Julia Stewart’s rise to CEO was nothing like climbing a career ladder. That’s because a straight path through the glass ceiling doesn’t always exist, she says.
Stewart, 68, has spent 20 years of her life running companies, including a decade at the helm of Dine Brands — which owns IHOP and Applebee’s, and had a peak market cap of $2.1 billion during her tenure. She’s currently the CEO of wellness company Alurx, which she founded in 2020.
With a background in marketing, rather than business operations, Stewart says getting ahead as a woman meant she had to be open-minded when seeking out new opportunities. She proactively left good jobs when she realized she was unlikely to get promotions, and searched for roles — even lateral ones — that could help her master new skills.
The strategy helped her carve an incremental path forward, she says.
“Early on in my career, it was all about getting more responsibility [and] more accountability,” Stewart tells CNBC Make It. “In my world, that wasn’t a ladder. I would sidestep and I would go over here to get over there.”
Leaving a ‘cushy’ job to learn new skills
After studying communications at San Diego State University, Stewart worked as a regional marketing manager for fast-food brands like Carl’s Jr. and Burger King throughout the 1980s. She quickly learned to seek out a new job, where she could learn additional — or, simply, different — skills and responsibilities, whenever she feared her progress could stagnate.
Sometimes, that meant moving to different regions within the same company, Stewart says. Other times, it meant leaving the company entirely.
“In that first [nearly] 15 years of marketing, I kept moving to get more responsibility and accountability,” says Stewart, adding: “I think I moved four or five times just for Burger King alone. I lived all over the country. I worked internationally. I did a ton before I ever got to [be] vice president.”
After landing that vice president of marketing role, at Stuart Anderson’s Black Angus Steakhouse chain, Stewart came to believe she’d never reach the C-suite without experience running business operations. She decided to leave her “cushy” role for an executive training program at Taco Bell, which required her to put on a uniform and work for 90 days as an assistant manager in a restaurant for hands-on experience, she says.
The move could’ve been considered a demotion. Instead, learning more about how individual restaurants brought in money opened up Stewart’s career path. She eventually oversaw Taco Bell’s entire U.S. franchising business, and left in 1998 to become president of Applebee’s.
After being denied a promotion to CEO at that company, she says, she accepted an offer to become IHOP’s first-ever woman CEO — and eventually acquired Applebee’s in a $2 billion takeover, forming Dine Brands.
A jungle gym, not a ladder
Don’t make a lateral career move just for the sake of doing it, especially if you haven’t finished learning new skills in your current position, career experts say. “I’m not suggesting everybody should do it,” Stewart adds.
But they can be useful for workers with stalled careers — even if they don’t always feel like obvious steps forward, research shows. Longtime Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg described her career ascent as more of a “jungle gym scramble” than a ladder, a phrase she attributed to journalist Pattie Sellers, in her 2013 book “Lean In.”
Ladders only allow you to move up or down, or get off, while a jungle gym allows for “more creative exploration,” Sandberg wrote.
If you do ultimately find success, you gain a new responsibility, Stewart adds: Pass on the lessons you’ve learned.
“When I finally got to the peak … it was all about, then, make sure you dig down into the organization, you give back, you mentor, you make a difference, you help people, you pay it forward,” says Stewart.
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