OYP Episode 53: Sharon Kamra

Sharon Kamra, Senior Vice President of Hiring at Publicis Sapient and former Chief People Officer of SapientRazorfish, tells us about the importance of pressure testing your environment when it seems to be lacking in growth opportunities before making a jump, the sense of fulfillment that comes with continued learning and how critical it is to keep one's ego in check when making career decisions.

 Interview

Peter Szczerba - Welcome back to the Own Your Potential Podcast, where you'll hear stories from leaders across the globe, about how they've taken control of their career growth and lessons on how you can too. I'm Peter Szczerba, and today, I'm very excited to be sitting down with Sharon Kamra, the Senior Vice President of Hiring at Publicis Sapient. Sharon, really excited to be sitting down with you today. Been looking forward to this one. Why don't we just jump right in? Can you take us through your career journey leading up until this point?

Sharon Kamra - Yeah, thank you, Peter. It's really exciting to be here. I've been listening to the podcast, and it's fantastic. So I'm really honored to have the opportunity to tell you my story today. So I'll start I guess I'll start with you. And at university. I don't know most people at Publicis sapient, don't know this about me. But I had a plan to be an elementary school teacher. And a lot of people find that hysterical now knowing me at this point in my career, but while I was at university in California, you know, starting kind of curriculum related to education, sociology, etc. I had an internship, I had to work during school to support myself and pay for my education. And I had an internship over three years that really exposed me to business and technology, and kind of building computer systems and what have you. And that internship really changed the trajectory of my education. I started picking up courses and business and really was pretty excited about that very different from what I entered into school, right after I graduated, I did go to Central America for a year, and I was teaching their American culture, English, and prepping us University Bound students. When I came back from that one year experience in Central America, or returned to California, I joined a small tech company that had a financial services product for credit unions. I was an implementation manager. And I was really in a role with people that were much more experienced, and you know, 10 or 15 years older, but because of that internship experience I had, during my university career, I had the skills and the swagger to be an implementation manager. So I was all going around the country for two years gathering requirements planning, executing the cutover, to our product. With clients, it was really heavy travel across from Alaska to Florida. At that time, I couldn't even I wasn't old enough to rent a car. So that was presented some challenges. There was no Uber back then. I did that for two years, really, you know, drinking from the firehose, and I think I had maybe 13 clients in those two years. And I got married and moved to New England with my my husband. When I moved to New England, I was really interested in finding a role locally, and I wanted to stay in technology. And I narrowed, I did a lot of research, and I narrowed it down to a company called Cambridge technology partners, and applied to a project management position there and started a long interview process with them. And one Sunday, I was reading The Boston Globe newspaper and Sundays back then used to be these giant tombs of paper and classified sections. And I saw an ad for a startup called sapient, which appeared to be very similar to Cambridge technology partners. So on a lark, I mailed my resume. And at that time, you had to mail a resume and a cover letter. And I mailed it on a Monday morning, and on Wednesday of that week, I was in the sapient office in Cambridge, Massachusetts for a full day of interviews. And I got offered a role. And I learned during the interview process that Sapiens founders met at Cambridge technology partners and decided to start sapient to really focus on the fixed price fixed time model for IoT projects at the time. So I joined sapient and this sort of been 24 years ago as a project manager, a technical project manager. And over the course of the last 24 years, I have had probably at least 15 distinctive roles. And part of that was You know, a combination of my own interest in and, and growing and learning, but part of it also was that we were in a space where we were helping clients reach their future. And a lot of roles didn't exist and were created over the course of those 24 years. So started as a project manager helping clients design and implement kind of pre internet, IoT solutions. That then kind of pivoted to being more of a business analyst, consultant strategy person working with companies to help them build business cases, look at their, their IoT projects and their effectiveness pivoted into another role when we when sapient at that time acquired enterprise, an ERP company, and joined that team and worked for a year as a implementing big Oracle ERP systems and ran a program management office for a client for a year. And then from that, really was at the height of the.com. Boom, and I kind of