Thinking “Career Forward” with Christiana Smith Shi, former Nike Direct-to-Consumer President

[00:00:00] Roy Notowitz: Hello and welcome to How I Hire, the podcast that taps directly into the best executive hiring advice and insights. I'm Roy Notowitz, founder and CEO of Noto Group Executive Search. You can learn more about us at NotoGroup.com. As a go-to firm for purpose-driven companies, we've been lucky to work with some of the world's most inspiring leaders as they've tackled the challenge of building high performance leadership teams. Now I'm sitting down with some of these very people to spark a conversation about how to achieve success in hiring and create purposeful leadership for the next generation of companies.

Christiana Smith Shi joins me at the Noto Group offices to share lessons from a rewarding career that took her from investment banking to consulting to Nike leadership.

After pivoting from her career in finance, Christiana spent over two decades with McKinsey serving as Senior Partner before eventually joining Nike as President of their direct to consumer division. She brings together her extensive professional experiences and observations in her bestselling book, Career Forward: Strategies from Women Who've Made It.

Christiana candidly explains many of those strategies from the book and much more. We also discuss wisdom she's gained from serving on boards from Williams Sonoma and UPS to Columbia Sportswear and Habitat for Humanity.

Christiana, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It's great to have you here.

[00:01:31] Christiana Shi: Oh, Roy, it's my pleasure.

[00:01:33] Roy Notowitz: It's a conversation I've been looking forward to. So take us back to the beginning. What was your first spark of interest in the industry and how did you get started in the career that you've built?

[00:01:44] Christiana Shi: So I spent 24 years as a management consultant. And I got interested in that career because I actually was on a client team that McKinsey & Company, my firm, was leading, and I was at Merrill Lynch, and I knew investment banking was not for me.

So I was already actively thinking about what I wanted to do with my life and realized I needed something to transition me into my next path. And that was grad school. So I went to business school, had a chance to hear from lots of companies, ultimately went to McKinsey. And after I was there for a few years, I had a chance to do a proposal for a retailer who, rest in peace, was named Mervins.

Ah, yes. Yes. RIP. They were Kohl's before Kohl's was ever Kohl's. And I served them for probably three years as a consultant and realized these are my people. This is what I love. I love everything about retail from the creative upstream to the logistics and the supply chain and the quantitative part to the brand building, to the consumer services and in store activities, everything.

And so I served every kind of retailer that you can think of from luxury to tires. If you sold it to a consumer, I probably worked with one of the leaders.

[00:03:04] Roy Notowitz: Such a great opportunity to work in consulting. You get exposure to...

[00:03:09] Christiana Shi: You see a range.

[00:03:11] Roy Notowitz: ...so much.

[00:03:11] Christiana Shi: You see a range of the formats. You see a range of success models, some not successful. And you see a range of leaders. And I learned a lot watching leaders and seeing what I respected, what I admired, what I didn't. But I knew that eventually for me, the real payoff was going to be to actually run a business, to be a leader in a direct to consumer business. And Nike had been my client at that point for close to 10 years and had offered me different roles along the way. And then my friend Jeanne Jackson stepped off the Nike board and led the newly created direct to consumer division and asked me to come over and I did, and the rest is history.

[00:03:55] Roy Notowitz: Oh, that's so cool. What a great story. You've coauthored a book with Grace Puma called Career Forward: Strategies from Women Who've Made It. Can you tell us about her and share what sparked the idea for the book?

[00:04:09] Christiana Shi: So, Grace and I met when we both were on the board of Williams Sonoma. Grace was the COO of PepsiCo. And we became very fast friends. Grace's background was supply chain and operations, and even though she was packaged goods, had a lot in common with the kind of work that I did.

And so we spoke the same language. And when the pandemic hit, we were swapping messages back and forth one night, and she texted me and said, "we should write a book." Completely out of the blue. There had been no discussion about it. I asked her what she was talking about and she said, "to pass on what we know to other women."

And so we connected the next day and talked about it and I said, why don't we each write down what our career advice is for women? What do we tell women when they ask us for mentoring? We were getting asked at that stage of our lives to mentor women all the time, including just people hitting me up on LinkedIn, who I don't know.

And you only have so much capacity. Mentoring is fundamentally an leverageable activity. You either do it or you don't. And so we knew it was self-limiting. And at least we thought if we wrote it down for people that we didn't have a chance to connect with individually, we could send them the book. We just wanted to put what we knew and we thought on paper, and that timing was, it was fortuitous, but it was, I think also just karmic because so many women left the workforce during the pandemic because the demands were just unrealistic and our fear at that time-- this was like 2022, so people had just started to, like, come out of it.

Our fear was that they wouldn't come back, and we wanted women to stay in the game. And that's a lot of our philosophy is stay in the game, play the long game, build the query you want, recognize that you've got to keep your eye out further than your current job and things will work out the way you want it.

[00:06:05] Roy Notowitz: Yeah. A lot of your advice in the book, like the example you gave where you wanted to quit and then the question was asked...

[00:06:12] Christiana Shi: Oh yes.

[00:06:13] Roy Notowitz: ...what would it take?

[00:06:15] Christiana Shi: That moment is one of those that you look back on and say "it changed everything." And just for folks that haven't read the book, what Roy is referring to is when I was a new mom and my son was, I don't know, a year old or less, I was back at the job and I was in line for partnership, which meant it was a very stressful time.

And I was working till nine o'clock at night most of the time. And then being up in the middle of the night with my son and I reached the end of my rope and I went into the office leader's office and I said that I needed to quit. And he said, "Christiana, you can't quit until you think about what it'll take to make you stay."

And that knocked me back because coming into the room, I believed like so many of us do that I had a binary set of choices. Stay, go. That's it. Stay: accept it the way it is. Go: take your chances and find something else. And what Bill Meehan, his name was, was saying to me was, figure out what you want. Come back and ask for it. And maybe we can meet it, maybe we can't, but we'll never get there if you don't ask for it. And so I did.

