Jenny Wood | Navigating a Career Path, Creating Followership as a Leader, and How to Showcase Your Full Potential

Hiring Insights

Jenny Wood joins Mosah Fernandez Goodman on this episode of Hiring Insights to discuss navigating your career path, how to create followership as a leader, and showcasing your full potential. Jenny is an executive at Google running a large operations team that helps drive tens of billions of revenue per year. She’s also the founder of Own Your Career, one of the largest career development programs in Google’s history with tens of thousands of people benefitting, an author, keynote speaker, mom, avid hiker, and pilot.

• What is the Own Your Career program at Google and what are the practical, actionable strategies that can help navigate a career?

• Your overall happiness depends on having well rounded self-fulfillment both inside and outside of your core job.

• Be bold, be curious, be you. Utilize your curiosity either as a leader or as someone aspiring to be a leader, it’s okay to not have all of the answers.

• Lateral moves are some of the most powerful moves you can make. Look for the potential and the opportunities it could create for you. "Lateral moves are some of the most powerful moves anyone can make. Your career is not always going to be up into the right. You're going to have twisty, windy paths and zigzag payoffs as Jason Feifer of Entrepreneur Magazine, Editor-in-Chief calls them in his book Built for Tomorrow, which is fantastic. "

• Bullets on your resume. Don’t be vague or generic. There are three things that you must have: numbers, context, and action. "I talk about blockers that we've put in front of ourselves that limit our full potential. I think people get nervous. Oh, but I don't have $5 million I can talk about, but you can make anything quantitative, results can be anything quantitative. It could be number of meetings you led. It could be number of documents you wrote."

• It isn’t about the five-year or ten-plan, it’s about the big, small things that you can do day to day that add up to the long-term plan.

• If anybody wants to succeed, coaching, external guidance, someone to keep you accountable is one of the most important things you can do.

• What qualities make someone a better fit for a leadership role?

• LinkedIn tip: ideas as content.