Erica: Y'all, we got someone super special on the show today. Someone that I am super proud to call a friend. And, also, y'all, I'm just really freaking proud of her right now because she is the newly appointed VP and GM of Capital Broadcasting Company, WRAL TV and Fox 50. And if y'all live near me, you know what I'm talking about. But y'all, this is big time because this marks the first time ever, not just because she's a woman, but ever, that both TV and digital are under one unified leadership. This woman is kicking ass. She is shattering ceilings, and she ain't worried about taking names because she is taking charge. So Heather Gray, how are you, my friend?

Heather: It's fun. How am I doing? I'm doing great. How are you?

Erica: I am doing great. But let's talk about this historic promotion that you just got. You are the first VP and GM, and first woman in this role too. So how does that feel?

Heather: It feels exciting, and a lot of responsibility, but not in a heavy way, in a really adventure kind of way. When you're forging a path, and it seems sort of ridiculous that it's forging a path and it's 2025, but that's what we're doing still. And that's good because I've been given the keys to do that. I can't even tell you how important that was to see and hear for people throughout the organization. I was shocked at the response. It didn't really occur to me as being this outlier data point, but it sure has been since the announcement was made. The amount of trust and support that came internally from the women across our company, and the men, but the women you heard loud and clear from, was pretty exciting.

Erica: Isn't that such an awesome feeling?

Heather: Yes. And if you weren't taking it really seriously before, suddenly you realize how important it is to everyone around you.

Erica: Yeah, I know that feeling, because sometimes you think you're just in it doing the work. You're showing up, being the kind of person you want to be, doing the good work. And then you're like, wow, what is all this hoopla? But then you really recognize how important it is to others.

Heather: I've talked to a lot of leaders in similar positions. It might not be gender specific, but doing something new, forging a way where that work will be messy and hard, and it's gonna be hard for whomever is coming behind you, that you're paving the way forward. I really felt it became a mantle: okay, I'm in it for me, I'm in it for the company, but man, am I in it for the women in this organization.

Erica: Heck yes. And tell me about the industry, because it's pretty male dominated.

Heather: It is. The way I grew up in local media, people my age rose through the ranks starting in small size markets and moving job by job. That pathway is a little less rigid now, you can accelerate faster through market size, but it was very much the way it was when I started. I started on the engineering production side in the nineties, which, I'm not sure the word STEM was used very often then. So when you're in engineering, technology, and production, working with a lot of equipment in that tech heavy space, I was oftentimes the only woman in the room.

Erica: Did you recognize it at that moment? Because sometimes when I was the only woman and I was young, I was totally naive to it.

Heather: Completely naive. I wish there had been some coaching for our younger selves going, hey, what you're doing right now is really unique and interesting, and you can parlay that in a way you might not understand. It was like, okay, raising my hand, doing the job, doing the work, not really being aware of what that composition was. That didn't come until much later, where you kind of look around and go, wait a minute, I'm the only one in here that's like this.

Erica: And you've been in this industry your whole life, you've raised children. When I'm thinking about news, media, and broadcasting, I don't really see motherhood fitting in easily.

Heather: You work through it. I did a lot of strange shift work. In newsrooms and local media, it's a lot of holidays, you never walk away from the business, it's twenty-four-seven now and was probably at least twelve back then. But you can make it work in positive ways. I worked early mornings for almost a decade, going in at two or three in the morning, which sounds horrific. It is. But if you have small children and you can figure out sleep schedules and coordinate with a partner, you could get away with a parent being present twenty-four hours a day for the children, which led us to some tough decisions around caregiving. I wasn't always my best self from a sleep deprived perspective, but I was able to be home to pick up from school, go to practices, be available by working crazy hours. That's the benefit side of it, but it's really hard and disruptive on your body and sleep patterns. There's some wonky things you do, like sleeping in closets during hurricanes so you can be on air twenty-four hours a day. But as long as you have a decent support system, you build your village to help with breaking news events, which is an odd path, but that's what you do.

Erica: I'm glad you pointed this out, because I've been coordinating a submission for South by Southwest for next year, called career momentum versus motherhood. Because it's this whole concept of, do I have to make a choice? What I love about what you just said is it did provide you that flexibility back in the nineties, when that wasn't a thing, to actually be a mom and be an all in worker.

Heather: I would say there are very few people who've worked a morning news cycle who have a lot of positive things to say about that, but that was one for me a hundred percent. The kids were the most important, still are even though they're adults. To be able to show up for all of that every single day, because you were done by twelve or one, done with the news, then you went back and tried to squeeze in a nap. It was one of the odd perks of that schedule for a long time. Of course, the minute we were into caregiving facilities, preschool or pre-k, I was like, oh, put me on a day side schedule, get some years back on my life.

Erica: Oh my gosh, get the years back. I don't know if you ever get a normal sleep schedule though, with kids, even when they're sixteen. Then you have different stresses and you're up at night for different reasons.

