Sustaining employee growth

Sustaining employee growth with Lisa Dallenbach

How leaders help their people grow

I'm excited that you're joining me for an interview with Lisa Dallenbach. Lisa is the Chief People Officer at Silverline CRM, a Salesforce Platinum partner headquartered in New York City where she leads the employee experience and corporate culture for the organization. In prior companies, Mindshare and Digitas, she spearheaded movements to improve engagement metrics, reduce attrition, as well as launch and scale tools to evaluate, develop and celebrate employees at every phase of their professional journey. Lisa, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Andy. I'm happy to be here.

I'm happy to have you on. We've connected a while back and chatted here and there. I know you've done a lot of cool things in the areas of employee experience, employee wellness, and engagement. These are things that my readers are always interested in learning. What can we do to improve these things? I thought it'd be cool to get you on to share some of that.

That's terrific and I love that phrase that you use there, “How do we celebrate our employees' journeys and their success.” No matter where I am, I look at my employees as my clients and my job is to figure out how to set them up for success and what that looks like for each of them individually in their whole journey with us and wherever that is in their career. It's a fun “task” to have as there’s a lot of fulfillment.

I like that perspective. We run a program called Multipliers based on the book by Liz Wiseman and I often ask people to think about what their diminisher managers have done or managers they've worked for that diminish them. One of the most common things that comes up time and time again is, they only focused on their mistakes and never celebrated the wins or the great things that happened. That's something that is missing in a lot of places and the best managers and leaders take time to celebrate wins and successes, which is crazily enough has not done that much.

I don't know where that all got hammered into our heads at some point but I would take that one step further. I'm a big fan of having to know the development areas are the places where you're not as strong, so all of us know where you’re strong at and where you're not as strong at. In that whole notion, so many of the review discussions and development discussions in the past were focused on, “Here's where you're good to your point. Let's not talk too much about that and let's focus on these areas where you need to improve.”

I would and encourage leaders to flip that around to say, “Here's the place that maybe you're not so strong so don't let that kill you. Don't let it be something that gets in your way but I don't want to focus on that. Let's say that it is what it is, but how can we go over here back to the left to these areas that you're strong and passionate about and also blossom? How can we help you grow and grow there?” To me, that's where the richness is. Don't let those other opportunity areas diminish what you’re able to do but somewhere, I don't know when back in the day, where the focus was always, “Get those development areas.” I question that.

A lot of managers think it's their job to help people improve on their weaknesses and their development areas but they don't spend enough time focused on understanding, “What are your strengths? What are the areas you can double down?” As I've learned in my own career over time, I'm happier, more fulfilled and more successful when I double down on utilizing my strengths versus spending all my time trying to “fix” my weaknesses.

It’s more inspiring too. For most people, whatever you have that is a development area or “weakness,” you've heard it before. It is who we are. It's not like, “This again? How good am I going to get in this area if it's not a strength of mine?” It’s interesting so I do encourage leaders. You can't let those pieces get in somebody away. How can you help them but focus on those areas of strength for people?

Let's back up a step and talk about who you are and what you do and we can get into some of that stuff based on employee experience. Tell me a little bit about who you are and how you got to where you are now.

[bctt tweet="There is so much growth to be gained, even in the smallest steps." via="no"]

My “title” is the Chief People Officer at Silverline, which is a technology company. I look at that role as my and my team’s job to understand the entire employee journey and how to set our employees up for success with us. In my career, I started on the client-side. When I was at Digitas, which is a creative advertising agency. I was there for fifteen years and I spent the first 7 or 8 years there on the client business. I was working on American Express and Barnes & Noble. I mentioned that because it much forms my thinking and philosophy as it relates to our employees.

I do look at them as our clients and as any customer on a brand journey. I want them from the beginning of that journey, which is potentially the first time a recruiter reaches out to them. It’s the first time they may engage with our brand and I do think of it as our brand and our employee experience. Anytime we have the recruiting coordinator spot open, I interview every single one of them because that's probably the first time someone experiences our brand. I want those candidates to understand how important that is. Any candidate we're talking to starts to engage our brand then and there.

They go along that whole experience with recruiting. Some come with us and some don't and those that come with us then transition into onboarding and getting into their role. That's where that becomes beautiful and the journey, we hope or we do a lot of work. Hopefully, once they come with us, they're in a role and they get good at that role, they keep circling around. We keep adding experiences for them so the circle of growth they have and providing new roles and new experiences, whatever they're doing, we continue to support that for many cycles.

