Mastering Leadership Skills: 5 Proven Steps to Fast-Track Your Career with Camille Batiste 🚀

🚀 Ready to transform your career and step into impactful leadership? 

In this episode, I'm joined by Camille Batiste to reveal a proven 5-step framework for Mastering Leadership Skills. A game plan that’s already helped countless professionals fast-track their growth and land leadership roles.

Camille’s journey from chemical engineer to senior corporate leader offers powerful insights for anyone navigating career transitions, especially if you’re in the “forgotten middle” of your career. 

With decades of experience in corporate America, including leadership roles at Honeywell and Archer Daniels Midland, Camille breaks down the essential steps to Mastering Leadership Skills:

✨ Grow Up – Embrace challenges and adapt to achieve growth
🚀 Step Up – Deliver results that make a real impact
👀 Show Up – Build visibility and presence as a leader
🗣 Speak Up – Own your story, voice your ideas, and influence others
📈 Level Up – Prepare for bigger roles and bring others along with you

🎯 Whether you’re a marketer, creative, or ambitious professional aiming for leadership, these strategies will help you navigate change, boost your confidence, and position yourself for success.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:45 Camille's Early Life and Education
01:48 Career Beginnings and Honeywell Experience
03:34 Transition to Archer Daniels Midland
06:35 Motivation for Coaching and Leadership
12:23 Developing a Leadership Framework
25:06 The Importance of Human Interaction
25:26 Visibility and Recognition in the Workplace
27:09 The Power of Speaking Up
30:36 Overcoming Fear and Taking Baby Steps
33:03 Level Up: Preparing for Leadership
34:21 Celebrating Successes and Human Connection
37:18 Learning from Others and Observing
41:44 The Value of Progress Over Perfection

Connect with Camille:
Website: www.camillebatiste.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camille-batiste/
Feedback link: https://pro.speakerhub.com/speaker-feedback/?qr=bb904e42-a4e6-448e-8fda-65eec1decb1d

Your host, Emma Graham, Career Coach and ex-recruiter, is here to help you with:

💡 Gain clarity on what’s important to you
💡 Confidently communicate your value
💡 Build a personal brand and a strong network
💡 Take a strategic approach to your next move
💡 Navigate the job market effectively
💡 Build career confidence with a repeatable success blueprint

🌐 Explore my coaching programs and free resources:
Website: https://www.egconsulting.au/
LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/emmajgraham
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emmagrahamcareercoach/

🎁 Free Resources:
📄 CV Development Guide: https://www.egconsulting.au/cv-advice
📄 LinkedIn Profile Optimisation Guide: https://www.egconsulting.au/linkedin-profile-guide

📅 Book Your FREE Career Strategy Discovery Call:
https://calendly.com/emmagrahamconsulting/discovery-call

Transcript

Emma: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Your Career Journey, the podcast designed to be your compass through the twists and turns of career development. Today I'm joined by Camille Batiste, a former chemical engineer who successfully made the leap from technical expert to senior leader in corporate America, including many years at Honeywell. Camille shares her powerful and practical framework for first-time leadership, the skills that she had to build along the way, and how she navigated that transition as someone who describes herself as naturally shy and introverted. If you're eyeing your next big step into leadership but are unsure where to start, join me as Camille shares her story. So I am joined today by Camille. Camille Batiste, welcome. Thank you, Emma. So happy to be with you today. Really pleased to be chatting with you and navigating time zones that, again, I seem to be doing a little bit at the moment. So appreciate your flexibility on the timing of this conversation. Super interested, Camille, to get into particularly your framework around leadership and how you talk about and think about leadership skills for people but before we do that with a podcast like mine with a name like mine it's always going to start with a little bit about your own career journey so tell me a little bit about how you got to where you are today

Camille: 1:31

thank you so much emma so quick summary of my journey i grew up in jamaica all the way through high school so some people will be familiar with o levels and a levels so i did that

