How Women Thrive as Leaders
Guest Speaker Susan MacKenty BradyIn this episode of WiseTalk, CEO and Executive Leadership Coach Sue Bethanis hosts Susan MacKenty Brady, co-author of the new book Arrive and Thrive: 7 Impactful Practices for Women Navigating Leadership. Susan is the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Chair for Women and Leadership at Simmons University and the Chief Executive Officer of The Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership. As a relationship expert, leadership well-being coach, author, and speaker, Susan educates leaders and executives globally on fostering self-awareness for optimal leadership. She advises executive teams on how to work together effectively and create inclusion and gender parity in organizations. A highly sought authority on emotionally intelligent leadership, Susan has been featured on ABC’s Good Morning America and has keynoted or consulted at over 500 organizations worldwide.
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INTERVIEW SUMMARY AND KEY TAKEAWAYS
Susan’s new book Arrive and Thrive stemmed from conversations between her and her co-authors around the pressure and experiences they were having as women in leadership. Within their discussions came about the 7 Impactful Practices of women in leadership. With a collective 85 years in leadership between the three of them, they were able to distill the most important tools and practices that they have used in their careers to help get them to where they are and lead effectively.
Breaking down these “7 Impactful Practices” (10:25):
- Investing in Your Best Self – this is in part knowing who you are at your best, and how to lead from this place as often as you can. Returning to your best self as often as possible.
- Embracing Authenticity – this is encouraging honesty from yourself about who you really are and helping other people to do the same thing.
- Cultivating Courage – It takes courage to take on new things and ask others for help along the way. When we realize that we do not need to go it alone and reach out for support and knowledge from others, we are more likely to thrive.
- Fostering Resilience – this is when we have a setback, we allow it to help us grow rather than returning to the same place.
- Inspiring a Bold Vision – this applies to both the individual and organization. Work on creating an inspiring vision that others will want to contribute to.
- Creating a Healthy Team Environment – promote an environment that is supportive, inclusive, collaborative, and healthy.
- Committing to the Work of an Inclusive Leader – by building a healthy team environment and modeling inclusive behaviors, inclusivity spreads throughout the organization.
These are excellent practices for anyone to work on as they move into leadership roles. Particularly for women, these serve as reminders to show up from a place of authenticity, resilience, and ultimately our best selves.
Sue and Susan also discuss how the pandemic has disproportionately affected women in the workplace, and how we are seeing more and more women shifting paths as they seek more purpose and meaning in their work. As leaders, it’s important to understand the perspectives of women in the workforce and how, for some women, remaining remote offers more flexibility in their day that makes a huge difference in their work-life balance and allows them to thrive in their roles.
Some key points Susan offers to women in leadership are: to be gentle with yourself and eliminate the self-criticism, have the courage to ask for help and reach out to others for support, try to return to your best authentic self as often as possible, and remember that vulnerability is not weakness.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“When we think about our best self and leading our life from our best self, it’s where your strengths and talents, both born and earned… when those come together with where you feel called to add value to others and also comes together with what brings you joy and vitality, that is your best selves zone.” (4:30)
“I really do believe that too often our work cultures encouraged women to get our foot in the door, only to leave us without support once we do.” (7:43)
“If you woke up women of color, you know resilience. If you woke up woman, you know resilience. If you woke up in any identity that isn’t in the majority of power, you know resilience. We’ve learned it, so fostering it eluded me at first, I was confused by it…. but it turned out it really is a thriving practice for senior women to share their resilience stories.” (10:25)
RESOURCES
Susan MacKenty Brady:
Website | LinkedIn
Book: Arrive & Thrive: 7 Impactful Practices for Women Navigating Leadership
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Sue Bethanis 0:00
Welcome, everyone to WiseTalk. This is Mariposa’s monthly podcast. We provide perspectives on leadership. Today we’re excited to welcome Susan MacKenty Brady. Susan is a Deloitte Ellen Gabriel chair for Women in leadership at Simmons University and the Chief Executive Office officer of the Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership. As a relationship expert, leadership wellbeing coach, author, and speaker. Susan educates leaders and executives globally on fostering self-awareness for optimal leadership. She advises executive teams on how to work together effectively and create inclusion and gender parity in organizations. She’s a highly sought-after authority on emotionally intelligent leadership. She has also been featured on ABC Good Morning America and has Keynoted or consulted in over 500 organizations. She has previously published two books on leadership her third, Arrive and Thrive: Seven Impactful Practices for Women Navigating Leadership is co-authored by Executive Chair of the Board of Deloitte, US Janet Fawlty, and Simmons University president Dr. Lynn Perry Wootton and this debuted this month and landed on the bestseller list, and The Wall Street Journal, Publisher’s Weekly and USA Today. Wow, that’s a lot, a lot, a big mouthful. So, I really appreciate you being here. And I know that we had to change the time because you were with Gloria Steinem yesterday, tell us about that, we got to start with that.
