Informational Interview
Interview with Tiffany Chow, SVP, Strategy & Business Development, NBC Universal News Group
Questions:
You recently celebrated your ten-year anniversary with NBC Universal. As you reflect back on your time, what’s the most important thing you’ve learned?
What do you think the next ten years of your career will look like?
You’ve got one of the busiest and most complicated roles in the company, overseeing partnerships worth hundreds of millions of dollars. How do you effectively work through disagreements and ambiguity?
What’s the most challenging part of your job?
What’s your advice for those seeking more balance between their career and life outside of work? Is work / life balance really a thing?
Reflection Essay:
In my conversation with Tiffany, we talked a lot about her experiences of working with others. Her strategic role forces her to resolve ambiguity, but she helped me understand more how coming to the table with a point of view, and a conviction in your beliefs, can be incredibly powerful in overcoming uncertainty and anxiety in teams. That if you are uncertain, those around you also get to be uncertain too. I think the same is true for modeling humility as a leader. If you signal curiosity, and are humble in front of others, those dimensions filter into the team’s behavior.
Tiffany also talked a lot about not being defined by what you do, but by who you are, and how that shows up in your interactions with others. She stressed the importance of being friends with others as a mean of getting things done faster, especially in environments where there is no right answer. She used the phrase ‘it’s important to land somewhere together’ in this context to stress the need to come to a place of common ground, whatever the outstanding differences in the conversation.
We also talked a lot about the future of her career. She just reached her ten year milestone at NBC, and while it has seen many changes in her role, she expressed the journey as a sprint. That she had spent her career so far running as hard as she can to reach where she is today. But how the next ten years will see her drastically take her foot off the gas. That if she has been going 60mph so far, the next ten years will be characterized by going 30mph, and that she feels she has the capacity to spend the next ten years living off the growth she’s experienced so far. I have a loot of empathy with this for my own journey. The first ten years of my career saw me emigrate, travel the world professionally, rise in the ranks of corporate organizations, survive cancer, get married and have children. That is a lot. But the last ten years have been exponentially slower, especially at work, where I came to a much healthier place of not being defined by what I do, but more so how I am. Tiffany is beginning to feel this too, and we agreed that work as an enabler for life is much better than life as an enabler for work.
These themes of conviction, ambiguity, and adjustments in career velocity resonated with me, but also gave me a fresh perspective on my own path forward. Tiffany’s insights allowed me to see my own journey with fresh eyes, but in a sense also validated my feelings of slowing down at work to speed up elsewhere (for example at Penn). This sense of understanding where you are directing your energy, and how that flexes up and down, inside and outside of work, and over time, is something I will continue to think about a lot.
