Shellye Archambeau – 2022 Wharton MBA Program for Executives Graduation Speech (San Francisco)

I have to tell you, I'm really thrilled to be here. As a Wharton undergrad, graduate myself, it's just great to be here and see all of you. As I look around at yourselves and at the audience in general, at your family, friends, loved ones, I'm really struck by the resilience of what all of you have gone through to actually achieve and accomplish getting your Wharton Executive MBA. Because you've made a lot of trade-offs, you've made a lot of tough choices, you've worked very, very hard. And you've done all this because obviously you have aspirations. You must be ambitious to have actually gone through all of this to actually get your overall degree. Is that a fair assumption? This is the interactive part. Okay, good, just wanna make sure. So, we're really clear. Everybody sitting here is ambitious, which means you have things in the future that you want to accomplish. Well, I have some bad news for you. Ambition alone isn't enough. And that's coming from someone who wrote the book Unapologetically Ambitious. So, listen up because I want to share with you what it does take. What it takes is managing your own career and being intentional about it. It's worked for me and I firmly believe it can work for you. Because frankly speaking, the odds weren't in my favor. I had no business becoming a tech CEO and a Fortune 500 board member. I was a little black girl growing up in the 60s and 70s, a very racially charged times where the world made it very clear to me that the odds weren't in my favor to get what I wanted out of life. My father didn't have a college degree. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. We moved seven times before I got to high school as my father was trying to improve his overall career status, right? Lot of things going against me here. But I'm here to tell you that with the right experience and background, the right decisions, being intentional and actively managing your career, I firmly believe you can achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve. Now, in the book, 240 pages or whatever it is, I talk holistically about how to get what you want out of life professionally and personally. Today, I've got 15 minutes. So I'm gonna focus on one subject and that is managing your career, all right? So let's go through this. Managing your career starts with setting goals. Decide what it is that you want in the future, whether it's to achieve, to create, or to impact, and then put a plan in place to achieve it. Well, Shelly, that sounds pretty basic, right? What I found is some people set goals and even fewer people actually put a plan in place to achieve it, but very few people make decisions every day consistent with their plan, and that's where the power is. After a fateful conversation with the high school guidance counselor, right? You remember that junior year conversation, do you want to go to college? What do you want to do after college? Now, that was a question, so this is the interactive part. Do you guys remember that? I wasn't the only one, right? Just making sure, okay. Well, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to go to college because of my family, boom, boom. That's what it was all about. And so she said to me, well, what do you like to do? And I said, oh, easy, clubs, organizations. I mean everything, National Honor Society, American Field Service, French Club, whatever, and I love leading these things. I'm even a Girl Scout, but don't tell anybody, okay? So she said, well, you know, businesses like clubs pull people together to get things done. And I thought, great, I'm gonna go into business, and I like leading these clubs, so I'll go lead a business. So when I looked up, the people who did that were called CEOs, so literally at 16, I set the goal to become a CEO. Now, did I know what that actually meant? No, but I had a goal, and so everything I did thereafter was trying to figure out how do I improve my odds to actually make this happen, which is why I chose Wharton Undergrad. Top business school, right? That's the first step. But then I did my homework and research, because here's how you create the plan. You ask yourself, what is it I want to achieve? What has to be true for me to get it? And then how do I make it true? So, all right, first thing, what do I need? Well, I'm a black woman in America, I need credentials, right? So Wharton. Two, I decided tech because it was a growing industry. So when I looked around at the best company back then, it was IBM, said, great, I'll go be CEO of IBM. Every CEO of IBM, turns out, started out in sales. So I did something that most Wharton graduates don't do. I actually started my career selling computers. All my friends were going off to be investment bankers and financial analysts and P&G product managers, real sexy, real cool, and I'm gonna go sell computers, what? If every CEO in IBM started out in sales, that must be the path to power. So that was part of the plan. I say that to say, think about what it is that you want to do, set the goal, and then ask yourself, what has to be true? And then put a plan in place to actually make it happen. Now, once you have that plan in place, it's really important that you tell the universe what it is that you want. You know, I talk to people all the time, and they'll say to me, Shelly, what advice do you have for me? I want to be a chief marketing officer, I want to start my own company, I want to run a company, and I'll say, great. Well, first of all, who knows you want to do that? And they kind of look around, what do you mean? I mean, who else knows that that is your goal? Maybe their boyfriend or spouse or parent or, no. How can the world help you if the world doesn't know what you want to do? I found that most people want to be helpful if asked in the right way. So tell the universe what it is that you want so that you can actually ask for help in the right way, because no one accomplishes anything of significance all by themselves, no one. So don't think you're gonna be the first one on the planet. Take help, ask for it. People will absolutely be helpful. I was at IBM, and I wanted to do an international assignment because I'd done my homework, and every single person that ran a business and reported to the CEO had done an international assignment, so obviously I needed that experience. So I started telling everybody, I want to do an international assignment, but more than that, I wanted to go to Japan, because most of them, not only international, but they'd gone to Japan. I didn't know why that was important, but obviously it was on the path, so that's what I wanted. Well, a few years later, I got a call from a guy who's now over in Japan. He said, Shelly, I remember