Career Growth Advice from Carolyn Henry, Tech Marketing Leader | Career Tips for Women in Tech Marketing

2B Bolder Podcast – Episode 75
Featuring Carolyn Henry

Episode Title: #75 Career Podcast Featuring Carolyn Henry, VP and GM of Americas Regional Marketing at Intel : Women in Tech

Host: Mary Killelea
Guest: Carolyn Henry



Mary Killelea (Host): Hi there. My name is Mary Killelea. Welcome to the To Be Bolder podcast, providing career insights for the next generation of women in business and tech. To Be Bolder was created out of my love for technology and marketing, my desire to bring together like-minded women, and my hope to be a great role model and source of inspiration for my two girls and other young women like you, encouraging you guys to show up and to be bolder and to know that anything you guys dream of, it's totally possible. So, sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation.

Hi there. Thanks for tuning in. Today's featured guest is Carolyn Henry. Carolyn is the vice president and GM of America's regional marketing at Intel. In this role, she is responsible for Intel's marketing activations across Canada, the United States, and Latin America. She leads a diverse group of marketers across consumer, commercial, and gaming segments and enterprise and data center marketing. Carolyn holds a BA from Connecticut College, a master's in technical communications from Northeastern University, certificates in marketing from Northwestern University, and a certificate in poetry from Washington University. She is an active and passionate board member of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, focusing on STEM education for underserved young people in the Bay Area. In addition, she is an avid traveler and enjoys learning new languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, and French. She lives and works in the Bay Area with her husband and young daughter. Carolyn, thank you so much for joining us.

Carolyn Henry (Guest): Thank you for having me, Mary. I'm so glad to be here.

Mary Killelea: Okay, so this is really cool for me. You have quite the exciting career journey. Tell us kind of from a 500 foot view, your career path and how it led to your current role at Intel.

Carolyn Henry: Thank you. I will. I tell groups of people that I get to speak to, especially through the Silicon Valley Education Foundation work, we speak to women in STEM, and we speak to groups of teachers and educators starting to get their arms around computer science. I tell them that I'm an unlikely person in tech. All right. My background was very much English, liberal arts. My undergraduate degree is English and Spanish. And it is an unlikely path to get to enterprise technology from there. And it's not unachievable, right? So, I like to say that to give people confidence to approach the field and to not think that it's so insurmountable to get the right credentials. But I did have to put a few things together.

One of my first roles out of college was at Jasko Ventures in Boston. It was a venture capital firm. And I got to see technology coming through the door and how that whole VC motion worked and the groups of people who were investing and the types of companies they were investing in and get to see a few things go IPO. And I thought, hmm, I get this. I get this business prospect. I get the technology. How can I put that together with my communications background? And I quickly went back to school to Northeastern University that had a very focused on co-ops and tangible experience, which I also loved. So, when I went back to get my degree, I centered in communications and computer science, learned C++, kind of built my technical chops underneath me in my graduate work. And from there, I led the path through internships to another fabulous enterprise software company that I won't name and spent 15 years of my career really growing and learning there, where I was able to follow a management track, have world-class education around how to be a leader, how to be a manager, how to inspire and grow teams, and really get those my feet underneath me there.

Through that work, I was able to dabble in leading demos across the world, really getting close to our sales teams and selling function and realize, oh, man, this is where it becomes real. I love this selling motion. And how can I quickly pivot into marketing, which I think is one of the most creative, exciting disciplines when that sales and marketing connection is really rocking, we can be a growth engine, and it's so exciting. And so, I pivoted mid-career about 15 years ago into marketing from there and have experienced a lot of fun, great experiences and so much learning ever since.

Mary Killelea: That is so important to demonstrate that you might not out of college known where you were going to get, but you continued to pursue things that piqued your interest and that your skills were, I guess, not easy to come, but you excelled at naturally.

Carolyn Henry: Absolutely, Mary. And I think I'd love to give that inspiration to younger people. You don't have to know the exact path. You don't have to follow a straight path. But what I think you have to do is always continue to learn, continue to sharpen your skills and continue to figure out where that overlap is, right? Those Venn diagrams of what the world needs, what you're interested in and what you can get paid for.

Mary Killelea: And I don't think there's been a better time because technology and everything is moving at such a fast pace that not everyone is skilled at certain things because there's so many things that are still yet to come. So, it's the curiosity of learning that is such like, I think, the secret sauce.

Carolyn Henry: Absolutely. And, you know, wherever I felt like I didn't have the depth underneath me or the chops, I'd send myself back to school, right? You know, I go back to Northwestern, get a degree in digital or not a degree, get a certificate in digital marketing and just kind of store that up, right? Or go back to the Chief Marketing Officer program that I did most recently. So, I think you can always add to your tool bag.

