Michele Choi is on a journey to find balance at the intersection of professional impact and personal fulfillment, doing the hard work to grow through each experience. As the Head of Business Development & Marketing at Medley, she’s helping this NYC-based group coaching startup develop mid-career leaders through growth opportunities, pivots, and more. She knows a thing or two about growth & pivots.
Michele’s parents immigrated from South Korea and she was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan to an academic family. Her dad was getting his PhD at the University of Michigan and her mom earned a Masters in French all while raising Michele & her sister – who returned to Michigan many years later to complete her doctoral fellowship. Indeed, the Chois all have advanced degrees and all love their jobs. For Michele, it’s taken a bit longer. Don’t worry, we’ll explain!
As Michele advanced through her studies, she set her sights on Duke – she enrolled as a Double Major in Economics & Public Policy and loved her time as a Blue Devil. But graduation comes for us all and she scrambled to figure out what she was going to do after her undergraduate studies concluded. She had completed a Finance internship at Citi the summer prior so that made some sense. But a friend of hers, Jillian Tellez Holub, had interned at McKinsey and thought Michele would be a great fit for the firm. Jillian invited her to a recruiting dinner and, as Michele learned more, the work sounded interesting.
Michele didn’t quite fit the archetype of the McKinsey profile, according to her. But through the kindness and mentorship of others, she built up her confidence that the firm was the right place for her to grow. She still remembers Jonathan Feifs, who she had met at one of those recruiting dinners, in her first interview for the full time analyst position. Michele recalls she was incredibly nervous and talking a mile a minute. Jonathan was kind enough to encourage her to slow down, take a deep breath, and trust her instincts and strong, creative intuition – it was a lesson Michele takes with her now, to take the time to believe in the best intent of others and to lead with kindness.
Starting her McKinsey career out of Atlanta, after a couple years working with Consumer and Retail clients on growth strategy and marketing studies, she was ready for a change of scenery. Enter: the world of startups.
One of Michele’s McKinsey mentors, Lisa Sun, had left years prior to join a growing e-commerce startup as their CEO. Michele decided to take the leap to join Lisa at Archetypes in New York and join as their fourth employee doing Business Development and Marketing. The early stage personalization e-commerce startup was on a mission to innovate how products, content & community are curated and delivered. The company helped identify your primary archetypes in an effort to understand yourself better, connect you to similar people, and make more inspired choices through tailored content. They were named one of Time Inc.’s Top 10 NYC Startups to Watch in 2013.
She took everything she learned & loved about McKinsey and put it into this turbocharged environment. McKinsey celebrated the generalist mindset and the training translated extremely well into early-stage startups. At Archetypes, Michele met Eunice Byun who was a great mentor to teach her more of the ins and outs of operating. Michele got great experience building up Archetypes’ social & e-mail marketing channels and running business development pitches.
But after 2 years, one of the strongest insights was that her balance was (still) slightly off. She was working just as many hours as she was at McKinsey with a lot of pressure to deliver and Michele couldn’t see her future path quite so clearly as she’d hoped. She decided to leave and take a couple months off to collect herself. It was Michele’s first sabbatical.
It’s not the easiest decision to jump without seeing where you’re going to land at 26. She made the decision to take some dedicated time to grapple with what drives her & what gives her energy. For the first couple of months she unplugged and recharged after 4+ years in the high intensity environments of consulting and startups.
Michele recalls that, coming from an immigrant family, sometimes you “do because you think you’re supposed to do”. But as a younger sibling, Michele grew up pushing the boundaries and always questioning. During her sabbatical, she replugged back into things that gave her joy and unlearned some of her unhealthier, high-stress habits. 2 months turned into 6 months.
During that time, Michele came to a new appreciation for how important close family & friend relationships were and set off to find something that helped her tie together those critical fundamental early dots. She started her initial search while doing some consulting & freelancing as a backstop, helping prior clients and colleagues with assorted marketing and branding projects. Next, she did some soul searching. She introspectively thought back about when she was happiest. She wanted to do good and do it well, aspiring to bridge corporate principles and focus on ROI but apply it to social impact and giving back to the community. She didn’t have the right words for it then but the same principles drive her today.
After reaching out to a former mentor she went back to McKinsey, this time as an operator. She joined McKinsey.org as employee #2 working under Mona Mourshed, a Senior Partner who had written a ton of research around building pathways from education to employment. The Generation initiative was funded with big aspirations to solve large global issues with the scale, speed & network that was unique to McKinsey. Michele helped the team launch and expand to 5 countries in just 2 years helping underrepresented young adults get trained and employed in promising career paths. Michele was the global program manager for the U.S. & India and they initially launched domestically in Pittsburgh, working with the local government, large employers and recruiting agencies to get students enrolled in reskilling programs – starting with nursing & home health practices.
