What led you to where you are today in your career?

My career started in live television. I got my footing on the partnerships side, learning how brands think and what they actually want from sponsorships. 

Moving into social and digital opened things up. Working on brands with global audiences taught me something I carry everywhere: when you know exactly who you’re talking to and what motivates them, the performance reflects it. Attention is earnable, but only if you understand who you’re asking for it from. That scope also demanded a level of precision I hadn’t operated at before. When that many people are watching, there’s no room to misstep.

I also got experience on the opposite end of the spectrum, in environments with real permission to experiment and fail. No preciousness about the brand, just creative latitude to try things and see what worked. Learning to operate in both modes, high-stakes precision and fearless experimentation, has shaped how I lead more than anything else.

I joined STN on the production side and grew into creative, then social and marketing. The throughline has always been moving toward where the most interesting strategic questions live.

How has your leadership style evolved over time?

I started in the trenches. A strong executor, always willing to raise my hand, and I tried to touch as much work as possible. That builds credibility, but ultimately it caps the team at your own bandwidth.

The shift I’ve made is from executor to multiplier. I focus less on producing the best output myself and more on building the conditions that let creative, social, and marketing teams deliver sharper, more distinct work than I could alone. That means clear structure, real coaching, and standards that hold when I’m not there.

The other shift is how I judge ideas. I used to look for the right answer. Now I push for the sharper question. This helps me push the team and elevate the work.

What’s a mistake that taught you an important lesson?

I used to blame the process when work went sideways. The process is easy to point at. It’s visible, fixable, and doesn’t require a hard conversation. But in highly specialized work like ours, the real issue is fit, not process. We have forced the wrong team on the wrong brief, then ended up rewriting the steps when output fell short.

This isn’t about limiting growth. It’s about being honest that some work demands specific expertise, and forcing a fit costs you across the board.

The real lever is people. Get the right team in the room. Galvanize them around a shared why. Give them the resources to do it well. That combination is where I’ve seen the biggest jumps in quality, speed, and strategy. 

How do you stay resilient during high-pressure moments?

My foundation came from live television. Early in my career, I was producing and supporting live global fan votes that affected the outcome of a show. When something goes wrong on live TV, there’s no cutting away, no do-over. You adapt in real time, or you fail in real time. That environment trained me fast.

What I learned is that resilience is not about the moment. It’s about everything you did before it.

When I think about high-pressure situations, my instinct goes straight to preparation. Have we walked through the scenarios? Does everyone know their role? Do we have a clear escalation path? Have we built in redundancies? If you’ve done that work, then when things go sideways – and they will – you’re not starting from scratch. You’re pivoting within a structure. You trust your team because you built the team. You move fast because you already thought through the alternatives.

Perspective does the rest. My mom was a NICU nurse. Her daily reality involved life and death. Social media is not that. Remembering that keeps the weight of the work proportional to what it actually is.

How do you define success for yourself and for the company?

For the company, success is an orchestrated dance. Everyone is in their seat, hitting their most critical outcome, trusting the people around them to do the same. When that happens, you feel the whole thing move together.

We’ve built infrastructure to make that real. The Great Game of Business gave us a framework for financial transparency. The whole team knows the target, where we stand, and what their role is in getting there. We track measurables every week across every department: new business meetings booked, client account health, scorecards, etc. Signals we’ve refined over years to know whether we’re actually on track.

For me, success is growth. Mine and the people around me. The 1% better framework is real, but what it means in this season is getting sharper as a coach and a mentor. Understanding how different people receive information. Figuring out which communication style makes a message stick. That work is harder than most people realize, and it’s where I spend a lot of my energy right now.

It also means staying ahead of a landscape that doesn’t slow down. The marketing and social space is constantly shifting. If I’m not finding new ways to break through, level up the product, and help set what the bar looks like, I’m behind. Success means leading that evolution.

What is one piece of advice you give to people working under you?