I went off and I thought about it and I came back and said, "if I could work four days a week, just have one more day at home, it would really mitigate a lot of the up and downs, the missed doctor's appointments. I'd have more time to count on with my son and I'd be able to get some things done at home." And I didn't expect McKinsey to agree because there'd been no part time anywhere. This was dawn of time, like this stuff did not happen and they agreed. And the funny thing was the partners agreed to it as my on-ramp back to full-time and said, "you can do it for three months and then you know, we expect you to come back full-time."

And I agreed. And then I was part-time for nine years.

[00:08:08] Roy Notowitz: Wow.

[00:08:08] Christiana Shi: Okay, because my attitude was, they'll tell me when it's not working.

[00:08:12] Roy Notowitz: Right.

[00:08:12] Christiana Shi: And I'm just going to keep going. And so I got elected partner and senior partner on a part-time program, which had never happened. And now dozens and dozens of women and men have both taken advantage of it. It's a formal program at McKinsey and I would say many professional services firms as well to have part-time.

[00:08:30] Roy Notowitz: That's so great. And it was smart of them to do that, obviously.

[00:08:33] Christiana Shi: Right?

[00:08:34] Roy Notowitz: Yeah.

[00:08:34] Christiana Shi: Think about it from their perspective. They had at that point, invested five years in me. I was the only woman in my class of associates. There was no woman in the year ahead of me. There was only one behind me. Like literally if I went, they, that was a lot of investment walking out the door. And I'm glad they took that perspective. One thing I learned in corporate America is it's harder to do some of that than in a professional services firm because when it's a partnership, you just quote unquote, need the partners to agree. But you just need the partners to agree. And a corporation, you're talking about a lot of policies and practices that have to get unwound for something like that to be changed and compensation and

[00:09:15] Roy Notowitz: All of it.

[00:09:15] Christiana Shi: All kinds of things. Yeah.

[00:09:18] Roy Notowitz: For emerging leaders, the concepts of "career first, job second" and "build professional equity," which were in your book, really stood out to me. And from your perspective, I'm curious, what does it take to consistently make career decisions with the long game in mind and what's the importance of building professional equity?

[00:09:40] Christiana Shi: I love that you asked about those because those are two of my favorite phrases in the book and concepts. I'll just explain what we meant by career first, job second, which is your job is not your career. Your job is super important. It's a critical element of your career, and one of the things we believe is you can't have a great career unless you're good at what you do. So the first thing you need to focus on when you're thinking about your career is every day keep showing up and doing a great job at what you're currently doing.

However, that is not enough. And so when we talk about taking the long view and, and having a career first mentality, it starts with figuring out where you want to go. And we were influenced by a quote I saw in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, the goddess, where she says, "you can't get where you want to go unless you know where you want to go."

It's so obvious, right?

[00:10:35] Roy Notowitz: So obvious.

[00:10:35] Christiana Shi: And we use driving analogies in the book a lot, and one of our analogies was, when you get in the car and you're trying to get somewhere, you set the GPS. We all do that now. You input a destination, that route can change. In fact, you'll get "rerouting" while you're driving. Why? because conditions changed.

In a career context, when you apply that, we say, "set what we call your cardinal direction," which is a general, overtime, much more specific idea of what you want to do in your career. Who do you want to work with? What kind of business do you want? What kind of functions, what kind of skills, what kind of values do you need to have?

You're going to get a lot smarter about that over time, but you've probably even got a general sense of your gut by the time you're in your second or third job. And if you pull up and force yourself to go through a series of questions, which we've got in the book, you start to figure out, "yeah, my cardinal direction is X."

And for me, it was to lead and it was to lead with a certain kind of mindset and a certain kind of leadership philosophy. And over time as I got into retail, it was to lead in retail. But how that came about, it was refined over time and over time. But the idea of setting the cardinal direction is then you can pull up every year and say, "am I on track? What do I need to do? What's my gap to that vision? And what do I want to commit to over this next year to fill that?" And it puts you in a position to have really good conversations with leadership or your bosses or your managers every year when you're sitting down and doing the annual review we all do.

Typically, your boss or your manager's going to ask you at some point, "what do you want? What do you need? How can I help you be successful?" And a lot of the time you're like, that's the last thing you stopped and thought about. We want you to actually do the work ahead of those conversations and be very intentional and strategic and use your cardinal direction to keep yourself on track.

[00:12:31] Roy Notowitz: I always say when I'm talking to job seekers, you can't arrive at a destination without an address.

[00:12:37] Christiana Shi: Perfect.

[00:12:38] Roy Notowitz: And to get very specific about what that address looks like.

[00:12:41] Christiana Shi: Agreed.

[00:12:41] Roy Notowitz: But the flip side of that too is the selection criteria or the filter for what they're going to do next. I think sometimes taking time to really think about that matrix, because going back to the values and the cardinal direction is something that. I think sometimes people forget or shortcut.

[00:12:59] Christiana Shi: I, I think that's very smart counsel that you're sharing because the idea that you could receive a job just coming over the transom to you that is exactly what you want might happen, but it's low odds, right? On the other hand, if you're intentional and you know what you want, you can focus your energy on looking in that area, in that direction, you just increased your odds.

I also think it's human nature, particularly if you got laid off, so it was unexpected. You feel that urgency of needing to know what you're going to do next. Needing to know that the cash flow is still coming, needing to know that you can take care of your family. It takes some courage to take the time to revisit what do I want next? Where are my guardrails? What are my goals? Et cetera.

I advise a lot of friends that have been in these recent rounds of layoffs, not just at my former companies, but really in industry to take that time --particularly because most of them have some kind of severance, have some kind of off ramp that they can use-- to take that time and not just start chasing interviews because the calls came in over the transom.

That might be "the" job. Yeah, but it's still important even if it is for you to have thought about what you want. because you're going to have to negotiate a little bit once you start talking to them.

[00:14:19] Roy Notowitz: The other thing too is sometimes people feel diminished when they lose a job and it's a psychological thing, which I totally understand. That mindset though of you're no less valuable. The day after you get laid off than the day before. And also it's very disruptive and I have a lot of empathy for people in that situation.

[00:14:40] Christiana Shi: I do too. It's difficult and I think for a lot of folks, especially ones that have stayed for a long time at the same company, the same employer, one of the things they've neglected over time is their professional network.

