Are You Doing What You Really Want to Do?

by | Oct 10, 2018 | Careers, Change, Corporate Communications, Leadership, Learning, Social Media, Work/Life

These beautiful photos of my farewell celebration are by Jessica Sterling

If you’re here, it’s because I really like you.

That’s how I started my remarks at my corporate farewell event exactly one month ago today.

As is my writing practice, I thought about what I wanted to say, who I wanted to thank, and how I hoped people would feel. I gave myself the speechwriting assignment and let my subconscious go to work on it. I find that ideas pop up while I’m doing other things.

Except with everyone else going on, it wasn’t quite done by the time the event arrived. Usually I like to ideate, write, iterate, memorize and then speak without notes. That didn’t happen this time.

This next part is for my colleagues who have told me I always seem prepared and poised. You may get a zing of delight to know that I was still writing my remarks in my Evernote app while my husband Kevin was driving us to the event.

So of course I couldn’t memorize it. And in the spirit of keeping it short, I left out a lot of what I wanted to say. So I’m sharing it here, for my friends and colleagues who were there, and for many others who aren’t in Southern California and couldn’t be there.

______

My daughter was 11 months old when I came to work at DIRECTV as a communications manager.

In my interview, Jeff Torkelson said, “It’s really busy here. Do you think you can handle it?”

Those words haunted me at the end of my first week. Everyone was running around with their hair on fire. No one seemed to leave at the end of the day. It didn’t seem like anyone else had a baby at home. I realized I’d made a big mistake in taking the job.

But I couldn’t quit after a week. So I decided I would commit to a year. After that I would find a new job.

But then I found ways to succeed in the environment, like doing thinking and writing projects in the early mornings. And without my even asking, my male and female bosses offered me the ability to work from home one day a week when I returned to work after my son was born.

So much opportunity grabbed me. And it didn’t let go.

A transitional time like this reminds me of wise words from great leaders.

Eddy Hartenstein, the charismatic pioneer who founded DIRECTV and the father of modern-day satellite television, said upon leaving the company many years earlier that “we are victors, not victims.”

I remember Eddy coming to my office to practice his talk before his farewell event. My colleague Tina Morefield and I listened and tried not to shed tears. I still get chills thinking about it.

Mike White, another legendary leader at DIRECTV, often said that “sometimes you need to replant yourself.” He is a model of ongoing reinvention and lifelong learning. He’s a super-smart English major who became a CEO.

After 30 years in the corporate world (!), it was time for me to replant myself. It felt like being in my 20s again, graduating from UCLA and wondering what to do with the rest of my life. So I began to look back over the years for clues.

When I was 5 years old, I loved to read and write. My uncle gave me what used to be known as a typewriter (younger readers can Google it). I’d type up stories, letters and calendars. Anything, really.

My grandmother and my mother encouraged my writing (along with my parents requiring that I take math and science every year in high school). My dad suggested I study English in college. But I wondered what kind of a career I could have. How would I become financially independent? If only I’d known then about where Mike White’s career journey would lead.

So I studied economics. And I ultimately found corporate communications, at the intersection of business and writing. It fits perfectly with my Strong Interest Inventory profile of artistic, social and enterprising interests.

Julia Cameron who wrote The Artist’s Way might have called it a shadow career. Because I really wanted to be a writer. But I didn’t know how to do it and live the life that I wanted.

That’s probably why I started an internal blog at DIRECTV in 2012 when my team launched a social collaboration website. And I started this blog on New Year’s Day 2015 to explore the future of corporate communications. I had a lot of support and encouragement from my boss at the time, Joe Bosch, our chief human resources officer.

Now writing is the foundation of what I’m doing as an emerging entrepreneur. I’m writing, consulting, speaking and teaching about how professionals can grow their careers and business owners can grow their companies through social media.

With that said, the time with my colleagues in the corporate world was anything but a shadow career.

That’s because of all the incredible things we did together. There were so many challenging projects. But we brought everyone’s talents together, worked as a team and made it happen, again and again. It was fun and rewarding along the way.

