You won’t catch Lizette Williams MBA’07 without a stylish pair of kicks. In fact, the marketing superstar and self-professed sneakerhead currently has her eye on a pair of Air Jordan 3s. But she doesn’t collect footwear simply because they look cool. They’re a wearable reminder of how far she has come. “I grew up really poor in the South Bronx,” explains Williams. “My mom was a teenage mom. There were no Jordans.” Today, having served in major marketing roles for Fortune 50 companies, Williams steps into her own power and walks a path she alone defines for herself — no matter the shoes she’s wearing. By Claire Zulkey
Today Williams leads a 20-person marketing organization at Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, overseeing all global content marketing for business audiences. Her path there started at Columbia University, where she studied marketing as an undergraduate. After early-career experiences in strategy consulting, she joined Management Leadership for Tomorrow, a pre-MBA prep program, and enrolled at Kellogg.
Business school taught her different ways to gain and leverage influence and showed her how to be a collegial leader, she says. “There’s a level of empathetic, authentic leadership development that I think is unique to Kellogg. That honed the type of leader that I wanted to become once I started to grow in a professional setting.”
Her studies gave her a confidence that she continues to bring to her work today — in fact, during her first year at Meta her team chose a theme song for itself, selecting Jay-Z’s “Swagga Like Us.” She knows that understanding how people take pride in who they are is an asset to brands that care about cultural relevancy. When she was head of cultural engagement and experiences at McDonald’s, her team’s strategy consisted of three words: Make it dope. “I take old things and I make them dope. I’m from the Bronx. I’m Puerto Rican. I know how to do it,” she says.
Even so, it was a long road from the Bronx to bringing Bronx culture to work, especially as the first person in her family to go to college. When she first joined the business world, she straightened her natural hair and wore sensible navy suits. As a young professional fresh out of undergrad, she says, “I was groomed for a certain way of projecting myself that was socially acceptable.”
Thankfully, she says, that began to change as she rose through her career after Kellogg. In one memorable role, she built Kimberly Clark’s multicultural practice, commuting from Chicago to its headquarters in rural Wisconsin with the mission of making Huggies diapers more relevant to Black and Hispanic moms. As an Afro-Latina and a new mom herself, she says, "I decided I was going to start showing up as who I am and showing how my culture influences my purchasing decisions, and I’m going to start embedding that into the work.’ That was when my career really started to take off.” She traded her suits for hoodies, her heels for high tops, and stopped straightening her hair. “What I ended up seeing on our floor is that everybody stopped straightening their hair.”
Despite managing her professional life with the precision of a very successful brand, there were other challenges that not even the most detailed positioning statement could strategize around. As the mother of a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old, Williams says that no amount of education or intentional goal-setting could prepare her for the strains and hard decisions of working parenthood. But the experience has given her perspective. “The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve started understanding that I’m bigger than the name on the business card and that who I am is not defined by a career climb.”
An inductee into the American Advertising Federation Advertising Hall of Achievement, Williams finds purpose in motherhood, mentorship, and leading a diversity effort in the advertising industry by focusing on the big picture. “I’ve been able to just take a step back and say that it’s okay for me to define success across a multitude of places in my life, both inside and outside of work. And if it’s not going well in one place, I’ve got four other places I can look to because that’s part of the long game.”