Medtech Snapshot: Pivotal Career Moment: Gaining Self Awareness

​Medtech Snapshot Podcast: episode #125 features VP Global Ops & IT Luis Morales as he opens up on a pivotal career moment - how tough feedback on his performance and the way he was showing up became the catalyst for his career growth moving forward.

Episode Takeaways:
💡 Perspective is everything
📢 Seek feedback on your performance
💯 Build awareness on how your actions relate to your performance

READ THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW:

Welcome back to another MedTech Snapshot, the one question, one answer, highly digests medical device podcast. With me today is the global vice president of operations and IT, Luis Morales. Luis, glad to have you on.

Travis, it's an honor to be here. Looking forward to our discussion today. All right, Luis.

I know I told you that we were only doing two questions here, but I fibbed a little bit. So I have a third one. So just kind of get right into it.

I would love to hear from you. You know, you've been in business for a while. You've led small organizations.

You've led large organizations. Can you think back into your career to a pivotal moment where an experience you had, a decision that you made, something you were involved in, when you think back to that moment, it really was the catalyst for what drove you to where you are today. I mean, it really was a breakthrough moment.

Yeah, for sure. Right. You know, this goes back a while, right? But I do talk a lot about my leadership journey and always this moment comes to mind.

And I would say I was an engineer working on a project. Project was not going my way. And at the time, I was giving an update to a senior management team.

And this was back when I was part of Guiding Corporation. And, you know, I didn't prepare well for that. And it was all about my presentation was mainly about why others were not allowing me to be successful.

Right. And the VP of operations at the time after the presentation pulled me over to his office and said, hey, I want you to sit down and listen to what you just did. And this person repeated my presentation to me.

And it was an eye opener. I'm like, well, you know, to reflect on how I performed. And the key takeaway was, you know, my career needed more perspective.

And that was a turning point to why you see on my background that up to that point, I've been a lot in engineering. And then I started transitioning within organizations to do roles in R&D. I did roles in quality.

I ran a production floor. And I think those that point led to creating these experiences that that build a significant amount of perspective for me and what it is to walk in other people's shoes and from a front shore lens and created deep experiences that I think have formed who I am today as a leader. And how I think about my role in a given function and the focus that I bring to my day-to-day leadership around business acumen and business focus, right? Because at the end of the day, it's not about building the best engineering or operations or quality organization.

It's not about building the best Kappa tool. It's about building an infrastructure and an organization that enables technology to reach patients. And if you look at it with that lens, I think you would do a lot of things differently.