Owning Your Career

 

Jenny Wood discusses the career-building program she founded at Google and shares practical advice on how to achieve personal growth, find mentors, thrive in uncertainty, build confidence, and write.

 

Episode Notes

Jenny Wood describes her career guidance as ‘common sense that’s rarely common practice.’ But through her creation and stewarding of the Own Your Career program at Google, she’s taught over 39,000 people and counting. And she’s now writing a highly anticipated book. So it’s safe to say that ‘common practice’ might not be that far away.

In her talk with Jesse, Jenny describes how 15 years at Google—where she grew from entry-level employee to operations executive—gave her the wisdom and experience to write a new playbook for any employee seeking to develop more confidence and chart their own journey to fulfillment. She touches on lessons she learned from resilient grandparents & industrious parents; her F-L-I-P method for knowing when it’s time to change roles; how to improve your approaches to networking and finding mentors; and ways to position yourself as a rockstar during organizational upheavals. No matter your industry or stage in life, Jenny’s advice is insightful, easy to remember and certain to transform how you think about your career.

(2:59) Lessons from a hard-working family

(5:05) Seeking growth from within during 15 years at Google

(8:11) Knowing when to F-L-I-P your role

(11:23) About the Own Your Career program

(13:10) Gifts and hooks: How to land an awesome mentor + new ways to network

(23:24) The keys to thriving during a reorganization at work

(29:18) On writing for an ‘everybody audience’

Guest Bio

Jenny Wood has grown from entry-level to an executive role at Google over her 15 years with the company, and she leads a large operations team that helps drive tens of billions of revenue per year. In 2021, she started a passion project within Google called Own Your Career. Through the program she founded, she’s trained 39,000 people on: acing a job search, building relationships, personal branding, effective email writing, landing the right mentor, maximizing workplace influence, and most importantly, increasing confidence.

A former Harvard Business Publishing writer, Jenny is now writing a book about going above and beyond to unapologetically achieve your goals. Jenny is an FAA-licensed private pilot, a daily hiker, an improv student, a tap dancer, and a zucchini bread connoisseur. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her two young children and her husband, Jon.

Helpful Links

+ Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Jenny Wood: While Own Your Career started as a women's initiative. It became very, very clear very soon that this was for everybody. All my career development tips are common sense. They're rarely common practice. So by doing these small things, you can be the one who rocks your career, whether you're a 23 year old entrepreneur, or a 48 year old at a Fortune 500 company, change is something that happens to you, but a transition is a process and the onus is really on each of us to do the work and to show up in the way we want to. Anything that can help somebody increase their confidence, remove those roadblocks we put up in front of us, reduce imposter syndrome. I basically want to give people the playbook and by open-sourcing my secrets that I've picked up along the way in 16 years in the tech industry, I truly think I can help people.

[00:01:10] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtrics studios, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas, fill some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences.

There are some people out there who just get it. And then there's a subset of those who get it, who can explain it. And then there's an even smaller group of those who can get it and explain it, who can scale their thinking by teaching it. It Here is, how to succeed in your career. And the who here, is my guest today, Jenny Wood. Jenny's a builder maker and doer, who's authored an incredible 16 year career at Google. And who's now a director of America's media operations at the company. But the reason I wanted to talk to Jenny today, wasn't just because of the beautiful career journey she's been on. It's because she curated and formalized the Own Your Career program, Google's fastest growing career development forum in 20 years. Jenny's practical yet profound strategies for growing in your career in big and small ways, deeply resonated with me as a brand builder and team builder.

And in today's episode, we talked about the balance of nature and nurture that helped Jenny grow into the person she is today. What's kept her at Google so long. What the Own Your Career program is, how it works and why it's been so successful? How to analyze whether a job change makes sense for you? The importance of always on networking in your career? How to succeed in a company reorg? The topics that galvanize Jenny to write about? And the launch of her new website, and her first book, we set the stage by talking about some incredibly important moments in her family's history.

[00:02:59] Jenny Wood: My paternal grandparents survived the Holocaust, left Europe with literally nothing. And after the Holocaust, my father also escaped Communist Hungary by walking through the forest at night, literally with his family's gold coins sewn inside of his ragged teddy bear. So from a young age, I remember never taking anything for granted. A lot of hard work. My mom was a therapist, a licensed social worker. My father owned a construction company as a general contractor. So hard work was something that I saw every day growing up. And in terms of my spirit, I was an ambitious little girl, a little unruly. Ambitious is something that I think I was just born with if we're talking nature versus nurture. But the story I just told about my family's history probably added a little bit of nurture to that ambition as well, or that desire to work hard and achieve things and create the life I wanted to create.

