Work and jobs are changing, and the speed of change continues to accelerate. Whether you are in the fourth decade of your working life or looking for your first job, managing a career against this background of disruptive, often unpredictable change is a challenge for everyone. Things are also being made worse by continuing pay inequality and workplace bias.
My guests this week are Grace Puma, the former COO of Pepsico and Christiana Smith Shi, the former President of Direct to Consumer at Nike. Grace and Christiana have recently authored a book called “Career Forward – Strategies from Women Who Have Made It”. The motivation behind writing the book was to empower women to maximise their career journey, get paid what they are worth and navigate the unexpected shifts that happen in the current world of work. There is some excellent advice here that Grace and Christiana believe is applicable to everyone looking to develop their career in our turbulent times.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The Career Forward Mindset
• Having a “Cardinal Direction” instead of a North Star
• The importance of mentors and sponsors
• Steering into the skid to deal with unexpected challenges
• Building career equity
• Dealing with pay inequality
• Reinventing work-life balance
• How can employers make the workforce fair and equitable?
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt: Support for this podcast comes from Transform. Recruiting Future is excited to announce a partnership with Transform. Transform brings together people-driven leaders, investors, and innovators across industries and backgrounds with a shared passion for people innovation and transforming the world of work.
Transform 2024 promises to be the best yet. You can expect three days of powerful content, innovation showcases, probing conversations, hands-on learning experiences, over 300 speakers, and energizing after-hours networking Las Vegas style. So, come and meet me in Vegas on March 11th through the 13th. Register now and save $200 by going to mattalder.me/transform.
[Recruiting Future theme]
Matt: Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 593 of Recruiting Future. Work and jobs are changing and the speed of change continues to accelerate. Whether you’re in the fourth decade of your working life or looking for your first job, managing a career against this background of disruptive, often unpredictable change is a challenge for everyone. Things are also being made worse by continuing pay inequality and workplace bias.
My guests this week are Grace Puma, the former COO of PepsiCo, and Christiana Smith Shi, the Former President of Direct-to-Consumer at Nike. Grace and Christiana have recently authored a book called Career Forward: Strategies from Women Who’ve Made It. The motivation behind writing the book was to empower women to maximize their career journey, get paid what they’re worth, and navigate the unexpected shifts that happen in the current world of work. There is some excellent advice here that Grace and Christiana feel is applicable to everyone looking to develop their career in these turbulent times.
Hi Grace, hi Christiana and welcome to the podcast. It’s an absolute pleasure to have both of you on the show. Please could you introduce yourselves and tell us what you do?
Grace: I’m Grace Puma. I’m the former Chief Operating Officer for PepsiCo and I’m currently an author and a corporate board member.
Christiana: I’m Christiana Smith Shi. And like Grace, I am an author and a Corporate Director currently. Before that, I was the President of Direct-to-Consumer at Nike. And before that I was a longtime senior partner at McKinsey & Company.
Matt: Brilliant stuff. So, you’ve both written a book together called Career Forward. And I want to start off by asking what the book’s about, why you wrote it, but also why you wrote it together and how you met each other?
Christiana: Sure, Grace and I started together the same day on the same board, gosh, seven years ago at least, maybe longer. And first of all, you don’t see that many women on boards yet. Women are still only 30% of the larger public company boards. So of course, we noticed each other. And then, second of all, as we got to see each other in action, I really respected her competence and her style and the depth of knowledge that she had, so that led us to start to become friends and eventually to go get drinks together at Fisherman’s Wharf. And I think it’s like in the movies, from there a beautiful friendship was formed.
Grace: So, one of the things that we were able to come together on is thinking about some of the commonality of experiences we shared. So, we both had adult children, if you would, it’s hard to call them children, they were in their careers, mid-stage careers. And we found ourselves sharing the fact that we really wanted to be able to transfer our learnings from our career so that the benefit of them as they take their own journeys. So, that kind of birthed the fact of, why don’t we write a book? And then it really, we thought, “Well, gee, if this could help our own adult children, it can certainly help many others.” So, it’s kind of that proverbial way to pay it back, so that’s how we ended up writing this book.
Matt: And tell us a little bit more about what the book is about.
