Career Defining Moments to Showcase Your Leadership Potential with Arika Pierce
Are you interested in taking your career to the next level? How about taking on a leadership position?
Leadership is not always about doing more; it's about shifting from doing to leading. This episode teaches you to recognize and embrace opportunities that showcase your leadership potential and brand. Learn how to create career-defining moments that will stretch you into becoming a great leader.
In This Episode, You Will Learn About:
Demonstrating your leadership skills
Become a great leader through career-defining moments.
How to shift into a leadership mindset
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About our guest:
Arika Pierce, President and Founder of Piercing Strategies, is a leadership development coach and expert passionate about creating forward-thinking leaders. After 15 years of corporate leadership experience, her 360 view of leadership has empowered her to help individuals hone their goals and reach their full potential.
Arika brings a fresh and innovative approach that focuses on shifting the mindset, beliefs and actions leaders need to thrive and succeed in their careers. She helps her clients create actionable plans that mitigate risks and open new avenues of opportunity.
Arika is a sought-after speaker whose interactive speaking style effectively engages audiences. She is also the author of The Millennial’s Playbook to Adulting (2018) and I Can. I Will. Watch Me: How Not to Be Overlooked, Underpaid or Undervalued (June 2022).
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The Role of Learning in Leadership
Let's discuss how to recognize and embrace opportunities that showcase your leadership potential, creating career-defining moments that will stretch you into becoming a great leader.
I started off working on Capitol Hill in DC and here in DC you typically work on Capitol Hill, then you go to law school, which I did, never practiced law, just went for the education and the loan debt. Then after that I went into corporate America and worked at a healthcare company being their DC representative. Essentially, I was their DC lobbyist. What happened was, I was working for the company at a very critical time, healthcare reform, and so as a healthcare company, they wanted to know what was happening, what was going on at the executive level. Immediately, even though I was earlier in my career, I was interacting with the senior executives. I was doing briefings to the CEO, the board even at times. As a result of that, my career really fast tracked. I held my first senior leadership position. Before I was 30, I was promoted to vice president and I sort of had to sink or swim. I really didn;t quite feel ready.
It’s one of those things where you get the call like, “Okay Erica, we’re moving into this position.” You’re like, okay, but you know inside you kind of freaking out a little bit. As a result, I just went all in on really developing myself as a leader. Anytime there were professional development opportunities, anytime someone said “Do you want to take this course? Go to this conference? Do this, talk to this person?” I was like, yes, I want to be a better presenter, I want to know how to brand myself. I want to know how to develop other careers, all of those things. It was always a focus of mine throughout my career, even as I transitioned to other leadership roles. Now I actually run a company that focuses on leadership development. We work with companies who are seeking to really develop the next generation of leaders. I also work with individuals who are seeking leadership development within themselves. We coach them and we help them with their leadership action plan. It’s been an evolution, but really there’s just been a theme of making sure that leadership is really understood and it’s really done in a way that really focuses on the right areas, not just telling people what to do.
It sounds like no matter what role you’re in, you’ve taken the initiative to continue to learn and to develop, which is sound like, obviously a passion of what you have now, which is why you’re doing what you do in the role that you have, and owning a business and helping others become leaders. Because learning never stops and it is those that are very successful are the ones that continue to learn and invest in their personal development.
Absolutely. I’m a big John C. Maxwell fan and he has a quote that says, “When you stop learning, you stop leading.” And I absolutely subscribe to that. I have an 87-year-old grandmother who calls me constantly about how to fix something on her iPhone. I’m patient with myself because I’m like, she wants to learn at 87. She still wants to learn. So don’t ever think because you’re at a certain age or at a certain level, or because you’ve been doing something for such a long time that there aren’t opportunities for you to still develop and push yourself and stretch yourself. It should never stop.
It should be part of what that routine is, part of the daily routine. I know that I carve out time every single day for personal development, whether it’s reading an article, listening to a podcast, watching like now, I'm taking a course at USF on leadership. So whether or not it is, there’s various avenues that we can take in developing our personal development, but it’s part of every day in helping us to achieve what we want.
I love it when I hear how other people are proactive about it. I think so many time, especially once you get out college, you are waiting for people to suggest, “Oh, you should do this, or you should, you know, take this training or you should do a six Sigma or whatever it might be.” Be as opposed to actually sitting down and creating your own professional development or personal development plan. Identify what your gaps are, where do you want to be in terms of that next level, and what do you need to do to get there? Who do you need to talk to? What types of opportunities do you need? What types of projects would you be working on? What’s the class skills, et cetera. Don’t always wait for someone to make the suggestion to you because again, if not, you will get left out.
