“Bee-ing” A Good Human
Meet Nic Harvey, senior director of channels and alliances for EMEA and APAC
For Nicola "Nic” Harvey, CloudBees senior director of channels and alliances for EMEA and APAC, the customer doesn’t just come first, "the customer is the hero,” she says.
As you can imagine, Nic and her team are laser-focused on fostering relationships with customers, a process that requires building a lot of trust. “It’s banded a lot around that trusted advisor narrative,” she says. “It’s about bringing the pieces together that enable us to solve problems for our customers.”
That same kind of trusting attitude is fundamental to how Nic and her team operate day to day. "It’s about integrity, responsibility, and accountability. But it’s mostly about showing up,” Nic says. "We succeed together, and we fail together. Everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon and come to the pub when a big deal has come in. But it’s about who shows up when you’ve lost.” That, Nic says, is what’s behind a successful team – a family with leadership. And it makes all the difference.
One of the many things Nic loves about CloudBees is what she calls our "good human” quality. That means treating everyone with kindness and respect – no matter their title. “We have a lot of good Bees here,” she says. "I don’t want to sound gushy, but it really feels like a family. I see that good human DNA throughout the organization and especially in IT. There’s a lot of diversity from a gender and race perspective, but also from a neurodiverse perspective.”
Having been diagnosed with ADHD last year, Nic has a very personal perspective on "neurodiversity,” the idea that it is normal and acceptable for people to have brains that function differently from one another. In some ways her ADHD is a superpower, she says, enabling you "that relentless persistence.” But it can also be exhausting.
Nic reminds us that just because our differences may be real, they aren’t always obvious to the casual observer. "I was described once as having a ‘high octane’ personality,” she says. "A lot of people have that too, but what’s important is that our differences demand different approaches – whether that’s how we learn, communicate, internalize, or retain information. We are all different and being able to have that lens – that inclusive neurodiverse lens – over everything we do is something I’m very passionate about, even before I was diagnosed.”
The first step is to cultivate awareness, Nic says. "You never know what people are going through. Everybody has a mask, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t genuine. That’s why you need that lens to just stop and think.” Life is better when you assume people have a positive intent, she says. "I hate when people interrupt yet I interrupt all the time. But I have the awareness now that it’s not me being rude, it’s because my brain is wired differently. I’ve now learned to raise my hand in meetings.”
We should also understand that it’s not just the overt bias – but the unconscious bias – that we need to be critically thinking about, Nic adds.
Ideally, people should wear their diversity lens in every situation, so it becomes a natural behavior. That, Nic would tell you, is what makes us good humans.