reinvented myself to be a UX UI, creative delivery director, we acquired again, a bunch of companies, and we needed people with leadership skills to lead creative. So at that time, the roles were information architects, content strategist of visual designers. We call it front end developers. And so for a number of years I was leading kind of the those types of teams kind of doing, we worked in all kinds of industries. So I think over those first few years, worked in financial services, manufacturing, technology, education, energy Telecom, and you name it with a lot of big established companies, a lot of startup companies. And then in 2002 1001, medeor, I went on maternity leave. And that was also a time when the.com kind of crash was happening. So I took out I was out for a few months. And that was a very interesting time, because the kind of things were contracting globally, and also at sapient at the time, and when I came back, instead of jumping right into a client facing role, I joined a senior client, a senior executive to work on business development and account planning. And so what that looks like was helping us build in people in sapient, at the time, really, a business development engine, and account planning and management. And so I had an opportunity to travel around with our CFO at the time, helping our client teams really grow their acumen around business development and planning for their clients. And that was pretty critical for us to succeed as a company. And then one day, I was walking around the Cambridge Massachusetts office and got pulled into a meeting in a conference room where there were a lot of executives, stakeholders from MIT, which was right next to our office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that have come to to hear from us about how to implement big projects, MIT had received a large grant to do something pretty radical at the time, which was to put all of their course courses online and open and free and available. That was an era where a lot of educational institutions were looking at how do we monetize our content, our IP, and MIT decided to do something totally radical at the time and said, We're not going to monetize this, we're going to make this available to the world. And they came to sapient at the time, because they obviously had the intellectual property, they obviously had a lot of technical know how, but they didn't have the ability to get to from point A to point B or point z at that time to really realize their vision. And so that little like getting pulled into a meeting to help them understand best practices in delivering big complex programs, led MIT to higher sapient. And we I became the program lead from from Sapiens perspective, and was on site at MIT helping them build that and scale that initiative which exists to this day. So that was really a program management role. had another child went on maternity leave, again moved to our family moved to Chicago. And while on maternity leave, I had kind of called into the office saying I would really like something small to do at this time, I'm still sort of half on maternity leave, but wanting to dip my toe back into the office world. And my mentor at that time had moved from being a client facing executive to helping kind of shape our operations internally. And she said, Well, are you interested in, you know, helping us recruit creative contingent contractors, we really hadn't been using contractors up until that point in our history. And I said, Sure, I could figure that out, I had no idea how to recruit I didn't really understand this the contractor space. And that one little assignment then pivoted my entire career, at that point to being more internally facing. So I came off maternity leave and built our contingent labor, program and engine globally, and then started adding other internal functions to my plate. So I went from continuing to own contingent labor or contractor global strategy and team to then adding resource management or as we call it internal, the Safia staffing, and then started doing a lot of work and integration and change management. As we started acquiring companies and started pivoting sapient to kind of the marketing, technology, intersection space. So got to work with a lot of our executives on how do we bring in these companies, and integrate them everything from people to the way that we face off to our clients to just all the things that you can think of when you're bringing when you're looking at acquisitions and bringing them in. That led to owning all recruitment for a brand called sapient nitro at the time, that led to owning our people success function for sapient, Nitro, two, in 2017, kind of owning HR learning talent, all the things that I mentioned above and kind of acquiring all those those functions under a brand called sapient Razorfish that we had for a year. And at that point, you know, I had a team of 600 people globally, you know, pretty big budget, the BAP sub brand of sapient. At the time, we had about 12,000 people. And then, you know, kind of pivoted to owning global recruitment as we started bringing our brands together under the publicist sapient brand, and from there pivoted into a totally different kind of role, which is the role that I'm currently in, which is the early careers program.

