Jenny Wood joins Mosah Fernandez Goodman on this episode of Hiring Insights to discuss navigating your career path, how to create followership as a leader, and showcasing your full potential. Jenny is an executive at Google running a large operations team that helps drive tens of billions of revenue per year. She’s also the founder of Own Your Career, one of the largest career development programs in Google’s history with tens of thousands of people benefitting, an author, keynote speaker, mom, avid hiker, and pilot.
What is the Own Your Career program at Google and what are the practical, actionable strategies that can help navigate a career?
Your overall happiness depends on having well rounded self-fulfillment both inside and outside of your core job.
Be bold, be curious, be you. Utilize your curiosity either as a leader or as someone aspiring to be a leader, it’s okay to not have all of the answers.
Lateral moves are some of the most powerful moves you can make. Look for the potential and the opportunities it could create for you. "Lateral moves are some of the most powerful moves anyone can make. Your career is not always going to be up into the right. You're going to have twisty, windy paths and zigzag payoffs as Jason Feifer of Entrepreneur Magazine, Editor-in-Chief calls them in his book Built for Tomorrow, which is fantastic. "
Bullets on your resume. Don’t be vague or generic. There are three things that you must have: numbers, context, and action. "I talk about blockers that we've put in front of ourselves that limit our full potential. I think people get nervous. Oh, but I don't have $5 million I can talk about, but you can make anything quantitative, results can be anything quantitative. It could be number of meetings you led. It could be number of documents you wrote."
It isn’t about the five-year or ten-plan, it’s about the big, small things that you can do day to day that add up to the long-term plan.
If anybody wants to succeed, coaching, external guidance, someone to keep you accountable is one of the most important things you can do.
What qualities make someone a better fit for a leadership role?
LinkedIn tip: ideas as content.
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[00:00:00] Richard: Welcome to Hiring Insights. The podcast that provides insight into the executive hiring process and experience, whether you are a job seeker, a people leader, a recruiter, an executive coach, or simply interested in talent, there is something here for you on the Hiring Insights. Today's episode is presented by Top Talent Advocates, where we advocate for executive and legal talent.
You can learn more about Top Talent Advocates, listen to other episodes, and hire great talent by visiting toptalentadvocates.com and clicking on podcast. Now here's your host for Hiring Insights, Mosah Fernandez Goodman.
[00:00:44] Mosah: Hi, my name is Mosah Fernandez Goodman and welcome to another episode of Hiring Insights presented by Top Talent Advocates. Today I’m joined by Jenny Wood who is an executive at Google running a large operations team that helps drive tens of billions of revenue per year. She’s also the founder of Own Your Career, one of the largest career development programs in Google’s history with tens of thousands of people benefitting.
[00:01:13] Mosah: Jenny, thanks so much for joining us today. We're incredibly excited to have you. For those folks who are listening to this and don't necessarily know you already, um, and there'll be some of those. I was hoping you could share a little bit about your background and what sort of gets you excited about work and, and life.
[00:01:31] Jenny: Well thanks so much for having me, Mosah. I am a Google executive who runs an operations team that sits between sales and engineering. I founded a career development program that’s become quite popular with in Google.
I’m an author, keynote speaker, a mom of two little kids and to keep things balanced I try to hike every day in Boulder, Colorado where I live and I also fly planes for fun.
[00:01:59] Mosah: Well thanks so much for sharing a little bit about you personally and obviously our listeners are excited to learn more about your experience, but most importantly, your insights. So, so today we're going to start off by understanding a little bit more about your career. You obviously have risen through the ranks at one of the largest companies in the world.
In one of the most interesting sectors and dynamic sectors. And so I'm hoping you can maybe walk us through a little bit about the stages of your career progression, how you even got into being a Googler.
[00:02:31] Jenny: Well, that's a story in and of itself. The way I became a Googler is such a, a microcosm of, of everything I do, which is basically asking for what you want, unapologetically.
I got to Google in such an untraditional way, and I don't mean untraditional background. I mean literally the way I got my job was so untraditional. I drove to the Google office in Denver, Colorado where I was living with my parents at the time, after I had just traveled through South America with a backpack by myself for three months, and I walked in the door.
It was an office of maybe 30 people at the time, this was 2006, super teeny tiny. Google was only 6,000 people at the time. I walked in with a printed out resume in my hand. I had applied online, but I'd heard nothing back and I thought there was maybe a formatting issue when I uploaded my resume. So whether that was true or I was just looking for, I really did think that, but I, I seized the opportunity to get in my mom's old Honda stick shift, drive to the office and sit there until someone would speak to me.
