive into his calendar and kind of his team and his rhythms. And he really didn't need much from me. And I did the same with the rest of the executives as well. And so I really understand, again, two expectations. What do you need from me? And here's what I can offer you. Fortunately, I was managing an executive team that all worked together. So they kind of knew the ebbs and flows of each other's rhythms and some of their activity spikes and things like that. And then boundaries really setting the boundary of, hey, Jeremy, you asked me for this. I really need some additional time because I've prioritized something for John or for Joe.

Jeremy · 7:21

So you did that role. That was your jump into the EA role. Yes. What happened from there to where you're at today at Atlassian?

Natalie · 7:30

Yes, I was ready to spread my wings. So the CEO of this startup had a dedicated assistant. I actually learned how to be a remote assistant from her. She was supporting him in Denver from Mexico. So learned a lot of tips and tricks. I actually learned how to become an assistant on Trello, which is an Atlassian product. I decided I want to spread my wings and support, you know, bigger fish or bigger company. I ended up at Ball Corporation. So for yourself or for listeners, if you're familiar with the Ball mason jars, that's where I was at. But fun trivia fact for everybody to keep in their back pocket. Ball has not made those mason jars since the early 1990s. They still get paid for them, but they don't do those anymore. So their primary products are aluminum. So aluminum cans, aluminum aerosol cans, things like that. So I was there supporting their Senior Vice President of Global Operations and Engineering and then two engineering executives that worked for him.

Jeremy · 8:27

And then how did you end up at Atlassian?

Natalie · 8:30

Yeah, I owe my referral at Atlassian to the Leader Assistant community. I met my referral from Joy Caves, who's no longer at Atlassian, but her and I were in the Saturday Coaching Series with Jeremy, and there were three or four other people in our group. This was right around May of 2020. I discovered the Leader Assistant community in April of 2020 after the world shut down. I reached out to Joy, I saw her posting at Atlassian, said, Hey, is this remote thing going to stick or am I going to have to go in the office? I have no desire to live in Austin, Texas, nor San Francisco, California. Would they consider a kid from Denver? So she referred me and I ended up here at Atlassian supporting the Vice President of Human Resources. And then about six-ish months later transitioned to supporting my current leader, Erica Fisher, who's our Chief Administrative Officer.

Jeremy · 9:24

Awesome. That's great. So I want to talk about a couple of the things that have happened at your time at Atlassian, but specifically, let's start with the remote work side. So my understanding is that you can work from anywhere, but you have to work in the Pacific time zone. Is that right?

Natalie · 9:44

Not necessarily. So we have certain time zone halos for different roles. So my executive leader works in Pacific time. She lives in the San Francisco area. So I have an overlap with her, pretty significant overlap with her. So it works. Where it doesn't work is if there's an executive leader in New York and we hire an assistant in, say, Sydney. That overlap is very, very minimal. So we are a remote first company with certain requirements for time zone overlap.

Jeremy · 10:13

So what's your, you know, you mentioned you had learned about remote work from that prior organization.

Natalie · 10:19

Yes.

Jeremy · 10:20

What's your top two tips that keep you focused and productive as you work from home?

Natalie · 10:28

I am the most distracted person ever. So this is a great question. It's something that I've had to learn. I remember in April of 2020, we're all working from home and I'm sitting on the couch next to my then-fiance current husband. Long term, that would have never worked because it was too distracting to look over him and talk to him or hang out with him. So first set boundaries. Be very, very clear with not only yourself, but your stakeholders or your team, what you're doing. Biggest, I think, tactical tip there is keeping your calendar blocks public where possible. There are certain times where I'll need to go pick up my daughter from school or I have a doctor's appointment. Most of my calendar is private, but certain things that are out of office or really family time that I'm proud of, that I'm happy to share, those are public so that the team knows what I'm doing. And the second one is just keeping track of all the things. Finding a system that works for you. I will always bias towards Trello. Again, I learned how to be an assistant on Trello. It's an Atlassian product. But finding a task management system that works for you so that you're not distracted by the team's messages or the Slack messages or all of the emails that are coming through. Find something that works for you and stick to it. That way, you know kind of what the expectations are for not only yourself or your stakeholders, but for your time throughout the day as well.

Jeremy · 11:42

Yeah, that's great. What about like, do you have like an interesting or a funny or an embarrassing work from home story?