And you can't build that overnight. And so if you unexpectedly find yourself job hunting and you didn't keep a vibrant professional network, that includes search professionals, that includes recruiters, that includes people you used to work with that have gone on to other interesting companies, then your on the back foot from the get go.

So I think one of the pieces of advice we have in the book is to treat your professional network like an asset and to be investing in that. And I think you asked me, and I'm sorry, I realized I didn't get to it. You asked me about professional equity earlier, that the two ideas are related because professional equity is the concept of what you stand for as an individual, as a professional, what you're known for, what your skills are, what your leadership reputation is, but also who you know. And one of the things we tell people is you've got to invest in your professional equity and your network the same way you would think about investing in a stock. And that means that you are looking for it to grow in value over time, but you have to make sure you making the right investments for that to happen.

[00:16:02] Roy Notowitz: I think what you also said, and I believed this for my entire career, like you have to be good and that builds your equity

[00:16:11] Christiana Shi: Well, and when we wrote the book. It was right around the time that some concepts were trending in social media, like quiet quitting. Lazy girl jobs, if you remember that. And now there's that concept of...

[00:16:25] Roy Notowitz: Job hugging?

[00:16:26] Christiana Shi: Yes, job hugging. But also the, the absent leadership. I can't remember the exact phrase, but it's where you keep your head down and you don't look to get promoted.

[00:16:33] Roy Notowitz: Oh yeah.

[00:16:34] Christiana Shi: Because you don't want to basically take on the responsibility and the stress. I know people that are following each of those philosophies. And our perspective was those are all just very short term ways of thinking. And the reality is, in a couple years, conditions will change. And they did. Yeah. And suddenly "lazy girl job" doesn't look good because there's no safe place to hide out. Right?

[00:16:58] Roy Notowitz: You talk about think like an investor as it relates to your career. So what does that mean?

[00:17:02] Christiana Shi: So if you think of yourself as a stock. Wouldn't you want to be known as a growth stock? Think about Apple back in the day. Think about Tesla. Think about Nvidia now, right? Growth stocks attract investment from people because they're going to deliver higher, faster returns.

It's the same idea for your professional aspirations. If people see you as someone who is good at what they do, who delivers, who puts numbers on the board, who has impact who's building a track record of leadership, they will want to invest in you. How do people invest in you? They extend their networks.

"Oh, you ought to meet so and so. I know them. You know, I'll set up a lunch for you." They invite you into special projects or opportunities. You know, "we're looking for a leadership for our employee resource group. I think that's something you ought to talk to them about." They suggest your name for opportunities when you're not in the room.

That's the kind of investment that you want to attract. And that happens when you are going somewhere and you're viewed as someone that's going to do that faster and better. But it also reflects on how you think of yourself, because if you think of yourself as a growth stock, as someone who's building their value, you will invest in yourself.

So what skills do I need to add in this next year? What conference or online course can I take? How do I expand my network? That's investing in yourself. How do I get my name out there in the industry? Maybe I need to join a professional association and be in a working group. These are all very strategic, very specific things that you can do that add value to you.

[00:18:43] Roy Notowitz: Right.

[00:18:44] Christiana Shi: And most people, again, just accumulate experiences in their day-to-day job and think that's going to be enough and it isn't. And if you're worth it, then you ought to also consider things like classes and reading and meeting people, and networking, all of those things as important uses of your time too.

[00:19:04] Roy Notowitz: Absolutely. What are the questions to ask before saying yes to a job? What advice do you have for people on that?

[00:19:12] Christiana Shi: I feel like you're the expert on that, Roy, not me. What are the questions to ask? Well, hopefully you're going into it again with a set of guardrails that you've thought about, which is this is what I'm looking for out of my next opportunity.

It includes thinking through the kind of people you want to work with, the kind of responsibilities you want to have, the kind of work you want to do, the kind of company you want to be in, but it also includes the kind of lifestyle you want to have and what else you're looking for to be able to do with your time. All important things.

I think the most important question in my opinion is whether there's chemistry and whether your values and the company align. For me, when I have felt like there wasn't a fit, it's typically because I didn't spend enough time meeting people and just assessing whether this is an environment I actually can be successful in. And it's a terrible feeling to, like, have that day two sense, which I had when I got investment banking. That day two sense of like, this is not the right place for me. So, what would you add to that?

[00:20:18] Roy Notowitz: I think there's always an element of, you know, what's the opportunity to learn? What can I do that I haven't done before and what's going to challenge me? And I think also just, is there the opportunity to create a vision for the department or function or business? You know, what kind of support you would have from, whether it's the board or investors or other people...

[00:20:40] Christiana Shi: Yeah. That's a good, that's a good one.

[00:20:41] Roy Notowitz: ...to actually implement and also just willingness for change or whatever it is that needs to happen within the organization, whatever the mandate is.

[00:20:49] Christiana Shi: Yeah, I think that last one's important. It's willingness to change or openness to change, but also what's the appetite for the pace? Because another thing for some of us that can be a real challenge is if you feel like you are always pulling faster, harder than everybody else and they're trying to slow you down, and that can be a really frustrating environment to be working in. Yeah.

[00:21:13] Roy Notowitz: Sometimes when we're comparing candidates for an opportunity, we think about, "what gear are they in? And does that match with where the company is?"

[00:21:21] Christiana Shi: That's a good way to put it.

[00:21:21] Roy Notowitz: Yeah.

[00:21:21] Christiana Shi: That's, and it also fits with our driving mentality that we use in the book. That kind of fit is very jarring, right? It can lead to a lot of negative kind of vibes where if people either feel like you're pushing too hard or you're not pushing hard enough. I think that's, yeah, that's critical to assess it. And I ask myself a lot of those same questions now, when I consider corporate board roles that I want to take, it's pretty much the same process because those will typically come either through my network or through a recruiter, and I have learned it is just as important, even though that is a part-time role, even though you're not leading the company intentionally, you are not the operator. It turns out a lot of those same questions are really relevant to whether the board is going to be a good fit. And I learned that the hard way by having some that weren't as good a fit. You learn by experience.

[00:22:10] Roy Notowitz: That's great. I do get a lot of questions about board roles from folks, so I know now who to refer them to.

