Eloise Jolly

I attribute my success to three main things. First is my drive - this job is very fast-paced and very demanding, so you do need a lot of energy to back it up. I'm the kind of person that doesn't sit still, and I think that serves me well in this position. The second thing would be organization. It always came very easily to me to organize things, and that's critical when you're managing so many moving parts. The third thing is that I'm a people person. I don't think you can do this job if you don't like people or can't communicate things properly to the right people with the right message crafting. In the same hour, I will talk to people from sales, engineers, software engineers, finance, packaging - a lot of different people with different backgrounds. It's a lot of topic switching throughout the day, a lot of decisions and fast-paced work, and that's why that drive, people skills, and organization - those three pillars are very key to making things move successfully.

The best career advice I've ever received, or really the guiding principle that helps me in my day-to-day both in my work life and personal life, is a quote from Michael Caine: 'use the difficulty.' In my job, things go wrong often, every day, and so it's about shifting your mindset and utilizing the cards that you're dealt with so that you can still flip the situation and really take the best out of it. It's about thinking fast on your feet and not being discouraged by difficulty - the other way around, use it as leverage. When I heard this snippet on Instagram, it was mind-blowing. I was like, that totally makes sense. Life is going to throw things at you. What you do with it is where the power lies.

In my day-to-day, I would say that I'm maybe 99% surrounded by men, and oftentimes they're all older or with more experience, especially if I'm talking with experts in their field. I know that some women would feel intimidated by that. I would say that confidence is key, and we really have as much of a say as our male counterparts. Something that I've noticed is that women will wait until they're absolutely sure of something before they speak up, and confidence is really key in my job. I'm managing several men - at this point, I'm interacting with over 100 men on my day-to-day. And I think it's about being confident and not being afraid to speak up and be at the table. I know it's something that a lot of women have heard before, but it's really the key here. I have absolutely no problem sharing my thought with a very senior manager at my company, even if it's something that they don't want to hear, even if I'm contradicting what they say. I think I'm there, and I have the courage to just say, nope, that's what I think. Another thing too is that a lot of the time there is a need for a decision, and I'm not going to have black and white, clear, 100% certainty that we should go that way. A lot of the time when you're in a leadership position, you need to make decisions even if you don't have 100% certainty. And sometimes, all that is needed is a decision - not necessarily the top one, because you can't know which one is the top one - but just daring to make a decision for the group.

What's challenging for companies as big as Bosch is that we have a very large portfolio of products, and so what's challenging for the customer is to know which ones are a good fit and who do I talk to. That's where I come in - I'm kind of the bridge between the customer and the company to make everything seamless, that gateway into the Bosch world. I'm connecting them with the right people and organizing things in the background so that it seems seamless. I think the challenge and where I step in is really to be that bridge that has that wholesome vision for that entire vision. That would be the challenge on my day-to-day. For the industry itself, I think when you're working on a leading edge technology, there's always new things to define, and so I would say that being creative enough but also keeping everything so that it protects the lives as much as it can be - that's the balance we need to strike.

I would say courage, authenticity, determination, and positive attitude are my top four values. Courage is about standing up and speaking your mind even when it's difficult. Authenticity - I think that nobody's perfect, and it's okay to just show up as who you are, because the more authentic you are, the more people around you will be authentic with you as well. Determination is about powering through - again, things are not going to go well all the time, and so it's about really that drive, that grit, if you will. And last but not least, positive attitude. I think that there's always a silver lining, and you can always use the difficulty. So yeah, these four are probably my top four values.