Emma: 1:46

the english way yeah

Camille: 1:47

Yeah, yeah. And I have a quick story there, which I'll share during the conversation. When I was in Jamaica, as most Jamaicans do, it's a small island. So everybody has the aspiration to leave, to go explore the world. And not only did I want to leave, I wanted to go very far away. And so I applied to several schools, but Stanford University was my first choice, which is in the US, but on the West Coast. And I really just wanted to sort of, you know, become more independent, be challenged, I academically, and that I was. And even during my time at Stanford, I did have the desire to move back home to contribute to Jamaica and Jamaica's development, but that was not to be. I just couldn't find the job that I wanted and ended up moving back to the U.S. My first real girl or big girl job was as a chemical engineer in the southern part of the U.S. in Louisiana. And even with that, that was actually a perfect perfect job opportunity, which the intent was for me to work in this plant for two years and then be able to move back to Jamaica. This company had plants in Jamaica as well as in the US. But unfortunately for them or unfortunately for me or fortunately, I don't know, I met my husband during that two year period. And by two years, we were married and my assignment ended. So I left that company and I ended up joining Honeywell International, which at the time was Allied Signal as a chemical engineer and really built my career at Honeywell. I would tell you a lot of the lessons that I've learned and who I am as a leader I've developed during my 20 years at Honeywell. So at Honeywell, I joined as a process engineer, a production engineer in a plant. I moved into IT, implementing SAP, moved into procurement and supply chain, which I absolutely loved and spent almost the rest of my career in some version of procurement and supply chain. First in the chemical side of Honeywell. And then I was asked to move to the aerospace division of Honeywell. So I spent two years in aerospace, more indirect procurement, more services and non-manufacturing equipment. And then I moved into direct, which is the components for the engines that we were making. And so in those two years, I moved from senior director to vice president. And certainly that changes the level of interaction that you have in the organization. And the inflection then for me For leaving Honeywell, I was recruited into Archer Daniels Midland, which is an agriculture company or an agribusiness company. And I didn't know much about agribusiness or agriculture at all. So the opportunity at ADM that I had was to take a lot of the learnings that I had at Honeywell, whether it was in procurement and procurement best practices, or even in my leadership style, and bring those best practices into ADM. and to mature the ADM function. Fortunately for me, one of the things that I learned through my journey was not just to bring the technical elements of what I learned in procurement, but to also bring my full self as a leader and to show up as a leader. I was perceived as ready and capable for other things, maybe even more ready and more capable than I thought I was. So I was recruited into doing a lot of different things and I had a lot of really great, exciting opportunities outside of procurement. So I was asked to work on some commercial projects and broader supply chain projects, so much so that by the time I left ADM, sorry, one year ago, I was responsible for the end-to-end supply chain of one of the business units. At one point, I was responsible for the transformation office of the enterprise. And I also helped to build up the supply chain planning function within the company. So, you know, all of that sort of culminated with what I felt like, gosh, I've done all the things that I want to do. There was one thing I haven't done, and I'm still on this quest. I've always wanted to run a business. And that hasn't happen yet, but I'm working on it and we can talk about that as we go through this conversation. So

Emma: 6:23

interesting. And I think what I like particularly, or I think the part of that experience that really resonates and we'll sort of go on to talk about in more detail is that some of the skills required to essentially navigate those big corporate organizations and how you, as you said, kind of show up and are perceived as a leader is not actually a reflection of your technical skills and and your ability to actually you know quote unquote do the job that there's a whole other set of skills that that kind of sit around that I guess that we you know blanket sort of call them leadership skills but there's there's a lot a lot in there kind of outside of that and and going into to what you do now and and kind of sharing that experience with with others what what kind of drove you to do that what was the most behind that, apart from wanting to build your own business?