But I think there was natural ambition too. We had this magazine subscription sale contest in middle school. And I remember seeing the first prize, which was a hot air balloon ride. And I thought that sounds so cool. And so I went door to door in my neighborhood and got all the subscriptions I could. And then I went door to door in the neighborhood next to mine. And then I went door to door in every neighborhood, anywhere in the vicinity until I won, and standing in that hot air balloon basket. I remember looking down thinking, it feels really good to go after what I want and achieve it.

[00:04:33] Jesse Purewal: And you literally took off and you have been helping people take off for quite a time in your career. I want to talk a little bit about the arc of your time at Google. You started out in account strategy, you progressed up to director of an ops team across North and South America. And, now you lead Google's Own Your Career program. But before we get into that, let me just start out with what are the set of things that had to be true in your career and in your life for you to decide to keep electing to grow in your career at one company, at Google?

[00:05:05] Jenny Wood: Here's what the factors have been for me. I truly, truly in the depths of my heart, feel that Google is the best company in the world. And I say that now with a lot of external touchpoints, and I just can't stop feeling that Google is full of sharp people, kind people, with a huge emphasis of wanting to help each other. I genuinely think that Google's a bit magical, and my philosophy is that you can always be learning within your role or your company. So if I'm mentoring someone and they're unhappy, they might feel ready to jump ship, right? It's, I'm losing sleep at night Jenny, I am not happy in my role, I don't feel like my strengths and talents are aligned with the responsibilities I'm given. I need to find something new. I always guide that the first step is look within your role.

Look within your company. It's a heck of a lot easier to tweak something around the edges than to have all the transition costs, to apply for a new role, to have rejections, to get something, to go through a year of learning a new company or learning a new department. So there's so much power in the little things you could do. So that might look like a couple of things. It could be having a career conversation with your boss and simply telling them, hey, boss, here are two things I love about my current role. And here are two things that stress me out. Man, the power in that, or volunteering an hour or two a week to help the marketing team, if you're on the sales team, or even joining your company's women's organization, or if you're lucky enough to be at a company like Google that has employee resource groups, join the improv team like I did, or the photography group, or there's so many different ways you can round out your full experience at your company, regardless of whether it's a 12 person company or a 200,000 person company.

And that's why I've always found growth, success, excitement, newness, in being at Google, because I seek it out. I'm simply proactive about it and it's a technology company, so things are changing every hour. And so it keeps it new and fresh.

[00:07:08] Jesse Purewal: And when you're counseling people to think about what chairs might be available for them to sit in inside the organization they're currently at, whether you're thinking through, hey, just how do you shift gears within your current role? I think beneath that are some assumptions around, hey, Google's the company where it's a growth environment. Opportunity probably exceeds what any given individual thinks about in the course of their day-to-day work. And so it takes that moment of like, okay, well let me pull out of the day-to-day and think this through in the longer term, what might my manager empower me to do? What might they challenge me to do? How could I challenge myself?

But in some ways you could say that works really well for growth. Does it work well for businesses or categories that are going through transformation and transition? Are there certain circumstances in which people need to sit in order for you to err on the side of, hey, try to make something right in your current role? Or is it honestly like really everybody should start there just because of your point about the switching costs and discovering something new and you might not ever find X, Y, Z out about yourself if you don't try.

[00:08:11] Jenny Wood: I think that it depends on the situation, but there are many times where I coach people to shift. I even have a little trick or pneumonic for it I say, how do you know when it's time to flip roles? F-L-I-P stands for fun, learning, impact, and personal. Fun, are you having fun? Are you rolling your eyes in the team meeting saying tried that six quarters ago, that's never going to work, or are you genuinely excited about the new project that your team's about to tackle. L for learning, are you having step function learning, real true growth? Because at a lot of companies you're going to be learning incrementally every day, but I mean the step function learning where there are some emails in your inbox every day that make you a little nervous and uncomfortable, because if you don't have any emails in your inbox that make you nervous or uncomfortable, then you're probably not learning in a material way.

