Paula Tomaselli Harper

I think being open-minded and always having a positive attitude has been key to my success. When I joined the Carter's team, I knew nothing about what I was going to be doing - the international piece spoke to me because I was from another country, but I taught myself a lot of things I didn't know. I was curious and I asked for help. I like that I am kind of a jack-of-all-trades. Even within merchandising, there are people who specialize in pricing, assortment strategy, or inventory management, but I am good enough to be dangerous in all of those things. I'm not necessarily a deep expert in any one of them, but that's really helped me manage teams that had those functions and know what questions to ask or what to question when they were recommending one thing versus another. It keeps people honest and also makes me more confident in myself making decisions, because I knew that I was well-informed.

I would say stay open-minded and do your research. As early on as you can, try to find those people who you will have a genuine connection with, whether it's leaders or peers. Sometimes when you're early in your career, you want to impress the VP or the senior director or the really high up leader, but those people are probably going to be long gone from the position that they have today to be able to help you in the way that you're hoping. I think it's really just do your best so that your peers know that you're the best, and people one or two levels up from where you are know your name - that's what I think works the best sometimes. Folks that are newer to the team are kind of focused on impressing the wrong leader that they would only see once every blue moon, but they weren't cautious of how they were being with their immediate team, and those are the people who are going to help you much more in the future to grow and get the next promotion. And stay open-minded. Sometimes some careers feel like they have a very clear path, from analyst to senior analyst to manager, but a lot of the time, stepping laterally or learning something that's adjacent will give you an advantage over people who have only kind of moved up straight up the ladder. It unlocks that outside perspective.

Client acquisition is a really hard one. I think now a lot of people hear this with AI coming - there's a lot of uncertainty of what a good use for it is, what should still rely on a human to do instead, so some people hesitate, or they think that even the AI that's out there today is good enough, and in many cases it isn't. Especially in the digital advertising world, it can cost you a lot of money to hand it over to AI if you're not properly training the AI, or if you're just relying on Meta or Google to deploy their AI, which has a very different goal than you as a business owner. So it's sometimes educating people, and there's just so much - everyone's getting bombarded right now. It's just kind of building trust and being able to really articulate what the value of what you're offering is when you're competing with machines that are supposed to be smarter than everyone.

Being honest, sometimes to a fault - sometimes I have to manage that one. But I think just being truthful. I never had a professional persona versus a personal persona. I am myself in both, and it hasn't always worked in my favor, by the way, but that is not something I'm willing to compromise. I've never regretted not doing that, even when it cost me a promotion or recognition in some cases. That's what you can always expect of me - that I will be transparent, and I'll be myself. If I agree, I'll tell you, and if I disagree, I'll tell you. I'm not gonna kiss ass. That's very hard for me to do.