Identifying Our Career-Defining Moments
We’ve talked a little bit and one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you as a guest is you talk about these career-defining moments and how we can identify career-defining moments where they can showcase their leadership potential.
First you have to get clear on what your leadership strengths are. You want to make sure when you’re thinking about what your strengths are or what your leadership superpower is, you think about three different things. You want to think about not only things that you do really well that set you apart, right? Your unique value proposition, but also what are those things that you do well that overlap with your passion? You’re excited about it. For example, maybe I am fantastic at putting together spreadsheets. I’m an Excel guru, but I don’t like doing it. It’s not my thing. It doesn’t excite me. I don’t want to do big financial reports or any of that. Then that probably is not your strength. So it should overlap with your passion. And then the third piece is really looking at what does your organization value? You know, I think sometimes when we really take, pull our heads up, we realize that we’re working really hard, but maybe not in the right areas. So you want to be clear: is one of my strengths or one of my unique value propositions that overlaps with my passion. How does that fit into what’s valued by the organization? And that sweet spot in the middle, that’s really how you get laser focused on what your superpower is, what your leadership niche is. Then from there you want to think about what are those that you can showcase it, how can you really make sure that the right people – your boss, your manager, other stakeholders, senior leadership, certain colleagues, team members, whoever it may be, how can you showcase it to them?
I’ll give a quick example, for me, when I was in my corporate career, I’m very much, I mean, I’m now a keynote speaker, so I’m a talker, right? That’s just something I’ve had for me my whole life. But now finally it’s paying off. But when I was early in my career, I realized that I needed to look for ways to show that I had that executive presence. That Icould be in certain rooms and I could perhaps lead and speak to the organization that could lead to perhaps speaking at conferences and being the go-to person.
So oddly enough, my company was going through, we were having or 30-year anniversary and so the executive team came up with this idea. They wanted to create this game show where everybody in the company would end up at some point participating in it and you would, there were prizes, things of that nature, and they needed a host for the game show. So number one, this was important to the organization because it was about employee engagement and they wanted to celebrate our anniversary. It overlapped with one of my strengths, which was public speaking and being able to show my presence. It was something that I was excited to do. Someone might have seen, oh wow, that’s a low, you know, really impact. But really it was high impact, high visibility, and it was one of the ways that I got to know other people outside of my own department as well as showcase some of my skills. It ended up being a career-defining moment, even though on its face, most people were like, I don’t want to participate in this game show host. That’s a waste of time. But you have to really look at things from a critical strategic eye sometimes, because it’s one thing to be ambitious, but you have to be ambitious as well as strategic. So, me, participating in that opportunity, it actually led to some really great more strategic opportunities to showcase myself as a leader. But again, I had to really take a step back and see how do I make this really a career-defining moment?
That’s a great example because you’re talking about the visibility and the opportunity to meet people in other divisions that you may not have met if you didn’t take, if you didn’t step up and say, I and volunteer yourself to be part of that host, and it’s really about those career-defining moments. It’s either some of them are presented to us, but a lot of times it’s us stepping up and raising our hand and asking the organization and our leaders and saying, what are some of the biggest challenges that we’re experiencing right now? What are some of the initiatives that are going on in the organization?
I would be interested in being involved in special projects. I know that just like in your career, my career as well, stepping into a leadership position before the age of 30 for a Fortune 500 company was really because I took the initiative to get involved in projects that most people may have just assumed other people would do.
You know, that we look sometimes at, oh, I’m just as I was in sales, I was in medical sales, so maybe some of the sales rep would say, “Well, I’m just going to do my job. But really, we want to hear from the sales reps to have the closest connection with the customers and what the needs of the customer are and what it look like if you stood up and volunteered yourself to be involved in like advisory board, and sharing ideas because that’s when innovations happens within the organization.
One of the things that, oftentimes, when I’m talking to someone, especially if we’re doing a coaching, engagement and someone saying, “You know, I feel stuck. I want to move to the next level, or I want to get a promotion raise, et cetera, but I just don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m not getting the right opportunities, all of those things.” When we start to peel back the layers, and I ask questions such as, what’s important to your boss? What’s keeping them up? At night, what are they working on? What’s the team focused on? What’s the five-year goal for the company? People are like, that doesn’t have anything to do with me, I don’t know. I’m just focused on what my job is at hand. That is absolutely a loss opportunity.
