Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hi, everybody. Welcome back. Ani Huang here from HR Policy association with our latest episode of Lessons from the Field, where we hear from experts and executives with decades in the craft and learn the lessons they learned, hopefully in less time than it took them to learn. So I have with me today Shelly Carlin, who is EVP of the HR Policy association and center on Exec Comp. She was formerly the Chro of Motorola Solutions, and she is now managing editor of D1Softball.com, which is the most complete source of news covering the world of NCAA Division 1 college softball.
So very, very different from her previous corporate career, which is why I've asked her here today to talk about the Chro's next chapter. So, Shelley, you have been through your fair share of career transitions, especially the latest one.
From the outside, it all looks seamless. Is that how it felt on the inside?
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I definitely have had my share of transitions since I left the Chro role about a decade ago, actually.
And I think actually the transitions have been pretty natural. I mean, one thing has kind of led to the other in a pretty comfortable way. But what I think isn't necessarily seamless. You alluded to it is I really live in two completely different worlds right now. I mean, I work with the association, love my work with the association, which is obviously a continuation of my corporate career.
But I also live in an entirely different world of college athletics and college softball specifically. I run a digital media company that's focused on college softball. I work with college teams and athletes on leadership.
And so I like to characterize it as, you know, kind of different hats, but there's a lot of kind of overlap, and all the things I've done in my career to this point have led to this. So the transitions themselves, pretty seamless. But my life is definitely got a lot of diversity in it.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Fantastic. I think that this is exactly the path that a lot of chros envision themselves going down. So this idea that it's not really retirement, but it's just another chapter, and in some cases, many chapters, several chapters, three, four chapters, and two chapters could be going on at the same time. So I'll just ask you, how did you know that it was time to leave your corporate role? I mean, was that something, an external event that prompted that? Or sometimes people ask that question, like, how do I know when it's time?
[00:02:29] Speaker B: You know, I think for me, it was both an internal and an external kind of set of factors. Internally, I get bored easily. I know myself well enough, I get bored easily. And when I was at Motorola, we had finished all of our major changes. We had separated the business for mobile devices versus the public safety side.
We had pretty much, by the time I left, completely replaced everybody in the C suite except for me and the CEO. We had transformed and completely redone the the technology platform for hr. We had divested the last of our non core businesses. We'd pretty much done everything.
I saw Steady State in front of me, and I know myself well enough to know that I don't do Steady State nearly as well as I do change.
This was a job I never aspired to. So we didn't really talk about that yet. But I was never intending to be a Chro. It kind of happened a little bit by accident.
So I didn't have a preconceived idea of a plan for how many years I would work or what I wanted to accomplish.
It was more a matter of internally knowing myself well enough to know that the challenge. We had kind of done all the big tough challenges and Steady State was not necessarily in my best interest, nor the company's, obviously. I'd also at that point started working with college athletes. I was a college athlete in college at UCLA and I had started working with them to help them prepare for their life after sport and had come to the realization that everything I had done, all the success I had had, was because of what I learned as a college athlete. So I knew there was something I wanted to do to give back in that regard and help athletes, primarily women athletes, accelerate their development by preparing them in a way that I didn't get a chance to have. So.
So it was kind of mostly internal externally. My mom was still alive at the time. She lived in California, I was in Chicago. It was hard to envision how I could continue to be a presence in her life in her later years from that far away. So that was more of a. That kind of prompted the timing. But the actual move, I think was really more driven internally.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: Okay, and I'm going to ask you more about sort of how you narrowed down then what you wanted to do. But first, how did you set up Motorola for success when you, that you knew that you were going to be departing, what planning or strategizing did you do there in preparation for that?
[00:05:04] Speaker B: So we had a very, you know, we had just as part of our regular talent management process, HR was included in that. So just like my C Suite peers, we had talent reviews, we had succession plans, we had development plans. So I had a, you know, kind of a well prepared and well developed successor in mind who had gone through lots of development experiences, who quite frankly was more prepared than I was when I took the job. So we felt pretty good about him. He was a very experienced Motorola and had, you know, everybody in the C suite knew him. So, you know, the preparation was more because we had put the work in, you know, in our talent processes across the board.
He had gone through transition with, you know, with the businesses. He had been involved in many, many of these, you know, big projects. So it was, that part was pretty seamless. And you know, and Motorola two culture makes a big deal. Motorola.
I like to say that the motto of Motorola was the king is dead, long live the king.
Motorolans didn't spend too much time thinking about the person that just left. It was like, okay, who's the new leader? Let's focus. So the organization handled it in a very seamless way.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: That's great. I think not everyone actually is in that position, so that definitely helps. And then the other question that we get a lot from folks who are maybe getting close to transitioning is you sort of had a very clear idea of what you wanted to do.
Some people don't are like, I don't know what I want to do. So I guess a, what would your advice be to figuring out what it is you want to do? But then once you, you kind of had that idea in place, how did you get from there to becoming managing editor of a media company? Like, how did that happen?
[00:06:41] Speaker B: You know, it feels now like I had a clear idea. I think if I'm honest, if I go back in time, I didn't have a clear idea, but I had a clear process. So let me, let me talk about that process of how I got to the idea that built on another, built on another. So when I was planning my exit, I actively considered three very distinct paths. One was I would continue working in HR in some capacity, either in another chro role or with HR policy, which is what I ultimately ended up doing. The second path that I explored was going to culinary school. I've always loved cooking. I've always loved food and organics and so forth.