[00:22:16] Christiana Shi: Oh yeah, I have a, I have a minor in boards. Yes, I do.

[00:22:20] Roy Notowitz: So, as you reflect upon your leadership journey and the work you've done developing leaders around you, what core beliefs or values guiding truths have become part of your playbook?

[00:22:32] Christiana Shi: My core leadership philosophy is that people do their best work when they are confident, not when they are afraid. And I formed that belief because I worked with and saw lots of leaders who lead by intimidation. Maybe not intentionally. I'm not saying they get up every day and want to bully their staff, and I don't even mean they're bullies per se.

But as you get more and more senior, whether you want to or not, you are already intimidating people by virtue of your tenure and your role and your success and your history. And I realized that when I got elected senior partner at McKinsey, because when you get elected partner, like what you said about when you're laid off, you're the same valuable person you are the next day, it's the opposite. So when you get elected senior partner, the day before you were leading work with teams, the next day you go back into the same teams, the same clients, and lead that work. But I had this manager tell me the next day that she was so much more nervous meeting with me that day. And I asked her why, and she said, "because you're a senior partner now."

And literally the day before she'd been in my office and that was the light going on for me.

[00:23:40] Roy Notowitz: Wow.

[00:23:41] Christiana Shi: So my, my core belief is whether you want to or not, just the virtue of your seniority exerts a certain influence on people. And so you've got to go out of your way to ask for feedback, to seek out the input of people that are at all levels of your team to spend time with them in a legit kind of authentic way.

I think that's one. The second part of my philosophy is I'm a glass half full kind of gal. I fundamentally believe in the inherent good of most people. Takes a lot to persuade me otherwise, and that's one of the things I will tell my teams sometimes when we're having trouble with someone or we're not getting what we want to get or whatever is people are not inherently getting up every day deciding to be jerks.

So we need to understand, we've got to seek to understand. There's some things we don't know. There's some context we need to understand. Now. At the heart of it, we know some people, in fact are jerks. That's life. You learn it as you get further along, but they are few and far between really. Most people are motivated by what they think they're there to do.

By their own aspirations, by their compensation people do what they get paid to do. And so you've got to spend a little time making sure you really understand that context. So I think optimism and believing in the inherent good of people is probably my second philosophy. And then my third one is the one we already talked about, which is there's no substitute for being good at what you do. You've got to know your stuff and if you don't, you've got to go fill the gaps in.

[00:25:11] Roy Notowitz: So for those leaders who maybe they're not bullies, but they're under a lot of pressure.

[00:25:15] Christiana Shi: Yeah.

[00:25:16] Roy Notowitz: And stress. Like a lot of the leadership assessments we use, like the Hogan talk about how you show up on a bad day, right?

[00:25:22] Christiana Shi: Yeah. That's, yeah.

[00:25:23] Roy Notowitz: And so many companies or larger companies that are good at talent development or leadership development and succession planning, invest in coaching and leadership development. Are you a believer in that?

[00:25:38] Christiana Shi: I believe in taking coaching when it's offered. So for starters, if it's coming from a good place and if a coach is someone who can really tune into you and what you do, and not just a generic sort of level of advice. I've seen professional and executive coaches have enormous impact on people. It tends to be when they're focusing on very specific behaviors and really working to make the individual more aware of what triggers that or when they're doing that and how to cope or use other behaviors to to mitigate. Right? So the best coaches actually spend time with you observing, fly on the wall, sit in the team meeting, watch you make a presentation, all of that.

And at McKinsey, I benefited from a lot of coaching and training that was part of the regular career path. At Nike, I got media training where I got videoed and I had this very terrific media consultant who was just so hard on me, just obliterated me in a basically a, you know, a CNBC or MSNBC kind of interview.

Those things do make a difference, right? So training is different from coaching, and both of those are important, but I think feedback is the other thing that's really critical and it can be hard to take. But I think I learned the most as a leader from doing things wrong and being lucky enough to have teams of people working with and for me who were willing to tell me that.

And it's why I'm a big fan of 360 feedback. I'm a big fan of upward feedback, but I'm even more enthusiastic about feedback in the moment. And we think about it as leaders, that we owe people feedback right after a meeting that we know it's most valuable immediately after the event. But we forget to ask for feedback afterwards.

And so I could make the list for you, Roy, of so many times I did something poorly and someone called me out on it who was working for me, not a peer. When I was a new manager at McKinsey, one of the things I had to get used to was I wasn't the one doing the analysis. I wasn't the one doing the spreadsheet. I had to look at somebody's spreadsheet and trust them.

And so I would stand there and like literally look over their shoulder. This was my third year, I was a third year associate I was learning, and this guy...

[00:27:53] Roy Notowitz: I'm guilty of that.

[00:27:54] Christiana Shi: This one of the associates on the team was like, "Christiana, there's probably other things you're supposed to spend your time on and then I'll show you this when it's done."

Right. Another thing I worked on, because I got feedback was because of time pressure, when someone's showing you their work, your instinct, my instinct was to just cut right to the things that needed to get fixed. because we don't have a lot of time here. You're showing me what you did, you're showing me your presentation, you're showing me your model.

I'm just going to go right to, "you've got to do this, you've got to fix that, you've got to fix that. Thanks very much. Next." And again, I had an associate on the team who said, "Christiana, you could take a minute and tell me what's right about this before you start telling me what's wrong." It literally has become a mantra of mine now that before I talk about an improvement opportunity, I talk about the legitimate, authentic, I'm not doing an attaboy, but legit things that I appreciate or admire. And sometimes if I really don't think it's great, the work product isn't what I want, but they worked hard on it, sometimes the best I can do is to say, I really appreciate how you have been sweating this thing. Let's talk about where we take it next.

I mechanically and methodically worked on that for myself and still my instinct at this age and this stage would be to say, "Roy, don't, there's like typos and lines, blah, blah, blah. Fix those." But instead, I like, I've programmed myself. These are the kind of things that only happen and get better if someone gave you that feedback in the moment.

[00:29:23] Roy Notowitz: Yeah. You have to always be practicing and working on those things.