Mary Killelea: What unique challenges do you think a marketing career in tech specifically has?

Carolyn Henry: I love this question. I'm sure we could talk about this for a really long time. But I think a marketer has a deep knowledge and skill set and it is a discipline unto its own. We know this as marketers. However, when you're a marketer in tech, it's almost discounted to some degree, right? And you can get a lot of pushback and pushback that you might not see in like a finance degree, right? Or a finance realm, right? Nobody asked them if they understand every in and out of a CPU, right? But people want to know that their marketers have the technical chops. So, I think you almost are is a twofold commitment to growing both skills. I've noticed that as some of the challenge along the way in marketing.

Mary Killelea: Yeah, continuing to stay on your tech acumen is essential. And I found through my role is that the people who are technical are so willing to take time and teach those that are curious. And I think as women, sometimes we forget to ask for help.

Carolyn Henry: Or we do. We do do that, don't we?

Mary Killelea: Yeah. Or we put this pressure on ourselves like, oh, I can't take that role because I should have that depth now.

Carolyn Henry: Correct. That whole 80%, 100% ready for the next step. conundrum that some of us women find ourselves in. We're going to stop that.

Mary Killelea: Okay. So I'm so impressed that you speak so many different languages. You speak Portuguese, French and Spanish. And I know you're raising your daughter to be bilingual as well. What value and how do you think that's shaped your life and your career?

Carolyn Henry: Ah, it's hugely valuable to me and something I feel really passionate about. I will caveat that I don't speak all of those languages well. I just I really do love language. And my first experience was rather late in life traveling abroad. It was, you know, 1999. It was my semester abroad in college. And I had been studying Spanish almost my entire life, it felt like. And I got to Spain and I couldn't communicate. And I was really frustrated by this. And I'd see my peers around me having such a better time because of their fluency in the language. And ever since then, I said, never again, right? So I learned more in those six months of the Spanish language than I did in 15 years of trying to study it. But I do think it gives you so much more entry and approachability and empathy and just that cultural fluency that I think is so important in this world. I try personally, I might offend a few people, but I try not to be the stereotypical American who travels abroad. And I think I studied the language before I visited a country. I try to be culturally adept, or at least somewhat knowledgeable. And it goes a long way. I've had a lot of wonderful experiences just because I've tried.

Mary Killelea: Well, and don't you think it opens up new career opportunities that, if you're like, let's just say candidate, candidate, and you're going for a global position, that's a real asset to have?

Carolyn Henry: It absolutely is. And I'm sitting in a space where I work with Canada, the US and Latin America. And I absolutely know that as part of my candidacy, it was considered that I can speak Spanish and I could step into some of those countries with some working knowledge of Brazil, for example.

Mary Killelea: So what do you love most about your current role?

Carolyn Henry: Oh, I love so many things, Mary, I really do. I have so much excitement and passion for this role. I will genuinely and 100% say, I love the people, I love the team. I love how professional and capable and brilliant the team is. And part of my joy in my work is when I can maybe be a part of the solution for those folks to unlock their own genius, right? Or give someone the confidence or give a person the air cover that says, Hey, go be creative, take some risks, take some chances, go be you drive your business, shine. And I'll be there for you. I'll be there behind you rooting your own and I'll be there in front of you. I'm trying to knock down some roadblocks. And I just really enjoy that. I also love winning. So I deeply, deeply am competitive, want to win with our sellers and with Intel, you know, get us back on the path to unquestioned leadership. And that's what I'm here for.

Mary Killelea: We touched on this a little bit at the beginning about kind of how you got to where you are today. And one thing that I know is building that career strategy just always seems so daunting. So especially if you're in a big corporation, and you may not know what are all the roles, like, how do I get from here to there? What advice do you have for women in big organizations on kind of creating that strategy and identifying opportunities?

Carolyn Henry: Oh, this one is so key, Mary, and I'd like folks to take a page out of my playbook and don't get stuck like I did. Right. I feel like I spent a lot of time kind of early to mid career in that first 13 years at a large corporation, doing my job, doing my job well, getting good ratings, getting that, kind of, top percent where I wanted to be. But I really wasn't advancing as quickly as I needed to. The monetary gains weren't where they needed to be. And I could have spent another decade doing that. Yeah, right. And I think the best advice I took was when I was getting really frustrated, and I couldn't get to that second level of management position. And I was I was feeling that I was bumping up against an unwritten ceiling. A mentor of mine told me to step back and strategize my career and do the plan for the next five years, do the plan, where do you want to be? So please take the time to work on your career, and take the time out of your day to day to do that. And I really reevaluated, I said, Do I want to be writing technical manuals and software in five years? The answer was no. Do I want to be leading teams of people at a global company? The answer was yes. Do I want to have more customer interaction? Yes, right. And, and the marketing path was just the way to go. And I really jump started my career after that first company when I realized I needed to leave, I needed to go outside to get the level and the compensation that I knew, somewhere in my bones, I knew that I was worth.

