professional development 101 w/ rhia dixon, assoc director, vml

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

And so Rhea, talk to me about why you're so passionate about professional development. Oh, man. The reason why I am so passionate about it is because I think that a lot of the times, especially in tech, especially for women, especially for people of color in tech, we are always just happy to be here. And if you were raised in a black household, you probably heard, hey, just keep your head down, do your work, don't make any waves, I'll make these. I was raised in a Southern Baptist household, and that's why I was raised. There you go. There you go. There you go. And that's literally not how, I've never seen the person that's just got their head down.

They actually able to climb the ladder. There's no way you don't get offered the opportunities because nobody knows who you are. Don't know which way to go because you haven't asked anyone, you haven't built up your network. I'm passionate about networking, got a whole talk about that too. And what I tell some of my mentees and the people that I coach is like, hey, I was like, and it's a lot of black women, a lot of women that I coach and mentor. And what I tell them is that they need to get themselves in SWG in their corner, SWG being the straight white guy, because they move through the world differently than us, they don't have the same obstacles so they don't block themselves in the same way that we would.

So yeah, so outside of that, there's if the people that are making the decisions don't know who you are, they're not going to be offering you the opportunities. And the goal is to be able to be that person that's at the top of mind or at least or five. So you just said a lot of amazing things that we can literally unpack with just that right there. I want to ask how somebody always start, let's start by getting noticed, because I don't think I really talked about that on the plot a lot. And I think there's some nuances to that. So let's start there. What are your thoughts on that?

Obviously you already had some thoughts, but just expound on that for me and let's kind of go down this route for a few minutes. So my favorite word is visibility. And my next favorite word is probably transparency. But as far as visibility, like being able to not just do your work well, but also tell someone about it, it's that's getting over that hurdle of being able to touch your own horn because we don't want to be braggadocious. I was like, but is it bragging if it's true? Is it bragging if it's true? Well, in between me and you, I mean, it sounds like we were maybe raised kind of similar.

Like, you seem not heard. And if you talk about yourself, your selfish or self-centered or... Right. All of that. Right. And so now I feel like there's a lot of us millennials in the workforce. And we suck in interview them because we can't talk about ourselves. And we suck in navigating corporate politics because we feel bad talking about what we've accomplished. Yes, yes. So like my number one way to actually get over that is too encourage people to start writing a third person about their dreams. It's third person is high key, not my favorite thing to do. It's the hardest thing. I don't even know what that would be.

Is that like that? Is that like referring to me like Taylor or is it they, them? It's referring to yourself as if you are not yourself. Hey, go. There you go. Referential yourself as Taylor, you could be Taylor, you could be he, he, they, they're all of that. Everything except for I and we. OK, there you go. Oh, somebody, somebody, somebody failed English and someone did well in English. I'm sure y'all can figure out by that conversation just then. But I think that that's important. Right. So I have my teams when we do, we have like a thing where we have to report that we have to send in.

Yeah. I make my team right there blurb because I'm not necessarily on the same projects that my team manager's on. We may be on the same client, but we might not be on the same projects. And so they are my eyes and ears into that project. And in order for me to have a pretty accurate project summary, I need them to tell me. And I prefer if they tell me in third person because it makes them step outside of themselves. And instead of looking at what they've done and saying, I, yeah, I did this. I still need to fix it. I was like, what else did you do, though?

So if you look at yourself from now, side and say, you know, hey, Keith actually did this today. So I'm talking to myself from the perspective of Keith and Keith is saying, well, Keith drove this conversation. Keith connected with people in LA because that makes you start listing those things as facts. Instead of your instead of feelings, facts and fact over feelings. Oh, I love that. I love that. Yeah, Chris comes in. That's how we were raising this South on talk about stuff. Yeah, 100%. That's what I said. None of us know and talk about ourselves. Do you have any exercises made for people who struggle with this?

I mean, aside from obviously the third person, is there anything else you'd recommend for people who have a problem going over their accomplishments in public? Yes. So aside from the third person writing, I made a part of a Bragg book. I'm calling Bragg book because I think that's what my friend Gabby and Bresty called it. She called it a Bragg book. And I have one. It's not mine. It's not a literal notebook anymore, but I use one note or I know that I want to a couple of my friends use Notion. And you just keep track of the things. I take screenshots of every single client, accolade, like every time that they say, hey, this was great work.