Camille: 7:21

Sure, certainly. So one of the things that I realized as I was contemplating this new phase in life and, you know, jumping ship and into the unknown was what are the elements of my corporate life that I enjoy and the elements that I don't enjoy? And the ones I didn't enjoy are the ones nobody enjoys. It's the meetings and the presentations and the meetings after the meetings, which seem to not be very valuable and I think that is that is correct but the part of the job that I very much enjoyed was the time that I spent investing in people and whether that was in coaching my own team or others mentoring other people getting coached even I found that that was also very helpful and enjoyable and I wanted to try to explore what could an enterprise or a business or or an offering look like for me to enhance my own skills to do a better job of that? Because not only do I have people when it comes to work in my life, I have my own family and I raise teenagers and they need coaching too. And even the young adults that they are today need coaching as well. And so I've landed on coaching and I'm taking the time now to learn what are the skills of coaching and what value does that bring and how does that help an individual go from where they are today to where they want to be. So that's one element of what I what I do today. The second element of what I do today, which is connected, is simply teaching some of those skills, which I think are lacking. And, you know, one of the one of when I think about my own career, and I think about the people that are in my life that are either in the organizations that I came from, or people that I've are part of my broader network, there is there there are maybe three phases in your career, the way I think about it. There's your entry phase. There's that middle, maybe the messy middle when you're trying to figure out who you are and what you want. And then there's the end phase where when you're really, really, I think, creating quite a lot of value, giving back, but you've essentially decided you are where you're going to be. And what I found is that there's a lot of support for entry level, right? We have rotation programs. We offer mentoring. A lot of times Yeah. Yeah. Early in career, you're deploying those technical skills. I was an engineer and I was solving pressure and volume and flow problems. And that was my job. And as an executive, I knew that I was running an organization and I had support to do that. But it was trial and error to get to that point that I started to learn, what does it take to get from capable individual contributor to effective leader? And so that audience is my target audience and so i've developed a course in fact we just recorded the last module earlier today so i'm really glad to congratulations that's a big monster yes very excited but develop the course to to help people walk through what are those skills that really need to be in place in order to to move to those positions and really to develop yourself as well right and And a lot of that comes from not just what you do or what you think or a little bit of what you say, but how are you perceived? Yeah.

Emma: 11:56

Yeah, I totally agree with everything you've just said. And I love your terminology there about the forgotten middle. And there is that, as you say, there's that kind of gap between, as we said before, being good at your job and being acknowledged for your technical skills. And then how do I get from there to perhaps my first management role and taking on a team? And I think also there's perhaps a lack of awareness sometimes, which is obviously what you're trying to combat about. What are the skills that bridge that? that gap you know if I've and it's the same as that you go through school and and you're rewarded for your technical knowledge for being able to give the right answer and same at university and then you know you maybe get into a graduate program for the same reason and and then after a little bit of time there's probably this awareness that the old cliche of the skills that got me here won't get me to the get me to the next bit but but not necessarily being clear on what those skills are and also really importantly not knowing where to go to gain those skills so yeah I think it is a sort of a little forgotten hole in the knowledge there so talk to me about the framework that you have developed because I love the outwardly simple nature of it they're the best things aren't they easy to understand and then the complexity sometimes is in actually developing that but yeah talk me talk me through the framework and how you conceive of each of those parts