Heather: When you wake up at two or three in the morning, sleep training is a really real thing for you. My kids were sleep trained, they slept like champs by three months, or I was too tired to notice, I'm not really sure which one.

Erica: Hey, look, we make it work. Okay, so being in the news industry, being a mom figuring it all out, in my world, sticky floors are those limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors, perfectionism, fear, burnout. Did you ever experience any of that in your career?

Heather: So often. I wish I had a way to verbalize what it was in the moment, but so often. You always think back to different cycles of your career, and if you could give advice to that version of you, it was so much like, your gut is right, trust it. If you think you can do it and you believe, you're right. Obviously you're showing up, you have work ethic, tools, training, education, but so often there was this silent dialogue going on inside of you: I think you could do this, these people around, do they understand it, I think you do understand it. And not speaking up, not saying anything. It wasn't necessarily a lack of confidence, I think it was really believing that what I thought was actually real.

Erica: I don't think I ever really heard of imposter syndrome until much later in my career, after I had already been through it all. But it still creeps up from time to time, with this new promotion. Did you feel any of that stepping into it? I know you held it internally for a bit. Did that help buffer it?

Heather: There are times this type of role has been offered before, and I didn't take it, for a lot of reasons, some of it I think is imposter-esque. But this time around, I'm so rooted in who I am and what I bring to the table, and that it is not what came before me. And that's okay, might even be better than okay. You think about qualifications and experience that former people in this world had, and mine is not the same. Valuing not being the same, in the current culture and shifting industry, was a huge asset.

Erica: I love that you say you're so rooted in who you are. Is that something you've always felt, or did that come later in life?

Heather: That definitely came later, over the last eight to ten years. You get a lot of training, a lot of three sixty feedback, you hear from other people and believe that feedback, and then you finally stop. This, I'm pretty good with people, I care about people, that should be one of those skill sets that's really important. I have the experience, don't believe my ten years or twenty years is less or more important than someone else's. It's different, it was a different path. It was recent and I wish it had been earlier. Maybe you finally get to a point where you need to be okay with who you are and what you bring to the table, how that could be advantageous to a company, and not making the case in the room, but having that assumed in everything you bring every single day. You don't need to be stating it over and over, the value of it. You're just bringing the value.

Erica: You are the value. You are the real MVP. I did a podcast session earlier with a woman who talked about putting up boundaries and recognizing you don't have to be everything to everyone, because you were hired for your own superpowers. If you're trying to be everything to everyone, you're watering down what you bring to the table, and then nobody knows what you bring to the table anyway.

Heather: You get lost then. Because if you're being compared to a set of attributes that lived with a different person before, you're not gonna be the same ever, and trying to move that way directionally leads you to muddy confusion, lack of clarity, loss of self, which I've experienced at a point in my career. You lose what your strengths are, your superpowers, because you're trying to emulate a mentor you trusted and respected, or someone else giving you feedback. All feedback is important, but not all needs to be change making.

Erica: I always say not all feedback is good feedback, but it does tell you something about the other person. So while someone may say you come across as intimidating, okay, great, now I know how to better communicate with you. But that doesn't mean you need to change all those things about you, just because it probably came from some old pale, stale white male higher up the ladder than you.

Heather: I like your sayings.

Erica: Alright, girl, you are super involved in organizations like the United Arts Council and the Local Media Association. Why is local journalism and its continued growth so important in today's crazy connected world, from a leadership perspective?

Heather: Local news in particular is critically important. It's not just how people understand what's going on around them, it's also verified, vetted, sourced, which I think is a big area of opportunity as it relates to content that lives. We talk a lot about news deserts. It started with print publications, newspapers, and there are very few print publications, especially dailies, left in the country, and that created a certain type of news desert. Now the business has changed, the model has changed. I've lived through this cycle, the internet didn't exist when I started, and then content on the internet became something much later. Going through those news cycle changes, and what that means for distribution models of information for people, it's complicated, but I think we're all better served when we have more sources of information, and when we can use our own critical thinking skills to vet those out and arrive at opinions about what's happening. The more it's narrowed in focus, the more boundaries and barriers put up around a right to a free press, hurts us all, because it means less available information. I don't think any of us want to live in silos with only one or two streams of information coming to us.

Erica: Hell no. Talking about your expansive career has got me thinking about mentorship and sponsorship. How has that played a role? Did it come to you organically, or did you have to figure it out on your own?

Heather: I think both ways. There's formal mentorship, opportunities throughout my career, here and in previous roles. A lot of informal too. I was thinking about mentorship yesterday, we had a woman on our team who's leaving, moving out of state, and I popped in to say goodbye. She stood up and said, I need to talk to you right now. She walked me into my office and said, I don't know how to do this, but today's the day I need to be brave about it, I want you to be my mentor, is that possible? And I said, well, yeah, it is. There was this relief on her side, and I said, are you okay, and she said, that took a lot for me to stand up. I thought about her bravery in that moment, and wondered, have I ever done it that way before, and the answer was no. I thought about what are the most valuable paths for mentorship or sponsorship. You gotta have all kinds, the formal one, here's the requirements of this mentorship, but then, who are the people I want to listen to. One of the reasons when we first had coffee, I was really excited, I wanted to listen to you. We're really different, our style of communication is different, even our energy levels and the way we approach rooms are different, so I was intrigued by, I want to listen to you for a little while, what would that look and feel like. That's very informal, but I'd say another pathway for doing the same thing.

