🏔️ 5 Pivotal Projects for Profound Impact
Inspiring Leaders Stories of Transformative Career Moments
👋 Hello. It’s Julia. Thank you for dialing into this edition where I explore the ways we community and connect at work and beyond weekly. I’m hosting an exclusive subscriber-only Newsletter Club for The Switchboard’s community. The second session is February 28th. It focuses on Work Hacks to Support Happiness & Success.
🧁 On a personal note, if you like to bake and make an impact locally, join me for National Muffin Day, a philanthropic food holiday I co-founded 10 years ago. We’ll be baking chocolate muffins with a healthy twist on Sun. Feb. 25th at 1pm PT / 4pm ET or you can bake anytime. As you consider the impact you aspire to make this year, take inspiration from these pivotal projects and the leaders who managed them:
🗳️ Be Involved in History: Sean Garrett
🪀 Embrace Childhood Wonder: Michelle Lee
🗺️ Incubate Ideas for Global Impact: Q Hamirani
💙 Change the Way People Behave: Claude Silver
📧 Invent Technology to Simplify Lives: Jacob Bank
🗳️ Be Involved in History: Sean Garrett
At 24 years old, I was working in the California Governor's Office. It was a cool job, and I loved every minute of it — the energy, the people and the projects. But, on a lark, I decided that I wanted to go work in Eastern Europe. It was 1992 and a very fascinating time in the region after the fall of the Soviet Union. I connected with a non-profit that offered me this wild opportunity to go to Lithuania to work on their first Parliamentary election since independence if I could get there in three weeks!
I dropped everything, left my job and friends, and flew to Lithuania not knowing much, other than feeling a connection to the country by coincidence — my birth mother was from Lithuania. I was adopted, and here I was on a plane headed back to the place where my mother left. It was a profound feeling.
The political situation was fascinating — there had been one previous Communist party, and now there were 27 parties running for Parliament! I worked for the one party that was the most democratic in ethos, helping them think through their messaging and story. I did everything from giving a speech on national television to firing up a big crowd of young people at a rock concert on behalf of the party. It was a crazy moment in time. My unsolicited advice is that if you can be involved in history, do it! That moment will never exist again — you can’t replicate that.
🪀 Embrace Childhood Wonder: Michelle Lee
For the past several years, I’ve been the Managing Director of IDEO’s Play Lab. Its collective growth has been a major source of pride. The Play Lab started 30 years ago with industry leaders — Brendan Boyle, Adam Skaates and others — who established a strong foundation built on decades of toy invention.
In 2016, we saw the opportunity to bring play beyond kids and toys and that led to Design for Play — the consulting side of our Play Lab offer. We've built the team to become the amazing group of talent that we have today. Our portfolio shows why play needs to be part of the conversation when tackling big challenges across industries.
We’ve focused on education by building a “Magic School Bus” with the Verizon Foundation as a way to allow kids to role-play as scientists and engineers to become passionate about these roles in the future. In health, we’ve taken lessons from video games to build resilience around smoking cessation. The list goes on to include work in climate and sustainability, as well as the future of work, technology and more.
🗺️ Incubate Ideas for Global Impact: Q Hamirani
I ideated and incubated Airbnb’s Digital Global Nomad program. In August of 2020, we piloted this program to support our employees and understand the complexity of regulations and tax implications when an individual wanted to travel across borders. We were simply responding to our employee’s interests.
At the time, we thought it would be a one-year temporary program. It was incredible having the opportunity to try something new while learning and working through it. Ultimately, this incubated program was extremely critical to enabling us to create our live and work anywhere program in April of 2022.
This project led to something even bigger — it had a ripple effect — it created an extraordinary opportunity for Airbnb to now become industry leaders in the future of work by leveraging our existing business model to enable our employees to live and work anywhere. As a result of that, we created this unique Center of Excellence.
💙 Change the Way People Hire: Claude Silver
When I started in this role seven years ago, I made three major changes. First, I changed the title of the department from HR to People and Experiences. Second, I removed the need for a college education for most of our roles because that was a real barrier to entry. Third, I changed the way we hired from culture fit to culture addition.
All of this led to establishing our core competencies. What we do is more than a job description. Our work is based on the pillars that we believe in — our values are central to this! Each department has its own core competencies for every level so employees can see what is required of them, where some of the deltas might be and so we can coach them on where they need to invest to grow. This program was a year in the making and we just started to roll this out!
📧 Invent Technology to Simplify Lives: Jacob Bank
I'm very proud of a feature I created for Gmail — the nudge to reply to an email. No matter how organized you are, everyone has forgotten to reply to an email at some time. The feature looks at emails in the past that we thought with a high probability you might have forgotten to get back to someone.
It seemed like a small feature, but the feedback that we received was incredible — users were grateful that we saved them from missing something important in their lives. It showed the power of a simple feature with a very small amount of assistance, it can have a significant impact on helping people get stuff done.
What pivotal project do you aspire to create this year? Reply or comment.If you enjoyed this edition, consider connecting with our community at the upcoming Newsletter Club event or sharing The Switchboard’s content:
Sign up to discuss Work Hacks to Support Happiness & Success on Feb. 28th: Register Here.
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Thank you for being part of The Switchboard community. I’m grateful to you for reading, reacting and commenting. Signing off for this edition. — Julia
Excellent insights from authentic, inspiring leaders again, Julia! Thank you for sharing these moments of transformation.