At our first-ever dealer conference called Dealer Revolution, I remember dancing the night away in what was then the Texas Stadium after Kerin Lau and her events team made the 2,000-person event happen. We got to meet Rod Stewart before he performed that night. When it came time to take photos, I hoped I wouldn’t be taller than him. I wasn’t disappointed.

The ever-incredible events team

There are KaBOOM! playgrounds in New Orleans, Atlanta and Las Vegas. Children are probably happily playing on them right now, thanks to the work by Tina Morefield, Brooke Hanson, Brynne Dunn Jones, Jamie Zamora, Andy Bailey and so many more.

Anthony Martini joined us when many of the installation and service technician companies were insourced. Out of nothing, he built the corporate communications infrastructure. And working with Carlos Botero, those communications helped create a workforce so engaged that Willis Towers Watson wrote a case study on it.

Launching social collaboration with Michael Ambrozewicz and Thyda Nhek Vanhook and IT colleagues Mike Benson, Frank Palase, Brian Ulm and many others was my first real introduction to social media. It made me want to crawl under my desk and hide until it went away.

But that didn’t happen so I had to conquer my fears and move forward. I launched an internal blog so I could learn and model what it was like to try new things, look silly in the process and learn from everyone in the community.

Creating an employer brand with Michael Ambrozewicz, Linda Simon and Rosanne Setoguchi along with Mark Schumman bordered on the sublime. I remember the electrifying moment when Vanessa Sestina completed the puzzle with our tagline, we entertain the future. 

Then it came time for the corporate campus to be upgraded. It meant new ways of working in open and collaborative space. There was a lot of hand wringing. Fellow members of the Campus Launch Advisory Board will remember. In the end, Paul James and Hilary Hatch did an incredible job and Tyler Jacobson communicated it to perfection, with great counsel from Reza Ahmadi.

When we got the news that AT&T was going to acquire DIRECTV, it was the thrill of a lifetime to be part of the integration team led by Jennifer Cho at DIRECTV and Jeff McElfresh at AT&T. What seemed at first like having a front-row seat to a Harvard Business Review case study was actually like getting an MBA in real time.

Through it all, I was passionate about advancing women at the company through mentoring circles and employee resource groups. What a thrill when Dan York brought the Academy Award-winning actor Geena Davis to speak at the company not once, but three times. She is doing incredible work to bring gender parity to television and film roles. And Phil Goswitz was able to have Gywnne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, come and speak to our women’s resource group.

Some of my mentoring circle friends

And as a capstone, I got to work with Fiona Carter as she championed gender equality and inclusion in the company’s advertising and media. I’ll always remember the inspiring work to measure and communicate inclusion with Chris Cervenka, Bill Moseley, Eric Ryan, Michelle Smith, Brett Levecchio, Caitlyn Wooldridge and so many more.

I’m beyond proud of the inclusive advertising being produced by Val Vargas, Sarita Rao, Sandra Howard and many others at the company. They are all role models that I hope many others in the industry will follow.

And whenever I didn’t know what to do or needed to brush off criticism, I got the best advice from my husband Kevin. Borrowed from the film Madagascar, he’d always say, “Just smile and wave, boys. Smile and wave.”

There are so many more incredible memories and people (like my most recent team members Stephen Santiago and Sabrina McKnight). It’s been an honor to work with all of you. I learned so much from you. We’ll always be connected by the DIRECTV and AT&T family.

Things came full circle last week when I heard from Tina Quinn, who was my coach over the last year. She recommended Steven Pressfield’s book, The Artist’s Journey.

It picks up where Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey leave off. Early in my corporate career I read about the hero’s journey. It articulates the timeless sequence of events for nearly every story, novel or film.

“The artist’s journey comes after the hero’s journey,” Pressfield says in his book about the lifelong pursuit of meaning. “Everything that has happened to us up to this point is rehearsal for us to act, now, as our true self and to find and speak in our true voice.”

There is a rich personal history that I draw upon now. It’s in no small part thanks to the people I spent the last few decades working with.

You have each inspired me in your own way. I am profoundly grateful.

So my question to you is, are you doing what you really want to do?Where is your artist’s journey leading you?

