NetWORK

What about networking? What role does networking play in your leadership success and how did you go about building your network?

I really messed up at one point in my career around my network. And that was when I transitioned from Schwab to Salesforce. I worked a lot at Salesforce. We're going to say I worked round the clock at Salesforce for a lot of different reasons and I didn't have time for networking. I didn't have time for anything, at least in head that was my story I was telling myself. I didn't have time for networking. I don't have time to do anything except for this job and I was doing this job all the time. And so when I left Salesforce, I realized I had like lost my entire network. It was like, wow, that was a big mistake. And I swore to myself…

It's a big mistake in a sense the fact that you now had to go and work at rebuilding those relationships?

Yes. And rebuilding those relationships and really rebuilding a network kind of from scratch. And one of the things that I left Salesforce and I really wanted to get back closer to something more tied to financial services, which is what landed me at PayPal. And it was like my whole financial services network, where did it go? And this was before LinkedIn and all these kinds of things. So, I didn't have current phone numbers. I didn't have email addresses. So, I really said to myself, you have to make time. Doesn't matter how busy your job is. Doesn't matter how busy your family is, you have to make time, you have to go to the dinners, you have to go to the breakfast. You have to go to the conferences. When you're at the conference, you don't talk to people you know, you talk to people you don't know, using every single one of those opportunities to meet new people. And I joined a number of professional organizations you and I are both in, the international women's forum. It's like, okay, I'm going to go to the new connections lunch and then meet as many of the women as I can. I'm going to go to this conference and I'm going to really make an effort to build that network. And I think women's stereotypically, but I think it's true. It's a true stereotype. I'm someone who likes to build a relationship and get really deep. I want to be your friend for a long time. But men have historically had very shallow relationships with lots and lots of people where women have more deeper relationships with fewer people. So, I challenged myself I can do both and so that I have constantly cultivated ever since I left Salesforce.