CHRISTIAN WORKING PEOPLE’S Q&A WITH SANJAY POONEN (10th JANUARY 2026)

Yeah, this is a tough question. And logic because in the HR organization, your job is to keep people engaged. People have invited me to holiday events or events, you know, those kinds. Even if I don't agree with a particular festival, I might say 'God bless you.' I have not felt my own conviction has been one to not go to a holiday party of some kind, but I don't participate in things that might compromise a conviction of mine. Obviously, each of you, I don't want to describe each of those events, but you know, I've sought not to. I usually don't speak, I just talk to people, I might eat some of the food. And I understand maybe in HR it's a little harder because you have to organize. And if your conviction is to not even be there, okay? And not even be visible, God will honor that. I don't know that there's a fixed answer there. For some of those, like I said, I don't want to describe each of those because there's a lot of different events an HR person has to lead. If you don't have conviction to go to some of them, the Lord will honor that. I hope you're not in a place where you will lose your job if your boss is supportive. But I've not found it to be something that compromises my conviction to not go to be present at an event where they're serving food. You know, I may not participate in all of the activities or agree with activities, but if there's food, I can say hello to my team. Often those are good occasions for me to thank my people who work there. So I'll give you an example. Just one example: Halloween parties. Halloween is a festival where people get together, they bring their kids to work. Now I may not agree with Halloween and so on and so forth, but I still felt it's okay for me to go there and wish the families and their children well. They're all often in costumes, and I appreciate the kids. I didn't feel like, well, just because I don't believe, I'm not going to go and see my team. But if you feel like you shouldn't be there during that, that's also okay. I have not felt the conviction I shouldn't go to that. Now I don't myself dress up like a witch or anything of those kinds, but I have felt to go and thank my team. And it's mostly because I want to say thank you to people, appreciate them, say hello to them, because often when I get to see people, I don't get to see them except in Zoom. So that's been my own personal conviction on it, but I realized in the role of this person who wrote this question, that might be harder.

Yeah, that's a tough one. I also have a great amount of empathy. It's clearly here the person who's writing this question is working hard. I say, Lord, you know, leave it in your hands. I'm going to do my part which is to work hard, give me wisdom and clarity of thought. It looks like this is a college student or a high school student studying, and maybe but also could be in work where you're working in place. Again, remind yourself, my citizenship is not in heaven – sorry, it's not on earth. My citizenship is in heaven. And sometimes, you know, we have to be like that widow who kept praying, kept praying, kept praying and praying. And sometimes there's a breakthrough not just for our personal life but certainly for our godly character, but also for things that puzzles we have to solve. They don't get solved overnight. Sometimes some of the things we have to pursue may take months, years, but don't give up and ask the Lord to give you wisdom. There are many things that I've had to solve in my life that haven't gotten solved, and I even failed in an effort. But I've always told myself, what's the worst thing that happened? Okay, I get fired. I hope you know we're not doing illegal things. Like the worst thing could happen, you go to jail for something. That's not if you're righteous, you're not going to jail for that. There were people who were treated worse. They were burnt at the stake. So be encouraged, brother and sister whoever wrote that, don't give up. And remember, if you don't accomplish what you're after, you didn't get an A, you got a minus or a B plus, that's okay if you worked hard. You could also find ways by which you could sometimes study or work with somebody else. Initially in my early part of life, everything I did was alone, studying alone, but it was very encouraging. As I got older, I could do projects and of course I wasn't cheating because the professor allowed it to learn with somebody else. And even in my last few years in high school, I found it to be incredibly encouraging to learn with somebody else. I would ask them questions. And this is the picture of iron sharpening iron. So one of the pieces of advice I'd give you is find somebody else you could learn with. I mean, of course, in many cases, you could – if this person who was writing the question was studying, you may have a tutor, that's okay. But God may find somebody else. And sometimes I found in my studying, iron was sharpening iron because we would test each other. And in the same place at work, you might find a colleague. That person might be smarter than you, that's great. I actually want to surround myself with people who are smarter than me because we can help each other. And I have no problem giving the other person all the glory when that happens, but we both accomplish the goal. So that might be, of course in this case of studying, you have to do the final exam yourself, you can't share it, but in college many of the projects you do are shared projects with teams, and not all of them are just individual projects. Maybe the Lord will give you people you can either study with or work with that help you sharpen the saw, so to speak.

