#32: Julia Boorstin, Senior Media and Tech Correspondent CNBC — The confidence dial, empathy as a...

Welcome to From Startup to Grownup, the podcast. My name is Alisa Cohn. I'm an executive coach, an angel investor, and the author of From Startup to Grownup. Each week I talk to founders, creators, advisors, investors, and builders of all kinds about their insights and experiences in going from startup to grownup. Today I'm thrilled to welcome Julia Borsten to the podcast. Julia is a senior correspondent at CNBC. She covers media with a special focus on the intersection of media and technology. She's the creator of CNBC's Disruptor 50, which looks at the most disruptive tech companies. Julia has a new book out. It's called When Women Lead. But this podcast is not just for women. It's for anyone who wants to upgrade their leadership skills. Julia interviewed 120 incredible women leaders. Some entrepreneurs, some established leaders, and teased out what makes them successful leaders. The same things that will make you a successful leader. We talk about so many things, including the confidence dial. We talked about empathy as a strategic skill, and we discuss why people who did sports make much better leaders. It's not why you think. This is a very rich and very informative conversation, and it'll be helpful for anyone who wants to be a better leader. So please enjoy my conversation with Julia Borsten. Julia, welcome to the show. It's such a pleasure to have you.

It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm excited to talk about this great book that you just wrote, When Women Lead. But I also, I first wanna start with your background. Tell us about your background. How did you get to be you?

Well, I, how did I get to be me? Or what have I been doing for the past 22 years as a professional? Both. I, both. So I, um, have been a business journalist my entire professional career. Straight out of college, I became a young reporter at Fortune magazine in 2000, just after the stock market had crashed. I was the last person hired before the market crashed. And I was, I was the young, eager one doing all the articles no one else wanted to write, um, for the early part of my career. And I was at Fortune magazine for 6 years. And for part of that time, I was also a contributor to CNN. At the time, Fortune and CNN were all owned by the same parent company, Time Warner. And so they frequently put on, uh, people from Fortune to talk about business stories on CNN. And I created a little bit of a franchise called Street Life, talking about Wall Street stories of the day, and really got comfortable on television. And after 6 years as a reporter and writer at Fortune while also appearing on CNN, I got a full-time gig in television at CNBC. I didn't think I would fall in love with it. I thought I would do it for a year and then return to the magazine industry. But in that time, I did fall in love with the business news on television. And at the same time, the magazine industry sort of imploded. So I was very glad to have made the transition to television. And I've been at CNBC ever since. I've been there for over 16 years. I started off as a general reporter, then I became a media reporter. I was offered the choice of retail or media, and I thought media is so much more interesting. It was starting to become really dynamic with the rise of YouTube, the evolution of Netflix. And I saw such potential to cover a dynamic transforming industry. And I went from covering media to covering social media to now covering media and technology, which started off really as two separate things. And now media and technology have so converged. It's amazing to watch these two fields really overlap. It, I, to me, it wouldn't make sense to cover media without technology or vice versa.

Totally. What a fantastic trajectory. I mean, really, it's kind of like evolution, evolution. And since your point converging together in this topic, you know, you wrote this book, A Woman Lead. I'm just curious about you. How did you learn to lead?

Because certainly you lead people. Well, it's so funny because I didn't think of myself as a leader until I started talking about this book and I realized we're all leaders. You know, I'm very risk-averse. Like, you could tell by the fact that I've only had 2 jobs in my entire career that I'm not exactly a big risk-taker, but I've always been very entrepreneurial within the journalism structure. And as you probably know, you know, as a journalist, you're constantly pitching stories, pitching ideas. The entrepreneurialism comes from like, here's my idea for a story, here's my idea for a franchise. And at CNBC, I had the opportunity to really be entrepreneurial. And specifically with this franchise that I created called the Disruptor 50 List. And I've always really been drawn to entrepreneurs, very risk-averse myself, very drawn to entrepreneurs and their initiative to create entirely new industries and, and disrupt existing ones. So I figured there's gotta be a way to talk, really dig into the businesses of entrepreneurs within this broader structure of CNBC, which is all focused on big public companies. So, I said, let's do a franchise where we look at the 50 fastest-growing, most interesting disruptive startups and tell our viewers these companies are going to be the giants of tomorrow or they are currently disrupting the public behemoths. So, I was very entrepreneurial with that. And I found myself really loving this practice of creating new ideas and new franchises within that structure of CNBC. And it was within The Disruptor 50, that I was really inspired by some amazing female founders and leaders. And I found them really doing things differently than their male counterparts. And I also felt like their narratives weren't widely known by people outside this sort of more narrow business world and weren't as familiar to people in the mainstream news landscape. I mean, it's so interesting if you look at like Elizabeth Holmes, she is one really high-profile failure But what I was seeing is all these really amazing success stories that I wanted to shed a light on.

That, yeah, that's amazing. And what I kind of get from you and your career is that you have been like a student of entrepreneurship, but also a student of like, what's different here? What's different here? And it feels like to me, when Women Lead, which I loved, I thought it was a great book and so well-researched. I think you were looking for like, what's different. And so I'm just curious, we're gonna dive into some of the details, but on the whole, kind of as a, as a starting point, what are some of the sweeping things which are different that you've noticed about women Leadership.

