00:00:01
Speaker 1: There is a bit of a myth about the death of the entry level job. In a world of AI, new roles and jobs will emerge, but who you know and your network is going to be particularly important to your career progress. If I am a twenty four year old and I have a profile on LinkedIn, I am sharing my experience and my learnings and what I'm building on LinkedIn, and I have a network of people that know me and will vouch for me that is authentic and human and cannot be done by a robot.
00:00:39
Speaker 2: AI is rapidly changing the way we work, but if there's one thing that it cannot replace, it's the power of human connection. Hi everyone, I'm Jessica Chen, host of Leading by Example. I'm also an Emmy Award winning journalist and the author of Smart Not Loud, How to Get Noticed at Work For all the Rights, We're doing something different on today's episode, I'm tossing the mic over to Connell Byrne, the CEO of iHeartMedia's Digital Audio Group, for a conversation with one of the sharpest marketing leaders in the game. Jessica Jensen has previously led teams at Apple Meta Open Table and Indeed now She is the Chief Marketing Officer at LinkedIn, where she and her team are reshaping the future of work. LinkedIn recently released two key reports, one on the status of the job market and the other on entrepreneurship, and together they paint a picture of a workforce that's changing rapidly, but maybe not in the way people think. We're in a period of reinvention where creativity, adaptability, trust and relationships will become even more valuable. As AI enters the chat, Jessica offers a perspective that's both practical and optimistic. She explains how the leaders who stand out will be the ones who lean hardest into the things machines can't replicate, things like human interactions, empathy, and authenticity. Now let's hear Connell's conversation with Jessica Jensen, CMO of LinkedIn.
00:02:25
Speaker 3: Jessica Jensen, CMO and so many other things, but we'll start with the CMO of LinkedIn.
00:02:30
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for being with us today.
00:02:32
Speaker 1: Thank you, colonel, it is a pleasure. I've been looking forward to it.
00:02:35
Speaker 3: Your role at LinkedIn chief Marketing officer, but you have a long journey to that role. A lot of things stand out in it. You've had key, strategic, important, marketing and product roles at many of the major tech companies that to some extent run our world today. So it's interesting to me, Like where Jessica Jensen chooses to show up and work and spend your time every day, feels very intentional to me. You've sort of chosen this place called LinkedIn to work. What brought you here and what made you make that choice?
00:03:09
Speaker 1: Yes, along and winding road. I am in my mid fifties and I have been working on internet and digital based businesses since nineteen ninety eight. So I started in management consulting at the Boston Consulting Group and we were in the process of taking companies from the offline world to the online world. And I have fallen in love with all things digital and driven my bus through a winding road of companies Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, Booking Holdings, et cetera, and learning so much along the way, and then so overjoyed and lucky to get to steer the ship a bit at LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of the lighthouses in the world of work and human connection. It's our mission as a company to help people find opportunity. So you know, seventy million businesses and organizations on LinkedIn one point three billion people. Trying to connect them all to greater and bigger things in a time of incredible upheaval and tumult is the challenge and a joy of a lifetime.
00:04:20
Speaker 4: So now I'm going to go way back.
00:04:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm interested in where Jessica as a young kid, thinking about what she wanted to do as an adult.
00:04:29
Speaker 4: What happened then? As a kid? I wanted to be how would you fill the sentence?
00:04:34
Speaker 1: Well, I think so, I'm from Kansas City, Yeah, and my father is a painter, and he became a creative director in advertising to pay the bills, and my mom was a speech and communications teacher, and so at the dinner table as a child, we wrote jingles and ads, and my dad would pitch his campaign to me and mom and we'd be like, I don't know if your audience insight on that is quite spot on. And then I decided I wanted to study Japanese and be a diplomat, and I went to international relations grad school, and I lived in Japan for a long time. And so I mean, I literally laugh with my parents today. I found my way back to the family business through the strangest path. You could not make up a weirder path, but I think that. You know, after BCG, I pursued a bunch of different business jobs that were more kind of in the GM arena. And then at Facebook, bizarrely they hired me to do a marketing job. And I was like, I don't know if you know what I do, but let's see how it goes. And then in that role, I was like, oh my gosh, I get to be an artist and a mathematician. That may be a little bit of an overstatement, but you know, it's the fusion. I call it. A painter with an avocus, right, like you are able to interweave narrative and storytelling and with driving business growth and straddling those two worlds and weaving them together. Nothing could be more exciting and challenging. And now I'm in the position of I'm a marketer for LinkedIn, and I market marketing to marketers. Yeah, I know, which is very analogous to your world too, right, And so it's endlessly fascinating.
00:06:26
Speaker 4: How long were you in Japan.
00:06:28
Speaker 1: I was in Japan for four years. I studied Japanese in high school, college and undergrad and then did a year of undergrad in Japan, and then worked there for about three and a half years after school.
00:06:39
Speaker 4: Wow.
00:06:41
Speaker 3: So my first adventure after college. My dad worked for a Japanese company and he gave me as a graduation present an open ended ticket to Tokyo and a phone number of a colleague. And so I got my college degree and got on a plane and went to Tokyo and I called his colleague.
00:07:02
Speaker 4: I went to his house.
00:07:03
Speaker 3: I slept on a six to Tommy Matt office for like three four months, and I got a job teaching English no way. Yeah, And every day, every day I would wake up teach English for three or four hours to everybody from elementary school kids to Boston.
00:07:18
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then wander Tokyo.
00:07:20
Speaker 1: Awesome.
00:07:21
Speaker 4: And I had this was before phones, So I had these small disposable cameras.
00:07:26
Speaker 1: Ye, me too.
00:07:27
Speaker 3: And I came home with maybe twenty five disposable cameras full of four months later, full of Tokyo. That's amazing, and developed these photos that are now across my house, and every now and then my kids would be like, what are these pictures exactly?
00:07:43
Speaker 1: Which I raised to audio cassette tapes and send them home to my family.
00:07:48
Speaker 4: Of you just sort of narrating where you're at.
00:07:50
Speaker 1: Absolutely, we didn't have phone, you had nothing.
00:07:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, you really went places. Then maybe once a week you'd be like, I'm still alive. This call is costed, Okay, I.
00:07:58
Speaker 1: Got aside for you. So I did live in Osaka for six months. Do you remember there was a giant earthquake in nineteen ninety five, Yes, and it was horrific, like six thousand people died in Kobe. I lived right outside of that area and I was, I mean evacuated from my apartment, lived in a high school gym for a week, and the phones were cut.
00:08:20
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:08:21
Speaker 1: So miraculously, four thirty in the morning, this earthquake happens. I get thrown out a bad For some reason in my brain, I was like, my parents are going to hear about this and wig out. I picked up the phone in my apartment and left them a voicemail and I had no access to a phone for a week after that, but my parents got the message that I was alive.