I is for impact, and that's business impact because if you're bored and you've been in your role for too long and your impact has waned, that's not good for the company, that's not good for your team, and it's certainly not good for your career. And then P, what's going on in your personal life? That's valid too. Is your job such a bad match that you're lying awake at night, not able to sleep, because you're so stressed about it or not spending any time with your family and friends because you're so overworked, and personal can also mean is your fiance in Ann Arbor in business school while you're in New York and you want to move to Ann Arbor within your company or to a different company to be with your fiance. That happened to me actually. And I didn't own up to how valid it was to have a personal situation that was inspiring.

A job change, my boyfriend at the time, now my husband started business school and I was in New York and I remember going to my director and I said, well, I'm really interested in moving into a strategy and operations team. And I think there are a lot of new opportunities in Ann Arbor and I'm really excited about the business growth there. And she said, Jenny, isn't your boyfriend John starting business school in Ann Arbor? And I was like, oh yeah, but that's not the impetus for my move. No, no, no. I would never do that. And she's like, Jenny, it's okay to want to move to Ann Arbor because your boyfriend's starting business school and you want to be with him and you see a life together with him.

And I was like, oh, okay, yeah, you're right. But I couldn't admit at the time that there was this personal situation that was prompting my desire to change role. So that's why I throw P in there as personal circumstances are okay, and valid and encouraged to bring to the table. Bring your whole self to work. So how do you know when it's time to change jobs or flip jobs? F-L-I-P for fun, learning, impact, and personal.

[00:10:48] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. I love how much the newfound focus for some leaders on empathy and the ignition of what was there in terms of empathetic DNA all along has been reignited by all the energy with remote work and things happening post-pandemic. So love hearing that story. And would that we only heard more. So as you thought about some of those F-L-I-Ps in your own life, what turn out to have been some more of those career or life investments or moments along the way over these 15 years at Google that helped empower you to take on this leadership role?

[00:11:23] Jenny Wood: It's more to me about the always on day-to-day actions I take as opposed to one or two or three paramount moments that were the foundation or the scaffolding of what's to come. So I love the question because it gives me an opportunity to share how I approach these micro -moments day to day, which is so much of what the Own Your Career program at Google is about. And I should mention, the Own Your Career program is three things. It's six PDF tip sheets, each covering a topic with, let's say 10 to 15 tips each. Some of those topics are things like stakeholder management or personal branding or influence tips, or how to get your next gig. That's number one. Number two is it's a 60 minute session, that is 30 minutes of my favorite tips from those six PDF tip sheets.

And then the second 30 minutes is Q&A with me and a fellow executive at Google, another leader or VP at Google. And then the third thing is it's a biweekly newsletter that is super short into the point. It's a two minute read and it's just a quick tip and allows people the opportunity to sign up for a two week challenge to try to use that tip. And then they automatically get an email two weeks later that says, did you do it? Yes or no? So we create some accountability. So in those three things, the six PDF tip sheets, the 60 minute session and the biweekly email, every one of those tips is emphasizing a micro moment that you can focus on in your day-to-day. So that's why I say to this question, it's less about some big moments that were colossally formative, and it's more about, it's just little stuff I do day-to-day.

So I'll share two things that I think have helped me get to where I am. One is good mentors, and two, is always on networking. When finding a good mentor, my favorite tip is to use something called gifts and hooks when pitching a mentor. So let's say you write an email to them saying, hey, Jesse, I listen to your podcast. I thought it was awesome. I'm a junior entry level person at your company at Qualtrics. And I would love for you to mentor me. I could send that email to you and maybe you'd say yes, but a more effective way to land a great mentor is to use something called gifts and hooks. Gifts, what am I going to offer you? And hooks, specifically what I need. Because to just say, hey Jesse, will you mentor me? That could be a big ask for you. You've got a lot going on. You're a super smart guy. You've got people who want your time, but if you employ gifts and hooks, it might sound something like this.

Hi, Jesse, I've listened to your podcast. I admire you so much. I would love for you to take me on as a mentee. The hook is I want your help thinking through how I could launch my own podcast, and the gift I'm going to give you is that I understand the millennial market, I'm right out of college and you're a little bit further on in your career. And I think that understanding your audience is important to you. And you might want to think about what's important to millennials and I can offer you that perspective. You're basically saying not only what you need specifically, but what you offer because oftentimes people who are more junior in their careers just throw up their own roadblock of, I don't have enough to offer to someone senior at my company, or I am too intimidated by how smart they are or how successful they are, this senior person in my company. Or why would that senior person waste their time on me who's 27, right? Or 23 or 38, right? Doesn't really matter how old you are, where you are in your career.

