Vote for You: Take Your Seat at the Table

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Copyright © 2023 Marnie Maton

All rights reserved.

Vote for You:

Take Your Seat at the Table

ISBN 979-8-88926-519-1 Paperback

ISBN 979-8-88926-520-7 Digital Ebook

Dedication

For my son, Dallas,

who sharpened my number two pencils for me.

Contents

Introduction: Your Guide

Chapter 1. Bro Culture

Chapter 2. How to Find the Right Job for You

Chapter 3. Your Squad of Allies

Chapter 4. How to Be Seen and Succeed at Work

Chapter 5. Unemployed

Chapter 6. Side Hustles to CEO

Chapter 7. Why Not Vote for You?

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Introduction:

Your Guide

In October 2021, a former colleague and dear friend of mine, Miranda Lee, had planned a trip to visit Los Angeles. Miranda invited another former teammate, Reese Chang, from the boutique ad agency in Santa Monica where we all worked together. The agency was a feeder to bigger things. Reese had just been promoted to senior manager at META—then Facebook. Reese and I were seated at a bright yellow table at Roberta’s, a popular pizza spot. We did the expected Instagram story, toasting our wine glasses in a happy cheer.

Reese had a bright smile. She was always chicly dressed—this time in a khaki jumpsuit. She and I excitedly caught up over a Spanish Albarino as we waited for Miranda. She spoke about her career in Singapore for META, missing global traveling, and her elopement during COVID-19. We were both account executives for a global automotive business, but we had not been close at the agency. At dinner, Reese mentioned that as a woman and Asian American woman, she didn’t quite fit into the rest of the META leadership because extremely popular male teammates seemed to rise much faster through the ranks. She knew she worked hard, had expanded her responsibilities, and enjoyed a good relationship with her boss, but she admitted she did not know how to reach the next level. I nodded, fully empathetic of her situation. I too am an Asian woman, a mother, and was also a global head of growth marketing at the time. I never quite felt like I fit in with my senior leadership teams—primarily men—either. In that moment, Reese probed:

How did you do it, Marnie?

I struggled with this my entire life. This feeling of being stymied, not fitting in, or not enough. I felt compelled to write this Vote for You guide on how to take your seat at the table because I recall how badly I needed a road map to manage my career when I was starting out in my twenties. The path seems very straightforward as we move from four years of high school, four to five years of college, and then graduate school for specialization in our intended professions. For me, as the daughter of immigrants, that predetermined path was college followed by law school, medical school, engineering, or real estate. When I graduated from The George Washington University in 2000, big tech did not exist as we know it today. Instead, it was AOL and Yahoo! with Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (FANG) in their nascent stages. But even when I reached my thirties and forties, I still found myself searching for a better road map to manage my career.

I immediately felt the impostor syndrome and started to say I didn’t do it. But, in fact, I had done it, even though my career did not follow the traditional path of consultant to business school to marketing leader at a global company. Starting out my career as a former strategy consultant at Accenture and Deloitte, a boutique ad agency in Santa Monica, and then a marketing manager turned executive at a tech company, a mom, divorcée, and first-generation Filipino American daughter, I had done it my entire life. In short, I took an unexpected path where I was constantly taking on new challenges at work to finally make it to chief marketing officer (CMO).

This guide is intended to help you unlock your own path. This path has not been prescribed by your parents or grounded in competition with what your friends have achieved. Rather, it’s about defining what you want from your career and life. This guide will help you understand how to climb the wobbly corporate ladder, find a new job, step out and start your own side hustle, or play with a passion like writing a book in the early morning hours. It will also remind you to take care of yourself and honor your own body and spirit. This road map is intended for working women of all colors, those who are just starting out, and those who feel like they’re stalling out on the corporate ladder. Having spent thousands of dollars meeting with executive coaches and talking to friends and family to accomplish a number of my most ambitious goals, I summarize the lessons I’ve learned along the way to help women like yourself who are looking to move up, leap ahead, and attain personal fulfillment along the way.

Although luck can play an important role in our lives, the ability to recognize the opportunities in your current role or a new one, and to propose measurable outcomes for yourself and your company, are important to your growth. Building a plan, executing on a plan, taking total ownership, and then doing it all over again at home and at work is also important. But these are not easy tasks. In fact, you may feel like I did after taking all those steps—exhausted and uncertain in how to make a change or pick what to do next. I was burnt out and running from Zoom meeting to playdates to an endless schedule of obligations, especially as a parent of a first grader right before COVID-19. When COVID-19 hit, the Zoom meetings increased in volume with fewer breaks to reset. I often felt resentful during the COVID-19 pandemic work-from-home years, and it showed up physically with tense shoulders, a sharp voice, and resting bitch face in video conference calls. But I needed a path forward during the COVID-19 darker days, and I didn’t have a guide to steer me in any direction. What surprises me the most as I read about successful women is they will say they just fell into new big opportunities. But this is true and not true. I believe a significant amount of planning took place to make the big role happen. Before luck happened, there was a vision, goal, and plan put in place to set things in motion.

