FQ at CES: Best Tactics for Upping Your Own Skills, and Those of Your Team

The session's moderator, Amber Coleman-Mortley, The FQ's Senior Director, Community and Culture, asked the panelists how they know when to kick their skill level up a notch. Sometimes it can happen during a staff meeting, said Erika Voss, Vice President, Platform Architecture & Core Engineering at Capital One Software. "If I'm in there with people on my team that can answer the questions before I can, I don't need to be there anymore," she explained. "I need to step out and learn something new. What's the next thing that's going to empower me to be stronger in the business?"

There's also a fine art to pushing team members to broaden their expertise. Assessment is key, because not all staff members are necessarily ready to move to higher levels, said Chandra Cirulnick, Vice President, Publisher Sales and SSP Strategy at Yahoo. "Going back to basics and refreshing some of those core skillsets to make sure people are really excelling in their existing position before piling more on top of their plates is the foundational work," she noted. "Then you can add new skills on top."

COVID has certainly changed the rules for what's the proper way to implement upskilling changes -- and communicating more generally, said Sara Badler, CRO Enterprise Advertising and Partnerships at Dotdash Meredith.

"We used to sit in a room, and a manager would tell someone something, and they'd say, 'Yup. On it.' But now, they might say, 'We can't do that,'" she explained, noting that the world of business has shifted and become so much more unpredictable. "The biggest thing for me about upscaling is surrounding yourself with people who are nice and honest and making sure your priorities are in order. Everything is changing for everyone all the time. We need to be conscious of that."

There are also occasions when honesty, on the part of leaders, can beget a sense of compassion and understanding as everyone strives to become better at their jobs and advance. Pangis related that when she started at Ampersand she was going through a divorce. "About four weeks into my role, I pulled the whole company together and said, 'Hey, I'm Nicole. I'm going through a divorce. It sucks. It's hard.' The reason I did that was because I knew that I was going to have some really bad days," she said.

Pangis admitted that 10 years ago, she wouldn't have shared that. Because she did, "the company started to know who I was. And a slew of men and women told me they had gone through that already or were going through it then, or were thinking of filing," she said. "I went from being this person who just walked in the door to: 'Wait. She's a human being.'"

Capital One's Voss has created her own unique way of spurring team members to stretch themselves. She coined a term a few years ago: Triple Ds -- do something, drive something, and deliver excellence. That led to the creation of an award related to the Triple Ds for her team, which has helped instigate change. "Watching them drive an impact on their own is exciting for me as a leader, because my team is leading without me. I feel like that's actually success," she said.

As for upping one's own game, Dotdash Meredith's Badler commented: "Something we say in my company that I love is: When you're doing 150%, that's when you're ready for the thing that you think you can do. Because you're already doing it, and you don't even realize it."

"We don't need to be experts in everything," added Yahoo's Cirulnick. She advised attendees to think about what advances would really matter to them personally, requiring a deep dive into new skills -- versus other information that "you just need to know the basic shape of and keep a pulse on. It's an important thing to keep in mind."

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