Ep242: Grit, Power, and Strength: Leadership Lessons from Lisa Davis

Lisa Davis spent four decades as a technology executive, often the only woman in the room. In this conversation with David Wheatley, she shares three of the nine core leadership principles from her new book, The Only Woman in the Room: grit (reframed as conviction), power (as advocacy and influence, not control), and strength (the emotional resilience executive leadership demands). They also discuss why results alone won't advance your career, the importance of male allies, and how to build a support network that sustains you through the hardest moments of leadership. Lisa's book is available now at https://www.daviscoreadvisory.com/.

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Transcript

David Wheatley, Humanergy

Well, welcome to this episode of the Humanergy Leadership Podcast. I'm your host David Wheatley and I'm joined today by an old friend. And I say that with the gentlest of emphasis on the "old," because we've just known each other for a while, Lisa Davis. And Lisa is an award-winning global business and technology leader, former global CIO and a business leader who's been responsible for $7 billion in P&L. She's led $300 million in digital transformation initiatives.

Deliverable, measurable results in AI, cybersecurity, cloud. She probably hates sitting here listening to this kind of stuff. Most recently, she served as the EVP and the Chief Information Officer for Blue Shield of California. Prior to that, she was a VP and General Manager at Intel. Prior to that, she was the CIO at Georgetown University. Prior to that, and where we first met, she was the CIO of the US Marshals Service as part of a 20-something year federal government career that involved high security global technology environments.

So we've got a tech expert. If anything goes wrong with our tech today, I know that Lisa's here to help fix it. Although my guess is, having known her a while ago, she won't necessarily know how, but she'll know who to go to to fix it. Because that was always her job as the CIO. She's also just written a book, The Only Woman in the Room. It's a leadership book that I have had the opportunity to read and found fascinating. That's one of the reasons why I invited her on today. So welcome, Lisa.

Lisa Davis

Thank you, David. I'm so glad that we've reconnected and it's just wonderful to see you.

David Wheatley, Humanergy

It's wonderful to see you too. And I loved some of the stories and I was reflecting back on, I think I know these people. And I will caveat that I do not feature in this book. None of it's about me. So what drove you to write this after a long career in IT?

Lisa Davis

Yeah, I had been thinking about writing a book probably over the last three or four years. Many times when I would do group coaching, mentoring, certainly keynotes on leadership issues, I was often asked by folks, "You should really think about writing a book." And of course, as we all know, as full-time operators, it's very difficult to find the time to do that.

So when I made the decision to stop being a full-time operator last February, this became one of my number one goals. And really the purpose, David, was to capture my experiences, my learnings, to share those learnings of certainly what it took me to navigate a four-decade career, and hoping that my lessons and stories would help others in their journeys and frankly make their journeys a little bit easier than mine was in navigating as a female executive, technology executive, and primarily in all male-dominated sectors.

David Wheatley, Humanergy

Yeah, so when I met you, I think there were two senior women leaders on the US Marshals Service team, you being one of them, a traditionally very male, white Irish organization, and then IT being a traditional male environment as well. So this idea of being the only woman in the room has been part of your career. And it's not that you are constantly the only, but you're often one of one or two or three, and a bunch of guys called John and David.

Lisa Davis

Yeah, absolutely. And that's in the intro of my book, the number of men called John. But yeah, I started working for the government as a high school senior. They were recruiting engineers at the time, back in the 80s. And I was a computer engineering undergrad at Syracuse, and frankly, those two experiences were the start of being the only woman in the room.

And then I continued to have a full, as you mentioned, 26-year career in Department of Defense, ending up in Department of Justice for the last three years with the US Marshals. And yes, I grew up being the only woman many, many times, literally the only woman in the room. And what it took to navigate those rooms, to be heard in those rooms, to ultimately succeed in those rooms. And those lessons, certainly from a leadership standpoint, really shaping me into the type of leader that I was becoming, stayed with me through my own career.

