S4EP03: Resilience and Authenticity in Leadership with Victoria Pelletier

In this episode about resilience and authenticity in leadership. Victoria Pelletier, a C-suite executive and inspiring mentor, opens up about her remarkable journey, defying the odds stacked against her from a challenging upbringing and rising to become a beacon of hope for many. We delve into her story — from dealing with body image issues and battling adverse circumstances to her experiences in a gifted education program, each narrated with great candor.

Do you ever wonder how vulnerability and transparency can shape effective leadership? Victoria, as the youngest and sole woman in her executive team and part of the LGBTQIA community, faced a unique set of challenges that necessitated a shift in her leadership approach. Her transformation from an all-business persona to a leader who embraces openness, vulnerability, and transparency provides fascinating insights. Learn how she built a successful team rooted in trust, creating a safe space for authenticity to flourish.

Finally, we discuss the critical importance of addressing behaviors and building trust in the workplace. Victoria shares a powerful story of empathy and change, recounting how she tackled an issue with a notoriously difficult team member. We delve into the concept of psychological safety in the workplace and why it’s key to fostering creativity and innovation. Victoria also underlines the business benefits of diversity and inclusion, and the necessity of doing the right thing, even when it’s hard. Join us for this compelling discussion that weaves resilience, leadership, vulnerability, and business ethics into a captivating narrative.

Guest Bio: Victoria Pelletier

Victoria is a 20+ year Corporate Executive and Board Director, Author and Professional Public Speaker.

Links:

Website: https://victoria-pelletier.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriapelletier/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/PelletierV2

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:06

Hi and welcome to the Becoming Trauma-Informed podcast, where we help you understand how your past painful experiences are affecting your current reality and how you can shift those so you can create your desired future. I'm Dr Lee, and both myself and our team at the Institute for Trauma and Psychological Safety are excited to support you on your journey. We talk about all the things on this podcast. No topic gets left uncovered. So extending a content warning to you before we get started if you notice yourself getting activated while listening, invitation to take care of yourself and to pause, skip ahead a bit or just check out another episode, let's dive in. Hello everyone, welcome back to season four of the Becoming Trauma-Informed podcast. We are in our leadership season and I have an absolutely amazing guest here with me today Victoria Peltier. Victoria, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. Could you tell our audience a little bit about who you are, what you do, what you?

Speaker 1: 1:09

love. I will try and be as brief as possible in doing that intro we love lots of info here, so you just say whatever you want to say.

Speaker 2: 1:20

Okay.

Speaker 1: 1:21

Well, professionally, I'm a very long-term C-suite executive. I became a chief operating officer at age 24, pretty big stretch role and have stayed ever since, operating at the C-suite or equivalent level, running predominantly business to business professional services organizations across North America and often leading global teams. In addition to that, I have sat on a multitude of boards. I'm an author, a professional public speaker and on the personal side, I'm a mom, a wife, a fitness fanatic, a foodie and a wine lover.

Speaker 2: 2:02

Okay. So I was like I can vibe with a lot of that. I was like mom check wife foodie wine, yes, okay. So one of the things that really captured me when looking at this from a guest's perspective was you shared with us your story of what life looked like before that very young, amazing C-suite exec role. So could you tell us a little bit about that?

Speaker 1: 2:28

Yeah, I share it quite openly because it's my why, to sort of quote Simon Sinek and I wouldn't have shared it so openly much earlier in my life and certainly in my career. But as I began to coach and mentor more and more people who wanted to understand how I achieved the success I had, what did I attribute my rise in the corporate world to? I was doing a disservice by not telling the story, and it's because I become determined to be better than my biology or circumstance. So that story is that I was born to a drug addicted teenage mother who was exceptionally abusive to me, pushing me upstairs, downstairs In this instance it was carelessness versus intentionality, but a cigarette on my eyes. I were, you know, patch for a number of months. I went in and out of the child welfare system and I am fortunate to be one of the lucky children who was adopted and out of the environment, and my parents who adopted me actually knew my biological mother. They'd actually taken care of me a number of times after an incident, and so the last words I remember Julie saying while I was in her care was calling my later to become mom and saying come and get her before I kill her. So I was scarred both physically and very emotionally.

