3 career achievements I can’t put on LinkedIn

Recently I received an award from a business partner. It came with a social media promotion kit complete with sample copy, graphics, and an image for my email signature. The award was thoughtful and certainly appreciated, but relatively minor in its significance. It also recognized work that I didn’t feel particularly successful at. However, I thoroughly enjoyed posting the award to LinkedIn, sharing the news with my chain of command, and the congratulatory messages I received over the next couple of weeks. I joked with colleagues that the award was trivial but nonetheless I was going to get as much mileage out of it as possible. Perhaps I was embarrassed by just how much I enjoyed the attention and recognition. Joking about it helped. 

Around the same time, I achieved something huge. Something so personally and professionally significant, it felt like one of those major turning points in my career. Like something that was going to propel me forward into bigger roles and more responsibility. But there was no way to share it on LinkedIn - not only was it not a succinct story, it was politically sensitive and personal in nature to the people involved. It got me thinking about what other moments in my career were powerful accelerators but couldn’t be packaged neatly for LinkedIn adulation. 

Here are three moments over the past few years that come to mind:

Stood my ground and didn’t back down

As mentioned, at the same time I received a partner award, I also went through a very challenging experience and came out victorious. Anyone who is a marketer at a B2B technology company knows that you often end up a convenient scapegoat for other parts of the business. When there’s an economic downtown or the business is underperforming, that only gets worse. 

In our case, there was one executive who’d been particularly cruel not just to my leadership and marketing generally, but also to some of my peers. This was expressed through derogatory, critical, aggressive lines of questioning in business reviews, an evident lack of respect from this person’s broader organization, and in some cases all-out conflict over strategy and budget. The lack of trust and good faith was toxic and terrifying. 

It was my turn to present marketing performance results to the broader go-to-market organizations. I was given 48 hours notice and dropped everything to prepare. I knew what I was getting into with this executive and made sure I knew my business backward and forward. 

During this business review, three groups were to spend 20 minutes presenting, with marketing going last. Due to lack of preparation from the other groups, 10 minutes into the meeting it was determined that it was marketing’s turn to share. 

I was grilled for 40 minutes about the data I shared, the insights we provided, and the recommendations we were making. I almost dropped from the call within the first few minutes - I was that angered and frustrated by the tone of the conversation. The leaders in the room were coming to the discussion with the assumption that I was lying about our performance, that our data wasn’t accurate, and that we were incompetent. 

But I stood my ground. I remained calm. I had answers to all their questions. I explained the same thing several times. I felt confident about the data. I was able to tell the full story I needed to tell in that meeting. 

When the meeting ended, I needed time to calm down and do some initial processing. But I felt good. I felt really good. It was by no means a slam dunk. I didn’t change their minds. But I did exactly what I needed to do. I had an executive-level conversation in the most challenging of environments and didn’t crumble, didn’t lose my cool. I felt awesome. 

A minute later I received a chat from the executive asking if I had a moment for a quick phone call. He gave me a call and apologized. He apologized if I felt under fire and thanked me for being willing to have the conversation even though it is hard. I responded that I valued the opportunity to have this type of conversation and that if we can’t talk through the hard things we aren’t going to be able to manage the business. 

The following day I happened to talk to my leadership briefly and mentioned how the meeting went, as well as the follow up call I had. She thanked me profusely - this executive has been a very challenging stakeholder for marketing for a long time. 

A week later, I spoke to her again - she said that because of the meeting I had with this executive, he reached out to her and said that he now believes our data. 

This is an achievement I could never share on LinkedIn, but one where I proved to myself that I can hold my own at the highest levels of our business.

Taught myself a new skill and empowered others to do the same

I never would have been able to withstand the questioning in that meeting if I hadn’t undertaken a major personal project in the months prior. As part of our business transformation, the marketing organization has been engaged in a multi-year investment in the systems, tools, and processes needed to better equip all the marketers to be able to articulate our contribution to the business.

This looks a lot like marketing analytics: measuring the performance of campaigns and programs and being able to make that data actionable to drive more results in the right place with fewer resources.

There are a lot of reasons why this is extremely difficult to do (which I won’t go into). It felt like that last frontier for me to explore and learn. I’d been putting it off for a long time. But in a highly contentious environment, I knew my best chance at being able to interface with all our stakeholders from a position of power and authority was with the data itself. I needed to learn it.

It was a hard project to start because it felt so big, and data often feels like a foreign language. I hunted down training resources from our marketing analytics team and found that what I was really looking for - a step by step guide specific to our tools, our dashboards, and my part of the business - didn’t exist.