And those environments didn't change much. Academia was all primarily male CIOs. And of course, technology is predominantly male because we have such low representation of females, today worse today as a matter of fact. And technology, it wasn't easy to figure out. That's how it was at Intel and semiconductors and manufacturing. And frankly, when I got to healthcare, I saw more women in healthcare than I had in my previous career, but that certainly wasn't reflective on the technology side of the house just because of low representation. So yes, my entire career has been spent in these rooms. It's really shaped the learnings and the experiences that I share in the book.

David Wheatley, Humanergy

I enjoyed the framing of that because on one hand, and you kind of allude to this, you're sending a message to the younger self, what you wish you'd have had as an entry-level person. You're also sending support to the women who are still struggling with this because as you recognize, it's not changed that much, unfortunately. But I think you're also sending a strong message to the men who would get some value, and also the men who don't recognize their complicity.

Lisa Davis

Exactly. The book is written for really, it doesn't matter which stage you're at in your career. If you're beginning your career, these are incredible lessons to understand, which frankly, I would have wished someone had shared with me prior to entering the workforce or my beginning in the workplace, of what it's going to take. What are the tools in the toolbox I'm going to need to have?

And really, one of the chapters, the first chapter on grit, is really the foundation of the entire book because it takes grit and perseverance to navigate as a woman in these sectors. But to your point, David, I wouldn't have got where I was without male allies, the importance of male allies. And many men don't understand what it means to be a male ally.

I have men who have a wife, have daughters, have sisters, who ask, "How can I be a better male ally?" I've had men read the book and tell me, "I had no idea that women have to navigate the rooms in this way." And they literally say to me, "All I do is I just enter the room and show up." So it's a completely different system.

And we should talk about the system when I use that word of what it means. But at the foundation of it all, it's a leadership book for both men and women of what I believe are nine core principles. And those principles came from really my discovery of all the things when I started writing the book, of putting together all of these learnings and all these various experiences and then working to group them into these pillars that said, yes, this is about grit. This is about power. This is why I felt these nine core pillars in my leadership were important for success. So I think it's applicable to both men and women.

David Wheatley, Humanergy

So let me maybe pick up on that then and just take a look at three of them. And I'm not going to ask you to read the book, but I'll ask everybody else to read it. You cover grit, power, and strength. And I thought you had an interesting way of defining them all.

Lisa Davis

Yeah, let's start with grit because that's really chapter one. I'm a huge fan of Angela Duckworth and her definition of grit, which she defines as passion and perseverance over a sustained period of time towards a long-term goal. Fantastic. But in my experience and understanding grit and perseverance, passion ebbs and flows depending on how we feel and the environments that we're working in and the complexity that we're navigating.

And the word that I really wanted to share as part of my learnings was this word conviction. And conviction is, no matter where my passion stands at the moment, my conviction is my determination that no matter what obstacle, what hurdle, what closed door, whatever it's going to take, I'm going to find a path and I'm going to be darn determined to continue taking one step forward, whatever it takes at a time, to reach my long-term professional goals.

So really the grit chapter explores what that conviction is. And frankly, a lot of people ask me, and what I explore in the book is, where does grit come from? And in my stories, my grit was formed at a very early age through my upbringing, not something that I want to wish on anyone else, but it certainly formed a lot of my grit. And I talk about grit. To build grit, you've got to go through some hard stuff.

I think too, I talk a lot with my own family members. Remember when we were growing up in our generation, we were just scrappy. We were scrappy. How do we teach our kids today to be scrappy and figure things out? And this is kind of part of what grit is all about.

The other chapter you brought up was around power. And I love this chapter because women don't like to talk about power, right? And I've always been a fierce advocate of owning your power. But when I talk about power, there's lots of different ways that I frame what it means to have power. Because power needs to be power as advocacy, power for good, power as influence.

And I talk about in the book this concept of status and influence. And I coach a lot of folks that will say to me, "Hey, I don't care about the title. I just want to have impact." And part of what I'm teaching in the book is it's really hard to drive impact or what I would say systems change without having the title, because the title gets you in the room where decisions are made. And I go into a lot about what it means to have status, what it means to have influence, and how those two things need to work together.

David Wheatley, Humanergy

We often use the idea of multipliers. If there's a zero in one of them, that means zero in the total. If it's a multiplier, then you have both, you can maximize that.