Christiana: We call the book Career Forward intentionally, because one of the main themes for us is play the long game in your career. Don’t just look at a series of jobs as a career plan, but actually think about your career the same way you would if you were writing a strategy or a business plan. What we try to do is share a mindset that we call the career forward mindset, which basically puts you in the driver’s seat of your career. And we aim it at women who are early and mid-career. But as it turns out, when we shared the advice with our publisher and editors, etc., it resonated with a lot of men as well, so it’s commonsense advice, we tried to write it in a very practical, frank kind of tone, as if we knew you and we’re your mentor for how you can stay in charge of the choices you’re making over the long haul so that you actually end up somewhere, we call it the cardinal direction. You end up somewhere in your career that you actually wanted to be.
Grace: The other aspect of it is it really gives you an opportunity to– It’s a practical framework, so it gives you the opportunity to understand some techniques and strategies to navigate the twists and turns in your career, because anybody through a long-term career is going to come through a lot of change, so that’s another aspect of the book.
Christiana: We were lucky enough, Matt, to have mentors and sponsors along the way. And it was part luck and part what we share in the book about how you can attract that kind of mentorship and sponsorship through choices you make. But we had those, and we’re well aware that a lot of people don’t. And so, we want this book to be as if we actually had the ability to mentor individuals, which is not a scalable proposition. You’re never going to be able to help all the folks that reach out to you on LinkedIn or after you do a speech or the kind of things that were happening with Grace and I. So, we thought we’ll put it in the book and we’ll write it as if were sitting with you over a cup of coffee after an important meeting and giving you feedback.
Matt: So let’s dig into some of those concepts in a bit more detail. So, I suppose the best place to start is with this idea of cardinal direction. Tell us a bit more about it and how people should be thinking about that.
Christiana: We chose the name cardinal direction after thinking about a couple of other options, including true north. And one of the reasons we picked cardinal direction is because it can evolve and change over time, whereas the notion of true north is it’s a fixed star in the sky and it doesn’t move, right? So cardinal direction is basically a process of thinking through and leveraging what you’ve learned so far in your work career, what environments, what kind of work, what kind of passions, what kind of purpose really motivate you and matter to you, and writing them down and going through a process of saying, “What does that say about what I want to do in my career?”
Grace: It also provides you, it’s kind of rooted in introspection, okay being able to really take inventory of your experiences, your capabilities, as Christiana said, your passions, your purpose, your environments that you work best and be introspective about how do you then use that information and that knowledge to stay focused on an end goal, so that’s what we encourage in the book that becomes your cardinal direction.
Christiana: And we get asked, how do you set your cardinal direction, right? Because neither Grace nor I were born wanting to be COOs or presidents, right? So clearly, setting your cardinal direction is not something that one has to wait for a lightning strike to hit you or be born with, right? And what we say is, first of all, if you’re starting out early in your career, you start to figure out your cardinal direction by getting a job. And now this is the practical part of it, get a job, get a couple of jobs, but be thoughtful and be observant and be mindful as you’re working about what’s giving you energy, who do you like working with? What are you getting known for? What do you see your colleagues coming to you to do? Are you the one that’s always looking around the corner? Are you the one they come to because you come up with an idea other people haven’t? Are you the one who delivers the toughest messages or who can do analytics that others really can’t? Take note of that, and we’ve got exercises in the book where you can ask yourself these questions.
And over time, as your work experience accumulates, you will have a pretty good sense of how to answer some of the questions that we have in the book. But we still encourage you every year to do kind of a gut check on where did I think I wanted to be, how am I tracking toward that and what might have changed, because your family situation affects your cardinal direction, your health affects your cardinal direction, the economy, the options that you have, your educational choices, all of these things inform it and so that’s why we say it can be evolutionary over the course of your career.
Matt: And I think that kind of leads on nicely to the next thing that I was going to ask. And I think you’ve alluded to this already, that we do live in very disruptive times. Things are often way out of people’s control. And I think in the book you call this sort of steering into the skid. And I know that lots of people listening may well have had their career pushed off track in the last 12 months or so, through layoff or changes in their company. What would your advice be to people in that kind of position in their career? Or how can people deal with all of these unexpected things that continue to be thrown at us?
