Evelyn Talatala Clough

The People Who Believed in Me Before I Believed in Myself

By Evelyn Talatala Clough

Success is often told as an individual story.

We talk about determination, hard work, resilience, and the courage to keep going. All of those things matter. I know because I have relied on every one of them throughout my life.

But as I recently began looking back at my journey in a much deeper way, I realized something:

My story was never mine alone.

Long before I had titles, accomplishments, or any real idea of where my life would take me, there were people who believed I was capable of more.

The first were my parents.

I grew up in a small barrio in the Philippines without electricity or running water. We did not have much, but my parents never allowed what we lacked to determine what we could become.

My father was a farmer. He saved every coin he could. My mother made enormous sacrifices for our family. Neither could hand us an easy path, so instead, they gave us something far more valuable: They taught us to believe in education, hard work, faith, and possibility.

One of the photographs I treasure most is of my father placing a medal around my neck when I was a little girl.

At the time, it was simply a proud moment between a father and his daughter.

Today, I see something more.

I see a man who believed in his daughter before she had any idea what she might become.

Sometimes Someone Else Sees It First

Years later, I arrived in America with one hundred dollars in my pocket.

I had an engineering degree, ambition, and plenty of determination. What I did not have was a roadmap.

I worked as a nanny. I worked in a jewelry store. I worked at a bank. I practiced my English and tried to understand a country and culture that were still new to me.

Eventually, someone passed along my résumé.

That simple act opened a door.

On January 15, 1995, I began working in Network Operations at Sprint. It became the beginning of a telecommunications career I could never have imagined when I first arrived in America.

Over the years, there would be other people who took chances on me, challenged me, gave me opportunities, and sometimes saw potential in me before I was completely certain I was ready.

I also encountered people who doubted me.

Those people taught me something too.

Their doubt made me work harder.

But the people who believed in me taught me something much more important:

What happens when someone is given the opportunity to prove what they can do.

Leadership Changed the Question

As my career grew, I eventually found myself on the other side of that equation.

I was no longer the person waiting for someone to open the door.

I was the leader who could open it.

That realization changed the way I thought about leadership.

Leadership isn't simply about delivering results, hitting targets, or building successful organizations. Those things are important. But some of the most meaningful results of leadership may not appear on a dashboard.

Sometimes leadership is noticing the quiet employee who has more potential than confidence.

Sometimes it is giving someone a stretch assignment before they think they are ready.

Sometimes it is saying, "I believe you can do this."

And sometimes it is allowing someone to fail, learn, get back up, and try again without deciding that one mistake defines their potential.

Throughout my career, I have led teams in the United States and internationally. The technology changed. The companies changed. The challenges changed.

But people remained people.

They wanted to know that their work mattered.

They wanted someone to see what they were capable of becoming.

Your Belief May Become Someone Else's Beginning

There is a responsibility that comes with reaching a position you once dreamed about.

At some point, success has to become about more than how far you can go.

It becomes about how many people you can help move forward with you.

I have watched employees grow into leaders. I have watched people become more confident because someone trusted them with something difficult. And I have seen what happens when people are given both high expectations and genuine belief.

That is one of the greatest privileges of leadership.

You may never know which conversation someone will remember twenty years later.

You may never know that the opportunity you considered small became a turning point in someone else's life.

My father probably never imagined that decades after placing that medal around the neck of his little girl in the Philippines, I would still carry that moment with me.

But I do.

A Story That Was Never Mine Alone

Recently, I finished writing my memoir, One Hundred Dollars: An Immigrant's Journey of Faith, Courage, and Purpose.

Writing it forced me to revisit parts of my life I had not thought about in years.

And somewhere between remembering the little girl studying by a kerosene lamp and the young woman arriving in America with one hundred dollars, I realized something that changed the way I saw my entire journey.

Yes, I worked hard.

Yes, I persevered.

Yes, there were moments when I had to believe in myself when very few people knew what I was capable of.