What my team does is understanding what the employees need across the whole lifecycle of their time with us and supporting them and enabling them to set them up for success at all points along the way there. Across here, we take a look at all of our goals and the work that we want to accomplish for the year. I have a journey on a map and we map it out against that journey to make sure that we're evenly balanced. Are there gaps that we're not paying attention to at certain points in the journey? A couple of years ago, when I got here, we didn’t think there was enough attention and support being given to onboarding which is so critical, so we revised that whole portion. That’s essentially how we look at it and it's inspiring because we use things such as the employee surveys and feedback that they give us to help us understand what they need. That helps us on that journey that they're on with us, know where to focus for them.

That makes sense. How big is Silverline?

Silver is about 300 people and that includes about 30 or so in our India office.

Creating A Great Employee Experience

What you're talking about reminds me of this whole idea of creating a great employee experience that some people are talking about. It's not only about what it’s like for you once you're in the groove as an employee. It starts before and throughout the interview process. What does that onboarding process look like? Do you walk in, somebody hands you a laptop, and you have no idea what to do or is there a full-on emergent onboarding process where people feel like they're welcomed and they're part of something. Can you talk about what that looks like and what do you think is important for a great employee experience?

That's interesting and it’s funny that you asked that question because when we looked at the onboarding experience, there are two pieces from my perspective. There's that literal day one and there's that onboarding that happens over the next 6 or 7 weeks that an employee is new. I stopped and asked our team, “What is our goal for that day 1 and 2?” Is it to learn anything or is our goal to make sure people walk away from that feeling, “Yes, this is the decision I made?” “Yes. I feel like I belong here.” “I met great colleagues. These people are terrific. I'm going to work well here.” “I have a nice network now to call and connect with.” Our goal is about connection and we can make that connection in many different ways. It can be across our diversity platforms or our philanthropic initiatives. It can be across that group that is the starting class type of thing and how do we network them? I said, “That's our goal. It’s for them to walk away and be like, “I’m so psyched that I'm here and I'm ready to go.”

As we revamped the whole onboarding, to reflect those first two days, and it has been so successful that we are probably going to close down our newbie Slack channel. That was there if people didn't know where to connect, didn't know what to do, and felt like they were lost. Our organization is 80% remote. We're probably going to shut that down. People don't use it anymore because this program has been so successful. There's a second piece which we still have some work to do, which is, now that you're in your department and doing the work. How are we making sure we're ticking and tacking in every place to understand? Did we explain the processes right? Did we explain the client’s right? Do you understand the team dynamic? It’s those things that go into making sure people feel at home and set up for success to do their job as quickly as possible, which is different. That's a tactical type of onboarding, which is important, but no one needs that the first two days. We bifurcated them out and made the first two about connecting and having a great experience with each other.

A lot of what they'll remember at the end of the day or a year is how they felt in those first couple days and if they embraced as they came into the organization.

Employee Growth: Look at your employees as clients, and your job is to figure out how to set them up for success and what that looks like for each of them.

We hear that back from them, which has been nice. You go on-premise that you think that’s what it should be, but we've heard that back from a lot of them so we're happy with it.

Transitioning To Remote Work

You mentioned that a lot of your workforce is already working remotely. Your company is also headquartered in New York City, which is ground zero in the United States for the COVID-19 pandemic. I see you working from your home in New Jersey. What has the response been like? How have you handled transitioning the workforce to even more remote work during this pandemic?

We were lucky. I've been on a number of calls with peers that had significant obstacles to get through to pivot to a remote workforce around technology and systems. We didn't have any of that. I do believe that in any great challenge, there is goodness that comes out of it. The interesting thing is, it has driven more connectivity with our organization since everybody has been 100% remotely. One of the things we did that we set up away, which was about the urgency of having one place to get communication with people. We set a COVID-19 Slack channel so we’re working remotely.

The COVID-19 Slack channel is specifically about having information. Everybody garnered around that channel and it became a place where they were all taking care of each other. When they would hear a resource and something going on, they would have different ideas and stuff. The connectivity in that has been amazing. We make sure that every single week we've got three specific communication streams. We have three specific communication streams that we put out every week. One is around, making sure people know benefits, any benefits changes, reminding them of EAP, and the virtual benefits that we have.