Camille: 13:33

sure happy happy to do that and it actually starts back in my my university years I would say that through high school was relatively easy for me not not a hundred percent easy I did have some courses that I found challenging physics was one of them and and calculus was another one or ad math is what they called it. But for the most part, I thought high school was pretty easy. And I was I had quite a bit of hubris going into university and I wanted to go to the best schools in the US. And, you know, I had other I had other wonderful institutions that reached out to me. In hindsight, now I look back and I go, wow, those were really awesome schools, but they weren't the top, top ones. And so I sort of, you know, moved away from those because I was going to go to the top schools. And and I specifically looked for the most rigorous programs. for two reasons. Number one, I wanted the challenge and I thought I was up to it. And number two, I wanted the degrees that were going to pay me the most money outside of school. So I got both of those when I chose chemical engineering and decided to add an economics degree on top of that just for fun. Well, I learned, you know, as one does. I did economics too, so I actually do think that is fun. That was actually the fun part of college. It was the engineering that sort of of tore me up a little bit. So I'll go through the framework through telling that story. So when I went into school, I was a good student and I was very much an introvert. So I wasn't one to ask a lot of questions or things like that. So when I was in the chemical engineering classes and actually organic chem, for example, was one that was specifically difficult, I struggled. And for the first time I had to, I sat in class and one time I was thinking and class because I had a friend in high school who wasn't good at math and she would always ask these questions and I would think how is it that you cannot understand something in the class this is all so simple and she just struggled with it and I remember thinking in class now I feel what she was feeling when I'm sitting there and I'm like I can't even I can't even ask a question because I have no idea what's going on and so it was there certain classes that were incredibly challenging and being that far away from home not having the support structure that I was used to I struggled and that was for the first time. And what I recognized and I watched other people who were also struggling because all of us were coming from situations where we were the number one in our class in high school. That's why we were at Stanford in the first place. And now we're all in a very tough situation. Probably a lot of people like me choosing classes that perhaps they should have been a bit more honest and humble when they were choosing those classes. And so one of the first lessons that I had to learn at Stanford was, and I called it I call it grow up. So the framework, everything ends with the word up because we're all about moving up and we're all about progress. So I had to grow up. And what that meant was that I couldn't continue to do what I was doing because what I used to do wasn't working anymore. So where I was able to go to class, understand the material, do the homework, breeze over some information, take a test, now I needed to actually dig more. I had to reach out to the professor. I had to ask questions. I had to find other people. I had to find other resources. And I had to make a choice. Am I going to grow up and actually take these actions and make the change and change me to get the result that I want? Or the opposite of that is to drop out. And I knew that I wasn't I was not a quitter and I wasn't going to drop out. So I recognized that I had to make a choice. And the choice was I have to grow up. I have to. And in order for me to grow, then it means I need to go through. I can't avoid these things because my tendency was, oh, I will tell you, I did avoid one electrical engineering classes and to this day electricity I do not understand and because I avoided it I really should have taken a double E class but in order to succeed you have to go through the process the learning comes through the doing the learning doesn't come by reading it by learning about it it's actually by doing it and so that was lesson number one I had to grow up and I had to do that in the four years that I was on the Stanford campus so I did graduate with both degrees. Very excited. And the great thing about that is once I have it, you can't take it away from me. I can't take it away from you. I got it. And then I'll fast forward to my first engineering job. And the lesson that I learned in this first engineering job is to step up. And it's closely related to the grow up, but it's around delivering results. And the fact that in the real world versus in an academic world, the results are critical. So I think about a doctor, for example, a doctor in med school can take a test and get a B and still move on to the next class or a C. No one dies. No one died. But in real life, I would like to see an A on every surgery, sir or miss, doctor, right? And so same thing, even in engineering, there are things that you could do, you could sort of make it and maybe not get every single thing. But I recognize that when you're in the real world, you know, that pressure and to be at the right level or that the plant, we can't have the plant blowing up because I did 80% of the work. And so the results that you provide are critical, not just for life and safety, but for the results of the business. And so I recognize that there was a shift. And so results are fundamental. And so I had to learn that whatever I was doing, I wasn't just doing it to sort of get a check in the box, but I was doing it because the outcome mattered. And so I think bringing purpose to what I was doing actually helped me to be more and more careful about what I was working on, with whom I was working and the results that I had. So I call that one stepping up because it's stepping up out of the protection of an academic environment to the real world where the results actually matter. So during my engineering, hands-on engineering phase, that's the lesson, right? Step up. So the first one, grow up. Second one, step up. While I was stepping as an engineer, though, I started to observe things around me as I was seeing engineers or professionals that were being promoted or that were getting the nice assignments or were getting to travel with leaders and those that weren't. And I started to kind of see a difference. And one of them, actually, I noticed with an intern that joined our group one summer. And this particular We were in a pretty rough industrial environment. So most of us wore maybe a polo shirt and jeans or khakis, something that's, you know, if it's damaged, it's okay. And this young man wore a button-down shirt and dress pants and dress shoes to the plant every day. And he would wear the safety garb when he was going into the plant. But in the office, he was always dressed up. And he would always say, my dad always said to me, dress for the job you want, not the job you have. I recognize two things from observing that gentleman. Number one, his dad was telling him that. So he had somebody in his life who was preparing him for what it takes to be successful in a corporate environment. Not everybody has that. Not everybody has a corporate dad who is giving you this kind of advice. And number two, I did see that he was treated differently. I did see that he was, even though he was an intern, the general perception was that he was going places That whenever he had his first job, he certainly got an offer from our company. He was already seen, even as an intern, as somebody who was leadership material. And I saw that not in just how people dress. I saw that in how they carried themselves. I saw that in people who showed up at events that maybe I thought were not important, but turns out that they were. So lesson number three in kind of preparing for leadership was leadership. to show up. And I think in this environment where a lot of us are remote, it means that even when you're remote to show up, like we're showing up here on camera to show up in the room, if you're in the building and there are people in a room to go to the room because it makes a difference. It does make a difference to show up how, how you dress and every company is different, right? My companies I worked for were pretty formal. Not all companies are formal. So if you work for Google dress, like, you know, whatever Google look I give you work from Microsoft, dress from Microsoft, but that connection, recognizing again, how am I being perceived? I'm being perceived by the fact that I'm there. That's one. How I dress and how I show up, that's number two. And then how I actually show up in terms of my posture. So how I walk, do I walk like a leader? Do I stand like a leader? And when I do my training, I do a quick exercise where I ask people in the training to do two things. The first thing is to sort of raise your shoulders and put your head down and kind of look like this and then talk about how do I feel if I look like this and then the opposite is to have your head up with your shoulders down it's just a small change but it even changes the way I sound yeah and the way I feel yeah just a small thing so that one is show up and we talk about you know how I learned through some of my experiences why it was important to be in certain places and there were times where I thought you know I I'm busy working on this project I can't go to that happy hour but their decisions made at that happy hour and and that's an opportunity to connect with people both leaders and others on your team and I had to learn and it was a friend of mine that told me that said Camille it's you really need to go these I know you don't you feel like it's a waste of time but it's actually part of the job for you to go so I had to learn to do that kind of thing