Peter Szczerba - Wow. I mean, I don't really know where to start, because I think it's just such an interesting, an interesting career journey, like, across two seemingly milestone moments you have, you know, first in your education, where you are going. And I think there's an interesting, full circle moment here as well, which help articulate in a second, but this idea that you're going into post secondary education to pursue careers in elementary school teacher, and then, you know, just through an kind of an internship and through through new learning, you decided, no, actually, I'm going to go into something totally different, go into tech and business. And you know, then basically have a relatively successful early career in that world, but then have as a result of circumstances in your life, and taking advantage of the opportunities that were still available to you that fit kind of your personal needs, as well as your professional needs, resulted in like a total pivot, again, into a completely different direction that you've now found even greater success in which I think is, was really crazy. And I think what's very cool about this is that you you started your journey out looking to become an elementary school teacher. And now your journey is focused on bringing in people coming out of school into the elementary school stages of their professional career. I mean, I think that's, that's a very interesting parallel and kind of full circle kind of moment. And I guess I just want to jump back all the way to kind of the technical aspect of things right, like through that time, right? Obviously, huge disruptive things happening in technology with the.com, boom and crash, etc. And then, obviously, you saw some massive changes in the organization with the acquisitions you mentioned, but as you're kind of climbing the ladder and building your career, tech wise, do you think that that that experience was able to set you apart as a leader in the kind of the internal people facing roles as well. Was it a different differentiator, the fact that you able to think technology platform systems, since that's such a core part of managing an organization of this size?

Sharon Kamra - Yeah, I think so. And I think also the client piece, I, you know, I never, and I think a lot of people that have been at sapient, for a while, wouldn't have called me an HR person, or if that wouldn't have been my brand, even though I've spent probably more, I guess it's now more of my career in that space. I think the, you know, sort of the ability to take something very undefined and messy, that doesn't exist, which is kind of what my career has been, you know, across all of the roles I've played, to really understand the or, you know, the client, the reason that we exist as a company is for our clients, and how that how I can bring that knowledge into our internal functions, I think is made all the difference. And I think that's it's made it you, you know, having a unique perspective to know, what are people in delivery, as we call it a at sapient are going through the challenges that they have, and being on the internal side to help build programs and systems and, and other things, I think has made a huge impact.

Peter Szczerba - I can only imagine, especially now with managing a workforce of 20,000 people, you know, globally distributed, largely connected through technology, the technology that underpins the management of those people is so critical. And I've seen that even in my own exposure to those areas of the organization over the last couple of years. So I can only imagine that being accelerative kind of differentiator for you. But in general, though, right, when we look at like your career journey, it was it was rather nonlinear. And I think a lot of people think when they especially earlier in their careers now and I'll admit, I've fell victim to this kind of line of thinking that you're in a capability or you're in an area of a profession, and you're just gonna keep climbing in that direction, right. And you become very focused on that. But there's enormous amounts of success and progression that can be achieved through diversions in that path. And I think you've experienced that. Can you talk a little bit about kind of what your mentality was along the way as you kind of shifted maybe from one direction to another, while all the while still maintaining forward momentum?

Sharon Kamra 

Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, is if I look at my career, and I map it, it's a lot of jigs and Jags and what have you. On the flip side, I have a my partner, my husband, he's a professor, and he's had a very Lent, you know, he decided you want to be a professor at 18. And here he is a professor. And it's just been, you know, a straight upward curve. And if I look backwards, it all makes sense to how I got here. But if I had been looking forward, it wouldn't have made sense. I mean, a lot of the roles that I spoke about Peter didn't even exist when I was in college. And so if I had sort of fixated on, this is what I'm going to be, this is the role I'm going to have, I would have missed all of this, these opportunities, I think that I've always looked at is something that I can make an impact on? Is it something that's going to grow me? Is it something that really takes my unique capabilities, and we'll take advantage of those capabilities and make me even stronger? And I could provide value to if it was a client or a type of role X, externally or internally? Those are the things that I've really focused on it, it's actually quite freeing, because you can I can move around and try different things. And I'm not focused on, you know, in this linear path, if you will.

Peter Szczerba - Yeah and you touched on something really interesting there, this idea of strengthening your gap areas are filling your gap areas versus strengthening your strengths or activating your strengths. And so I guess what there's, I mean, there's two different schools of thought there, right, in terms of which one would give you more forward progression or momentum, as you were evaluating some of these opportunities? Did you find yourself leaning into more of the direction of my skill set and my strength would be really disruptive and valuable here, versus this will grow me a lot because it fills these gap areas that I don't currently know, was there one direction you lean more than the other?

