Get To Know: Eliza Leonardis

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Why We Do What We Do Here in Corporate Marketing

Eliza Leonardis’s official title is Director of Digital Marketing. But if you’re ever lucky enough to get to work with Eliza, you’ll quickly learn that doesn’t begin to explain what she does. “Director of Digital Marketing” is an apt description of the piece of Eliza’s job that relates to making sure Exela’s web site looks how it should look and says what it should say. But it doesn’t address Eliza’s role as the head of Exela’s Corporate Marketing team.

Corporate marketing’s mission is to raise brand awareness. Corporate marketing is the reason you know Exela exists, and equally important, the reason you feel compelled to pay us any attention at all. To paraphrase a television commercial from the 1970s, when Exela looks good, we look good. Corporate marketing is different from product marketing, which raises awareness and desire for what we’re selling, but we work hand in hand with the Product Marketing team and need to always be aligned in terms of message. With a company of our size (23,000 employees all over the globe), this isn’t as easy as you might think, especially when you consider the two teams operate in at least four different time zones. Anyway, not only does Eliza run Corporate Marketing (I report to her, as do all the others on the team), she also has to make sure we’re all in constant communication with Product Marketing.

But none of the above addresses Eliza’s unofficial role at Exela, which is a sort of hybrid of “Chief Motivation Officer” and “Chief Morale Booster.”

The motivation part

Eliza doesn’t just get the job done, she gets all of us to get the job done. And again, that’s not always as easy as you might think. Each of us has a distinct function (for example, I’m outward-facing content, whereas my colleague, Nick, is inward-facing), and the only thing any of those functions really have in common is the goal of getting your attention and keeping you interested. But Eliza has a deep understanding of what each of us does and knows exactly how to get the best performance out of each of us.

The morale part

They say when you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. Well, that’s kind of true, especially for those of us who are, in fact, getting paid to do at Exela what we would likely be doing as hobbies if our jobs didn’t exist. But some might argue work is always “work.” That’s why it’s called “work.” That’s where Eliza’s other unofficial role comes in. No one knows how she does it exactly. We know it has something to do with the upbeat and bubbly personality. We know it has something to do with really believing in each of her reports, even when we don’t necessarily believe in ourselves. We know it has something to do with the pizza parties (including today’s Valentine’s Pizza My Heart Party) and the Hershey’s Nuggets that magically appear on her desk when we’re in a meeting that’s about to go long. But there’s also something intangible Eliza brings to the table that has this team producing prolifically and constantly setting new goals and challenges. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at our LinkedIN page, which she’s grown more than 300% since this time last year).