Some advice and recommendations that I foten give to people is when you have your one-on-one meeting with your boss, so hopefully it’s happening on a very frequent weekly or biweekly basis. But if you’re showing up to that meeting just with your list of what I’m working on, and it’s just a very transactional meeting, that’s a lost opportunity. Especially I would say in the virtual hybrid environment where you may not be having other interaction with them, outside of this one-on-one meeting. That list of what you’re working on can be sent to them ahead of time. Right? And you can say quickly, if there’s any questions, I’m happy to answer them. But I really want to spend this time getting a better sense of what you think the team will be focused on over the next few years. Or I’d love to hear about some of the things that came out of that strategy meeting that you were at last week, or the business reviews, things of that nature. That’s when you start to better understand where the priorities are focused for your boss. When you can say, “Oh, is that something I could work on.” Or that’s an area that I actually have a lot of interest in, or how can I help support the work that you’re doing in this area? That’s when you’re creating those opportunities. But without asking those questions and only waiting for them to always pull you in, that’s going to be a loss opportunity. That’s an easy thing that people can immediately start doing, move away from those transactional one-on-ones to those acts, the more engaging one-on-ones where you are actually getting answers to those deeper questions, where you can start to set yourself up for new opportunities.
Stepping Up In Your Career
I am so glad that you brought this conversation up because I was just on a call earlier this morning with a client and we were talking about how this individual wants to get promoted. They’ve been in the organization for a long time, but they feel stuck, and I started to ask those questions: What, where do you see the future of the organization? When you talk with your manager, what are some of their pet peeves? What are some of their challenges? And they didn’t really know. That goes into that, the assumption or the perception versus reality. If you want to step into a leadership role, it’s not only understanding like you’re talking about, it’s not only understanding your managers, what are their challenges, what are their objectives, what are some of the things that most people don’t know. That’s always a good question to ask. What are three things that most people don’t know about your role, or what advice would you give to yourself on day one, but also going a step up? Because the person that’s going to be making the decision to possibly hire you into that leadership role might be another level up.
You want to understand what the qualities they’re looking for, as well as the person that’s in that role. I always say, who’s going to be that sponsor and who’s going to be that decision maker? Those are the closed doors that determine whether you’re going to get that position, but you’ve got to advocate for yourself. You’ve got to put yourself in there and approach. Approach the conversations with curiosity.
I always tell people, no one cares about your career more than you. You really have to just accept that and also most decisions about your career will be made when you are not in the room. That is why it’s so critical to have sponsors as you have really honed in on, but also to make sure your brand is speaking for itself. One of the things that I think is really critical as well is there’s a lot of times there is a lot of focus on our personal brand. Then I say there’s your personal brand, there’s your professional brand, which is some of your technical skills, and then there’s your leadership brand. That really gets to, how are you influencing people? How are you engaging people? How do people receive and experience you in terms of your leadership presence?
Sometimes we don’t spend as much time thinking about that, right? We’re like, Oh, I get along well with everyone and then everyone knows my work, and my work speaks for itself. But no, you really want to get very clear on what your leadership brand looks like. Oftentimes, people say, well, I’m not leading people yet, so I don’t have to worry about that. But that had nothing to do with being a people manager. And being a people leader does not mean that you can’t still have leadership within you before you hit those benchmarks. Leading without authority is really important because you can still influence people. You can still and there’s still people in the room who may not be people leaders, but when they say something, people lean forward. People want to hear it. They’re able to bring people in, people trust them. Don’t wait until you get into those higher level positions to start showing up that level, it’s the whole idea, right? Dress for the job that you want, not the job that you have. I say the same thing for leadership. You can lead every single day through your actions, your interactions and experiences.
There’s a quote that always sits above my desk. I always look up when I say that, because it’s really right there, but from the VP of Hallmark, it’s Tara Frank, and she said that, “People don’t get promoted for doing their job well. They get promoted for the potential to do more.” And so how are you when you’re looking at different roles that you want to promote into, where are you showing the potential to do more? I would always say that the higher that we go up within an organization, often decisions are made. When a position does open for a director level, VP level, and sometimes a manager level, often the person who they want to put in that position is already decided before the position even opens up. It’s because the individuals that have been working the steps to get to that role, and that’s what a lot people I think sometimes miss, is you gotta be campaigning for yourself from the beginning.