00:08:43
Speaker 3: It's nuts to think of what would that look like today given the technology and connectivity we have so different. Were you're tracking locations on your kids you know, exactly six miles a way to make sure they're on their way home and it's still even fifty nine. Yeah, it's a different world. It's a totally different world speaking of tech. So I come from a place where a couple sons who are about nineteen and twenty, they're in college, but they're about to enter a workforce that if you just accept what I think is a little bit of an overstatement and maybe a mythology, they're going to have to compete more than anything with AI. LinkedIn came out with a lot of research, deep research, good faith, just like, hey, I'm not sure that's what this is kind of research, and it changed a lot of what I thought where it was like, yes, global hiring is twenty percent below pre pandemic levels, Yes, job transitions are at a ten year low, but the slowdown that's real may not be driven by AI. You have more applicants per job than any time since COVID. I think of on the side by the way as my kids, especially my two older sons, having gone through at least the beginnings of high school in COVID and now hitting a job market that's complicated. To say that lead I do really feel for them, So we'll put that aside for a second.
00:10:03
Speaker 1: Well, but let's feel for all workers. It's not a young person dynamic.
00:10:09
Speaker 4: You guys found.
00:10:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, So to do a little bit of myth busting, there's been all this media narrative about entry level jobs, young people's jobs getting crushed. Our data shows that that's not entirely true, and that entry level jobs have not declined out of step with any other types of jobs. So I'm not saying it's easy or good, but there is a bit of a myth about the death of the entry level job. Now our job's changing and evolving. Certainly, Yes, does everybody need to know AI skills to be in this workforce. That's true whether you're entering the workforce or you're forty or fifty or sixty. So I think we are very focused on people building the skills and the agency that will allow them to reimagine career paths, which are not linear anymore. Once upon a time, you could be twenty two and get an entry level finance job and march of the penguins along through the ladder. Over time, that is radically changing. Yeah, people are going to have more jobs, They're going to do gig and contractor and solopreneur and some full time, and you know, people will have a portfolio of jobs. But the idea that like entry level or low level jobs don't exist is actually not true. Now things are changing incredibly rapidly. Like will that be the case in a year, I don't know, but that's what we're seeing now.
00:11:43
Speaker 3: That sort of tracks like I think two years ago, even I would have panicked as a dad, and maybe as a youngster, and I would have believed a lot of this stuff without digging even just a little deeper into it. But I think it tracks with how now I'm seeing my own kids, but also my observation of the entry workforce and iHeartMedia right starting to realize like, oh, it's not necessarily the jobs not there. I just might need slightly different skill sets in order to do that job and be competitive. And you guys have some stats and some of the stuff you put out that AI is actually there is tangible evidence that it's creating jobs, already creating new jobs that weren't there before. Yes, there is a flip side of this that I also love, though I think there was a stat in one of your pieces says candidates are three point six times more likely to get hired if they have a connection. Yes, So, amidst all this great research and I think new mythbusting stats around AI and its effect in the job market, you still have these pockets of but man, it still helps to know a guy well.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: I think the power of connections and network is getting more important.
00:12:49
Speaker 4: Talk to me about that. Why do you think that?
00:12:51
Speaker 1: Because in a world of AI, a lot of you know, quotes, basic jobs or things that you used to need humans to do will evolve or disappear. New roles and jobs will emerge. But who you know and your network is going to be more important to your career progress, particularly because you will have more of a portfolio set of jobs. Over time, people will change jobs and add jobs more frequently, and so connections are key to that. And also, let's be honest. In the world of AI hiring, there's a lot of junk and a lot of falsehood out there. So if I am a twenty four year old looking for jobs in these arenas and I have a profile on LinkedIn, I am sharing my experience and my learnings and what I'm building on LinkedIn, and I have a network of people that know me and will vouch for me that is authentic and human and cannot be done by a robot.
00:13:57
Speaker 4: Yeah, we have this.
00:13:58
Speaker 3: We lean into this hard at iHeart, in full transparency where I didn't know that the stuff that we do that we just sort of called our standard operating procedure, a way to run our company, namely like a thousand humans on microphones having conversations like this one, a little bit organized, a little bit messy, a little bit of everything. I didn't know that that was going to become a differentiator. Yes, that that human element of doing a thing, of having just an organic, normal conversation was going to be differentiated in an age of AI. It's not to say that our company is not to a large extent operationally helped by AI ours, but it is now a differentiator of ours. To brand partners, whe were like, hey, we're guaranteed human, and it's interesting, Like when I think of your guys world, it feels similar. It's like, yes, AI is a thing you need to upskill or reskill, but also you need to be connected to other humans or you won't have the leg up that you definitely need like you always needed. Maybe now more than ever. That's really interesting to me.
00:15:00
Speaker 1: I think so too, like human judgment, your ability to emotionally move people and connect with people humor, fun right, like these are what made people thrive. It's what makes people attracted to companies. It's what makes people go above and beyond in their work. We better lean real hard into all of that.
00:15:27
Speaker 4: I have an extreme example of this.
00:15:29
Speaker 3: I was in New York on a trip about a week ago, and I'm in the lobby and turns out to be a grandmother is sitting there checking at the same hotel, and she sort of approaches me and says, oh, what do you do for a living?
00:15:40
Speaker 4: Very talkative older woman.
00:15:42
Speaker 3: Was it me.
00:15:44
Speaker 1: Not you?
00:15:46
Speaker 3: I was like, yeah, I work at iHeartMedia. We do this, that and the other, and long story short, we shared an elevator together. She takes my email down. She says, I'm going to give your information to my granddaughter who's about to graduate from college and she's looking for a job. Two weeks later, I get an email from her granddaughter, who's now I truly believe will end up with her first paid internship at iHeartMedia.
00:16:07
Speaker 1: That's so awesome.
00:16:08
Speaker 3: When I got on the phone with her granddaughter and said, hey, your grandmother was lovely. What can I do to help? She talked all about her AI skills. She's like, well, I just graduated from college. It was a really interesting time to be in college. I'm a graphic designer and I started out college when AI had not exploded, and now that's all we're talking about, and I want to talk to you about my skill sets.
00:16:29
Speaker 4: It was just this really.
00:16:30
Speaker 3: Interesting journey in and out of new high falutint artificial intelligence skills, but also grounded in this very she introduced us that I couldn't make up if I tried totally.
00:16:43
Speaker 4: It was incredible.
