CNN Senior Live News Editor Melissa Macaya and Product Manager Ana Graciela Méndez of the Marshall Project spoke to NPF’s Widening the Pipeline fellows about what it means to lead at every stage of your career. Here are five pieces of advice they offered:
Lead beyond your title, Macaya says. “And in journalism… titles are used obviously to showcase an inner symbolic in your trajectory professionally. But many times people find identities in their titles and that’s important. But there’s so much more that you can do in your role beyond the title.”
Have ownership of a project, area of work or a topic, says Méndez. When you know what you’re good at, ask yourself how to transfer the skill to different issues that are of interest to you. “If you are extremely passionate about climate change, for instance, and you can own that beat and you can shape it into what you want, you can really do whatever you want with it.” You could work on a product team to build products around climate reporting and storytelling, she suggests.
Exemplify the characteristics you value in a leader, Macaya says. Ask yourself what characteristics you admire most, and then try to exhibit those. She offered the example of empathy, connecting with people or something else as a valuable skill in workplace settings.
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Macaya said. In highly competitive settings like Washington, DC, people can be intensely driven to achieve their goals. That makes it easy to get lost in the pursuit of career accolades. At age 21, Macaya was told ‘Don’t be so focused on the destination that you are forgetting the journey that you need to enjoy that’s going to make you a better leader at the end.’”
It’s okay to say ‘not right now.’ When Méndez worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer as a special projects editor, she was offered the opportunity to become deputy editor at a different desk – a role she was told would lead her to managing a newsroom. But she decided it was not where she wanted to be in that moment of life.
“It also takes a little bit of humility to understand exactly what work you want to be doing and whether you’re positioned to be doing that. Like am I right now really in a place where I want to be leading a newsroom? … And again, leading beyond my title, I can still find ways to lead.”
Access the full transcript here.
The Widening the Pipeline Fellowship is sponsored by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation and Lenovo. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