So I decided I would create one myself, hoping that in the process it would force me to learn how to measure my marketing activities. I started with the metrics I needed to observe and took the time to ask my colleagues which dashboards they use, what each metrics means and how it’s calculated, and how to view those results through different dimensions (account segment, country, etc.).

I also had to figure out how to understand the results and their connection to the actions we took. For example, if a web page saw a spike in visits, what happened to cause that change? Was there a change in how much advertising we were doing, or was the page recently updated with more compelling content?

In concept, these are very straightforward requirements in running and managing marketing campaigns. But in a scaled, matrix, and portfolio organization, the infinite calculus of complexity makes it challenging to know what the data is saying.

Furthermore, it’s challenging to ensure that those insights - what the data is saying - don’t live with just the one person that is observing them. All team members involved in a campaign should be working with the same information and the same insights around campaign performance. How do you you ensure the whole team is not only well-versed in the data, but is coordinated in their understanding of what the data means?

To me, this meant that our team needed to develop a unified, joint practice of observing our campaign performance. A new collective muscle that ensured insights didn’t live in one person’s brain but shared with everyone. 

We began by training each other on our measurement and reporting tools and then by establishing a weekly reporting cadence to each other. No one asked us to do this - no executives were requiring reports, no other stakeholders were looking for reports on a weekly basis - but by trading off each week who pulled the data, it meant that each of us were getting into the dashboards ourselves, asking questions, and then recording the data in a place it was accessible to all of us.

We achieved just just by being willing to try and see what kind of impact it would have on our team and our campaigns. We were all willing to just take the first step, and it ultimately took us to a place where we were all speaking the same language about our campaigns and programs, where we were talking about what needed to change from a place of shared insight, and made decision making more efficient.

It should go without saying that had we not undertaken this exercise together, we would not have been able to defend our work and articulate our contribution to the overall business from a place of power, authority, and credibility (even under the most charged circumstances).

Didn’t say yes to the wrong thing

When I graduated from business school, I had been also working full-time for a local small technology company. It had been a hard place to be and I had stayed too long, and one of the reasons I got an MBA was because I wanted to be part of the world of big business. I really didn’t know how to actually achieve that though (once I had the degree in hand).

I embarked on a job search in the last few months of my MBA program, and in total received for job offers that spring. It’s a nice thing to be able to say - that you’ve received four job offers - but in my experience, it’s not all that fun. For started, I didn’t receive them all at once. I didn’t get to pick the best of the bunch by evaluating them all simultaneously, knowing that I’d have a job no matter what. They came over a period of 2-3 months and each one was something that could have been good.

The first one was for a small consumer insights firm owned and led by the founder. The second was for a small, legacy ad agency, also owned and led by the founder. The third one was an MBA internship that summer for a major telecom provider that was likely to turn into a full time job.

I had learned that I worked best in large organization and I wanted to work in a place with room to grow. I wanted to work in a place where I was small fish in a big pond, where there were a lot of strong leaders to learn from and a lot of different directions I could take my career in.

It wasn’t easy to turn down those three job offers without knowing if I’d ever land a role at a company that fit the bill. I could only follow my instinct and continue to say no to the things that weren’t right for me. If I committed to something that wasn’t right for me, that I’d be stuck in a place that was wrong for me. I felt accountable to the people who had referred me, to the people who had taken the time to interview me, and to my husband who wanted me to be in the right place but also not make a bad decision.

I ended up receiving an offer mid-May that year (After a 6 month job search) at a Fortune 500 technology company based in California with a local presence in Colorado. Looking back, I’m not sure how I got hired as I knew absolutely nothing about their products, business, or industry, but I’m grateful I did. In the four years I’ve been here - the longest I’ve ever been at any company - I’ve grown both personally and professionally in ways I could never have identified right out of school. I’ve held several different roles, become much more technically literate, and matured as a marketing professional and a leader.

I look back often at the path that led me to this company and I’m grateful that I followed my instinct - as risky as it was - to hold out for the job that was right for me. I had never had the courage to do that before, and I’m profoundly grateful to where it led. 

None of these achievements fit tidily into a LinkedIn post. None of them are clean, clear uncontroversial accomplishments. I would never want to offend people in my network involved in any of them by describing them as wins, or in only telling my side of the story to an audience of hundreds or thousands. Others may even see these moments as failures for me. But to me, I get to hold onto them, continue to learn the lessons they are teaching me, and remember that success doesn’t always look like an award that comes with a promo kit.