00:16:45
Speaker 1: People will write a post on LinkedIn and I'll comment on it. I don't know these people, some woman in Geneva, you know, and I'll write a note and be like, that was so awesome what you shared about your personal journey, and thank you for bringing your humanity and your emotion to your stuff on LinkedIn. I was moved by it. And then the next thing I know, I'm meeting with them. I'm having coffee. They're maybe pitching me work, maybe I'm hiring people, Like that's the magic unlock that people are going to need one hundred times more in three years.
00:17:37
Speaker 3: Part of the research you guys have done too is the Entrepreneurship Report and the fact that entrepreneurship is becoming multi threaded. That seventy three percent of gen z founders have multiple income streams. We're really just like collapsing all these words of founder, creator, and it's all sort of morphing into this what I think LinkedIn calls this sort of new collar era.
00:18:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, talk us through it a little bit.
00:18:05
Speaker 1: Well, I think that the multi hyphenate or multi threaded worker is exploding in the world in a really positive way. Maybe I should use the word blossoming right, Like, it has never been easier to start a business because of AI. The things that used to be laborious and time consuming and expensive about starting a business you can do from your desk in five hours. That's incredible. And so people are becoming a small business founder and a creator and working a part time job and studying an entirely new field. So the LinkedIn economics team rolls up to me. There's a guy on that team who is a data scientist and court all of the economic research that you're referring to. Sure, he has a giant creator following on TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn. He is an exceptional content creator and a data scientist at LinkedIn, and those two things are totally in tandem and wonderful. Now people have full time jobs and they need to treat them, course of course, But right I think that the landscape of what is possible now for people who choose to embrace the agency that they have and the voice that they have and the AI tools that they can use is boundless. There's so much creative potential for businesses, for brands, for people, and I think we're just scratching the surface on that. But the creator landscape on LinkedIn is expanding so.
00:19:48
Speaker 4: Fast any talk to me.
00:19:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean we have doubled the number of creators on LinkedIn in the last few years. We have a program called brand Link where we pair brands and creator content.
00:20:00
Speaker 4: Oh wow.
00:20:00
Speaker 1: And so it's the nexus of business in, creativity and celebrity all in one delicious package.
00:20:08
Speaker 3: It's cool because I feel like in the creator economy, when you give creators tools to do more good stuff, they will do that. Yeah.
00:20:15
Speaker 1: I mean it's interesting. I do think people have had kind of a bifurcated mind, like I use LinkedIn to find business contacts or to you know, market my product, but I may creator over here. No, no, no, it's all the same soup. If you want to reach workers and business people, this is the place. Bring your voice, bring your creativity. Like people are building massive businesses here as creators.
00:20:47
Speaker 3: You don't have to compartmentalize. No, And when a founder is a creator, is this new sort of new caller?
00:20:53
Speaker 1: They all ask each other.
00:20:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, everything's everywhere, and it's funny. I mean I think back of like a younger Connell or a younger Jessica walking around Japan. I thought it would be very compartmentalized. I'll just do this and that'll be my life and that'll be my business card. And I think about the job that I wanted to do, and it waffled. Sometimes I wanted to be a rock star, sometimes I wanted to be a corporate guy. I wasn't sure. Part of the reason I was in Japan figuring it out. But I never thought it would be multi threaded. I really never thought that you could have your cake and eat it too, whatever the expression you want to use. I thought that you picked a lane and stuck with it.
00:21:33
Speaker 1: I think that that is really.
00:21:36
Speaker 4: It's blown up.
00:21:37
Speaker 3: You know sometimes when you're talking to friends, you're like, what do you tell your kids these days? And I think the only thing I got right in my career, the only thing I actually got right, was just open mindedness. Yeah, oh, let's see where this goes. Try it that approach, Let's see where this goes. It's how I got into digital media. It's how I got into podcasting, It's how I got ato. iHeartMedia.
00:21:57
Speaker 1: You're never stuck. Yeah, try it. I started a startup, and the amount of effort that we had to put into building that web business and the marketing and the sales and the accounting and the HR it was so overwhelming and so arduous, and we ran that business into the home equity crisis in two thousand and eight. It was a giant failure. It is the biggest failure of my career. I tried it. I wouldn't trade it for anything. Didn't screw up my career. You just keep trying things, and today it is so much easier to do that.
00:22:33
Speaker 4: You have a daughter, what do you talk to her about this stuff?
00:22:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's fifteen. She is a painter. She is obsessed with documentary, film and history. And she's a journalist and she's a volleyball player. And so I'm like, you are a renaissance teenager. Bless do it all, do everything. Two years from now, You'll love some of it, you'll hate some of it. Start a business, be a creator or not. Don't be intimidated, don't be scared. You can try anything and then change your course.
00:23:07
Speaker 3: Your daughter and my son are having this conversation in five, ten, twenty years out.
00:23:11
Speaker 4: Just talk a little bit about it.
00:23:12
Speaker 1: I definitely am not going to take a bot on twenty.
00:23:17
Speaker 4: Where are we?
00:23:18
Speaker 3: I mean, does all marketing become influencer marketing? Do all jobs become hyper multi threaded? The more I think about you and LinkedIn, It's like you guys are a little bit of the.
00:23:29
Speaker 4: Authority on where this might be going. But I'll still give you a pass.
00:23:33
Speaker 1: Well, I'm definitely in the opining zone. I would say in marketing, we are going to have multiple channels for a very long time. So I think that multi threaded marketing and multi threaded marketers will continue and win. I do think we will see the collapse of roles. I think that we will have brand strategists who are copywriters and video creators and campaign optimizers. You look at a small business today, right The person running marketing at a small business has the insights, does the research, writes the brief, makes the ad traffics the ad optimizes and measures. I think everyone in marketing in a large company should start thinking like that. The separation of roles will erode. Then for workers and people entering the world of work, the only thing that's going to matter is your agility, your creativity, your willingness to try new things and fail and learn. Because what the world of work will be in five years, none of us can say yeah, but I guarantee it will require more flexibility, more creativity, personal connections and networks, and I think the ability to communicate effectively and to ask great questions, and to write and think clearly and make good arguments. Like those things are not changing.
00:25:19
Speaker 3: I hear all the stuff you're saying, and it's like I would wrap all that up in a word humanity, And it sounds cheesy and hackneyed and whatever, but it's like in a world where AI, of course will become more important and of course will operationally at least drive more and more things, bringing your humanity to work will be more more and more important too. I want to talk about your work around women in the workplace and the advancement and support of women, especially leadership and executives in the workplace.
00:25:45
Speaker 4: Talk us through that.
00:25:46
Speaker 3: I know it's been a through line and is mission critical important to you as it should be.
00:25:51
Speaker 4: Thank you, tell us what you got going on and maybe how we can help.