Thanks to Jessica Sterling at JessicaSterling.com for these beautiful photos of my farewell celebration

What Happens When You Share Expertise in LinkedIn Articles?

by | Jun 17, 2018 | Learning, Social Media

There’s only one you in the world. No one else has traveled your exact professional path, experienced identical situations or learned the same lessons.

Of the more than 560 million LinkedIn users and counting, only you can tell your unique professional story.

That’s the big takeaway from analyzing 49 articles I posted to LinkedIn starting in May 2017. The top articles were largely inspired by my personal experience:

If you aren’t already posting LinkedIn articles, here are some reasons to consider it. And if you’re already writing articles, this may help you up your game.

Just over a year ago, I started an experiment on LinkedIn. I posted to LinkedIn every weekday for a month. Why? To test the data point that it takes 20 LinkedIn posts each month to reach 60% of your audience.

In developing an editorial calendar, one of the easy ways to share content was to repurpose my blog posts at carolineleach.com. This solved another problem – promoting my posts. Repurposing posts as LinkedIn articles reached a broader audience among my LinkedIn network.

In analyzing the data over the past year and reflecting on my experience, here’s what I learned in the form of benefits from regular article writing. By writing an article weekly, as I did, or probably even monthly, you’re likely to:

Create a sustainable writing schedule. When I began writing articles a year ago, there was a healthy backlog of blog posts. It was simply a matter of organizing the topics in a logical flow, making minor content updates to ensure timeliness, posting the articles and sharing them with my network.

Once the backlog was done, though, a weekly article needed to be written. With a busy professional position and an active family with two teens, where was the time going to come from?

Here’s one of the ways having teens can be a blessing. They generally sleep in on the weekends. That’s why early mornings on the weekends became my writing time. And the weekly article was ready to repurpose on LinkedIn during the week when more people visit it.

Committing to a weekly article pushed me to create a sustainable writing schedule every week. If you’re a lark like me, or a night owl like my teens, you can take advantage of early mornings or late nights. Or you could turn part of your lunchtime or your public transport commute into writing times.

There’s an ideal intersection. It’s between areas when you can carve out time and when your brain is operating a high level of efficiency. Look for those times.

Grow your network. My articles that attracted the most engagement have been those where I’ve done experiments and collected and analyzed related data. That made me wonder how my network grew between May 2017 and June 2018.

LinkedIn has a handy feature where you can download all of your connections into an Excel spreadsheet. BTW, this is a good practice to do every 3 to 6 months, so you always have an up-to-date record of your contacts. You never know when you might need it!

While I thought my network had grown over the last year, it was surprising to see connections were up more than 60%! There are many reasons for this, and I believe my weekly articles are a big one. Why? Because people mention them in their connection requests.

While connections went from about 1,900 to 3,160, followers also grew from zero to 440 in the same time period. The combined group is just over 3,600. That data helped me set a stretch goal for this year of 5,000.

Establish yourself as an expert and increase your influence. By sharing your professional expertise and your unique perspective, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your area of focus.

How can you measure this? The growth in your network connections and followers gives you one indication.

You can also look at the trend of your profile views. How are they increasing over time? What’s the makeup of people looking at your profile? Is it the group you want to reach, whether it’s industry leaders, peers or recruiters?

You can also look at speaking requests. Because of my LinkedIn articles, I’ve been invited to speak to …

A highlight was joining the team of social influencers at the inaugural AT&T Business Summit in 2017. John Starkweather, Michelle Smith and I along with several others shared our experiences in LinkedIn articles. (Note: opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)

What’s next? This spring I did research on how people are using social media to boost their careers. That identified several people who are doing it well. I’ve begun interviewing people who are crushing it in social media and will start sharing profiles of them soon.

The ascendence of AI, artificial intelligence, and AR, augmented reality, are fascinating in how they are influencing social media. These are areas I look forward to researching and conducting experiments.

The best part about reflecting on that last year? Seeing a holistic view that added up to significant progress. Without pausing to reflect, the feeling of moving forward wouldn’t be as strong.

And having a sense of forward momentum is what creates “the best inner work lives,” according to authors Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. They studied and wrote about the importance of daily action toward meaningful goals in The Progress Principle.

How are you making regular progress in sharing your expertise with the world?