Grace: Yeah, it’s interesting because steering to the skid is, I think it resonates with everybody, no matter what your career path is or the environment that you’re working in. The key though, is it’s about self-awareness and it’s about resiliency and how you take action in those situations. So, it can be everything from an economic downturn where you’re facing layoffs in your company, to management or leadership changes to big cultural changes, it could be a lot of different things. But the point is, how do you make sure that you’re monitoring when those conditions are shifting? And then how do you take actions? And we talk in the book a little bit about, like you asked, what can you do? One of the things you can do is really self-assess the situation pragmatically and unemotionally. What’s actually happening? Why is it happening? And then decide to take a position for yourself where you hold your power.
And holding your power means get rooted in your capability and your ability to contribute. Figure out ways to increase your equity in your current environment and make sure that you’re performing. Because performance is the key to be able to have options. Even if things go and change in your current environment, you’re going to know you’re going to be marketable and you’re going to land on your feet. So, the key is about staying focused and pragmatic, but also moving towards action.
Matt: Absolutely. You mentioned equity there and career equity and equity players that are things you talk about a lot in the book. Talk us through those in a bit more detail.
Christiana: Yeah, so we wanted to bring that concept to your own reflection and your own sense of self, that concept of equity, which equity has two meanings, right? One is a stock or what something’s worth. The other is fairness or equality, right? And we actually talk about both. But just starting specifically on this idea of professional equity, it’s the idea of thinking of yourself as a growth stock. And growth stocks are the kind of stocks everybody wants to invest in because they offer such great growth, they offer exciting future potentials and they usually give you a pretty good return on your investment, right? And we say to people, think of yourself as a growth stock. What is it that you can do to grow and accelerate your career faster? Because, by the way, as you do that, others notice it. And your professional equity, meaning your value in both your current job, but also more broadly in your sector or your field, will begin to increase, and people notice that, and they invest in you.
The same way that we invest in stocks, they invest their time, they create opportunity for you, they mentor you, whatever it is. And you build your professional equity, no surprise, by delivering performance just like a company has to. You’ve got to deliver results year on year. So, the first part of building professional equity is be good at what you’re doing. Before you think about anything, you’ve got to earn that by delivering impact in your current role. But if you do that and you start to build that reputation in your company, in your field, in your office, wherever, as a strong performer, you’ll see that you start to create that flywheel that increases your professional equity. And we know many times in the book how you can then choose to use that equity/invest in yourself to get the opportunities or the flexibility or the next job that you need or you want.
Grace: Professional equity is built in performance, for sure, as a table stake, but it’s also built in continually learning and growing and reading the tea leaves of where the next level of capability is and cultivating those ahead of time so that you’re the actual person that they know is going to be there for the long term, is going to be able to contribute at a higher level.
And it’s often can be beyond your day job. It can be things where you’re stepping up for experiences or to lead something outside of your core responsibilities, and you do it well. Again, my grandfather used to say, “The more you know, the more you’re worth.” There’s some basic truth in that in terms of the higher your equity is, the more you’re going to be able to be given opportunities and the more flexibility you’re going to get in that environment.
Matt: Talking about opportunities, and you mentioned fairness there and equality. Obviously, one of the biggest issues that we still have in many workplaces is pay inequality towards women doing the same job as men and not being paid what they’re worth. What would your advice be in terms of helping people deal with that kind of situation, whether it’s a job that they’re currently in or it’s a position that they’re moving to?
Grace: So, one of the things I think you’d start out with, which is interesting, is think about the way anyone feels. Compensation and studies show this, compensation directly correlates to how you feel about your job and how you value the company or the business that you’re working in. It’s super important to be competitively paid. There are statistics in our books, I think it’s from half a million dollars can be lost if you don’t get competitively paid early in your career. You just never catch up over the long-term career path. And so, it’s really important not to fall behind and to really make sure you’re competitively paid.
And Christiana can walk you through some of the key strategies that we’ve come up with in the book that we think are really appropriate and proven to be thoughtful about as you progress your career from the beginning.
Christiana: I would say the strategies that Grace is referring to in a lot of ways mirror exactly what employers do when they’re setting comp levels, particularly for their senior executives, but for any level in their organization, we’re saying think about doing the same thing for yourself.
So, what do they do? They benchmark. They look at a given role and say, what do we see in the marketplace for our peer companies or for our sector, what do we see this particular role earning in terms of total direct compensation, right? to use the catchphrase. What we are saying is, as an individual, you can do that now. That information is available to you more today than ever before, because you can go online, whether it’s Glassdoor or it’s another site or it’s talking to your colleagues or doing peer group or Reddit.com, for God’s sake. You can find out what the going rate is for something roughly similar to yours. And we encourage people to at least look, put the periscope up and look around and know that at least once a year.