Really good question. This one's an easier one to do because I talked about this person I love, Thomas Kuran. But Thomas Kuran is the best networker I know. He's incredible at it. He's not the CEO of a company. I don't know. He's retired now. I don't know what he was doing, but he's an incredible networker. And I don't know if he started off as an introvert or extrovert, but he's an incredible networker. So, you know, the best place you can develop a little bit of charisma is in the church. Okay. Learn. I often find people who say, you know, I'm really grateful I come to the fellowship, Wednesday night fellowships, and I share five minutes because the discipline of crisping my thoughts to share in 2 minutes or 3 minutes at the church allows me to be more crisp when I go to work. And I've described work. Praise God for that. Do you think your colleagues have a Bible study on Wednesday night where they can practice speaking? No. So if you have 2 minutes where you're asked to give a testimony and you prepared and you wrote down the points so you could be crisp, that's a place where you're learning to be a little bit more of an extrovert. Now you don't have to be someone who's giving a keynote speech in front of a million people, that's okay. Some are gifted to speak, but you can all develop a little bit more of that ability to speak and write. The ability to speak and write is something you can all develop and you must develop as a skill because in many cases you have to articulate your thoughts to your boss, to your colleagues in written and spoken form. And thank God now for ChatGPT and AI tools that help you write better. That's great. That's fantastic. I'll take all the tools I can get, whether it's spell check or ChatGPT. But you can develop that extrovertedness at the church. It's amazing to me. I see these brothers and sisters tell me, 'I was, the skills are now at work. The Lord used me in it, made me better at that because I was bold to share a little bit on Wednesday nights.' Now don't come to the Wednesday nights just to build that skill. You're coming there to build up the body. But I think a tangential element of your practicing writing and speaking is very important in the workplace. So much of what I have to describe to my team and to my board, my boss is the board of a company, or in earlier cases it might be manager or director or vice president, you have to do in spoken or written form. And the shorter you have to speak, the more you have to prepare. I've heard the story about Abraham Lincoln. He was asked by a reporter, 'How long do you take to prepare for a 5-minute speech?' And he said, 'It takes me 5 days to prepare for a 5-minute speech.' And the reporter was really stunned. 'Why does it take you that long?' So then he asked him, 'How long does it take you to prepare for a 15-minute speech?' He said, '2 days.' And now the reporter was very confused. 'How long does it take you to prepare for a 45-minute speech?' 'I'm ready right now.' He said, 'So, the less time you have to speak, think of your boss asks you, can you give me a two-minute update on what's going on, the more you have to be prepared because you don't want to ramble on.' It's the same way when brother Jeremy or the elders in church say, 'I'd like you to all take 2 minutes during sharing time.' We have sharing time in our church. The people who prepared and thought about it, maybe written this down, are probably the ones you're going to get some impact in. Not because they're articulate. They thought, they prepared. So, if you're an introvert, you probably need to prepare a little bit more. That's okay. You can develop that skill, but you don't have to become this person who's getting ready to give a keynote to a million people. You can develop that to the level you are. You may still be a shy person. Many shy people are better at writing than they are at speaking. That's okay. But you can develop that then. And then networking, the piece of it, which is how many people you meet at work, that's okay. Don't feel discouraged, but there's somebody else who is networking with everybody else. But there's probably a circle of influential people in your company that might be able to help you. I tell people often inside my 6,000 person company, at Cohesity or the 30,000 person company we had at VMware, 100,000 person at SAP, these are three most recent companies I've been involved in. There's usually about 1% of the company that are really making things happen. Okay. So maybe it's 50 people inside this 60 people inside the 6,000, or maybe 300 people inside VMware, or 1,000 people at SAP. You want to know those people, right? And you just need to know, and one of the best ways in which you can network with people may not be able to do it with senior people but with colleagues of yours is take them out to lunch or have a coffee with them and ask them a lot of questions. Be inquisitive to learn. And everybody who is, you know, even if they are a peer of yours, everyone likes to teach somebody else. And when you tell somebody, 'I'd like to learn from you,' it makes them feel special. I want to learn from everybody, even though I'm the CEO of my company. I want to learn from a lot of people in my company because they know more than me on about a particular topic. So if you are anywhere in that hierarchy of a company, ask yourself, who are the most influential people in my company that I can learn from? And go and get a coffee with them. And or tea, or maybe if you can have a lunch with them and spend quality time listening to them, asking them questions. Think about the questions you could ask them, and the Lord will build that relationship. And any of the people I've known in the industry, you know, that's how it always started. And then sow the seed to continue that relationship, maybe send them a happy new year message, right? Or remember their birthday, happy birthday. These are all ways in which you can build connective tissue with somebody else that allows you to keep that connection going. And the Lord will give you. Now, for some people, I call them serial networkers. They're able to do this in mass amount of numbers. That's okay. God's given you that gift. Praise God for that. But if you're an introvert, don't be discouraged. You can build, and then when we finally get to the end of our life, you know, it's amazing when you get to 70, 80s, and 90s, your circle will – that network circle will shrink, okay? Because many of them will pass away and so on and so forth. And the most important people you know who will matter to you at the end of your life are your family and the fellowship you have. That's it. Because we all shrink, and at that deathbed, there'll be a few people sitting around you. So just think about it at that time when you're at that peak of your life. And yes, the network does matter. You can build that to what you think will help you. But don't be discouraged if you're an introvert. God will open. Then sometimes I've also prayed, final thing on this one is, 'Lord, help me open a door so I can get an opportunity to meet this person and give me favor with that person.' Right? In the Old Testament, there are many places where it says God granted this person favor. It's a great verse. 'Lord, grant me favor in this person.' God gave Daniel favor. God gave Joseph favor in the eyes of someone else. Right? There's a great verse in the Old Testament where it talks about the heart of the king is in the palm of the Lord, palm of God. Okay? So your boss might feel like a king in your life or your CEO or somebody else in the industry. You're approaching them about something. Who do you think is more important? That person or the Lord? It's saying the heart of the king is in the palm of the man. Here's my palm. Okay. In the middle of that is your boss. Pray the Lord will give me favor. Pray, 'Lord give me favor in this conversation,' because that person is small in the context of your palm. I prayed that prayer many, many times. 'Give me the articulation of thought, give me the speech, and give me favor in the eyes of that person for this conversation or for this presentation,' and the Lord will be faithful.