For instance, I had a conversation with Olive, a successful non-profit consulting business owner and friend. She worked in business development at a nationally recognized art museum. Her boss in the role literally died on the job. After assuming her boss’s job, Olive found she couldn’t sleep and felt perpetually anxious. So she wrote down her list of things—we’ll call them non-negotiables—she needed next in her life and work. It was a deliberate exercise and one that I heard echoed from a good friend, Christina, who transitioned from a consultant to the job of her dreams through her own list of things she wanted in her future role and lifestyle. I was inspired to create a Top Ten Non-Negotiables List for the most important things to me at work and in my personal life. After completing these lists with lengthy consideration, it’s important to look at what to do once you’ve come up with a vision of where you want to go and how to bring your list to life.

But how do we get there in the first place? This begins with an understanding of the most crucial democratic process—the political election. Think of your search for your Top Ten Non-Negotiables as a counterpart to our presidential elections. In recent years, the stakes of elections have forcefully played out in media with the importance of campaign strategies greatly magnified. Given the ever-increasing focus on elections and an accompanying notion of fairness and equality in elections over the past decade or so on social media, I looked at the strategies that propelled people into the most important role in the United States to create a road map for this guide.

The strategies involved in political campaigns can help you not only unlock your true passion in life, but they can also help you find your next job and move up the corporate ladder. As recent campaigns have shown, no candidate can afford to be passive when running for office. So if you want to find a job or move up the wobbly ladder, the successes and failures of recent political candidates may teach you a thing or two.

Let’s start with the advice from the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a nonpartisan organization that is Working for Democracy, Making Democracy Work, which upholds democracy as a human right. This purposeful work creates opportunities for women to overcome barriers to equal and active political participation. But, more importantly, NDI brings individuals and groups together to share ideas and build campaigns that empower women by including them as equal participants in the political process globally (2022). NDI provides free, open-source tools to help individuals and governments build healthy and fair democracies; and this inspired me to leverage political campaign plans as a framework for this Vote for You guide.

As I read their advice, I realized how applicable it was to job searches and passion seekers. Campaigns are the basis for everything. From the post you like on Instagram for the perfect pair of workout sneakers you’ve been eyeing or to the local mayoral or presidential campaign, campaigns are built with customers and voters in mind. Communications and marketing people drafted a brief to create something just for you to discover in your Instagram feed based on your interests. Now, to build a successful guide for you, it’s important to look at some recent political campaign failures to help take the lessons learned by those who spent millions of dollars to win.

Let’s take the examples of Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney. Both failed to win the most coveted position in American politics, the presidency, not just once, but twice. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, businessman, and lawyer first ran in 2008 but dropped out fairly early in the campaign. Four years later, he lost the 2012 election as the Republican nominee when he faced off with Barack Obama. Romney’s main problem was that he never clearly defined himself or his presidential goals. His slogan Believe in America did not stick because he did not have a clear why or what for his platform, which left a vacuum and made it possible for others to define it for him. According to Tom Cohen of CNN, Romney’s senior campaign adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom complained that his campaign was Like an Etch A Sketch. You can shake it up, and we start all over again, which was a comment that exposed Romney as a flip-flopper, waffler, and a candidate with no core values (2012). One of the key reasons he lost was because Romney let the other side define him (Forbes 2012). Ultimately, because he had no clear message, it was easy for the other side to define him.

At the same time, Romney failed to make advantageous use of a business background in consulting and experience as a Harvard-educated attorney while lacking the swagger and business positioning future candidate Donald Trump exuded. Similarly, Wayne Drash of CNN suggests that Romney appeared as an out-of-touch rich guy who shipped jobs overseas thereby losing credibility as a candidate who claimed he would jumpstart the economy (2012). Finally, with women feeling convinced that Romney and the Republican party were hostile to them, the Republican National Committee (GOP) experienced a huge loss. This left the door open for Donald Trump’s win in 2016.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton appeared to enjoy far more advantages than Romney. After placing eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling during her 2008 run for president, she promised the glass ceiling would shatter beneath her feet in 2016. But the glass lay unshattered because her vision did not speak to her voters’ needs. Even though Hillary presented herself as the First Woman President, her goals and passion did not break through as in the case of Donald Trump or even relatively newcomer, Bernie Sanders, who campaigned with Not me. Us.

According to Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Hillary’s first campaign speech on Roosevelt Island proved ineffective even though she attempted to channel President Roosevelt’s first Democratic convention speech with a reference to continuing a rendezvous with destiny (Allen and Parnes 2017, 2). Ultimately, Hillary could not sell her vision for the country. In an interview with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Parnes observed, "She [Hillary] had this wall in her Brooklyn headquarters that had ‘Hillary is for’ and there were lots of Post-It notes saying for various