Absolutely. I think that people really have to become much more comfortable with advocating their accomplishments, especially, I will say women, I see definitely women struggle with this, quite a bit in terms of, I don’t want to come off as being too bragging or being too over the top. I always tell people if you’re worried about that, I’m already clear that you’re not doing it. you’re not over the top. You’re probably not doing it enough if you’re already pulling yourself back. One of the things that people should, everyone should be doing it is having an accomplishment list or a brag list. Call it what you want, but where are you tracking on a regular basis? You’re not waiting until it’s performance review time to think about, ok, what are some of the things that I worked on that I want to make sure that my boss is aware of? You want to have at the ready, I say, on a weekly basis, where you’re writing down everything, doesn’t have to be the Super Bowl. Some things could be small, but a client sent an email, how impact I was on this project or I got to receive these accolades or kudos or I was leading a project on time, on budget, things like that.
Tracking that on a regular basis and then always looking at that list with a keen eye of what are the things that I really want to make sure align with that next level of leadership that I am speaking volumes or on a repeated basis to those who are decision makers? Who are thinking about who’s ready for the next level? Don’t assume that anyone else is tracking or thinking about these things. I tell people, you’re not LeBron james. No one is tracking your stats. No one knows these things. you know better than you. You have to have these accomplishments. I think especially now if you’re working virtually, making sure that you’re finding the spaces to definitely still speak about your attributes and yourself, and those casual conversations and those soundbites management manages a lot through soundbites. Finding those places where then your boss says, how’s it going? That you have to respond ready, that could say a little bit of something you’ve been working on, that you’re really excited about or things of that nature. That's really important and sometimes just a missed opportunity for a lot of people.
I tell people that sometimes your manager doesn’t always know what you do. They’re not with you by your side every single day. I know that when I was leading a team, I saw reports, I saw sales reports and ranking reports, and I was able to analyze that to see what my team was doing, but I didn’t always know the great things that they were doing day in and day out that were leading to those results. So I always encourage my team. I want to celebrate your success with you. It also takes you sharing them with me. So I love your idea. Write down your accomplishments that you’ve done each week. Share them with your manager. Use it as an opportunity to say, “I just recently had a win. I did X, Y, Z to get this particular. Would you like me to share this with the team on our next conference call?” Because that’s an opportunity to step into leadership and those career-defining moments as you’re discussing. And the reality is it’s not the end of the year. It’s every single day you are writing something down and preparing for the annual performance review. Because if you do that well and you really keep track of your successes, that’s when you get, you have the credibility to ask for the raises, to go for the promotion.
The Leadership Mindset Shift
You’ve got it all documented there. When we are transitioning into a leadership role, you and I have both done that transition from an individual contributor role to a leadership role, and we both did it at a very young age. Let’s talk about the mindset shift because it is a big shift and I think sometimes the perception of what people think leadership is may be actually very different. So let’s talk about the mindset shift.
I think that one of the biggest mindset shifts is really being clear on what your role is as a people leader versus what your role was as an individual contributor. Sometimes that shift is really difficult, because typically if you’re moving into a people leadership role, it’s because you’re a high performer, right? You’ve done very well. But typically in most organizations now, you’re not being asked to do just your job very well. That’s actually a smaller portion of your responsibility. What you’re actually being asked to do is to make sure that everyone else is doing their job well to make sure that they’re motivated, that they’re developing, that they have engagement, that they are being productive. And that sometimes is a whole lot harder. Well, because people are now involved, right? Personalities, different motivations. Everybody has lots of different things going on individually at home and in their professional life. You there’s going to be conflicts. Those are the things that you are actually now being really charged to focus on.
I think for some individuals, it sometimes feels its easier to just really stay focused on the tasks at hand, because they don’t want to deal with people, part of the people management. They actually will put the people part kind of to the side and just feel like they’re just managing, they’re a project manager. What’s the update on this? Is this done? Is this on deadline? Yes, that’s a piece of it, but no, it’s actually making sure that you know each of your team members individually. That again, they feel excited to still work at the organization every single day because if not people of course will leave. And that leads to other issues and gaps.