Susan MacKenty Brady 1:21
First of all, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be with you. And thanks for joining everyone. Right. So you know, we Jenna and Lynn and I did a google talk a few weeks ago, and the producer of Google Talk also does work under the header of exponent, which I hadn’t heard of. And essentially what they are is they’re talking circles with Gloria, she is 88 years old. She is living and working from her home in Manhattan. And she’s doing a few of these and they are recorded. So we’ll be publishing some version of some of this once they are out. But it’s an intimate circle, you know, the tagline of exponent is we do not get in line. We form circles. And you know, it was as generous and generative as you would think. It was just a beautiful conversation. And I’ll be honest, like walking into her home was it was like the 1970s, Gloria Steinem, like awesomeness about, you know, artifacts, and just beautiful things everywhere. And she is just lovely and a bit and sharp and fun, and just thoughtful and it was really cool conversation.
Sue Bethanis 2:36
Was it all women in the circle?
Susan MacKenty Brady 2:38
It was all women in the circle
Sue Bethanis 2:40
Right, was there a topic? Like do you think? Is there a specific topic for these things?
Susan MacKenty Brady 2:44
It’s more generative than I thought. We started with- I’m so used to doing all this press now, and it’s like, I get the question in advance, and I have a certain amount of time that I can answer. And so, you know, all the three authors we were all looking for sort of guidance. And it started with introduce yourself. And we did and we ended up talking, interestingly enough about working and mothering and doing too much, and how sort of the, you know, the theme of so much of the difficulty of waking up woman and going to work is managing your responsibilities outside of work and how we negotiate that, be that children or eldercare or even just home, whatever it is. And you know, Gloria didn’t have children. For the rest of the panel, there was four of us. And then she had two people on her team staff that participated plus Rebecca, everybody else was a mom, but Gloria, and she was so curious and interested. And yeah, we got we got right into it. Good.
Sue Bethanis 3:51
Good. Well, speaking of which, you know, I normally start with a question about your journey, and I will get to that. But I want to start with something that I saw on Twitter when I was looking at your Twitter and I want to relate to totally with what you just said, because in one of your tweets a couple of days ago, you were quoting, actually, it’s you you’re it’s what you actually said I probably from your book, it says it’s an evergreen riddle for women. On the one hand, we are told to be our authentic self. And on the other hand, the working world wasn’t made with us in mind. So it’s along the lines of what you’re talking about. Could you elaborate on that? Because not only do I completely agree with it, but I think that it would be well worth hearing your thoughts on that.
Susan MacKenty Brady 4:30
Yeah. I have. Okay. So I will confess to you that I believed in meritocracy until probably about 10 ish years ago, when I was confronted with the truth that I might have been naive, and what I mean by that is I really thought if I work hard and you know, perform and do well and achieve that I would be treated equally to my male counterparts who did the same thing and you know, I have a 19, soon to be 20 year old and a 16, soon to be 17 year old. So I didn’t take a big period of time off other than maternity leave, which is in America for most of us, like no time at all. And so I, you know, I stayed in the workforce, and I’ve worked hard. And the sort of the hard truth I had to come to. And by the way, I was raised by a single father, my mother is in my life, but she lived 250 miles away. And my father, you know, and I had brothers, like, you can do anything you want to? So I really thought like, I don’t know, I mean, why would anything be different for me, just because I’m a female. What’s true is the unconscious biases. And the some of the even perpetuated by women, unfortunately, about other women still exist. And so we have to call them out. Mine was, for example, I learned earlier that I have admitted before, so I knew my strengths, you know, so when we think about our best self, and leading our life from our best self, it’s where your strengths and talents, both born and earned, those that you develop over time, but those are that are innate characteristics when those come together with where you feel called to add value to others. And it also comes together with what brings you joy and vitality, that is your best selves zone. And you know, as soon as you get some clues, like losing track of time, doing something, like just feeling joyful, like looking forward to something I’m talking on the professional route, chances are, those are clues that you might be in your best self zone. So I knew that I had some skill in communication and in public speaking. And my first foray into thinking about how best to do this led to the gift of feedback that I needed to practice vulnerability. And that I heard some things that weren’t very favorable about how I was out for myself. Now, I was talking about my inner critic, and it was really vulnerable. I thought it was really good for women in particular, to hear how I get myself back to worthiness. So it didn’t feel at all self-serving. And I remember at first thinking like, what, what’s that about? And then that’s literally I came crashing into the fact that a lot of the systems and the norms, but also the belief systems, right, the belief systems, not just the processes, were actually not made for us to navigate effortlessly, you know, in the professional world. So I remind us of that, because we still have work to do.