Speaker 1: 3:53

As a child, I think I made some poor choices in terms of situations I put myself in at times. I was raped at 14 and no victim blaming in that, I just recognize I put myself in some precarious positions. Sure, my parents, although incredibly loving my mom in particular, amazing woman, who worked incredibly hard to break down some of the walls and barriers I built to get me to understand the feelings and actions and behaviors I had were lower from a socioeconomic perspective. My dad was a school janitor, my mom was a secretary and I remember her saying to me when I was 10 or 11 years old she's like Tori, you need to do better than us.

Speaker 1: 4:36

Without really being able to put the words to it, then I knew I was going to be better than the biology, the Julie's world, nor even the circumstance. I mean I never had to worry about food insecurity or not having clothes on my back, but there was no money for anything else. We never went on vacations and I never got to go on my school trips, those kinds of things. And so I started working at age 11 because anything extra I needed to pay for. But I also very quickly learned that my ability to perform was within my control. So how I got up from a work perspective, the skills that I brought, my work ethic as well, started to garner me a lot of attention and progression. And so those early years, a lot of that adversity, trauma and circumstance, is the reason why I am where I am. It is the fuel to let me think of and operate in this no excuses, unstoppable way of living.

Speaker 2: 5:35

And wow, that is a lot. And just thinking about this from an adverse childhood experience perspective, that's something we talk a lot about in the trauma world and I'm like, okay, I can see three or four of them just right off the bat from the surface level story of the environmental piece of profound unsafety and uncertainty for those first several years.

Speaker 1: 6:04

And yeah, I'd say that several. And then I mean it continued, you know, for it took a long time for me to get comfortable with who I am, to love the person that I was and feel.

Speaker 2: 6:16

Why did that journey look like for you? It sounds like one of the places that you found a lot of empowerment was through the work perspective, like that felt. Like you said, and a lot of that is resonating of like this is a place that I can control and I'm good at and I can feel empowered around it. What else helped you kind of from the like self-love perspective?

Speaker 1: 6:41

So I'm often asked about how to be resilient and do.

Speaker 1: 6:45

I you know it's innate. Can you learn how to and I think it's a bit of both, so I think there's DNA fight or flight. I'm a fighter, so I think there are some of that. That's just purely innate. But I also have learned to flex and improve that resilience muscle and that comes from my mom who sent me to I hate it as a teenager. She's like Tori, let's just unpack this like, let's sit down and understand why are you feeling this way, what emotions, why did you act? And I drove me insane. But the ability to do that has carried with me, and so my self-reflection to understand the feelings and emotions has helped me to, you know, give myself permission to stumble and fall down and make mistakes and know that that's okay and I'm not gonna be rejected necessarily for that to also just think and act and model the language and thought and behaviors of the person I wanted to be or become and stop feeling some of those fears of failure. But it also took a lot of years, like I think I didn't feel like I was good enough Now I also had, interestingly, throughout school, so there was a whole bunch of other things for me.

Speaker 1: 8:00

One I hit my height by the time I was. I'm taller for a woman, but by the time I was 11, so I was bigger than all the kids in school. I was taller than my teacher when I was in grade four or five, like I'm the middle back kid in all the school photos, right. So from that to developing everywhere at that age, to being part of the gifted educational program at a time when it didn't seem to be as cool, and so I was ostracized for it. And it wasn't until I skipped a couple of grades and I was the same height as everyone, finally and like.

Speaker 1: 8:31

But I just was constantly.

Speaker 1: 8:32

I had no one, no one. So I continued to battle with it, even when I was in a safe environment, in the home front, in the other areas. So again, work was an anchor for me because, even though I started, because people made fun of me at school for being tall, for being smart, for all these things, but again, the work world, I could control it, but they were still competing. So I made really poor choices in terms of some of the relationships that I was in, from an abusive partner at one point to one that was really controlling. And it wasn't until, again, I gained confidence in myself, I lived in a lot of fear of like not being good enough or being rejected and so translating sexual affection or attention with love and recognize at some point like no, no, no, like that's not it. So it wasn't even probably until so, although I think there was progress consistently with that for my teens and really into my 20s. But I think I didn't really hit sort of my confidence stride until I was in my early 30s.

