BROADCASTS.com

Teodora Gouneva was enjoying one of the more satisfying chapters of a 25-year finance career when she began hearing voices again.

She tells us that although for most of her work trajectory she had been able to ignore them, on this occasion the contentment that she had so carefully guarded began to give way.

The year was 2013, and the role offered to Gouneva was to serve as CFO of PayPal\u2019s Braintree Venmo operations, the enterprise resulting from PayPal\u2019s recent acquisition of Braintree.

\u201cFor me, it wasn\u2019t an immediate or obvious \u2018yes,\u2019\u201d recalls Gouneva, who already occupied a senior finance role overseeing a big slice of the company\u2019s business after having adroitly climbed PayPal's finance career ladder for the previous 9 years.

\u201cI loved my current job, and there were still things on my road map that I wanted to improve and fix,\u201d continues Gouneva, who notes that it was at this point that the voices once more surfaced\u2014this time, not to be ignored.

\u201cPrior to that job offer, I would very often have people tell me \u2018You should take more risks!,\u2019 but I don\u2019t think that I had ever really considered doing so before,\u201d says Gouneva, who credits her divisional CFO tour of duty with adding some extra operational heft to her resume in light of Braintree having acquired Venmo only a year earlier.

Comments Gouneva: \u201cThese were two completely different businesses in one, and we made a strategic decision to run those businesses separately.\u201d  

Still, in the months and years that followed, the organizations sought to achieve a better strategic alignment, a feat largely reliant on changing the behaviors of the different sales teams.

\u201cWe had to paint a picture for them of what the ultimate goal was and what was important and why,\u201d remarks Gouneva, who credits changes in PayPal\u2019s sales compensation programs with helping to bring the new picture into focus.

While Gouneva leaves little doubt that she\u2019s happy that she ultimately listened to \u201cthe voices,\u201d she tells us there\u2019s no escaping the fact that risks will always be risks.   

She asks: \u201cDo I leave the certainty that comes from knowing exactly what the role is, or do I embrace something new that is not very clear and could ultimately be good or bad?\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney