Executive Hustle Podcast with Kirsten Yurich
The struggle is real. Busy executives strive to do their best, be their best, and leave something left for "Act II" when they get home.
This is the podcast explores the experiences and life journeys of local leaders. Each episode explores a facet of life, leadership, or learning in such a way that everyone listening walks away with at least one actionable way to level up their life.
Executive Hustle Podcast with Kirsten Yurich
From the Body Blocker to Building Foundations with Carrie Traeger
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode of The Executive Hustle Podcast, Carrie Traeger and Kirsten dive deep into Carrie's long and successful career. Carrie has a gravatas that any person or team who knows her, benefits from. Carrie spent her early career as a body blocker. CFO of RDG Companies, 30+ years in one company, she thought loving her team meant standing in front of every hit coming their way. The hardest lesson of her career was learning to move aside. In this conversation, Carrie traces the shift from saving her people to letting them thrive, what 10 years on a local school board taught her about patience, why an ESOP is a leadership decision before it's a financial one.
A final treasure is hidden in the story of how her Rosie the Riveter grandmother still shapes the way she leads today.
More gems in this episode, Carrie and Kirsten explore:
· Dreams need foundations. A Thoreau quote from her valedictorian speech became the through-line of Carrie's career and her parenting. Dreaming is the easy part. The work underneath is what makes it real.
· Surround yourself with people who are better than you in their area of expertise and let them be better. Young leaders try to be the smartest in the room. Mature leaders build rooms full of smarter people.
· Local government moves slowly. Change in a school district requires patience in a way private business does not. Find out what Carrie uses to remember this lesson.
· Teachers are heroes with responsibility and no authority. They sit alongside air traffic controllers and nurses as the most stressed roles in society, and we dismiss them with "but they have summers off."
· No one has expert status on people or technology. After three decades, Carrie still calls herself a novice in both. That humility is a feature, not a bug.
Carrie Traeger BIO: Carrie Traeger is the Chief Financial Officer of RDG Companies, a Central Pennsylvania real estate development and property management firm with nearly 300 employee owners and more than 6.5 million square feet under management. She has spent 31 years inside one company, growing from staff accountant into a CFO seat that oversees Corporate Accounting, IT, HR, Payroll, and Support Staff. A two-time Penn State graduate with a B.S. in Accounting and an MBA, Carrie has served the community in many ways. She spent 10 years on the South Eastern School District Board of Directors. She lives in near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania with her husband Paul and has two thriving adult children. Carrie recently took up painting and enjoys spending time in her new home library.
KIRSTEN YURICH BIO:
Kirsten is a licensed behavior analyst, speaker, author, and retired CEO who partners with business leaders to help them achieve more of what matters most to them. Kirsten’s clients are high performing CEOs, founders, and executives looking to “level up” in life and business.
Kirsten share’s her expertise in leadership, performance management, and learning with executives through coaching or consulting, peer groups, and speaking.
For more info, check out Kirsten Yurich HERE.