[00:29:27] Christiana Shi: And build an environment where your team feels safe giving you that feedback.

[00:29:31] Roy Notowitz: Yeah.

[00:29:31] Christiana Shi: That's the really big thing.

[00:29:37] Roy Notowitz: A lot of people ask me, "what exactly do you do at Noto Group?" We partner with entrepreneurs, founders, executives, investors and boards to help them build high performance leadership teams that excel and endure. We've had the privilege of working with more than 250 leading brands from early stage innovators to global icons, and we've placed hundreds of executives along the way. As a certified B Corp since 2013, and proud 1% for the Planet member, it always starts with your mission and values and finding leaders who can bring those to life. If you're curious, you can find out more by visiting our website, NotoGroup.com. Thanks, and now let's get back to our episode.

When you think about growth and, and the impact you've driven across major brands, what role has talent played and what have you learned about hiring and building teams along the way?

[00:31:03] Christiana Shi: I have to say that one of the biggest changes for me moving from management consulting to Nike was learning about talent and hiring. Why do I say that? At McKinsey, we had a very structured way of assessing talent. We went on business school campuses. We gave them a business case, a problem with math and numbers that they had to solve. We had a set of characteristics we looked for that included problem solving, ability, entrepreneurship, communication skills, teamwork and tolerance for ambiguity.

So very specific things that we evaluated people on. It was the same every year, and having LED teams constantly, you have a very good intuitive sense of what you need, and then you have this very structured set of characteristics you're looking for and years and years of track record of doing it well. That was McKinsey.

Then I get to Nike where, you know, leading an integrated business, I had all kinds of functions that were reporting to me, right? I had supply chain, I had real estate, I had store operations, I had marketing, I had merchandising, and what you need and what the skills look like in each of those areas is very different and at the same time, it's the same company. And so you also know they need to have a cultural fit. They need to have a values fit, they need to have an energy or gear fit like you talked about earlier. So it took me a while to realize how to do that. And I think I benefited from the, the talent management and recruiting professionals that I could work with at Nike, I learned a lot from them.

Actually, my HR business partner, my talent leaders, they became my advisors basically because a lot of this was recognizing over time what was going to work in the context of Nike, and they knew that honestly better than I did. What I knew was the skills that I was looking for. That's the part that I could figure out the most, but it took a while to tune into who's going to be successful or who's not.

It's a very strong culture, as most companies have very strong cultures, and so we had a history for a while of hiring people and within two or three years they were gone. We called it graft versus host. Like you just couldn't graft something onto the vine. It just never would take, it took a while to figure out how to do that at scale and have it work. Because we were trying to build a new business area inside Nike in direct to consumer, particularly on the digital commerce side, and so we were bringing in people from very different companies. They might have been similar brands, but they were very different, like digital native kind of companies, and a lot of them were not good fits.

Or Nike wasn't a good fit for them, so it took a while to figure it out. We had to revisit how we could make sure that they felt valued in a company where the brand was king and product was king. And one of the things I learned over time that I think was a big predictor of an individual's likely success was whether they thought of footwear and apparel as just another widget or as footwear and apparel.

And what do I mean by that? There were a lot of digital, experienced, talented people that we would interview who didn't care what the product was. They knew what they needed to do to make a good website. They knew to what they needed to do to run transaction histories or manage the supply chain. I wanted people who on day one were coming in talking about their favorite Air Max that were coming in talking about, you know, how they were a runner that were... whatever. And it took me a while to figure that out. If Nike was just another widget and they were going to leave and go from there to soap, they were not going to be successful at Nike. So the passion for the brand and the product was as big a predictor, a success as anything.

[00:35:02] Roy Notowitz: Yeah, it used to be like if you were a tennis product manager, you pretty much had to be a tennis pro or have some sort of connection to the sport, and I think over the years that sort of softened a bit and it's like just passion for sport or passion for performance product. What's your perspective on that?

[00:35:20] Christiana Shi: Yeah, I think over the years it got diluted to some extent in part by hiring a lot of people in functions where again, you could treat sport or the product or whatever as the widget, and you could swap it out and make it orange juice the next day. And I'd do the same thing.

An example was software engineers, right? To drive Nike digital, both commerce and then what was called then digital sport. But things like the, the fuel band, if you remember the fuel band.

[00:35:45] Roy Notowitz: Yeah, I remember that.

[00:35:46] Christiana Shi: Or the sensor that you had in your shoes back before that. Right? All of those products were supported by digital technology and that digital technology was typically being developed and enhanced by engineers. And we did some of this to ourself. When I first got there, Nike kind of kept those folks at arms length almost like recognizing, "hey, you're not one of us. And so when I took over nike.com, the, it was outside the campus. It was in a building off campus.

[00:36:14] Roy Notowitz: I remember that.

[00:36:14] Christiana Shi: Quote unquote outside the berm, and you remember,

[00:36:16] Roy Notowitz: Yeah.

[00:36:17] Christiana Shi: ...if you were inside the berm, which was this grassy wall that goes around Nike's campus, you were cool. And you were the big, the big kids. If you were outside the berm, you got this message literally every day as you drove to work that you were ancillary.

That you were separate. They were in a building that had nothing to do with sport. So it was called the Rogue at the time, it wasn't even, it didn't have an athlete's name, it didn't have a sport name, nothing. So I come in, as you know, VP of Digital Commerce. I'm driving every day to the "Rogue," which is outside the "berm," and I have to drive my car or ride my bike every day to get to all my meetings on campus.

And my teams are working like mushrooms in a basement, you know, they could have been working for anybody. So we worked really hard to change that. And in the construction work that Nike did, about five years later, the berm expanded. And the Rogue and all those buildings were renamed and they were brought inside the berm.

It was a journey though, and it was probably 10 years from start to finish that a lot of folks that were brought in, because Nike needed their skills were kept at arm's length because they weren't quote unquote Nike people. You're either in or you're out. And so I think we learned the hard way that when you need to add a lot of skills to your company, because you're going in a new direction, you've got to do it in a way that makes those people feel as integral, as core, and as valued as what your quote unquote typical person looked like.

