Kevin Dear recently took over as the enterprise sales team manager for Iowa and Nebraska at Microsoft Corp. He leads a 10-member sales team that works with Microsoft’s largest business clients in the two states. Dear has been in the company for 6 1/2 years. He has previously worked for Kingland Systems Corp. and General Electric Capital Information Technology Solutions. Prior to that, he was a seventh-grade social studies teacher at Clear Lake Middle School. Microsoft earlier this year opened an office in downtown Des Moines in the Western Gateway, moving from its previous location in West Des Moines.

We’ve gotten that question a lot over the last two months. The Microsoft folks that work on the ground in this office are any Microsoft employees who happen to work for Microsoft and want to come into an office. We’re a very flexible company from a work standpoint. We ripped out our time clocks many years ago. So the primary folks who work in the office here are our enterprise sales team folks. The team that I lead is made up of enterprise sellers across Iowa and Nebraska. Folks just come in here to land. We work directly with our enterprise customers in Iowa and Nebraska. We’ve got about 35 enterprise customers. Those would be our largest customers.

Who are your customers?

It’s all businesses. We don’t do any consumer activities out of this office. We’re selling to our largest customers. We measure – because we’re a Windows operating system company primarily, and a software company – we measure our customers by the number of desktops in our enterprise. While there are other layers of the Microsoft sales organization that operate in the Des Moines area and in Iowa, we deal with the largest customers. They may be customers with 3,000, 4,000, up to 25,000 or 30,000 desktops in the organization.

What are your goals in this position?

My goals are for everyone on my team to be successful in whatever way that means, whether it’s successful at Microsoft in their careers, successful in life, successful in providing for their family. I’m a huge proponent that people in leadership roles, their primary responsibility is to make sure that everyone on their team is happy and taken care of. In the end, for some folks, success is defined as making a good living. For other folks, it’s doing something that they’re very very passionate about. And for others, it’s having the flexibility to balance their work with the rest of their life. We tore our time clocks out a long time ago, and the great thing about Microsoft is, everyone who works here knows we measure our folks based on their performance and results. As long as they’re getting their job done, we don’t pay close attention to the hours that they work. My belief is if my people are happy, then the customers are happy, and they are more likely to buy our solutions.

How did you transition from being a social studies teacher to being involved in the tech world?

When I worked at Clear Lake, I was always interested in and involved in technology. I was part of a team that wrote a grant for technology in the school through the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust. We received a grant, and I was the primary administrator of the grant. We built a computer lab in the school for the first time. Part of the grant paid for networking in the school. I had an interest in technology, and my first job when I went to GE was selling software and hardware services to schools across Iowa.

What do you do outside work?

I’ve been quite busy over the last year. I got married about a year ago in May. I’ve been quite busy with that. We just moved into a new home recently. Outside of that, I’ve got two kids. I’ve got a daughter that goes to school in Boston, and I’ve got a son who lives in Milwaukee now, and he’s in a band that tours nine months out of the year. What I did when I had my kids with me is we traveled a lot, and I still like to travel a lot. I was raised in a military family. Other than that, I do like endurance sports. I’ve run, in the last eight years, 23 marathons. I’ve been to Boston five times and run that. Both of my kids were in the Stebens Children’s Theater in Mason City, and I’ve been a patron of the theater for a number of years providing financial support for a scholarship fund. My wife and I recently became involved with Youth Emergency Services & Shelter.