We have a second stream that is around good resources. Don't forget to take care of yourself. Here's some for physical health, for mental health for parents working on with kids, for people trying to deal with the isolation. We also then do executive office hours, which is once a week live with our CEO on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we try to have something fun. We did an online scavenger hunt. That was a blast. We put a clue out every half an hour every hour throughout the day. People post whoever found it first and they won prizes. We've done a lot of things to make sure we're taking care of each other and stay connected through that channel. I can't say that I knew it was going to be that successful going into it. I did it as a quick, “I’ve got to have one place for everybody to get information.” That has become a beautiful benefit of it since we've all been remote.

Speaking of remote, you've got your canine coworker talking back there in the background. I've got my kids coming in and out. It's the new normal we all live in, which is totally fine. I love that you seem to up the ante on communication both from the CEO and across the organization for people to be able to talk to each other. As I've been studying this and talking to people, it seems like the real critical keys to making the transition successful are building trust and empathy, understanding what people are going through, and increasing communication so people don't feel left out, lonely, or disconnected.

It seems so basic. Even the update of, “We have nothing to update you on this week,” so people don't wonder is important. Believe it or not, we had some employees who say, “I wish every employee had someone reach out to them.” My first reaction was, “We are reaching out to a lot of people.” We're asking our leaders to get people on our radar screen that either is struggling one way or another so we can support them. I thought to myself, “We can do this. We're not a huge company.” It's one of the reasons I like working in a smaller company. There are ten people on the executive team, I can take our entire employee organization, randomly assign fifteen employees to every one of us executives and we're all going to reach out to them over the next ten days. Every single person has someone reaching out to them.

Those little things go so far and even to your point, that empathy, even though they know there's not a whole lot we can do now, but the fact that you show you care as an organization. Even with something little like a phone call, such as the example I gave or the broader strategy we have around making sure we are in touch, communicating, and listening. We sent out a survey because we have all these communication plans in place but I thought, “They're okay, maybe we should check-in.” We sent out a quick survey that says, “Do you feel supported? Do you feel you can manage the workload? Do you know what to focus on?” We've heard so much of that from employees that there's so much noise in the news and the headlines. Even with that, I had a lot of people get feedback in the comment section to say, “Just the fact that you asked and took the survey sends a huge message.” They know there's a lot we can't control.

Creating A Great Culture

The fact that you're reaching out, they're hearing from executives and you, they know that you care about them. It’s not like, “Get to work. Figure it out.” You’re communicating, asking questions, and showing empathy. It's fantastic and it's related to another question I wanted to ask you. We talked about employee experience and your reaction to this. I know you have done some workaround, and I'm passionate about this idea of creating a great culture. It sounds like you've had a great culture there at Silverline. What's your philosophy on how to create a great culture? Does that change or shift when most of your workforce is remote?

We have core values at Silverline, which we try to live and showcase as often as we can, not every day, but we try to live by them and call them out. You'll see them live and active in our culture. Those, to me, are core and my belief is, every organization needs to evolve and change. We're all being forced to change whether we like it or not. Every headline says, “I doubt we'll be back to exactly the same ever again.” Your core values of who you stand for and what you want to be, stay with you no matter how you evolve and change. That to me is important.

[bctt tweet="Enable your employees to discover how they want to define the culture." via="no"]

As we have grown and changed, people say, “What about our core values?” I absolutely believe that your core values always are there. You grow and evolve around them and you don't want to be somewhere that's not evolving now. That's not good for anybody's career or any organization. You always want to be evolving. That is still changing. The other thing that goes along in tandem with that is many of the programs and things that we have in place here, I believe, need to be driven by the employees. It's their culture and it should reflect what they believe in, what they love, what they feel strongly about, and what they want to drive. I certainly don't ever want it to be a place where the people team is like, “Here are your programs and ideas. This is who we're about.” Even down to our diversity program, which we call DIBS which stands for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

Any activity that we have or goals for the year and the same with our Cares Program, which is our philanthropic efforts. I have a nice group of employees that come in and they say, “Here's what we want to focus on, and here's what we want to do.” It reflects the employees. I'm here to help enable them so it's about going back to that whole experience for employees, whether it's about their career and their growth. How does my team enable them? It's the same thing for the culture. What they want that culture to be and how they want to define it, I want to hear it from them and let my team help enable that for you and make that happen. That's important.

I even take that even one step further because we are largely remote even in regular times. We call them hubs so anywhere where I've got more than six people in an area. If I've got ten in Colorado, fifteen in Chicago, and fifteen down in Florida. I let them decide in their hubs, what they want to do, what they want to be about, and what the activities are. I work with them to set up what they want to do and give them budgets. Our Florida group even wants as logo to go with theirs is different than say what the Colorado group wants to do. It’s important that you define that and who you are. Those are my perspectives on culture.