Sue Bethanis 7:28
Okay, so you’ve written a couple of books. Why this book? What was motivating for you specifically around this one? I know you have co-authors, but like, was there something specific that happened? You did some research? Tell us a little bit about that?
Susan MacKenty Brady 7:43
Yeah, first of all, I really do believe that too often our work cultures encouraged women to get our foot in the door, only to leave us without support once we do. We wrote and tried to change that. But the story behind that is my last large body of work was about how to overcome, often hidden hurdles to advancement. So as we go and confront opportunity to do more and to step into more positions of leadership, navigating some of the trickier things that I think probably all underrepresented populations have to navigate, but women comprise the biggest percentage of that. So that was mastering your inner critic. And when I came to Simmons, two things happen. One was I stepped into this Deloitte Ellen Gabriel chair and was in conversation with some two partners that Deloitte and then president of the university talking about what kind of project do we want to take on in my tenure as chair, and the conversation wasn’t about the project, the conversation was about how all four of us by any sort of standard, we’d sort of arrived in a very senior level of leadership, really needed to talk still about what was going on. Felt lonelier, at the top, felt less, in some ways, less-resourced interpersonally and tra-personally, you know, in a lot of demands, and so the pressure, so the stress is higher, the pressure is higher, we have more work to do. And we feel less comfortable being completely transparent because people are looking to us, it’s different than being authentic. And actually the idea came out of a circle, a talking circle. I told Gloria, this yesterday, the idea for this book did it’s like wow, you know, we have a lot of collective wisdom about what it would take to thrive. Let’s sit down and talk more and we were set up with Janet and Lynn, it was sort of like, uh, you know, the current sitting president at Simmons said, you have to work with Lynn, she’s the incoming and the two partners that Deloitte said I want to introduce you to Janet, just let’s see if there’s something here and the first conversation was like 85 years of collective leadership experience between the three of us which Lynn doesn’t like me to say, and, and the seven practices emerged pretty quickly and we got our footwork right, we did some research, obviously, and cold and distilled more research, and then talked to sitting CEO. So that’s how it came to be. And I wish I had it sooner, you know, in my life, I don’t think you need to arrive to get, you know, value from the practices in the book.
Sue Bethanis 10:18
But let’s talk about the seven practices, if you could go through them and maybe give some examples of a few of them, that’d be awesome.
Susan MacKenty Brady 10:25
The seven practices are both meant to be, you know, intrapersonal used as a source of reflection, but also you can apply to others as you lead, and as you grow in other ways, but the first is investing in your best self. And this is, you know, really knowing who you are at your best and how to lead your life from that place as often as you can. So there are two parts to investing in your best self, there’s knowing her and then there’s returning to her, which I think this book also I’ll just say, like, we’ve already gotten feedback that the book is really helpful to all genders, to men, to all. And, you know, the context of some of the research that we include, the context of why we thought these practices particularly would be helpful to women is in the book, nonetheless, the practices hold for everyone, I think. The second is embracing authenticity. So you know, this is encouraging honesty from yourself about who you really are, and helping other people to do the same thing. The third is cultivating courage. And I loved researching and helping to write this chapter because courage is not the absence of fear, as many people know, it’s really the presence of vulnerability and confidence mixed together. And I could talk more about courage, but we, you know, you can go in whatever direction you would like. This is our fourth practice. And the big aha for me was, you know, when we have a setback, we don’t return to the same place from where we left. We returned to, you know, hopefully, a wiser, more knowing self, and the value of fostering resilience because this practice kind of annoyed me I remember laughing with my co-authors about it. I don’t want to foster resilience, I don’t know about you, like I woke up woman, that alone if you woke up women of color, you know resilience, if you woke up a woman, you know resilience, if you woke up in any identity that isn’t in the majority of power, you know resilience. We’ve learned it, so fostering it eluded me at first, I was confused by it. And then when I dove into the research, and we did a lot of culling and distillations of wisdom out there about this, it turned out it really is a thriving practice for senior women to share their resilience stories. And the power of that so that we all can continue to learn and grow. The fifth practice is inspiring a bold vision. And we look at this both for the independent person like what’s my vision, what’s my inspired bold vision for myself and also for the organization and how to go about that. Women, I think, you know, have gotten a bad rap about women in the vision thing since the famous HBR article was written. And then we have committing, creating a healthy team environment. And our last one is committing to the work of an inclusive leader. So I would say, really, the first, the first four practices in particular really helped to fuel the last three. And if your practices were in imagery, the bullseye, the center, the core is investing in your best self because that’s from where you lead your life. We’re kicked out of our best self all the time for all sorts of reasons. We want to come back to her as often as possible, even you know, in the moment so we don’t say or do things that we regret.