And it was like a shared receptionist who came out, not even a Google employee, and she's like, oh, you can just drop your resume there and I said, no, but I think there's an issue with my resume. I really need to speak to a Google employee. And I was professionally persistent, if you will. And the time I was waiting felt like an excruciating, you know, hour was probably 30 seconds waiting for her to, you know, decide to call somebody or not at the actual Google company.
And then ultimately, someone did come out and I gave them my resume. I talked through my background. I had just done research at Harvard Business School prior to being abroad. And the rest is history. So what do they say, 80% is just showing up. I literally just showed up, I’m not advocating for that being how I would recommend it, but it worked.
[00:04:31] Mosah: We offer a lot of services at Top Talent Advocates, but I don't know that we necessarily go and wait in people's lobbies for them, but that that's incredible. Yeah, we do offer gorilla marketing, but that's, that's a different type than what we've heard from other guests and certainly from other clients.
[00:04:46] Jenny: I would imagine.
[00:04:48] Mosah: I love this story. And so since you've been at Google and it's got a reputation for being a very creative and obviously forward-looking company, you applied that sort of ingenuity and, and harnessed that culture to create a really large development program. Would you share a little bit about maybe what the program is and what it does?
[00:05:09] Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. So the Own Your Career program is simply a passion project of mine, and the goal is to help increase confidence of Google employees, give them practical, actionable strategies to navigate their career.
In any company, Google or otherwise, there's so much ambiguity. There's, there's such a challenge of, you know, where do I even start? What's the first thing I do? How do I manage up? How do I network? What do I do now that we're working from home? And, you know, some companies are fully remote, some are hybrid, some are, you know, struggling with are we in the office?
Like it's, there's so much to navigate, there's so much uncertainty. There's so much challenge in what any employee has to go through. And because of all of it, there can be so much anxiety and that anxiety is typically in where do I start? What is my first step?
And I have laid awake plenty of nights, anxious about how do I get time with my boss's boss, because I know it's important to quote unquote manage up. How do I, you know, recover from that typo, that glaring typo in that really important customer meeting? I'm never gonna get the next promotion. My boss is gonna be, you know, that's all she's gonna be thinking about.
So given my own anxiousness and stress about how I navigate my own career, I really wanted to do something to help other Google employees. So what happened was a couple years ago I was trying to move from a sales role in New York City to a technical role in Boulder. And it was not easy. There's, I was already at a relatively senior stage in my career, so it's not like the positions were a dime a dozen.
I probably had 60 or so coffee chats. That's 6-0, not one six. That's a lot over a six-month period. And what I did was I just wrote down a Google doc of 15 bullets of things that ultimately helped me land that dream job, that executive role, or very exciting role that I ultimately ended up getting. So by writing down those 15 tips, I simply wanted to remind myself in the future, what are the most practical and tactical things I did that helped me land this job.
[00:07:15] Mosah: Can you share some of those with us?
[00:07:17] Jenny: Yeah. Okay. So here's one. One was called notice the eye flick. And what that meant was when I was having a coffee chat with someone, a virtual coffee chat, you could also use this in an interview or any, a one-on-one with your manager. I would notice the eye flick to the upper right corner of the screen.
That meant to me they were checking the time. Well, time to wrap up that particular answer that I was, that I was giving or that part of the conversation. So that simple, teeny, tiny tip. Notice the eye flick is what I wrote as one of the 15 bullets in that document. That is how specific I'm talking because it's very easy to give ivory tower type of information.
Oh, you should network or you should manage up, or you should, you know, work on the projects that are most important to your senior leadership. Well, sure, but like how do you start? What do you do? What does your email say to your manager's manager when you're asking them for 20 minutes?
How can you network if you're introverted? What are some tactics you can use? Maybe it's chat versus in person. So I really wanted to get down to the practical and tactical. I wrote these 15 bullets for myself. It started scaling a little bit as people would come to me for mentorship and I would say, hey, no problem. I'm happy to give you time, but read this doc first. It might get you ahead of the game before we meet.
And then it started getting shared beyond my knowledge, it went a little bit viral. We put some nicer design behind it, and the rest is history. There are now tens of thousands of Googlers using the program and it's uh, kind of just become this big grassroots thing within the company.