In the middle of that is your boss. Pray the Lord will give me favor. Pray, 'Lord give me favor in this conversation,' because that person is small in the context of your palm. I prayed that prayer many, many times. 'Give me the articulation of thought, give me the speech, and give me favor in the eyes of that person for this conversation or for this presentation,' and the Lord will be faithful.

Okay, so this person here is very good academically, looks like, but has a problem at work. You say, 'Okay, maybe you're in the wrong job.' That's possible. You're not motivated. Maybe there's another job. Maybe the Lord can open that for you. Sometimes, you know, even though you might be very smart, it looks like this person is very good academically. Okay, say, 'Lord, I'm not motivated by this job. Maybe I need to change my career.' That happens. That's happened to me in my 20s where the company I was working in felt like it was going nowhere, and the Lord allowed me – I went to graduate school and came back and took another job in a different part of – I mean, I've been in the tech industry all my life, but I took a different function. I moved from engineering to product management, and I found that to be a little bit more fulfilling. So that's okay, so the Lord may open that door if he does for something that makes you more motivated. And one of the things that – there are a lot of these personality tests that I find to be helpful to take. There's one called the Myers-Briggs test. It just tells you a little bit of who you are, you know. And HR teams can help you with those tests. They often then map – I think you would be good at this or that. And typically in a tech company, you have engineers, sales reps, HR, finance, legal. And a good company will seek to move people around within this. Maybe there's an opportunity to move into a different function. But if you're still called to that function and that's the best skill you have, sometimes you just have to persist and say, 'Lord, I need your help to get out of this boredom I'm feeling or lack of motivation. Help me be motivated. Find ways by which I can be motivated or bring me someone.' Like I said, I've always, when I've gone through periods of lull, I've looked for someone else who can bring me motivation. And it's a little bit like the Christian walk, right? If you remember the story of Pilgrim's Progress, it's a very lonely walk when you have to walk alone. I love the fact that there's brothers and sisters in the church to walk with, and same way at work. 'Lord, give me one colleague that I can bounce ideas off.' And I really believe hardworking can also be driven by teamwork. We collectively could do better than we can on our own.