00:25:54
Speaker 1: I was raised by feminists, my father and my mother, and I believe at the fair core of my being that work needs women and women need to win in the world of work, and that women make amazing leaders and all of the research shows that diverse teams perform the best drive the best business performance. So I have dedicated a lot of my time and effort to ensuring that women feel supported and welcome in the world of work and that women rise through the senior ranks. We have a sad reality going on now, which is that women are forty three percent of the workforce but thirty percent of senior leadership globally in companies, and we are seeing a backside now on women entering senior roles has dropped from thirty six percent to thirty three percent in the last few years. So I am ringing the bell, pressing the alarm. Weird weird alert alert. We are not making progress and that is unacted. That should be unacceptable to every board, to every CEO, to every government. And I enlist all men, women and people to support women to rise and thrive in work, because it is perilous if.
00:27:16
Speaker 3: We do not. Have you seen across your own career good years and bad years for those kinds of trends.
00:27:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I would. I mean like I started in management consulting in nineteen ninety eight and I was the only woman in a CEO meeting time and time again, and I had to wear pantyhose. So those days are long gone, and let's say hallelujah to that. So great progress in some regards, but we have not won the battle. Right until we have full parody in the c suite of women and men and frankly all walks of people and life, we have not won.
00:27:57
Speaker 4: And I think that that's the hard part.
00:27:58
Speaker 3: It's like when you're having this conversation with somebody, it's sort of like, no, I'm not trying to be difficult here, but until it's fixed, it's not fixed.
00:28:06
Speaker 1: That is a great way to sit to tell you, Yeah, it's a great way to say that. Yeah, flexibility in the workplace matters. Yeah, women getting put up for stretch assignments and leadership roles, women demanding equal pay. Women are not taught to be negotiators. They're not good at asking for their value. Women have got to learn to ask, and men have got to learn to say to women, you deserve to be paid what you deserve to be paid to do this role. And by the way, I'm going to put you in this role that you think you're not ready for, and you are right.
00:28:42
Speaker 3: Last questions here. That's true to the nature of the show. Leading by example. Talk to us a little bit about how you lead by example with your own team through the good the bad.
00:28:52
Speaker 4: What's that like?
00:28:53
Speaker 1: Treat others how you want to be treated is a management mantra and a life mantra. And so I really try to be flexible, honest, transparent. I try to celebrate and thank people for little things and big things. I think that if we don't have fun at work, we will curl up in a ball and cry on the floor. So I'm trying to hold a high bar for performance and work and growing our business. But also share joy with people, share sadness with people.
00:29:32
Speaker 4: Sure.
00:29:33
Speaker 1: I think my greatest aspiration is that people feel comfortable about the good, the bad, and the ugly, and that they can share them in a real and secure way. And I will tell my team like, I'm overwhelmed, or I've got some stuff going on with my teenager or my old parents that is really weighing me down, and I'm having trouble focusing outside of those challenges. But also we're doing amazing work, and we're growing this business and we're changing hearts and minds, and bless you for your awesome innovation and creativity and what you're bringing to the people of this company and to the outside world. But that all of those things are part of the soup, and that is what being a human being is. I think that the more we can connect as humans and share the pain and share the joy, yeah, it makes work a lot more worth doing.
00:30:32
Speaker 3: Jessica Jensen, the CMO of LinkedIn, I cannot thank you enough. You guys are doing awesome work at LinkedIn, and concretely, some of the research you guys are putting out there is surprising, it's thought provoking, it's super cool.
00:30:43
Speaker 4: So I really appreciate you talking to us.
00:30:44
Speaker 1: About Oh that means the world to us. Thank you.
00:30:52
Speaker 2: Thanks so much to Connell Burn, CEO of iHeartMedia's digital Audio group, for jumping into this conversation with LinkedIn CMO Jessica Juhensen. And as I was listening to this conversation, I kept thinking about this theme of what it means to lead by example right now. So the first takeaway was this the landscape of what is possible is now boundless. You know, they were talking about the nature of work and how that has changed. And I don't mean it as just remote work or flexible hours. I mean the entire architecture of what it means to build your career. There's no longer this expectation that you have to have a full time job. You stay in your lane and that's your whole professional identity. That model is gone. In fact, LinkedIn just released its newest Entrepreneurship report and found that seventy three percent of gen z founders today have multiple income streams where success is being redefined from just trying to make money to finding freedom and growth. And what I love about this is it really honors the complexity of who we are as people. We have multiple interests, multiple skills, multiple callings, and the world is finally starting to embrace that. But what I find especially encouraging is that even large corporations are leaning into this. I mean, you heard from leaders at LinkedIn and iHeartMedia, which is signaling this kind of open mindedness that I think all of us should take seriously. Here's a second takeaway. Failure is not necessarily failure, it's data. So this moment was a brief mention, But Jessica said that at some point in her career she started her own company and in the end it didn't succeed. The two thousand and eight crisis hit and her entire business collapsed. She called it the biggest failure of her career. She also said she wouldn't trade it for anything. And I'll tell you why this part really stuck with me. Whether you've been laid off, a venture didn't work out, or maybe you are just feeling a bit stuck in your career figuring out what your passion is. I want you to know that none of this time moving forward is ever time wasted. Maybe you made a mistake, maybe you feel that you chose the wrong profession, and you're thinking things might not work out. But hearing Jessica, who is now the CMO of LinkedIn, having her speak about her failure and her saying that actually none of it is time wasted, that meant a lot. Because what's most important if something fails, trusting that there will always be something waiting for you on the other side as long as you keep moving forward. And here's a third takeaway. Human skills are the competitive edge for the future. This third takeaway came from a point that Connell made and it really deeply resonated with the work I've been doing for years. He talked about this concept of humanity, specifically how being created, being open minded, and communications are not soft skills. They are the skills of the future. I can't reiterate that enough. And that is what's going to set you apart in the age of AI. If you're leading a team right now, it's getting them to start to think about how can they use these skills where they have to think outside the box. But more importantly, as a leader, how do you create room for it?
00:34:24
Speaker 1: Right?
00:34:24
Speaker 2: Creating that space and talking about it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I thought it was such a great conversation. I learned a lot, including these takeaways, and I want to say for all of you listening, if you enjoyed this episode, or you have feedback on what you want to hear and guess you would like to hear from, please rate and review Leading by Example.
00:34:48
Speaker 1: Every review, every rating. It really does help.
00:34:51
Speaker 2: Us reach more people and make this show the best it can be. I'm Jessica Chen, the author of the book Smart Not Loud, How to Get Noticed at Work for All the Right Reasons, and the CEO of soulcast Media, a communications training company. For more information about me and what I do, head over to Solcastmedia dot com or add me on LinkedIn and Instagram. A huge thank you to our production team at Ruby Studio, especially Kelly Kyle, Matt Stillo, and Sierra Spring. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Leading by Example. I will see you then.
