Pitney Bowes Leaders on How to Build a Team You’re Proud Of
There are countless books, podcasts, and articles on leadership. But nothing can quite describe the sense of pride a leader feels when they watch a team they’ve built succeed.
That feeling of pride resonates and inspires others to continue to work hard, achieve more, and build on their strengths. We sat down with some leaders at Pitney Bowes to hear how they’ve been able to build teams they’re proud of. Read on for their stories and advice.
Value Unique Perspectives and Experiences
To build a successful team, it’s crucial to focus on the skills, perspectives, and experiences that each individual team member brings to the table. “One skill that stands out above and beyond everything is that once you are in an executive role of any type, you are really a human resources leader. Many people don't understand the amount of time that is spent on the people side of the equation with our most precious resource, talent,” says Pitney Bowes Chief Financial Officer, Ana Chadwick.
So, when you’re choosing people, Senior Vice President and President of Pitney Bowes Global Financial Services Christopher Johnson encourages leaders to fill the team with as many diverse perspectives as possible. “Diversity in business is about winning. It's about achieving success. The best performing companies are those that promote diversity and inclusion,” he elaborates. “Diversity gives us something that is important for our business: diversity of thought. Through our different lenses — whether you are a woman, from whatever race, religious background, belief, identity, or orientation — we can see opportunities and build on each other’s ideas. This lends itself to an environment where the best of the best ideas can be forged.”
Similarly, Executive Vice President and President of Sending Technology Solutions, Jason Dies keeps his eye out for people with unique backgrounds and talents. “I generally look for people with diversity in experience and perspectives,” he says. “For example, sales and marketing, or finance and supply chain. Even within your own part of the organization you can get different experiences that will allow you to look at things in a new way. Being ambidextrous — the ability to work on multiple goals at the same time — is important.”
But your team members aren’t the only source of unique perspectives that you can tap into. Ana encourages leaders to remember the role that mentors and sponsors can play, which is why she suggests they nurture their network. “When you find someone who's willing to stick their neck out for you and sponsor you, make sure you keep those relationships. It’s one thing to have someone sit at a distance and give you advice, but when you have someone who can say, ‘This person can do that, or is ready for that,’ treasure those sponsors. Keep in touch with them.”
Be Intentional About Your Leadership Strategy
Before you start building your team, you have to hone in on your leadership skills and work to embody them in your personal and professional life. Ana stresses that leadership extends far beyond the office. “You [can be a] leader at any stage or in any role. I look at kids, and they can be leaders in their own classrooms,” she elaborates.
Ana learned a lesson early in her career that has stuck with her as she’s grown into executive roles: the 3 ‘E’s of leadership. “As a leader, you have to have energy and you need to have the ability to energize others.” Then there’s edge. “You're not here to please everybody. You need to have a path and a mission, and you must have the edge to get there.” The last one is execution. “I've always been a firm believer of those ‘E’s: Your energy, energizing others, having edge, and execution, which you have to do with passion. Once that all comes together, a leader can set a vision, break down that vision into manageable tasks, and rally people around achieving those things.”
Bill Hughes, Chief Communications Officer, offers a different take on embodying leadership. When it comes to leadership styles, he prioritizes showing unwavering support to his team. “Somebody told me once that the best demonstration of leadership is how you bring people along with you, and whether or not they believe that you have their back,” he says. “That's true. When people know that we learn from mistakes, and we have each other’s backs, you have a much more efficient and productive team.”
These Pitney Bowes leaders break down some actionable ways to exercise those leadership skills and improve executive presence. President of Presort Services, Debbie Pfieffer urges new leaders to, “fill the space [they’re] in. You can’t be a quiet mouse in the corner. Don’t assume that others at the table have all the answers or more experience. Ask questions, lean into conversations. Be present and ask the questions that you know other people have, but that they’re afraid to ask.”
Jason reiterates the point that leaders shouldn’t be afraid to conscientiously take up space. His top tip for exuding a confident leadership style is to be prepared. “One trick to remember is that most times when you are presenting, you actually know more about the topic than the people you're presenting to. But on the flip side of that, be cognizant of your audience; you don’t want to overwhelm them by demonstrating everything you know about a topic,” he says. “When I give a presentation, I think of it as a story; it's not a set of individual charts or facts that I'm going to recite, but it's about moving the audience from point A to point B.”