Or hey, I really appreciate it. This I take a screenshot, send it to myself, and to my manager because I know, but I can't assume that my boss is going to know that my client is happy with me. So having the people in your support group, right? So hopefully your manager is supportive. And hopefully have a couple of cheerleaders in your squad because everybody needs those. Because as soon as you start doubting yourself and running you up against those issues, we're like, I don't think I know what I'm doing. The person that you've been sending all those screenshots to, they'll be able to come right back and say, hey, you did this and this and this and this.

In the past three months. That's not even the last six months. In the past three months that we've done on the table. So yeah, that's what. Talk about being visible, right? I think that's kind of along the same things too. You know, talking about yourself being visible. You know, I think it's something that I've had to really realize through the last few years of my career is that I think you can be three types of people in corporate settings. You can be person who keeps quiet. Those that works leave, which is fine. You can be the person who plays the political corporate game. Probably get the, the seat at the table, may not be liked among other people or you can be true your authentic self and maybe realize that you're going to miss out on some opportunities because of that.

That's where I fall in. So I want to hear your thoughts about how to play the corporate ladder a little bit because again, the stuff that I just don't really talk about. So sometimes it depends on like, you know, the setup of your actual organization. Sure. Well, that right now it is very, I think that it's pretty easy to get visible and just that I don't think that everyone's confident in how it is. Yeah, I understand. We have an internal, you know, like basing blog or you can write posts. It can be anything from a case study to, you know, something interesting. You found out to share.

That's one way to do it. We also have like an internal, like, and those stupid questions. Regular, regular reading. It's opt in. You can come or not come. You can ask any question under the sun. We've had everything from like benefits to, so what's your favorite AR, your favorite setup? Yeah. And it's open forum. And so I think that getting active in those things, like we have employed, we have a pretty robust employee resource group offering where we have our, we have our ethnic ERGs. We've got one that's for neuro divergent, which is the wired not weird. And I kind of love that one. We have our women's ERG.

There's literally so many things, so many different ways. So I think that typing up in some of the conversations, I always tell my team is type up. If you have something to say, say it. Yes. If you don't, no one's gonna know what you were thinking and you don't know if you're the only one that's thinking that. I think that it's important to share your expertise. It's hard sometimes to do a lot of writing, but if you find something interesting that you think would be helpful or shareable with someone, just write it up, share it. You can share it in chat. You could share it on LinkedIn, there's medium, there's all kinds of places that you could start sharing things.

I like to go and do conferences and conference speaking because I enjoy teaching, but I don't wanna be a teacher. Right. So, you want my cake, I can't. It's Ricky, I want to feel claustrophobic, just thinking about it. Yeah. So those aspects, and actually leveraging the ability to do like a skip level meeting with your boss's boss or somebody else that might be a couple of levels above you, it's not, if you take it from the perspective of I only do skips because I have a problem, then you're holding yourself back. I think they be willing to talk to everyone. You should be willing to talk to the most junior to the most senior.

Some of my favorite conversations are have been with my executive leadership team. So I've got my CTO, my chief architect, several of our executive and managing level directors. In fact, I have had some of the best conversations. They're fascinating. And I opening, and then they start getting me thinking, like, what do I wanna do next with this? But since they know what I'm interested in, it's very easy now to get aligned to those things. There you go. Imagine that, communicate what you need, then become more aligned, more happy with your career. Thank you for them with that. I wanna go back to a few comments that Liz comes in here as a few few minutes ago.

If you're a highly visible person, you've gotta amplify others to get them to the same level of visibility. Yeah, I'm really big on this. You've got people's advocates in the workplace, especially if you're loud like I am. You gotta speak up for not people who are loud as me. So I'd totally agree with you Liz on that. Bragg books are so great to for days when you're just down and frustrated, being able to reflect on all the things you've done, Ryan comes in, I've been using Google, keep note for success stories. That's when it's time for reviews. I pull that note back out. I love that.

And then Lincoln, you're coming in to know your executives and what they are experts in and what they care about. Yeah, 100% I love that. All right, Liz, it's kind of moved to two other topics I really wanna talk about. You said something backstage that I was very profound. The distance between two and three is bigger than one or two, bigger, bigger than one to two. Talk about that because I thought that was pretty profound what you said. So the distance between two and three. And when I talk about two and three, I am lumping together all of the mid level, whatever you might have.