Emma: 23:53

I think sometimes and I know I definitely thought this myself and it's and I've also observed it in others I think there's sometimes a reluctance from people to kind of admit to themselves that all that stuff matters I think we perhaps try and kid ourselves that oh I'm doing a good job so it doesn't it doesn't matter that that doing a good job should be you know quote unquote enough and sure like that's a really lovely sentiment but it's not it works in the real world unfortunately so you know back to your earlier point about having a choice I guess it's everything in life isn't it it's the choice to kind of recognize that whether you like it or not this is the reality of the corporate world that the work world and you have a choice to to either embrace that and and to show up and and to do these things or to just kind of you know live in your own kind of delusion and keep telling yourself that oh it doesn't matter do you know what i mean have you have you seen that

Camille: 25:02

yes absolutely absolutely i was i think i did a talk a few years ago and i'm trying to remember exactly we we talked about this showing up and it was really maybe around leadership of people and one person had a question and they said that i don't i don't understand how decisions are made based on you know this sort of soft loosey-goosey stuff i'm doing my project and we're getting results is that not enough And I had a bit of a sarcastic answer. And I said, you know, when you're leading, when you're leading things, that's probably just fine. The things don't care. Right. But when you're leading humans, then all of these interactions make a difference. And leadership or becoming a leader, all of these things are all about human interaction. And so it's not just doing the work. That's great. Robots can do that. Yeah. But robots are not going to interact eye to eye. Yeah. you know there'll come a day when maybe they'll replace us as well but for now for now we still have human interaction we still have individual feelings one for another and that is what we're managing and that's what we're we're fostering as we're fostering our leadership skills

Emma: 26:14

yeah and you have to be seen if no one knows that you're there it's pretty unlikely that they're going to tap you on the shoulder and go oh camille we think you're amazing we'd like to we'd like to hand you this new promotion if they don't know you if they've never had an interaction with you exactly if they've never said oh I noticed that Camille's always at these events let me let me go and have a conversation with Camille and like the intern you know in his in his smart outfit people noticed him because of that and I would suspect he had more conversations than someone who perhaps hadn't presented themselves that way. Yeah,

Camille: 26:58

indeed. work but if you decide if you decide that you would like to have a leadership role you would like to have influence in the organization to be a part of strategic decision making then we need to then upgrade our leadership capabilities