And now I do separately thought leadership around all sorts of topics around how to thrive both professionally and personally.
[00:08:54] Mosah: Yeah, that's tremendous. The thing I think people would also like to know is, is the point that you got to at, at the end of your last comment you know, so there's this program within Google and listening to you and reading what you post and, and your sort of material generally, you know, basically the things that we do to research for an interview like this. But if someone wanted to say, listen to you live and in person, or maybe book you for a conference, can you share a little bit about some of the speaking engagements that you're, you're doing and maybe that, that other part of who you are professionally?
[00:09:28] Jenny: Yeah, so I think of your career as a relationship almost. So, for example, I love my husband dearly. This is, today's our,
[00:09:39] Mosah: Well, you chased him on a subway, I think.
[00:09:41] Jenny: I chased him off a subway. Yeah, we can talk about that too. Talk about chasing what you want and achieving it. If you don't ask, you'll never know. I literally chased him off the New York City subway.
So I love my husband dearly. Today's our ninth anniversary. Despite the fact that we have a wonderful relationship, I would never expect to get all of my fulfillment from just my husband. There are some things that need to be fulfilled by friends or by projects, or by my job that I would never be able to get from my husband.
So I think about my core job the same way, I love my core job. It's challenging and problem solving, and I lead a wonderful team and I have incredible people above me who inspire me, and yet I would never expect to be a hundred percent fulfilled just from that core job. So whether it's launching and founding this own your career program at Google, or doing external thought leadership and speaking. That is to me, something that just helps me be a well-rounded person overall. And it increases my happiness. It increases my efficiency. Cause I'm quite busy. So, you know, what do they say? If you need something done fast, give it to a busy person. I'm quite busy so I do things very efficiently and it also gives me a lot of fulfillment that I can have both my core job and also the external thought leadership on LinkedIn or, you know, any speaking I do such as this or other outside of my core job, it makes the total package more fun for me and more fulfilling overall.
[00:11:08] Mosah: That's, um, sort of helping fill your proverbial cup, right? That, that's wonderful advice.
[00:11:15] Jenny: Yeah. And the way I might offer this to your listeners, is that if you are in a data analytics role at your company, but you love photography, see if, and if you're a small company you're probably not going to have this, but if you're at a bigger company, join the photography club or go to the improv group, you know, in your town and do that every Thursday night at 7:00 PM right? Because those things really do matter in your overall happiness.
[00:11:45] Mosah: One of the things that the listeners or our audience are, are interested in is understanding sort of how to advance yourself. And you have this wonderful tagline that says, you know, be bold, be curious, be you. I'm wondering if you might in, in sort of the same context of giving this, um, practical yet inspiring advice, share with our listeners how they might use or leverage the concepts that you're getting in that, or you're presenting in that tagline to help advance themselves professionally. Because a lot of folks that we talk to, whether they be clients or people who are simply interested in better understanding how to manage their careers, don't know how to go from a director to a VP level. Don't want to necessarily wear the proverbial gorilla suit and, and go about it in a more creative fashion.
I can you give some insight in connecting that tagline to how one can help manage their own careers?
[00:12:46] Jenny: Absolutely. Within, be bold, be curious, be you. Let's focus on, be curious because if we're talking about someone who's trying to get from the director level to the C-suite level, I actually think that the curiosity is the element that is going to be most useful to them.
So for example, I ask a ton of questions. Let's say I'm at a restaurant with my husband. The server will come over, he'll say, okay, Jenny, ask your questions. Like, we make a joke of it because I ask a ton of questions.
[00:13:16] Mosah: Is this like Portlandia with what happened to with the chicken kind of thing?
[00:13:18] Jenny: Exactly, exactly.
So, I have a reputation for better or for worse of asking a lot of questions. I would say I'm borderline nosy, right? Nosy is got a negative connotation in elementary school, but it can have a really positive connotation in a corporate environment because the more you ask, the more you're going to learn.
So here's an example. If you're a director and you're at your CEO's town hall, raise your hand and ask what their priorities are for H1 or ask what's keeping them up at night? There are so many people who keep their hands down in anxiety that, you know, that I've had for, for so long in fear. Well, what if I say the wrong thing?
What if I sound stupid? What if he already covered it and I or she already covered it and you know, it, it looks like I wasn't listening. Or, you know, what if it's something that will, what if I ramble? What if my question is too long? All of these things are barriers we put up that limit our potential to learn, to gain, to understand through asking questions.
