What Is It Like to Work for Google? The Invisible Mentor Interviews Sarah Speake
Interviewee Name: Sarah Speake, Strategic Marketing Director
Company Name: Google UK
Website: http://www.google.co.uk/corporate/
Sarah Speake – Your Invisible Mentor & Workshop Leader
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Sarah Speake: I have a significant year this year. This year is my 40th birthday. I live in London, I’m married and I have two small children, I work full-time, and I’ve always worked in the technology sector. Currently, and for the past 4 ½ years, I have worked for Google. I recently started a new job as Strategic Marketing Director for the UK and Ireland, and prior to that I was our Technology Sales Director.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Sarah Speake: Absolutely crazy busy, which is something that gives me a lot of energy and is very much in keeping with my personality. Because I work full-time and have two small kids, I get up at 5:30 am so that I’m at my desk at 7:00 am, which is wonderful because it usually gives me a couple of hours of me time to plough through things before my team arrives. I work through the day till 5:00 pm and then I leave. I let my evening without exception, be my time for family, friends and not anything work-related. So I make a very big and intended distinction between what I do work-wise versus my personal life. And that’s something I think that’s really, really important.
In addition to my Google job, I also do quite a lot of charity work, for two different charities. One is SANDS which stands for Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Society and the other is Platform 51, which has been set up to help disadvantaged women. I’ve never sat around twiddling my thumbs.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Sarah Speake: I’m a pretty energetic, motivated person most of the time anyway. Because I’m a natural extrovert, I get a lot of energy and motivation from other people so it gives me huge amounts of pleasure and motivation to see my team develop, to be achieving lots of different things that help various different people. So whether that’s customers in a work context, or whether that’s the women I work with outside work, I think that’s probably one of my key motivators. And I’m always challenging myself to do more, and do things differently. But generally I’m pretty motivated.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Sarah Speake: My big break work-wise was when I was headhunted by Google, and I was eight and a half months pregnant at the time. I was referenced by someone who worked for Google at the time that I had worked with previously. I had my first six interviews here a week before I gave birth and was very impressed with Google as an organization, not just in terms of the technology and innovation focus but very much the attitude and the culture, so when I returned from maternity leave I started here at Google rather than returning to my previous employer. I can safely say it’s the most enjoyable, challenging, motivational organization I have ever worked for or with so I will always consider that to be my biggest break so far at least.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Sarah Speake: You asked what SANDS stand for and my first daughter died when she was 11 days old. And the toughest decision undoubtedly that I have ever had to make was to switch off her life support machine. Inevitably it changed me as a person. I can now genuinely look back – and this is six years ago that this happened – at this experience and say that it made me a better person. I also think that the experience meant I put work in a very different perspective so although I’m very passionate about work and as I’ve already said, very motivated by it, I think my experience with Amélie, our daughter allowed me to view it differently and certainly not the be-all-and-end-all of life, that I probably viewed it as certainly in my earlier career in my twenties.
Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?
Sarah Speake:
- Definitely my daughter’s life and death that I just touched on briefly.
- Becoming a counsellor for SANDS the charity that I work with, looking after other bereaved parents, which I now do quite a lot of has enabled me to actually consider myself to be very lucky, and as perverse as that may sound, given what I’ve just outlined. I think I’m incredibly lucky. I have an amazing family and now have two living children. I have a job that I adore, I’m fit and healthy and it’s allowed me to see that in comparison to many others, I’m well off and I don’t mean in the financial sense by that.
- Getting married, has shaped my life as well. In that sense I think I’m very lucky to have married someone who I genuinely see as my soul mate, and I certainly couldn’t have the career that I now have without my husband’s unquestioning support.
Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?
Sarah Speake: Becoming the person I now am in a work sense in that I’m deemed to be a very good inspirational mentor, leader and coach and that’s something that I take great pride in, and something I’ve always aspired to be known for. Now being known for that type of person, that’s a huge accomplishment.
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Sarah speaking: Posing good questions first and foremost, so that I challenged myself. And that’s also for formal mentors in he business community that I’ve had. Equally I have a close set of girlfriends, many of whom I have known for over 20 years, and in a less formal sense I see them as my mentors too. The two give me very different sets of advice in a way because they know me in a different context, but they definitely influence my life in a very positive way and allowed me to challenge myself by posing questions that I would probably be a bit reticent to ask of myself without a bit of prodding.
Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?
Sarah Speake: Be authentic and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. I’m naturally a perfectionist and a bit of a control freak if I’m being brutally honest, and I think the advice around not being scared to make mistakes allowed one to learn more than constantly thinking that I have to do everything perfectly and 200 percent. I think I’ve actually learned as much from my mistakes as my accomplishments.
Avil Beckford: As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?
Sarah Speake: I’m a huge believer in self-assessment, to constantly strive to better one’s self. I’ve just talked about the idea of being authentic, which is a piece of advice that I have been given on a number of occasions by mentors in the past. I think self-assessment is very difficult to do regularly but I think that by holding the mirror up to one’s self and truly looking at what am I good at, what am I not so good at, does it actually matter if I have a few weaknesses? Probably not, but keeping check of the direction that you are going in and going through that process is really important. And it’s something that I do on a regular basis to keep myself on track, equally, asking people for feedback. I think it’s very difficult to be authentic unless you genuinely understand how you’re viewed by others, and that includes the positive and the negative. So taking feedback and not necessarily seeing it as a personal slight, it’s actually taking it on board and working on it by going through the process of looking through the mirror.
How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let's keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.
Related articles
- The Chief Mentoring Officer Interviews Annemie Ress, Senior HRD eBay & Global Engagement Lead at eBay, Part Two (theinvisiblementor.com)
- The Chief Mentoring Officer Interviews Annemie Ress, Senior HRD eBay & Global Engagement Lead at eBay (theinvisiblementor.com)
- Interview With Invisible Mentor Stefan Meister, Director, intercultures (theinvisiblementor.com)
- Interview With Invisible Mentor Stefan Meister, Director, intercultures, Part Two (theinvisiblementor.com)
- Interview With Invisible Mentor Jeanne-Marie Robillard, Senior Account Executive, National Speakers Bureau (theinvisiblementor.com)
- Chief Mentoring Officer Interviews: Do Big Breaks, Mentoring, and Hard Work Equate to Success? Part Two (theinvisiblementor.com)
- 12 Blog Posts People are Reading on The Invisible Mentor (theinvisiblementor.com)
Get Started Here – I want to help you get started on your learning journey. Read The Invisible Mentor 2015 Reading Challenge, then Join the Facebook Group for the Reading Challenge today, connecting the ideas from the books you read!
In the meantime, THANK YOU for your time… Thank you for sharing this post, and thank you for connecting with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest! What was your biggest takeaway from today?
Brought to you by Avil Beckford – dedicated to helping you grow and blossom professionally. You’re never alone!
Book links are affiliate links.
