Perspectives: Advocate for yourself and your career
Perspectives: Advocate for yourself and your career
Fight for what you're worth
This week’s Perspectives is a conversation with Rease Rios, Director of Content at Qase. Her career has been an exploration of various passions and a series of lessons that helped her learn to value her own worth and know when (and how) to fight for it. She’s an expert in all things content marketing — long-form articles, brand strategy, creative copywriting, SEO strategy, social media, graphic and video design direction, and more. But if you ask her to distill it down, she’ll always happily call herself a writer.
I met Rease a few years ago when we both worked at the same marketing agency and I have always been impressed with how she navigates her career and advocates for herself. Below is my conversation with Rease, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Anna Burgess Yang: Tell me a little bit about your background and how you began your career.
Rease Rios: I worked at a startup where I was a search engine marketing analyst. Eventually, I used my skills and built a travel website with a couple of friends, which then transitioned into me becoming a travel writer. I really started to use my content marketing and digital marketing skills to freelance for various agencies and companies. Then I decided to join an agency as an employee because I wanted to have more stability. I discovered that remote work is a really good way for me to balance a lot of what I loved about freelancing with the security of having a salary.
ABY: So you spent some time at a marketing agency and then went in-house at a tech startup, Webflow. You were promoted at Webflow on an individual contributor (IC) track instead of a manager track. What was that like?
RR: One of the reasons I chose Webflow was because they had separate tracks for IC promotions and people management promotions. I wanted to stay on the IC track because I loved doing writing there. And I was able to show, metrics-wise, why I deserved to be promoted. I had the classic SEO metrics that were easy to report on. But I also had a lot of qualitative metrics because I worked closely with customers and customer stories, and created some things that were more hybrid marketing/sales assets. I also often asked for stretch goals.
ABY: You left Webflow because of your manager. Can you talk a little bit about that?
RR: When I started at Webflow, I actually had the best manager I've ever had in my life. He was an amazing director of content and it was really through him that I was able to stretch and learn. One of the last things he did before he left was my promotion.
So I got my promotion and then had this brand new position with no manager. No one to help define the role, set goals, and track what I was doing. During that time, my team was expected to manage itself, for a little over six months. Then I got a new manager and was initially very excited to have a manager again. But it became clear, very quickly, that the manager was not suited for the role, at all. He did not have the skills to run content at that level.
It got toxic really fast. The job I thought was my favorite job of all time — a job I intended to stay at for a long time — quickly became something I just couldn't imagine myself working at anymore.
ABY: What's the impact of having a bad manager?
RR: It's a job killer. It really is. You start to question everything you do. You start to get resentful and unmotivated. And if you're really enjoying your work, especially in creative work, it's really hard to be creative when you're mad. It's hard to be excited about projects when you know that you're not going to get credit for them. Or maybe your manager is going to take the credit for you instead of you. Or maybe your manager is going to be disappointed no matter what. It makes you worried about your stability because if you have a bad manager, all it takes is one to two bad performance reviews based on their opinions for you to suddenly go from a top performer to being on a performance improvement plan. And that's infuriating to me.
I think people get pushed into management with absolutely no training. For many people, you run out of room in the IC track with nowhere else to go, but you want more money and a better title. So the company says, "Ok, now you manage six people." All of a sudden, you're in charge of six people's professional development, and you have no skills and no background to help you do that. And then you are a bad manager. It might not mean that you're a bad person or even bad at the core parts of the job. But you're bad at people management.
ABY: When you left Webflow, you moved into a director role. What did you look for as you were applying to companies and how did you position yourself?
RR: During that half of the year when we really did not have leadership, I began to realize that I really wanted to run content and that I was capable of doing that.
When making that transition, I think it's really important to look at the size and stage of the company. I had an opportunity to go for the Director of Content role at Webflow. I didn't want to, because Webflow is at a completely different stage. It's a company with 600+ employees. That's a major operation and there are a lot of processes that are already in place. Brand voice and tone guidelines have already been set. Your budget is probably already set. There are a lot of things that aren't very flexible in a company of that size because you're already coming into an inherited system.