The best thing I can do for someone new to my team is get everything on the table before we start moving.

I use an exercise called Assumptions, Agreements, and Expectations. Depending on the situation, it might be a formal exercise or just a conversation, but the intent is the same: get it all out up front. What I’m going to assume. What I expect from them. What we’re both agreeing to. The non-negotiables for how we work together.

When that doesn’t happen, you end up with two people working toward the same goal with completely different definitions of what done looks like. Nobody flags it because nobody realizes it. You’re not moving as one unit because you were never on the same scorecard.

This applies everywhere. Project kickoffs: What is the end state, and is everyone clear on it before we start? Client relationships: how are we going to work together, and what is our team actually there to do? 

Misaligned assumptions are quiet. They don’t surface until something breaks.

What do you wish you had known earlier?

I spent years fighting for a seat at the table. What I eventually realized was that it wasn’t the right table.

There’s real value in putting your head down and working toward something. But the effort has to be pointed in the right direction. Fighting to be seen in an environment that doesn’t respect what you bring or has no interest in developing you is energy spent in the wrong place.

Finding a place that values your perspective, gives you room to grow, and is willing to invest in you is where the work compounds. That’s where you actually become who you’re capable of becoming.

I wish I had known earlier that the goal wasn’t to earn a seat anywhere. It was to find the room worth being in.

What habits or routines have had the biggest impact on your success?

Knowing what you’re working toward and checking in on it regularly. That’s the foundation everything else sits on.

As a team, we review our scorecard weekly. Not as an administrative exercise, but as a genuine gut check on where we are and what needs attention. Every quarter, we do a lookback, review what happened, what worked, what didn’t, and make adjustments going forward. Then we plan the next quarter with that context in hand. 

The bigger habit underneath all of it is just discipline. Taking the annual goal and breaking it down into quarters, then into milestones, then into the weekly work. Knowing what the roadmap looks like ahead of time so you’re building toward something instead of reacting to whatever’s in front of you.

Consistency is the habit. These systems just make it easier to maintain.

How do you maintain balance outside of work?

This past year has been the biggest learning curve of my life. I became a mom for the first time, and everything I thought I knew about balance got tested.

What I’ve come to understand is that my cup has to be filled for me to show up for my son. That means I can’t run through everything I have during the workday. I have to leave something in the tank for when I get home.

I’ve also had to be honest with myself about where I struggle. Rest and recovery have never come naturally to me. I’ve had to actively build space for it, which is harder than it sounds when your instinct is always to keep moving. Working out and finding mindfulness moments have become non-negotiable for me, not as aspirational habits but as actual requirements for functioning.

The bigger shift has been learning not to defer my own needs. Putting myself at the forefront felt counterintuitive at first. It’s made me a stronger mother, a better partner, and a more present leader. Those things are connected, and I don’t think I fully understood that until this year.

What are you currently learning or improving?

I’ve been spending a lot of time studying change. How it actually works, what it looks like in practice, and why it’s so disorienting even when you know it’s coming.

I’ve been diving into Martha Beck’s work, and the framework that’s stuck with me breaks change into four stages. The first is the death and rebirth of what was. Something ends. That ending has to be acknowledged before anything new can take hold. The second is dreaming and scheming, the space where possibilities start to form before there’s any plan yet. The third is action, building toward the new state. And the fourth is arriving there and actually letting yourself settle into it.

What I keep coming back to is how universal this is. It maps onto a business going through a rebrand, a team navigating a structural shift, a person stepping into a new season of life. The stages don’t change. The resistance to moving through them doesn’t either.

The only thing that’s certain is that things will change. Learning how to recognize which stage you’re in, and what’s actually needed there, is some of the most practical work I’ve done in a long time.

Dena’s approach to leadership reflects something STN Digital has always believed, that the best work happens when the right people are in the room, aligned on the same goal, and given the space to do what they do best. That commitment to people, strategy, and craft is what drives everything STN brings to its clients.

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