The third was just completely checking out and moving to Mexico and living on the beach. I mean literally doing nothing, living in flip flops and a T shirt. And I actively chose to look at those three things. And while I didn't pick obviously the beach, I didn't pick culinary school. The thing about culinary school that was valuable was it got me comfortable with the idea that radical change was something that Was not only comfortable to me, but was something that I wanted to. So what I really wanted in my post corporate life was something different and getting over that, oh my goodness, can I actually really completely do something very, very different? So it wasn't the path necessarily. The outcome wasn't clear, but the process was very clear. And here's what I explored and that kind of led me down the path that I am in terms of.
While I didn't get it right on the exact options or what I got right was understanding what I needed out of my next chapter. And so that my advice is more around, really focus on what you need out of your next chapter. Not necessarily what other people think you need or what you've done in the past. So I need a challenge. I needed flexibility. Again from a personal standpoint. I needed to be geographically in a certain place and I need some flexibility.
And I also needed something that could be about purpose.
And that's where the college athletics thing came in. So what I didn't spend enough time thinking about though, honestly was how much white space I need in retirement or whatever I consider to be retirement quasi, I like to joke, fail retirement over and over. But white space meaning building time in to reflect, to make sure that you know what I'm doing, how I'm spending my day and time is really aligned with my values. And so what I didn't do initially, I'm doing a better job at now.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: That's great. You mentioned other people.
Was there anyone or someones in particular that you felt like really helped you along this path? Whether it was networking or advice or just help you to kind of make the decisions and do the path that you wanted.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: I didn't have any structured support. So I didn't have any, you know, counselors or any other than the financial advisors obviously that we all would have in this circumstance.
I think the people that helped me most, again my challenge was really about giving myself permission to do these non traditional things.
So the people that helped me the most were the people that I was doing the non traditional things with, the people that in the softball world, in the college sports world who were A, so grateful to have somebody bring a set of expertise that they didn't have to their to them and B, just so much fun, you know, it was just so much fun. So did I have people help me structuring? No. And obviously I think today there are a lot more focus on this issue to help executives, you know, navigate through that process.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Were there any periods of this transition that were more Challenging or more unsettling than you had expected?
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I think the period right after I did it was. It wasn't hard at all. I mean, it was. That was pretty easy. And the first couple years were pretty seamless.
I think the hardest part, again, was a few years in when I had to admit that the things that I was doing, some of the things that I was doing, I was doing because I thought that's what a former chro should do. Specifically, I was looking at board seats, I was looking at maybe another chro role, but for some reason, I didn't have a lot of energy behind that.
And I was treating my athletics, my college athletes things.
Those were the fun things, but I was treating them almost still like a hobby. And I finally realized that I was trying to do retirement the way I thought a CHRO should do retirement, rather than really all the work I'd put in about what I wanted, actually following that passion into athletics. And that led me again to the helping college athletes through a nonprofit that I started and then subsequently post Covid in the last two years becoming the managing editor of D1 softball. So it was really the hard part was just acknowledging that, you know, you put all the work into knowing what you want.
Now go act on it.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: Yeah, that is the tough part. So I guess along that vein, or, you know, expanding on that, what's your advice to those who are contemplating retirement from corporate life? Not retirement period, in the next one to three years?
[00:12:07] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think it's really kind of along the lines of what I just said. I have the sign in my office, and it basically says, do more of what makes you happy.
And I think making sure that. I kind of looked at that every day and making sure that align how you spend your time with what you say makes you happy. So the advice would be, number one, be clear on what it is you want out of retirement. And number two, revisit that. Right. Because I've been out of the corporate world for 10 years and I've every few years revisited. The first pivot was deciding that, okay, you're doing things because you think you're supposed to probably not really what you want. The second pivot was Covid and a reevaluation I think the whole world had about our purpose post Covid. And that led me to basically now taking on running a media company, which I had really zero experience in, other than, I know, softball, because I played it.
So the advice would be, again, be clear about what you want and what you value, what you expect. Revisit that, because it's going to change depending on how long you're out of the workforce.
And recognize that the deeper you get into retirement, the less time you have to do the things that you say you'll someday do.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: I love how you applied the exact process orientation that made you so successful as a head of Total Rewards and a Chro to these items that are completely unrelated to corporate lifestyle.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I sometimes overanalyze things, and I think this is probably a case where it actually served me well, because going out of a corporate life of structure and discipline and everybody, you go where they tell you to go. And to a large degree, your life is planned and scheduled. Sometimes people struggle when that's not there. I didn't because I had that kind of that. That part of my DNA that helps me structure things. So I have structured things pretty significantly. And again, my mentality is more like, okay, is that structure getting in the way of missing new opportunities? Because I'm sure that if we have this conversation another five or ten years, I will have had six more pivots.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: I am also sure of that. Shelley. Well, thank you so much. This has been really insightful. Thanks for sharing this journey with us, and thank you to the viewers and listeners. We will be in touch soon with the next chapter of Lessons from the Field. But until then, so long.