Speaker 2: 9:34

One of the things you said really stuck with me of your mom sending you down and having you practice curiosity about what you were feeling and like reflection, evaluation, like metacognition of thinking, about your own thinking and your choices. And I think that's really cool that she did that, because a lot of parents we I've got three little ones and I didn't even know what metacognition was myself until they were toddlers, and so that is a skill that I think a lot of people aren't taught and sometimes self-develop, and I would say it's pretty rare for somebody to develop it very well without someone teaching it to them. And so I'm actually curious because what I've found is, from a leadership perspective, the ability to be curious about what you're feeling and have those emotional regulation and nervous system regulation skills. They can make such a difference in those roles. So I'm curious about your experience with that.

Speaker 1: 10:38

Yeah, I am. So my first leadership role was at 14. I was the assistant manager of the shoe store. I worked at Wow and then, when I got promoted to executive role at 24 and a brand new mother a stretch role where I had to learn a lot and leverage the strengths and skills of many others I've had what we refer to now as imposter syndrome. So one I was the only woman female executive and I was the youngest by at least two decades. I'm also part of the LGBT community. I was married to a woman for 11 years. I'm now married to my husband for 10, or with him for 10.

Speaker 1: 11:14

And so I was like, oh, I'm the only, and I felt like I needed to show up in a very certain way, because I didn't feel like I belonged there. And so, for me, my leadership. I wasn't authentic and transparent and vulnerable, and so I was like this mask I wore to the office, all business, all the time. I'm not gonna tell you my backstory. I'm not gonna tell you that I had a really difficult weekend, none of those things. But in turn, I didn't ask my team those things which builds trust within, in the relationships, and so I got a nickname as the Iron Maiden in my 20s and that's also very strong business performance. I've driven. I've been through 18 mergers and acquisitions, which come with really difficult decisions. You're often having a restructure and I can do those things, but again I didn't demonstrate how difficult it was for me. Still, emotionally, my best friend calls me turtle. I have a really tough exterior. I can handle a lot, but I'm all soft and marshmallow-y on the inside.

Speaker 1: 12:10

So my leadership had to change. I needed to look at the woman that stared back in me in the mirror and say, like this isn't the kind of leader I would wanna work for and follow into the proverbial fire. I think they feared me but wouldn't maybe not follow me. And so I had to get really comfortable with the things that I was not comfortable with, and so that meant being much more open and being vulnerable, saying I don't know what I don't know and being okay with that and asking other people for help explaining to people.

Speaker 1: 12:39

I remember a boss when I said like I don't disconnect, I have to tell my team do as I say, not as I do, because by choice I choose not to be disconnected when I go on vacation. That's because I don't wanna come back to a thousand emails so I might be on there. I don't make conference calls necessarily, but I don't expect that for my team, but I had a boss call me out on that and I needed to. I finally got comfortable saying this is my story, mike, you need to understand where I come from, the control I feel around work, my A-type personality, and where it comes from, and so I would never have done that, and so that was me managing up.

Speaker 1: 13:10

But that's also how I lead my teams as well is learn to be much more just, transparent, authentic, vulnerable with the teams, and in both ways. So by me doing it, it creates a safe space for my team to feel that they can do that, and we bring our whole selves to work every day, and so we need to understand those dynamics, the lived experience whether it's work experiences, the diversity of thought, experience, backgrounds that come. We need to understand that, and so that was a shift for me that I needed to make, because I initially got it wrong.

Speaker 2: 13:47

That is so key, what you're talking about in terms of trust, because I think so often as what I was taught about leadership is that trust. I was taught the cognitive trust, side of trust Of yeah, you need to be capable and you need to be consistent, like people need to be able to rely on you and they need to believe you know what you're doing, and no one ever had conversations with me about the effective side of trust, which is that you're really honest and open with people and that you're also compassionate and vulnerable with people. So those were skills that I was actually really good at and nobody told me, hey, yes, keep doing those skills, like. Instead, it was focused on the competency and the consistency, and it was a really interesting experience for me as I started my own business and started leading other people who were part of our team and our participants, and I was like, oh, without that effective trust, this doesn't work.