Development Opportunities For Employees

It's a lot of empowerment and ownership by the employees and listening. You mentioned investing and programs being owned by employees or them taking ownership or driving. What development opportunities are you providing to your employees at Silverline?

The number that we provide that is on the line, so to speak, say some programs where we're developing their technical skills. In fact, there are a couple that passed the CTA exams here in New York, which is an unheard level of excellence in the salesforce development world. I would say the program that I'm the proudest of is, we have two leadership programs in place now. We have this incredible group of strong leaders and by a leader, we mean anyone who's leading people. It can be one person or entire teams who are strong given that they haven't ever had any training. Like in many organizations, they’ve got employees who've grown up here and they put in roles all of a sudden managing people and they've never been given the skills to do that. We have our first program, which is called Leap, which uses both some cognitive behavior and skills assessment, tools, and diagnostics to help them understand.

We use a predictive index at Silverline to understand themselves, their team dynamics, and how to manage better that way. As well as then a whole suite of fundamentals, which is around giving and receiving feedback and having difficult conversations. All of it is embodied in the mindset of being coaches. I've talked to so many of our leaders to help them understand that every employee will go off stray yourself and myself included. That's the job of a leader. It’s to help them see more of this, less of that and get them back on that path. I do love the analogy from the book Good to Great, “The job is to make sure they're nice rivers, sometimes they go and the rivers might overflow a little bit, but you get them back not to let them become a big puddle.”

Help them in that coach's mindset of how to continually coach which also then backs into the whole notion of our performance management philosophy, which is ongoing conversations, coaching, and feedback at all times. They go through this leadership program and in the end, we use a terrific partner, SAGE that comes in and gives them each individual coaching session. They can take from this whole leadership program, whatever is individually important to them. This goes back to their individual experience. Some of them might struggle with giving and receiving feedback and delegating. They can pull all the content and learn but then, in the end, they have time with a coach to go deeply into the areas that they choose to. It's a dynamic program that I'm excited about. We're midway through it now.

There's another program that is also for up and coming leaders and this one is one in which they do get some competency training around leadership but they are each asked to identify something that they see as an improvement area. One of our core values is always better together. What they're asked to do is find something or something that they think the organization and we could be better at. It could be a process, philosophy, a way of driving team dynamics, whatever it is, and they're given a mentor to match to put together a framework and a solution around that. The capstone to that session is they present those ideas to the executive team. Those are the two that I'm proud of. Both of them drive a lot of engagement with the organization, but they're deeply rooted in the individual development for these leaders, which, of course, helps them at Silverline, but wherever they go in their career and wherever their growth takes them.

You get a lot of the fundamentals of leadership, you've also got some innovation built-in there, where they're working on new projects and presenting to the executive team, which I always love seeing. I'm curious, have you built a lot of this in-house? Do you work with partners? I know you mentioned SAGE.

It's a little bit of both. I would say the program where they’re looking at solutions and problems, and that kind of thing, that’s called Double Jump, that we pretty much do internally. In the other one Leap, we use a predictive index. We use SAGE for some of the content and coaching. We use the Paradox of Leadership and Fierce as well so we bring in a variety. I also teach a couple of sessions. I opened up every single session with one of our leaders sharing this framework, which is two questions each time. One is, what was your first job? What did you learn whether you expected it or not? Which is always fun.

Employee Growth: It's not inspiring for a leader to tell their team about where they're going. Instead, explain why you're going there.

You wouldn't believe what people's first jobs are. I love to share mine. Mine was dusting rocks and cutting and filing but I learned so much at that job. It's that and what is your best lesson learned whether that's something you learned yourself as a leader or as a mentor? We open every single session with somebody sharing that. It’s a nice framework. It's the group I engage with the most. They are where the rubber hits the road in terms of leading our clients and people and growing our people and themselves, and making sure that they are growing to become our stronger and stronger next generation of leaders. I'm engaged with this group.

I like that question about starting off with first jobs. It's one of those things that humanize executives. You're a person that started off doing some weird job too like dusting rocks or whatever.

They’ll see that everybody starts somewhere. This one fellow talked about his summer lifeguarding, “It’s the easiest job I ever had. I sat there and watched people swim, hung out with friends but my biggest takeaway from it was, it was fun. I realized that a job has to have fun in it no matter what you're doing.” You can always have some nice insight no matter what it is.

