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Bozoma St. John doesn’t shy away from the spotlight.
St. John, 48, Netflix’s first black C-level executive as their Chief Marketing Officer. She becomes Uber’s first chief brand officer Responsible Reshaping the image of ride-sharing companies. And she make headlines In 2016, she said, she rocked the stage at Apple’s annual conference even though she didn’t look like a typical “Apple fan.”
St. John’s career has been as bold as her personal style. To that end, she was given what she considered to be well-intentioned but misguided advice.
When St. John was asked about the best career advice she’d ever received, she told CNBC Make It: “An early manager told me to never wear red lipstick or red nail polish.”
“She had good intentions in doing it, like, ‘You walk into a room, you don’t want to be too bold. You don’t want people to make comments about you before you even say anything,'” St. John said.
But “it made me question how I looked in the room. As a black woman who is tall and bold in her wardrobe, I found that it really shrunk me.”
St. John said she decided to ignore the advice and change it completely to “become the most colorful, bold, sharp, witty person in the room and feel very confident about it.”
“I was able to succeed because I didn’t take that advice,” she said.
St. John continues to pursue huge transitions in her career, first becoming CEO of her own hair and beauty brand Eve by Boz, and recently added “reality star” to her resume as a cast member on Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and as co-host of NBC’s “On Brand with Jimmy Fallon.”
She also wants you to pursue a major career change.
As people head into the new year with new work goals, now is a good time to pursue what you really want in your career, St. John said. “This shift can happen at any time,” she said.
Here, St. John draws on her own career and experience managing thousands of people to share the signs it’s time to quit, how to build your professional brand, the top red flags when interviewing with a company, and more.
When you know it’s time to quit
My advice is, if something terrible happens to you on Sunday, you’re definitely in the wrong place. If you come back from vacation with a stomachache and don’t want to go back to work, or you’re so scared of work that you can barely sleep, then I think that’s a big sign that you have to go now.
Big mistakes people make when chasing a raise, promotion or quitting their job
If you want to move up at work or gain more experience, set a timeline so you can achieve that goal or decide it’s time to leave. Set up a schedule with your boss.
Too often, people approach promotion or raise conversations from a very self-centered perspective. What the company and your manager want to hear is how it will help the company and the wider community of colleagues.
So if you position it as: “By March 1, I hope to be promoted to position
When you’re trying to get to the next step in mid-career, you should definitely have a plan in place to make sure you keep your timeline in mind when talking to your boss.
It is a mistake to think that this is all you have and you have to come up with ideas on how to be successful. If you don’t include your manager in your timeline, they won’t know what you want to achieve.
Lay the groundwork so that when you have the conversation, it’s clear to everyone that either you’ve hit your target for a raise or promotion, or if you’ve done your best and it hasn’t happened by March 1, everyone is on the same page: “I’m quitting.”
How to take control of your professional brand
Whether you’re on TV or sitting in a cubicle, I believe your personal brand is important and, to some extent, out of your control. So you have to control as much as possible.
If you’re sitting in an open cubicle and someone doesn’t appreciate your work, your responsibility is to make sure that the brand image about yourself is that you’re hard-working, that you’re creative, or that you’re a problem solver. Communicate the brand as much as possible as if you were in front of the camera.
The first quality she hired
That’s the first thing: show up as your whole self. Don’t try to cut your edges to fit in better. The way to make yourself memorable is to be truly memorable.
We all have so many beautiful and unique things about us, our experiences, the history that we’ve lived through, and incorporating that into your answers and into the conversations you’re having will actually make others remember you.
We often think that, as humans, we must have similar interests or similar tastes to someone in order for them to get along with us and want to hire us. I think the opposite is true. Curiosity, wanting to get to know someone because you say, “They’re from this place, or they’ve had this experience, and that might improve the job offer because I don’t have that experience,” is really how you want to be perceived in an interview.
The biggest red flags she looks for when interviewing with a company
If you’re in an interview and the person you’re talking to sounds like they’re looking for someone just like them, run. Run fast, run far, run far.
You want to be in a place that appreciates and loves the unique contributions you bring to the job. It’s not just about your business experience. It’s about your cultural experience, your personal experience, and your emotional experience.
You are one of them, so bring it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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