Emma: 27:43

yeah the the next the next up

Camille: 27:46

yes so the next next up i might have to use that for something you can borrow that i'll let you have that one Thank you. So the next one, the next lesson is speak up. And it's closely related to show up. And I think you said something about if you don't tell your story, then who is going to know what you're working on. And I've had several instances where I sat in a meeting earlier in my career when we're trying to solve a problem. And I had an idea. But I talked myself out of my own idea, told myself the idea was stupid. And I was not going to share my idea. Okay. Five minutes later, somebody else shares the same idea that I had. And it was brilliant. And I'm thinking, can I be mad at that person? I'm thinking one minute, that was my idea. Well, no, because I actually didn't share it. And so shame on me because I didn't share my idea. Now I was able to add to his and everything, but there's no way I could say, well, that's my idea too. That's where I recognize... I recognize that, you know, and that person, maybe even if it was a dumb idea, okay, it's a dumb idea, but I'm going to share it anyway. Why? Because I'm in the room for a reason, right? We're here to bring all the ideas to bear. And typically what happens when you're doing something like brainstorming is that the final decision isn't one of the ideas. It's a consolidation of all of them, right? And we take all the goodness of all of them to come up with what that best solution is. So even if it was a dumb idea, I'm bringing it anyway so the new camille today camille this might be a dumb idea but here it is i thought of this somebody else can add to that so

Emma: 29:33

yeah and even if it is a not great idea it might actually then spark in someone else that might be the bridge between you know thinking a and thinking d it might be the thing that gets someone else to the idea that's actually potentially the the solution they're all kind of bricks in the wall in the sense

Camille: 29:52

yeah yeah yeah and i think you share too if if you're busy working on something important but you never tell anyone yeah then who will know that you worked on that very important thing so another reason to speak up a third reason to speak up is if you don't tell your own story someone else will and it likely may not be the story you want told and so it's so important that you own your own story you own your own narrative and you're repeating that as you're interacting as you go to the happy hour as you go to golf I say golf I I don't play golf. As you go to the events that, that you are actually sharing with people, what you're working on, the successes that you've had, and sometimes very importantly, what it is that you need from them to make an ask. And sometimes we forget that piece and we think people are going to hear what we're doing and automatically know that we need something or what we need. And sometimes we're lucky that way, but most of the time we have to, we're going to have to ask for what we need. And so that speaking up is so important. And as an introvert, as a shy person, as somebody who wants to be in the background, that was a skill that I had to build over time and get comfortable with being uncomfortable because that's not something I love to do. But in order to get what I needed, I had to speak up. I had to ask for what I needed. I had to let people know what I was working on. And I had to speak up in meetings and share my thoughts and ideas. That's what our companies pay us to do.

Emma: 31:21

Yeah.

Camille: 31:22

So it's very important.

Emma: 31:24

Your point there, around and I think it's also true for show up as much as it is for speak up and I'm really interested in your thoughts on this that as someone who as you said naturally shy naturally introverted not kind of naturally the person that would you know be shouting not shouting but you know be the loudest voice in the room and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable again 100% agree with you but how I think that's the bit that people get really stuck on. They, they can logically totally agree with what you're saying. Again, it's a conversation I have a lot with my own clients as well. Logically, they get it. They, they even might, you know, understand the steps of, if these are the things that you actually need to do. Great. But that, that first little step of action, it's just so scary. Sometimes how oftentimes, how, how, How did you manage to kind of overcome that, particularly in those first few where you don't even have the reflections of success to look back on?

Camille: 32:38

Yeah, two things. And I think you alluded to one of them just now in your question. The first one is baby steps, right? So I didn't go from not being able to speak in that meeting to taking over the meeting. I have to take over a meeting today, right? It was baby step. And so in the example of being in a meeting and feeling like either I have something to say, but I'm afraid to say it, or I don't have anything to say. Sometimes I'm sitting in a meeting and I really have no input. I got nothing, right? But I can still participate. I can ask a question, which is sort of a lower intensity way of interacting, right? I can amplify somebody else's idea, or I can even just congratulate them. I Emma made. I hadn't thought of it that way. Is there anything? But I'm contributing. I'm certainly giving Emma kudos. And so that's a positive thing that's showing leadership without really having to say a lot. So just baby steps, I think helps. And so you don't have to go from, you know, from zero to infinity in

Emma: 33:46

a day. Which leaves us our fifth up.

