29 Dec Action Plan: Google’s Melonie D. Parker

Action Plan

Google’s Melonie D. Parker has forged a remarkable career by parlaying people-centered leadership into transformative results.

by Jackie Krentzman

When Melonie D. Parker was 15, she got her first job at a grocery store in High Point, North Carolina. On Fridays, many customers used their paychecks to buy groceries, then received the remainder in cash. It was the busiest day of the week, and Parker tried to keep the checkout line moving as quickly as possible.

But one day her manager encouraged her to shift her focus, saying, “Melonie, you have to treat each person like they’re the only person in line. Don’t look at the line. Look at the person in front of you. And if they’re not nice or they’re rude, you have to tell yourself they are probably having a bad day.”

“That made quite an impression on me,” says Parker. “He was teaching me to be fully engaged and present with the person in front of me and not distracted by things that weren’t my priority.”

Parker, vice president of employee engagement at Google, has the ambitious task of leading a team of 200 plus in building and maintaining the company culture for more than 181,000 employees across more than 60 countries. She has succeeded by applying the age-old lesson of leading with empathy and compassion, which has helped make Google a gold standard in company job satisfaction.

“Melonie demonstrates an exceptionally high level of emotional intelligence when making complex business decisions, displaying deep compassion and understanding for all employees while upholding the integrity of the business,” says Marian Croak, Google’s vice president of engineering.

Overcoming obstacles

Reaching a point in her career where Parker could apply her innate and learned skills took time. She says the biggest obstacle she had to learn to overcome was understanding and applying the unwritten rules of corporate culture. Parker’s background as a first-generation college student meant that the tools she needed to navigate this labyrinth of rules had not been passed down to her, like they had to many others.

“In my 20s, I just didn’t understand these rules,” Parker says. “My parents taught me that hard work was the key, and that I had to be better, faster, and smarter to succeed. I didn’t understand the value of networking and allowing people to get to know me as a person.”

When she was learning the ropes of human resources and employee development at Lockheed Martin, Parker figured she would advance by outworking everyone. People would invite her to networking events and opportunities to socialize outside of work. She always politely declined, considering them frivolous and unnecessary. Then, one day, one of her managers pulled her aside and said, “Melonie, you’ve got to stop turning these opportunities away. You’re not getting to know people, and your network is just as important as doing your work because nobody knows that you’re sitting here doing all this work.”

Parker says the manager invited her to a holiday cookie exchange.

“I trusted her, so I went. I didn’t bake cookies, but I dipped some Oreos in white chocolate and added sprinkles,” she says. “That day, I began to get to know them in a different way that helped to build camaraderie and trust, and my network became stronger just like that. That was my first ‘aha’ moment, and I have sought out opportunities like that ever since.”

From that point on, Parker was on the fast track to the leading edge of shaping positive corporate culture, holding various roles at Lockheed Martin for 17 years, then as vice president of human resources and communications at Sandia National Laboratories, and for the past eight years at Google.

Making her mark: “Add in, don’t fit in”

Parker attributes her success in part to the adage she coined, “Add in, don’t fit in.” The phrase has become her mantra and the organizing force of her decision-making. Fitting in implies giving up your unique attributes, when they should instead be added to the mix.

“One of the beautiful things that my parents did was instill in me the skills and know-how to fit in,” she says. “But over time, I learned it’s not about fitting in. It’s where you add in. What are the skills you possess that no one else does? How do you bring them to the table? When you know that you’re adding in, you gain confidence and respect.”

Guiding her team to add in means recognizing others’ superpower, sometimes before they even know it themselves. “Good leaders see others’ potential,” Parker says. “Just because a person may not be good at one thing, it doesn’t mean that there’s not something else they are exceptional at that can add to the mission. As leaders, we have the responsibility to create conditions where people can show up and perform their best.”

Harry L. Williams, the president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, attributes Parker’s success to her uncanny ability to connect with and see the value in people, regardless of their status or background.

“Melonie is able to get the best out of everybody,” he says. “There is something electric about her presence; you want to pay attention and listen. People trust her. She will take in all the information, capture what everyone is saying, and put together a plan of action. That sort of intentional leadership is transformational.”

Leadership lessons

Over the years, Parker has honed a variety of strategies that can be applied by anyone, anywhere. It starts with listening and actively hearing employees’ feedback. Every week, Google conducts an employee survey, with two questions that gauge employee satisfaction. Parker’s team tracks trends and patterns, applying them to the lifecycle of a Googler from recruiting and hiring to the workplace experience and even to offboarding, to create meaningful experiences across each phase of the lifecycle.

“Those survey responses allow us to see around the corner,” she says. “They supply the information we need to constantly iterate and improve the culture for everyone.”

One critical component of job satisfaction that has undergone a sea change in the past few years is work-life balance. Beginning with the scramble to accommodate employees’ and companies’ needs during the pandemic, there’s been a whiplash of rules and messaging in Corporate America: You can work from home every day. No, you need to be in the office twice a week. Actually, make it five days a week.

Parker prefers to focus on work-life integration instead. This approach means blending one’s personal and professional lives to determine how to best prioritize tasks and set a schedule. Work-life balance, on the other hand, emphasizes keeping one’s work life and personal life separate, constructing distinct walls between the two. Work-life integration focuses on results, recognizing that to some degree, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all typical workweek.

Early in her career, Parker learned this the hard way. She was a single mom raising three kids and trying to maintain strict boundaries between her role as a mom and as an employee. She wasn’t able to do either role to her satisfaction. Today, she says she wishes artificial intelligence was a tool she could’ve used back then.

“I would have leveraged it for my schedule—not only my day-to-day schedule, but [also] things like setting optimum time frames for taking a nap or planning our vacations,” she says. “It would have saved me so much time and allowed me to focus on what was most important: spending time with my family and maximizing my impact in the workplace.”

Go for the gusto

Over the decades, Parker has soaked up wisdom from a vast array of sources. But she keeps circling back to this quote by former President Theodore Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

“This quote resonates with me for several reasons,” Parker says. “First, it values action over inaction and calls us to move from the sidelines into the arena of life. Second, it acknowledges there is no effort without shortcomings or failure. Lastly, this quote is a testament to the courage needed to be vulnerable. To enter the arena is to risk failure, public judgment, and personal pain. In short, it is better to live a life of meaningful struggle than passive safety.”

Of course, to take action, you first must put yourself in the arena. Parker counsels aspiring leaders to open themselves up to new experiences.

“Early in your career, grab a hold of as many experiences as possible,” she says. “That will allow you to know a lot about the business. And by exploring a wide range of roles, teams, and departments, you will know which competencies you prefer to exercise the most. And then as you go up your career ladder, you’ll know where you want to specialize.

“And then you want to create an opportunity where you’re bringing others with you, and you want to have a plethora of mentors who help you see around the corner and guide you as well, because you want to be in this continuous learner mindset.”

Williams says that people gravitate toward Parker because she isn’t afraid to make decisions and is willing to shoulder the consequences when things don’t work out—and happily gives credit to others when they do.

“When Melonie calls, you respond,” says Williams. “She is trusted because everyone knows they are talking to a person who is about action.” EW

Photographs by Ken Cedeno