Speaker 1: 14:44

Right.

Speaker 2: 14:45

Right, it's like what you said like they respect me, they don't feel connected to me and if you want your team to like go hard in the paint especially for you in scenarios, they've got to trust you and feel like you know what I get to have her back because I know she's gonna have mine, and so I love that you're creating that with your team, because that is somewhat rare in a lot of leadership spaces and I'm curious your experience around that. You know you've had a variety of experience and seen probably a lot of different types of structures from a leadership perspective. Do you feel like it's easy for leaders to be vulnerable, like? Do you feel like that's getting rewarded in the leadership space, especially in corporate?

Speaker 1: 15:35

I still find it quite rare, to be honest, even though when you listen to the likes of Adam Grant, bernay Brown, simon Sinek who, by the way, did a podcast, all three of them together, which was pretty awesome, but you listened to their research and experience and how they educate in the workplace and other leaders, and they talk about this very thing. So it's so prevalent in conversation but in action that's where I see it still lacking. But I think there's significant and for a number of reasons I think there's significant fear in people, much like I had early on, to be vulnerable, to be transparent. I also think some company cultures and dynamics don't reward that and I'm a big believer and we need to do the right thing. That doesn't mean being a human-centered leader who's compassionate and authentic and transparent, who focuses on building a diverse workforce. It doesn't mean that we have a trade-off for our business success metrics, the fact it drives it, but that means standing up to power. That means saying a big part of me, being open and transparent, is also operating with radical candor, quoting another, kim Scott, although I've always operated that way, she just kind of put the vernacular around it. So being direct and open from a place of care and compassion for those that we're referring directly with.

Speaker 1: 17:05

But I do that to power. I will protect my team to say look, this kind of toxic behavior, we're going to address it and I'm going to protect and insulate my team if others are not prepared to within. But that's gotten me lots of side-eye from people who were like, oh well, that's a senior leader that you've just called out or raised that red flag to, and so I have no fear in doing that. But then also the ability to just that. So I'm talking again, going up up to conversations or even laterally with peers and organizations. But just going back to the team dynamics of being a leader and sharing openly, there's just this incredible fear in. What does that look like? Whether it's fear in opening themselves up or just over what might be the ramifications. Where are they going to go? Where are they going to share this? So going back to trust within the organization. So I wish there was more of that, quite frankly.

Speaker 2: 18:07

Yeah, one thing I've seen in the boardrooms I've sat in is a lot of times there are adults in suits and we look like adults.

Speaker 2: 18:21

Right, we all drove here, grown up humans, and yet when I'm listening to conversations, it's like I can hear past pain from like five-year-old version of you and 12-year-old version of you coming out.

Speaker 2: 18:36

And that has really been fascinating to me because I remember before I got into leadership roles, I just assumed that, ok, well, people who are in leadership roles like, yeah, they're really regulated and they figured all their stuff out, and like they've processed their past trauma and all these things, and really and I don't know if this is social conditioning, because I do feel like our society does this to leaders we almost like separate them and how do I want to say it? We pedestalize them, both from a oh yeah, like they've got all their stuff together, and also they can't be human, they can't make mistakes like the rest of us. They can't be really honest and say, like, whatever, they're thinking like the rest of us. So I would just love to hear your take on that. You know, having been in as many spaces as you've been in, do you see a lot of leaders like, and you're like oh, how you are reacting right now is not about this. It is about something else that has happened to you. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:34

I've seen it quite frequently and I think this is where I try, and you know, get to the root of like, where is this coming from? And I saw, you know it was a team member of mine whom you know had hired him into the organization and very quickly I was getting feedback from the team around how he would show up and engage. And you know he came in as a partner, executive level and he'd make a point of in all these meetings. Well, like, I'm the executive and I make the decision in this kind of like, we're a team here and so we're gonna collaborate. So I needed to have and this was in the first matter of months actually, you know, so we were still working on building our working relationship and trust in what that meant.

