Introduction to (un)leaderly

Welcome to (un)leaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through a leadership perspective. In this episode, host Barbara Iverson shares her ideas and goals for the podcast and what listeners can expect in episodes to come. She tells stories from her life and what prompted her to start a podcast that looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. Every week she offers a challenge or task for listeners, to prompt reflection or growth. This podcast is the perfect listen for someone who feels like they don't quite fit to the typical leadership profile. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello and welcome to Unleaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through a leadership perspective. My name is Barbara Iverson. I am your host. And I am very excited about getting this podcast off the ground. I hope that you will return and see what we're up to. When I say the world through a leadership perspective, what on earth does that mean? Well, everything is leadership, right? And when I talk about leadership, I mean leading ourselves, leading others, maybe leading teams, maybe leading entire corporations or even countries or whatever, or leading your family. It doesn't need to be specific, but there are so many ways to see the world through how does this affect us and what does leading through this mean? Or what does being a leader in this moment look like? That's what I want to explore. I'm going to process my own experiences through this light, through this lens, and I'm going to invite others to join me. And I hope that you will listen with open ears and an open mind and curiosity about what you might take that's new, or that you may agree with an experience because you have had something similar in your own life, or you may be challenged by hearing something that you think you disagree with, but the more you listen to it, maybe you agree, maybe you never do. But how can we approach our experiences and what we encounter through curiosity and a lens of what does this mean for me? How do I need to take this and move forward with it? So, not always easy answers, and that's the fun of it. So, in this podcast, I'm also very interested in challenging more traditional ideas about leadership and management. I'll tell you in a moment a little bit more about myself, but I have more than 25 years of experience working in the leadership development space with all different ages and in different contexts. And I have become a bit frustrated in time with the more traditional ways of looking at leaders and leadership and expectations for what a leader looks like. And part of that comes from my experience as a woman, because in certainly in Western cultures, leadership leaders are often considered to be older, white, straight, tall men. And those who don't fall into those categories often struggle in some way. And so I want to look at what are the traditional notions of what a leader is, how they behave, what qualities do we look for in someone that we call a leader? And what is not necessary? What can we leave behind? What can we say? You know what, let's redefine this. Let's let's think about it in a different way. So I want to challenge some of those traditional ideas and look for spaces where we can engage with people who don't fit into those stereotypes. I also want to encourage women in leadership. I am a woman who has been in leadership positions. I consider myself a leader. And I have also seen younger women coming up and struggling to find themselves within, again, those traditional notions and ideas about what a leader is and looks like. So I want to encourage women in leadership and use this platform to do that. And not just women, non-traditional leaders, people who don't fit the stereotype. And you know what? Even people who do. If you are an older, straight, white, tall man who's leading something, you are very welcome here as well. Let's approach what we're doing with curiosity and see what comes out. And if you're encouraged, I think that's great. The other thing that I'm wanting to do in this time is to hone my storytelling skills. As a child, uh, you may remember this as a as quite a young child, I knew a million jokes. Did you know a million jokes? Everybody I knew knew a million jokes. My brother and I would tell each other jokes all day long, sometimes the same one over and over again. We knew so many jokes. And I, somewhere along the line, I lost that. And okay, I don't want this to become a joke-telling podcast. I still I don't know many jokes, and many of them are not really funny. The storytelling aspect of telling jokes. So, as a uh younger woman in my 20s, I remember I had a story for everything. Any experience, anything, any topic somebody would bring up, I had I had a story to tell. Whether it was my own life or something I'd read or something I'd seen or whatever, I had something to say. Quick note that my 20s-year-old self was quite insufferable at times when it came to these stories. But at the same time, there was a skill and a desire for connection in telling stories that I think is worthwhile. I want to explore that. I want to get back to the skill of storytelling and engaging an audience with just my voice to tell about something that I experienced that I think might interest them. Let's see how we go with that because part of storytelling is also making connections, making connections between people, making connections in our minds between topics, and finding those aha moments of realization. So, my background. I have a master's degree in global leadership, which is a super funny name of a degree to say because people think, oh, what does that mean? Well, I'm ready to take over the world. No, that's not what it means. But it was leadership from a global perspective. So there were people from all over the world in the cohort that I went through this process with, and we all learned a lot from each other. And we studied things like organizational behavior and development. We just we looked into mentoring, culture building, lifelong learning, adult learning, these kinds of topics. And it was illuminating and so helpful for me to take some tools that I could take further into my career and personal life as well. In the working space, I have worked in a nonprofit, I've worked in academia, and I've worked in the corporate world. And I'm really glad that I have all three of those perspectives because all three of those operate very differently. And the expectations of what a leader is do actually shift from one to the other. Not tremendously, but I I saw differences between them. So I'm looking forward to looking into those with you and talking about them. And then, of course, there's my own perspective. We can't escape who we are and our backgrounds and the way that we were raised. And so that is what I bring also with me into this discussion. So I am a woman, I'm an immigrant, I moved from my native United States after I was educated, and I moved to Europe. So I've lived here for just over 25 years. So that I bring into every conversation and my perspective. I'm also part of Gen X. So that has shaped my view of the world and my view of myself. I'm white, I'm educated. I come from a Midwestern town outside of Chicago, having grown up and been educated in Illinois, but then also having the experience of developing as an adult in my 20s, in particular, in California. So those things have made me who I am, and I bring that into my discussions of things. There are other things that will come up through the course of this podcast, but that's basically who I am. I want to make a note about language and try to get on the same page with what leadership means and what management means. These words are often used interchangeably these days. And often I think the word leadership is used where management is intended. As far as I can see, sometime in the 90s, people who did management seminars found that they were the butt of jokes and it was very dry and very boring. And so they started slapping the name leadership on what they were doing. Leadership being a much sexier word, a little bit more nebulous, a little less clear what exactly you meant, and that made it exciting. So instead of management seminars, suddenly there were leadership seminars and tons and tons of books, mostly by white men. And they talked about leadership in a very specific way, with different labels on the characteristics that they expected to see in a leader and different types of leader. And what I found in my work at a tech university, a startup tech university here in Berlin. So I was the head of the interpersonal skills department there, and I developed a leadership module. And over the course of a semester, students had to explore leadership from their own experience and also draw from that of others. And a number of young women came to me saying, I don't really know if I'm a leader. I look at, I look at these, you know, characteristics and character qualities, and I don't think I really fit. And I found myself thinking, oh dear, this is actually very unfortunate because I do see leadership qualities in this women, in these women, but I'm not looking for the same things that um Google is telling them to look for. It's not Google's fault. But what they were finding online and what they were finding in their research was describing a character that they didn't quite see themselves in. And so I wanted to change that and actually unleashly started as a book. And now it's developed into a podcast. The book hasn't been published. It's been the receptacle for my thoughts on this topic. And I decided I think it's time to bring it into a podcast because I am a verbal processor. I love to talk through things. And I hope that together we can explore some ideas and come out of them on the other side with new aha moments, let's say. But one thing I asked the students in this process also to wrestle with was the idea of power, authority, and influence, and what those three things had to do with leadership and management. Because I'm sure you've had the experience that not every leader of a team or manager of a team is the person with the most influence or even power on that team. There can be someone else who is quietly or loudly leading the team and it's not the manager. So this is something that I'm very interested in looking at and thinking about. All right, story time for you. So in my lifelong development class for my master's degree, we were asked to explore our own lives and think back to experiences that had made us who we are. I want to tell you about four moments in my young years that I can look to as either pointing to leadership qualities in myself or just having stuck in my mind as something important that has made me in some way who I am. So the first is actually a memory that I don't have. But I am two years younger than my brother. And he, especially when we were growing up, was the kinder, gentler, softer person than I was. And my dad enjoyed telling me about how, as really young children, as soon as I could talk, I directed our play together. I decided what we were going to play, who was going to play what role, when, how, all of those things. And my brother went along with it happily. Or maybe unhappily, because at one point he finally used the word no with me. And my dad told me how he and my mom celebrated at that moment. Yay, he's gonna be all right. Because they were really worried that he would only ever do exactly what I said. But it showed me through my dad's telling of that story that there was something in me from a very young age that wanted to direct, wanted to tell people what to do, wanted to make the decisions. So the second story is a few years later when I was in early elementary school, and we would get report cards with the topics like math, science, music, whatever, and grades. And then on the back, there were more, let's say, interpersonal notes. And one of them was plays well with others. And one semester, I think two semester two quarters, two out of four in a year, I got a minus for that. And I was a very ambitious student who didn't get minuses in anything. And so that was a bit disturbing, confusing as well. And I didn't really know what to make of that, and I didn't really know what it meant, because no teacher had spoken to me about this being a problem, nor had my parents. Nobody had ever said, hey, you don't play well with others. So I was left to imagine that this was simply because I was, in the word that's used for little girls and almost never for little boys, bossy. I again wanted to direct. I wanted people to follow my lead. I wanted people to do what I thought would be fun or cool or amazing or whatever. And that was seen by my teachers in my very conservative school as not a quality that a young lady would be successful taking into her later years. And I think that their intentions were, if they were thinking about them at all, their intentions were probably fine. Uh it's, you know, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt that they were doing the best they could, but that my strong personality was