View Leadership as a Profession: Interview with Verizon President of Global Networks and Technology Joe Russo

I recently went one-on-one with Verizon executive Joe Russo. Joe is an Executive Vice President at Verizon and serves as Verizon’s President of Global Networks and Technology.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?

Joe: Verizon is the only company I’ve ever worked for, and I’ve had a long career here. I started my journey as an intern and then my first job was in a Network Operations Center doing data services as a supervisor. Throughout this journey at the company, I’ve learned so many lessons along the way. I’ve had failures along the way, mentors, challenges, job opportunities, experiences – all that have led me to my current role now as the President of Global Networks and Technology. When I reflect on my 28+ years at the company, there are a few key themes that stand out.

I’ve always felt like my best attribute was my strength in leading people. Regardless of if I was leading a team of engineers at the Network Operations Center, leading a team of technicians in a field, leading a set of customer service representatives in a call center, or leading a group of service order writers in the enterprise segment, I approached it all with the same leadership perspective. I also, because of this, felt like I could do jobs around the company that gave me a breath of experience, such as working on our consumer business, our wholesale business, or on the network team learning how the network ran. This view I had of myself as a leader allowed me to take on risks in roles where I could, for example, run a consumer call center organization which is very different than running a network operations group or a field technician group. The foundations were all the same. I would ask myself: how do you best support the people? How do you develop them? How do you get them the resources that they need? How do you ensure the systems, processes, and work outputs are what the business needs? And that’s the way I have approached all my jobs in my career.  

I’ve had failures along the way – everyone has. If you aren’t failing occasionally, you’re not stretching yourself in new ways. Some big lessons are learned from little failures. Generally, those failures were all about not being mature enough, or experienced enough at the time, which was fine because that’s how I learned. Sometimes I didn’t approach a problem the right way or deal with people the right way, which lead to not having as much success as I would have hoped at the time.

I feel like I’m still learning every day and working to hone my leadership style. It’s been a great 28+ year ride at Verizon. 

Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?

Joe: I have a unique position leading one of the largest technology networking companies in the world, certainly the largest in the United States. Quite often I think people overlook the power of the foundational connectivity that makes all this technology work. I think they miss that a little bit. When people think about the applications they run or the devices they use, none of those things happen if there isn’t a set of underlying connective tissue that makes those things work.

Here at Verizon, we always talk about that connection and for us, the common themes that are happening right now are largely broadband, cloud, and mobility. Those are three fundamental areas that we are making sure we are building into the infrastructure of this country and, to some extent, the world.

Broadband is all about the amount of throughput capacity and latency to give customers the ability to do things they never could do before. Latency and throughput are two important metrics that measure network performance. While latency refers to the speed at which data transfers across the network, throughput looks at the volume of data that can pass through the network over a specific time.

The second trend is advancements in the cloud. While enterprise workloads in the cloud have been a trend for quite some time, we are now really starting to see with AI a notion that cloud computing is moving more towards the network edge and is much more localized. It’s certainly a capability that we have been building toward for years. 

The last trend is mobility. I think it goes unnoticed just how mobile we all are, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. In a post-COVID world, people are working from all sorts of different places. Video conferences for almost every meeting have become the norm. People are just way more mobile in all aspects of life – not only in the way they work but also in the way they interact outside of work with family, friends, and loved ones. 

I’m very focused on these three trends right now, as we work to enable them for the country and our customers.

Adam: What should everyone understand about 5G? What is the future of 5G?

Joe: The first thing people should understand about 5G is that it is a critical unlock for capabilities. Just like the prior evolutions like 3G, which gave us the ability to talk to each other while moving around, and 4G which gave us the ability to go on the internet while moving around, 5G will unlock the power to do workloads at scale while we are moving around.

Today, our current devices and applications are limited by the fact that 4G only had a certain amount of capacity, throughput, and latency. With 5G we can unlock all three of those attributes, adding significant capacity so you can do things you never could before, increasing the throughput dramatically and reducing the latency. This will uncover a set of devices and applications in the consumer marketplace, as well as in the enterprise marketplace, that we haven’t seen yet.

I have a great t-shirt that reads: “We don’t wait for the future, we build it.” That’s the way I see 5G. We’re building a set of capabilities that only 5G can do. 

Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?

Joe: The word that always comes to mind at first is adaptability. Every team, every leadership goal for their team, is slightly different. In my career, I have had several roles here at Verizon, and in each, I come back to this: you must understand what the team needs, what the business needs, and what your set of peer groups are going to need from you. You must be keenly aware of these things and able to adapt to these situations.

Empathy is another quality I try to build into my own leadership style. It’s important because you are leading people. You’re trying to motivate them, develop them, get them to do things they’ve never been able to do before, and if you can’t relate to where they are coming from and have empathy for all the complexities of life and work, I find that you’re never going to get the best out of people.

A third quality for effective leadership is approachability. Trust is like oil in a machine: it just makes things run smoothly. To build trust, people need to get to know each other so that they know where you are coming from, they understand your intentions, and they trust that your intentions are good and not self-serving. For me, that’s all about sharing common experiences and being approachable and that is one of the ways trust gets built.

Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Joe: Leaders and aspiring leaders take their skills to the next level by viewing leadership as a profession. Here’s what I mean by that: just like any profession you need to learn, you need to practice, you need to observe best practices, you need to get good feedback, and you need to internalize that feedback and digest it. I often liken leadership skills to those of a professional athlete. A professional athlete has coaches to guide them, they have statistics that give them feedback and they make their own observations about their performance. I view leadership as a profession like being a professional athlete. Now, I’m not a professional baseball player, but I am a professional leader. In my role, I need to understand: am I getting good feedback? Am I observing best practices? Am I learning about what people need from great leaders? This is where it comes down to treating it like a profession throughout your career and using all these things to pull together to get better each day.

Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?

Joe: When building, leading, and managing teams it’s important to remember that your job as a leader is to make sure you are getting the most out of your team. It’s a simple equation: you need to have the right resources, right skills and right capabilities to foster a place of growth for your team. You must develop and support your team, so they know you have their best interest in mind. This will then encourage them to follow your lead, even if the path seems unfamiliar to them.

If you are going to lead people, it’s critically important your team understands the larger plan of where you are taking them so you can develop that path with them. You must create a vision and clearly articulate how they can help the team reach this greater goal.

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?

Joe: Take risks. We all fear failure, but that’s the key to growth. If you’re not failing, you are not learning enough and not developing your skills enough. It’s so easy to stay in the same place, but taking risks helps you build character and confidence to keep going and persevere.

Build relationships. You must work to cultivate relationships with your team members to build trust and long-lasting relationships. It’s amazing how motivated your teams will become if you work to develop this trust with them and demonstrate that you have their best interest in mind. 

Play to your strengths. For me, my strength is being a leader. I know that is what I’m good at and I work every day to make sure I’m making things better for my teams and our customers who use our network.

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?

Joe: Early on in my career I was told to improve one thing every month, and that will be 12 more than the guy sitting next to you. To me, that is such a powerful piece of advice.

If you are trying to make the world, your business, your employees’ lives better, whatever it may be to you, try to focus on one goal each month. If you focus on one single objective each month, the change you make in a full year is very powerful.

Thinking about improvements this way brings a lot of clarity to what I get up and do every day. I wake up every day and just try to make things better. That piece of advice has guided me tremendously throughout my career.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one-on-one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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