Or let's say you're a leader and you're leading your, your team meeting. Well, great, you don't have to know all the answers. We, as leaders have imposter syndrome all the time too. So when you feel that pain of imposter syndrome rather than putting pressure on yourself that you have to have that brilliant insight about the strategy of the Blue Widgets Project.
You could turn it back on the team and say, what have you seen in the market that would influence our blue widgets strategy? Or what headwinds have you heard from our customers that would influence how we think about blue widgets versus green widgets? You're just asking the smart leaders who report to you what they've seen, what they've heard, what they know, what they feel
So the curiosity can go up. It can be asking your, your CEO a question in the town hall. It can go down to the other people you're leading because you don't have to know all the answers. So within, be bold, be curious, be you, I'm particularly passionate about, be curious.
[00:15:25] Mosah: Both at restaurants and in a professional setting.
[00:15:28] Jenny: Both at restaurants and otherwise.
[00:15:30] Mosah: Got it. Awesome. Thank you. So I, I think that's really helpful as people think about upward trajectory and as, as you used the phrase, you know, managing up or, you know, even managing above their direct line.
[00:15:45] Jenny: Yeah, I call it managing hire.
[00:15:47] Mosah: Managing hire, okay. I like that. That's great. When someone is managing their career within an organization, certainly the size of Google allows for different opportunities.
And you alluded to the fact that there probably might not be like a photography club at a mid-size business or a mid-gap, right? As someone looks to potentially, uh, leave an organization, as is often the case, right? The 30-year career gold watch is a rarity. How should people, in your opinion, consider moves laterally and navigating those types of, uh, significant decisions in one's career?
[00:16:22] Jenny: Lateral moves are some of the most powerful moves anyone can make. Your career is not always going to be up into the right. You're going to have twisty, windy paths and zigzag payoffs as Jason Feifer of Entrepreneur Magazine, Editor-in-Chief calls them in his book Built for Tomorrow, which is fantastic.
The story will give to highlight how passionate I am about twisty, windy paths and lateral moves is actually that same story of when I moved from this leadership role in New York City to this on a sales team to, uh, this technical team in Boulder. I got that role I mentioned already I was very excited about it.
It was a great opportunity. But it was on paper, a lateral move. It was going from the same level to the same level. No more pay. In fact less pay cuz it was going from the New York City market to the Boulder market, which are different, you know, uh, costs. And I took it anyway because I saw the potential.
But what I did not see was how much I might learn simply by changing organizations within the company. So I was going from a sales organization that was super extroverted, and bop, bop, bop on the sales floor. Lots of speaking to think, lots of high energy, lots of rah rah, to a very introverted, quieter, different style of, of organizational culture in this technical team in Boulder.
And I was struggling. I knew I was struggling. I felt it. I felt like I wasn't quite landing my team's buy-in and I felt nervous. I felt anxious, I felt stressed. And a peer of mine said, Jenny, can I give you some feedback? And I said, sure.
I love feedback. And she said, you've been interrupting people. And I went and she was right. And it's not that I've never interrupted anybody from that moment on, but I probably do it about 40% less of the time. And I'm so much more aware of it. And the reason I learned that skill that became critical to me being a better leader, critical and more inclusive, and more thoughtful and a better listener overall in general.
Was because I took a lateral move from one part of an organization to another that had a dramatically different culture where interrupting and bop, bop, bop kind of conversation overlapping was not as expected as the norm, as accepted.
So the things you learn in a lateral move are tremendous and that's just one example of the many things I've learned in my own lateral. You double your network, you double your skills, you double your problem solving. You just have so much more that you're able to tackle versus staying in the same organization, moving up into the right and not learning as much.
So I always optimize for learning and advise people to do the same.
[00:19:31] Mosah: Yeah, tremendous. That's great advice. There's a tool that's needed to move, whether it be up laterally, re-engage in the workforce, and that's a resume. I know you have some thoughts, uh, around what stands out, how to build, how to utilize, and whether regardless of the industry that you're moving into, I'm hopeful that you can give us some insight into what resumes need to have, how they can be utilized, and maybe some things to watch out for.
[00:20:03] Jenny: Yeah. Well, I hired a brand new team this year. I'm basically running a startup within Google for my core job, my core operational role that sits between sales and engineering.