Speaker 1: 20:21

And so I approached it in this instance of saying to this individual like, look, I feel like I might understand. I said I don't wanna speak for you, I don't know your lived experience, but let me tell you about mine. And I told that story. I said, look, when I came, you know, up, and because I rose so quickly and I wasn't sure I belonged there and I worried that people wouldn't accept me, I showed up in a very certain way, almost to prove that I prove I belong there, and I'm not sure if that's what you're doing, but this is how it manifested. And here's a nickname I got and this is what I experienced for my team. So I'm not.

Speaker 1: 20:58

And I said to him I'm sharing that with you because this is the feedback I'm getting and I wanna understand and help you through that.

Speaker 1: 21:04

And maybe you're not aware of where that comes from, but maybe it's a great opportunity to kind of think about that, as then we try to, you know, redirect the way in which you're engaging and pivot to sort of rebuild well, build and rebuild a new reputation here within our organization during this. And so one I don't think he, no one had ever given him the feedback. So, going back to this kind of radical candor I think they probably just shuffled him around, but it was known feedback because I ended up having a reach to people who'd worked with him in the past, who wasn't part of the original reference process, to say, like what are you hearing, seeing, like what did you? And so, yeah, no one had ever done it before, and then for so to be called out on it, but then for me to approach it from a let me tell you where I've made mistakes. Maybe there's something similar, but like, let's otherwise try and figure this out together and I think for him that was like a very, very different conversation that he'd ever had.

Speaker 2: 22:00

Yeah, I'm hearing like your. Yeah, you're really hitting on those pieces of effective trust, of like I'm gonna be honest with you, it's gonna be with compassion and I'm here to protect my team and you're part of that team. So we get to have a good working relationship too and you get to feel safe here, not like puffing up right. And I'm so glad you brought this example in because I think a lot of times when people show up like that in spaces without the understanding of trauma responses and psychological safety and all of these things, people see that and we immediately judge it. We're like, oh, this guy's a jerk or you know, he's so full of himself. Like we say these snap things and it's like what you said, those are the leaves in the branches, that's what we're seeing at the end. But like what is the trunk of that issue? And then like what are the roots underneath of that? Because if we stay at the behavior level and don't get curious about the motivation level, we really lose a lot of great opportunities to shift the way that our team members can then feel safe showing up. And like that when you can help somebody feel recognized that they're in a threat response and shift that to then them feeling safer and showing up as their full selves will make such a difference. Such a difference and it's also kind of fun.

Speaker 2: 23:32

I'm curious if you've had this experience, because we've had that experience with some people who have shown up that way in other places and then they come to our space and then they feel safe and they drop some of those behaviors and people are like, oh my gosh, what did you do? And I'm like you know, just treated them like a human with past stuff and asked them what they needed and like, got curious and they're like, oh, okay, I would have thought you would have said like you put them through a remediation or like a performance plan or something. And that's what we want to do, that's what the system tells us to do. It's just been such a fascinating experience to watch how much compassion and like, hey, I see you, I think I get where you're coming from and also I'd like to understand more that piece alone, what that can do.

Speaker 1: 24:21

Yeah, the challenge in many of these large well, no, in any corporate environment it doesn't matter whether it's large or small, but what I see is in leadership, the best individual contributor for farmers are the ones that get promoted in the leadership which doesn't necessarily translate right.

Speaker 1: 24:38

Like just because you're the top salesperson doesn't mean you're going to be the best sales leader and coach for other people or take whatever function, it doesn't matter. And so then we're not educating and providing that kind of training and support to the leaders to be really effective. And so there's been a shift much more, you know, to that over the last number of years. But there's this connectedness around the way companies compensate, reward and incent their employees that drives very different behaviors in the organization, and so they're at conflict a lot of the time. So this is where you know I say I focus on like let's do the right thing, but there's lots of things, like you know, around the entire organization we need to do to support and enable doing the right thing and being the right kind of leader, and so that's why I think more, don't do it. It's hard work.