It's this imposter syndrome and this false belief that I don't have as much to give as this person who's more successful or established has to offer me, but it's simply not true. There is so much any individual can give to anybody regardless of tenure or role or title.

[00:15:11] Jesse Purewal: I think mentoring is such an interesting use case to speak specifically about, there's somebody in the organization right now that I'm working with as a mentor. And this person started our first couple of biweekly one-on-ones with this sort of, I'm not even sure that this is the right room for me to be in. You've been doing this that long. I've only been doing it this long. And after the first couple of meetings, he happened to say, here's a book that I was on vacation and somebody gave to me and I read on the plane and it was an insight he had from a book. And one thing led to another, led to another, led to another. And all of a sudden I'm like, I've got my ideas for my next three guests for the fourth quarter on the podcast.

And it was just being yourself and being a little bit uninhibited around any gap or any delta you perceive between your tenure, your experience, the gift you have to give, all of these kinds of things, treat it as if you had been at a mixer and just happen to meet the person in the room. You get talking, sometimes the stricture that we have next to our names, or next to our titles are on our business cards for those who still carry those, put so many obstacles in the way that actually aren't really there in our brains, but they're there in these processes and behaviors. So I love the invitation you are giving. And I would just second it by giving that short anecdote to say mentoring in particular with the gifts and the hooks, I think is a really powerful metaphor.

[00:16:36] Jenny Wood: And I love what you've said about tearing down those inhibitions, because so much of the work I do to help others is just about helping them increase their confidence and releasing those inhibitions.

[00:16:48] Jesse Purewal: So what about number two? Jenny, give me something on the always on networking, which I love that frame of reference by the way, always on networking.

[00:16:55] Jenny Wood: So you think about networking as this icky, stressful situation at a cocktail party with sweaty palms, gracefully trying to enter an exit circles of conversation, right? But networking looks really different now in our digital age, at a lot of our companies, especially internal networking within your company which is so colossally important. Networking is simply setting up a 30 minute video call or phone call or in person meeting with someone who you work with, who you know, but want to get to know better. Someone who's smart, interesting, helpful, you name it. And I try to do this in an always on way. And we even developed something through the Own Your Career program. And a lot of the stuff I'm mentioning today is the tips are right and the resources are only available to Google employees. But I am writing a book. I am working on an external website where I will not share the same tips that I share at Google because that's the Google Own Your Career program, but I'm broadening it out to be overall, how do I help people get what they want?

So a lot of this in different forms and different ideas will become publicly available, but something we have within Google right now is just a little spreadsheet that people can make a copy of called the 12 by 12. And it's simply to identify 12 people you want to have a meeting with in 12 months, just 12 people a year, super low barrier to entry. I love James Clear's work. He and I happen to share the same literary agent, the amazing Lisa DiMona. So I respect his work and look at it a lot. And he mentioned something in Atomic Habits, his most recent book called implementation intentions. And he references a study they did in the UK where there were two groups and they were looking at whether writing something down, made you more likely to do something.

And, oh my gosh, the results were baffling. Not surprising, because I'm familiar with the concept of implementation intentions, But I love this example. So both groups were told to exercise for the week. One group was just told to exercise, the other group was told to exercise, but to write down what time, what day and where they were going to exercise? I'm simplifying the study. But the control group that was not told to write it down, did 38% of the time. The variable group that was told to write down what day time and where did it 91% of the time. So simply by writing something down and in this case, writing down the 12 people you want to meet in 12 months, simply one person per month, has a dramatic increase in the outcome of you actually doing it. It's one thing to have the idea, but then your inbox, and your meetings and that deadline for Friday all get in the way. But by writing down 12 people you want to meet in 12 months, it increases the likelihood that you'll do it.

[00:19:38] Jesse Purewal: Love it, love the hot tip there in terms of how to make that actually happen and materialize. Jenny Own Your Career is Google's fastest growing career development forum in 20 years. What are the key components that you believe have made it so successful?

[00:19:55] Jenny Wood: It's wildly practical. An example is if you're looking at your to-do list on a Monday morning, and there are 12 items there, an example of an Own Your Career tip is use the four D's to work through that to-do list. What are you going to do? Delay, drop, and delegate. Now, Jesse, you might say, Jenny, what does that have to do with your career? Well, I will say in your career, you should say yes to the big and no to the small. The big is leading the 2023 strategy plan for your organization. The small is being the 19th person to reply all for Sally's birthday, happy birthday, Sally. And I'm not saying you shouldn't support Sally in her birthday, but maybe give her a high five when you see her in the hall, you don't necessarily need to pile on to that long thread.