So I've seen hundreds and hundreds of resumes in my day, but even just recently, I have looked at a lot of resumes. So to me, there are three things that you want in the vast majority of your bullets on your resume, and that is numbers, context, and action.
So let's walk through that. Here's what not so good looks like: grew significant amount of revenue at my last company. So grew significant amount of revenue. It's vague. It's generic. It doesn't tell me much.
Okay, so let's take it one step further. Let's add the number. Grew revenue by 5 million dollars. Okay, well now we're getting somewhere.
Let's take it a step further. Let's add the context. Grew revenue by 5 million dollars, which was 20% year over year, despite economic headwinds.
Got two flavors of context there. 20% year over year gives us context as to what it was before, and despite economic headwinds gives us context to just how hard that environment must have been.
Now, let's take it all the way home. Grew revenue by 5 million dollars, 20% year over year, despite economic headwinds by launching weekly office hours for the customer, which had never been done.
So in that last one, we have the number, we have the context, and we have the action that you took. And by the way, like you said, this could be for any industry. This is for any role, any position. It's also a great internal tool for asking for that next promotion, asking for a raise, because I advise to any of your listeners to write some quarterly accomplishment bullets, whether your manager asks for them or not.
You might have your single annual review, but if you send a couple of bullets at the end of quarter. With things like that, with the number, the context, and the action you took, you are going to be in great shape when you go to have that annual review, and I recommend sending it to your manager at the end of each quarter, and then taking your best of greatest hits and creating a one sheet summary.
This doesn't have to be a 10-page document, a one sheet summary before your annual review to tell your own story, right? Everyone has a personal brand. Everyone has a personal brand, whether they like it or not, whether they know it or not. So you may as well own your personal brand and own your accomplishments as, as I've now taken it more toward the, how you can leverage it internally versus just on a resume.
[00:22:41] Mosah: Yeah, no, that’s great advice. And while resumes don't necessarily excite an entire population, they certainly get people like you and I excited. Oh, of course. Yes.
[00:22:50] Jenny: Of course, but we're weird .
[00:24:40] Mosah: We’re special. Yeah. The methodology that we use for resumes without making it sound formulaic, and we've mentioned this on previous episodes, is there's a very common acronym, STAR methodology.
The situation, task, action result. We tend to encourage our clients, and it's challenging depending on the role that someone inhabits, but to use RSTAR because the result is why someone is being hired. Anyone can be in a situation, literally, anyone can hold any role that doesn't require licensure, whether they, and they can be assigned a task and they can take a certain action, but it's all about the results, right?
That's what you're really being hired for. So I, I loved your example of walking people through the different sort of hearkening back to my law school days, right? Sort of you know a level one answer, if you will, versus what's actually being sought. Right? And that was a perfect example, so thank you for sharing that.
[00:23:51] Jenny: Sure. And I think what sometimes, you know, I talk about blockers that we've put in front of ourselves that limit our full potential. I think people get nervous. Oh, but I don't have $5 million I can talk about, but you can make anything quantitative, results can be anything quantitative. It could be number of meetings you led. It could be number of documents you wrote. It could be, uh..
[00:24:10] Mosah: Something you were a part of the team and organization as a whole. You, you know, we often encounter that with our lawyer clients, our legal folks who say, well, I don't have a book of business or I didn't actually do well, you were a part of, right? And so having that context, supporting sales is also really a key.
[00:24:30] Jenny: Absolutely. And what I heard you just flip is the candidate saying, well, I don't have a book of business. I don't have anything to say there, and you're advising you are a part of, to me is a confidence shift. That's someone saying, well, I don't feel like there's enough that I did.
I don't think there's anything that's interesting enough to write home about. That is a confidence shift. That is what I try to help people get over with these teeny tiny tactical strategies because let's be real I, I personally feel that it is not about the five-year plan. It is not about the 10-year plan.
I've never had a five-year plan. I've never had a 10-year plan. It is not these big, colossal decisions or strategic moves. It is about the big, small things you do day to day that add up to have the long-term effect you want to have. Every action you take, every email, you write, every conversation that could be more powerful.
Every meeting you lead that could be more purposeful are all casting votes for the future career you want to have. So to me, it's these teeny tiny actions. The results, the star method in your bullets, in your resume or your accomplishments doc. It's the two-sentence email that you sent to your boss's boss asking for time.
It's the actually sending it versus not sending it. These are the small actions that add up to be the long-term plan.
