“How Humility and Collaboration Brought Me Success!” Arivazhagan V’s Story

I have been working in the oil & gas domain since 2013. My first job was in Rajasthan, India, where I worked for six years straight. I got married in 2018 and joined Quest Global in 2019. I was thrilled to join Quest Global because working here meant transitioning from a field job to a corporate setup and having more time with my family and a better work-life balance. Despite the excitement, I was anxious about the new working setup because things would be very different. We were a team of four: two of the team members came from a similar background to mine and one was a recent graduate. Given our experiences, we all had a lot to learn and adapt to.

For our first project as a team, I was the HSC Systems Completion lead, where we supported our customers in building their plants in West Africa. I started noticing how working in the field differed from working in a corporate setup.

In my previous job, we used to interact directly with the site execution team with a bunch of papers in our hands for project planning and execution, but now we had to connect with people online globally in different time zones. It was challenging for us on many fronts. As we were understanding each other as a team, we were also understanding Quest Global and the processes, the customer, and different colleagues sitting in different locations with their ways of working. It was getting clearer by the day that we had to be agile and flexible in order to do well.

In addition to the things we were adapting to internally, the tools being used for the project were new for us, as was the customer. The right thing to do was to understand the tools and systems properly before rushing implementation because one misstep would have led to the loss of the customer’s time and money.

Our managers understood all this and ensured they were reachable to us whenever we needed them. We got all the required support and training through IDP. It made me realize that the culture at Quest Global is very open and transparent. The leaders are very approachable and this was very different from my past experience. All I had to do was ask and commit!

This was when I realized the power of humility and collaboration. Our humility to accept and call out that which we did not know enabled our managers and customers to give us the required help. Accepting the gaps in our knowledge upfront made the customer appreciate our integrity, and it increased our credibility in front of them. We all, customer included, collaborated and learned together to make the project a success, which created an ecosystem that supported our growth and customer success. 

With all these efforts and much more, within one and a half years of my joining Quest Global, I was promoted. I was thriving in the environment and was able to support my team as well. Our team increased from four to nine members, the scope of work increased, and we extended our customer support from one region to 13 regions.

Coming from an organization where the project management and execution was done manually, I understood the challenges that accompanied that, so when Quest Global was able to help its customer move to 100% digitized execution at site, it made me extremely proud!

In my journey of learning and working, I realized that my managers always had my back! This gave me tremendous confidence when facing customers and recommending solutions to them. This also made me realize that I needed to pass the confidence on to my team so it would be the same for them.