Sharon Kamra - I think it's been both at different times. And I think it's looking at the opposite. I've looked at the opportunity and and looked at where I was, and, you know, I think one of the things just to take a little bit of a tangent. I think one of the things that I've learned in my career is success. as measured by only me, my success is only measured by me. And I think, you know, when I've focused on internal motivation, I've had the most success may be measured externally, if that makes sense. And when I focused on external validation or motivation, that's usually when I've not been the happiest at work, or ever, or even done my best work. So, you know, I think when I looked at an opportunity, or if I've looked at a shift or a, you know, something in my noncollinear, an opportunity to change roles. You know, I think that sometimes it is about filling a gap that I have, I haven't done this before, this would be really great in terms of my own success and skill sets, or it's been a time where Oh, the opportunity would really benefit from my capability, the strengths that I have, and, and the impact that it will create. And so I think it's been both at different times, based on you know, being open to kind of going either way, if you will, if you have this choice of, it's gonna grow me or it's gonna leverage my strengths. Ideally, you're finding both, but sometimes it definitely ways stronger one way or the other.

Peter Szczerba - Yeah, for sure. And so I'm, you know, bringing that back to, you know, another moment where you kind of pivoted a little bit, while you were kind of a technical pm earlier on, as there was, you know, the boom of of.com. And the internet, you mentioned shifting more to creative delivery lead and leaning into UX and creative design. And even that, for example, when we talk about a strong people strategy leader, right, like the part of critical critical parts of people's experience, as individuals in an organization is interacting with some of the platforms and tools we talked about before, right? And if, if that interaction is it smooth, isn't seamless, is inefficient, doesn't feel like an enabler, and instead feels like a blocker to progress in their growth or whatever. That's a huge challenge. Right. So that in itself was another valuable skill set or toolset, you added to the packages, you then eventually made a pivot into these these people facing faith.

Sharon Kamra - Yeah, no, I think so for sure, I'm in those early days around creating experiences, first generation experiences digitally for, you know, brands and companies and the, the, you know, I guess the training or the exposure that I got at that moment has, you know, has carried out through the next 20 or so years. And it is very interesting. So it's come full circle, where in my current role I do a lot personally around hiring our next generation, experienced designers. And so it's been really amazing to come full circle from those earlier days to really understanding what are the right qualities and characteristics of experienced designers that will be successful at pool sapient but also be successful helping our clients with their customer journeys and experiences.

Peter Szczerba - Right and then so I want to touch now a little bit as we transition into kind of that people strategy phase of your career. There was obviously an enormous ascension, as you kind of continue to add purview to your plate as you have that owning, labor management, staffing, recruiting all of these different areas, which ultimately culminated in being a chief talent officer when we were sapient, Razorfish, I mean, objectively, right, that is, that is success. Right? I understand that you kind of talked about measuring your success kind of internally for yourself, but whether internal or external, once you reach the C suite level, I think that a lot of people would objectively say that, that that is an enormous milestone or success. But then, you know, you you consciously took took a step back and focused a little bit more on global hiring right and, and now have built back up again, to lead our global kind of, like you said, early careers and kind of campus recruiting efforts in defining what the next generation looks for organization. Can you talk a little bit about that kind of arc? And that, that peak and valley and peak because I think that's a really interesting part of your journey, you know.

