Women in Leadership: Alexa Carleo

Welcome to #TeamTuesdays , our weekly series highlighting what our Verizon Connect UX Research team is up to: how we’re learning, evolving, and leading user experience research across our business!

Last week, I reflected on some themes about Women in Leadership. We talked about the challenges that women face, the benefits that we all experience when women hold senior leadership roles, and the future of women in leadership. I came away from my research for that piece feeling motivated to help with representation: shining spotlights on women leaders at Verizon Connect.

This week, we kick off this series of Women in Leadership with a leader whom I have had the pleasure of working with for the past 7 years!?

Meet Alexa Carleo , who is one of our UX Research senior managers!

She leads our Research Operations and Rapid Research teams. You can learn more about her incredible work here , and read on to learn more of her personal story!

Seeing Women in Leadership

Alexa joined the Verizon Connect team as a student intern in 2016. “One of the main reasons I decided to stick with Verizon after getting offered a position was because, during my internship, it was really interesting and important for me that a large portion of the executive leadership team at the time were women, and a couple of them were women of color,” Alexa shared. “And that was really cool. Even at that moment, the EVP was a woman: Marni.”?

Alexa is referring to the inspirational leader Marni Walden, who retired from the business in 2017 . Marni and her colleagues made a strong impact on Alexa, especially at the beginning of her career in UX Design.?

“They were really involved in the internship. Not just to show face. Everyone knew each other,” Alexa reflected. “We were all in the office together. We could bump into each other, and everyone remembered me. We could have conversations. That was really impactful as a young woman coming out of school.”

As mentioned in last week’s #TeamTuesdays article, Women in Leadership at Verizon Connect , studies have shown that this early engagement with women leaders is especially crucial for women leaders of tomorrow. DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast and Harvard Business School , for example, highlight that younger women who are able to work with established women leaders are better able to avoid negative stereotypes and systematic barriers in the office that keep women from leadership progression.?

Having this makeup in leadership served as a protective layer against those challenges.

“But then I saw that makeup change,” Alexa reflected. “It’s something I’ve seen grow and change. It’s something I wish were changing quicker. There was discomfort for a while, when there weren’t people like me on the leadership team.”?

This was particularly true as Verizon Connect became even more global. The demographics of our executive leadership admittedly shifted to primarily men.?

“It was worrisome to me,” Alexa said. “It was something I thought about, and something I talked to our leadership team about. It’s something I’ve tried to be vocal about in a respectful way.”

Having said all this, Alexa does recognize the unique challenges that businesses face when holding to this commitment to progress. “You don’t get it right once, and then, you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, this company is progressive and inclusive.’ It can change over time, and it was always important for me to pay attention to that and to talk about it,” she acknowledged.?

Pointing Out Challenges and Lifting Others Up

Alexa shared some kind words about the fact that I have been her mentor and manager through our shared tenure, noting that having a manager who is a woman of color felt comforting to her.?

I wanted to get a sense of what exactly provides that comfort. Representation of shared values is definitely something we all have on the UX Research team. But I wanted to know what other factors underlie that comfort. Understanding where the comfort comes from, for the entire team, helps me understand what to act on and foster as a leader. We can enhance those strengths, replicate them, fix them when they’re broken, and in the end, everyone can benefit.?

Alexa shared that one place where that comfort comes from is seeing women in leadership positions across the business, and that all leaders were able to help lift up their teams.?

“It’s not just about having women in executive leadership positions who feel like they have fought their way there and are holding to power,” she observed. “I would hope that women who have established themselves would get promoted to higher levels of seniority! But teams may still not be reflective of diversity. It’s about not having a token person. It’s about establishing that anyone and everyone can be included. I hope that [women senior leaders] have a path to help bring people up along with them too.”?

And Alexa is walking the walk. Having that core principle of inclusivity meant that Alexa was also pivotal in helping build an increasingly inclusive team as we grew in size and scope. This included hiring people from different disciplines, backgrounds, and walks of life. (Check out her Research Ops team, which we’ll also discuss a little later!)

Further, much of the discussion about including women in senior leadership revolves around motherhood. But that may not be all womens’ experiences.?

And in addition to that, inclusivity helps uplift women, but it can lift all populations.?

In last week’s article , I saw this addressed in McKinsey & Co’s study , which showcased how this could also have positive impacts for people of color, and people who identify as LGBTQIA+.

“Let’s open the umbrella even wider. [Leadership opportunities] are not just for ‘women with children’. It’s not even just ‘women’. It’s maybe ‘not men’,” Alexa offers, in an effort to state that we can open the door wider for people who don’t fit the male template or status quo.?

This is a conversation that I see directly playing out now, as we discuss our creative hiring practices in Verizon.?

We have whole teams dedicated to making this process more accessible, more transparent, and more empathetic. Several leaders have made fantastic impacts in their own individual processes by opening up pools of talent by thinking outside of the box. One leader even requested that recruiters do more searches for candidates when the first wave of a search happened to result in candidates who were all men.?

“That’s great! But there’s a discrepancy between what is good, and what is good enough,” Alexa pointed out.?