Mary Killelea: Thank you for being transparent on that, because I think you hit on so many important points in that in that statement. You mentioned you had a mentor who kind of gave you some good information, how did you establish that relationship with your mentor?

Carolyn Henry: This is a great one for all of us. I've had so many wonderful mentors in my career, male and female, I would point to a couple of different paths. There are mentors you have that you might learn from, by watching them from afar. There are mentors that you have a personal relationship, and that just becomes natural, and it deepens. And you might meet with them like once every two weeks and really dig into your career. And that's lovely and wonderful. But that's few and far between. I think, a lot of times, junior people in their careers come knocking and say, Hey, will you be my mentor? Will you be my mentor? And it's just not natural.

And then there are, you know, sponsors, sponsors who might see something in you. They don't know all of your work. But they vouch for you in rooms where you are not in. And I've been very lucky to have a great healthy mix of all of those. But I will share with you and with the group that I absolutely prospected a couple of those, right? So, we talk about sales, we talk about prospecting clients. I identified a female leader who is, you know, headed for the C suite. And I knew that she emulated almost everything that I wanted to be. And I started sharing things with her, like offering her items or wisdom or something that I thought that I could add, or even just encouragement or say, Hey, you know, don't let the big corporation make you more like them. We need you, right? And so I started a relationship with her and then eventually ended up working for her. And one of my sales compatriots, my friends, my colleagues, she laughed at me and she said, you prospected her. I said, Well, yes, yes, I did.

Mary Killelea: That's brilliant. I love it. Well, basically, what you're doing is you're owning, you're the CEO of your own career.

Carolyn Henry: Absolutely. Yeah.

Mary Killelea: And I think so many people are waiting for an invitation or thinking their work will speak for itself. One thing I've learned is like, unless you're going out there and marketing yourself, you won't get noticed or people will look at someone who might be more vocal in drawing attention to themselves. And that's a hard thing to learn.

Carolyn Henry: It is, it's really hard. And sometimes it's very uncomfortable for people. Right. And I think, as someone who loves marketing, I get it. I'm like, okay, you've got to be marketable, right? You got to rack up the differentiators. What's your value? Cut through the noise, right? You got to have people see you. But I think maybe take yourself out of the equation and just have empathy for the person on the other side. There's so much coming at them.

Mary Killelea: Yeah.

Carolyn Henry: How are they going to cut through the noise? How are they going to have the right perspectives if you don't raise your hand, right? Or if you don't at least try. This is what I'm known for. These are my superpowers. Please think of me when you need this.

Mary Killelea: Yeah, great advice. What drives you to be successful?

Carolyn Henry: Ah, well, I think there's two answers to this, Mary. Early in my life, I lost my father. And I think a lot of my childhood, my high school, college career, my early career, I just tried to spend making him proud. Right. I had this angel or person on my shoulder that I really just wanted to make proud of. It is an engine. Right? And I think now, later in my life, it's my family, it's my daughter, I get up every morning and I want to achieve to provide for her and to make sure she has the life that I think she might enjoy.

Mary Killelea: When you have considered new roles over the years, what have been some of the non-negotiables?

Carolyn Henry: Hmm, non-negotiable. I think there's two. For me is my immediate boss. Right. I need to make sure that this person is invested in me, believes in me, and has some skin in my game. Right. And by that, I mean, the success.

Mary Killelea: Right.

Carolyn Henry: So I really look for that. And I have spent a lot of time being the only, right, the only woman in the room, the only ex in the room for a while, and I'm tired of it. Right. So now I look for other women. I look for peers and women that I can rely on and kind of do that check on the culture.

Mary Killelea: What is the best piece of career advice that you've gotten?

Carolyn Henry: Oh, wow. There are so many. Do I get more than one? Hold on.

Mary Killelea: You can have as many as you want. We want all your wisdom tips.

Carolyn Henry: Thank you. I think a really fundamental one is, you know, do what you say you will do.

Mary Killelea: Right.

Carolyn Henry: Just be credible. Make sure that your word means something and that you will deliver. I also think, you know, bias towards action, just have a bias towards action. Just go rack up the wins and try to put some points on the board. And I think market yourself. Right. I have really taken that to heart. I've had coaches, I've had executive mentoring over the years. And they've always stressed the importance of what are the stories that you're going to be able to tell out of this experience, out of this role or this job or to the next one.

Mary Killelea: What do you think holds women back mostly from excelling in their careers? And what advice do you have for them?