More About Lisa Dallenbach

My first paid job was one that my mom got for me. I was working on a county highway maintenance crew down here in Orlando, Florida during the summer. That job was not fun and I learned quickly that manual labor out in the heat was not something that I aspired to do. I definitely needed to go to college, get my degree, and get a job where I could work in air conditioning. As soon after that, I lasted for one summer. I ended up going to work in pharmacies after that. I got the degree and moved on. It’s interesting the things that we've done. Speaking of jobs and careers, I was curious, Lisa, thinking back across your career so far, what's been your proudest moment or thing that you're most proud of in your career so far?

My proudest moment is in a place I have so much passion around and it’s around employee development. It was when I was at Digitas and this is what I happen to be still working on the client business. I was on American Express at the time. To give some perspective, Boston was the home office so they were about 400 people. New York was small. We were only 100 maybe but they wanted to scale that specifically to American Express and a few other clients in New York.

They asked me to come off the business and help them scale the New York office and build out the learning and development function for employees. To be honest, I was naive and young and I said, “No. I love the client business and helping clients. I don't want to do that.” I had a great mentor who came down and she gave me the knock on my door. She said, “When they identify you as somebody who could help them build out the office, might you say yes.” I said, “Fine. I'll do that for a year,” but I want to go back to client work.

That was an incredibly important step because that's where I realized that you're building a brand, whether it's for a client and their brand, or internally for the organization, it's the same thing and process. That's where my thinking comes from and how much I believe. I'm building the brand of Silverline and helping build what that brand experience is like for our employees, which I already mentioned. That work I did to build out the learning and development function in New York was such a big milestone for me because it was then taken and scaled nationally to our North America offices. I had taken L&D at that point, which was basically PowerPoint, Excel, and Word. It was nothing.

I made it a matrix function. I divided it out to be soft skills, craft skills, what that looked like if you were junior level, senior level, and looked across departments. We made it interactive. We built a website and we launched it like a brand campaign. We had promotional elements, materials, contests and fun things to do if you went to the website and promotional little desktop drop things. We did it all around the theme of Feed Your Mind. We had menus that listed all the curriculums for the different departments and levels. It was the first time and it was so exciting for me. It was something I was so proud of because I was head in living that whole idea of, I'm building their experience as I would to customer on any other product that they're out there buying. I want them to be excited about it. I'm thinking about how I can get this group of people to be excited and engage and partake in this experience that I'm building for them. They did and it was successful. They scaled it across North America.

It was a lot of fun and we became well-known for our development program. It was a key differentiator in recruiting for us. It happened that I was in the place at the time when they needed something done, and they had the money to spend on it. They let me go 150% at it and do it. It's an example I use. Sometimes people will talk about career paths and I mentor a lot of employees to say, “Sometimes, yes, we have a plan but sometimes it's an opportunity that comes your way that makes no rhyme or reason.” If you think about where I was serving American Express and working on partnership and rewards offers with them, it makes no sense for me to take a left turn and do this. Go for it. Don't take unnecessary and crazy risks but what did I have to lose? It wasn’t “my career path.” Look where it got me. It was an important time for all those reasons.

That's cool and awesome that you got that opportunity. You took advantage of it. You went all-in on it. What do you have to lose? Take a shot and you’ve got to welcome those opportunities when they come and not cast them aside if they're not technically on your career path.

[bctt tweet="The job of a leader is to get their people back on the path." via="no"]

A shout out to my mentor, Judy Jackson, who heads the employee experience in WPP now. She was the one who came down and said, “Hello,” and encouraged me. Don't be so head down in what you're doing. Put your head up a little.

We need those mentors. I’ve got to ask you about the other side, Lisa. What's been your biggest mistake or failure so far in your career and what did you learn from it?

I almost went there because the flip side of that is, I often get so passionate about what I'm doing that I put my head down and I go. Where that's become a lesson for me is in managing teams. It's not inspiring for a team to have a leader say, “This is what we're doing. This is where we're going. Just go.” They want to know why we're going. They want to partake in that development of it. The truth of the matter is, often they have better and different ideas, and we get to where the goal is, it looks different than what I thought. That's absolutely okay.