And those are the kinds of things to me that are small and that could be taken off your to-do list. So you can free up your time for the big, because the big are way more important for your career than the small. And the tips are practical like that. I said wildly practical because they are these moments that keep people up at night, that stress people out, oh, it's Sunday night. I can't sleep because there's so much on my to-do list. But if you look at those 12 and you apply the four Ds, what am I going to do? Delay, delegate, and drop. And then write the word next to each one, Monday morning first thing on each of those 12 line items, do, then another do, then another drop, then a drop, and then a delay, another delay, that's going to whittle your to-do list from 12 to say eight or maybe even five.

And that's good for your career because it helps you focus. Another example is let's say you want to have a career conversation with your manager. You want to talk about getting that next promotion. You might want to ask for a raise. You want to take on more responsibility. So if I think of the contrast between theoretical career advice and practical career advice, theoretical is you should have a career conversation at least once a year with your boss. The Jenny flavor of that is think about how to make that career conversation a, happen, b, intentional, and c, really darn effective. Think about what the meeting title in the calendar invite looks like when you want to have that conversation.

Bad looks like this. Let's say you're my boss, Jesse, Jenny one-on-one. This is what good looks like, a calendar invite that has the title, Jesse, Jenny quarterly career conversation. And then the body of that calendar invite in the notes section says, I'd like to spend the full 30 minutes talking about my career development. Oh man, what a signal that sends, and then I can really get out of it what I want to. And so it's freeing up the time for that in a very intentional way.

[00:22:40] Jesse Purewal: I have found that the preface to the conversation is super important and relatively low effort, high return situation. So Jenny, one of the things that I wanted to discuss with you was you're heuristic on how to succeed in a reorganization. We're in a time in the economy where a lot of teams are transitioning, a lot of businesses are going through transformation. There are a lot of stop star continue, or 4D style conversations happening within teams and across companies. The word of the moment is uncertainty, right? And so in light of that circumstance that some people might be contending with now, what's your view on how to not just survive reorganizations, but actually thrive in them?

[00:23:24] Jenny Wood: Yeah. So much of this is intentionality in how you show up because let's be honest, reorgs are hard, they're stressful, they're unnerving, right? It's who moved my cheese? And basically a change is something that happens to you. But a transition is a process and the onus is really on each of us to do the work and to show up in the way we want to. I love the expression at your company. One should think about being a net positive energy contributor. And there are so many ways that can show up after a reorg because that's a time when you might be feeling crummy. Listen, some people in a reorg get the long end of the stick, and maybe you're feeling great, but oftentimes people get the short end of the stick or just feel uncertain and nervous, and uncertainty is anxiety producing.

So it's a fair feeling and technology companies like yours and mine go through a lot of reorgs and a lot of changes in a lot of transitions. So I do have a heuristic around this. It's called reorg, R-E-O-R-G, which stands for react, evaluate, overinvest, resist, and grow. But I want to focus on overinvest. This one's my favorite because to me, it's the crux of how you can show up like a rockstar and how a reorg can actually propel your career and help you thrive in it as opposed to feel like it's happened to you, and it's a really bad thing.

Let's say your company is reorging from a regional structure to a product specific structure. So you used to have red, yellow, green widgets, all regionally focused. And now you have everybody focused by the widgets first across all regions. So if you are someone from the America's region and you are now on a team focusing both on green widgets from the European region, you might say, hey, you might send out an email three days after that reorg and say, hey, 16 people on my newly formed team focusing on just green widgets across all geographic areas.

I'm the green widget expert. You all know red and yellow and blue widgets, but I'm the green widget girl. So I've dropped 60 minutes on calendar that will allow me to up-skill you on how green widgets work. So you're over-investing even though it's probably hard thinking, all my friends, where are my old team and I liked my old manager. Well guess what? Your new manager is going to see that you're leaning in, that you are on the bus, that you are being a net positive energy contributor and not just rolling with the reorg, but helping other people get up to speed in this new structure. Or it could look like a new work stream that helps build culture, they need a comms team and you voluntarily that. So there are a lot of ways you can lean into the reorg and overinvest there to ultimately benefit the business and your career at the same time.