Speaker 1: There is a bit of a myth about the death of the entry level job. In a world of AI, new roles and jobs will emerge, but who you know and your network is going to be particularly important to your career progress. If I am a twenty four year old and I have a profile on LinkedIn, I am sharing my experience and my learnings and what I'm building on LinkedIn, and I have a network of people that know me and will vouch for me that is authentic and human and cannot be done by a robot.
00:00:39
Speaker 2: AI is rapidly changing the way we work, but if there's one thing that it cannot replace, it's the power of human connection. Hi everyone, I'm Jessica Chen, host of Leading by Example. I'm also an Emmy Award winning journalist and the author of Smart Not Loud, How to Get Noticed at Work For all the Rights, We're doing something different on today's episode, I'm tossing the mic over to Connell Byrne, the CEO of iHeartMedia's Digital Audio Group, for a conversation with one of the sharpest marketing leaders in the game. Jessica Jensen has previously led teams at Apple Meta Open Table and Indeed now She is the Chief Marketing Officer at LinkedIn, where she and her team are reshaping the future of work. LinkedIn recently released two key reports, one on the status of the job market and the other on entrepreneurship, and together they paint a picture of a workforce that's changing rapidly, but maybe not in the way people think. We're in a period of reinvention where creativity, adaptability, trust and relationships will become even more valuable. As AI enters the chat, Jessica offers a perspective that's both practical and optimistic. She explains how the leaders who stand out will be the ones who lean hardest into the things machines can't replicate, things like human interactions, empathy, and authenticity. Now let's hear Connell's conversation with Jessica Jensen, CMO of LinkedIn.
00:02:25
Speaker 3: Jessica Jensen, CMO and so many other things, but we'll start with the CMO of LinkedIn.
00:02:30
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for being with us today.
00:02:32
Speaker 1: Thank you, colonel, it is a pleasure. I've been looking forward to it.
00:02:35
Speaker 3: Your role at LinkedIn chief Marketing officer, but you have a long journey to that role. A lot of things stand out in it. You've had key, strategic, important, marketing and product roles at many of the major tech companies that to some extent run our world today. So it's interesting to me, Like where Jessica Jensen chooses to show up and work and spend your time every day, feels very intentional to me. You've sort of chosen this place called LinkedIn to work. What brought you here and what made you make that choice?
00:03:09
Speaker 1: Yes, along and winding road. I am in my mid fifties and I have been working on internet and digital based businesses since nineteen ninety eight. So I started in management consulting at the Boston Consulting Group and we were in the process of taking companies from the offline world to the online world. And I have fallen in love with all things digital and driven my bus through a winding road of companies Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, Booking Holdings, et cetera, and learning so much along the way, and then so overjoyed and lucky to get to steer the ship a bit at LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of the lighthouses in the world of work and human connection. It's our mission as a company to help people find opportunity. So you know, seventy million businesses and organizations on LinkedIn one point three billion people. Trying to connect them all to greater and bigger things in a time of incredible upheaval and tumult is the challenge and a joy of a lifetime.
00:04:20
Speaker 4: So now I'm going to go way back.
00:04:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm interested in where Jessica as a young kid, thinking about what she wanted to do as an adult.
00:04:29
Speaker 4: What happened then? As a kid? I wanted to be how would you fill the sentence?
00:04:34
Speaker 1: Well, I think so, I'm from Kansas City, Yeah, and my father is a painter, and he became a creative director in advertising to pay the bills, and my mom was a speech and communications teacher, and so at the dinner table as a child, we wrote jingles and ads, and my dad would pitch his campaign to me and mom and we'd be like, I don't know if your audience insight on that is quite spot on. And then I decided I wanted to study Japanese and be a diplomat, and I went to international relations grad school, and I lived in Japan for a long time. And so I mean, I literally laugh with my parents today. I found my way back to the family business through the strangest path. You could not make up a weirder path, but I think that. You know, after BCG, I pursued a bunch of different business jobs that were more kind of in the GM arena. And then at Facebook, bizarrely they hired me to do a marketing job. And I was like, I don't know if you know what I do, but let's see how it goes. And then in that role, I was like, oh my gosh, I get to be an artist and a mathematician. That may be a little bit of an overstatement, but you know, it's the fusion. I call it. A painter with an avocus, right, like you are able to interweave narrative and storytelling and with driving business growth and straddling those two worlds and weaving them together. Nothing could be more exciting and challenging. And now I'm in the position of I'm a marketer for LinkedIn, and I market marketing to marketers. Yeah, I know, which is very analogous to your world too, right, And so it's endlessly fascinating.
00:06:26
Speaker 4: How long were you in Japan.
00:06:28
Speaker 1: I was in Japan for four years. I studied Japanese in high school, college and undergrad and then did a year of undergrad in Japan, and then worked there for about three and a half years after school.
00:06:39
Speaker 4: Wow.
00:06:41
Speaker 3: So my first adventure after college. My dad worked for a Japanese company and he gave me as a graduation present an open ended ticket to Tokyo and a phone number of a colleague. And so I got my college degree and got on a plane and went to Tokyo and I called his colleague.
00:07:02
Speaker 4: I went to his house.
00:07:03
Speaker 3: I slept on a six to Tommy Matt office for like three four months, and I got a job teaching English no way. Yeah, And every day, every day I would wake up teach English for three or four hours to everybody from elementary school kids to Boston.
00:07:18
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then wander Tokyo.
00:07:20
Speaker 1: Awesome.
00:07:21
Speaker 4: And I had this was before phones, So I had these small disposable cameras.
00:07:26
Speaker 1: Ye, me too.
00:07:27
Speaker 3: And I came home with maybe twenty five disposable cameras full of four months later, full of Tokyo. That's amazing, and developed these photos that are now across my house, and every now and then my kids would be like, what are these pictures exactly?
00:07:43
Speaker 1: Which I raised to audio cassette tapes and send them home to my family.
00:07:48
Speaker 4: Of you just sort of narrating where you're at.
00:07:50
Speaker 1: Absolutely, we didn't have phone, you had nothing.
00:07:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, you really went places. Then maybe once a week you'd be like, I'm still alive. This call is costed, Okay, I.
00:07:58
Speaker 1: Got aside for you. So I did live in Osaka for six months. Do you remember there was a giant earthquake in nineteen ninety five, Yes, and it was horrific, like six thousand people died in Kobe. I lived right outside of that area and I was, I mean evacuated from my apartment, lived in a high school gym for a week, and the phones were cut.
00:08:20
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:08:21
Speaker 1: So miraculously, four thirty in the morning, this earthquake happens. I get thrown out a bad For some reason in my brain, I was like, my parents are going to hear about this and wig out. I picked up the phone in my apartment and left them a voicemail and I had no access to a phone for a week after that, but my parents got the message that I was alive.
