Eleanor Harowicz

I attribute my success to resiliency and grit, and just refusing to give up. My life has definitely not been a straight line. I've had to go sideways, step back, and pivot. I married a soldier in the U.S. Army in 2009, and I had to step away from my corporate role at Dun & Bradstreet to move out and live with him. I really had to bounce from one entry-level job to the next, and my career struggled for a while. I just refused to quit, and everywhere that I went, I asked myself, okay, what can I learn from this situation? I feel like you can learn something from any situation, even if it's a negative. What can I learn from being a daycare teacher working on Fort Sill? What can I learn from cleaning stalls at some little backyard horse barn? What can I learn from being a waitress at Denny's? I stumbled into telecom because I walked into a call center that would hire you if you had a pulse. Instead of complaining about how miserable it was, I asked, okay, what can I learn from this and how can I be excellent at this? Then I said yes to projects and opportunities to help. It just kind of builds and grows from there. When Verizon came calling in 2018, that was a huge jump forward in my career. I just refused to give up, and I just kept trying to be better at what I was doing, and learn something from every situation, and make connections across projects. I try to be a good people leader that people want to work for, not feel like they have to work for me.

I received two key pieces of career advice that have shaped my journey. The first came from a regular customer at a restaurant where I worked. When I told him I was leaving to work for Dun & Bradstreet, he said, you're gonna work for 10 years, and at the end of 10 years, you need to make sure that you have 10 years of experience, and not 1 year of experience 10 times. What he meant by that was to always be looking to grow, and stretch out of your comfort zone, and take on new challenges and not just stay stuck and stagnant in one specific skill set or one specific role. I think that's especially salient right now with the AI revolution, and recognizing that you can't stay stagnant. In 2 years, knowing how to use AI is going to be as foundational as knowing how to write an email. The second piece of advice came from my first boss at Verizon. When I was thinking about making career moves, he said, I want you to think about when you're making a career move, that you're running towards an opportunity, not running away from a bad situation. He was trying to help me not be impulsive and reactive to maybe some frustration or friction that I was facing with people I was working with or a process. It taught me to stay deliberate in career moves.

My advice would be to just be excellent where you are, figure out where else you can insert yourself, and don't quit. You're gonna hear no, and it's going to be fine. The sun will rise the next day. Keep going. Keep learning. I learned a lot in 4-H as a kid, and it really was more about being confident and continual learning and being able to stand up in front of people that you don't know. I remember doing my first presentation when I think I was nine and I was terrified, but it serves you well. Now I'm walking into presentations with a bunch of VPs and senior directors on topics that are not, perhaps, as straightforward, and I can do it because I built that foundation early on.

The biggest challenge right now is change management. There's a lot of 'we've always done it this way' in telecom, so there's a lot of changing hearts and minds that has to happen to get people to move forward and continue to evolve. A lot of what I'm working on right now within my organization is unmasking the boogeyman that is AI. People feel intimidated by it, and they don't know where to start. I'm trying to get folks to realize that you're not going to break something that you can't unbreak with a Control-Z. Just get in and try it. Get in and use it. Start real small with this piece, and then you're gonna get better. I'm trying to get people to rethink, instead of just using it to help write an email, how do I rethink how I've done this process for so long by integrating AI into the entire workflow? How can I streamline this? There's a lot of that fear of it's going to take my job, and therefore I'm just going to ignore it and pretend it'll go away. One, it's not going to. It's here, Pandora's box is open. And two, it's not going to take your job, but somebody who knows how to use AI could take your job if you refuse to adapt and evolve. It's gonna change what you're doing, but it's not going to take away work.

Integrity is most important to me. Say what you mean, mean what you say. Keeping your people at front of mind is also critical. I believe in leading your people from the front so that they can get more out of themselves than they think that they can. People will live up to or down to your expectations. If you expect that they are capable of great things, they will find that they are capable of great things. If you expect that they are incapable and require constant micromanagement, you will kill their spirit. I work really hard to not be an obstacle for my people. I try to remove the obstacles from them, and stay close enough that when they start to falter, I can step in at the right time and just give them the one or two tweaks that they need to get back on the right path, as opposed to coming in and totally taking over. I want to empower the people underneath me, and I want them to get promoted. I look to advance their career and not just keep them underneath me because it makes me look good or because they're making my life easier. I can always develop the next person.