A C-Suite Master Class: Lessons in Leadership

Gale told a large, captive audience that education and the love and support of people who cared about her – most notably her grandmother – played a major role in helping her achieve her goals.

“I was born in poverty, raised by a grandmother, and today I am where I am today,” King said. “One, I had a tremendous grandmother who gave me love. And I had a dream, and I did the work. So there were people who cared about me, loved me, and instilled a sense of success and work ethic. Because success comes through work.

“I am always telling people that anything and everything is possible if you do ‘Left foot, Right foot’,” she added. “You’ve got to get up and make progress toward your journey.”

King, who earned a journalism degree from the University of Florida, said she couldn’t see herself in her current role when she was 22 years old.

“I could see that I wanted more out of life, and I wanted to move up,” she said. “So I started to see that there were other jobs and I started to work on ways to move into some of those jobs.”

HER JOURNEY
King had never lived anywhere outside of Gainesville when someone at Nationwide “saw something in me and offered me an opportunity to move to Columbus, Ohio,” she said. She has since relocated five times.

“You have to be open to testing yourself and taking advantage of opportunities,” she said.

BREAKTHROUGH MOMENTS
King said she’s had too many breakthrough moments to count, but said one of the greatest is her journey to where she is now.

“The statistics of my birth would have said at best, I would be in a lower level job,” said King, the first in her family to graduate from college. “You weren’t born into a home with people with a college education. Everything would have said I would not be where I am today.”

“Breakthrough moments come daily,” she said. “They come all the time. You just have to be aware and build on them.”

King told the audience to always be thankful. When she became a Senior Vice President, she wrote 10 of her former colleagues and bosses personal letters thanking them for their help and reminding them of something specific they did to help her advance.

Most of all, King told conference attendees to always value their worth.

“I always believed I mattered as much as anybody else,” King said. “Other people mattered, but I mattered as much as they did. You have to begin to get to a place that wherever you are, you deserve to be there. And you don’t care if there are 100 of you or one. . . The only thing people will respond to is how you show up. If you show up weak, that’s how they’ll treat you. You have to act like you belong until you feel like you belong. And that’s what I did.

“How you treat yourself is how other people will treat you,” King added. “Act like you matter.”