Like maybe at your big tech, it would be like your three or four level, at your three and four levels, we whatever before you get up like five and staff and whatnot. So what's the difference between two, the difference and the distance between two and three. And the fact that it's not the same is what gets you from one to two. One to two being, you're going from, I know nearly nothing to, okay, I've been at this a couple of years. That's a fairly, you know, shortish gap. Depending on where you work, you can get a whole lot of experience in that amount of time and start commanding different salaries because of your skills that you no longer entry.

But what's the difference? Like how do you get promoted to the next level? What makes you senior? What makes you a lead? What makes you a leader? And it's not just the coding every day, it's not just learning all the tech, it's not just diving super deep into this one tech stack. That's all a particular path. I was like, but as you start moving up or wanting to move up, you've got to do a few different things. Let's say that I want to, I'm trying to get from mid to senior. Right. I know that my tech skills can always be honed. I can always continue to sharpen those.

But what about the other skills? Like them being able to actually get your team on the same page to accomplish the goal. Right. And to align to the appropriate outcomes, being able to spot wrinkles in the fabric that you can get snooed out ahead of time. They might not even know that you're smoothing them out. But you've already spotted them, being able to apply that experience that you picked up because what you have picked up over the past two to three years should be influencing how you maneuver going forward. For instance, me, I'm not a certified accessibility expert, but I've got a couple of people on my team who are.

And I meet accessibility experts. What gets me in conversations is every time like I see a carousel, I'm a little bit triggered. And so I start asking questions. I know that your carousel has to have arrows. It's got it. You can't just throw it up there and not let me know that there's more content. I need to do this more content. So whether it's in the controls or a peekaboo, something's got to be over there. Can't just get rid of the arrows. The role looks nice and pretty. Removing, removing focus rings can't do that. The fact that anybody can be sued is what drives me in my accessibility knowledge.

Yeah. So being able to spot those things and start telling people in ways that make sense to them that hey, we have to start baking this in from jump so that we don't have to retrofit it at the end. It's the same way with writing styles for code and coming up with whatever your architecture is. It's about being able to identify opportunities for processes that can be leveraged for your game, right, leverage for the success of the project, to help you curb time, still maintain quality and I like less churn. Like I don't want to see a ticket that's done. Come back because we didn't check it on, right, or whatever.

But it happens, right? You have process. Let me ask you this, this may be a little bit of a hot take. Ah, hot take, just a thought, confident thought. Would you say the technical skills get you in the door from one to two but the people skills get you to two to three or vice versa? Which one would you say works best? I think that from two to three, it is more about, and I say people, it's kind of people but it's also like how are you applying that people and how are you applying that to that? Yeah, it's more like a higher, it's not as like need to know this, this and this.

I feel like that goes from one to two. Yes, yes. One to two is to me, highly like it's transactional and it's about education, it's about figuring out how the things work. And the two to three is figuring out why they work and being able to distill that to someone else. Whether it's your team or your company, being able to get them to the why behind the moves that we're making. 100% and navigating people. I feel like that's gonna get the two to three which is what I've really seen in my career too. Yes. All right, another thing you said and again, all these topics we can literally have an entire podcast about but I gotta fit them in five minute windows so we'll obviously have to do a follow up which I'm not mad about.

How do you make your success repeatable? You also, like literally, for again, for those of you all tuning, I don't set questions for these things. Like I hop on with Rhea, obviously I know her real well but like I was like, what do you wanna talk about? And she just lay out some absolute heat. So how do you make your success repeatable? You brought that up backstage. What does that mean and what are your thoughts on that? For me, making your success repeatable is about finding out what works. If it works pretty well, write it down, do it again. But you also have to be open to new information.

So if I find that something that we're doing can actually be done better, then the document is open. Let's add this line. So let's rearrange these steps. Let's refactor. Yeah. And refactor me. Boy, but having those processes in place. So I like checklist because the checklist for me helps my team figure out what they need to do before this is actually done. So it's included in my definition of ready and before you get to done, these things need to be done. But I do that because people are in various places. We might be working asynchronously. We might have time zones between us in several countries sometimes being able to have that all stored in one place.

Yes, let's document that process. Let's, I like PR templates. You'll hear about that at render. I love the PR template because you can go through and make sure that you've done what you need to do. You provided appropriate context switching for whoever's going to review. It makes that process so much faster. I think that a lot of people get caught up in, oh, it's going to take all this time. It shouldn't, it shouldn't. If you set the standards. So I'm a, I'm a standards in process and outcome driven person. I want, no, how am I going to accomplish this thing and execute at very high quality?