Speaker 2: 25:36

I got chills as you said that we were just having this conversation in our teacher training program because we were talking about evaluation of learning and like metrics, and we got in this very awesomely nerdy conversation about statistics and operational definitions, all these things. And one of the conversations we were having is, you know, because we do consulting work and people are asking well, you know, we want to come in and put in trauma, informed practices and, like these companies care about their retention and about their profit margins and about their benchmarks and KPIs and all these things. And I said yes, and it can be both. Right, we can come in and look at what are the metrics that this system has to meet, or you know things that, like it's going to be a much bigger project to shift those metrics and maybe that is something we want to do over time. And for the current moment, how do we meet those? And also do it through, like you said, doing the right thing, because I think a lot of people put those two things on flip sides of a coin and they say we can do the right thing or we can, you know, follow the rules and or hit the metrics.

Speaker 2: 26:47

And it's not. It's a both and yes, and I'm curious about you know, I think I know what you're going to say, and one of the things we've seen is that, when you focus in on really helping people feel safer and ensuring that they have what they need in order to thrive, like every single one of those metrics gets better over time, but there's this initial period sometimes, that is, things get a little harder or the metrics go down for a second, and that's a period that I notice is really hard for a lot of companies to hold, because there's a lot of urgency, and so it's oh my gosh, it's not immediately working, so let's shift it again. It's like hold on, just hold on, and so I'm curious about your experience with that.

Speaker 1: 27:36

Yeah, I hear that a lot, even as it relates to diversity. I'm a massive diversity, equity, inclusion advocate. I've been a practitioner, I've been leading like people, focus teams and practices for a very long time, so I'll use that. As it relates to hiring a diverse workforce, many leaders will say it's expensive, it's going to take too much time, etc. And so they view it as, rather than this being the right thing to do, of having a workplace that's representative of the communities that we live in, and they talk about how hard that is and it's going to cost money. I'm like this isn't the right thing to do. I said it drives business results. However and so it is to your point, it is an and here it's not or we don't have business success and results or a diverse workforce. We have both, and the reality is, when you bring up the diverse side, the business results are higher.

Speaker 1: 28:34

But the important piece is the inclusion, and this goes to creating safety in the organization. When people feel that it's an inclusive environment and that they belong, it's because not just there's more people that look like them, but it's because they can speak up to the lived experience that they've had. They can be vulnerable around, maybe, the areas and skills that they're lacking or where they need help or they recognize they need to pivot. And so, again, having leaders that create that kind of psychological safety is, in fact, what drives those outcomes, not just having the diverse workforce, because they'll run out the back door as fast as you bring them in If you don't Right Create this inclusive environment where they feel like they belong. And so, for me I'm constantly having a conversation with that.

Speaker 1: 29:30

It's and and it's not just and this directly correlates to better results. You've got higher employee engagement and retention, which translates to higher productivity, which drives both top line and bottom line results. Lower risk that gets created in the business. There's more innovation and creativity all of these things Right, and so I just use that as an example from a D&I perspective. But that's for all the areas of doing the right thing in business. It takes hard work. There is what I refer to as strategic intentionality that's required, and yet, to your point, there might actually be some decline in some numbers for some period of time as you're adjusting. Hiring diverse talent that hasn't began in the opportunity means you might actually need to educate them on some of those skills to bridge the gap, and therefore, they might not be as productive initially, but then they're going to leapfrog later.

Speaker 2: 30:21

Yeah, yes, and you know, I come from the, the health care field, and one of the biggest things we know about the health care field is that medical errors are one of the most expensive, both from a financial perspective and also just from a human perspective. They cost us so much, and one of the things that I experienced was a lack of safety in reporting mistakes or reporting near misses, and so we used to have this thing of near misses. What did you almost do wrong? And you know, at the time I don't think I really had, I think I was exhausted. Number one and number two, I don't think I had the. I didn't have enough of a like step back view to see.

Speaker 2: 31:14

But there was really a mixed message, right, because we have this system set up in a way that says, hey, we want you to feel safe telling us when these things happen, because we want to protect people, we want this and we want that, and on the other side, if you make a mistake, there are a lot of punitive actions that can come from that. So is it I do the right thing? And then I either I potentially personally suffer or do I not do the right thing and protect myself? And if we're going to put people in those cognitively dissonant positions over time, that builds that. That causes burnout.