[00:25:58] Mosah: If you’re starting your executive level job search now and, and you've walked through some of those more practical tips, how do you see people engaging advisors? So it could be a coach, it could be a peer, it could be accessing information online. How do you see people sort of enriching themselves? What, what advice or guidance would you give to people starting their job search or starting to contemplate their next move?
[00:26:23] Jenny: Coaching is one of the most fulfilling and productive activities I've engaged in in the last several years as a coachee, as a beneficiary of an executive coach. I had my session with my executive coach yesterday and we talked about my need for external validation. I mean, that's big stuff. It's stuff that blocks me to be more productive.
It's stuff that blocks me to come into my own full potential. We talked about how I was offered the opportunity to, this is a big opportunity I was offered within Google and I turned it down. A couple years ago I would've been salivating at the opportunity, and so she helped coach me through, how do I say no to something really big?
If anybody wants to succeed, coaching, external guidance, uh, someone to keep you accountable is one of the most important things you can do. Sure, we can all get a gym membership and go to the gym. We sometimes we know the things we need to do to get a job. We have to have the right, you know, we have to get, hone our bullets on our resume and not have any spelling mistakes and be on LinkedIn, I think is an important one, which we can talk about too.
But an accountability partner and somebody who just as a fresh perspective and can see things that you don't always see is so helpful. The gym references. You can go to the gym, you can sign up for gym membership, but a personal trainer's going to tell you like, well, all right, you got to up the game now.
You got to do; you can do 20 reps now…
[00:28:04] Mosah: You don't really need to do 45 minutes of the neck machine. Right?
[00:28:06] Jenny: You don’t need to do 45 minutes of the, is it a neck massage machine? I'd love to do 45 minutes of that.
[00:28:10] Mosah: That's great. That'd be great. That I think that's probably recommended. One other quick question about, flipping the table having come out of hiring a lot of folks recently and building a whole new team, what are some of those things that you look at and say, wow, those are the qualities or those are the attributes that you need and want on your team? Forgetting about the sort of task specific skills and then what are, are some of those red flags where you go, wow, that person would've gotten it, but for ________ or, I can't believe they ________ fill in the blank. Any insight on that?
[00:28:45] Jenny: Well, I'm really passionate about the first part of that, which is what qualities make someone a better fit for a leadership role? Two things come to mind being a net positive energy contributor and humility. If you think of the leaders that you admire, and I'm sure you speak to lots of leaders that, that you admire or look up to, it's unlikely that someone will be a real downer.
A real downer just kind of bum you out or make you kind of feel depressed, right? I mean, yes, bring your whole self to work, but the leaders that I admire typically have high positive energy. It’s high versus low energy, and it's positive versus negative energy. If you think of that as a two by two.
People who inspire you. People who, even if it's gonna be a tough year, say we can get through this and here's our plan. And yes, buckle your seatbelts it's gonna be a bumpy year, but given the tenacity, the resilience, and the capacity and the talent that this team has shown, I know that you have the ability to thrive in this year.
That's the kind of high, you know, net positive energy contribution that I always admire in leaders, cuz that inspires me to feel like we can do it. We got this like a good coach, right? Think of it as a football coach or a swimming coach, they'd probably have a similar vibe prepping someone before that big game or that big meet.
And the second is humility. So two of my favorite things a leader can say are, I don't know and I was wrong.
You don't want to say that all the time. We want our leaders to have some answers and to, you know, be right a lot of the time. But when someone has the ability in a leadership role to have that presence of mind to say, I don't know, or I was wrong, that to me is a sign of strength, not weakness.
The other thing would go along that falls under the category of humility is the concept of servant leadership. So I'll offer a strategy there for leaders who are listening and I call this the support suffix. You're going to have lots of one-on-ones, one-on-one meeting that is with your direct reports.
At the end of every one-on-one meeting with your direct report, regardless of their level, I recommend closing your one-on-one conversation with this question. How can I support you this week? How can I support you this week? You are there to serve. That humility, that desire to help, that desire to remove their roadblocks, to boost them up when they need to be boosted up, to give them, you know, challenging projects that will help them thrive and grow to help them through that tricky customer dynamic or that stressful situation with a fellow employee at the company.
That is the stuff that makes you a fantastic leader, that creates followership for you of people who want to work with you. How can I support you this week?
[00:31:47] Mosah: So if people want to better understand where your thoughts are about the future, or they're interested in, you know, maybe contacting you or perhaps even booking you for a speaking engagement, anything you'd like to share about the types of work that you're doing outside of Googling?