[00:37:40] Roy Notowitz: So you've led massive teams through growth and change. When you're assuming a leadership role within an organization, how do you get to know well enough the strengths and opportunities of the people within those teams. And then what are some examples where you've identified unique talents to the benefit of the business?

[00:38:04] Christiana Shi: Well, first of all, you've got to take advantage of the regular processes that you have, right? So actually really use the semi-annual and the annual review process. And I like to use the semi-annual, not the review where you're getting your rating and your comp, but the kind of mid-year review, to hear more from the individual themselves, what they want from the rest of the year.

And we reflected that in the book as I talked about earlier, by saying, "Hey, come into those meetings with an ask, with a sense of what you want." And it's because being on the other side of those discussions as a boss or a manager, it was a lot easier for me to help develop paths for people if I knew what they wanted to do.

And I thought it was really important to actually sit down once a year and draw out career maps. And we did that. I don't know if you ever saw those at Nike.

[00:38:49] Roy Notowitz: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:49] Christiana Shi: But we would draw out career maps for people and...

[00:38:51] Roy Notowitz: One pager, usually....

[00:38:52] Christiana Shi: One pagers, and it had branches because you could do this or you could do that, but it was driven off of those things will get you this set of capabilities. Those things will get you this exposure. They'll get you this experience. It was intentional that I thought was a very valuable tool. It's also important to recognize that as a senior leader. You're never going to know everybody on the front line of your organization.

You've got to rely on the leaders below you to know their own teams and to ask the right questions and ask them to be assessing and doing all of those things so it goes deep into the organization because it's just not humanly possible to get to know everybody. I was at Nike for seven years. I had people in every corner of the world that were rolling up to me, and I knew I would never meet every store associate store athlete, right?

But I wanted them to feel like they knew what they needed to know from me, and I wanted them to feel like they understood the direction that we're all trying to go together. But you need to rely on and hold your leadership teams to account to push that thinking all the way down into their organizations.

So an example, when I first took over nike.com, there was a woman who was leading the replatforming effort that was just about done and replatforming is a nightmare and I wish none of you to ever have to do it. We were moving from three or four different instances of nike.com's technology stack to one global digital commerce platform, which by the way, unlocked all the growth...

[00:40:22] Roy Notowitz: So much,

[00:40:22] Christiana Shi: ...that happened there. Unbelievable. I took over two months before it went live. So I mean, I had no hand in the design or anything. The teams had done great stuff, but there was a woman, Nicole, who was leading the, that effort from the digital technology team side. And so again, because of that culture that I mentioned where the technology people at that time were kept as apart, separate and apart, not viewed as one of us.

I got to know her and thought this person has general management capabilities. Just watching the way she led that effort, watching the way she led that team, and over time created opportunities that Nicole fully stepped up to for her to take on more and more of a general management kind of role. And eventually to lead what we called Nike's global store, which was actually the global P&L for all the countries that we were in, where we didn't have a physical presence, but we were going to do digital commerce.

So it was a real P&L kind of business. And she'd never looked back. She knocked the ball out of the park and is president and CEO of a standalone brand outside of Nike now. But it's one of the best examples where if you just took typecasting or you just took the function that somebody was in as their full potential, you were going to miss a lot.

And I've always believed in cross training. I've always believed in trying to map people across multiple functions, because you can't create CEOs of the future...

[00:41:51] Roy Notowitz: Right.

[00:41:51] Christiana Shi: ...when you just go up through one, you know, silo of a company, right? And yet, you know, for a lot of businesses and professions, the way you succeed is you keep getting good at the thing that you're doing.

I'm a merchant. I'm just going to take on bigger and bigger categories, then I'm going to manage other merchants. Then I'm going to be the head merchant, right? But if you want to be considered to be the CEO, don't you need to understand the balance sheet? When's the last time you looked at a balance sheet? Don't you need to understand how your products are actually delivered? Don't you need to understand digital commerce and some sense of technology? And now I would add AI. How are you going to get that, right?

[00:42:29] Roy Notowitz: How do you avoid the Peter principle, like getting promoted beyond your level of competence? Because that happens in corporations sometimes where you know somebody's working hard, doing a great job and they just get promoted a little bit over their head maybe, or they, there's a learning curve.

[00:42:46] Christiana Shi: I don't see that as much anymore. I see the opposite, which is just as potentially damaging, which is I see people that are stuck, that are left in something for a long time. I call that benevolent stagnation. It's the opposite of the Peter principle.

It's basically, you're so good at what you're doing right now that your employer has no incentive to move you out of that. You're critical. We need you and we're going to make you feel great, Roy. because we're going to give you an increase every year. But eventually you're going to look up and go, "but I'm still doing the same thing I was doing five years ago and I used to think of myself as a growth stock and I used to think I was going somewhere."

You've got to watch out for that because it can be very comfortable and you may have a phase of your life where that's just what you need.

[00:43:29] Roy Notowitz: That's fine. Yeah.

[00:43:29] Christiana Shi: To do the same thing every day and to know it and to have a handle on it and no surprises, then you go, but, the reality is there's a thing in the world called gravity, and gravity applies in business too, which is you cannot stay in a holding pattern for long because business conditions change, corporate conditions change, leadership conditions change, your own needs change, and eventually, if you don't grow, you will fall. Yeah. And what happens is there's a reorg, there's a layoff, there's a change in leadership, and suddenly the fact that you've been doing the same thing the same way for years is not valued. And you don't want to make yourself vulnerable like that. So I feel like it comes back to that be good at what you do, but also keep growing and keep challenging yourself.

[00:44:16] Roy Notowitz: And the flip side of that, for a leader who maybe has someone like that on their team who's really great at something, is to look at that and say, are there other things that we're doing that we're not utilizing...

[00:44:27] Christiana Shi: Yes.

[00:44:27] Roy Notowitz: ...this person's capabilities for?

[00:44:28] Christiana Shi: That's, so that's really important for all of us who are in leadership roles. We have the responsibility to be aware of when we are pigeonholing someone in that stagnation because we think we can't afford to lose them. I mean, I know that feeling you absolutely hate to give your team member up because it's going to throw a monkey wrench for months. You're going to have to train somebody new. They're going to have to get to know the team. They're going to have to get to know you. That happened a lot, both at McKinsey and at Nike because it's a grow or go environment, and I give them credit for that, which is people didn't stay in the same role for more than three years. Five years was considered a lifetime.