Yeah, this, you know, if I extrapolate here, it's probably a boss who's political or maybe undermining. Sometimes, you know, it's sad. I've talked about bosses who are servant leaders, and sometimes they're bosses who are threatened by good people on their team. Like often we work with people who, when we're doing well, the boss is actually undermining us. And you have to view this a little bit like the hostility Daniel faced or Joseph faced. We're not always going to have – I've had bosses of mine who are, you know, threatened or insecure. And there may be a little bit of that politics going on, but again, I come back to that verse I talked about, right? The heart of your boss is in the palm of God. If you really believe that, you say, 'Lord, I want a breakthrough today. It's Monday morning. I'm going in. You know, he or she, my boss, is not – because they're politically – like now this boss is just, it's not malicious.' Then you can have a conversation with them. And that's where I want to go to next, which is – many, you know, there are crucial conversations we need to have. There are even books, psychology books written about crucial conversation. How do you have a crucial conversation with your boss? And that takes a lot of preparation because you want to have it in a way that does not threaten your boss but can help them. And the Lord can give you wisdom to have a constructive conversation saying, 'Dear boss, let me just role play here. I really am grateful for all the opportunities you've given me. And I'm very committed to this team. And I'm really grateful for the leadership you're providing to this team.' You're kissing up a little bit to the boss, but you're saying things that you authentically mean. 'Hey, I'd love your help on this particular topic. I don't seem to be getting the information fast enough on this. I'm sure it's not because of anything other than you're busy, so forth. How can I have a breakthrough here so I can get some of this information more?' If you say it in a nice way, unless your boss really hates you, okay? God can give you wisdom to – in some senses you're kissing up a little bit to your boss, but you're doing it in a way that solves the problem you want. And that is the wisdom we all need, which is how do I say things to my boss in a way that gets what I want. Okay? And the Lord can give you wisdom. And every one of those are opportunities for constructive crucial conversations. Many of the conversations I've had to have, they're crucial conversations that need to happen. And they're all like mini negotiations, okay? And every negotiation, whether it's with your family at home or your boss, you need wisdom on how to speak and how to write. God will give you that.

Same. It's almost the repeat of the same thing except for the boss is now your colleagues.

It's the same thing. You could cut, copy, paste what I said. The heart of your colleague is in the palm of the Lord. How much more? Yeah. It's easy to get irritated. This one though, pure relationships often are political. Why? Because they are trying to undermine you so they can get ahead. Your toughest relationships at work are going to be with your peers because they're jealous of you and they want to get ahead of you for that promotion. Okay? Build bridges, build coalitions. The best relationships you can build with your colleagues are where you're looking to help them be successful. 'Hey, I'm happy to get successful.' Now, however, you don't want your colleagues to stomp over you and take credit for the work you're doing and so on and so forth. And that's an opportunity with your boss one-on-one, when you're with them, to clarify what you worked on. And if you're faithful, I am sure Daniel had friends, but Daniel's work stood out for itself. Okay? And the Lord gave him favor in the eyes of Nebuchadnezzar or Belshazzar or Darius or whoever was the king there. So don't be discouraged by colleagues who are trying to undermine you. They are the crabs that are trying to pull you down. I describe the story of crabs in a bucket. They're all trying to pull each other down. Politics exists. Every organization with even 10 people has politics. Sadly, even in a church there's politics. People are trying to grab on top of each other and become the boss and so on and so forth. So, you have to be – you can either be a victim of politics, okay? Or you can say, 'Lord, you're going to give me strength and a tough nature to deal with politics and work through it.' And in my 30 plus years of career, I've had story after story. Probably I'll write a book on how to handle politics. It happens all the time. All the time. But so far, the Lord has not made me a victim of politics so much that I've been burned at the stake like the first century Christians. Okay? I still am alive. I'm here. I've not gotten everything I wanted every single time. Many times I've been passed over for promotion, this, that, the other. People make fun of me. I'll give you a small insight. Okay? There is a website called Blind. Okay? Blind is a website where people can anonymously post whatever they don't like about the company. Okay? And you have to log in from your company email. So you can't obviously see it all of you, but all of the Cohesity people can go and see it. And it's anonymous. If you're a Cohesity person, you log into Blind, you should see the things they say about me. It is very humbling. I stop reading it because it's like – I mean, I'm hated on that for something or the other. Okay, I say, 'Lord, if I want to read it, I can use it humbling, but that's – I'm going to work every day to honor you.' But then when I'm at work, my audience are my employees and my customers every day. I want to make my employees and my customers successful. Okay, there's going to be some – my employees aren't happy. Try to do the best we can, and maybe the reasons that they're happy are legitimate, some they're not. So I think the same way here, your relationship with your colleagues – you know, seek to build bridges, build coalitions, but then you know, don't allow what they think of you ultimately to affect your work quality.