The second thing we say is stay on top of what your roles and responsibilities are, because they do evolve. So, when you first get a job, you’ve got a job description, etc. But over time, you may raise your hand as Grace said, and pick up additional opportunities or responsibility or workload, or your boss may come to you and say, “Hey, we’re consolidating. Can you also take on this part of it or this team or whatever?” Note that down. Periodically when you’re doing your performance review with your manager or leader, talk about how your responsibilities have expanded. And at some point, you may come back and say, “I think that this actually requires a review where my compensation is at, because I’ve looked and I’m now carrying double the staff that I had, or I’ve now got an additional function I’m responsible for or whatever it is.”
And it’s striking to us that women don’t do that often enough. And we’re suggesting that you make it at least annual discipline, not to ask per se, but to know where you are and to determine whether conditions have changed enough that an ask makes sense.
Grace: And so I think this is kind of rooted in confidence with facts okay, and nonemotions in these conversations. But it’s super important because, especially if you’re going to be a high performer, you’re going to find that a lot of times you’re asked with high capacities to do more and more and more, maybe more than your peers. And that’s actually good because it gives you learning and capability building and more experience and higher equity. However, with that, the background drop is to keep a pulse on the things that we’ve talked about, making sure that your compensation tracks with that work.
Christiana: Well and Matt, I’ll give you one real-life example, just to bring this to life for everybody. My niece and I were talking just the other day. She works in technology. She’s a senior manager, mid-career. Her company, like a lot of tech companies, just announced a restructuring. It’s very, very of the moment right now that technology companies are doing this and along with the restructuring, a layoff. And her boss told her that she will be picking up another group, that another group will be combined with hers and her team will now include both. I said, “Okay, you obviously got to read the room. At the moment the layoffs are happening it is not a good time to talk to somebody about how you want an increase, but make a note of how specifically your scope is changing and expanding as a result of this. And in 6 or 12 months when you’re sitting down and going through your performance review and talking about your comp, bring in some numbers to talk about where that scope is currently in the marketplace and how that compares to your comp and decide if you think that merits an increase.” And she had not thought of that.
Matt: One of the things that we’ve seen since the pandemic is people thinking very differently about work and how it fits into their life. We used to talk about work-life balance, but that’s very much kind of out of the window at the moment as people sort of move their thinking on. In the book, you talk about a 360-degree life model, talk us through that and how it kind of relates to the way that people now think about their jobs.
Grace: It’s interesting because we’ve been hearing about the work-life concept for decades, and honestly, we both feel that it really hasn’t manifested to a solution for people, it’s actually a stale concept. And so, the concept we’ve come up with is 360-degree life. And at the heart of it is you don’t pit the different facets of your life against each other. Instead, you’re looking at full integration of your life, and you look for ways to be successful and fulfilled in your career and in your personal life. So, you’re embracing opportunities of owning a challenging life and a full life in a very positive way and that satisfaction is very intentional in the decisions you make.
Christiana: I think we also recognize that like anything that we’ve talked about in Career Forward, conditions change. And so, if you take this notion of 360-life and you think about, as Grace was saying, kind of across the wheel of circle of life that is me, and all of the things that I do or focus on or care about, different things are going to spin up to the top of that wheel at different times in your life. And we want you to feel like you can influence, if not really drive, what your work evolves to be and how your work and life kind of combine to suit that need. And we give examples in the book for both of us about how we made choices at different times or made asks of our employers at different times to manage what was kind of at the top of that wheel for us at that point in time.
So, my example is working in management consulting, which is a 07:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M. kind of job where you’re usually traveling four days a week. And I had a kid and I tried for nine months to do the job the way I was doing it before I had a kid, and it wasn’t working. And I felt like I was coming up short everywhere. So, I thought, I’m going to have to quit because the career looks like that, my needs look like this, they don’t match. And my office manager at the time said to me, “Don’t leave until you figure out what it’ll take to make you stay.” Which put me on the back foot because I hadn’t thought about what it would take to make me stay. I just thought this isn’t working and I got to go. That’s the mindset that I’ve really tried to adopt ever since that we’re trying to communicate in this book and that’s 360-life, which is then I stepped back and I thought about, what do I need to make me stay? I came back and I said, “I need to actually have at least an additional day at home, I need to be part time,” which back then, even now, is a very unusual long-term concept.