On the downside, that kind of churn can be challenging to deliver results. On the plus side, you did not see people getting stuck the same way. And so it's a trade off. I think as leaders, we always have to walk a fine line between getting our teams to the point where they're performing and performing well and having some steady state, but also challenging ourselves to change that up for their good and for our own.

[00:45:39] Roy Notowitz: Let's talk about boards really quickly again, and I'm curious to what extent as a board member or board director you're involved with raising the hiring bar in companies.

[00:45:51] Christiana Shi: The board's direct role is to hire and evaluate the CEO. The CEO's role is to hire and evaluate everybody else. However, the board drives strategy with the leadership team, and that strategy has to include talent strategy. And so the board's job is to call out, connected to the strategy, what are the capabilities that they see that are needed? We do that all the time. There's usually an annual talent review. I just came out of it yesterday for the nonprofit board I'm on, and we are the mirror that we're holding up basically to the leadership team and saying, see this is how we're looking in terms of the skills that we need for the future, the diversity that we're trying to achieve, the global footprint that we need, whatever it is, right? That aligns with our strategic goals. The board's job is to hold that mirror up and say, we need this and to prioritize and push hard in the areas where it needs.

But the board's job is not to run the company. And so for better or for worse, one of the things you have to get used to as a director is you're not making the hiring decisions on anybody other than the CEO.

[00:47:10] Roy Notowitz: For women leaders who aspire to serve on corporate boards, what are the most important steps they can take during their career to position themselves for that opportunity? And, and what strategies have you seen work best for landing board roles?

[00:47:24] Christiana Shi: So I could write another whole book right on corporate board service, both getting on a board and then enjoying and doing well on the board. Maybe that'll be the future book. We'll see. I, first of all, I'm a big fan of board service, whether it's public or private or nonprofit, because I think it rounds a leader out to be on the other side of a lot of decisions and to see how leadership and boards can work together to really drive the performance of a company and serve the stakeholders.

So I support the notion. However, one of the first things I do when women come and ask me about corporate board service is I turn it around and ask them, why do you want to be on a board? What do you want to get out of it? Because it is more work and it is more work on top of your day job. And so you're going to have to make room for it.

And you're going to have to know what you want, just like the jobs that we've talked about to make sure that you get it. And again, like I said earlier, you've got to interview the board when they're interviewing you to make sure it's a good fit because it's actually hard to get off a board. It's not impossible, of course someone can quit, but you've got your professional reputation to some extent is at stake. And so you don't want to go into these roles lightly, and many people are on boards for 10, 15, 20 years. So this is a very long-term relationship you're committing to typically.

[00:48:51] Roy Notowitz: And if the values aren't aligned and you have a fiduciary or legal obligations as well...

[00:48:55] Christiana Shi: Oh God.

[00:48:55] Roy Notowitz: ...there's a lot of risk involved.

[00:48:57] Christiana Shi: Oh yeah. That is one area in particular where doing your homework is critical, is as much as you can on the financial and performance side and the integrity of the company. The problem is they can't and don't have to show a lot of that to you when you are, quote unquote, an outsider. I always say to people when they're considering a board, speak to the whole leadership team if they can, and if the CEO won't let you do that or doesn't support, that's a red flag in and of itself because you really need to learn.

I've had, as we all have situations where I got in and I was like, you know what? This one's probably not right for me, but I'm going to have to make it work. So then in terms of how you get on your first board, what's going to surprise a lot of people is at least half the time, this is my unscientific number, at least half the time, it's through someone you know, maybe the other half the time is through a recruiter.

Both of those channels are really important, and it comes back to what we talked about earlier around building your professional network. When you need it, you don't have it and you don't have it, you can't get it right away, right? So think about over time how you stay in touch with people you worked with that went other places.

Think about how you respond to recruiter calls when you're not interested in the role, but you could potentially help them. Like I say in the book, you know, one of the things you ought do is build a network of relationships with recruiters, even if you're not looking for a job. Why? Because you can help them, help other people, you know, find a job.

[00:50:28] Roy Notowitz: Exactly.

[00:50:28] Christiana Shi: And when you do want to do something different, whether it's board service or changing your own role, you've got more of a, of a relationship to build on than some very transactional, you know, "I don't know you" kind of call. So if I look back at the boards I've been on, the first board I ever got on was through a former McKinsey colleague, second board I got on, recruiter calling me out of the blue because of my reputation. Back to, all of these things come back together again to your reputation and your network. The third board I got on through people I had worked with before and a former client, the fourth board I got on, a recruiter and it has gone like that back and forth now for all six or however many boards it's been for me.

You've got to invest in both and what, who I feel the worst for are women or men who come to me and want to get on a board, and they're not known in their industry. They have a pretty senior job. They don't know anyone that's on a board. They haven't talked to any recruiters in the past about a board. And they're thinking of doing things like paying a recruiter to put their name in front of boards. Boards never, I can just tell you...

[00:51:33] Roy Notowitz: Yeah. By the way, we don't do that.

[00:51:34] Christiana Shi: Yes. Okay. Thank you. For anyone listening when boards get sent resumes by people they don't know or firms they don't know, they don't do anything with those resumes, right? They just don't. So that's not going to work. This is basically your network and your professional reputation coming back home to roost.

[00:51:53] Roy Notowitz: I always think about this, and it's been part of my formula for success, is that if you invest in the success of somebody else or of other people, that always comes back around, right? And so I've probably filled more jobs that, for free or board roles just by, because I'm invested in you, in the person and we have plenty of work.

So it's not like I, this abundance philosophy and just investing in the success of other people, that always brings a lot of value, you never know where or when

[00:52:23] Christiana Shi: It really is a pay it forward thing. You, exactly, you, if you come at it transactionally and you think it's a tit for tat, if I do this for you, then you're going to have to do that for me. You're missing the point. Because it's a rising tide, it's going to lift all the boats. You don't know when these things will come back. But I have, we have some of the stories in the book. I have so many examples where something that you did for someone else comes back later in ways that you could never have anticipated.