Yeah, I think that's a good one. And career changes happen on average. I think now the Gen Z, the people in their 20s, they change jobs every two years. I've not changed jobs that often. I've typically in the last two jobs worked eight years each of them. I've been three and a half years now at Cohesity. I could imagine ending my career retired at Cohesity. I love the company that much. But if the Lord's, you know, pray first off for guidance, maybe seek the godly counsel of those around you as to whether thing, and make sure you land another job. Don't – it's tough in this environment to be jobless for a long period of time. So, it doesn't mean that you're at work and you're constantly interviewing, but I think it's wise to, you know, unless you really have a certainty that you can take some time off and do it and you have enough savings. The change of a career, you want to think carefully. It's like – and especially as you get older, it's harder to switch jobs because, you know, people often think, 'Okay, you know what, are you as hungry in your 50s and 60s as you are in your 30s and 40s?' You probably, if you're young, you could probably do this more often, right? Where you switch one to the other or go to a smaller company. And certainly if you are, you know, the first part of this is you are losing interest, and there's a lot of stress. In some of the situations where I've had to change, I don't tend to be a person that gets stressed very much. The Lord has allowed me to handle that in a different way. So I don't deal with the blood pressure of stress as much, but I could – I could sense there was a lot of politics in the company, and over the course of several months, the Lord opened a new door for me. And without going into detail, in the two changes I made moving from SAP to VMware and then of course VMware, it was because of a situation where the door ultimately was clear to me that it was closed. So the Lord will give you that. And my encouragement to you is there should be no place for discouragement. You know, we've seen that we've heard that, right? Make discouragement and condemnation a one-way. Don't be condemned. Don't make discouragement a one-way street. 'I'm not going to enter down that street. Lord, give me the encouragement I need for today so that even though I have to go to work from 8 to 5 or 8 to 6 or whatever, I am going to use that opportunity to honor you, and you are going to give me the joy. You're going to give me that spark in my life.' No human being – there's a great saying that some famous person said that there's a hole in everybody that can only be filled by God. There's a hole in everybody's heart that can only be filled by God. So all of these things are holes. 'I'm discouraged. I'm losing interest. I have mental stress.' These are holes in us, and we all naturally go through them because we're human, or they are victims of the world we live in. That can only be filled by God. No work satisfaction, because even a work satisfaction of a project or success or whatever is temporal because my own experience is often a few successes are followed by a failure. So may the Lord give you, brother or sister who's written this, wisdom on how to handle it.