And I ended up working on a four-day-a-week schedule for almost 10 years and getting elected partner and getting elected senior partner. That’s the kind of thing that we’re talking about. And it sounds bold and it sounds scary. And honestly, at the time, I didn’t think about it that way at all. I just took his words to heart and said, “This is what I need to make me stay.”
Grace: And I also think sometimes it’s around the choices. One of the things we talk about in the book is being empowered and being in control of your life and the choices you make. So, when you think of 360-degree life, one of the examples I had in my career was my daughter was in high school and I was at the point and ready to get these big chief procurement officer jobs, but most of them required or all of them required relocation from where I was living. And uprooting her in the middle of high school was just not an option, she would have had a hard time. So, I intentionally did not look and take those opportunities or pursue them. I ended up looking in the market locally, and I was given this great opportunity in the Chicago area where I lived, and I took that job and I knew I’d do it for another three years, which is what I did and got it done and had great experiences and great successes that led me to the next big job. But it also was a 360-degree choice. I didn’t put my career on hold. I made strategic decisions to be successful at home and to be successful in my career. And so, it’s often not a trade-off discussion, it can be a solution discussion that you’re making consciously and intentionally, and therefore you’re satisfied because you are accommodating a full life.
Matt: As a final question, there are lots of people listening who want to help make the workplace more fair and equitable. And because of the kind of the roles that they have, they can play a big part in doing that. How can people listening be allies and advocates to really help with some of the things that we’ve been talking about?
Christiana: I think it’s really important for folks in the field where they can help to really take some of these principles we’ve been talking about to heart. So, for instance, take a look at your development processes, particularly for women or others, right? And people of color, anyone who isn’t kind of the majority, but look at the processes and ask, do they ask people to reflect on the kind of questions that we’ve just talked about? Do you have a career sort of discussion that isn’t just about how someone’s performance has been the last six months or the last year, but is forward looking about where they want to go in the longer term? I worked at one company where we actually, for every year, when we sat down and talked to our teams, we talked about a career map for them. It wasn’t just what’s the next job you want to have. We actually had, we called them horizons, three horizons and said, what do you want to build? Where do you want to go? What other parts of the company intrigues you, etc.? that kind of process, and also working to connect people to mentors and to sponsors internally who will create opportunity for them and spend time for them. I think those two are really, really powerful.
Grace: I would say it’s kind of like what you do with your family, right? I think it’s important to help people embrace their own empowerment to manage their career, to grow their capability, to take advantage of all the great experiences they can have in companies and the learnings they can have, but to also feel in control, especially in these corporate environments, that they’re owning their career path, they’re owning their capability and their contribution, because from that comes a lot of growth versus I’m waiting for an opportunity to hand it to me or someone’s holding my future in their hands. And that’s a mindset and we talk about this in the book, I was always very grateful for the companies that I worked for and for what I was able to achieve. But my loyalty was at the center of being able to own my career and to my family and to what I wanted to accomplish and aspire in life, and that’s healthy, so that’s one of the things that you can kind of institutionalize.
I would just say I’ve seen too many people that either stagnated because they were buying the Kool-Aid, “Oh, they love me, my performance reviews are great,” but they weren’t progressing, that means there was probably lack of really good feedback to them or honest feedback to them. So, if you’re stagnating and you’re sitting in role and you’re laughing and you’re getting good performance reviews, but you’re not going anywhere, you need to think through that. That’s another piece is that what companies can do is continue to provide candid feedback and don’t do it at the risk of not losing that capable talent, do it in terms of the spirit of being able to have everybody achieve their greatest capability.
Matt: I think that’s absolutely phenomenal advice. In fact, this whole conversation has been full of phenomenal advice. So, thank you so much. Lastly, remind us of the title of the book and where people can find it.
Christiana: The book is called Career Forward: Strategies from Women Who’ve Made It. It’s available at any bookseller in both hard copy, audio, eBook, you name it, you should be able to find it. And for more information about the book, about Grace and myself, where we’re going to be speaking, etc., you can go to careerforwardbook.com.
Matt: Christiana, Grace, thank you so much for joining me.
Christiana: Pleasure, Matt.
Grace: Thank you, Matt.
Matt: My thanks to Grace and Christiana. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show.
Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
