Google Executive Mentors HPU Students

Teena Piccione, a global transformation and operations executive at Google and High Point University’s Data Expert in Residence, spoke to students and faculty about life skills at the third annual Elizabeth Miller Strickland Women’s Leadership Summit.

HIGH POINT, N.C., April 1, 2024 – Teena Piccione, a global transformation and operations executive at Google and High Point University’s Data Expert in Residence, recently visited campus to mentor students and encourage leaders.

Students, faculty and staff filled the Callicutt Like Skills Theater on March 19 to hear Piccione’s message “From Googling Leaders to Leading Google” as keynote speaker for the third annual Elizabeth Miller Strickland Women’s Leadership Summit. She also joined a panel discussion with Linda Foggie, managing director and global head of real estate operations for Citi Realty; Andrea Mohamed, COO and co-founder of Launched2Lead; Jacqueline Olich, principal and founder of Veza Alliance Management; and Elizabeth Segovia, CEO of TradeCentric.

While on campus, Piccione met with business, engineering, data analytics, statistics and political science classes and shared lunch with students.

“I find there are too far and few women at the top,” said Piccione, who is part of HPU’s Access to Innovators program. “I always say I have a foundation of five F’s and one A – faith, finance, friends, family and fun. We underpin it by A, which is attitude. Everything you do and bring is exponentially part of who you are and the fabric that you weave in. Everything I have done in my career had to be based on that.”

Making it to the top of any profession requires a bit of grit, Piccione said. She shared her background as a first-generation college and high school graduate. She learned to articulate her value while growing up with brothers and a father who was a self-made mechanic.

Piccione joined Google in 2019 as managing director to lead Telco, Media & Entertainment, Gaming (TMEG) industry sales and customer engineering teams within Google Cloud. In 2022, she became senior director of Google’s Core Project Management Office, supporting corporate engineering teams. As the only woman at the podium leading 3,400 men and working with engineers who are technical and sometimes difficult to understand, she overcame challenges to make Google easier for consumers to use.

Although college graduates have the advantage of knowledge, they must learn how to translate what they have learned into where they want their career to go, Piccione said. Students should not expect to start at the top but can get there, she said. She provided the following tips for students to start their careers:

• Find a mentor.
• Find an advocate.
• Hire a board of directors (people who will be honest and advocate).
• Create a LinkedIn profile, post and tag well-known members.
• Scrub your social media to make sure every photo and post reflects you well.
• Know everything is always online.
• Learn to network.
• Validate your references.
• Volunteer.
• Keep learning (Google, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon offer free courses).
• Never give up (and help somebody else).

Natalie Babinski, a freshman business administration major from Orlando, Florida, said she loved the ways Piccione discussed current conditions and social media.

“To be educated at our age about what we should and maybe shouldn’t be sharing is so important,” said Babinski. “The digital footprint is real. I also enjoyed how she shared her struggle, her personal background and then shifted the focus to us, wanting to connect with students and be engaging.”

When asked why the time is right for women leaders, Piccione related her experience as an executive at AT&T when a man assumed she was a subordinate and asked her to get coffee for him at a meeting. Another male executive intervened and explained Piccione oversaw AT&T’s finances. The first man quickly left the meeting.

“Never has power transitioned so fast,” said Piccione. “Women right now have all the buying power. Women in the world are inheriting more money than anyone else. The times have now changed. If you think about it, women bring a lot of things that men don’t have. We have a bit of compassion and there’s also a drive because we couldn’t get to the top and we didn’t have all the seats. There’s also the impression we have earned our seats. When they ask why for women’s leadership, it’s because we have had a grit and a grace that has gotten us where we are.”

The Strickland Women’s Leadership Council was established in August 2020 as part of a generous $12 million gift from Elizabeth Miller Strickland, who passed away Nov. 14, 2023. The council was founded on her belief that the empowerment of women in business and leadership is a life skill worth pursuing.