Speaker 2: 31:53

Because I'm in a dilemma and that has been something that, as a leader, has been really important to me. As I tell team, I'm like look, I will never be upset with you if you make a mistake, like I might be upset that a mistake got made. I might have feelings about the mistake. I'm not having feelings about you making the mistake. And once I've processed my feelings about this mistake, we're going to come back and I'm going to be curious about why. Because I want to understand Is this a me thing? Is this a communication thing? Are you under resourced? Did you just have a bad day? Was it a fluke? Because if we can learn from that and you can feel safe coming to me and saying like, hey, I made a mistake that's going to save us so much time, so much money, so much energy over the long haul, and so it's really like this Are we looking at how the policies and procedures and practices that we're putting in place, do they actually support people doing the right thing, or are we putting them in this cognitively dissonant state?

Speaker 1: 32:59

Yeah, and I think this goes back to two things we talked about. So those are the leadership perspectives. So for me, I've been put in positions to report on whether it's large scale transformations or projects, and when something goes off the rails and inevitably something's going to happen where and I remember at one point there was a pretty big one that happened by a member of the team and my leader wanted to know who, and I said it doesn't matter, I'm accountable, I own the team actually. So let's just this. It happened. Here's how we're remediating it and moving forward.

Speaker 1: 33:31

I'm not giving names here and so creating that kind of again, safety and environment. So people know that I've got their backs. Yes, we're going to have a conversation later about, to your point, being curious how did this happen? And figure out how do we prevent this from occurring again in the future. So that's tough for many leaders to try and do that. When asked a very direct question, I refuse to answer it yeah, and so you'll have that. And, to your point, also around the kind of dialogue you have in saying like I'm going to be angry that the mistake was made, but not with you, and having those that kind of dialogue.

Speaker 1: 34:07

The second reason I think that's a challenge is going back to incentives. So I'm sure in the medical and the health care world, much like in the environments I've been in, there's metrics for everything, and so, whether it's defects if you're in a manufacturing or whatever, so they get measured. So creating stuff's going to happen. We're not looking for perfection here. Well, I'm sure we all would like that, but let's reality like under front of reality, that's not going to happen. And so, again, creating some space around that so people aren't always feeling like I'm going to get fired if I make a mistake.

Speaker 2: 34:45

Yeah, yes, because you know, from a human need perspective, it's not just a psychological safety piece of do I belong, it's also the physical safety piece of. You know, this job is a source of resources for me, it's a source of money, it's a source of security, and so if, if, that resource is going to be threatened to, sometimes, as humans, we do weird, unexpected things when our physical safety is threatened. Sometimes we fight, sometimes we run, sometimes we, you know, say yes to things that we really should say no to. And that is, I think, from a leadership perspective, one of the things that, when I think back to the leaders that I really loved following that, I'm like, oh man, I would have, I would have gone to the ends of the earth for that person. They really cared about ensuring that my needs were met, that my need for choice, you know, giving me opportunities to do things and saying, hey, you want it like Giving me agency to do what I could do best instead of micromanaging, and the psychological safety piece of like, oh my gosh.

Speaker 2: 35:58

I like I remember bringing my kids to work and I had car seats and I was like I'm so sorry. It was one of the first two weeks I worked there and I was like I'm so sorry, their bus, this happened and this happened. I just got a grab and they were like no, and they brought them into their office and they were like playing with them and I was like, oh okay, my kids belong here. That's cool. I went to the physical safety piece of hey, like I saw you made a mistake and that's not really like you. So are you? Are you good? Are you good? Because sometimes it has nothing to do with, sometimes there's you know, something to fix from a systems perspective or operational perspective, sometimes it's. I'm just really exhausted because x, y and z is happening. Okay, like can you take two days off or can you go home now? What do you need? And that that really made all the difference. That made me want to work for people.

Speaker 1: 36:52

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 36:54

So I guess my last question for you would be you know, having been in this space for a good amount of time, what do you think is the biggest growth edge or opportunity for us as leaders in today's world?