In this part of our conversation, Alexa celebrates that leaders are able to impact change, but also challenges us to make our baseline processes better.?

When reflecting on these stories of hiring, and finding only men candidates, Alexa pointed out, “Why institutionally did it take that long for that leader to notice? And why wasn’t [a balanced search] already baked into the process? Those are the things that we, as women, look at. Let’s dig deeper. What could we do before that moment so that we don’t have to be on our toes about being inclusive? Let’s quicken the pace in which we are becoming inclusive in our leadership team.”

Self-Reflecting, and Catalyzing Change

When thinking about her role in making teams more inclusive, Alexa always admirably starts with self-reflection.

“I think it’s pretty cool that my leadership, all the way up until the CEO, is women, and that my entire team is made up of women. But that means that I have some unique [challenges].”

When I asked about what those challenges are, Alexa shared that the rare opportunities of seeing and working closely with women in leadership, across so many teams and levels, have set a very different tone for her career, which impacts her thoughts about the future.

“I’ve never managed someone who isn’t a woman,” Alexa pointed out. “Ideally, it shouldn’t be that different, but as someone who is a woman in the workplace, I know that probably would be and is.”

It’s exciting to see that leaders like Alexa are thinking about how to adapt and shape their early management styles to accommodate diverse groups of people, especially when you consider DDI’s finding that women leaders in particular often need to move to new positions outside of the companies that they have been established in to be able to gain access to roles in senior management. Based on that trend, we women leaders must proactively think about how to adapt to senior management opportunities in completely new environments.

Alexa often wonders about how ready she is for that kind of a shift.

“If I were to plunk myself out of this position and go somewhere else, doing the same things, having all the same skill sets and tools and experience, but how translatable would that be?” Alexa shared. “There’s a certain fear that if I had men leaders all the way up to a CEO who was a woman… would that feel different? Could I support my team in the same way? Would I show up differently? Would I feel comfortable? How much teaching would I feel like I have to do on inclusion that I don’t feel like I have to spend as much time on with my team currently?”

She also wonders how her own self-perceptions might have influenced her career choices.

Alexa reflected, “Right now, we’re in the middle of mid-year evaluations, and there’s a part of me that’s like, ‘Have I ever pushed myself in the agenda for my future career development like a man would?’ You know how they say that men see a job description, and if they match one or two of the things, they still apply for it, whereas women often feel like they have to have the entire list all the way down?”

One such “they” that Alexa means is this fantastic Forbes article on gender gaps in the workplace . The Forbes authors state, “Women often hesitate to advocate for themselves by applying for promotions or higher-level roles, or contributing at the same level as their male peers in meetings. This fear is partly a result of women experiencing the same stereotypes that punish women for errors their male counterparts would be forgiven for and it is magnified by a lack of female role models for women to follow.”

Alexa shared that she would like to get better at managing conversations about compensation or promotion, while pointing out that those who benefit from the patriarchal structure of corporate culture may have more experiences to lean on or benefit from when “playing the corporate game”.?

“How am I showing up potentially in that?” Alexa asked of herself. “And how am I potentially not pushing my team to take opportunities and risks because I don’t see them as opportunities or risks that play out?”

To that point, during our conversation, we both felt the need to avoid any kinds of negative stereotypes that could hinder perceptions of us and our work – especially when it comes to appearing dominant or aggressive.?

“That’s a concern,” Alexa continued. “Am I holding my team back in those ways by not… by not being as… I don’t know, the word’s not ‘aggressive’… but… aggressive.”

When I gathered up my own courage to even ask about the hesitancy to say the word “aggressive”, we shared a great moment that illustrated the point made by Forbes and so many studies like theirs.

And it pointed out the flip side of the kinds of words we use to describe ourselves, and the impact they may have on perceptions of us.

“I’m someone who is non-confrontational, who is in her first corporate job, who isn’t embedded in the hustle culture. I’d rather be a… the word’s not ‘soft’,” Alexa reflected again, “but inclusive. Calm. Chill. Someone who gets things done but isn’t a part of the other side of that [hustle culture], which is what other leaders might look like in other spaces on other teams. That’s what’s portrayed in the media. That’s what my dad is like. That’s the experience that I have [to refer to].”

It made me wonder whether this softer, gentler, but equally impactful and beneficial type of leadership style, would ever gain as much respect as something more Glengarry Glen Ross or Wolf of Wall Street -esque.

“As someone who wasn’t positive I wanted to be a leader, I had to be convinced that it was going to be the right path for me,” Alexa revealed. “Sometimes, a leader is a blocker – they block things from their team, or they block their team from things that aren’t in their best interest. Being non-confrontational and not of that communication style made me worried that I would be an ineffectual leader.”?

I then wondered how much overlap these admittedly shared concerns overlap with the concerns of any new leader. I asked myself how the rest of our management team might think about these experiences, and how they have managed past those concerns.

“Those who expect [leadership] to be the next steps in their career may not necessarily take time to skill up,” Alexa pointed out.?

And she’s right – many leaders feel like they stumble into leadership roles, due to circumstance, need, or other factors.?