00:08:43
Speaker 3: It's nuts to think of what would that look like today given the technology and connectivity we have so different. Were you're tracking locations on your kids you know, exactly six miles a way to make sure they're on their way home and it's still even fifty nine. Yeah, it's a different world. It's a totally different world speaking of tech. So I come from a place where a couple sons who are about nineteen and twenty, they're in college, but they're about to enter a workforce that if you just accept what I think is a little bit of an overstatement and maybe a mythology, they're going to have to compete more than anything with AI. LinkedIn came out with a lot of research, deep research, good faith, just like, hey, I'm not sure that's what this is kind of research, and it changed a lot of what I thought where it was like, yes, global hiring is twenty percent below pre pandemic levels, Yes, job transitions are at a ten year low, but the slowdown that's real may not be driven by AI. You have more applicants per job than any time since COVID. I think of on the side by the way as my kids, especially my two older sons, having gone through at least the beginnings of high school in COVID and now hitting a job market that's complicated. To say that lead I do really feel for them, So we'll put that aside for a second.
00:10:03
Speaker 1: Well, but let's feel for all workers. It's not a young person dynamic.
00:10:09
Speaker 4: You guys found.
00:10:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, So to do a little bit of myth busting, there's been all this media narrative about entry level jobs, young people's jobs getting crushed. Our data shows that that's not entirely true, and that entry level jobs have not declined out of step with any other types of jobs. So I'm not saying it's easy or good, but there is a bit of a myth about the death of the entry level job. Now our job's changing and evolving. Certainly, Yes, does everybody need to know AI skills to be in this workforce. That's true whether you're entering the workforce or you're forty or fifty or sixty. So I think we are very focused on people building the skills and the agency that will allow them to reimagine career paths, which are not linear anymore. Once upon a time, you could be twenty two and get an entry level finance job and march of the penguins along through the ladder. Over time, that is radically changing. Yeah, people are going to have more jobs, They're going to do gig and contractor and solopreneur and some full time, and you know, people will have a portfolio of jobs. But the idea that like entry level or low level jobs don't exist is actually not true. Now things are changing incredibly rapidly. Like will that be the case in a year, I don't know, but that's what we're seeing now.
00:11:43
Speaker 3: That sort of tracks like I think two years ago, even I would have panicked as a dad, and maybe as a youngster, and I would have believed a lot of this stuff without digging even just a little deeper into it. But I think it tracks with how now I'm seeing my own kids, but also my observation of the entry workforce and iHeartMedia right starting to realize like, oh, it's not necessarily the jobs not there. I just might need slightly different skill sets in order to do that job and be competitive. And you guys have some stats and some of the stuff you put out that AI is actually there is tangible evidence that it's creating jobs, already creating new jobs that weren't there before. Yes, there is a flip side of this that I also love, though I think there was a stat in one of your pieces says candidates are three point six times more likely to get hired if they have a connection. Yes, So, amidst all this great research and I think new mythbusting stats around AI and its effect in the job market, you still have these pockets of but man, it still helps to know a guy well.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: I think the power of connections and network is getting more important.
00:12:49
Speaker 4: Talk to me about that. Why do you think that?
00:12:51
Speaker 1: Because in a world of AI, a lot of you know, quotes, basic jobs or things that you used to need humans to do will evolve or disappear. New roles and jobs will emerge. But who you know and your network is going to be more important to your career progress, particularly because you will have more of a portfolio set of jobs. Over time, people will change jobs and add jobs more frequently, and so connections are key to that. And also, let's be honest. In the world of AI hiring, there's a lot of junk and a lot of falsehood out there. So if I am a twenty four year old looking for jobs in these arenas and I have a profile on LinkedIn, I am sharing my experience and my learnings and what I'm building on LinkedIn, and I have a network of people that know me and will vouch for me that is authentic and human and cannot be done by a robot.
00:13:57
Speaker 4: Yeah, we have this.
00:13:58
Speaker 3: We lean into this hard at iHeart, in full transparency where I didn't know that the stuff that we do that we just sort of called our standard operating procedure, a way to run our company, namely like a thousand humans on microphones having conversations like this one, a little bit organized, a little bit messy, a little bit of everything. I didn't know that that was going to become a differentiator. Yes, that that human element of doing a thing, of having just an organic, normal conversation was going to be differentiated in an age of AI. It's not to say that our company is not to a large extent operationally helped by AI ours, but it is now a differentiator of ours. To brand partners, whe were like, hey, we're guaranteed human, and it's interesting, Like when I think of your guys world, it feels similar. It's like, yes, AI is a thing you need to upskill or reskill, but also you need to be connected to other humans or you won't have the leg up that you definitely need like you always needed. Maybe now more than ever. That's really interesting to me.
00:15:00
Speaker 1: I think so too, like human judgment, your ability to emotionally move people and connect with people humor, fun right, like these are what made people thrive. It's what makes people attracted to companies. It's what makes people go above and beyond in their work. We better lean real hard into all of that.
00:15:27
Speaker 4: I have an extreme example of this.
00:15:29
Speaker 3: I was in New York on a trip about a week ago, and I'm in the lobby and turns out to be a grandmother is sitting there checking at the same hotel, and she sort of approaches me and says, oh, what do you do for a living?
00:15:40
Speaker 4: Very talkative older woman.
00:15:42
Speaker 3: Was it me.
00:15:44
Speaker 1: Not you?
00:15:46
Speaker 3: I was like, yeah, I work at iHeartMedia. We do this, that and the other, and long story short, we shared an elevator together. She takes my email down. She says, I'm going to give your information to my granddaughter who's about to graduate from college and she's looking for a job. Two weeks later, I get an email from her granddaughter, who's now I truly believe will end up with her first paid internship at iHeartMedia.
00:16:07
Speaker 1: That's so awesome.
00:16:08
Speaker 3: When I got on the phone with her granddaughter and said, hey, your grandmother was lovely. What can I do to help? She talked all about her AI skills. She's like, well, I just graduated from college. It was a really interesting time to be in college. I'm a graphic designer and I started out college when AI had not exploded, and now that's all we're talking about, and I want to talk to you about my skill sets.
00:16:29
Speaker 4: It was just this really.
00:16:30
Speaker 3: Interesting journey in and out of new high falutint artificial intelligence skills, but also grounded in this very she introduced us that I couldn't make up if I tried totally.
00:16:43
Speaker 4: It was incredible.