But there were also people along the way who opened doors, offered encouragement, challenged me, trusted me, and believed.

My name may be on the cover of the book.

But I did not get there alone.

Perhaps that is one of the most important lessons success has taught me.

We spend so much of our lives wondering whether someone will believe in us.

Eventually, if we are fortunate enough to succeed, the question changes.

Who will believe in themselves because we believed in them first?

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The Leadership Lesson I Had to Learn: Your Job Is Not to Be the Smartest Person in the Room

Early in my career, I thought becoming a leader meant having the answers.

I believed that if I wanted people to respect me, I needed to know more, work harder, solve the problems, and prove that I deserved to be in the room.

The higher I climbed, the more I realized how wrong I was.

Today, I lead organizations filled with people who know things I don't know—and that is exactly how it should be.

My job isn't to be the smartest person in the room. My job is to build a room full of smart people, give them the confidence to use their voices, and create an environment where they can do their best work.

That may be one of the most important leadership lessons I've learned.

Leadership Isn't About Having All the Answers

I've spent much of my career leading highly technical organizations. In those environments, it can be tempting for leaders to believe they need to be the technical expert on everything.

I learned a long time ago that isn't scalable—and it isn't leadership.

I want people on my team who are better than I am at what they do. I want the engineer who understands the network at a level I don't. I want the person who sees a problem differently than I do. I want someone who is willing to tell me, respectfully, "Evelyn, I don't think that's the right answer."

That doesn't diminish me as a leader. It makes the organization stronger. If I'm always the smartest person in the room, I've probably built the wrong room.

Sometimes You Have to Believe in People Before They Believe in Themselves

One of my favorite parts of leadership has always been developing people.

I've watched employees hesitate to apply for a position because they didn't think they were ready.

I've seen people underestimate their abilities because no one had ever told them what they were capable of.

Sometimes they just need someone to see it first.

Throughout my career, I've created career paths, training opportunities, certification programs, and development plans because I believe people need more than a job. They need to be able to see where they can go.

But development isn't only about programs.

Sometimes it's a conversation.

Sometimes it's giving someone an assignment that scares them a little.

Sometimes it's saying, "I know you can do this," and then giving them enough room to discover that you're right.

There is something incredibly rewarding about watching someone grow into a role they once couldn't imagine themselves doing.

Accountability and Caring Can Exist in the Same Room

I have high expectations. Anyone who has worked for me probably knows that.

I believe in accountability. I believe in owning the outcome. I believe that when customers are depending on us, we don't get to say, "That's not my job," and walk away.

But I've never believed that accountability and caring are opposites. You can expect excellence from people and still care deeply about them. You can have difficult conversations and still treat someone with dignity. You can tell someone they need to improve while also helping them figure out how.

In fact, I believe people will often give you more when they know that your expectations come from believing in what they are capable of—not simply from demanding results.

People should know when they work for me that I will hold them accountable. But they should also know that I will fight for them, advocate for them, recognize them, develop them, and celebrate them.

Both can be true.

You Don't Get to Stop the Business While You Transform the Business

I've also learned something else about leadership through years of acquisitions, integrations, reorganizations, and operational transformations:

You don't get to stop the business while you transform the business.

I wish you could.

It would be much easier to say, "Everyone stop for six months. We're going to redesign the organization, integrate the technology, fix the processes, train everyone, and then we'll turn everything back on."

Of course, that's not how it works.

The phones still ring. Customers still need you. Networks still have outages. Employees still need answers. And the business still has to perform.

That is where leadership becomes less about the perfect PowerPoint or organizational chart and much more about people.

Because the hardest part of transformation isn't usually designing the new process.

It's bringing people with you.

People need to understand where you're going and why. They need to know what the change means for them. They need opportunities to ask questions, disagree, learn, make mistakes, and eventually become part of building the new organization.

I've learned that you cannot simply announce transformation.

