Laura Sarmiento

The best career advice I ever received was from my VP, Chief of Creative and Content at the Heat. She told me that a lot of people think to climb the corporate ladder, you just need to follow the path given to you, going from coordinator to specialist to manager to senior manager to director up that lateral line. But she said the way that she got to where she's at now, she was actually looking more for what in this organization needs help, or needs solutions, or how can I be a better resource. She kind of built her own side path and from there grew departments that didn't even exist before. Rather than just filling in the steps of a role and waiting for someone else to step up in front of her, she created her own role based on what was needed and presented herself as a useful resource to fill in a hole that was there that no one realized was there.

I would say to not be intimidated. One of my struggles was that I was too much of a people pleaser, and in my role as a project manager, that was kind of affecting my team because I was saying yes to a bunch of things that now had to go to my team to execute, and I wasn't necessarily being a good liaison or defender of my team. Having to represent them, I had to learn to say no, especially to older men that were at the Heat for longer than I was. Just be more confident in yourself and your own abilities. There's men out there that will apply for jobs that they're not half as qualified for just because they have the confidence, whereas women, if you don't meet one single criteria, you already put yourself down. So definitely ignore that little bug in your head and just go for it.

Challenges are definitely the live element of it. It's kind of hard to keep a routine when the product that you're marketing is a live group of people, and you're very dependent on their performance in terms of how well sales do and how well your overall brand does. But that's kind of the fun of the challenge, making sure that we're upholding that. Besides the fact that we work in sports, we're also in entertainment, so we're here to provide a great guest experience regardless of whatever's happening on the court, to keep people coming to the games either way because they want to have a fun night out in Miami, not necessarily because they want to see a great basketball game. That's one of the challenges but also an opportunity, that you have to kind of make your own success as a team and organization without having to rely on the actual talent on the court. Another challenge is definitely a very male-dominated field, but I'm very lucky that at the Heat, we have a very diverse group of people from all walks of life, and we have a lot of women in leadership. At conferences, especially for some reason in the creative teams, I'm one of the only women in the conference room. I think many women don't know that that's an option for them, or they just think with sports you have to be really good at analytics or knowing everything about the sport.

I would say integrity and respect amongst yourself and your colleagues, and upholding to your own standards and being a good representative of the organization and team that you're working with. I think that just helps a lot with our workflows when we can all trust each other, and you're all true to your word. When you say you're gonna get something done by this deadline, then I can trust you. It just makes life so much easier. Or you can come to me honestly and say that you're struggling with something, and we can help come up with a different solution rather than get mad about it that it's not gonna get done in time. A lot of open communication and being honest, I think, is the best thing for a team to be, and it helps workflows work better and helps the team attitudes. I think we have that at the Heat, especially in my internal creative team. We've all just built such a great, functional little family, and we produce a lot of great work, so we're always very proud of it and the way that we've built our workflows.