something that they didn't think was gonna go well later on in life. So they wanted to kind of curb it while they could. So the third story, I was in eighth grade, and I had the opportunity to spend a month in upstate New York at a camp where there was a camper in training four-week program. My brother had done it the year before and loved it. And so I was gonna go, but I needed the recommendations of a couple adults who were not my parents or not family members, and I asked one of my teachers to make a recommendation, Mr. H. So he did. He wrote a glowing recommendation, said that I would benefit very much from such a program and that I would add a lot to whatever group of campers were going through it with me. Very, very kind. Well, before schools finished that spring, there was a cheating scandal. So there was an upcoming test, and the answers had been written on a piece of paper and passed around. And it landed in my hand. And I do remember opening it. I don't remember really looking carefully at the answers because, as I said, I was an ambitious student and wanted good grades, and I studied and did whatever I could on my own and didn't really feel like I needed to cheat, whether it was a good idea or bad. But anyway, I did handle the note with the answers on it. Well, the person who had the note was caught, and that person started naming names. And when they did, my name came up. Now, I didn't get into any specific trouble at the school. I think it was discovered that I really didn't do much with it. Probably I didn't even pass the test. And that would be the proof that I didn't cheat. I don't know. I don't remember that. However, I do remember Mr. H coming to me and he sat me down after class one day and he said, What am I supposed to do? And I just sort of looked at him and he said, You asked me to write a rec recommendation for you for this camp, which I think will be a great experience for you. And I wrote a glowing recommendation for you because I think you're a great kid and I think that it's a great opportunity for you. And now you've been part of this cheating scandal. So what am I supposed to do? Should I write to the camp and tell them, hold on, no, I take it back. Should I not do anything, which doesn't feel very honest? What should I do? And I did not have an answer for him. And to be honest, I don't remember what happened after that point in the conversation. But the reason that it stays with me is I think it was one of those early moments when there were consequences for a behavior that wasn't badly meant, but it still had negative consequences in some way for me. And it wasn't a clear-cut, you know, you're being punished or you're being rewarded for your behavior either. It was simply you need to think about this. Who are you? What are you doing? And how your actions actually have impact. And that was an important moment because it it caused reflection in me. And it has stayed with me. And I don't have a clear like way to wrap up what it meant, but it has stayed with me. So the fourth short story I want to tell you took place a couple years later when I was either um in ninth or tenth grade, either a freshman or sophomore in high school. I'm actually not sure which one. I know my brother was around, so I wasn't any older than 15. And I was part of a youth group from our church, and there was one time where we were on a bus to an event. I think we went to a farm in the middle of nowhere to play games and have some activities that you wouldn't have in the church gym. I was sitting up at the front chatting with the leaders, who were mostly university kids, but I was chatting with them and I remember, okay, so this was outside of Chicago in the suburbs, sometime in the mid-80s, and I had a bear, a Chicago Bears pin on my jean jacket. And when I hit a button on the back of it, the LED lights flashed, and oh my, what a reaction. It would get the whole bus cheering and screaming. And we were very analog and low-tech in those days. But I asked the leaders, hey, what are we going to be doing when we get there? And they said, Oh, we're going to be playing this game. It's super cool. It's called Capture the Flag. So if you are from that generation, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's a team game. You're trying to capture some item that the other team hides, get it back without being caught, blah, blah, blah. It's a lot of fun to play in the dark as young teenage kids. And so there were going to be two teams, and I said, Cool, who's leading the teams? And they said, Well, you're leading one. Now, keep in mind, I am one of the youngest people on that bus. Certainly one of the younger, in the youngest half, if not the youngest quarter. And I said, I I'm what? And they said, You're you're leading. You're leading one of the teams. You're gonna be, you're gonna be the head of it. You know, I don't remember. I kind of remember the game because I think my brother was on the other team, and it devolved into some sort of like US Russia. Like Cold War standoff among kids playing games. But it was a moment that I recall because, uh, not because of the flashing LED pin, but partly that, but because it was, there was recognition that people would follow me if I was put into a position of leadership. And that meant something to me. And so I've remembered it. I've taken it with me. So there you have four short stories of moments in my early years that have been poignant and have stayed with me. And I don't have a clear label to put on them or no specific behaviors that come out of those experiences, but they have stayed with me. And what I encourage you to do in the coming days and weeks is think about three or four moments from your young years that have stayed with you. You don't have to put a label on them or say what they mean to you, or if they were a leader moment or a follower moment or a I'm gonna be a doctor moment. They could be, they could be all those things or none of those things. But think of those moments that have stayed with you and consider why. Maybe, maybe dig a little deeper to to discover why. And if you're able, share them with someone. It's fun to share those things and you sharing that with them may lead to them sharing something interesting with you. And wouldn't that be lovely? So I want to say thank you for you to you for joining me today. I hope you'll come back and see where we go with this project and have a wonderful day. One last thing before you go, please appreciate with me the beautiful work of Lilia Keyes in putting together our intro music. Thanks, Lilia.