Episode Summary
Everyone has a different experience when it comes to working in a company. And while it may be easy for some to get ahead, others fail even though they try their best.
However, you have to learn to stand up for yourself and be able to communicate effectively and respectfully to advocate for yourself even though it is sometimes difficult.
In this episode of Taking the Lead, Jenna Rogers, the founder of Career Civility, gets into civil communication and how you can use it in the workplace. Jenna and our host Christina Brady discuss the importance and power of effective communication, how to successfully stand up for yourself, and why people struggle with self-advocacy.
Guest Profile
- Name: Jenna Rogerss
- What she does: Jenna is the founder of Career Civility
- Company: Career Civility
- Noteworthy: Jenna is a working mom, a female leader in tech sales, an entrepreneur, a wife, a dog mom, and a woman on a mission to redefine communication in the workplace. She graduated from Arizona State University and received her master's degree from Northwestern University. Jenna provides tactical communication advice on #emailtiptuesday and has created a community for working moms and helped people communicate more effectively in the workplace. She has worked in sales for most of her career, and in July 2019, she founded Career Civility, a communications consulting and public speaking firm.
Key Insights
- The importance of communication. In her career, Jenna has experienced belittlement, been taken advantage of, and has been laughed at because she wasn't able to communicate effectively or stand her ground against clients or colleagues. Recognizing that women are treated as inferior in business, Jenna founded Career Civility, where you can learn to start communicating more effectively. "It can be incredibly empowering to be able to effectively use your voice and stand up in situations that aren't right, especially in the workplace, and outside the workplace, when it is colored by money and people aren't necessarily humanized. They are a means to an end; they're a line item in a budget. Being able to use communication as the tool to fight back is something that I'm really passionate about, not only for myself but then again paving the way and making the workplace better for those who come after me."
- Advocate for yourself, but prepare for that voice. Communication is of great importance when working with people, and it plays a significant role in your progress. Bad communication can get in the way of others noticing the difference you are making at work or impact your pay scale. According to Jenna, people decide to speak up only when they have experienced such negativity, and she points out that one should not react hastily. "We can strategize. We can come up with a better way to articulate and communicate. And I think that's also the biggest roadblock because a lot of times when we're in these situations, our emotions get the best of us, and then we're not communicating effectively, and we're getting clouded by other things that might not have been most important in that situation. So, I would say those would be the two biggest things. They get so worn down that they're like, 'Whatever, I have nothing to lose,' but then, they think they need to do it right then and right there. But it's actually: let's take a step back. Let's gather all the data. Let's figure out what we want to communicate, and then we communicate it. We can communicate it more effectively."
- Don't forget that we are all human. The calling out of institutionalized racism, bigotry, and discrimination has led to much more attention being paid to being valued at work. While older generations believe this value must be earned, younger generations believe they should be valued before they walk in the door because they are human beings. Jenna observes that people do not know how to build relationships with each other and often forget that there's a human being that drives the bottom line. "We're all human. We all have experiences, and those experiences actually enhance the conversations that we're having at the dinner table or at Thanksgiving with family members that maybe don't agree with you. But the same thing in the workplace; these different experiences actually enhance the bottom line — improve, increase the bottom line — enhance our ideas, collaboration."
Episode Highlights
From a W2 Position to a Founder
“I have always enjoyed learning, and I’ve always felt like there is a better way to do things, and this gets into my story and my identity as a biracial female in the workplace. But when I was doing my undergraduate studies, I learned about this concept of civil communication. And when I learned about it in my undergraduate studies, it was more so a tool to advance community conversation, and you could use it within politics. However, I worked at a law firm all throughout college, and I saw the opportunity that this could be applied to the workplace. So when I got into corporate America, right out of college, in a W2 position, it was like the exact place you don’t want to be. However, it was a great learning experience, and that was where I sparked the idea of founding Career Civility. Because I needed more confidence, and I didn’t feel as competent to go off on my own and be a founder, I went back and got my master’s. So, I pursued a Master’s at Northwestern, and that gave me almost the foundation and the springboard and the confidence to start this organization.”
Using Civil Communication in the Workplace
“When I first started Career Civility — I started kicking around the idea in 2019 — I would go around and tell people, like, ‘It’s about civil communication and using civil communication in the workplace.’ And they would just look at me like I had two heads because civil communication is a brand-new term. I imagine it’s like when human resources or public relations was a terminology those people started pioneering, and people were like, ‘Public relations, what’s that?’ That’s how I feel with civil communication. It’s just so new. People don’t know what it means, and yet everyone knows that communication is necessary. It is the number one soft skill that employers look for in the workplace. It’s what keeps your relationships afloat and healthy, and yet no one actually knows what it looks like. So that is the mission of Career Civility, as I always promise to provide tactical and practical communication advice.”
People Struggle With Self-Advocacy
“They don’t know what support looks like, so they don’t know how to ask for it, and they don’t know how to communicate it. The second one is that they don’t have the time or the opportunity to reflect on their experiences and what that actually means. The work weeks, while they may seem long, they go really quickly, and there is so much that you are dealing with on a daily basis. It is hard to sit there and reflect and figure out what one experience meant to you or how to improve that experience. And this is something that I work with clients a lot because another thing — yes, B2C, but I also work with founders, primarily female business owners that have a team of like five to 10 people. And that’s really tricky too because you have this — you see it in B2B too but you have this — if someone gets promoted from an individual contributor and now they’re a leader, they’re flexing between this buddy-buddy and needing to set boundaries and expectations and leading. So, when so much is being asked of us in our day to day, we don’t have the opportunity to reflect and improve upon what is happening; therefore, we don’t know how to ask for support. We don’t know what we need.”
