Today, part of our day was listening to Rachel Nusbaum, an extremely young manager at Cisco, about leadership. What was most interesting to me was her process towards becoming a leader: to be able to succeed as a leader, the toughest step seems to be getting a chance to fill a leadership position. She talked (like we’ve been told before) about the extreme importance of connections: as a result of being in some convention with other women in positions at Cisco, she got to make a good impression on a VP in the future area she got promoted to; typically, when someone gets promoted, they have to move to a different area, as the odds of the person directly above you stepping down when you want to move up are minimal, and this was no different.
She has 2200 connections on LinkedIn; by far the most out of everyone I’ve seen so far in this program.