Sue Bethanis 13:45
So I think this juxtaposition, I have a client I’m thinking of right now, who you know is her best self and hers who she is very assertive and being assertive on Zoom and interrupting people is something that she’s kind of getting feedback about. It’s not – it’s negative. So we had to come up with something that felt like she could get in but not be too interruptive. And so we come up with like interrupting with questions. So she felt like she wasn’t losing too much of herself. But yet still taking feedback. I think that that’s what a lot of us, especially those who are a sort of have a problem with like, trying to figure out how to be who we are, but also being collaborative as well. So can you speak to that a bit?
Susan MacKenty Brady 14:27
Leadership is a relationship. It’s a social construct, and I learned this from several of my mentors over and over again, I make the joke that my job as a leader is to narrow the delta between my intention and my impact, right? And so to be authentic, if part of my authentic self is assertiveness, which it happens to be, what’s also important is how I land how I impact others and if my timing, if my ferocity, if my intensity of assertiveness is actually having an impact on others that makes them not want to pull in and pull up, it shuts people down or out. Probably not a winning strategy. And I do need to pivot and I’ve talked to a lot of women leaders, I’m sure you have to, and men, who have a personality trait that they’re getting feedback on. That is, frankly, you know, a strength overblown or, or deep non contextualized. Right. So, it’s not that we’re asking you to be less of who you are, we’re asking you to be more conscious of how you impact others as you are, who you are, and know when to moderate your energy.
Sue Bethanis 15:43
Yeah I like that narrowing the delta between intention and impact. I like that a lot. So let’s talk about the pandemic. I don’t know, when you wrote this book, was it during it, I assume
Susan MacKenty Brady 15:51
We rallied together as an author team, the month before the pandemic. And then it took us like 10 months to get clear what we had and what we wanted to say. And we sent the proposal to a couple of publishers. Okay, so the book was written, you know, majority of last year.
Sue Bethanis 16:13
Right, right. Okay. So, you know, I figured that was it was probably last year. So given that, how has the pandemic affected women’s leadership? And in a way that’s differentiated from men? Is there? Is there a difference as to,
Susan MacKenty Brady 16:26
You know, I’d love to hear your opinion on this too. I think the great reckoning is mainly a “she” phenomenon of massive, massive proportion, I am seeing women reconcile their relationships in and outside of work, reconcile their hopes and desires. You know, I’m here as like just a bozo on the bus saying, Do not leave yourself out of your own life. Right. And if ever, there was a time when everything just kind of, you know, we were either forced in or forced out or felt different, you know, everything became acute our life is right now, I think women are in a really, really powerful position to negotiate what we need/want for ourselves in a way that we haven’t before. And I think the great reckoning is, like on record, what’s happening when women leave the workforce in droves when we need to leave. And it’s not just hourly, I mean, I’m seeing a phenomenon of knowledge workers as well really stop and think, do I want to do this anymore? If not this then what? You know. So I saw a lot of that going on. And look, I think we knew human beings, we need connection. And we also want purpose and meaning. Right, and the pandemic confronted us with all of it.
Sue Bethanis 16:46
Yeah. Yeah, no question. I’m in total agreement with you. I don’t obviously think it’s just women. I think it’s everyone. Yeah, I think it affects women proportionately because they’re the ones that are usually in stereotype, usually dealing with the home. And so there’s more juggling, I guess, on the one hand, on the other hand, it might be a little easier for some because they’re at home, and they can actually juggle what they are doing at home rather than don’t having to commute. So I think that there’s a whole commuting backlash. I think people don’t want to compete, and they realize that they’re feeling better about that. So I think that that’s a big issue. And certainly, gas prices are not helping.
Susan MacKenty Brady 18:26
But it does raise a big dilemma Sue, right. So here’s what we’re doing is now I’ve experienced, I don’t miss my two-hour commute that, by the way, in Boston, the way the crow flies, it’s just nine miles to campus, right? I don’t miss that. I don’t want it. I don’t need it. I can be perfectly effective here. The problem is I’m missing out on both the need for social interaction, but also the great political connections to rise that are happening. And so the quality of life where we have we have yet another trade-off. And so yeah, there’s definitely a trade-off. Yeah, super intentional. Yes. Super intentional to be inclusive of the people who remain at home. If there are conversations physically together, you know, it’s a hard time to lead right now.
