The 10 Most Successful Businesswomen to Watch
The biggest obstacle in modern business is dealing with and adapting to sudden changes. The ever-changing needs of customers present constant obstacles but these can become opportunities. The same can be said for macroeconomic conditions that may impact business outcomes. One of the keys to success is to create an environment that inspires employees to change by helping them understand how crucial a change is to the success of the company and what their role is in leading that change.
Create an environment that inspires employees to change by helping them understand how crucial a change is to the success of the company. It’s crucial to take the lead if you want to motivate your team to effect change. Introducing Stephanie Dorman, Mediaocean‘s Chief Customer Officer. With over 25 years of demonstrated success, the leader, manager, and operator have built and sustained teams to meet changing business needs.
Career Beginnings
Being an avid reader and active writer since a very young age, Stephanie spent her formative years in Alabama, her home state. At the University of Alabama, she double-majored in English and History with a minor in Creative Writing. She also served as President and Treasurer of the university’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta. She relocated to New Jersey and continued her studies for a master’s degree in corporate communication while she started her professional career.
Stephanie has had the good fortune to establish and maintain teams for 27 years in a variety of functional areas, including service, operations, business management, technology, and human resources. As a result, she has a thorough understanding of organizations and how each functional area affects the whole. Stephanie seeks to collaborate with the leaders, peers, and team members to influence and impact change, take measured risks, and execute rapidly in order to achieve effective results. Her experience encompasses corporate transformation and operational excellence.
Mediaocean
Mediaocean is the mission-critical omnichannel advertising platform. It integrates brands, agencies, media, technology, and data, with more than $200 billion in annualized media expenditure controlled through its platform. Advertising Infastructure and ad tech are key components of the company.
Ad Infrastructure: Mediaocean provides all-inclusive media management solutions for budgeting, managing, and simplifying operations for international spend. To manage and report on media in real time, together with creative, financial, and transactional data, customers can establish financial controls that adjust for global markets.
Ad Tech: The platform has a full end-to-end workflow for large-scale omnichannel purchasing. Mediaocean’s clients use a consistent workflow to manage campaigns, regardless of whether they are running in open or closed ecosystems, direct or programmatic, digital or traditional.
Positioning her Duties
In her role as Chief Customer Officer, Stephanie is responsible for Mediocean’s global clientele’s satisfaction and retention. She also manages customer success, customer experience, knowledge management, and project services. She previously held the position of Chief People Officer at Mediaocean, where she improved and modernized talent acquisition, employee relations, learning and development and diversity, equity, and inclusion across the Mediaocean global community. Before that, Stephanie held the positions of EVP/GM, Lumina and Customer Experience, and SVP, Client Services at Mediaocean, where she was in charge of a number of departments, including product management, engineering, account management, customer support, training, content management, implementation, and project management.
Leadership Philosophy
Based on four essential success elements, Stephanie’s leadership philosophy is as follows:
- Make sure your direct leadership team is capable and strong.
- Lead like a democracy rather than a dictatorship.
- Always be prepared.
- View everything as a learning opportunity.
She asserts that in order to succeed, you must be adept at: being willing to take risks and make, admit, and address mistakes; managing for the short- and long-term; pressuring your leaders to always have a plan B and C; sharing and communicating cross-functionally to foster transparency; and working collaboratively through significant decisions.
Accepting the Hurdles Along the Way
Despite preparation and the use of lessons learned, Stephanie thinks managing through an M&A is never simple. Every aspect of a firm, from culture to operations, is different and creates fresh opportunities and difficulties. In order to attain the best results while combining firms, she adds, “I’ve learned that an open mind and a high degree of flexibility are more necessary than any playbook architecture.”
Stephanie gained a deeper appreciation for the functions of human resources, talent acquisition, and learning and development in fostering a positive workplace culture and employee experience during her tenure as Chief People Officer. This was at the height of the COVID lockdown and during the course of the company’s two largest acquisitions – 4C and Flashtalking. The objective was to position the HR team to become more business-oriented and, as a result, better business partners, but she also discovered that she was changing her own leadership and customer service attitudes. As she returned to a role that served customers, she discovered that she was much more sympathetic to the experience of the employees and that she had grown more discerning about which rules and processes were required.
Stephanie first led a Product and Development team while serving as GM for an incubator product. This was much outside her comfort zone. In spite of her lack of in-depth knowledge, Stephanie was able to lead the technological functions and gain the respect of the team leaders thanks to her eagerness to learn and ability to apply an operational approach to circumstances.
Tapping into the World of Management and Business
Stephanie is skilled in organizing resources, optimizing workflow, and developing operational efficiencies. She prides herself on getting rid of pointless, outdated, and redundant operations. Stephanie takes great pleasure in being able to collaborate with teams to identify gaps and use inventive resourcing to achieve targeted business results while maintaining a high level of productivity. She has expertise in establishing an environment of empowerment, execution, mentorship, and motivation where staff members strive to go above and beyond expectations in order to grow managers at various levels. The teams she has managed have consistently had strong employee retention.
Technology Advancement
Artificial intelligence applications excite Stephanie. Drishyam AI and Imposium, two firms that tap into potent and useful application cases for AI and machine learning, were acquired in 2022. According to Stephanie, Mediaocean will incorporate this technology into a larger platform and increase its investment in related fields. Agencies will also need to develop new skill sets in order to fully utilize the potential of this technology; thus, they will need to educate their clients and business partners in order to get them ready for the future’s constant stream of rapid change.
Change Management: The Future of Business
Adam Grant is a writer who Stephanie likes to read and follow on social media for his daily dose of thought-provoking ideas. Her favorite book of his is “Think Again,” which explores the power of unlearning and relearning. Although many management books cover this core idea, Grant’s perspective is particularly poignant from the standpoint of change management: “We won’t have much luck changing other people’s minds if we refuse to change our own.” Since Mediaocean was founded in the 1960s, it has experienced numerous generations of industry changes, making change management one of the topics Stephanie is most passionate about. She believes that even as their business models, staffing structures, technology stacks, and product offerings evolve, the team must remain accessible to customers.
Stephanie is thrilled for her team to be there as trusted advisors, as AI enables clients to push creative boundaries and harvest more significant insights from data. She also thinks that Mediaocean will keep playing the twin role of being a trustworthy resource that customers can rely on while also innovating in ways that will have the biggest positive impact on their businesses.
Empowering Women with Wisdom
Stephanie discovers that the best approach to making a difference and enabling others to follow suit is to focus on your voice as a leader, regardless of your gender. The biggest mistake women make, according to her, is concentrating too much on their gender. This may sound counterintuitive. She discovers that the best approach to making a difference and enabling others to follow suit is to focus on your voice as a leader, regardless of your gender.
Stephanie advises, “My advice is to be confident in what you know—and what you know you can do despite what you know—and make that your baseline for success.”
Website: www.mediaocean.com