[00:32:04] Jenny: I have a website, itsjennywood.com. That's, itsjenny wood.com. You can sign up for my biweekly newsletter. It's super short, under two-minute read. Really practical and tactical, similar to the stuff I shared in this conversation. And I, I post nearly every day on LinkedIn, so that's a good way to follow me as well.
I'm writing a book so in a couple years here, the book will come out and it'll be chock full of sample language you can use, you know, email examples. I can't emphasize it enough. I love the practical, tactical, small things that as I call my newsletters called big, small things. I love the non-pie in the sky, ivory tower type of advice.
I like the very specific, very tactical, very practical guidance that I can help others implement because that is what adds up to the total package of successful career. Ultimately in life I want to give everybody seven minutes back every day and seven very specific minutes. I want to give everybody back seven minutes of more sleep. That you're not tossing and turning thinking, what should I write to my boss's boss? I want to write the email for you and have you just go copy and paste it. I want to give seven minutes back of you not waking up in the middle of the night with a start thinking, oh my gosh, how do I network? How do I network while working from home? What do I do?
What's the first step I take? How do I do it if I'm an introvert? I want to give people seven minutes back of sleep by helping guide them through a great way to, you know, manage up when you're thinking through how to have that weekly one-on-one with your manager, what should I say, what should I prepare? And in that case, it's a, a one-on-one doc that you always prepopulate with business topics first, in my opinion, people topics second, and then some you know, career development topics.
[00:34:03] Mosah: One final question for you. If you could afford to give someone seven minutes back as far as utilization of their social media, which I know you do really well and very impactfully. In fact, I think that's what drew our attention to you initially, and as a potential guest and as someone who is leading the way, what seven minutes of advice would you give? Not that the answer has to be seven minutes, but how would you save someone seven minutes on that LinkedIn usage or social generally?
[00:34:34] Jenny: I did not use social media until a year ago, whatsoever. I did not ever post a picture on Facebook, or maybe when my kid was born, you know, my daughter was born five years ago, but I didn't have a login to LinkedIn.
My hands were shaking, my hands were literally shaking the first time I posted on LinkedIn just about a year ago, maybe slightly over. My hands were then shaking again the first time I posted on mobile. I was like, I can't possibly do this on mobile. What? I'm sure I'm going to do it all wrong. And now I post every day.
So my quick tip there is concept called ideas as content. This also came from Jason Pfeiffer, who I referenced earlier. Ideas as content means that anything can be content. So for example, today’s my ninth anniversary with my husband. So I wrote a post about the importance of bringing, you know, business strategy skills into your relationship.
So for example, at work as a leader, you would very easily delineate between who's pulling the data and who's presenting the data to the customer, right? Clear rules and responsibilities. Division of labor. So at home, are you intentional about who's doing the dishes and who's doing laundry? Right. So at work, you would never want to be super in the weeds about how someone executes their product launch, right?
That would be bad leadership, bad management. You'd want to trust them. At home, are you micromanaging how your partner plans your vacation? Right. So the post today was just thinking about how, oh, okay, it's my anniversary, what are some business skills that are kind of related to relationship skills? And I just wrote a couple lists of things that were related.
So the reason I share that is because any idea you have could be a LinkedIn post. You could see something as you're hiking, like I do every day. I invite people to feel no pressure to say something genius. It's more about the repetition of the habit, of putting your ideas out there. Oh, some will be great, some will be meh, but not everything you do can be better than average.
That's just not possible mathematically.
[00:36:38] Mosah: That's right. Well, for the record, I'm dishes and not laundry. I felt comfortable sharing that with you, Jenny. I don't know. You know, and right now it's only been an hour, but you know.
[00:36:50] Jenny: Love it.
[00:36:52] Mosah: Thank you so much for joining us. Jenny Wood of Google everyone please reach out, consider engaging for an exchange of ideas or perhaps to book Jenny and just certainly make sure you follow her on LinkedIn. Thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it.
[00:37:08] Jenny: Thank you. Such a highlight of my day to have this conversation.
Take care.
[00:37:13] Richard: Thank you for joining us on Hiring Insights. Remember, you can learn more about Top Talent Advocates and listen to other episodes by visiting toptalentadvocates.com and click on the Podcast link.
You can also email us at tta@toptalentadvocates.com