Episode 41: Interview with Jean Holloway SVP, General Counsel at CryoLife, Inc.

Yeah, so I've been a lawyer for a long time, almost a little over three decades now, with some small forays into non-legal work. Started out with a private law firm, then went to work for a non-profit to run a non-profit for a while, worked a little bit in the City Attorney's Office for a while, then I went to McKinsey and Company and was a business consultant for a while. After that experience, I went in-house to take on increasingly senior roles in medical device companies, and I've been in the medical device field since 2003.

I think the advice that I would give her is to be willing to explore and to take on risk more in their career. I've certainly taken on a lot of risk in my career in terms of moving from position to position. I had a lot of flexibility to do that because my husband was also employed, but every single one of those opportunities was better than the next, and I enjoyed every single one of them and learned something from them and was able to take it to my next job. So I would say take on a little bit more risk, and also be patient that things are always going to work out great.

Mentors in my estimation are essential. I've never had a formal mentor where I've been paired up with somebody as a mentor, but I've had very close working relationships with individuals who are more senior than I am, whether in the business world or in the legal world, who I have developed really open and trusting relationships with. They feel like they've been able to give me very candid feedback on how certain things went, how this has gone well, this hasn't gone so well, you might want to try this. They've been essential to me at every point in my career, quite frankly. I've had two or three at the same time who I've been able to go to and talk to about things and give me advice. They're just essential.

I think the most essential piece of advice was something I said earlier: patience, and standing back and learning and gathering more information before you start to take action. I think that's the most important thing that I've learned in my career. As new leaders, sometimes we come in feeling like we need to make a mark and make an important mark quickly, and I think that's true, but I think it's important before you do that that you have a good piece of the information, that you understand the culture that you're working in, and that you have a healthy appreciation for those before you start making big changes. The other thing I would say where some leaders really trip up is rather than being positive and looking forward, they sometimes spend a fair amount of time dinging the prior administration. Whether they're correct or not about that, the prior administration was no good, it doesn't make them look very good to do that because everybody has friends, and you're bound to offend somebody if you spend too much time dinging the prior administration rather than looking forward and developing plans on your own.

I think it's really important to have, even at this point in my career, a one, three, and five year plan. Things don't always, and they rarely work out exactly how you intended them to be, but unless you have some idea of where it is that you want to be going, and I think that's to combine it both professionally and personally about where you're going to want to be going in the next year, then in three years, and in five years, and then lay out a plan about how you need to get there, you're going to be a little bit chaotic in terms of how you're managing your career. Which is not to say that you shouldn't take advantage of opportunities that come along, because I know in my career and a lot of my friends in their career, a lot of where we've gotten in life has been something that's a surprise to us, that comes out of left field, that we need to be able to evaluate. But I think it is pretty important to plan and to bounce your plans off of your boss, off of your mentor, or your spouse or your significant other. It's really important.

Well, I'm a big believer in exercise. I try and make time almost every day to get some exercise. I really do feel that that relieves a lot of stress. I also think it's important to kind of walk away from things for a little bit, to give your mind a rest and to give yourself a rest. So to put down your phone and put down your iPad for whether it's only six hours or 12 hours or a day, where you can give your mind some quiet time and engage in other hobbies that you like to do, I think is really important. I just went through a really stressful time here at work; it's our annual board meeting and all that kind of stuff, and it's about two weeks of intense stress. It's important after that to take a little bit of time away to decompress.

I think your credibility is almost everything, right? And that's true whether you're a lawyer or you're the CEO or the CFO. So again, I think it's important to start slowly, but it's also important to do impeccable work so that the work that you're putting in front of the board, whether it's oral or a presentation, is well thought out and correct and buttoned up. Even things like typographical errors and stuff like that take away from your presentation. So making sure that what you're doing is correct is essential. And then again, I think listening is really important. What are the concerns of the board? What are the concerns of each board member? Developing relationships with the board in those small moments that you have of downtime is really important. So you build up your credibility over the course of a year or two, and that can go a long way for you. But that's the most important thing in my estimation.

Yeah, so again, it's much the same thing. I think first it's about establishing your credibility with your leader in terms of having your facts straight and the law straight and that kind of thing. It's also about developing the relationship with the leader so that he or she understands that, for example, my obligation principally as the general counsel is to the company, but my CEO is going to be a lot more receptive to my advice if he or she feels that I also care about them as a person and their success as a leader of the organization, and that my advice is coming from a perspective of not only protecting the company but helping him or her to succeed in their role. Again, it's a lot about listening. So what I do if I have a particularly difficult situation with the leader is the way I approach it. Timing is really important. You want to make sure that you're having this conversation with the leader not when they're frazzled with an investor or they had some horrible interaction with a board member or something like that. So timing is important. And then asking more questions, like, 'Well, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? Were you aware of this?' That kind of thing. I generally find with that kind of inquisitive style, you and your CEO or your board member, whoever it is you're trying to influence, can actually get to the same spot. It's rare that I find myself in a position where my leader or my board member says, 'Well, that's just nonsense and I disagree with everything you said. I'm not going to do it.' It just doesn't happen.

You know, I think for me it's been kind of the old favorites: 'Good to Great,' 'Execution,' 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.' Quite frankly, all of those core principles show up almost all the time in every leadership book that you read. There's another one that I read called 'Leading Quietly,' which I also thought was very insightful about the extraordinary value that a quiet, humble leader could bring to an organization. So those are kind of the four that I think I keep going back to in my career.

Well, I personally love teaching. I view it as something I do in my job every day with the team that I have here. And it's what I've always been surprised at, maybe it says more about me, is actually how really bright some of these people are and insightful, and how people who are entirely new to a subject matter can just bring new wonderful insights to a subject matter even if they've had no experience with it before. They bring a part of their life or their experience to a subject matter, and then they'll say something or ask a question and you'll think, 'Oh, I've never even really thought about it like that.' So it's a wonderful opportunity to learn from other people as well.

Well, I do love running, so that's part of the exercise. I do that a fair amount. I love music. I play the piano. I go to the opera. I have a wonderful family, so I spend a lot of time with my family. I love reading, and so I spend as much time as I can reading both the classics and new books and interesting books.

Have fun in your job. That's what I say. Don't take a job where you're miserable, where you hate your boss. There are plenty of really good jobs out in the marketplace, so you should not only be advancing your career, but you should be having fun while you're doing it.