Sue Bethanis 19:11
Well, I think that it’s going to be interesting what the data is. I don’t – there probably is data out there that I haven’t seen yet. But who is staying home? Because the office is/was made for white males. So I don’t know, the people that are going back. Are they mostly white males? I don’t I don’t know. I mean, it seems to me that that’s, I would probably venture to guess that the people that are going back are the people that the officers made for in the first place.
Susan MacKenty Brady 19:33
We talked about this. I mean, the great advent of flexibility. You know, I used to feel this way about myself and I feel this about working mothers in particular that I’ve hired in the past. There’s so, I was so grateful to get an ounce of flexible time. I would work harder at home and harder at work, you know, and so I think the whole thing comes down to what I would want to call us all to do is really think about what it is that we need in order to have wellbeing however you define well being right? Just like thriving, I’m not going to define what thriving looks like for you. And I’m not going to define what wellbeing looks like for you, that’s for you to define. But now’s the time to sort of look at these parts and think, what do I need, and then we have to courageously go make some requests at home, and at work, right to modify our lives so that we can step fully into our potential, which is part of for me, what thriving is right is, is being very thoughtful. And
Sue Bethanis 20:35
well, I was just gonna say I love the word attentional, because you’ve read it, you’ve said it a couple of times, in different ways. And I think that -California, things may be a little bit different here. I don’t know. But most people are not going back. And if they are going back they’re going back maybe once a week, at the most, so a couple of times a month. So there has to be some intentionality around how do we connect if you’re going to be on a team? If we’re going to call the team then there’s a risk, there’s an expectation of belonging and inclusiveness. So that means there has to be attention on the manager’s part to actually do that. And I think because the last few years, it’s sort of been everything’s been so mishmash, and we weren’t sure. Okay, so now we’re sure. Now we’re sure we’re gonna have Hybrid. So, therefore, we need to be just as sure about how we’re going to connect. And I think that’s part of our job is to help managers through that, because it’s going to be on the manager’s HR is not putting policies in place, Manager decides what you want to do with your team. So that means the managers have to decide, and they gotta be intentional about it. And they’ve got to have, they’ve got to talk to their team about it. And sometimes people don’t want to like they don’t care about having relationships at work. Okay. Well, most people do, though. So what do you think about that?
Susan MacKenty Brady 21:41
Well, you know, this was the topic of our board meeting. So the institute that I run at Simmons, has an incredible board of directors, you can see who’s on it if you go to inclusive leadership.com big companies, big, big companies, and we meet quarterly and we just had our meeting this week and the topic, we usually do a breakout and do lots of deep dives on a topic and the topic was, what are you doing when it comes to asking your employees to come back? Are you giving, I call it like for choice points. So you know, we’re gonna go back to the office, and you have to be there three days a week, but you can choose the three like your manager can choose the three days a week or something like that. So it was a really good discussion, what I’m seeing is the jury’s still out on this one. I think there’s a lot of experimentation going. I also think I just was coaching a woman last week, who was really struggling. And she said I think my team needs to come back. And they don’t want to, and I was trying to explore with her why she reached that conclusion. And I think there’s, there’s a lot of preferences, a lot of biases that are driving some of these decisions. And because last I checked, if you’re in a knowledge worker job, this isn’t the industrial revolution, we don’t need equipment, other than what we’re looking at, right. So I don’t know about you, but I’ve been pretty darn productive in this environment. So I think that the decisions need to be driven by the maintenance of psychological safety, which means it’s not that everyone’s always happier and everyone gets a vote. But you can bring your unique self to work, however, you bring it to work. And I want to really make sure you feel like you belong. And so I’ve got my eye on how connected in are the different members of the team. And you know, because I put my head down and had some my own resilience stories with a death in the family and a cancer scare and, and medical leave, and I wrote a book, I haven’t really been managing, per se, I rely on the people on the team to do this. And there’s so much subjectivity in all of this when we don’t offer guidelines.
Sue Bethanis 23:56
Totally. Oh, yeah, for sure.
Susan MacKenty Brady 23:57
What a great human experiment. This going back to work.
Sue Bethanis 24:02
totally. So going back to your seven practices. I do want to talk about cultivating courage because I do think that this idea of vulnerability, courage, and confidence balance of that is difficult, and it’s especially difficult on Zoom. So let’s assume that even if people go back 1,2,3 times a week, it’s not gonna be more than that. We’re going to be on zoom most of the time. And I think that doing anything on zoom in terms of expression in any kind of emoting, influencing, showing emotional intelligence, any of that is harder. So let’s focus on the courage part. How do we demonstrate courage in general? And how do we do it on Zoom? Video?