Natalie · 11:51

Oh, gosh, people are always surprised how tall I am. And by tall, I mean, not at all. Jeremy, even with me in person, you know, I am five foot tall on a really, really, really good day. And so that's always kind of the interesting thing in meeting people in person. The executive partner that I have, she's 5'10. So we are not anywhere close in height. People always love to like see us in person together. I didn't meet any of my coworkers in person until over a year after I started with Atlassian, about a year and a half. And so that was kind of the most shocking thing for people is like, oh my gosh, Nat, you have such a big personality. They find out that I'm not a big human. I am five foot tall again on a very good day. And I'm also very, very shy.

Jeremy · 12:37

That's awesome. Well, I think I think it was you that I saw glimpses of on LinkedIn about the Atlassian onboarding process. And it's obviously remote first. So there's challenges to onboarding somebody remotely. What's one thing that they've done really well in onboarding remote team members?

Natalie · 13:02

Yeah. So I've been with Atlassian for over three years. And this statement remains true is that Atlassian really lives and dies by our values. We have five values. They're very, very public. And they are not five values that kind of exist on a poster board somewhere in a corner. They are often referenced. You can feel them. We have Slack emojis for them. They're part of performance processes. We really continually go back to the kind of this cornerstone of who we are. It's very apparent throughout onboarding. You kind of learn what the values are and how they might show up for you or how we expect our leaders to act from these values. And again, even three years later, going through all the changes, the Atlassian values continue to kind of be the who we are and how we do things, not only internally but externally as well.

Jeremy · 13:49

So what's like a practical thing if somebody's listening and they're saying, hey, we're hiring a remote team member. What's something tangible and practical that we can do during that process?

Natalie · 14:00

Yes, have an introduction meeting for the sake of meeting. And I know that will make assistants everywhere cringe because we hate meetings for the sake of having meetings. But one thing that I learned very quickly is that you have to be really, really patient with your relationship building and kind of your networking building when you're starting a remote role. I am not naturally a very patient person. It's something that anybody will tell you. My mom especially will tell you this. Patience is a virtue that Natalie has almost none of. And so it was a conscious decision for me to sit through introductory meetings and say, this is who I am. This is where I'm from. This is what's important to me. It kind of starts to create that, again, that psychological safety. It talks about building those relationships and it gives people the opportunity to get to know you as a human being before we dive right into the heavy stuff or the big stuff. So tactical advice, take the time, make a formal agenda to not have a formal agenda. Get to know your people, get to know your network. And it creates a lot of empathy in the workplace, again, especially in a remote environment where we don't have the opportunity to run into each other, the water cooler or read each other's body language in a hallway to say, Natalie might be having a bad day, maybe she needs some support.

Jeremy · 15:09

What's a good like icebreaker question or I know you said no agenda, but for those meetings, what's your go to icebreaker?

Natalie · 15:20

Yes, my favorite photo of life is my favorite icebreaker. I throw this out in leadership team meetings and we call it photo panic where you see everybody kind of grab their phone and they're like, Oh gosh, what's my favorite photo of life? So it can be something recent, it can be something old. My phone wallpaper is another one where I'll ask Jeremy, what's your phone wallpaper? What's your computer wallpaper? I think those ones, especially you find out very quickly what is most important to people. For me, my phone wallpaper is a picture of my grandparents from 1950. And so people know very quickly that those are important people to me.

Jeremy · 15:51

Nice. Love it. Well, my phone wallpaper right now is a picture of my wife with a, I'm going to show you, even though the listeners can't see it, my wife with a goat on her back.

Natalie · 16:05

See? And she's cool. She's got a goat on her back.

Jeremy · 16:10

Right. Right. So either her or the goat is important to me, right? It's like, which one? No.

Natalie · 16:15

And it means Jeremy's mysterious, right?

Jeremy · 16:17

Right. Awesome. Well, let's talk a little bit about your last three years at Atlassian because I'm assuming you did not start off with the Senior Executive Assistant and EA Manager titles.

Natalie · 16:35

Yes.

Jeremy · 16:36

So how did that progress? Yeah.