[00:26:05] Jesse Purewal: Jenny we've hit on a lot of different topics today that happen to be subjects that you write about, but there are many that we won't get a chance to touch on specifically today, thriving as a working mom or respecting both introversion and extroversion or growing from mistakes, what particular topics really galvanize you and move you and make you grab the pen and write?

[00:26:29] Jenny Wood: Anything that can help somebody increase their confidence, remove those roadblocks we put up in front of us, reduce imposter syndrome. I basically want to give people the playbook, and by open-sourcing my secrets that I've picked up along the way in 16 years in the tech industry, I truly think I can help people because it's both the people study. Before I was at Google, I was a researcher at Harvard Business School studying three things, one, negotiations for a year, two, organizational behavior for a year, and three, strategy and technological substitution for a year. And in that second year doing organizational behavior, I just loved studying what made people tick? How do you get someone to, yes? How do you influence in the right way? How do you promote your work tastefully, not shamelessly? What drives people? So I love this day-to -day study of people.

I feel like every email in my inbox, every time I hop on a one-on-one video call with somebody or a phone call, I'm always just soaking in what makes people tick. And then there's the data-driven side, which is, I love knowing what people most want help with. So every tip I've developed at Google, or certainly every one of those six PDF style tip sheets are based on wisdom of what employees tell me they want. So we're really big on surveys and data collection. I have thousands and thousands of data points that tell me what people need the most help with and where I can offer the most. And then I just write tips based on that. So it's half people-driven and then half purely data and numbers based on, oh, this is where people need the most help. This is what I'm happy to write about.

But ultimately a lot of what I do is just writing a playbook, like here's what a good email versus a bad email looks like, or here's what a good first slide in a deck looks like versus a terrible first slide in a deck looks like, and I will write both and draft both and say, this is good, this is bad. I love examples. And I do this on social media a lot too, of this is good, this is bad because it makes it so tangible for people, and nothing is rocket science in what I share, everything I've shared in this conversation has been pretty basic, but I would offer that while all my career development tips are common sense, they're rarely common practice. So by doing these small things, you can be the one who rocks your career, whether you're a 23 year old entrepreneur or a 48 year old at a Fortune 500 company, because they apply equally in both cases, they are all common sense, but they're rarely common practice.

[00:28:54] Jesse Purewal: Jenny, what perspectives do you think being a woman has lent to your work, your thinking, in your style? I'm conscious that working through a technology company for the past 15 plus years has probably not been without its challenges. So what do you think turn out to be the influences of going through your career, going through your life as a woman?

[00:29:18] Jenny Wood: It's an interesting question because when my agent Lisa, my ghost writer, David and I sat down to figure out the audience for the book I'm writing, one big question was, is this a female audience? Or is it an everybody audience? And I was adamant that this was an everybody audience. While Own Your Career started as a women's initiative or partnering with our women's group at Google, it became very, very clear very soon that this was for everybody. That was simply because the feedback from men was just as strong as the feedback from women. So practically I just wanted to fish where the fish were and say, well, if everybody is using this and benefiting from it, why would we cut off half of the audience for this book? I will also say that being a female leader gives me an element of empathy that I might not have just because I can see both sides of the privilege coin.

So I identify as a white female American leader influenced by American business culture. So first of all, I know those biases. When I talk about these topics with folks in Latin American countries or in Asian countries, there are real nuances that I encourage people to integrate and make these approaches feel authentic to them or their culture or their upbringing. For example, in Latinx communities, there's a big emphasis on we, we did this, we accomplished this together. Whereas one of my tips might say, take credit in your bullets that you write for your performance review to your boss. I led this department, not some weak language, like I co-led and helped and had a little bit of a hand in the editing, no take responsibility for the amazing stuff you did and share that with the world.

So I want to honor these different cultures and encourage people to tweak as it makes sense for their culture to be authentic. But I say, I identify as a white American female because as a female, I've definitely had some headwinds as a leader at Google and as a white person, I'm sure I've had some tailwinds. So I think that being a female leader gives me an extra dose of empathy to be able to see both sides of the privilege coin.

[00:31:08] Jesse Purewal: Thanks for that reflection. So you are in the midst of standing up a website, you are in the midst of writing a book. So some really exciting stuff going on. Talk to me about what's in the offing here on the site and in the book and what you're doing with themes and stories and titles and all the rest of it?

