Exclusive Q+A with Eboni K. Williams: Adaptability Amidst Change, Skills that Serve a Lifetime & Taking Agency in Your Career

It’s Black History Month, and my team and I at LinkedIn are doing a deep dive on “Decoding Career Agency for Black Professionals.” It’s all about how we use skills, networks, and information to take control of our careers. In LinkedIn’s 2024 LinkedIn Most In Demand Skills , Adaptability rose to be the "Top Skill of the Moment." When I think of adaptability, no one embodies that skill set more than Eboni K. Williams ; entrepreneur,?lawyer, television host and author. Usually it's Eboni interviewing me as anchor of the nightly news on the Grio TV, but for Black History Month, I turned the tables on her. Here's a snapshot of what she shared:

Drew: You’ve been a practicing attorney, best selling-author, and national media and television personality. What role has adaptability played in your career?

Eboni: I don't have the career that I get to have today, without embracing adaptability. To sustain successfully in any business, in any genre, you've got to have that malleability; the ability to adapt on demand. It is actually not natural to me, contrary to what my career and resume might tell you.

If we zoom out and think of adaptability in the sense of more traditional career pivoting, I have done a tremendous amount of it. I started my career as a criminal defense lawyer, transitioned into a national broadcast journalist, anchoring cable news talk shows, and now I host a nationally syndicated judge show. The key to adaptability lies in my insistence on not focusing on companies I work with or the capacity in which I do that work. You will not hear me talk a lot about being a journalist or being an anchor. What I focus on are the skills, the transferable skills. The same skills I use that make me a breakout star are the skills I learned in law school.?

• Pro Tip: Adaptability is the “Top Skill of the Moment” in LinkedIn’s 2024 Most In Demand Skills . Check out the list to identify other skills that you can develop and lean on throughout this year.??

Drew: What does having agency over your career look like for you and what advice do you give to others?

It's been more than 10 years since anyone has heard me say something like “I work for ____”; I don't work for anyone, and I'm very insistent upon it. The only W-2s I receive are from Eboni K. Williams LLC, and I pay it to myself - that is part of my agency. I take great pride in being able to derive income from excellent strategic professional partners like Byron Allen and Warner Media Group, but I’ve extracted myself from this paradigm of being an employee. For me, it was never going to afford me the long term positioning and independence that I seek; I stepped away from that, sometimes, meaning that I got less money. I've interviewed for many deals over the past six or seven years, where the money on the front end was better if I accepted employment status, but I always refused that model in lieu of a more entrepreneurial format, one that allows me to be the president and owner of my own business entity. For me having agency means making the decision about my own career and having the power to succeed, or not, in my own hands.?That's where my agency comes from.

Agency is very important to me. It's more important to me than the income. And that's why I'm proving to you how much I will refuse other models that don't feel safe to me.

Now if I tell the same story to two of my best friends, the very thing that makes me feel safe scares them to death. These are extremely successful women whose safety derives from being in a W-2 employment format. So it's not an either/or; it's a pure assessment of what makes you feel safe and then executing on the right strategy for that model.

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Drew: Code-switching is something that so many Black professionals do to level up and find belonging at work. 60% feel it’s necessary. What’s your take on code-switching in the workplace, do you think our parents would have a different point of view??

Oh my God, yes, yes, yes. My mother grew up in the Jim Crow South in east Louisiana, and she did not go to school with white people until she was in high school. She's a really bold, confident, kind of bullish Black woman in her own right, she's always been an entrepreneur, but my mother has never been in white spaces in terms of her work. She raised a daughter with a certain expectation, that I would effectively code switch, use my skills, appease, and play the game in very conventional ways. So when she sees me show up in ways that are so unconventional [anti-code switching], whether it was the Trump docket at Fox News, or in the Real Housewives of New York it’s hard for her to understand. Just now, in the last 18 months, she’s started to concede that I do know a bit of what I’m doing and sees how it's very different from anything she could have conceptualized.?

That said, I think our generation sees our flexibility, our opportunity to lean in or out of code-switching as our choice; that’s liberation for us. And then I think the generation above us, see any level of pushback of cultural norms of whiteness as a threat. So, you have a full spectrum of opinions around how much or how little of one's blackness or challenging of whiteness shows up and what that means.

What I would say for code-switching broadly, I'm at a stage of my career where I just choose not to do it anymore. I don't have to do it. I'm not gonna do it.?

I think code-switching is very much about autonomy and agency. It’s a personal decision that no one should be shaming anyone for opting into elements of code-switching that they deem necessary for their survival or ascension.

As a culture and community of Black people, we need to do a much better job of not shaming people who opt out of code-switching, stop telling people they're sabotaging their success, simply because they choose not to lean into a structure or paradigm of code-switching that others feel is necessary. We need to give ourselves more grace, more space to make more individual decisions. I don't think this moment in history affords a consensus on this issue. I do not think there is a Black consensus available to us around code-switching in the workplace. This is not consensus work. This is some of the most individual work of our generation. And we gotta treat it that way.

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MY FINAL THOUGHTS:

Eboni and I could have talked for HOURS, in fact this is about half of what we discussed. We may have to do a second edition or BTS of the audio if she’s down. This Black History Month, my team and I at LinkedIn focused on agency because FREEDOM and POWER should not be foreign to us in our careers. My good friend and Pulitzer Prize winner, Karen Hunter , often asks her guests, “how does that get us free” on her SiriusXM show. How does your strategy for your career—your network, your access to information, your commitment to learning new skills, your adaptability to change—get you to have more freedom and agency? Does that look like higher compensation, more time off, more flexibility to have multiple income streams or just being your authentic self without fear of isolation? I believe information sharing and careers built by community is the key, it’s why I do this newsletter. But let’s figure it out together!?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Eboni K. Williams , you are THE TRUTH! Thank you for sharing your insights and for showing up in the world the way you do. You model agency in spaces where Black and brown folks don't often see it.

Make sure to catch her on your TV, and catch me joining her on The Grio sometime soon!