When FedEx Custom Critical CEO Ramona Hood started her career at the transportation provider, her initial goal was not to become the first African American woman to lead a FedEx operating company.

“I was a 19-year-old single mom, so my focus at that time really was around having a job with constant hours,” Hood told CNBC’s Frank Holland at the CNBC Work Summit on Tuesday.

“It was many years later that I started to focus on a career and recognized the world of FedEx and how big it was,” she said. “I decided to really be intentional with my career, and that focus has driven me to the place I’m in today.”

That focus over a 31-year career with FedEx led to Hood’s February 2020 appointment as CEO and president of the operating company, which oversees transportation capabilities for expedited ground, temperature control shipments, and other industry-specific solutions.

Hood shared some of the lessons and learnings that helped her climb the corporate ladder, as well as how she navigated the Covid-19 pandemic in the early stage of her CEO tenure.

Moving up the ranks

Hood said that when her focus shifted to moving up the ranks to leadership roles at FedEx, one of the first things that helped her was thinking about “how I can bring value to an organization and then beginning to share that with people.”

That later evolved to having her own board of directors, filled with people supporting her career.

As her roles and responsibilities changed, Hood said her “intentionality” changed as well.

Now, she says, her focus is “on bringing the business forward to ensure that our people are able to demonstrate the best in their s𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁s and their ability.”

Leading with grace

In the early days of the pandemic, which came alongside the start of Hood’s tenure as CEO, she said the expectation from many was that it would be short-lived and “we’d be back to the normal that we all knew within 60 to 90 days.”

But as it became clearer that it would not, Hood said that an important thing she took away from that period was “the grace that we gave everyone.”

“You think about people starting to work from home, and the interruptions that would happen because they weren’t necessarily set up for that environment … there was just a lot of grace that we all had for one another,” Hood said.

Maintaining an agile approach and focusing on communication were keys to her leadership during this period.

“Our focus was really to get people home fairly quickly with the infrastructure that had not been tested in that way, and our goal was to continue to work to see if we’re going to break it and then fix it,” she said. “So that ability to take such a complex problem and breaking it down into simpler terms and doing it at the speed that we did was something that we continue to utilize in our work today – how are we solving problems and how can we do it faster than we have historically.”

Working in a hybrid environment

With the multi-generational workforce at FedEx that is now working at both home and the office, Hood said that it’s been important to embrace both “physical and digital meeting together.”

While some of that has been focused on the tools that are used to bridge that gap, it’s also making sure that “when we do come to the office, doing it with intentionality,” she said.

That also impacts leadership, with Hood noting that you need to have visibility across your team so that you can mentor and sponsor them. “It’s important to look at how you do that both in the physical environment as well as a digital environment,” she added.