11 Tips To Success From The Woman In Charge Of The World's Largest
Cruise Line
Carnival
Cruise Line president Christine Duffy Christine recently made waves in the
cruising industry when she appointed Shaquille "Shaq"
O'Neal to be the company's new CFO (chief fun officer) and launched a
brand campaign titled, "Choose Fun."
It's
part of Duffy's management philosophy: “People first and financials will
follow." And it's one of the hallmarks of her leadership as the head
of the world’s largest cruise line. With 25 ships, 43,000 employees and
nearly five million annual passengers, running Carnival Cruise Line
is no small feat.
Duffy is
the first-ever woman to serve as Carnival's president — and this year
marks her third at the helm. Hers is an inspirational success story. She
began her career as a travel agent and rose through the ranks to become CEO
of Maritz Travel Company (a world leader in corporate meetings, events and
incentive travel), then CEO of the Cruise Line Industry Association (CLIA),
before taking her current role. "I am all about this journey of change,
transformation and reinvention," says Duffy.
As a
leader in the travel space, Duffy is also a champion for women's
rights. She founded Meeting Professionals International’s Women’s
Leadership Initiative to address the limited number of females holding
executive and leadership positions in the travel industry,
and she is a member of The Committee of 200, an organization of the
world’s most successful women business leaders, working to advance women’s
leadership.
We
recently caught up with Duffy to get her insight on how she got to this lofty
position, how a fun factor can help you in your own career and how she
inspires other women to get ahead.
1.
Start Small
My
mother is French, so I speak French and growing up I spent a lot of
time traveling in France and in Europe. I knew I wanted to be in
travel. Back then, the best job was to be a Pan Am or TWA flight
attendant. I made it to the final rounds of the interviews in New York, but
what I didn’t realize was they took very seriously the fact that you had to be
5 feet 4 inches in your stocking feet. I’m 5 feet 2 inches. I was pretty
devastated when that didn’t work out. So I ended up getting a job as a
receptionist at a travel agency on Walnut Street in Philadelphia,
which was travel agency row. After six months, I went down the street
to McGettigans Travel Bureau. This was 1982 and I was hired by Norbert
McGettigan, who met me in the reception area and said "hire her." So
for $200 a week I became a travel agent in Philadelphia. McGettigans did a ton
of cruise business back when the QE2 was in Philadelphia. They
had done the wedding of Grace Kelly.
2.
Follow the Unconventional Path
My
fundamental principle is to find your passion and pursue it. The one thing
consistent for me is travel. Running a trade association was quite different
than being a travel agent or running a big consumer company. All of it
ties back to my passion, which is travel. You need to figure out your passion
and go after it, and be willing to get out of your comfort zone, which clearly
I have done many times because every time I was offered a great
opportunity, my immediate reaction was: "Are you talking to
me?" Focus on the journey, but stay open to what shows up.
3.
Make Yourself Known
Don’t
assume people know what you do, whether you’re a business or an individual. Operating under the radar
is not a sustainable strategy for success. I see this with many women, who
don’t want to talk about what they do because they think people should notice.
They think: "My boss should know what I do, people should know the value I
contribute; it’s not nice to talk about what you’re doing; it's braggadocious,
it’s whatever." That is just not a good thing. Generally, men are
much better at saying, "Hey, look what I did."
4.
Go Beyond Your Job
I
think women get very heads down and say, "I’m working really hard; people
should know what I am doing," and they don’t engage in what is going
around them, whether that is your community, whether that is your hobby or
whether that is a professional network. You have to have a network and you have
to work at these things. I am a big believer that the more you get
involved outside your job, the more you advance.
5.
Give Back
I
believe in giving back and helping others along the way, and I do make
sure — especially given the environment today — that I never forget every one
of my opportunities came from a man. There were no women saying, "Hey, do
you want to be president and CEO?" because there were no women in those
roles. So I do think this idea of giving back — and for me, given where I am,
helping other women see the possibility of what they can do — is
important. If someone would have told me that I would have been president of Carnival
Cruise Line when I was turned down from Pan Am, I would have thought they were
smoking something.
6.
Don’t Focus on a Straight Line
There
are a lot of opportunities that you are not expecting that don’t exist right
now. You really can’t predict what is going to happen, and if you’re not
open to what shows up because you are so focused on the next step, you’re going
to miss it. A career and a life is not linear
and if we are so focused on the next step, we don’t see what's around us —
real possibilities.
7.
Take a Step Back to Get Ahead
When
I left Maritz to go to CLIA, you could have said that was a step back. I took a
lot less money, and CLIA was a non-profit. If I had not taken the CLIA job, I
would not be here. But it never even occurred to me when I went to CLIA
that it would lead me to a cruise executive job.
Photo courtesy of Andy Newman/Carnival Cruise
Line
8.
Embrace Your Inner Fun Factor
The
other thing that is interesting — and I’ve had this said to me numerous times —
is that people want to work with people who are fun and easy to work with.
There are people who are difficult to work with, and I never thought that would
be a criteria. And I hate to say this, but I think there is also this
thing where women sometimes are overcompensating and thinking, "I’m going
to act like a man and I’m going to be tough."
9.
Have Empathy
A
lot of people are coming out of great schools and they are so smart, but they
don’t start at the bottom and work their way up. When you start in the middle
or start as a director, it is really hard to be empathetic to the decisions
that we make and how those trickle down and impact people on the front lines. I
think about that when I go on a ship. I spend time walking around and just
thanking the people who clean up the cabins or work in the engine room. I
don’t think people understand how appreciated that is and how people just want
to be acknowledged for the work they do and the contributions they make. So how
do we make sure that we’re empathetic?
10.
Think About Travel as a Career Option — and Consider Its Impact
I
don’t know that kids go to school and say, "I want to be in the travel
industry." They are all going in and saying, “I want to work for Google or
Apple or I want to be an investment banker or a lawyer or get my MBA."
There is an under-appreciation for the value of travel as an industry and the
economics of travel and why travel matters in such a big way. Clearly, if you
are working at St. Jude’s, that is an amazing mission and purpose, but I
believe what we do serves an amazing purpose for people because a vacation is
the most precious thing. Travel brings people together with all of this
divisiveness that we have. When people are on a Carnival cruise ship, they are
just together having fun. I also look at the people we employ — we have
40,000 employees on the ships representing 60 countries and 110 different
cultures, and they're working together and living together and serving our
guests. It’s pretty amazing. But a lot of people don’t translate that
to a job and a career. Or they translate it into a job but not a career and
that’s where I think we have not done a good enough job attracting and being on
the radar of a lot of these academic universities. But we really do need
to make sure that we are attracting the best and the brightest and more people
that can see travel as a real legitimate option. Because there are so many
different things you can do in the travel industry.
11. Take the
Next Step
Did
you see Darkest Hour? At the end of the movie, there is a quote,
which is my new thing: “Success is not final,
failure is not fatal and courage is getting up and taking the next step every
day.” It
is so true because success is not final — it is very fleeting. There are people
who get some success and think, "I’m better than everyone else," or
people that have a failure and think, "I’m dead." And neither is
true. It is about getting up every day and figuring out the next step to
take.
Laura Begley Bloom
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2018/03/29/11-tips-to-success-from-the-woman-in-charge-of-worlds-largest-cruise-line/#2f1d03675b0a
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