Michele loved the work she did at McKinsey.org and Generation. She found that while her impact was large and meaningful, education was not her specific passion area. So, after a couple of years, Michele pivoted (again) to Harvard Business School as a throughway for her next entrepreneurial act. This took her to Boston.
At HBS she co-founded ONEE, a company that re-invented the friendship bracelet for young women, using tech-enabled jewelry to encourage a more convenient, discreet, and social way to communicate. The first product was designed with campus sexual assault prevention in mind. As graduation approached, her CTO & Co-Founder decided they were not able to commit full-time after school concluded. And Michele’s big learning? She didn’t yet have the confidence to do it on her own. She was still a little impatient and unsure about going it alone.
Michele loved her time in Boston though. She had easy access to New York to see friends. It allowed her to be close to her sister, a pediatric ophthalmologist at Tufts. She loved going to the Public Garden during tulip season, hiking outside in the Berkshires or Middlesex Falls, or catching a meal at Saltie Girl or Coppa.
As business school wrapped up and she wasn’t quite ready to pursue her own venture full-time, Michele returned to McKinsey Consulting for 5 years, with Boston as her home base. She pursued a path in Marketing & Sales consulting (still with consumer and retail clients), and carved out a specialization in digital transformation, which brought her closer to being in an operational role at McKinsey and rose to Associate Partner.
Still, she was searching for a finer balance more closely aligned with her unique skills & talents to find a greater impact. She wasn’t really challenging herself in new ways. She was a culture warrior at McKinsey and made deliberate public strides to find and promote the right balance. People would come to her looking for tangible & tactical ways to find balance in their own careers. Her colleagues at McKinsey were some of the brightest people she’s had a chance to work with. Their bar for excellence is high and have helped her define what she expects out of teammates. They taught her what amazing talent looks like. Could there be another destination that had a similar bar-raising culture?
It was time for a new chapter. But first, to refocus, a sabbatical. She again took 2 months to unplug doing some traveling and self prioritization. She created a detailed rubric to guide her search and worked closely with an amazing executive coach through McKinsey who encouraged her to take the grace and time to think expansively. She had probably 50 conversations with her network and beyond to help guide her next move into areas of interest like beauty, wellness & community.
Then she found Medley. A different type of company pulling on some of her prior experience. Medley is democratizing access to high-quality group coaching, specifically with mid-level managers in mind. Michele was actually beta testing a similar concept on her own and then found Medley with some serious traction of their own. She fell in love with the coaching space and what it can help people unlock through small groups for emerging leaders. Coaching has historically been reserved for executives or new hires, or was considered ‘remedial’ – Michele had seen the value of rewriting that narrative. And now she’s passionate about paying it forward, for more people to get access to impactful coaching.
Michele now heads up everything go-to-market at Medley and leads partnerships with large and growing enterprises to help bring them group coaching in a scalable way to their emerging leaders. Their group coaching model is relatively new in the coaching industry – and focuses on building foundational leadership skills like self awareness, relationship-building, communication & empathy. The Medley team is helping build the dynamics and influence needed to become a great leader.
Here are the three things Michele has learned on her rather unconventional path from McKinsey consulting to startups to McKinsey.org to business school back to McKinsey and eventually back to startups again from her Boston home base:
Do The Work for Maximum Impact – “What drives you? What gives you energy? What are my unique skills and how can I bring those into the workplace to drive sizable impact beyond what someone else could have done? The world would be a happier place if more of us took time to align what drives us personally with how we’re putting that into our professional work instead of what we’re ‘supposed to do’”
Relationships Are Everything – “Every step that I’ve made was done through a warm introduction. Whether it was McKinsey or the next startup I joined, getting to know people at a human level instead of a box to check has made all the difference”
Don’t Be Afraid To Ask – “When I’m able to ask a bunch of questions and solicit perspective from a bunch of places, I always make better decisions. When I was preparing to join Medley I galvanized a ton of friends and mentors to get their perspective and gather more information on the opportunity. It’s important to always stay curious and learn from other people”
Michele sees herself potentially starting another business when the time is right. She doesn’t know if that will be in the traditional startup sense or stoking a more creative angle. Owning creative projects on your own time can also create ownership after all. In the meantime, she’s focused on driving positive social impact at scale, creating value in the intersection between social impact and innovative fun at Medley.
Thanks for sharing Michele. If you want to learn more, you can reach out to her on LinkedIn or sign up to learn more about Medley! We’ll be watching the emerging leaders you help transform into more dynamic, inclusive, and authentic leaders before our very eyes over the coming years. Let’s go!