Intro (00:00):

Welcome to The Taylor Ten. A fast-paced, 10 minute deep dive into the minds of those shaking up the marketing world, bringing you the sharpest insights, boldest ideas and breakthrough trends driving the industry forward. So tune in, get inspired, and stay ahead.

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Maeve (00:17):

Hello, I am Maeve Hagen and welcome to The Taylor Ten. I'm here with Susan Oguche to talk what it means to curate a career with both purpose and agility and to learn from her journey across big brands, team sports, and nonprofit work. All in just 10 minutes. Susan, thank you so much for joining me.

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Susan (00:38):

Thank you so much for having me.

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Maeve (00:40):

Your career path has been anything but linear yet purpose really seems to be at the center of it. Let's dive in to see how you've navigated your evolution while staying really true to your values. So first up, looking back across your career from big brands to sports, to nonprofits, what's the common thread that ties it all together?

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Susan (01:02):

Yeah, I think there's two through lines across my career. One is that, can I say I'm a failed journalist? Absolutely. I really came into the field of communications because I truly love words. I love communicating, I love being able to tell a story, and I think I was one of the fortunate people to find this career and to be able to make a living, essentially telling some of the greatest stories in the world. So what's always kind of attracted me to a new opportunity is just what is it about this brand, about this product that the world needs to know? I know when I left Abbott and went to go work at a startup, obviously Abbott's a large pharmaceutical company, I worked on their more of their nutrition pediatric side to go into a food tech company when I moved to Home Chef, people were like, I was the CPG person.

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(01:59):

I had always worked for these bigger brands, but Home Chef was really about helping bring people together around a table and everything that means community togetherness, family health, nutrition. And so being able to help them get that story out into the world was something I was really proud of and excited about and energized about. And that's really been everything from my time at P&G to my time at Nike or even most recently with the NBA at the Cavs. It's really been about being a storyteller, and I think the second one is really what you hit on at first is really around this idea of purpose. I believe that we're all put here on the earth for a reason and we don't always get to figure out at the start what that purpose is. We're not all the Dalai Lama that's like brought to the world to bring peace and unity. A lot of us have to live this life to figure out what that is. And for me, I've been able to do some of that through my work. I got a spark of it in my early days at Procter and Gamble, working with the P&G Foundation and helping them really launch their platform at the time, which was Live, Learn, and Thrive. And that was really impactful. It was truly about living. How do we provide infrastructure resources so that people can survive some of the roughest parts of the world?

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(03:22):

How do we create a system where people can learn? So supporting education, going into schools, coming alongside teachers, providing instruction where it's needed and then thrive. Those are the things that make life worth living. The things that really help bring joy to people, whether it was through investment in sports or investment in young girls and giving them opportunities that they might otherwise not have. And that was sort of my foundation in the professional world, and it helped me understand that this idea of for more than profit, this idea that you could do work that created value for shareholders and investors, but that also had a deep and lasting impact in the world was something that I've never left since then.

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Maeve (04:12):

What does it mean to curate a career with purpose instead of just chasing the next opportunity? Clearly you haven't just chased things. You've really sought out what you want in your next experience. For those listening, what does that mean? What does that look like? How have you been able to curate a career with purpose?

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Susan (04:31):

We all have to make a living, right? So I know that it's a privilege to even be able to have a conversation about curating a career because a lot of people just have to do the job that they have to do to be able to feed their families. I do feel really blessed in that I landed in a great place. I did not plan to start my career at Procter & Gamble. I feel like that is one of the blessings of my life in that I was able to work with people who helped me understand what I was good at, what I was interested in, and what my non-negotiables were in my professional life. And I think having that foundation of what's really important to you, whether it is..some people are like, I really, really want to work in that high power job so I can accumulate resources and be able to provide for my family. And some people are like, I want to be able to go and make an impact on communities that look like me. And for me, I was able to kind of come up with what those things meant for me and make choices based on that. And it also meant saying ‘no’ a lot. And so I think a big part of it, of curating a career with purpose is understanding fundamentally what is of value to me.

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(05:40):

And for me, it wasn't ever about ‘I need to work at this company with this name’. It was really about the type of work that I got to do and the people I got to impact. But then I think the second one is being really okay saying ‘no’ to things that are not with that, and having a lot of confidence in the fact that no is a complete sentence. I think those are the ways that you can continue to curate something that feels purposeful and that feels really authentic to who you are.

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Maeve (06:10):

Which skills or leadership traits I should say have proven essential no matter where you've worked, you've been in roles now in these leadership roles and you've gathered a tool bag of skills, what has been essential and consistent across all of your roles that you continue to take into your next opportunity or whatever you're doing next.?

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Susan (06:34):

I always like to say that an underrated trait is just being easy to work with, likable and

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Maeve (06:41):

Nice,

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Susan (06:42):

Adaptable. I think one of my leadership philosophies is work hard and be nice, and the word nice kind of has its own, its own baggage, especially as women and all of that. But I think more than just about kindness. It truly is about understanding that you're working with people that we're all focused on accomplishing the same goal, that we're on the same team, and entering every day with that sense of assuming the best intentions of people. I would say that's kind of what I try to walk into every day with, because the work of a leader is hard. The work of trying to move an organization in a direction strategically or otherwise is really, really challenging. But being able to have a sense of other people's humanity, know what people's kids' names are, just the basic things that make life a little bit easier for all of us as we're in the workplace, I think is something that's important and that leaders can really truly model that

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(07:48):

obviously the work is important, but we as humans in a relationship with one another, spending so much time in our day together is also really important. I think another leadership trait that's essential is being willing to understand very deeply what the business of the organization is. One person, obviously in my previous role with the Cavaliers, used to say that it was really important to be in the bowels of the business and to understand how your business functions, how it makes money, how everyone at every level does their work, not from a sense of micromanaging, but I think one from just a sense of respect and reverence and understanding what people are going through in their roles. Also, there are going to be things where you are sitting at a level of leadership and you're trying to understand why a process isn't working properly or why a part of the business isn't operating in the way that it should. And to be able to understand the organization well enough to point out where the bottlenecks might be, where people might have points of frustration, where jobs are not being done as efficiently as they could be. I think that that's a really important leadership trait, and we have a lot of leaders today that want to operate at the 50,000 foot view, and that's also great. But I do think that a true leader, someone, when it's needed, is willing to roll their sleeves up and get in the trenches with their team to find a solution.

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Maeve (09:18):

If listeners walk away with one lesson, just one about building a purposeful, agile career, what should it be?

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Susan (09:24):

Throughout my career, I've had to have the courage at times to say, you know what? I'm actually going to try to look for something else that feels in this moment. Maybe it's just in this season of my life that feels more consistent with what I need, what I feel like I can contribute where I am as a leader. I think that courage and that conviction and the sense of what's the best that could happen and that optimism, that another opportunity is around the corner, is something that's really essential if you want to be able to cultivate purpose in your career.

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Maeve (09:55):

Thank you, Susan. I appreciate it very much. Thank you.

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