Susan MacKenty Brady 24:40
Okay, so kind of the minute the world shut down, and we started working like this, I think what happened is the two roles that felt like this became like this, and those are human resources and human being, and we actually saw the human beings with whom we resourced with every day in a different light and what I think that’s awoken in a lot of people is the need to be seen and cared for and feel safe. And it was vulnerable. And I think where cultivating Courage comes in the first, second, and third tip I have about cultivating courage is to not go it alone. We’re not meant to do much alone, you know, as you know, so, and I think sometimes we forget, I did find some research that we added in the book about people’s reluctance to ask others for help. We underestimate by as much as 50%, others’ willingness to help us. So you know, it takes courage to do anything you haven’t done before, including speaking up and asking for help to do the things we want to do. Or that we see or speaking up or speaking out. It doesn’t have to be in in a zoom, when multiple people are popped in, it can be one on one, it can be on the side. But I’d say, you know, noticing when the last time you recognize something that made you feel nervous or scared, and how you managed it. So starting to pay attention, first of all, to the moments of like, when you feel your heart race a little bit because you want to speak up and you shy away, like what are those moments where you need to sort of step in and take risks. And then I remind people a lot of the time that very rarely do we fall flat on our face and stay there forever. If we do fall flat, we get right back up. And that’s when we go to fostering resilience. And oftentimes, the risks that we take, aren’t nearly as scary when we take them as we thought they would be. And so that’s where borrowing confidence comes in. I’ve used that a lot. My first book, I’d never written a book before who and I had little impostoresque thoughts like who the hell am I to write a book? I happen to be in a, you know, in the leadership development field, surrounded by people who were best selling authors, some of them at our big conferences, and I befriended a few people and said, Can you help me understand how to go about this? And what do I want, I got the metaphor of the whale’s belly, which, which helped me through my very first big book, which was, you know, you go in thinking there’s light, and you don’t see it for a while. You’re like, head down any big project is right. But that metaphor got me through those darker days of like just a slog of feeling like oh, my god produce a manuscript. So it’s things that are just an example. I borrowed current I borrowed wisdom I asked for, help me understand sometimes I just needed to talk. And so I think so much about developing cultivating courage for ourselves is looking around and seeing other people have probably done something like what I’ve done.
Sue Bethanis 27:39
Right, but well, you know, when we start coaching with people to the beginning, before we even decided to work with us, and particularly if they’re, you know, they’re always one on one calls, right? I find myself normalizing people’s experiences because they’re there by virtue that they want help. I mean, literally, you know, if you have a coach, you’re looking for support, just to get to that step is a big deal. And then I, the next step is like just to demonstrate to them that what they’re feeling and what they’re experiencing is normal, and other people feel the same way. Other executives feel the same way. Because it does, because there is this misnomer that there’s no one else that feels this way that. And that’s why people don’t ask for help, because it’s too vulnerable, because I don’t think that anybody feels this way. And there is a ton of imposter stuff going on. I mean, we all feel it, I feel it every day, in different ways. So there is this, this lack of wanting to ask for support, which is why coaches actually we have even there’s even a market for coaches because they’re willing to do that. That’s like cachet in a way, right? But not necessarily willing to help get help from other their peers, which we course encourage because we encourage peer coaching all over the place. And in fact, if there was more peer coaching, there probably be less reason for us to be to exist.
Susan MacKenty Brady 28:03
I have to say, I’ve had, I’ve had several amazing coaches. And I’ve had the opportunity. I don’t know about you and your colleagues, I learned sometimes more. I feel like sometimes I learned more from my clients than they do from me in a coaching engagement. It’s so much easier to be clear about someone else’s journey.
Sue Bethanis 29:07
Right. Exactly. Yeah.
Susan MacKenty Brady 29:08
You know, the reason why I think, you know, most executives could and should reach out and on, you know, and step into a coaching engagement, at some point in their careers, particularly when you’re at the top is in part to have a sounding board of someone who has your back. I think peer group is the most under-leveraged, under-resourced support group of all time. And what drives us from not doing it we’re all busy, busy, busy, we’re either managing up or managing down, but we neglect the power of having a circle with our peers out of fear. I think it’s really fear-based and how will they use this information? What’s people’s agenda? You know, we’re looking for resources and one meeting and the next week, right? We’re supposed to be like collaborating, and that’s where it’s safe to sort of strategizing with a coach and think, Okay, what’s the best way to navigate this that’s going to land like I intended to write, as opposed to just, you know, rushing out the door. Yeah. I’m a big fan of coaching, I just engaged with a coach who was instrumental in helping me birth this book, not from a content perspective, but to help me get over my own stuff about not stepping fully into my to leveraging my brand. I mean, I’ve been sort of out there a lot in the past eight years-ish. And I couldn’t bring myself to, you know, post or, you know, if all felt like bragging, and because I was criticized about that earlier in my career, I was so sensitive, like, I don’t want anybody to think I’m out for myself, God helped me, you know. And I just want you to know, I just, this last week, I gave all of my social media platforms over to help with a team of people who are helping me do it because I couldn’t, that was such a big move. But a coach helped me get there. Like, you know what, what I’m hearing Susan is you will be a blocker in your own way on this particular thing, and it’s really okay for you not to have to do it yourself. And I was like, ah blew my mind.