Natalie · 16:39

So when I started Atlassian, I was supporting our former Vice President of HR, who actually reported to my executive leader now. My current leader's former assistant was going out on leave and she said, hey, I think you'd be really good at this. So let's do kind of an interim support role with yourself and Erica, who's my current leader. So supporting Erica for a month. I like to tell people it was love at first sight. That's definitely a one-sided story. You can ask Erica a different time how she felt about it. But for me, it was really an opportunity to kind of find the person that believed in me, that cared about me. One of our very early conversations was about my growth and my career goals, how she could support me in those. So for me, again, it was like love at first sight. My team member came back from leave and decided she didn't want to do the role anymore. So we interviewed and by interviewed, I had to interview with Erica. She interviewed a couple of other people as well. So I was promoted to the role. We, at the time, were not a centralized function at Atlassian. So it was, I reported directly to Erica, all the assistants reported to either a single leader or to their principal leader, if they were in kind of a one to two or one to three ratio. Back in, gosh, October of 2021, so a little bit over a year now, the leadership operations team, so all of our executive assistants and our administrative assistants centralized into one function. So we are one team. We roll up through program management and our CTO org. We report to a single person. So that's where the manager role came into play, where I now manage other craft focus assistants. I have a team of 10. They're incredible. We do a lines of business structure where like I work with all of our GNA teams, so people, legal, finance, real estate team anywhere. It makes the most sense because that is Erika's org itself. So we have like our go to market org. We have our engineering org. We have our markets, our markets org. And that's how our reporting lines are structured. So it was not something I walked right into. It was not something I ever actually thought of myself doing. I would have told you even today, I'll tell you like I'm a terrible manager. Hopefully my team is different. But it was not something that I kind of had on my on my career checklist, if you will.

Jeremy · 18:53

What's the biggest shift or mindset shift even for wearing the manager hat versus before when you didn't necessarily wear the manager hat?

Natalie · 19:08

Yeah, I think the mindset shift wasn't so big for me. I've always been a huge advocate of like mentoring, coaching, growth opportunities, especially for craft focus assistance. That's kind of always been my schtick, if you will. But I think the biggest mindset shift for me was becoming a people leader. Again, it was not something that I really saw myself doing. There's a whole bunch of other formal things that come into play. So it's not necessarily only mentoring, but it's actually performance coaching. It's not only partnership building and relationship building with leaders. Now it's resource allocation and partnership management. So all of the things that I really enjoyed doing, mentorship again, getting to know leaders, kind of sharing best practices with teams, now becomes like actually part of my job where I am expected to set goals with my team members or do coaching with my team members or do performance management or do escalations. All of those things are not only kind of an optional thing, but they are a requirement of my role.

Jeremy · 20:12

Well, I think it's awesome just to hear all about what's happened since that walk we had in Denver with those small group of assistants and just super excited for you and happy for the journey that you've gone through and where you're at now and just crushing it at Atlassian, as I say that fast 10 times. What's maybe one thing you would want to say to the assistants of the world just in general to maybe like your football fan, your Super Bowl ad, what's your Super Bowl ad saying if you're trying to buy a Super Bowl ad for 15-20 seconds to the assistants of the world?

Natalie · 20:59

Yes, if you're going to ask for a seat at the table, show up for dinner and bring a side. What I mean by that is if you're going to ask your leader or your leadership team for a seat at the table or an opportunity, take it and bring your best. You wouldn't show up to dinner either no call, no show or without a side. I'd encourage all leader assistants everywhere that if you're given a seat at the table, show up for dinner and bring your best. We know you have value. We know that you have worth. It's not even about proving it. It's about showing it. Show up and bring a side.

Jeremy · 21:30

Love it. What's the side that you would bring if you're going to a literal dinner?

Natalie · 21:34

This is such a good question. I'm a horrific cook. I'm not a good cook. It's something easy. I think just the season, November, Thanksgiving here in the US, I love green bean casserole so much. That's my go-to.

Jeremy · 21:49

Nice. Love it. Well, thank you so much, Nat, for taking time to share your story. Is there a good place that people can reach out and say hi?

Natalie · 21:58

Yes, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can find me at Natalie Lee and Jeremy will have my LinkedIn link in the show notes as well.

Jeremy · 22:06

Awesome. Yes, I will. And leaderassistant.com/245 to check out that link and reach out and say hi to Natalie. So thanks again for being on the show. Best of luck to you. And hopefully we get to hang out in the Colorado area again soon.

Natalie · 22:21

Awesome. Thanks, Jeremy.

Speaker 3 · 22:33

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