Carolyn Henry: Oh, Mary. Okay. So this one is so near and dear to my heart, obviously. I think there are so many things that women are up against. And if you hear nothing else from me, I want our women listeners to know that it's not our fault. It is systemic. Right. And I think that there is systemic bias in the workplace, in the environment, in the country where we don't have the support we need to raise our children. We don't have the infrastructure. Childcare is infrastructure to get to work. Right. I think there's different biases in couples and, you know, who's doing what work at home and whether that's a cisgender couple or whatever it is. But it's not all on you. Right. And that's, that's a hard one. Right. Because you could get frustrated, you could let it get you down. But what's the next right thing that you can do to try to make that better for yourself, your immediate team, or the next one.

The other thing I wanted to say about that is that you got to let go of the perfection, right? We talked a little bit about that in the beginning, Mary. You're more ready than you think. Trust yourself. And you got to go. I think especially in these uncertain economic times, nobody has the answer. I mean, we've been surprised by so many things. And you're as smart as the next person. You don't have to have all the answers. You have to trust your capabilities and go. I think

Mary Killelea: I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna like loop that saying, you're ready before you think you're ready.

Carolyn Henry: 100%. And Mary, if I may just kind of loop back a little bit before, you know, we, I spent or we spent or some folks around our age spent some time listening to the lean in messages, right. And, and I do think that they're partfully helpful. It's not all of it. That if we just lean in, work harder, like go for that corner office, like we talked about the systemic problems up against us. But there are some good nuggets in there, right? So don't count yourself out before you're out. And I say that as a recent mom, as someone who was planning her family, and as someone who looks at my friends and peers around me. And I, I saw the inclination, I felt the inclination to pull back, like long before I was even married or before I even had the child or before I was even up against like, what does it mean to be working when pregnant? And what does it mean to be working, going back to work after you've had a child, right? You kind of, some of us had an inclination to take our foot off the gas. And I would really just encourage you to cross the bridge when you get there, right? Don't count yourself out.

Mary Killelea: Yeah. No, and I think that's Cheryl Sanders point from that book is really, you know, don't take yourself out of the race before you've even participated in the race.

Carolyn Henry: And you might find beautiful mentors who say, hey, you want to be a VP with a, with a baby on the way? I've had three, no problem. Let's go. Right.

Mary Killelea: That's a beautiful thing. So that's a great question. So as women in upper management, what can we do for other younger women in and outside the office? I mean, you participating in the STEM mentoring, that's fabulous. What are other things that women who are listening can do to help other people, other women?

Carolyn Henry: I think many of us are, and I know that we all want to, right, but we've got to pass it backwards, right? However the saying goes, we've got to extend the ladder back down and fiercely protect those on their way up. Right. So really try to be vocal, try to be vocal in a room full of men who might be our peers and protect those hours that women might need to support their lives outside of the office, protect those women who are on their way up. And maybe it's second nature to some of us who've got that mama bear in us, but really just defend, be vocal. Nothing should be hidden or not talked about because we are making inroads and socializing things to be more normal in a historically male-dominated space where there was a full-time partner at home taking care of the rest of the world.

Mary Killelea: What does to be bolder mean to you?

Carolyn Henry: It means to be courageous and to be confident. I think that your podcasts have been amazing, Mary. I've listened to a few. I think we can all learn that we're worthy. We have it within us, and we should just kind of shed some of the baggage and be confident.

Mary Killelea: Fabulous. Last question. Any good resources that you could direct someone to who wants to upskill some of their marketing knowledge?

Carolyn Henry: Oh, sure. I personally love anything Yung Mi Moon puts her hands on. So she's a woman, a professor at Harvard Business School. I think she had a beautiful book a few years ago around differentiation. She's also a participant on the After Hours podcast from HBR, if anyone's listening to that.

Mary Killelea: I'm going to include that, in the show notes.

Carolyn Henry: Awesome. I really just love and admire her. She's a marketing professional through and through. So that's one. And then even in the podcast, I love her style. I love how she holds her own with a couple of gentlemen on the podcast. There's a lot to learn there. So there's one. I'm also following Reshma Saujani. Also, she's written Pay It Forward. She's very much in the forefront of the US, the Marshall Plan for Moms. And she is part of the lean-in generation who outwardly, publicly said, hey, we got it wrong. There are systemic things up against us. And let me tell you, it's not all about being brave. So I just really appreciate those two women leaders.

Mary Killelea: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time. It has been a joy to talk to you. And I appreciate your support.

Carolyn Henry: You're welcome, Mary. My pleasure completely. Take care.

Mary Killelea: Thanks for listening to the episode today. It was really fun chatting with my guest. If you liked our show, please like it and share it with your friends. If you want to learn what we're up to, please go check out our website at 2bbolder.com. That's the number two, little bbolder.com.