Camille: 33:50

Okay. The fifth and last up is a level up. And that sort of encompasses everything and when I talk about level up I talk about preparing for that move right so all these things you're saying okay I'm gonna speak up I'm gonna I'm gonna show up and now I'm being noticed okay now I need to be ready to take on this leadership responsibility so learning what does it mean to be a leader in this organization and that's through exposure try and experience different experiences in the organization some training I had leadership development training And I look back to that to this day. So getting that leadership training and preparing for those roles. The second element of level up is once you are leading, being sure that you are bringing the next generation along. So it's leadership is not just about me. Leadership is about others. It's not just and not even just my team, even my leaders, my peers and my direct reports, but bringing people along and helping them understand what it takes. to get to that level. And then the third level of the third element of level up that I know I need, and maybe a lot of people like me need is to learn how to celebrate successes and celebrate the ones that is not our, I come from a support function. And I always look to look to salespeople, sales and marketing people who are fantastic about celebrating. The rest of the organization does not celebrate like sales and we can learn from them because it is is energizing and it is motivating when you recognize, wow, we did a good job on this. Wow. You know, the team really came together. Wow. Look at the result and what that means for the business and the strategy of the business. Not just, okay, that's done. What are you gonna have to do for me lately? So a part of leadership is celebration. And I learned that from watching salespeople. I used to sort of smirk at salespeople. Oh, there they go again. But they had something going. One quick story on celebrating in procurement in one of my organizations, we had had the year before a record year in terms of the results. And we were having a global leadership meeting and I stood up and I'm presenting to the group and I said, okay, last year we had a record year and the room is quiet. And one of the people in the room got up and said, did you just hear what she said? We had a record year last year. Shouldn't we celebrate? And I thought, yes, yes. And ever since then, it just really stuck with me that, and this was, and she was from, I'll just say she was from Brazil. And so I think the culture there kind of could teach us a lot about celebrating, but it really stuck with me because I realized that people can be so demoralized with all of the work and all of the pressure and everything coming, just a small celebration, a small dinner, an outing, a team building event. And then for individuals, just kudos on something that they've done in the day it means so much it's cheap and it can really help the group get through tough times when we're good about you know giving them great recognition for good work

Emma: 37:11

and also I think just that human connection of you know saying to another person well that was great like well done like you did a really good job yeah I think there's a I mean it's a different point but I think more broadly that there's a bit of a lack of human connection in the world today and and even just those kind of small instances I think could make such a huge difference and they're the things that over time probably bond teams together and two leaders as much as anything else I think

Camille: 37:45

so true so true I think about my favorite leaders um yeah the the images that that stick in my mind are celebration events or when they gave me feedback on something certainly when they gave me constructive feedback as well that's a gift yeah and I appreciate that too but it's usually what what sticks in my mind are all the positive interactions that I had with them

Emma: 38:05

yeah on that point and you mentioned it a couple of times earlier as well and I think it's really important observation and I think it's such an underrated thing to to observe the people around you and and kind of what are they doing that makes them great at that particular thing or you know I don't know Dave is great at presentations like what is it that Dave is doing that makes him great like what are the components of that you know you're observing the intern and how he was received you're observing your colleagues and and kind of trying to unpick the the behaviors or the things that they're doing that are really kind of resonating and then thinking well how do I weave that into my own approach like how do I how do I tell that thing and put my own kind of spin on it. I think it's such an underrated skill, particularly actually when it comes to leadership and to your kind of remote working or working from home point before. I think that's one of the challenges that it's very difficult to do that when you're not necessarily in the room with someone or, you know, even just on an open floor. I think about it in my own career as well, how much I learned just from overhearing other people's conversations and hearing how other people approach the particular thing. I just think it's a really underrated, what would you call it, activity skill, I don't know, thing to do. Yeah,

