Empty Nests and New Beginnings

Welcome back to Season 3 of the Path to Leadership! After an extended summer break filled with family transitions, academic pursuits, and professional growth, we're excited to dive into new leadership insights.

• Moving into the "wonderful chaos era" as empty nesters while both children pursue their educational journeys
• Returning to school at 49 to pursue an MBA with a focus on data science, addressing gaps in business knowledge
• Launching "Leadership on Course," a program connecting golf strategy with leadership development
• Highlighting recent research on middle manager challenges, including lack of confidence and purpose alignment
• Introducing the Leaders Catalyst Index, a tool measuring culture, competence, relatedness, and autonomy in organizations
• Previewing upcoming episodes featuring guest conversations about generations, leadership, and AI

Thank you for listening to the Path to Leadership. Please subscribe, leave reviews, and share what topics you'd like to hear in future episodes. Contact me at katiervin.com to learn more about the Leaders Catalyst Index.

Follow Catalyst Development on LinkedIn @catalystdevelopment and @drkatieervin

www.katieervin.com

Measure what matters. Lead with purpose. Take the LEADERs Catalyst Index: https://katieervin.com/catalyst-score/

Learn more about Supervisor 101 at www.cdleaders.com/supervisor101

Theme music by Emma Jo https://emmajo.rocks/

Chapters

• 0:50 Welcome to Season 3
• 3:10 The Wonderful Chaos Era
• 5:25 Back to School at 49
• 8:50 Leadership on Course Program Launch
• 12:05 The Middle Manager Challenge
• 15:35 Leaders Catalyst Index Introduction

Transcript

Dr. Katie: 0:25

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Path to Leadership. Hope you all are doing well. Welcome to Season 3 of the Path to Leadership. I'm so excited to kick this season off. It's starting a little later than I had anticipated. I was thinking that we would be back in August and I think that's the teaser that I gave everyone as I signed off for the summer. But I will tell you, the summer has extended to September and it has been so wonderful and so wonderfully chaotic. I did a LinkedIn post recently about this era of my time Shout out Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey. This era of my time Shout out Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey. But I'm in the wonderful chaos era of my life.

Dr. Katie: 1:16

Over the summer we moved our son to Wichita to start a new chapter in his life as he studies to become a airplane mechanic, which we are so proud and excited and thrilled for him and his journey. Our daughter, who is starting her fourth year of college so traditionally senior, but we're calling it a fourth year because she has two years of golf eligibility, kicked off being a student athlete at Pittsburgh State University, kicked off being a student athlete at Pittsburgh State University, and so anyone who knows me knows my tie to Pittsburgh State, and how much I love the school and how proud I am to be an alum, and how much that university shaped me and who I am now as a 49-year-old woman. And so I could not be more proud to have her as a gorilla golfer. And, even more significant, they've never had a women's golf program. And so she, um, is a leader on the team as they establish who they're going to be in the future. And so, um, she just played in her first golf tournament recently. She led the team in scores and and just talking about it I'm so emotional I could not be more proud of her.

Dr. Katie: 2:34

And so, as my husband and I ventured on to being empty nesters, I decided that I'm going to go back to school to get my MBA and I know a lot of people think that I'm crazy for that, since I already have my doctorate. But as this year has progressed and the business has been doing so well and I'm working with so many phenomenal clients, more and more I'm realizing that, while I love my degrees my sociology and psychology and human resources development and adult education leadership there's a gap when it comes to the business side of life. I have been so fortunate to have 26 years of corporate experience and to do so much great work from the human resources and operations standpoint, but I was missing the gap and then convinced my husband to go back and so we are doing our MBAs at Pittsburgh State University and that's been really cool. So my emphasis is on data science, his emphasis is on human resources, and it is a different day to go back to college at 49 than even when I started my doctorate in my early 40s. It's very different and exciting and I love lifelong learning and growing. And that's really where I pride myself in my business, in that I'm not going to do a workshop, do a talk, create a program without real deep research on it. I want to make sure that what I am teaching and developing and training and doing is not just something that I woke up in the morning and thought, oh, this sounds interesting, let me do some Google or AI and whip something together. I want to make sure that it is rooted in research and rooted in the work that I do and I want to make sure that it's able to have the impact that I want it to have. So it's a really exciting time in the urban household, as we all four of us are back to school and going and doing the work. I also have had a summer of really great speaking engagements. Thank you to the people that shout me out and recommend me and refer me. That has been so much fun to do. I have spent a lot of summer golfing with a lot of amazing women, which is my heart and passion. I launched a new program called Leadership on Course, which is tying together golf and leadership and how our strategy on the golf course also creates strong strategy in our careers and our career journey. So that's been a lot of fun. And then just spending a lot of time with amazing clients as they invest in their leadership development programs. I have a couple of really fantastic retainer clients that I just adore spending so much time with and really to watch them grow and thrive and do amazing work and to invest in themselves, into their organizations. That's been a lot of fun. So it's been really exciting.

Dr. Katie: 6:05

Off season for me, but I'm excited to get back with you all. Off season for me, but I'm excited to get back with you all. Each week I'm like, oh, I want to get back to the podcast and I get asked it. Recently I've been asked quite a bit like we're waiting for a new episode, when is it coming? So we're back and we're going to do some fun this season.

