#13 Liz Gebhard: You Don't Have to Climb the Ladder to Move Forward | Target, Amazon & Beyond

And how do you...

It's so interesting because you're probably one of very few people that can speak like that and go, well, 20 years ago, we didn't have this.

Now we're working in this way.

How do you keep yourself completely relevant and ahead of these changes? Because I think sometimes...

particularly with AI and any kind of change that we have, typically most people live with this sort of fear of change and they also don't grasp what's changing.

So do you think, I feel like there's some juicy nuggets in here of what we can do generally, actually, to kind of keep up with that transformation.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I think a couple of things that have always guided me is I received a lot of good advice early on in my career, particularly from at the time, much fewer women leaders that were around me.

But those that were were sort of very aspirational to kind of to kind of look to.

And a couple of things that I'd heard early on was.

the more something the opportunity scares you, the more likely you should probably lean in to try it because that means there's a biggest opportunity to grow and kind of apply and understand.

I think if you take the easy path to your point on relevance, it's something that's generally things that are either repeatable If you're super comfortable the whole time, you're probably not feeling very challenged.

Your engagement might drop off.

The ways in which you approach it might just be kind of run in the middle, press a button, move on.

And I think by our parents' generation, or my parents' generation at least, was very much you go to a company, you stay there 35 years, you might be an accountant, and that's the only thing you do.

And I think going into my career, I was always a bit anxious already to start with.

I don't really know if I want to pick this thing now and then do that for the next... 35 years.

So I think even starting my career really early days, I was in university, majored in marketing and journalism, and then I've never done either of those jobs.

So my first job out of uni was right into supply chain analytics, which, you know, natural fit for a marketer.

But I just kind of found interesting spaces, even within things that I didn't really know that I would find passionate or interesting.

And then that opportunity led me to accidentally discover an email functionality within a tool, which then put me towards a tech career, which is, I guess, sounds a really strange thing.

But, you know, things like that that were just at the time felt like little steps or little things that then led me to the next thing that led me to the next.

And I think the big thing that I've always been guided by is again, kind of assessing the risk, but equally going into things knowing I might not have that exact skill set as they're writing it out of the job description, but I do have these three things, and I think those should apply this way, and then communicating myself and my value in a way that kind of showed that, and that has been critical for me because I have moved between heavily kind of tech data analytics roles to commercial leadership roles across really broad spectrums of business, and Commercial leadership, although you need to know the P&L, the fundamental thing there is vendor relationship strategy, building long-term planning, pivoting that back to tech, to kind of chief of staff roles that was looking broadly across the business.

I moved then into HR because I was super passionate about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and they happened to have an opportunity to lead a global function.

And when in your life are you just going to get a chance to kind of lead at that scale? And if you've already been in the space before, And you get somebody that's reaching out to you to tap you on the shoulder to say, hey, have you ever thought about this? I think, first of all, sometimes people see things in you that you don't yet and kind of listening to that idea of what else you should be looking at and equally evaluating, is this something that's a two-way door I could always revert back? Or is this something that I can't come back from if I make that pivot? So I think part of staying relevant is continuing to challenge yourself Really, the second part of that was just fundamentally always being curious.