Set Goals and Empower Your Team
Once you have established your team and a leadership strategy to support them, creating clear objectives to ensure they’re on the right track is the final step. Setting goals and working strategically is natural for many leaders, but oftentimes that involves getting out of your comfort zone. Take it from Christopher, a first-generation American. “I come from humble beginnings. What my family has achieved has been through a lot of hard work and sharing our experiences. To get the right set of experiences, you need to put yourself into positions that might sometimes be uncomfortable. As a Black man growing up in America, if I didn't get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable, I would not have been able to accomplish the things that I have. It's all about putting yourself into positions where you can learn.”
And don’t forget to celebrate your (and your team’s) success.
Christopher continues to give back to others, whether it's by sitting on local charity boards or empowering his team. “I get a great deal of joy helping people succeed — seeing how individuals on our team have been able to grow their careers, expand, learn, and develop.”
Bill agrees that empowerment is important to building and retaining a team you’re proud of.
“When you find great people, you want to do everything that you can to keep them. I try to reward people that are thinking differently. I think that's critical to success. Their success is your success.”
EnerSys CFO Andi Funk on Success in Finance, Leadership, and Paying It Forward
Andi Funk knows firsthand the power of lifting up others.
“That can mean helping someone else yourself or, equally as impactful, hearing about a problem or issue someone is facing and proactively connecting them to a friend,” she says.
She’s seen that play out in her own life. “Many good things that have happened in my life have stemmed from times I’ve given back,” she reflects. Part of what led her to become the Chief Financial Officer of energy storage technology company, EnerSys is because of her belief in doing good.
She was volunteering as Audit Committee Chairperson for the Berks County United Way when she first met Mike Schmidtlein, EnerSys’s former CFO, who later asked her to come on as his backfill successor.
“I’m a big believer that what you put out there comes back to you. Giving to others and to the community is not only personally fulfilling, it can also be very synergistic,” says Andi.
Now, in a leadership role not often held by women, Andi prioritizes giving back not just to her general community but specifically to other women and girls looking for guidance on finding their own paths to success.
That includes working with EnerSys’s Women in Leadership (WiL) business resource group and creating opportunities for younger talent to experience what it feels like to be a woman in business.
Read on to hear more about Andi’s story and the lessons she wants to pay forward to others.
Putting Herself in Positions to Succeed
Andi believes that your greatest strength is often your greatest weakness. She reflects that a key to her career progression has been identifying her strengths, and also being self-aware to recognize and compensate when these strengths play out as weaknesses.
“Math was a strong suit; being analytical always came pretty naturally to me,” says Andi, who started out as an accounting major with a sociology minor. She focused on accounting specifically because, “It’s the language of business, and no matter what you do in business, it’s important to understand how financial statements work and how a company makes money.”
After several years in industry, she wanted to go back and learn something new, and was deciding between pursuing a law degree and an MBA. Her then-employer was willing to sponsor the MBA, which steered Andi in that direction, and she began her program shortly after going on maternity leave with her first child.
“More than anything, I learned how to take on a ton. I learned how to grow. How to prioritize, how to identify the big rocks and know what I needed to focus on,” she says.
While she felt some trepidation about joining the program at the start—” What am I doing here?” she remembers thinking—she ended up recognizing the power in embracing something new.
“The important thing is stepping out of your comfort zone and taking on roles that cause you to stretch and grow,” says Andi.
Inspired by that lesson, she went on to take on new roles in new parts of the business cycle: leading business development, where she negotiated and structured deals and oversaw due diligence; manufacturing, where she implemented a cost analysis program; corporate finance, where she took a company out of chapter 11 bankruptcy, restructured their loans, and put a new forecasting and budgeting process into place; and even C-suite leadership, where she built a meaningful work culture.
“[These experiences] allowed me to see across a business, and really be empathetic for the different functions and how they need to collaborate and work well together,” she says.
That is exactly what she’s now doing as EnerSys’s CFO. When she first joined the company as VP of Finance in the Americas, she instituted a new strategic planning process, along with other transformational efforts. Now, as CFO, Andi is working on integrated business planning process improvements to align internal resources and capital allocation decisions, and strengthening external stakeholders’ awareness of how EnerSys’s solutions are connected to a changing world.
“Our Lines of Business are tied to global transformational megatrends such as 5G, renewables, grid stabilization, electrification, automation, and changes in materials handling, because our products enable these things to happen more efficiently. This is an incredibly exciting time to be at EnerSys,” she says.
And an enjoyable one, to boot.
“What I really like about EnerSys is that we’re a large company, so you’ve got the complexities and interesting dynamics of being a midcap, global, publicly traded company. But it also feels like a family. It’s easy to get access to people. People have open-door policies. People care about each other,” she says. “From day one coming into the organization, you don’t feel like an outsider.”
Lifting Up Others
No matter how busy her schedule gets, Andi continues to prioritize making time for others, especially other women looking to build careers in finance.