Dr. Katie: 6:26

The next week's session, I talk to the amazing leader at Agriculture Futures of America, mark Stewart. I adore him and the work he does with agriculture, students and in that space, and we just have a really great conversation about generations and leadership, and so that's a fun one. So we'll have a mix of guests. We'll have a mix of me just sharing the work I'm doing and the research I'm doing, the ahas that are coming through my work and I think too, as my husband is going through the MBA with me, I'm going to convince him to join me for some conversations. I know a lot of people really really enjoyed the one we did in April of last year on AI and it's funny when people reach out to me after that one they're like you guys have such great chemistry. I'm like great, that's a good thing. We also just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary in June. I'm glad that our chemistry comes through in a podcast because we are very lucky to have each other and I just love talking work with him because he is such a great supporter of me and me of him, but also I learned so much from him and the work he does, and I know the feeling is mutual because he tells me all the time how he is sharing my work. So it's just a fun synergy that we have. So I'm going to convince him to join me for some of the podcasts as we go forward too.

Dr. Katie: 8:09

So I want to hear from you what do you want to hear about this season, what is on your mind, what is going on? I just got done writing my September newsletter and I'm really excited for that to go out. And the reason why I'm excited for that to go out is it really highlights a recent white paper by Simon Sinek, and I know so many people really enjoy Simon Sinek I do as well but his group just did some research on middle managers and really the stress that they have going on with them right now, and so, whether it be the lack of confidence that they have or the tying their purpose with the purpose of the organization or just the human side of things, and that's where my corporate leaders I have a couple corporate leaders programs going on right now, which is my six-month leadership program where we really go into not just why you should be a leader but how, and really measuring that transformation of those six months. It's a really powerful program and I'm so proud of it, but it just really what Simon Sinek's group really reinforced was the stuff that I hear and see from leaders all the time, which is they're trying to do their best but they just don't know. What they don't know and we see this so often with clients that I am working with is that you know we promote people and then we expect them to have these magical powers the next day, like you're an individual contributor, and then tomorrow you wake up and now you're in charge of people, go get them, go inspire them, go make it great. And that's not easy to do. And there's some people that it comes very natural to and that's fantastic. But just because it doesn't come natural to you doesn't mean that you can't be a great leader. It just means that there's some work to do. And that's the stuff that I love to do so much and I love to watch leaders grow and thrive and, most importantly, I love to hear the feedback from their employees on how they can grow and how, through their leaders, their supervisors, their people leaders doing this work, their path is more clear for them too. So it's just a really really fun program and I'm just so excited for all the work that I'm doing.

Dr. Katie: 10:47

And I'm excited to highlight not just Simon Sinek's research, my research and other people's research that continues to be reinforced. We're seeing that it's not slowing down. Be a leader, but how, because if we continue just talking about why we need to build strong leaders but we're not investing in the how, then that's where it becomes really this echo chamber of yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been talking about this for years Like nothing's ever going to change, nothing's ever going to happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We get it so really excited about all that. Yeah, we get it so really excited about all that.

Dr. Katie: 11:47

So something fun that I have been working on for years that launched last month actually in August was something I call my Leaders Catalyst Index. It is a way to measure culture, competence, relatedness and autonomy in your organization, and it's one of those, if you think about a pulse survey, but it's deeper because it's rooted in research and it really helps us to identify where are the areas, what are the programs, what are the maybe the root cause of some of your problems in your organization. And so the fun thing about the Catalyst Index, the Leaders Catalyst Index, is it allows management executive teams to take it and then we have an employee version so we can compare it with what the leadership thinks is going well and what the employees think is going well and where might we have gaps. And it's something I offer free to organizations from the executive standpoint. The executives can go on and take it at any point. That's free, and then it's a minimal charge for employees to take it so we can align and find ways to bring everyone together. And then for my retainer clients and those longer term clients, they get a significant discount on the Leaders Catalyst Index.

Dr. Katie: 13:09

But I am so it is so important to me that we are measuring, especially because leadership skills are so hard sometimes to measure, especially these. What people call soft skills, I call career power skills. But there is way to measure especially these. What people call soft skills, I call career power skills. But there is a way to measure impact and there are ways to measure employees' feelings about the work that's being done. And there's not a lot of tools out there that do it, and that's why when I did my research and found that not a lot of people were using self-determination theory to measure motivation at work. I knew that there was a deeper piece to this and that's why I created the Leaders Catalyst Index, because it ties my research into the work that I do, and so I'm excited for that. So if anyone's interested in trying that, please reach out to me or visit my website, which is katiervincom. You can find it on there and you can go in and you can take it and then you can set up a free consultation of what that might look like for you and for your organization. So excited again. I can't say it enough. I'm sure people listening are like, yep, we get it. You're excited. But I'm so fortunate to do the work I do and to have these conversations as we go into season three. So stay tuned.

Dr. Katie: 14:34

Make sure that you subscribe to the podcast so it downloads each week as it comes out and then also it's really helpful to me. Thank you everyone who has left comments and reviews. It also helps. We know everything these days is so tied into algorithms and so it just helps the podcast get traction and get support. But I do the podcast because it's a labor of love. I would rather have 100 people listen to this and me to be able to have impact in your life than to have 10,000 downloads and it not resonate with people. So for me, it's just so important that you can use this, that it's practical and that you get little nuggets out of it. So, with that, go, do great things, be great leaders. Let me know what you want to hear, let me know who you want to hear, and I am looking forward to another great season. Thank you for listening to the Path to Leadership and I will talk to you next week. Bye, everyone.