And if you give me a sec, I'll tell one story. Just so people can, can see it because over the long haul of your career, this can make a fundamental difference in how you do and whether you get where you want to go. So for me, I mentioned Jeanne Jackson, who was my boss when I first joined Nike. I met Jeanne in 1998 or 99 when she took over at Banana Republic as the brand president.

Gap Inc. was my client. We were in Japan. I met her in Japan on a trip that we had organized for Don Fisher, the chairman who brought along some of his executives to look at the Japanese market, which ultimately Gap obviously entered and did well in. And Jeanne was on that trip and we hit it off. And for the next three years probably, we had lunch every couple months and I would pen it into my calendar so that I didn't forget at least a couple times a year, and Jeanne would call me when she wanted some research or information she thought McKinsey would have, and I would just send it to her. And I would kid her sometimes and say, "Jeanne, I get paid for what I do." And she would say, "Christiana, we're going to hire you at some point."

And eventually she did, and we served her at Banana Republic. Then she was on the Nordstrom board. We served Nordstrom, then she joined the Nike board. I was already working at Nike. Yeah, the life went on. She was at walmart.com as the CEO. We served walmart.com and eventually, so that was, I met her in 98 or 99.

In 2010, I went and worked for her at Nike. 10 years later, if you would've told me when I first met her in Tokyo on a trip that she was going to be my boss at Nike 10 years later, I'd be like, you've got to be kidding me. You've got to be kidding me.

[00:54:29] Roy Notowitz: You just never know where.

[00:54:30] Christiana Shi: You just never know. But cultivating that relationship over time was fundamental to my career, to my success, and frankly to my enjoyment because she's one of my best friends.

[00:54:42] Roy Notowitz: I always tell people, it's probably less likely that I'm actually going to place you just based on the percentages, but it's a long-term strategy. And having those, those relationships. If I introduce you to somebody who then ultimately introduces you to somebody else, then yeah, you know, it's the credibility factor.

[00:55:02] Christiana Shi: And you literally never know over time when that's going to hit. So if you keep looking for it, forget it. That's the wrong mindset.

[00:55:08] Roy Notowitz: Just just keep doing good work.

[00:55:09] Christiana Shi: I like the abundance mindset. I, to me, again, it's that fundamental belief that people are inherently good that they have good intent and that doing something good for others comes back to you.

[00:55:20] Roy Notowitz: So what are you most excited about as you ponder the future? How are you thinking about the future?

[00:55:26] Christiana Shi: And the future.

[00:55:26] Roy Notowitz: And what's next?

[00:55:27] Christiana Shi: We haven't even talked about my personal life, but I am a relatively new grandma, and so I have to start with a shout out to...

[00:55:35] Roy Notowitz: Congrats.

[00:55:35] Christiana Shi: ...My two and a half year old granddaughter and my three month old grandson.

[00:55:39] Roy Notowitz: Amazing.

[00:55:39] Christiana Shi: And say that part of the future that I look to and feel so blessed is getting to watch them grow up. Knock on wood. As a professional woman watching the son that I raised, find a great partner in life. And watching the two of them balance work and life and raise children is a huge gift that I say to a lot of people is it just reminds you that it is worth it.

It is worth it what we're doing now, sometimes when you're in the trenches, sometimes when you're working hard, you can't look up and feel comfortable. It is worth it because I'm at a stage in my life where I look forward to every day. I am only doing things I want to do. I don't have days where I look at my calendar and I'm like, "Ugh, I can't believe I've got to go to that," or whatever.

I invest my time as a scarce asset only where I want to. And by the way, financially, I invest my money where I want to. I have a fairly sizable amount of time that I put into nonprofits. In my case, it's Habitat for Humanity and Doernbecher and a couple other things. And it's because I want to, and it's the payoff I think that comes from working through all the ups and downs of a long career, but keeping your eye on where you're headed and what you're getting out of it. I just feel like this stage of my life, you know, having written a book, being on boards, I want to be on leading a nonprofit, having a wonderful family, like what else do you want?

So I look forward to the future to start with. I am, if I was going to bring it back to a professional level, I am more anxious right now than I've been in a long time about all the forces that are at work on both business and philanthropy. It's a really challenging time and it's unpredictable. The tariffs are making us all crazy. Both corporate boards I'm on are affected in different ways, but, hugely affected. The political environment and the uncertainty around that is affecting the nonprofit that I'm leading. And I worry for my grandkids about things like health and safety for them as they grow up.

So I would say I have a little bit more of persistent anxiety than I've had in a while, but it's offset by the optimism that is, you know, what I use every day and I'm going to do the best that I can, obviously to be a force at work in this whole uncertain time. When the book came out, my son did three separate events with me, where-- author talks, where he interviewed me, and it gave me a chance to hear his perspective on what it was like to have a working mom and to realize that in fact, you did not damage your child when they were growing up.

All the guilt that you carried around all the times that you felt like you let them down that net-net you did good and your kid's going to do good in the world. And I don't know that there's a better feeling than that.

[00:58:35] Roy Notowitz: Well, you're an inspiration to so many, and I really appreciate you taking the time to come in and share these great insights into how to build a successful career and live a 360 life.

[00:58:48] Christiana Shi: So, oh, I enjoyed this Roy, it's good to meet you because we've known each other kind of at a distance for a while, and so if this is what it takes for us to meet face to face and talk. I think I'd do that 10 times over, so thank you.

[00:58:59] Roy Notowitz: Yeah. I'm looking forward to our next conversation.

[00:59:01] Christiana Shi: That's right. Coffee in the Pearl.

[00:59:02] Roy Notowitz: Perfect.

[00:59:02] Christiana Shi: All right. Thank you.

[00:59:03] Roy Notowitz: Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to How I Hire. Visit HowIHire.com for details about the show. How I Hire is created by Noto Group Executive Search. To find out more about us visit NotoGroup.com. You can also sign up for our monthly email job alert newsletter and find additional job search strategy, resources, and content on hiring on our website.

This podcast was produced by Anna McClain. To learn more about her and her team's work, visit AOMcClain.com.

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