Her efforts to that end include participating in coffee chats for the company’s WiL group; speaking to middle and high school students about her career; serving as a mentor and an executive in residence for college students; arranging job shadow sessions for young girls; leading PeaceTrust, an affinity group for a local women's shelter, Safe Berks, and participating in EnerSys’s own mentoring program, among other projects.
Andi is cognizant that she’s made choices along the way that have allowed her to have both the career and the family that she currently enjoys, and one of the main things she stresses with her mentees is the importance of examining their priorities.
“It’s easy to feel conflicting pressures like, ‘Oh, I really should be a stay-at-home mom’ and ‘I really want a successful career,’” she says. “You have to find out what’s the right place and balance for you. As my mother taught me and I now repeat to my own children, ‘With every privilege comes an accompanying responsibility.’ You can’t have one without the other; you have to want both.”
4 Key Lessons for Success in Leadership
Looking back at the path she’s taken, Andi can identify a few key learnings for others considering a role in leadership:
- “Have confidence in trying something new. Every time I got out of my comfort zone was where I've had the most rewarding work experiences and personal life experiences.”
- Have a sense of urgency, but temper your emotions. “Most things aren’t life and death. Identify those big rocks, work on them with vigor, and keep the rest in balance. All right, we have this issue—how are we going to solve it?”
- Prioritize helping others and being responsive. Andi re-emphasizes the importance of paying it forward. “Not only do you feel good, but you set yourself apart,” she says. “Good things come out of it. Be someone who helps others and can be relied upon.”
- “Have fun. Life is short. I believe in working hard, but this is our one shot at life. Leave your mark and do it smiling. Better yet, do it while laughing.”
Interested in learning more about EnerSys? Check out their open roles!
3 Tips from Freddie Mac’s Courtney Liebowitz on Leading as a Woman in Tech
Courtney Liebowitz—now the Director of Governance, Information, Security, and Data Loss Prevention at Freddie Mac—didn’t have much experience with information security when she first joined the federal mortgage lender as a consultant in 2013.
Since starting at Freddie Mac, Courtney’s hard work and thirst for continual learning have led her to take on several new challenges, including her most recent promotion to director. We sat down to ask her what other key lessons shaped her path into leadership, and what advice she has for other women looking to follow in her footsteps.
Finding Her Stride as a Leader
As a consultant, Courtney taught herself the ins and outs of information security and quickly proved her mettle at Freddie Mac—her success didn’t go unnoticed, and she was hired full-time as a manager in 2018.
One of the things Courtney has appreciated most about Freddie Mac is how supportive the company is of her desire to learn and stretch herself.
“If you want to learn something new, or go to a different division, people support that, and there’s a lot of opportunity,” she explains. For Courtney, that opportunity has meant increasing responsibilities through promotions to senior manager, and most recently, director.
Leadership is something Courtney has taken to organically. “It’s in my nature to take on extra stuff, to fix things,” she says. But she attributes her development as a leader in large part to the support she’s received from Freddie Mac.
“I’ve had a lot of training experiences throughout my tenure at Freddie Mac. They’re absolutely supportive, and very much promote women in technology,” she says.
One of the most formative experiences Courtney has had at the company was a six-months-long executive leadership training for women in information security. “It was fantastic,” she says, noting how the training opened her eyes to some of the barriers women in the workforce face.
“Prior to the training, prior to seeing the data,” she explains, “it wasn’t something I was particularly aware of because I have never been made to feel that way—dismissed, or too assertive—at Freddie. Not at Freddie, not one time.”
Understanding the challenges that do exist has made her grateful for the environment she finds herself in at the company. In addition to the training she’s received, she has a great example to look up to in Betty Elliott, Freddie Mac’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). “My CISO is a very strong female lead. She's amazing,” she says.
Paying It Forward: 3 Tips for Other Women in Leadership
Courtney’s self-taught approach, coupled with the support she’s received from Freddie Mac, has led her to a fulfilling leadership role in information security.
Now, she wants to pay that forward to other women in the field.
“The most fulfilling part of my job is watching someone that I’m coaching, or mentoring come into their own,” Courtney says.
She shared three tips for excelling as a leader:
- Trust your gut. If you are considering taking on new opportunities, even ones you might not feel entirely prepared for, go with your gut. “Use your best judgment,” she says. “Your gut’s not going to lie to you.”
- Put others at ease whenever you can. Courtney shares an example of how she was able to encourage a mentee who was scared about delivering a presentation: “I told her, ‘I’ll be in the meeting with you. If you stop talking, I will start.’ And she’s been presenting extremely well ever since.”