Sue Bethanis 31:13
That’s great. That’s great. Okay, I want to shift gears here a little bit, I want to talk about burnout. So I want to talk about the other side of this because I think that there’s quite a bit of that going on and kind of and again, this might be affecting women more because they’re just taking on more. I mean, I do four zoom calls. And I’m, like spent and most of our clients are doing eight a day, at least I don’t even know how that even works. But you know, whatever, and they’re not sleeping as much. And then there are all sorts of things going on in terms of work-life balance, but I am concerned about burnout. I’m concerned about depression, I’m just concerned about sleeplessness. What do you see? And what do you have to say about how we can deal with this, and you actually use the word anti ambition as well in your book, which I think is really interesting. I had a guy who was a good friend of mine, who I used to coach say, I just don’t want to work as much anymore. Yeah, I’m like, and he doesn’t have to, which is part of it, because he’s made, he’s made it but it’s like, but he doesn’t really want to. And I think that that’s like, would be an example of anti ambition, I guess.
Susan MacKenty Brady 32:13
So look at you know, I think time is, our energy is our most precious commodity diminishes as the day as the hours roll. I think that we are in, we are beginning to experience what will probably be the greatest mental health crisis of our time. And, and we’re woefully under-resourced for it right, not only for access to therapists, but access to, you know, tools, and it’s happening, not just for those of us in the professional world, it’s happening for our children, you know, that feeling it and depression, we see it all over the place. And, stress and fatigue. And I think, you know, there won’t be a company in I think in five years, it doesn’t have a chief wellbeing officer. And just like, you know, in the early 90s, there came to be the chief diversity officer, you know, not just special companies that were great places to work for. But everybody, because we have to keep our employees well, and mentally well, the good news, I think, is that this is going to open up a place to talk about, you know, mental well-being in a way that people don’t feel shame about it.
Sue Bethanis 33:28
Yeah, that’s yes, that’s what we got to get to.
Susan MacKenty Brady 33:32
And I’m happy to use I mean, I use myself as part of the first practice of investing in your best self. The latter, no first is coming to know her and the latter is returning, the return is all about us all about self-esteem. And it’s about holding ourselves in warm regard. And knowing that we are imperfect human beings and so we will err, we need to have a way to shore up internally inside of ourselves and come back to a place of enough-ness in ourselves. And we also need to do with other people. So when we feel disappointed with the people around us, because I don’t know about you, but I just I’m more short-tempered, after two years of the pandemic, I know my fuse is shorter because I’m tired or because you know, because and I have to sort of pay attention pretty quickly. If I’m feeling some level of disappointment be it at home or even with people I work with totally, and my tone and my effect and so practicing, hey, I want to check in with how I landed gives other people permission to do that too. And if I practice this, if I walk this then I’m okay calling on one of my direct reports and saying you know, I think let’s talk about what happened just now because I think your intention was x, here’s how it landed for me, what’s going on? And when I’ll likely hear oh my gosh, my kids, daycare, overwhelmed
Sue Bethanis 34:52
Yeah. all the things.
Susan MacKenty Brady 34:57
This Yeah, officially here. I think most Leaders are woefully ill-prepared for this as well, because
Sue Bethanis 35:03
I don’t think they’re even asking. So I think we need to be, you know, we need to be asking like you you asked, you said, Well, what’s Hey, that just happened that was different, like what happened like what’s going on with you? I think that we need to ask because we’re gonna find out a whole shitload of stuff that’s going on that people are trying to manage in the background. You mentioned kids, like, as much as I have hated the pandemic. I’m as, like a big extrovert, and it’s been horrible, horrible. My poor kid who’s 16, you know, to go through a pandemic, at 14 or 15 is like, just horrible. So I just like as bad as I feel, he feels worse. So I just could have like, put my energy toward him because it’s just if you’re an extrovert, and you’ve lost connection with people, it’s really difficult. It’s really hard
Susan MacKenty Brady 35:50
Yeah. And I think that’s the biggest opportunity from a mental health standpoint is right. Isolation is dangerous.