If I figure that out, why would I not do that again? Why would I not train someone else to do it that way? Because by the time we get through doing it a few times, we're at well, well, well, machine. Yep. So I like doing that. I like trimming bloat because there are sometimes we like to use all the shiny new things. But all the shiny new things if we're not actually using their features, why are we using them? Right. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Any more thoughts on that, Fright? Ask you some rapid fire questions and wrap up here? No. No. All right.

Last. All right. So again, thank you all for tuning in. If you have any questions, please ask them in the chat. Now we'll get to them. Otherwise, I'm going to rapid fire on a few questions here. So we have, if money was the same, what would you do for your job outside of tech? I would travel. I would travel. I would travel. I would travel full time. Yep. Take it. Let's go. I love it. Where, where, where is the one place you want to travel to from a destination perspective? I'm curious that you haven't gone to yet. I want to go to St. Lucia. OK.

I want to go so bad. It looks so pretty. And I want to get there. Can't confirm. I did not, I did not stay on St. Lucia. I sailed into the port of St. Lucia. And it looked like it was like, kind of stormy that day and like a lot of clouds up in the mountains. It looked like something from like Pirates of the Caribbean was gorgeous. I'm allergic to snow. Please. Sun, sand, beach, meat. There you go. I love it. Second question. What do you do outside of work that brings you joy? I talked to my girls. I have Kansas City Women in Tech.

You've seen one of them in here asking all the questions. Liz is my, that's one of my girls. I love them. So I do that. I also am an avid Marvel Cinematic Universe watcher fan. Hey, what's I know asking your favorite movies a little hard, but like is there one lately that's been really good or something you've been watching lately that you want to shout out? Right now I just, I'm enjoying Disney Plus's series. Someone they do. They bring the things into the series. Loki is probably one of my favorites. Awesome. I love it. Third question. Any tools, technologies, trends that you're reading, researching tinkering with on a team that you're excited about.

Do you want to share? Yeah. So like one of the things that I've been learning from my client team, we were introduced to this thing called Mavis H. And it's like a little shell. You can open it up and mob. Like Bob, you can even use it for just regular pairing, right? But it does is it'll set a timer for you. You can figure it in your IDE to set your timer. We use about seven minutes on ours. But I know you want it's time to switch, switch drivers and navigators. And I think that that's fantastic because one of the things that happens when you're pair of programming is you get into the zone and stop rotating.

Yeah. It's easy to stop rotating. So that's a way that we are holding our trying to be accountable, right? And make sure that we switch. That everybody has the opportunity to drive and or navigate. That's cool. It's my problem, my favorite thing right now. And I've been playing with Vit. Js, V-I-T, Js. I thought you said Vit. Vit, sir. This is not. I said, I said, this ain't the stream where that golf was. Taylor, I cannot wait. Thank you. I don't see you already. Anyways, what is she saying? I thought I was sick of you already already. Oh my god. Don't get your friend. Come get him.

Now Monday. You say V-I-T-V-I-T-E? Yes, V is a victor. I. All right, so what is it? What is it? It's another, I was going to say, framework library for writing JavaScript. And we're using React with TypeScript and beat. And so I kind of like how it is set up for you can do testing. And it's pretty much following the just library for testing. And I found out about it because one of my direct reports wrote a blog post about create React app going away. And so I can not. That's too much. You're too much. You write it Liz. You write it. I'll help. Open source.

I love it. Last question. So we'll wrap it up here. Again, Rhea, thank you for coming on. Everybody, thank you for tuning in the comments. It's been great this morning. This shows called guidance counts for 2.0 because we had guidance counts as a middle school high school in college. But now as adults, we don't really have somebody or something to turn to and ask career advice questions to. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Rhea? And just my biggest advice would be don't wait for it to not be hard to go do it. And this people go do it now. I love that.

That was deep. Cool. All right. I'll Rhea, stay on real quick. Second of all, you backstage. But you'll have a great one. Appreciate you all, Dad. Hey, we got a crazy awesome line up this week. So tomorrow, we got YK on Twitter. He's got over $150,000 on Twitter. He's coming on the show. We're going to talk about content creation, the power of content creation, and putting yourself out there. And then my dear friend, Matt Doulson, who's a senior project manager slash change manager at Deloitte. He's coming on Wednesday talking about institutional change, how to make people flow in the right direction in an organization such to be a great conversation.

So again, there are more than not 30 AM Central CEL tomorrow with YK. You'll have a go and read you the best. Please. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode. And I am very grateful. Because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes. And I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the app store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please.

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