In today’s job market, many are taking advantage of the “great resignation” to make a job change. What does this look like for a marketing operations professional who is now moving to a whole new culture and set of problems to solve?
Debra Schad, Senior Manager at Indeed.com, has just transitioned to a new role at the tech company after 15 years at Adidas. She knows she is coming in with a solid foundation, but more importantly, she is coming in with a fresh perspective on the marking operations puzzle.
Join us as Glenn and Debra discuss:
- The value of perseverance
- Data paralysis — how to avoid it and what your leadership needs to know
- Bringing an eye for sustainability into a new workplace
The value of perseverance
Debra’s values listed on her LinkedIn profile includes the word “perseverance” — a word that has carried her through her professional career, adapting to new cultures and company challenges. But what makes this word stand out for Debra is an important distinction in meaning that many might overlook:
Yes, it’s about not taking the easy path when a difficult one is more appropriate to your goal; it’s also about what happens when you fail: You can’t just get back up. You have to get back up and make sure you’re still on the right path.
Don’t let yourself get distracted by a new goal and let the one you’ve put all your time and attention into simply fall by the wayside.
One of the more challenging aspects of Debra’s career has been to persevere through her experience with data.
Data paralysis — how to avoid it and what leadership needs to know
Before joining Indeed, Debra worked with close to 20 teams across the organization globally. And while she mentions a strong need for foundation when it comes to addressing each team’s needs — always helping them at exactly the right moment — the accompanying challenge was to sift through the entirety of the 20 teams’ data.
But what made this different from your run-of-the-mill data collection?
- Different ways of communicating
- Different targets and goals for each
- Varying levels of structure
- Different thoughts around culture
The ability to speak the same language of reporting to 20 teams (who all look at data reporting differently) is undoubtedly complex. So, how can Debra even begin to tackle this challenge?
By zooming out and seeing the larger data puzzle.
From there, she can see how each team fits together — and what they need to do their job effectively, regardless of the variations in their approach to data.
This also means the data you do collect only has to speak to the specific priorities of each team. Otherwise, you’ll end up with too much data to make sense of anything.
“Sometimes you don't need all the data because sometimes that creates data paralysis.” — Debra Schad
But that subset of data that Debra pools for the 20 teams isn’t the end of the process. It must then be compressed again in an overview for executive leadership.
This process is about understanding what your leaders want to know most.
- How much you’re spending
- Return on investment
- Areas of most caution
Without a conversation with leadership about what’s most important to them, you can find yourself talking at them — presenting data that might be accurate, but not relevant.
Bringing an eye for sustainability into a new workplace
Despite Debra’s desire to change careers, it didn’t make the shift any less daunting. After 15 years of forming connections across the world, the idea of moving to a new culture and structure was a challenge — but one she knew she had to make.
“Many times in operations you have moments where we need people to say, ‘Hey, this is not going the way it should be going.’” — Debra Schad
One of the biggest challenges she hopes to dive into at Indeed is their sustainability efforts — a task she accomplished at Adidas simply by having an eye out for areas of improvement. In her experience, organizations have a long way to go on their sustainability journey.
“When you start to put together what that foundation and those processes and procedures look like,” Debra says you should “always have in the back of your head: How do we make more efficient use of our time together? How do we make sure that when we meet somewhere, it's not just cost effective, but it's sustainable?”
Debra’s biggest piece of advice for anyone trying to make a change with sustainability in their organization?
If you see something, say something. Only through her sole efforts of reaching out to existing partners was she able to bring sustainability to Adidas.