- Know when to compromise—and when to walk away. “[In a workplace,] you have different personalities. Sometimes, you can work together to come up with a compromise. Other times, you may have to agree to disagree and walk away. But if you're just constantly battling, you'll never get anywhere.”
Want to work with Courtney at Freddie Mac? Check out their open roles!
Navigating the Path from IC to Leader at Helm: 3 Lessons from Sam Gomez
You know that scene in Arrested Development where Lucille guessed how much a banana costs (and was wrong by a factor of 50)?
That scene works because it really is what out-of-touch politicians sound like.
And that’s why Sam Gomez believes in supporting local, grassroots leaders through the work she does as a senior frontend engineer at Helm, a data platform for political organizers aimed at creating a more participatory democracy.
“It’s ridiculous when I see politicians try to put a budget plan together and they’re like, ‘Rent, $800.’ It’s like, ‘Where are you getting rent for that?’” she says. “It’s important to support grassroots politicians because those are the people that are us, that are living in our shoes.”
Sam didn’t set out to work in a politics-adjacent field. She didn’t set out to be a leader, either. Both things happened because of the mission and culture at Helm—so we sat down with her to find out more about her journey, as well as what advice she has to share with others looking to also find meaningful paths at work.
From MySpace to Frontend
Sam got into coding by teaching herself HTML and CSS in order to personalize her MySpace page. She loved connecting a few lines of code to an external change that would make her page better reflect her personality.
“I was excited that I was understanding it, so I was like, ‘I wanna do this. I want to make websites for a living,’” she remembers. “That was in middle school. You don’t expect stuff like that to really stick. But it did!”
Her first job out of college was in front end development, which Sam was grateful for. “I’m honestly not sure I would still be in this field if I couldn’t work in the front,” she says. “I had an internship project that was more back-end-oriented and I kind of felt miserable.”
It’s the immediate return on investment that Sam loves about front-end work, she says. “The reward is quicker,” she explains.
Even though Sam had started out working as an individual contributor on the frontend at her last job, she wasn’t feeling very fulfilled. She’d been asked to take on a management role, which had removed her from day-to-day coding and replaced it with endless meetings and responsibilities she wasn’t ready for. “I wasn’t getting the training I needed, and I felt like I was drowning,” she says.
So she started looking for a new role.
Enter Helm
When Sam saw a post from Helm on LinkedIn, she was immediately intrigued. “I’d never worked in the political space before, but when I saw they wanted to help these local-level campaigns and advocacy groups, it almost felt like a calling,” she says. “Like, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to help. I like helping the community, and I feel like this will do that.’”
She applied, and found the interview process “almost too good to be true” because everyone she interacted with was “so nice” and the whole thing was quick and transparent. Sam had applied for an individual contributor role, because she wanted to take a step back from management, and that’s where she started.
A few months in, though, her manager asked her about her career goals during a 1:1, and Sam shared that she’d like to get into management again—with the right support system. From there, she moved to a tech lead position, where she got a feel for making decisions.
It’s been different at Helm, says Sam, because she’s not been thrust into leadership without any guidance. She’s going through training materials with Helm’s Director of People Operations and another coworker, who are putting together sessions on how to manage.
“It shows that they really do care about supporting us and making sure they are setting us up for success,” says Sam, who has found that a mix of coding and management is her calling.
“I like to help people, and solve people’s problems, but I still want to be an engineer. I get the best of both worlds right now,” she says.
Sam now has a few direct reports, and has solidified her transition into a leadership role.
3 Lessons on Moving Into Management
As her career progresses, Sam is racking up hard-earned wisdom about building a meaningful experience at work. She shares some of her favorites with us:
- Stay open-minded to feedback. “I used to take things personally, or get really defensive,” says Sam. “If you’re always in a defensive stance, you’re not going to grow. Now, as a manager, I want my direct reports to trust me and be open.”
- Enjoy the payoff. Sam’s working on a new product, and is making sure to take the time to slow down and celebrate all the hard work she and her team have done to get there. “We know what we’re doing now. It feels so nice, when you’ve been doing all that hard work in the beginning, to see it come to life,” she says.
- Embrace the pendulum. Sam is modeling her path at Helm off of other senior engineers-slash-managers she sees who are also pursuing the best of both worlds. “It’s the pendulum effect: I started out as an engineer, and am working my way up to manager. Once I’m good with that project, I’ll start a new project back as an engineer and work my way up,” she says. “I want to be a really good manager—trusting and empathetic—but I still want to code. I still want to stay up-to-date with the newest trends or best practices or technologies.”
Does working with Helm’s mission and culture sound good to you? Check out their open roles!