00:16:45
Speaker 1: People will write a post on LinkedIn and I'll comment on it. I don't know these people, some woman in Geneva, you know, and I'll write a note and be like, that was so awesome what you shared about your personal journey, and thank you for bringing your humanity and your emotion to your stuff on LinkedIn. I was moved by it. And then the next thing I know, I'm meeting with them. I'm having coffee. They're maybe pitching me work, maybe I'm hiring people, Like that's the magic unlock that people are going to need one hundred times more in three years.
00:17:37
Speaker 3: Part of the research you guys have done too is the Entrepreneurship Report and the fact that entrepreneurship is becoming multi threaded. That seventy three percent of gen z founders have multiple income streams. We're really just like collapsing all these words of founder, creator, and it's all sort of morphing into this what I think LinkedIn calls this sort of new collar era.
00:18:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, talk us through it a little bit.
00:18:05
Speaker 1: Well, I think that the multi hyphenate or multi threaded worker is exploding in the world in a really positive way. Maybe I should use the word blossoming right, Like, it has never been easier to start a business because of AI. The things that used to be laborious and time consuming and expensive about starting a business you can do from your desk in five hours. That's incredible. And so people are becoming a small business founder and a creator and working a part time job and studying an entirely new field. So the LinkedIn economics team rolls up to me. There's a guy on that team who is a data scientist and court all of the economic research that you're referring to. Sure, he has a giant creator following on TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn. He is an exceptional content creator and a data scientist at LinkedIn, and those two things are totally in tandem and wonderful. Now people have full time jobs and they need to treat them, course of course, But right I think that the landscape of what is possible now for people who choose to embrace the agency that they have and the voice that they have and the AI tools that they can use is boundless. There's so much creative potential for businesses, for brands, for people, and I think we're just scratching the surface on that. But the creator landscape on LinkedIn is expanding so.
00:19:48
Speaker 4: Fast any talk to me.
00:19:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean we have doubled the number of creators on LinkedIn in the last few years. We have a program called brand Link where we pair brands and creator content.
00:20:00
Speaker 4: Oh wow.
00:20:00
Speaker 1: And so it's the nexus of business in, creativity and celebrity all in one delicious package.
00:20:08
Speaker 3: It's cool because I feel like in the creator economy, when you give creators tools to do more good stuff, they will do that. Yeah.
00:20:15
Speaker 1: I mean it's interesting. I do think people have had kind of a bifurcated mind, like I use LinkedIn to find business contacts or to you know, market my product, but I may creator over here. No, no, no, it's all the same soup. If you want to reach workers and business people, this is the place. Bring your voice, bring your creativity. Like people are building massive businesses here as creators.
00:20:47
Speaker 3: You don't have to compartmentalize. No, And when a founder is a creator, is this new sort of new caller?
00:20:53
Speaker 1: They all ask each other.
00:20:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, everything's everywhere, and it's funny. I mean I think back of like a younger Connell or a younger Jessica walking around Japan. I thought it would be very compartmentalized. I'll just do this and that'll be my life and that'll be my business card. And I think about the job that I wanted to do, and it waffled. Sometimes I wanted to be a rock star, sometimes I wanted to be a corporate guy. I wasn't sure. Part of the reason I was in Japan figuring it out. But I never thought it would be multi threaded. I really never thought that you could have your cake and eat it too, whatever the expression you want to use. I thought that you picked a lane and stuck with it.
00:21:33
Speaker 1: I think that that is really.
00:21:36
Speaker 4: It's blown up.
00:21:37
Speaker 3: You know sometimes when you're talking to friends, you're like, what do you tell your kids these days? And I think the only thing I got right in my career, the only thing I actually got right, was just open mindedness. Yeah, oh, let's see where this goes. Try it that approach, Let's see where this goes. It's how I got into digital media. It's how I got into podcasting, It's how I got ato. iHeartMedia.
00:21:57
Speaker 1: You're never stuck. Yeah, try it. I started a startup, and the amount of effort that we had to put into building that web business and the marketing and the sales and the accounting and the HR it was so overwhelming and so arduous, and we ran that business into the home equity crisis in two thousand and eight. It was a giant failure. It is the biggest failure of my career. I tried it. I wouldn't trade it for anything. Didn't screw up my career. You just keep trying things, and today it is so much easier to do that.
00:22:33
Speaker 4: You have a daughter, what do you talk to her about this stuff?
00:22:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's fifteen. She is a painter. She is obsessed with documentary, film and history. And she's a journalist and she's a volleyball player. And so I'm like, you are a renaissance teenager. Bless do it all, do everything. Two years from now, You'll love some of it, you'll hate some of it. Start a business, be a creator or not. Don't be intimidated, don't be scared. You can try anything and then change your course.
00:23:07
Speaker 3: Your daughter and my son are having this conversation in five, ten, twenty years out.
00:23:11
Speaker 4: Just talk a little bit about it.
00:23:12
Speaker 1: I definitely am not going to take a bot on twenty.
00:23:17
Speaker 4: Where are we?
00:23:18
Speaker 3: I mean, does all marketing become influencer marketing? Do all jobs become hyper multi threaded? The more I think about you and LinkedIn, It's like you guys are a little bit of the.
00:23:29
Speaker 4: Authority on where this might be going. But I'll still give you a pass.
00:23:33
Speaker 1: Well, I'm definitely in the opining zone. I would say in marketing, we are going to have multiple channels for a very long time. So I think that multi threaded marketing and multi threaded marketers will continue and win. I do think we will see the collapse of roles. I think that we will have brand strategists who are copywriters and video creators and campaign optimizers. You look at a small business today, right The person running marketing at a small business has the insights, does the research, writes the brief, makes the ad traffics the ad optimizes and measures. I think everyone in marketing in a large company should start thinking like that. The separation of roles will erode. Then for workers and people entering the world of work, the only thing that's going to matter is your agility, your creativity, your willingness to try new things and fail and learn. Because what the world of work will be in five years, none of us can say yeah, but I guarantee it will require more flexibility, more creativity, personal connections and networks, and I think the ability to communicate effectively and to ask great questions, and to write and think clearly and make good arguments. Like those things are not changing.
00:25:19
Speaker 3: I hear all the stuff you're saying, and it's like I would wrap all that up in a word humanity, And it sounds cheesy and hackneyed and whatever, but it's like in a world where AI, of course will become more important and of course will operationally at least drive more and more things, bringing your humanity to work will be more more and more important too. I want to talk about your work around women in the workplace and the advancement and support of women, especially leadership and executives in the workplace.
00:25:45
Speaker 4: Talk us through that.
00:25:46
Speaker 3: I know it's been a through line and is mission critical important to you as it should be.
00:25:51
Speaker 4: Thank you, tell us what you got going on and maybe how we can help.