“I spent a lot of time during my work here, years, skilling up on those things,” Alexa highlighted. “I don’t know if everyone else takes that level of precaution. I’m still doing trainings all the time. Thankfully, Verizon has a lot of those.”

Two shining examples are Alexa’s participation in a formal program, like the McKinsey leadership program, and having support for informal spaces to have interpersonal and team dynamic conversations as they organically come up.

“I find it so, so, so helpful,” Alexa shared. “And I think having managers who can talk about the soft manager stuff, those small, nuanced conversations about how things are working – not just about how projects are going on, or how the team is faring on their work – but also, how am I managing people. It’s so extremely important because it’s all interpersonal, the tough stuff. That is hard to work through on your own. It feels very nebulous when compared to learning how to use a new tool, or that kind of thing.”

Using Communication as a Tool for Inclusive Success

Alexa ended our discussion talking about her own shift in identity through her management journey, and how she hopes to inspire her teams as she progresses.?

“I am a maximizer. I like to get things done. I like being on high-profile projects. I like doing a lot of work, the quantity of work,” Alexa shared. “It was important for me that when I became a [leader], I wouldn’t settle too comfortably into management. I want to do this and more.”

She is proactively thinking about how to avoid the tendency of many managers to experience the negative effects of failing up , or the phenomenon of progressing through management and leadership roles that are increasingly powerful and influential without truly learning and growing.?

This extends to her direct reports as well.?

Alexa detailed well the balancing act making strong progress and replicating them at scale. For example, she shared the experience of losing a high performer like her as an IC to management, and gaining a team that could expand on her work. “I want to encourage my team to be as efficient and maximized as I was as an individual contributor,” she explained. “And it was important to me that as a manager, I was still making a high quality and quantity impact.”

It’s this proactive approach to constant betterment that is a defining factor of Alexa’s approach to leadership.?

And it’s clear that holding space for these dynamic, amorphic, uncomfortable, confusing, but passionate and optimistic conversations, is one major key to any leader’s success.

“I think that’s what [the future] looks like,” Alexa offered. “We can look and feel diverse, and there are paths toward that. But even if it isn’t at the moment, leadership is aware of that, and they’re willing to put plans in place. They have an answer to our questions. That is what is important to me. That we’re not just doing lip service to it. We’re recognizing that there’s potentially a discrepancy, and we have a way to fix it.”

There are certainly some hallmarks to highlight in the progress that Verizon and Verizon Connect have made in addressing those systematic barriers for women in leadership.

“When Alicia came in, that was really exciting to see,” Alexa highlighted. Alicia Nachman is our Director, and is another leader in our unique direct reporting line of women leaders. “So, it wasn’t like there weren’t women in my line, but it was important to see leaders not just at my level or the level above me, but all the way up and down, around, and lateral.”

This has had an impact on how Alexa manages her team, which happens to be all women. More specifically, Alexa manages the team that was highlighted in the last #TeamTuesdays series on Attracting and Managing Top Talent!

Ariel Cole , Kelcey Little , and Iris Barrera, UXC all report to Alexa directly, and they form the UX Research Operations / ResearchOps team.?

Because our Verizon Connect Experience Team leadership recognizes the strength that comes with having women in leadership, we are also open to inviting team members from a variety of spheres. And the ResearchOps team discussions hold space for these discussions, especially when it comes to women in leadership.?

“It’s something that my team has talked about as well. There’s excitement when a woman gets promoted,” Alexa smiles. “It does really matter for us, being able to see what the future holds.”?

Alexa’s constant awareness about our women leaders serves as a way for her to keep all of her team communications open and psychologically safe.?

“There are plenty of times when Verizon Connect hasn’t gotten it right, and it’s important for me to talk to my team about why those moments feel weird, and what we can do. We can then share those moments to you, who can then share them up and down the chain. We can point out when things are working well, and when they’re not.”?

When teams create a culture of communication like this, a culture of communication that is inclusive and empathetic, teams expand that energy to other kinds of conversations, too. This means that teams can feel comfortable giving fair and even challenging feedback on processes, outcomes, and strategy. Yet another reason why having women in leadership positions, and having open dialogues about these kinds of matters, helps businesses in the long run.

Summary

It has been a joy to get to work with Alexa, and to see her grow as a team leader, but also as a thought leader. I feel that way about all of our UX Research Team members. I’m lucky to get to work with an entire team of people who have prompted thousands of thought-provoking moments and conversations (for example, read more about our team-led discussions about impact , or retaining top talent !). All of our conversations have challenged my own perceptions about how to be an effective and influential leader, and as a woman, I too have had the same concerns and questions along the way.?

The reflection doesn’t stop here, though! Next week, we’ll learn more about the amazing Michelle Morris CCXP , Associate Director of Competitive Insights on our Experience Team! You’ll hear more about the transition from these early management questions to ones that are prompted with more career experience, and a bigger variety of work environments and cultures. I’m certainly learning so much as I go on this narrative journey with these amazing women, and I’m hoping that you are, too.

Loving this series? Share your own thoughts, and highlight your own leaders as part of the conversation! And as always, check out every #TeamTuesdays piece for more about our Verizon Connect Experience Team!