It’s ensuring that you know where they want to also go next in their career. You are identifying opportunities so that they, again, will want to advance within the organization. That’s really a huge shift is really making sure that you understand and you’re clear on what your role is. It’s not just kind of doing their job. Staying like kind of tracking how everyone else is doing their job. Some people kind of view people management from their perspective. But I will challenge everyone, when you think about someone who was a great leader for you, someone who really helped you developed your career, you won’t, probably won’t say, “Yeah, they were great at making sure that I met my deadlines.” That’s not what your going to say, right? You’re going to say, “Wow, they really made sure that I was growing, that I was advancing, that I was having opportunities.” “I could go to them to get feedback. They really helped to stretch me.” Those are the things that you’re going to say. Thinking about it through that lens is something that sometimes gets lost in that shuffle.
I agree with you a hundred percent because I know that shift from going as an individual contributor was more about the task in hand. When I was in sales, it was more about the customer engagement, which you do have a lot of that customer engagement as well.
But it was very helpful to have a degree in psychology because I found that was probably the skill that helped the most because you are interacting a lot of times. You are sometimes putting out fires. Sometimes those fires are customers, and so it’s actually engaging in conflict resolution for customers and ensuring that they feel heard and that they feel acknowledged and they’re able to provide solutions as well as helping your team feel motivated when sometimes they feel burnt out. Being able to identify the signs of emotional and physical burnout with your team and being able to engage in a conversation and say, “Are you okay?” And “how can we get things back on track?” Ensuring that you understand what their core values so that you know what motivates them and being able to have those open dialogue, authentic, vulnerable conversations that you’re connecting with them on a deeper level.
That is more of what I found and agree with you on that mind shift switch. When it comes to what leadership is really about, it’s about more of that engaging in conversations and supporting your team, achieving their goals, not so much as much of your goals. Servant leadership.
I would say for sure a degree in psychology would come very much in hand, with some of the things that you have to deal with. I mean, I remember I had a situation where I was managing someone who was really right out of college and within kind of a month’s span she had her whole apartment destroyed in a tornado. She lost everything, her car, her apartment, and she also had just moved for this job to this city, and I’m her boss. They don’t teach you that like at school. Like what do you do? How do you support this person? Both that’ going though this and we were going through a rebranding process and she was our head of marketing. So it was one of those things where I was like, wow, I actually don’t know how to handle this situation and had to really navigate it. But that’s the part about people leadership, that every people don’t think about those parts of it, but that is it. You become sometimes for your team, their go-to person for a lot of things and knowing also the boundaries and all those pieces. And so it's not easy. It’s very rewarding work as well because everyone is not meant to manage people. There are great leaders out there who, perhaps are not great at leading other people, but those of us who are and who enjoy it, it can be very rewarding because when you become a force multiplier, meaning that you’re present, you’re able to bring people together and really make powerful; and impactful things happen. That is a huge feeling and role that some people play in the organizations.
Taking Our Next Step to Succeed
One of the most challenging roles because you really are flexing every single day, your communication style. And like you had some unique situations. There’s been times where there’s corporate restructuring, downsizing and acquisitions. Our company at one point went through an attempted hostile takeover from another organization. And so navigating those emotions, and a lot of times it’s navigating the emotions of uncertainty, fear, am I going to have my job? There’s been times where people have been displaced and unfortunately were laid off. How are you empathetic and supportive with them while also motivating the people that are still with the organization? That’s a lot of behind the scenes a lot of people don’t see.
You’re supporting something, somebody through something every single day. It’s different and it’s always changing. But like you said, it could be very rewarding to see people flourish and achieve their goals. What are three kinds of words of wisdom that you want to leave people with that they can go ahead and say, here’s what I took and here’s how I’m going to apply it.
Number one, I would say that, know what your next step is. You don’t have to know exactly your tenure plan, but at least have an idea of what your next step is and start to identify what you need to do to get there. Number two, I would say that, be thinking about how you can learn every single day. Shared podcasts, articles, if you are subscribing to Harvard Business Review, it’s like a hundred bucks, I think a year, fantastic articles, especially for new managers come out every single day though there is, send newsletters. But look for those things. Make those investments in yourself large and very small at times. Then lastly, I would say that, make sure that you are really thinking about who the stakeholders that you want to be engaging with. I call them your board of directors: your mentors, your sponsors, your boss, your boss’ boss, your colleagues. You need to really be clear on who those people are and make sure that they are experiencing you as a leader on an everyday basis.