You have to lead people through it.

The People Doing the Work Matter

Some of the people I admire most in an organization will never have an executive title.

They're the people answering the phone when everyone else is sleeping. They're troubleshooting an outage at 2:00 in the morning. They're staying beyond their shift because a customer is still down. They're mentoring the new employee sitting beside them. They're solving problems that most of the company will never even know happened.

Leadership has taught me to pay attention to those people.

Titles don't tell you who the leaders are in an organization. Actions do.

One of my responsibilities as an executive is to make sure those contributions don't become invisible simply because they happen behind the scenes.

Recognition matters. A simple "thank you" matters. Knowing someone's name matters. And making sure people understand how their work connects to something bigger than themselves matters.

How I Measure Leadership Today

My definition of success has changed over the years.

Of course, results matter. I am an operations leader. I measure things. I look at performance, customer experience, efficiency, reliability, and whether we're delivering what we promised.

But those aren't the only things I measure anymore.

I also look around the room.

Who grew?

Who found their voice?

Who became a leader?

Who took on something they once thought they couldn't do?

Who is ready to take my seat someday?

Because if an organization can only succeed when I'm in the room, then I haven't built a successful organization. I've built a dependency.

The goal should be to create people and teams capable of succeeding long after the leader has left the room.

That's why one belief has become central to the way I lead:

"The best leaders don't just manage people—they inspire them, believe in them, and help them become more than they thought possible."

Leadership isn't about proving that you're the smartest person in the room.

It's about looking around that room and realizing that you helped build it.

- Evelyn Talatala Clough

Vice President, Network Operations | Leadership & Operational Transformation Executive

The More You Know, the More You Grow

In August 1990, I arrived in the United States from the Philippines with an engineering degree, a suitcase, and one hundred dollars in my pocket.

I had dreams, but I certainly didn't have a roadmap.

My first job in America wasn't in engineering. I worked as a nanny. Later, I worked in a jewelry store and then at a bank. Every job taught me something, but deep inside, I knew I hadn't crossed an ocean and left everyone I loved behind to stop there.

Then, on January 15, 1995, I was given an opportunity that changed my life: I became a Network Operations Technician.

I still remember how much I didn't know.

Technology in America was far ahead of what I had experienced in the Philippines. Instead of allowing that to intimidate me, I stayed late. I studied. I asked questions. I learned.

That became one of the philosophies that would follow me throughout my career:

The more you know, the more you grow.

Over the next three decades, my career took me from technician to executive leadership. I led technical organizations, transformed operations, built teams, and eventually led people not only across the United States but internationally.

But the journey wasn't a straight line upward.

There were times I deliberately moved sideways. There were even times when a career decision might have looked like a step backward. I stopped measuring every opportunity by the title that came with it and started asking myself a different question:

What will this teach me?

That question changed the way I thought about success.

I learned that sometimes the experience you gain from a lateral move prepares you for an opportunity you couldn't yet see. I learned that you don't have to know everything before walking into a room—you just have to be willing to learn what you don't know. And I learned that courage doesn't mean you're not afraid. Sometimes courage simply means moving forward while you are still afraid.

As my career grew, something else changed.

My definition of success changed with it.

Early in my life, success meant survival. It meant helping my family. Later, it meant building a career and proving that I belonged in rooms where there were very few women—and even fewer women who looked or sounded like me.

Today, success means something different.

It means developing people. It means mentoring women who may not yet recognize their own potential. It means opening doors and then holding those doors open long enough for someone else to walk through.

And it means remembering where I came from.

That one hundred dollars has stayed with me—not because of what it could buy, but because of what it represented.

Hope.

Sacrifice.

Possibility.

And a promise to myself that I would make the opportunity I had been given mean something.

More than three decades later, I understand something the young woman who stepped off that plane couldn't possibly have known:

The greatest measure of success isn't how far you travel from where you started. It's how many people you help move forward because you made the journey.