Sue Bethanis 35:56
Yes, it is. One of everybody but especially for extroverts.
Susan MacKenty Brady 36:00
For everybody. I, myself am undersocialized. I got this from one of my friends and mentors, undersocialized and then yet when I went back, I had like 10 events in seven days, weeks ago. And I had to like get dressed and wear pants that zip and like, were presentable outside my home. I was just a hot mess. I went out and I realized I am so ill-prepared to make small talk. I’m sorry. I undersocialized I was like, what, what am I talking about? Like? It’s almost like we have to reculture ourselves.
Sue Bethanis 36:38
There’s no question about it. Like we have to put the pants on and we have to put our small talk hat on seriously. I think it’s okay. I think everybody, Well, I think we realize it. So we kind of got to the under socialized. I like that word under socialized? I do think that there’s the issue of social isolation. I do. And I think that there’s a difference between loneliness and solitude. I think that in the solitude there’s been a lot of lessons that we’ve had to learn around that and how we were able to practice that more because we’ve been in the pandemic but it wouldn’t tell it to go to loneliness. I think that that’s and isolation is causing that I think that that’s a different matter. Our last WiseTalk guest actually talked about loneliness. And I mean, what have you seen in this? I think this is part of the issue around the well-being and the mental crisis, you’re, you’re addressing, I think that that’s part of it. Say more about that.
Susan MacKenty Brady 37:32
So first of all, I have to say, so I love the distinction between solitude and loneliness. It’s really, I could kind of geek out with you about that alone, but the remedy for, I think, now’s the time, if you’re not journaling already, folks start to journal. I mean, there’s so much richness and giving yourself time with your own thoughts and feelings, and expressing them, even if they seem jumbled and crazy to write it down and get it out. And then talk to others about it. I think the time is now to be conscious, and when I talk about intention, or thoughtfulness, or consciousness, it starts with a framework of self-awareness and it goes to a framework of self-management, which means tuning in and tuning up, if your heart feels lonely, if you feel like you’re sad, that’s probably a good indication that you should call your best friend reach out to you know, someone who you love and trust, make a connection, right? Because it’s a slippery slope. Different from I’m at the point where yes, I’m, you know, with a book release, and it got on best selling and I’ve heard from more people in the last three weeks of my life than I have in the last 10 years combined. And I love it and I’m doing all these kinds of podcasts, everything. I love it and I’m craving alone time, solitude. I’m not worried about people you know, I’m not worried about being lonely. And so I think that the skill and again, coaching can help, I’m not trying to like you know, buoy our profession, but I’m just saying like, I’m probably preaching to the choir, I think part of what we need to offer in our redesign of value and when it comes to executive coaching is allowing for restoration and rejuvenation and teaching leaders how to do that. Because here’s the thing if we don’t do it, we will burn out and last I checked our organizations desperately need us.
Sue Bethanis 39:26
okay. Lots of good things anything any last thoughts? There are a lot of great things we talked about ambition I love the vulnerability and confidence like
Susan MacKenty Brady 39:36
I have to say like I’m a big fan of an Adam Grants work on everything and the red thread other than don’t go it alone that runs through all the seven practices is for sure leading with a curious mind. I mean, nothing works when you don’t let’s just put it that way. But I also I guess what I would want to end with is reminding us all to be gentle with ourselves and gentle with the people around us if ever I was saying this before the pandemic like, everybody chill out, I mean my gosh, like, Can you just be a little more gentle on your self-criticism? Can you be a little more gentle on your expectations of others and how fast and hard you’re rowing the boat and PS that was for me to you know, gosh, if that was needed three years ago, it sure needs to be right now. Okay, and yeah, I get I have a sign in my office that says Get gentle with it. I give it to every single one of my coaching.
Sue Bethanis 40:29
I love it. I love that. You know, the article that I penned last year that still is relevant is you know, take the armor off, you know, the same…
Susan MacKenty Brady 40:38
Yeah the veneer of perfection, guess what folks like it’s cracked. If you didn’t do it, the world orchestrated that for us. Now what are you going to do?
Sue Bethanis 40:47
that’s right. That’s right. Well, it’s been lovely to be with you. I want to just give everybody some more information. It’s Susan MacKenty Brady. You can find her on LinkedIn. You can also find her on the website Arrive and Thrive and her Twitter is @smackentybrady, again the book is Arrive and Thrive: 7 Impactful Practices for Women Navigating Leadership.
Susan MacKenty Brady 41:13
So arriveandthrive.com to
Sue Bethanis 41:16
Tthanks again, everybody. See you guys next time. Thanks again, Susan.
Susan MacKenty Brady 41:24
Here’s to thriving everybody. Yes, thank you. Bye