[00:31:26] Jenny Wood: So I'm super excited. My new website has just launched and it's, itsjennywood.com. That's I-T-S JennyWood.com, and I'm working on the copy for it today. And here's the draft of what the landing page is going to say, which should give you a sense of where we're headed with the book. In 2011, I was single and living in New York City. I spotted an attractive guy across the train for me. I wanted to talk to him, but I was too nervous. Then he got off the train, just as the doors were about to close, something took over me. I leapt up for my seat, chased him down the platform and gave him my number. We got married three years later, the New York Times wrote about us. That moment taught me something. When I sit idly by, I get nothing. But when I chase what I want, I create the life I want.

I took the same approach at work. It changed everything. I started taking on mentees, they told me they'd lay awake at night too wondering why they didn't speak up with good ideas. They were too nervous to ask senior leaders for help. They didn't know how to tastefully self-promote. I'd been just like them and I knew I could help. So I started pushing them. And as I did my own career grew, from entry level to operations executive, to founder of Own Your Career. I studied how small daily actions could increase, impact and influence. I created a playbook to increase people's confidence, so they could thrive professionally and personally and soon other teams at other companies were asking me to push them out of their subway cease as well. And now I want to help you.

[00:33:04] Jesse Purewal: The amount of help that you've provided to me today, to our audience today, it's going to scale. And Jenny, I can't wait to get my hands on the book, ready to do a little lightning round Jenny to bring us home?

[00:33:14] Jenny Wood: Totally.

[00:33:15] Jesse Purewal: All right. Give me a brand you can't imagine living without?

[00:33:18] Jenny Wood: Goodr sunglasses, they're 25 bucks prepare. I've got two small kids, they get ruined all the time and they have such fun coffee and marketing and total irreverence. If you try to click on their customer service bot, it says, what can my merry band of Flamingo bots help you with? They just don't take themselves too seriously.

[00:33:36] Jesse Purewal: What's a book you like to recommend?

[00:33:38] Jenny Wood: Free Time by Jenny Blake. It's an incredible book that will literally give you more free time no matter what business you're in.

[00:33:45] Jesse Purewal: Who's a builder that you personally admire?

[00:33:48] Jenny Wood: Oh, Jason Feifer, who's the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine and he has a new book coming out in September called, Build For Tomorrow, literally a builder. It talks about how you adapt to change. And he talks about these four processes you go through. One, panic, two, adaptation, three, new normal, and four, wouldn't go back.

[00:34:07] Jesse Purewal: And we've hit on it a bit today. But summarize for me your secret sauce. What's the unique blend of stuff that makes you do you?

[00:34:14] Jenny Wood: My ingredients are unexpected boldness, palpable energy, genuine desire to see others succeed. And I don't know if the audio will pick it up, there's an ice cream truck going by my house. So I might add happiness because that just makes me feel very happy right now.

[00:34:29] Jesse Purewal: That's so great. If you had to leave people with one piece of advice, what's the most salient thing for folks to take from today?

[00:34:36] Jenny Wood: I mentioned Jason Feifer's new book coming out in September, Build For Tomorrow. And I was lucky enough to read an early copy. And on page 199, he writes, "Lean into your strengths rather than dilute your strengths with all the things that you're not good at."

[00:34:53] Jesse Purewal: Well, Jenny, you have leaned into strengths. You have helped our audience get a little bit better at potentially a lot of things. So thanks a ton for doing it and let's do it again soon.

[00:35:02] Jenny Wood: Jesse, thank you for having me. I think you are absolutely brilliant. I adore your podcast. I hope it grows and grows and grows. And this was just an absolute joy and privilege to be here today. So thank you.

[00:35:13] Jesse Purewal: Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and a review, and tell a friend. Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics studios original, hosted an executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. An awesome team of people puts this show together, including our show writer, Todd Bagnull, and our head of social media, Chelsea Hunersen. From StudioPod Mediain San Francisco our show coordinator is Nicole Genova. Editing and music are by producer Sterling Shore, and executive producer Katie Sunku Wood, with sound engineering by Ryan Crowther. At VaynerTalent in New York, Samantha Heapps, Hanna Park and Yvonne Lynn provide publicity and promotional support. The shows designers are Baron Santiago, and Vinsuka Chindavijak. Our website is by Gregory Hedon. Photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Ben Hawken, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.

Season 5Jesse PurewalJenny Wood, Jesse Purewal, prioritization, mentorship, uncertainty, future of work, google, tech, career advice, resilience, employee experience