Sharon Kamra - At that point, you know, I had, you know, a guess, as you said, scaled a mountain top and really kind of looked internally to say, you know, okay, yeah, I think that was a point. Also, Peter was definitely focused on maybe a little bit more of that external success. And, you know, I was I was probably not growing as much as I had had at different points in my career, and was really interested and You know, how am I going to grow myself? How am I going to take advantage of my skills? Is it in this role? Or is it in a different role, and it was definitely a moment where I looked at, you know, should I make a move out of people sapient. And I actually chose not to, and I decided to stay and do something very different. at a level that was definitely much more hands on than running a team of 600 people, and, you know, took that took that leap of faith, it definitely was required a little bit of managing my own ego. But I think it was really, it's been really fulfilling for me. And I think the managing of the ego, where the ego is really focused on maybe those external validate validation, the external acknowledgement that you're at a certain level. And just knowing that I could do great work in the early career space, was very excited about it. When I moved into that role, it was 2019, which was the first year that Jen Generation Z was coming into the workforce. And, you know, this generation is just uniquely equipped with so many things, the skill sets and the way of being digital natives, so important to people, so Sapiens future, you know, the problem solving skills, that this generation was learning, the empathy, the data, analysts, annal, analytical skills, all of the all of the above, I knew that it was critical for people so sapient, to really pivot to leveraging Gen Z, not only for the health of our company, but for really, for our clients and their customers we need, we need Gen Gen Z, digital natives to be part of solutioning with us, for the future. So the, you know, the pivot, the mission was was so compelling that I was able to, I think, you know, quiet the voice, the ego that said, Well, this is really hands on this is really different. And really tap into this is really important. My success is measured by just me, not by what people think. And I have the unique capabilities to make the early career program successful and strong and scale it up pupils to sapient, just given my history here, my early days and education, my passion for the company, and the ability to kind of start something in a startup mode internally to a big organization to make it successful. I don't think there was a lot of people in the company that could do that. And, you know, I'm so I'm really grateful for the the opportunity, but it definitely definitely breaks the mold of this linear, you know, Upward Bound, kind of external recognition recognition model that we're we're all sort of taught early on as sort of the, the, the objective.

Peter Szczerba - Yeah, no, I think it's a really fascinating, fascinating thing to explore, just because I think it takes a lot of confidence encouraged to determine to, like you said, to evaluate the fact that you don't feel like you're growing enough, once you've achieved that kind of objective success. And we on this podcast over and over, I've talked about kind of this never ending pursuit of learning and development. But I think it's most compelling to hear when someone who has reached, for example, the C suite, a larger organization to, to say that I'm not growing enough anymore, I and as a result, I don't feel the same happiness, I would have maybe otherwise. And they say, to be able to have the that self reflective moment to say that maybe that at the moment, what was driving me was more of that external validation. And actually, in terms of internal satisfaction with my role and my impact in what I'm delivering, and most importantly, where I'm continuing to grow, would be if actually stepped back into this direction. That's that that takes, I think, a ton of confidence to be able to do and really hard self reflect reflection. And like you said, I think quieting the ego. That's not an easy thing to do, especially when we're talking about the stakes with which and within which you were doing that.

Sharon Kamra - I think the context is important. And you know, I think one of the things that you and I've spoke about before, which is being able to take risks in an environment or a place where you You know, failure might not be as painful. I think that's also been a key part of the story that maybe we can talk a little bit about, you know, I've, I've felt, you know, supported, and encouraged to do some playing like I did, because I've been in this company for a while, and I've been able to create these different career paths that are focused on impact. And I do think that's an important thing for, you know, people when they are thinking about, I'm looking for something different, I'm not growing, definitely, I would encourage folks to look within the company that they're there at, to see if there's an opportunity to do something different. Our ability to take risks on people I think, is gonna be higher on people that we know. And, you know, and then that will be people that are at your company, or if you're at a company, that company that you're at, at the moment. And I think that's been a key part of my story. And, you know, I think why I've stayed the 24 years here, is that I've been able to do all these different things, because it's been in a place where taking risks within one's company is encouraged. And, you know, I think that's something that when people think about growth, they think about having to leave, or they've been stagnated. They feel like they're stagnating, those are just met, thoughts that you're having, you can change your thoughts and say, What can I do differently at near within this company? And I think most organizations, especially today, in December of 2021, will take risks on the people that they they have, and I think it's it's much easier to reinvent yourself within your own company than it is to reinvent yourself into a new company in a new role.