Lisa Davis

Absolutely. And then strength is a really important chapter because, to be honest, certainly in the environments that we're operating in today, when I talk about strength, I'm talking not just physical strength, but the emotional, psychological strength of what it takes to persevere and navigate complexity and challenges and operating environments. The strength that it takes to be able to sustain yourself, to be the leader that others want to follow, to have clarity in decision making. How do you develop that strength and why is strength so important in terms of becoming an executive, sustaining as an executive, and operating at the highest levels?

David Wheatley, Humanergy

And that's really a lot of resilience.

Lisa Davis

A lot of resilience, yes.

David Wheatley, Humanergy

So if I build on that idea of clarity, because there's another piece you talk about in the book, which I see a lot, which is managing perceptions. And the idea that if I'm making this decision, I'm starting to think about, what are other people going to think? And I start to manage that. And you talk about managing perception by leading with clarity. Say some more about that.

Lisa Davis

Yeah, to lead with clarity, I think you have to be grounded and understand what your own core values are. And I think that was certainly for me always my rudder, my guidance. I was always very clear. Now, of course, it took experience, frankly some age, some wisdom, and getting strong clarity around what my values were.

Even growing up in Department of Defense, I knew core values for me were about honesty, loyalty, respect, transparency, and beginning to shape my core values as I entered the workforce. So as I became a leader, I was very grounded in terms of the leader that I was, what my core values were. And I think that is a fundamental element to be able to lead with clarity versus leading based on perception.

And there's a wonderful quote by Eleanor Roosevelt that says, I wish I knew earlier that I didn't need to pay attention to what other people thought I should be or who I should be. And it's important in leadership that you develop those and can stay grounded in your decision making and how you're supporting your team and your organizations, how you're developing people. And that is where true leadership clarity comes from. And of course, alignment to the mission and the company's goals, but those two things have to align in terms of being able to lead with clarity.

And many people find themselves, sadly, in organizations where maybe it didn't start that way, but the organization has shifted. Maybe there's been new leadership changes, maybe there's company restructuring, lots of different reasons in today's environment that folks are navigating, that it becomes unclear. You thought you had clarity and you're like, I'm not sure this is aligned to who I am, aligned to my professional growth, aligned to the impact that I want to give. And we find ourselves many times as executives saying, wow, my ladder is no longer leaning against the right wall that I thought it was. What am I going to do about it?

David Wheatley, Humanergy

So it gets to something I've explored quite a bit, that the leadership journey is actually more of an inward one than an outward one.

Lisa Davis

Oh yes. I said the other day, the journey is the therapy, right? I think that leadership journey, they always say it's the journey, not the final destination, where my greatest amount of learning was. And part of what I encourage, certainly the folks that I coach and engage with, is that learning and that growth always happens at the exit of your comfort zone. And you have to step out of that comfort zone and take those risks. And every time that I've done that in my career, and I've done that a lot, is where incredible learning and growth happened, personally as well as professionally.

David Wheatley, Humanergy

I think you talk a lot about being raised by a bit of a perfectionist father and things like that. If people are saying, well, I wasn't raised by that. I think your call is find places that make you uncomfortable because that is that inward learning push. I corrupt the Dag Hammarskjöld quote, "The longest journey of them all is the journey inwards." That's the one we should be exploring. But we do that most when we're uncomfortable.

Lisa Davis

I couldn't agree more. Even writing this book was frankly very uncomfortable for me. It was a journey in learning in itself. I was trying to find the right balance of sharing my personal story but not having it be a memoir, to providing leadership lessons and discussion opportunities to help others navigate their career, and finding that right balance.

And the more I talked about leadership lessons, the more feedback I got from my user group that said, "No, you're the product. We want to hear about you." And I'm like, well, this wasn't supposed to be about me. This was supposed to be about the leadership lessons. So that was stepping out of my comfort zone and frankly being very vulnerable in sharing my own personal stories, what shaped me through those experiences into the leader I am today. And hopefully sharing those lessons with others that they'll be able to navigate their own journeys a little bit easier.

