FWL's Signature Event - A Lesson in Transition and Relationships
Posted on Tue, Aug 25, 2009 @ 05:06 PM
A guest post by Vera Devera
For attendees of FWL's recent signature event, the question "How many degrees of separation are you from Kevin Bacon" can now be "How many degrees of separation are you from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg?
The "how many degrees" question was popularized in the late 1990s when a character on the TV show Mad About You posited the question. However, it's been around since 1929 when a Hungarian writer, Frigyes Karinthy described the phenomenon in a short story called "Chains." The term "six degrees" came much later in 1967 when sociologist, Stanley Milgram, decided to test this theory in an experiment called "The Small-World Problem." Milgram discovered that the average "length" of the path to any one person is five.
As you probably have come to realize, making connections and building relationships is one of the keys to success in your professional life.
On Tuesday, August 11, Future Women Leaders presented its annual signature event, "Transitioning Careers & Industries" at Varnish Fine Art Gallery in San Francisco. The event featured a unique silent auction where time with professional coaches and women business leaders were bid on, ultimately raising nearly $800 for Future Women Leaders programming and scholarships. After an hour of networking over cocktails and gourmet Vietnamese hors d'oeuvres prepared by Le's Catering Kitchen, over 80 women and men gathered to hear keynote speaker, Lori Goler, Director of Human Resources at Facebook, now the fourth largest site in the world.
Goler immediately set expectations, admitting that if one were to look at her bio, they would not see a functional resume - she had not become Director of HR at Facebook by the traditional route of increasing responsibility in the same functional area. After earning a bachelor's degree from Yale University, Lori entered Kennedy School of Government to study public policy. Over the summer, she interned for Walt Disney Company. Lori then switched tracks to earn a Master's of Business Administration in addition to her master's in public policy, from Harvard Business School. Her previous summer internship helped her get her foot in the door for a real job at Disney, where she spent two years conducting strategy and business planning for the consumer products businesses. Intuition told Lori that she must re-evaluate her career path.
Lori continued to share with us how she leveraged her personal relationships with former business school classmates, not particularly to get a job at their companies, but to gather information on the business climate and landscape. Each call she made turned into an opportunity. For example, when she left Disney, shortly thereafter, a friend from grad school was pregnant and frustrated how there weren't any cute clothes for expecting mothers. Initially an idea born in a living room, Lori - with her background in strategic planning at Disney - was there from the ground up to help transform her friend's spark into babystyle.com, a thriving online retail business with 200 employees. {Read more about Lori's background including 5 years at eBay by clicking here.}
Goler admitted that she doesn't participate in formal networking, such as attending events for specific groups, and that the opportunities that have come her way were because she leveraged her personal social network. In fact, she had gotten in touch with Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, through a friend at a party. She also told us that she initially didn't want the human resources job, trying to rationalize her lack of any formal experience in recruiting. However, she couldn't deny she did have experience in hiring more than 300 people over her career.
Ironically, while Lori isn't a serial networker, her team of recruiters at Facebook frequent LinkedIn and friends-of-friends of current employees -- how's that for making 6 degrees of separation work? For now, she's happy to be on the ground, building a young company with amazingly talented people. This week already, Facebook has reportedly grown twice as fast as fellow social media site, Twitter.
Being a Future Women Leader member for the last couple years and a grad of FWL's Leadership Development Program (LDP), Lori's story of "transitioning industries and careers" definitely resonated with me. Through LDP, I had a better understanding of my Myers-Briggs personality in personal and work settings and also learned ways to practice leadership in different situations. I went on to find a career path that was more aligned with the personal values I had identified in LDP and my personality style (I'm an ENFJ). Like Lori, I'm a builder and enjoy being part of something in the beginning where passion over years of experience really counts. Finally, I credit my own social network for helping me to find my current job. When I started at my new company, I learned that the person leaving the position I was filling was going to succeed my previous role at a company I had left in 2007! The world is definitely small. Thanks, Stanley Milgram for 6 degrees of separation...and thank you, Lori, for showing us that an un-functional career path and building lasting relationships can result in something truly extraordinary!
P.S. I, and the other 80 FWL signature event attendees, can say we are now 5 degrees from Mark Zuckerberg!
About Vera Devera:
Vera Devera is a do-gooder by day (Account Executive at Donordigital, an online fundraising and advocacy nonprofit consultancy) and also moonlights as a special event planner (Va de Vie Events). She is currently a featured Weddzilla.com blogger and also blogs about her $10,000 wedding.