Yeah, this sounds like it's a manager of a team as opposed to just an individual contributor. I think just because someone disobeys your command, that's not just a reason to – there are many people who often don't listen to me. I think that where I've had to make those changes in the team, it's not because people – I actually want people to disagree with me, okay? But we call this 'disagree and commit.' Like we all, if we're all going to get together, and many times I'm wrong about 'should we do this, should we do that?' And let's assume you're the manager. So I think the thing that I would want to ask in this question is, is the person on your staff doing this because it's the right thing to do? Are they doing it just to be rebellious? And the way to find out is to have a team meeting and say, 'Hey, listen. Is this the thing we should do or not?' And if the person is doing this just to be rebellious, it will be very obvious. And there'll be other people on the team who are saying, 'Yeah, this person is doing this just to undermine you.' And someone who's repeatedly rebellious and political – okay, they're going to – forget them being rebellious towards you. They're going to destroy the team. But you can do this if you're the manager, you can have again a crucial conversation. You can have a conversation with them saying, 'I think this is the right thing to do. Why are you repeatedly doing this?' And maybe they explain themselves, and maybe they can change. I believe before you finally take the decision to move someone out of the company, you should have had many conversations. The cruelest thing you can do to somebody is fire them before you've given them feedback. As again, you know, do unto others as you want done to you. Imagine that someone fired you and you never had feedback on what you could do better. That's the cruelest thing you can do as a manager, is fire someone you never gave them feedback along the way. And worse than that, sometimes you have given them good feedback all along in their reviews, and suddenly you decided because they're not listening to you, and they bring back all their reviews and say, 'Listen, I was a good employee for many, many years, and then suddenly...' So if you're a manager, the most important thing you have to learn is how to give feedback, constructive feedback, 360 feedback. 360 feedback – I call this often. 360 means you're in the middle and there's a circle around. There's a 360 circle around you. Who's above you? Your boss. Who's to the side of you? Your peers. Who's below you? People who report to you. You want to have a regular way by which you're receiving and giving 360 feedback. Often as a manager, I ask of my people,

My team, and I often ask of me three questions that I ask people to respond to. It only takes 15 minutes to respond about this. So this is the feedback I then use to give of that person, and I use that same template for people to give feedback of me. Here are the three questions. Number one, okay, please pay attention. What three to five things does this person do well? Okay, question number two. What one to three things can this person improve? Did you notice the difference? I want to start with what they do well, and I want more of what they do well than what they can improve at. What three to five things that they do well? What second question, what one to three things can they improve? Third question, on a scale of 1 to 5. Okay. Um, five being they walk on water. They use this expression walk on water meaning they do nothing wrong, and one means they're utter failure. How do you rate the person? Okay. And we have a rating scheme in our company. Five is exceptional and one should be I forget that. So we use those numbers one through five. Answering those questions often takes only 15 minutes. Now once a year when I'm collecting feedback either on my team people report to me or I ask people to do it to me, I give these three questions. Okay. So imagine if you've never given people feedback and then suddenly you decide, oh this person's not a fit. How do you think they feel? So we all need to get comfortable in a very structured way giving and receiving feedback. And I'll tell you what, feedback is a gift. Do not be defensive when you receive feedback that's constructive where you can improve. And the best place to learn that, you know, brothers and sisters, is the church.

Yeah, I think this is one where I have a lot of empathy for this because this is a person who is, it's tough because of health, and I think the most important thing I tell our team members, I work to your health comes first, always comes first. Your health and your family comes first. I hope you have an understanding job manager who will support you in this stage of life. I hope it's not permanent, but you know, but the most important thing you can pray for is a supporting manager that can help you through that. Sometimes you may have to take disability or time off. You should not feel bad about the fact that during those moments of health, you have to step back a little bit. I think if it happened to me, I would have a conversation with my manager and say, I need to work less. And that may be for a season, but if it is permanently, the Lord will give you grace to hopefully support yourself. It sounds like this one person may be also being supported by the church. That's good. And then say, okay, Lord, for this season, I'm not able to be a Daniel, the number two person in Egypt. That's okay. That's totally okay. There's plenty of other people who could serve. Hopefully you're able to support your family, that's more important. And I pray that your health will be important, but my attitude as a manager often is to support people like this, and the most important thing if you're a manager is to support people in your team and to give them all the space they need to be able to deal with their health. That's much more important. And when you do that, you build a culture in your company that actually allows people, let's say it's a season that they're going through a health issue, they come back that they're very supported. But I pray the brother, sister who's going through this, that your health is restored and you have enough to be able to support your family.