00:25:54
Speaker 1: I was raised by feminists, my father and my mother, and I believe at the fair core of my being that work needs women and women need to win in the world of work, and that women make amazing leaders and all of the research shows that diverse teams perform the best drive the best business performance. So I have dedicated a lot of my time and effort to ensuring that women feel supported and welcome in the world of work and that women rise through the senior ranks. We have a sad reality going on now, which is that women are forty three percent of the workforce but thirty percent of senior leadership globally in companies, and we are seeing a backside now on women entering senior roles has dropped from thirty six percent to thirty three percent in the last few years. So I am ringing the bell, pressing the alarm. Weird weird alert alert. We are not making progress and that is unacted. That should be unacceptable to every board, to every CEO, to every government. And I enlist all men, women and people to support women to rise and thrive in work, because it is perilous if.
00:27:16
Speaker 3: We do not. Have you seen across your own career good years and bad years for those kinds of trends.
00:27:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I would. I mean like I started in management consulting in nineteen ninety eight and I was the only woman in a CEO meeting time and time again, and I had to wear pantyhose. So those days are long gone, and let's say hallelujah to that. So great progress in some regards, but we have not won the battle. Right until we have full parody in the c suite of women and men and frankly all walks of people and life, we have not won.
00:27:57
Speaker 4: And I think that that's the hard part.
00:27:58
Speaker 3: It's like when you're having this conversation with somebody, it's sort of like, no, I'm not trying to be difficult here, but until it's fixed, it's not fixed.
00:28:06
Speaker 1: That is a great way to sit to tell you, Yeah, it's a great way to say that. Yeah, flexibility in the workplace matters. Yeah, women getting put up for stretch assignments and leadership roles, women demanding equal pay. Women are not taught to be negotiators. They're not good at asking for their value. Women have got to learn to ask, and men have got to learn to say to women, you deserve to be paid what you deserve to be paid to do this role. And by the way, I'm going to put you in this role that you think you're not ready for, and you are right.
00:28:42
Speaker 3: Last questions here. That's true to the nature of the show. Leading by example. Talk to us a little bit about how you lead by example with your own team through the good the bad.
00:28:52
Speaker 4: What's that like?
00:28:53
Speaker 1: Treat others how you want to be treated is a management mantra and a life mantra. And so I really try to be flexible, honest, transparent. I try to celebrate and thank people for little things and big things. I think that if we don't have fun at work, we will curl up in a ball and cry on the floor. So I'm trying to hold a high bar for performance and work and growing our business. But also share joy with people, share sadness with people.
00:29:32
Speaker 4: Sure.
00:29:33
Speaker 1: I think my greatest aspiration is that people feel comfortable about the good, the bad, and the ugly, and that they can share them in a real and secure way. And I will tell my team like, I'm overwhelmed, or I've got some stuff going on with my teenager or my old parents that is really weighing me down, and I'm having trouble focusing outside of those challenges. But also we're doing amazing work, and we're growing this business and we're changing hearts and minds, and bless you for your awesome innovation and creativity and what you're bringing to the people of this company and to the outside world. But that all of those things are part of the soup, and that is what being a human being is. I think that the more we can connect as humans and share the pain and share the joy, yeah, it makes work a lot more worth doing.
00:30:32
Speaker 3: Jessica Jensen, the CMO of LinkedIn, I cannot thank you enough. You guys are doing awesome work at LinkedIn, and concretely, some of the research you guys are putting out there is surprising, it's thought provoking, it's super cool.
00:30:43
Speaker 4: So I really appreciate you talking to us.
00:30:44
Speaker 1: About Oh that means the world to us. Thank you.
00:30:52
Speaker 2: Thanks so much to Connell Burn, CEO of iHeartMedia's digital Audio group, for jumping into this conversation with LinkedIn CMO Jessica Juhensen. And as I was listening to this conversation, I kept thinking about this theme of what it means to lead by example right now. So the first takeaway was this the landscape of what is possible is now boundless. You know, they were talking about the nature of work and how that has changed. And I don't mean it as just remote work or flexible hours. I mean the entire architecture of what it means to build your career. There's no longer this expectation that you have to have a full time job. You stay in your lane and that's your whole professional identity. That model is gone. In fact, LinkedIn just released its newest Entrepreneurship report and found that seventy three percent of gen z founders today have multiple income streams where success is being redefined from just trying to make money to finding freedom and growth. And what I love about this is it really honors the complexity of who we are as people. We have multiple interests, multiple skills, multiple callings, and the world is finally starting to embrace that. But what I find especially encouraging is that even large corporations are leaning into this. I mean, you heard from leaders at LinkedIn and iHeartMedia, which is signaling this kind of open mindedness that I think all of us should take seriously. Here's a second takeaway. Failure is not necessarily failure, it's data. So this moment was a brief mention, But Jessica said that at some point in her career she started her own company and in the end it didn't succeed. The two thousand and eight crisis hit and her entire business collapsed. She called it the biggest failure of her career. She also said she wouldn't trade it for anything. And I'll tell you why this part really stuck with me. Whether you've been laid off, a venture didn't work out, or maybe you are just feeling a bit stuck in your career figuring out what your passion is. I want you to know that none of this time moving forward is ever time wasted. Maybe you made a mistake, maybe you feel that you chose the wrong profession, and you're thinking things might not work out. But hearing Jessica, who is now the CMO of LinkedIn, having her speak about her failure and her saying that actually none of it is time wasted, that meant a lot. Because what's most important if something fails, trusting that there will always be something waiting for you on the other side as long as you keep moving forward. And here's a third takeaway. Human skills are the competitive edge for the future. This third takeaway came from a point that Connell made and it really deeply resonated with the work I've been doing for years. He talked about this concept of humanity, specifically how being created, being open minded, and communications are not soft skills. They are the skills of the future. I can't reiterate that enough. And that is what's going to set you apart in the age of AI. If you're leading a team right now, it's getting them to start to think about how can they use these skills where they have to think outside the box. But more importantly, as a leader, how do you create room for it?
00:34:24
Speaker 1: Right?
00:34:24
Speaker 2: Creating that space and talking about it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I thought it was such a great conversation. I learned a lot, including these takeaways, and I want to say for all of you listening, if you enjoyed this episode, or you have feedback on what you want to hear and guess you would like to hear from, please rate and review Leading by Example.
00:34:48
Speaker 1: Every review, every rating. It really does help.
00:34:51
Speaker 2: Us reach more people and make this show the best it can be. I'm Jessica Chen, the author of the book Smart Not Loud, How to Get Noticed at Work for All the Right Reasons, and the CEO of soulcast Media, a communications training company. For more information about me and what I do, head over to Solcastmedia dot com or add me on LinkedIn and Instagram. A huge thank you to our production team at Ruby Studio, especially Kelly Kyle, Matt Stillo, and Sierra Spring. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Leading by Example. I will see you then.