David Wheatley, Humanergy

Then you also talk about the value of adding connection and advocacy to the ability to deliver results. And we were having a bit of a conversation in the preamble about this, that those people that say, I just need to deliver the results, but you build on that with these ideas of connection and advocacy. Tell me some more.

Lisa Davis

Yeah, results alone will never get you ultimately to probably hit your goals. Maybe tactically they will. But if you really want to grow and you really want to drive impact and systems change and move into being an executive, results don't speak for you alone. And the importance of connections and relationships have been with me right through my entire career. I'm still in contact with people.

David, look, you and I, we haven't talked in almost 20 years, but I still am in contact with people. Yeah, well, through social media, thank goodness for social media. But relationships with people that worked for me 30, 35 years ago. Part of leadership is followership. Followership is about relationships, building trust, building connections with people. You do what you say you're going to do. Your actions and your words align.

So I tell young folks, my own kids, my two youngest kids are 23 and 24, network, network, network. Build connections and those connections will support you through your entire career. In my book, I talk about my last four executive roles. I was looking for a role. They came through relationships, through my network.

And going back to results, who at the end of the day is going to speak your name in that leadership performance management discussion? That David is ready for his next step. David is ready for this position. Having those relationships, those sponsors, those advocates are critical for navigating your career and moving to your next role.

David Wheatley, Humanergy

I think you use a similar term in the book. We use the term "your personal board of directors," and the mental picture I have is a seating chart for that meeting of your personal board of directors where you have a table of coaches and a table of mentors and a table of sponsors and a table of friends. And what you're describing is this combination of the mentors, the people who you go and seek advice from because they've made this position, and sponsors who are the people who talk about you in rooms that you're not in.

Lisa Davis

I think the biggest thing you should ask yourself, certainly from a brand standpoint, and if you think results can speak for themselves, is what do they say about you when you're not in the room? What does your brand represent? So intentionally building your brand is critically important as you continue to navigate your career.

Because that is what my brand, what does Lisa Davis stand for? And what will people say about Lisa Davis when I'm not in the room? Hopefully all good things, right? But that is really important. And having that support network around you, I call it a personal board of directors. But let's be real. If you have a family, if you're considering having a family, if both you and your partner are working, you need a support system.

So you need a support system to help you navigate your career. And I was fortunate enough to have an amazing partner that allowed me to do that. But also you need that team around you because it gets lonely at the top. I talk about that a lot. Who are those allies that you trust? Usually they're outside of your workplace or certainly chain of command. I would highly recommend because information is currency. And that you can just pick up the phone and say, "You know what? I'm done. I can't take it anymore. I think I'm losing my mind. Am I crazy?" And those are the people that would say to me, "You're not crazy. Let's take a breath. Let's figure out how we're going to navigate this particular situation and help you manage," because there will be times, if you haven't had them already, that this will happen.

David Wheatley, Humanergy

Yeah. Humanergy, I've made the best part of a 30-year career out of being that person for a lot of folks, which I appreciate. And for those new to the Humanergy Leadership Podcast, you'll find a whole episode on personal board of directors if you have a search for it. So that builds on exactly what Lisa's talking about.

So Lisa, where can people find out more? The book's out March 31st, 2025.

Lisa Davis

The book is coming out March 31st. Two weeks of book launching. Kindle's available now on Amazon, but if you want the paperback or hardback, because the cover is so beautiful and took so much time in designing, they are available on March 31st. You can find out lots of information on me at my website, daviscoadvisory.com. Certainly reach out on LinkedIn. I have a Substack where I write a lot about what's in the book and Instagram. So there's lots of places to find me.

David Wheatley, Humanergy

Yeah, and you put out that Substack newsletter every other week, every two weeks. I know I've been getting it. So I appreciate that. We'll put links in the various notes to those places as well. And by the time this comes out, the book will be available in all those different places, which is great. Lisa, thanks very much for joining us this afternoon and sharing a bit more. I hope people go out and find that book and enjoy it as much as I did. And maybe we'll have Lisa back on in a while to talk about what she's learning next. But thank you for joining us.

Lisa Davis

Thank you, David. It's been a pleasure.