Earlier in my career, leading teams and leading people was something that was a big learning for me. You can't be excited about something and think everybody else is going to be excited about it with you. You have to engage them in the way, involve them and let them build it with you. That becomes their excitement and their experience as well. It helped me to become focused as a leader on the goal. How do we get there? It doesn't matter if it's my way or their way. Getting to the goal together as a team is what matters. I had to learn that quickly because I thought, “I'm so excited about this and my passion is such a great thing.” You had to channel it the right way.

It’s such a huge difference. People want to feel like they're part of something. They want to know why they're working on something. They want to be connected to purpose. When you tell them to do things, it's not their project. They're not empowered and don't feel ownership over the results like they would if they're involved in that decision.

It’s Marcus Buckingham who uses this when he talks about this. He said, “Sherman didn't go into battle without explaining why they were doing and what the purpose.” That's such a good word that you use, the purpose of what we're doing. He said, “That doesn't excite anybody.”

It’s important to connect to that for yourself and for the people in your organization. Lisa, are there any trends that you're following now in talent development that you're excited about or watching closely?

Certainly, the use of data and analytics wasn't there a few years ago in people in talent management, which is terrific. For the two trends that I'm watching, everybody's watching AI. I'm still like, “I don't know how that's going,” but there's something out there. I don't know what that nugget is. Certainly, predictive analytics is something I'm excited about now. We haven't started using those yet. I’ve done my own homegrown predictor analytics and it’s not pretty. I'm glad there are other people out there that have great software and technology to help do that and understand how I can be more proactive with people. Understanding where I've got talent at risk and understanding talent and being able to make decisions on the front end versus the back end when you're reactive. Sometimes it's a little bit too late. The predictive nature of data and using that with people in an organization is one I'm looking forward to applying at some point soon.

It's interesting how that stuff is all developing and moving so quickly. Is there a book that you often recommend or have made a big difference for you in your career?

The book I still love and I know it's so old probably dates me, but it still is one of the best books I've ever read is Good to Great. It has the basics and I still remember that whole chapter about, who's got on the bus? Are they in the right seat on the bus? I read it years ago. It's one of the best books out there. I heard Adam Grant speak years ago when he was starting his career. He's so human to me, which is back to what you were saying and we were talking about. No matter what the circumstance, what environment is doing, and what's going on with your organization, an important part of leadership is that empathy and that human piece. It's something that I purposely have crafted my career on. It’s one of the reasons that I’ve been so blessed to love what I've done. It’s because I focus on the human piece and I do hope by making a difference in the employees, each and every one of them whatever they need on their experience. HR is a process. You need processes and policies but I think we've got to be out there as humans. I do love Adam Grant because he does have such a beautiful slant on all the leadership and management issues we tackle each day.

Employee Growth: The truth of the matter is that oftentimes, your team members will have different ideas or better ideas that will get you where you need to go.

There's nothing wrong with referencing an older book. You don't date yourself. If I say The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite books, it doesn't mean that I'm 100 years old.

Andy, Thank you for that. I'll take that.

You’re welcome. Lisa, last question for you, for anybody reading who's looking for ways to accelerate their success, careers, and move up the ranks to be more successful in talent development, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

This goes for any career. If you're interested in it, try it out even in the littlest of ways. You and I were saying, sometimes those first jobs or shadow people, sit in, and watch what they do all day. It's important to understand what you like and what you don't like. You might want to pursue what you don't want to pursue. Many people are looking at internships. I had two that I absolutely hated what I was doing. That's important to learn. I would encourage anyone, wherever you want to go with your growth, take the risk, if you can, be open-minded, and learn even the littlest of things.

Sometimes people think they have to make these big career moves or take new jobs. There is so much growth and experience to be gained even in the smallest of steps. It could be shadowing somebody, sitting in on a meeting, having them share finished documents or share a framework of how they're thinking about something on the front end. It’s anything that can get you a sense of what it is and if you like it and what are gaps you might want to fill if it is something you want to pursue. Sometimes people look at it as this massive step and there's so much you can do that are smaller steps that add up and they get you there.

It's a long career. The little steps add up. Look for ways to learn and grow and try new things every day. That's what I'm doing and it sounds like what you've done a lot of. It's benefited both of us so great advice. Thank you.

You never know where it will take you.

Lisa, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me and share some of your experience and wisdom. It's been great for me.

It’s my pleasure, Andy. Thank you.

You're welcome. Take care.

You too. Be well.

• Silverline CRM
• Multipliers
• Book – Multipliers
• Digitas
• DIBS
• Cares Program
• Good to Great
• SAGE
• Fierce
• WPP
• Marcus Buckingham
• Adam Grant
• The Great Gatsby