Erica: I love that, because whatever I did, it worked, because we had coffee again.

Heather: Yeah.

Erica: And she's here again today. It's so interesting you bring that story, because it got me looking back through my life, and I've had a ton of great mentors and sponsors, all happened organically, and I've never once asked someone to be one.

Heather: There are times you might not have capacity to be a mentor to someone. But think about how that makes me feel to be asked, and immediately begin advocating for how I can help. It doesn't matter if it's a different industry, or someone I've never met before. If there's something identified about you that you might be able to help me with, I'm like, yes please, how can we take all these decades of learning and experience and failure and iteration and fast forward, accelerate whatever it is you're trying to do, because we don't want to keep it to ourselves.

Erica: And for everybody listening, Heather and I met because we were on a panel called glass ceilings and sticky floors, after the book, in this really cool museum with shattering glass hanging from the ceiling. They asked you, what piece of advice would you give to women out there looking to climb the ladder, but they feel like they're cracking their head against a really thick panel of glass. What would you tell them?

Heather: I raise my hand in every room, whether it's for the opportunity or to learn more about it. Curiosity, if you're innately curious about everything, if you get excited about things you don't know anything about, because it means you get to learn, that's been everything for me. I constantly raise my hand and ask the questions, and I've frequently found that the questions might not always be well received in a room, but eventually they are, because people figure out they're good questions. They might lead us to different types of thinking, so that's been a track record of success. When people wonder who's gonna work on a team, if you have any nugget of curiosity around what that might mean, or even if you want to confirm it's something you're not interested in at all, give it to us, I'll do it.

Erica: Would you say curiosity is one of your personal core values?

Heather: Yes.

Erica: What would be some other core values you hold dear?

Heather: I genuinely believe I can learn how to do anything. I don't think there's any level of education someone has that I could not achieve. We talk a lot about emotional intelligence, but when you think about capacity, expertise capacity, I feel like anyone can really develop expertise. So it's around, I just really value learning and education, formal or informal in nature. I love hands on education, but learning, I think when everyone's starting from scratch, when you have to learn about whatever the change might be, that's a really equitable space to be in.

Erica: From ground zero. I like that. So what are you learning right now, besides your whole new role?

Heather: The role is interesting, because we talk a lot about the changes in the industry and the acceleration of change. It's always changed, every decade there's a rollover related to technology or how people consume what we do. But the speed right now is a dizzy cycle, because of the contributions of machine learning and what that means for our business, when you're a content creator. There's a clear technology path around workflow and systems, but then there's one around content itself as a product, and the influence of all of this into the words we write, the video we shoot, the way we send push alerts, the way all of that is categorized in a web world we cannot control. Being careful about what words we're using, what video, what we're saying about it as a brand and organization, there's so much to learn there, being thoughtful and intentional in a space that doesn't allow time to just sit with it for a while. The speed of that is one thing. Then the business model has completely changed. We all love appointment television, people sitting in their living room watching TV, but the reality is more than fifty percent of the audience is consuming us in places that are not what you'd consider legacy television. Audience understanding and education is a really key piece right now.

Erica: There's still something very nostalgic for me about having the news on when I'm cooking dinner, getting the kids ready, because that's what my family did, they always had the news on in the background.

Heather: Having the news on via television is an interesting, key piece of our business. People will say they watch TV, but really that's not what they're watching, because television is coming through a television device and it's not being cast or streamed. That's a digital distribution channel versus a linear television channel. It was built on this one, and people sort of think it's still that one, but that's completely changed.

Erica: Wild. She's taken us to school, y'all. Heather, as you step into this unified leadership role, what is your vision for WRAL, Fox 50, Capital Broadcasting?

Heather: The vision is to be viable from a business model perspective, and to be a source of solution for all of our different communities, and I define our communities in a bunch of different ways. There's the community at large, which is our region, how are we positively influencing or impacting our region. There's our community of consumers and users, the overall audience community on the client side. Then there's the community that are the advertiser client side, which is very different. So it's about how to successfully navigate a business model in which we are positively influencing each of those communities. The fourth one is our internal community as well. I have a lot of focus on community business success, and leaning heavily into what we do best, which is localization and hyper localization of content, to be really important to all of those communities' lives here.

Erica: I love that. The question I always love to ask everyone as we wrap up, if you could go back all the way to your first role, your first day stepping into that job, what is that one piece of advice you'd give that Heather, knowing everything she knows now?

Heather: Every piece of your life, everything you've done, has made you fully equipped to be an absolute success.

Erica: Boom, mic drop. Heather, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's so fun to take our friendship from IRL to the podcasting relationship.

Heather: That's really exciting right now.