“Leverage your strengths,” Catherine Berger from Grupo Bimbo

Meet Catherine Berger, Vice President, Marketing Transformation & Services at Grupo Bimbo, where she helps reimagine how one of the world's largest baked goods companies connects with modern consumers. She is known for building teams and driving meaningful change through channels like consumer experience, full-funnel investment, analytics, content, packaging, consumer connections, and marketing transformation. 

Catherine recently sat down with Jocelyn Hudak, Senior Director, Content and Digital Marketing, at SiriusXM Media in our Pass the Mic booth at CES. During their time together, they discussed how connection can lead to success, and how encouraging people to leverage their strengths puts teams on a path to growth.

Take a listen to Catherine’s full interview below, and then check out some highlights from the conversation.

Leverage your strengths.

Highlight: “Knowing what your strengths are and knowing how you can leverage them—that's really empowering. It's one thing to say you're really great at connecting one-on-one with people because you're a really great listener. But it's different to say you can really pull together a cross-functional group of people and get the best out of them because you listen.” - Catherine Berger

Connection leads to success.

Highlight: “I think I've learned over the course of my career that connection is one of the most—if not the most—important components to success, at least in marketing… I think listening is a superpower that not a lot of folks have. Even sitting down and doing something like this, you get to hear different perspectives and address those perspectives, and I think that connection leads to influence and influence leads to business growth.” - Catherine Berger

Point out other people’s strengths.

Highlight: “When we're hiring diversely—and I mean that in every sense of the word—we enable people to point out each other's strengths. Because they become very obvious when you've got a lot of different strengths sitting at the table… You think that you know yourself best, but then someone is like, ‘You're really great at this,’ or ‘You did that because you've got this particular sensibility.’ And then, it's like, ‘Wow, yeah, I do.’” - Catherine Berger

Plan your trajectory.

Highlight: “Oftentimes we're asked, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ or ‘What do you want to do in five years?’ And that concept of trajectory and how important it is, that the first several steps in your career matters so much for where you're going to end up, it just really made an impact on me. And I think that's a helpful way to think about navigating careers short-term and long-term.” - Catherine Berger

Figuring out what you (and others on your team) are good at is a great way to build teams up with strength and strategy. Looking for more inspiration like this? Check out the Pass the Mic page.

Feeling inspired? Read on.