I really went back to my roots in kind of that scrappy startup world. I looked for places that needed someone who had a very varied marketing, generalist-type background, to be able to handle various access aspects of content.
I also knew that I still liked being an individual contributor. I wanted to be a director, but it didn't mean that I wanted to give up all the aspects of being a content marketing manager that I love. I didn't want to stop writing. I didn't want to stop doing research. I just wanted to be able to pair that with a little bit more control over the process and the strategy. It was really finding a role that could strike that balance.
ABY: What are some of the things you've enjoyed in your director role?
RR: I've been helping some of my co-workers develop their personal brands and teaching them the value of that. We have two developer advocates, which is very lucky — most companies only have one, if they have one at all. Their whole role is about being visible in the industry, which for us is quality assurance testing in the software development industry. I help them navigate how to bring their personalities into their work, but still be on brand and represent our brand in the way we want.
I also find that many people who come from a more technical background struggle with writing for the internet. They don't know how to be conversational, how to make an article skimmable, or how to write a good hook that makes people want to keep reading. I've created resources for them and watched them grow and get better and better at it. I find that really rewarding.
ABY: What advice would you give to other people who know they need to advocate for themselves more in their careers?
RR: Documenting everything is a big one. Sometimes, documentation is about being safe for yourself. Like your psychological safety and job safety. When my manager unexpectedly left Webflow, the interim manager really had no idea what I'd even worked on. And it was pretty easy for me to be able to pull up a bunch of different documetns and create a summary with links. Like, "Here's my daily work. This is the kind of stuff I work on. Here are examples for you and here are the metrics tied to this work. Here's the work that doesn't have clear metrics, but here's how we judge success." Those types of things. Being able to document what you do and your contributions is important.
I also have a folder of screenshots of people telling me that I did a great job or had really good results, or my work was featured in a newsletter, or other things like that. I think it's really hard to advocate for yourself, especially for women. Women are generally told to be humble and told to sit down. I think it's easier to brag about yourself when you're forced to look at all of this evidence of how great you are. It's a lot easier to go into a meeting and say, "You're going to give me a raise, and here's why."
ABY: Why do you think it's hard for people to advocate for themselves?
RR: I think anyone who doesn't have confidence, and women, in particular, overexplain. One thing I do for myself is when I'm going into a meeting that makes me nervous — like a performance review or 1:1 with a manager — I will put a post-it note on my computer that says, "Mute." And every time I finish a sentence, I put myself on mute. Because I think there's a tendency to fill the space, especially in remote work. Someone is thinking or pausing, and you say, "And I also did these things! And if you need more data, I can send that over!" You start to sound a little more frantic and more defensive. Whereas, you should be able to just end that sentence and let the other person sit with it.
ABY: You've walked away from jobs you've enjoyed because you felt undervalued. How do you know if you're being undervalued?
RR: Some people will say look at market value. I think that's a lot harder in the remote world because salary structures are based on so many different factors. I think it's best to look at your personal results, what is expected, and whether or not you hit those things.
And if you can, find out what other people are making. Some companies have the information and are able to share it, but they won't offer it up. I will ask, "Can I see the salary band for the next level? And can I see the expectations?" I was able to get that information at Webflow. That helped me a lot because I was able to say, "I checked all of these boxes."
I don't love comparing my work to other people, but if you feel like you're being undervalued, a comparison to someone at the same level is another way to do it. I don't like to create unnecessary animosity, but I've had to do it in the past. I try to emphasize, "I'm not saying the other person doesn't deserve this. They do. I'm saying I also deserve this." I've actually said that exact line. Like, "This person has this title and this is what they're achieving. I don't have that title and I'm achieving all the same things. How are we going to make this right?"
Soemtimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's very frustrating and extremely disappointing. But that's where you have to be able to walk away. You have to say, "Ok, you don't value me, then I'm out." Usually, that means you have to look for another job while you're still working since I don't think most people are in a position to say, "You're saying no to me today, so I'm leaving today."
But if they don't respect your value, you need to find a place that will.
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