Peter Szczerba - Yeah, absolutely. I think there's an interesting, like risk and opportunity analysis to do there, right? I think that if you're looking to have accelerated growth, and maybe a similar path to where you're at, sometimes it's very difficult to achieve that in a greater way than going to a different organization, right. And then, you know, the organically, there may be opportunities for you to diversify and do different things as you go to new organizations, because they may do things slightly differently. But it's, it's really about weighing kind of what the motivator is, or the primary motivator is at the time of making that decision, right. So if you're willing to tolerate the risk for potential career progression, or monetary reward, and that maybe isn't as available in that moment in the organization you're in, and that's the priority, then then maybe that's the decision you make, right. But if if it's around looking for an organization to tolerate risk around you, so that way you can pivot or move horizontally or have, you know, geographical mobility or anything like that, then likely that there's a lot more of that available to you in a place where you've built up brand equity and worked very hard to do that. To your point, I'm going to reset button when you move into an organization unless you're following maybe a mentor, a leader, where they'll vouch for kind of the brand that you bring with you relatively quickly. I think that that's another key consideration factor. But it's always a complex decision. Right? Yeah, I think at any moment, and particularly as you get further in your career, where you've built up like a long history of kind of career experience that that really kind of steers you a little bit more than it does early in your career. But I think even even that, I think you have bucked that trend and made rather significant transitions late in your career and didn't allow kind of your your past to steer it. But rather just use the diversity of your kind of past experiences to in to help, I guess, justify the risk and the jump to do something totally unique and different.

Sharon Kamra - Yeah, for sure. And I just pick on what you said a little bit, I think, you know, I think, for the most part, the way that you framed it make sense. But I do would encourage people even if they feel like they're, they have to make a move out of their company in a linear path to really pressure tests, that pressure test that was your people, managers pressure tests with other folks in your current organization. Because I think that we make a lot of assumptions without, you know, sort of looking at the context that you're in, as, you know, your current company. And sometimes you would be surprised that just by asking just by, you know, getting some other opinions, there might be many times there is the opportunity to grow even within your own role in the current company that you're at. So, I always encourage people to think about that. I see a lot of folks just make The assumption without really having those conversations because sometimes it can feel easier to just pivot to a new company a new job. But I would encourage people to always really have those conversations and, you know, and in the company that you're at to see, is there a way that I can grow in a way that's not supporting my, you know, my needs at this point in time?

Peter Szczerba - Yeah, I actually really love that that sentiment, the idea of pressure testing, because I think there's an element also of, regardless of the decision, whether it's to move externally, whether it's to stay internally, the point of making these types of decisions is to maximize your kind of potential, your growth, your forward progression, or your ability to drive impact, whatever the kind of primary decision factor is, but you're just trying to maximize that. And so without, to your point, pressure testing your current environment to see whether that opportunity really is there, when you kind of apply a little bit of your leverage and your and your and kind of your, what you bring to the table to see like, hey, is this opportunity here? For me, I think that's a really important exercise to do and making assumptions could could leave a lot on the table that you didn't realize was there, I think that's an absolutely great, great thing for people to walk away from this conversation with you. But in kind of talking about environment a little bit what in this context pressure testing, but in a different context around, you know, something that we've had a conversation a little bit out in the past, you're you're a woman who has ascended to significant levels of leadership in areas of technology and internal facing roles. And obviously, across time periods where there was far less women in roles like that. And so there's probably a lot of kind of things that you had to overcome in regards to the environments that you are ascending through. Can you talk a little bit about that and kind of your perspective on on leaning into an environment versus an environment kind of leaning into you?