Speaker 1: 37:13

Everything we've been talking about today quite, yeah, quite, I mean there's. There's so many like competing dynamics, regardless of what industry you work in. You're a technology company because everyone's trying to digitally transform. So there's new skills that are, you know, being required, the automation, although all that I mean. So that's all the stuff that we're we are dealing with.

Speaker 1: 37:33

But I think when you look at late, there's a lot of research that shows sort of the arc of sort of the strategic priorities that companies have and how it's viewed very differently. So you're going to look at your shareholders and senior executives versus the employee population and then actually a subset of that employee population, particularly the younger generation coming in, how they rank the importance of those areas around technology and innovation. And that's what I think is the most important part of this is purpose and impact and mission and values, and there's others as well, but I'll point that it's funny. It's stark difference between shareholders and senior executives who will skew heavily towards technology and innovation and put kind of that purpose, impact, mission, vision, values at lower. But that is where our new entrance into the workforce are focused significantly, and in focusing on purpose and impact and aligning the work we do to individual values, mission statement and going into a kind of environment where people are going to want to stay requires very different leadership. So we need to flip the models in terms of how we're working and be as leaders and clearly articulating outcomes.

Speaker 1: 38:50

I've you use examples of like leaving, for if you're not feel like you're going to take some time off?

Speaker 1: 38:54

I've had a saying with my team for like for as long as I can remember, and certainly well before coven, and we were all working remotely where I would say there are no schedules, they're just deliverables. So you didn't ask me for permission to take a child to a sporting event or an aged parent to a doctor's appointment. So I think that commitments will need to make and sometimes they'll dictate a time we need to be on a call, but otherwise leave early if you need to leave early and and I would do that I tried to when my children were young leave the office at a decent time to be home for dinner with them, and then I got back online after they went to bed my choice and I. That's how I did it, and so being clear around what success looks like, how it's measured and making sure going back to metrics are aligned to that and the right kind of culture and environment that we want as a team, and measuring things very, very differently. That's that's the biggest challenge I think leaders have today and will continue to.

Speaker 2: 39:49

Quite frankly, yeah, thank you for that. I agree and I I'm really glad you brought in that part about the younger generation, because you're absolutely right. I have three teenage well, tweens, one teenager and already the conversations about what work looks like for them, and them watching their father and I work and, and you know, watching us, you know I'm a 30 hour a week human running a business, you know, and they're like, are we allowed? We're allowed to. Oh, we can, we can do that. Yes, you can do that, it's possible. So I think you spot on of the younger generations, they really care about how it feels to go to work and that is something that we get to prioritize as leaders. I said last question, I have one more, one more wrap up question Is there anything you're working on right now that you're really excited about?

Speaker 1: 40:47

Well, I decided to make a career transition to go back to, instead of being leading consulting businesses, going back to being the client that I normally serve. I'm in the midst of some of the discussions around what does that look like? So going back to being a CEO or a C-suite executive for a different type of company than I've worked out for the last number of years. So that that's a big one. And the next one is you know, my world of public speaking and a lot of the media work I've done has been highly, highly focused around advocacy for underrepresented communities, and particularly LGBT and women, and my younger child is trans. So, as I mentioned, I'm queer. I was married to a woman in the past, so it's been personal, but also more so as we've seen seen things change so dramatically here in the US, whether it's around women's reproductive rights, what we're seeing happening for the LGBT community, etc. So I'm really excited about the work and advocacy that I continue to do in that arena as well.

Speaker 2: 41:51

I'm really enjoying that work, as the mother of a non binary kiddo appreciate it because it matters, it really does, and it it's a whole piece of psychological safety, and physical safety as well, which they get to have to. So thank you, I am sure that our audience absolutely love this and if anyone wants to connect with you will make sure that your contact information is in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it for having me.

Speaker 2: 42:23

It was great. See you next week y'all. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Invitation to head to our show notes to check out the offers and connections we mentioned, or you can just head straight over to Institute for traumacom and hop in our email list so that you never miss any of the cool things that we're doing over at the Institute. Invitation to be well and to take care of yourself this week and we'll see you next time.