Camille: 39:38

you know, I grew up with five siblings and I'm number, so I'm number five of six. And a lot of what I learned about even behavior as a child and as a teenager is watching my older siblings and what worked for them or what didn't work Yeah. You know, so not going to do that, you know, but I'm going to do that because I can see how my parents, how my parents treated some of their teenage activities and recognize, OK, and also figured out, you know, maybe how to get around, how to do the thing, but not get caught doing the thing. But it was through observation and watching and watching how things work for them, because I think, you know, in in in corporations, one of the one example of observing and this was actually overhearing someone talking about another person presentation to the ceo and in that particular example this person while they were giving him feedback about what was wrong or what they were not going to support he just kept going right he said he kept going with the ask and not realizing presentation is over you're not going to get what you asked for it's time for you to exit the room right so the self-awareness right and that's but all i did was listen to someone else you know i was over maybe i was yeah i was over overhearing someone else's conversation about another person and I recognize okay note to self yeah I need to know that when I'm in those meetings to be able to read the room and understand the cues and you're right it's much more difficult to understand those cues when everybody's in the room and you're on screen and so I would tell somebody if they had the choice to be in the room or on screen I would I would tell them to take the choice to be in the room for sure

Emma: 41:21

I yeah 100% agree with that and Tia will show up as well I think if there's you know meetings where it particularly if they're important meetings if it's optional whether you're there or not 100% be there like if you have the choice and you are in the same you know city or whatever yes you want to be there like that's in my opinion an important one where you kind of want to be in person indeed I love that framework Camille I think it's so so helpful as I said outwardly simple and and people can remember it and kind of walk through the steps but a lot of complexity under each one and of course the other thing i really like about it and i think it's often the way you know born out from your own experience that you've kind of lived those things and and seen the impact of those things and are now kind of passing passing those things on which i think is really cool thank you final question and it's always the the final question here and that is what What do you know now that you wish you knew then?

Camille: 42:32

You know, I chose a word for 2025 and that word is progress. And what I like about the word progress is it's not that I've arrived and I don't know that I will arrive before the end of the year, but I do intend to be better than I was at the beginning of the year. And Camille of then, however we define then, college or early career, wanted perfection. And what I would tell her is that progress trumps perfection. That it's more important to be moving forward than to be aiming for perfection. Because in perfection, sometimes there's no movement at all. And so there are times that I didn't move at all because I was looking for perfection. And what I look for today, now, is progress. And so even if in any of those cases where we talked about showing up or speaking up or leveling up, it's not about being perfect today, but Let's make one step towards where we're trying

Emma: 43:37

to go. It's a really interesting transition, isn't it? And I wonder if it's something, certainly that idea of perfection for people when they're younger that are often high achievers, that you hear that word often, like I'm striving to be perfect. And I think there's perhaps a window of time when you are younger that maybe it's useful, but then you kind of recognize quite quickly and maybe it's when that idea hits the real world that it kind of doesn't exist and actually can do you more harm than good, both from your own kind of mental health, but also to your point about the inertia that can sometimes be created by that.

Camille: 44:21

Do

Emma: 44:21

you choose a word every year? Is that something that you do as you come into the new year?

Camille: 44:28

This was the first time and it came out So I live in Cincinnati in the US and there's this church in Dallas. So they're far away from me and I watch them online and they choose a word every year. And so I thought, hmm, that's a good idea. And so I kind of thought through that late last year and decided that that was going to be my word. And the other reason I chose the word is that it's a noun and a verb, right? So we progress to achieve progress, right? So there's sort of two elements. And so I don't know, I love that because I could think about, okay, what am I doing to achieve progress? But as I do that, I am progressing towards it. So it's just, I don't know. I just, it was fun coming up with the idea and I've been sort of reflecting on it throughout the year and reflecting on my own progress as I continue to build out what it is that I want to be when I grow up. And

Emma: 45:26

we're all still working on that, aren't we? One day when I grow up. Thank you so much, Camille. I really enjoyed that conversation. And as I say, I really love your approach to that and the framework itself. And thank you very much for sharing it and sharing your stories and what you've learned so far.

Camille: 45:47

Thank you so much, Emma. I really appreciate you having me on the podcast.

Emma: 45:53

Very welcome. Before you go, I've got a quick favor to ask. If you enjoyed this episode or something in it resonated with you, I'd love it if you could leave a Thanks again for listening. I really appreciate it.