Sharon Kamra - Great question. You know, when I joined Sapiens, I think at that time, I was the only female project manager. And I vividly recall, like, a couple months after I joined, we had a project management, a project manager training in an off site location, and it was 25 project managers at the time in the company. And I was the only female project manager. So I guess I would say, early part of my career, it was really about conforming to the leadership style of the organization, my peers, my colleagues, really about me changing to look more like the organization and the people in it. And, you know, that was, I think a lot of the kind of feedback or the things that I'd be working on, it would be to be more assertive, to be more aggressive, to have more, quote, leadership presence. And, you know, as the organization became more diverse, you know, the issues are the issues that, you know, that I would face or other women would face sort of pivoted. And it was definitely kind of a, an era of women focusing on leaning in, on, again, coaching, getting coach coaching other women, to again, I think fit in more to the standard model of leadership. So despite having more women in the company, I think we focused more on women leaning in what can women do to not feel like imposters? How can women speak up more, etc. And, you know, where I'm at today is, and I think where society is, and especially, I think, you know, the pandemic has helped accelerate or disrupt some of the things that we think about when we think about leadership. I think it's less about fixing women at work and more about fixing the places where women work or where, you know, where, under historically underrepresented people work. And I'm, you know, I'm super excited about where I see this moment in, sort of corporate world of can we really start dismantling some of the assumptions and the, the way that corporate world celebrates or rewards a certain type of leadership, or a certain way of working and and really be truly inclusive. I think it's something moment that in time with all the things that have been happening with pandemic and social issues, to really take advantage of changing the places where under historically underrepresented people work in, I think we need to get beyond the conversation a lot of the conversation now has been about is about where we work. And I think we need to get into the conversation about how we work, how we look at leadership, and how do we really pivot to an inclusive environment for all types of folks.

Peter Szczerba - So I think what I find particularly interesting about this is you found yourself in a position to uniquely impact this the environment as well.

Sharon Kamra - Yeah I think so. And I think starting with, you know, the early career folks coming in, and not just focusing on historically underrepresented folks, we're focusing on the whole population, the men, the women, you know, everybody to think about work to think about leadership in a way that is inclusive from the get go. So I think that to me, is, again, one of the great full circle moments to be able to go from being in that training class of PMS, and being the one woman and 24 men to the kind of cohorts that we're bringing in now that are very diverse, and helping shape those folks to having a perspective that there are all different ways that leadership shows up. And it's not sort of the sort of the stereotypical ways of leadership operating in a in an environment.

Peter Szczerba - Yeah, and I think what particularly excites me about this is that, you know, I've grown up with this organization, I joined through the campus recruitment program in whatever shape it was in eight and a half years ago. And I think that to your point around how you've described, this first wave of Jen's ears coming through new professionals, with more empathy with a greater understanding of digital and technology, given that they've are digital natives, as you mentioned, but also that many of their formative years in high school and then in University took place during a time where diversity equity inclusion have been at the absolute forefront of just social discourse, political discourse, and just general discourse. And so for that reason, as you welcome these, you know, diverse waves and cohorts into our organization. And then you know, how, as well as with other organizations doing the same for their own kind of campus recruitment efforts, you know, you're we're really setting the stage for what the future of corporate organizations are going to look like, by to your point, setting that level of diversity across every dimension early on, and then communicating around, you know, it's about the environment leading in around you, and you being able to bring your whole self into, into your work. That's a totally different message than you received 24 years ago, and even across the majority of your career, and yeah, it's gonna make a big, big impact for these individuals. And then also organizationally.

Sharon Kamra - Yeah, I mean, I just I'm so I'm so bullish on this generation, and also what we're doing at Publicis sapient, to bring in folks and really allow them to be their full selves at work. I'm excited about the impact that they they're going to have personally, like you mentioned, the impact that you're going to have on our clients and our clients business, and the impact they're going to have on the world. I have no doubt that this generation is going to solve some of the big biggest problems that we have in front of us as a as humanity has around climate change and other types of big meta issues. And I'm super excited about it. And I just feel really privileged and grateful that I have this opportunity to work in this space, and help bring these folks into people sapient and really stay with them those first couple of years and help them reach their potential and in whatever way they define that to be for themselves.

Peter Szczerba - I love that sentiment. I love that we have leaders like yourself, both at Publicis Sapient and wherever else across other organizations focusing on these types of things and creating these types of nurturing early stages of career journeys for folks. Sharon, it's been a fantastic conversation. I appreciate your time and I look forward to reconnecting a little bit down the road when when early careers is scaled even further, and we're starting to feel some of the impact of these individuals. So thank you for your time.

Sharon Kamra - Thank you, Peter. This has been a real pleasure to reflect back and have this conversation with you appreciate the opportunity.