I spent just over 2.5 years at Kellanova, now Mars. In the scheme of things it’s not that long and I’m sure any executive recruiter looking at my resume would be a bit suspect about the pace at which I have changed in my last two roles. Establishing roots is important and only happens at around 4 years.

That said, I still learned an immense amount about how to operate in the workplace. To simplify things I have broken it down into two pieces. First, managing personal career progression. I entered Kellanova with the goal of making a challenging pivot internally. I was able to do so but I made some missteps along the way. In my next role I hope to grow and expand in responsibilities rather than pivot away and that shift is important. The second section is navigating networks. As long as you can fundamentally do the job (and most jobs in business are relatively straightforward) your career acceleration is determined by how well you can navigate networks. Managing interpersonally is incredibly important in how quickly you get promoted, what your hallway reputation might be, and how fast you can get buy in for important projects.

Navigating Networks:

1. Understand how decisions are made. At Kellanova, decisions are often made before you step into the room. It’s a culture where pre-meeting alignment is important. Often a meeting is not a forum for debate and if it is, it means that whoever was advocating for something prior wasn’t able to effectively manage. Knowing how decisions get made will tell you if its worth stepping up in a meeting to make a case or if you should focus on building consensus externally.
2. Even in large organizations your hallway reputation matters. People talk to each other and in most places (pretty much everywhere) information travels incredibly quickly. If you are a consistent problem, if you gossip a lot, if you aren’t a good coworker people will know about it and it will subtly (or sometimes significantly) influence your ability to get things done.
3. Networks are built over time. I like to think of networking as trying to make new friends and you don’t make real friends in just your first conversation. Proactively checking in with your network, being helpful to them, and just engaging is the best way to build allies across the organization – people who I thought I would never work with have ended up being incredibly influential in my own career development.
4. Positivity and forward momentum takes you far. Being eager to support, being focused on solving problems, and focusing on the goal are all table stakes but not many people do it. When navigating a network people want to talk to people who are positive and getting things done.

Career Progression:

1. Don’t push too early. I desperately wanted to pivot into brand marketing after joining Kellanova and pushed my manager hard relatively soon after joining to let me make the pivot. This was the wrong call. I quickly overplayed my hand and showed him that I didn’t want to stay in Executive Search at Kellanova, creating a situation where I didn’t have his support to make the pivot but had also signaled that I wasn’t a long term prospect. I was incredibly lucky that the tailwinds of the Mars acquisition, a lower executive search workload, and an incredibly supportive manager ended up creating the right environment for me to make the switch, but if I was being more strategic I would have focused on doing the job I was hired to do for the first 2 years and building credibility before asking to take on a new role.
2. Be in the office (virtually or not) early. People say they don’t care but they do. If you want to accelerate (versus progress at a standard rate) be in the office early.
3. Take notes in every meeting. You immediately provide value to your manager and your team if you do the basic, menial tasks that no one wants to do. Hopefully AI will automate some of this drudgery but right now its one of the most effective ways to be proactive and directly help your team and yourself early in a new role.
4. You build your reputation by doing consistently good work and bringing an ownership mentality to the business. Even in a legacy fortune 500, viewing yourself as the business owner and bringing that sense of urgency is so valuable.