several years back, you said you were interested in going to Japan. I have a job that I think fits your skills. Are you still interested in coming to Japan? All right, tell the universe what you want. You never know who's gonna be able to be helpful to you in the future. Now, the next part, take risks. Take risks. Do you know why companies, that legal entity called a corporation, do you know why they created it? They created it so individuals could come together to take, wait for it, shared risk. Business, by definition, is about risk-taking. You don't grow, you don't launch new products, you don't expand, you don't get into new markets. You don't do any of that without taking risks. Well, the same is true with your career. Take risks. Don't wait until you think you know absolutely everything you need to know before you go after the next job, right? Take the risk. Everything's a learning curve. You'll figure it out, you always do. So take risks. The thing, the job that's uncomfortable, the new thing to start, I have found by taking risks, you can move faster and farther. So take risks. All right, so we got it? You know what you're gonna do to manage your career? And then I'm gonna give you a quick bonus section. Set goals, put a plan in place till you notice what you want, so you can ask for help and take risks. Now, you've got the basics on how to manage your career. How do you actually climb the ladder? Because you know what? It's different. Managing your career is one thing, but navigating how to move up in your career is another. And having been a CEO for 15 years and sat on corporate boards for almost 20, I've had the ability to see a lot of people move through the organization and up that career ladder and have seen what keeps people, holds people back, why they think you hit grass ceilings, all of those things. So I'm gonna share with you what most people don't actually share with you, which is how expectations change as you move up and forward in your career, because that's the key. It's not enough just to do the job. It's not enough to achieve your objectives or crush those numbers. You've also got to make sure that you are meeting the expectations that are typically unsaid. All right, are you ready for them? Yeah, that was kind of lukewarm. What do you think, Dean James? Are you really ready for them? All right, thank you, thank you. You know, we're all up here excited and you guys are acting like this is every day. You are graduating from a Wharton Executive MBA program. You should be excited, okay? All right, so here's the key, early roles. In your early roles, it's all about your personal achievements, what you're able to actually do. It's about the potential that people think you have. It's about teamwork, right? And how well you kind of fit in from an attitude standpoint. That's what people are looking for. They're looking for kind of potential. And based upon that, they're gonna give you a chance. As you move up into those middle tier roles, it's all of that, right? You still gotta achieve your objective, show good attitude, teamwork, right? All those things. But now it's also about, are you able to actually manage a team, right? Can you form and create teams? And do people want to actually follow you? Are you able to achieve work through others? Are you able to actually solve problems and execute against the company goals that come down, right? Now they want to see, can you take a team and actually get things done? Makes sense, right? All right, next step. Now we're getting into that junior executive role. You still have to do everything that I just talked about, but now expectations rise again. You have to show the ability to design team structures. It's not about just managing a team that you're given, but can you actually design a structure to meet the evolving needs of the company or the organization? Do you have the ability to deliver consistently as you're making those decisions on how the team or organization should operate? Do you have the ability to actually anticipate and influence the strategy of the organization? And they're also looking for people who have a proven ability to identify and develop talent because a leader's job at the end of the day is to develop more leaders. If you aren't developing more leaders, your organization will not scale full stop. So the higher you get, the more important that becomes. And then are you becoming not just a problem solver, but a go-to problem solver? Are people always reaching out to you to look for your help, insight, and advice, right? That's the kind of junior executive. Then when you get up to senior executive, it's all that I just talked about, but now it's even more. Can you consistently develop leaders, right? Can you consistently develop leaders? Are you an effective risk-taker? And I'll tell you, that one is one that I see most people not demonstrate and holds them back, all right? So risk-taking, can't tell you how important that is. Ability to create strategy, not just anticipate, not just influence, but actually create strategy. And then do you have external influence beyond just internal influence? Because everything you've done so far has shown that you can influence things across an organization. To be a senior executive, they wanna know you can have influence outside of the organization. So what are you doing to actually demonstrate that? And then lastly, are you actually optimizing not just to your team, not just to your unit, but are you optimizing to the whole company when you make decisions? Even, even if it might be negative to your individual, right, set of responsibilities. So as you rise, expectations change. So it's not good enough to say, gosh, I'm working just as hard, I'm getting everything done, I'm doing, but I'm just not moving up. It's because the bar is constantly rising. The good news is, you spent a lot of time here at Wharton being prepared, Dean James talked about that. You've demonstrated resilience with what you've gone through over the last several years. Now, by approaching your career, by taking ownership for it, you own it. Not your boss, not your company, not your manager, not your spouse, you own your career. So be in charge. Make sure you are doing all those things to manage it. And then as you're operating, remember those points I made about what's expected every level of the way, because they wanna see those behaviors before they pull you into those next jobs. Bottom line, I fully believe that you, each of you, has the ability to achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve, as long as you are intentional and you make trade-offs and choices every day that are moving you towards those goals you set. Thank you very much for having me today, and I'm so excited about what you're going to accomplish.