First of all, thank you. I'm so glad you love the book. And yes, you are right. I think we as a culture always love to celebrate and learn from outliers, right? We want the biggest success stories in business. We wanna understand the athletes and the artists who've done things totally exceptional, right? And so what I was really interested in for my whole career is how have people done things that have defied the odds? And for the startup space, who can succeed in a landscape where 90% of all startups fail. So that was always the table stakes, right? But for women, what I was understanding is that women have defied even higher odds. Not only do 90% of all startups fail in the first 10 years, but female founders have far less access to capital. So I wanted to understand how the people with the highest odds against them had still managed to succeed because I figured those people would have massive lessons for everyone to learn from, not just for women to learn from, but for everyone. And women in the tech landscape have had so many challenges, their success stories are really phenomenal. So, yeah, so I started off wanting to tell these inspiring stories, and then I realized there are these key commonalities, skills and strategies that have enabled these women to succeed despite the odds. And so digging into the stories, doing about 120 interviews, led me to research explaining these women's skills and strategies. I could break it down into 3 basic skills, 3 basic strategies. Um, uh, uh, for you, if you like. So in terms of the skills, yeah, we wanna hear that. Um, women are more likely to lead with empathy. As you can imagine, empathy is incredibly valuable when it comes to connecting with your customers, connecting with your employees, or your, even your investors or your partners. Women are more likely to lead with vulnerability. That's an essential skill to invite collaboration. One CEO told me that nobody wants to work for a know-it-all, and she really used her own vulnerability about what she was good at and what she wasn't to invite, um, top executives from other companies to come work for her. So that's, I would say, skill number 2. A third one, which was a huge surprise for me, is gratitude. Women are more likely to practice gratitude, and gratitude correlates with longer-term planning, as opposed to going for the near-term win, for the immediate win, having more patience about what you're trying to do in your business and in your career. So I think that was a really interesting one. And women, Julia, Julia.

Yeah. I wanna interrupt you for one second because that's fascinating. By the way, in my book, From Start-Up to Grown-Up, I talk about the, the superpower of positive feedback, right? People don't do that. Praise and positive feedback. And that's what I thought you meant by gratitude when I saw that in the book. But now you're talking about long-term planning. Explain that more. Like explain what, what gratitude and long-term planning have in mind.

By the way, positive feedback, it would indicate if you have more humility and are better able to recognize a, and offer positive feedback to people around you. So I think, positive feedback is something women are great at because they have humility about their own contributions and understanding and valuing the contributions of others. So that is definitely something women do more of. But there's this interesting idea that if you practice gratitude, you're more likely to make long-term plans rather than go for the short-term win. And that practicing gratitude makes people realize that they're okay with where they are now. They don't need that near-term immediate payoff. They can have more patience. These are like, I feel grateful for where I am, who I am, the every, you know, all the gifts that I have and where I am in my life and career. And if you have that moment of practicing gratitude, you could say, wait a second, let me not rush for the near-term payoff. Let me think about what the long-term potential is and how much bigger I can be thinking. If I feel good about where I'm right now, I'm not rushing for the near-term win. I can have patience and plan for more upside down the road. So I think there's this interesting thing where, you know, there's all this research about how people who practice gratitude are happier and healthier, and gratitude is actually a better thing to focus on than happiness. Right? And so I think that's an interesting shift. But what you're saying about the importance of positive feedback really plays into women's strengths as well, because if you look at some of the strategies, women are more likely to give positive feedback because they're more likely to lead in a communal way, which means they're more likely to bring in perspectives from across an organization rather than lead in a top-down, making the decision in the corner office type of approach. And positive feedback indicates that you value the perspectives of other people and you're more likely to be incorporating them into your, to your planning and decision-making. So that is a great strategy that women deploy. But by the way, everyone can deploy that. Just because women are more likely to lead with a communal approach doesn't mean that they're the only ones who should be. Another strategy that I think is really essential to point out that, again, everyone can emulate is the value of being a divergent thinker rather than just converging on a problem. So convergent thinking means you're rushing towards a solution, focusing in, honing in on one solution to a problem, and trying to get that solution as quickly as possible. There are occasions in which that is really a great thing to do, but there are also times when a divergent approach, which means pulling on threads of things that are tangent— seem tangential, or that are more about painting a picture of everything related, can be incredibly valuable. Women are more likely to take a divergent approach, but here's what I found in all of my interviews. Taking a divergent approach, building a big picture of the forest rather than just honing in on the tree, that is incredibly valuable when it comes to being adaptable. And as we've seen in the past couple of years of the pandemic, an adaptability quotient is essential. And if you've already done all the groundwork to understand the landscape, understand what's going on and where things are moving and what the related issues are related to the one that you're supposed to be focused on, that when things change, you'll be better equipped to pivot because you understand the full forest.

Yes. Boy, that's a lot. I love all that. I want to kind of go back and double-click. So the strengths or the first set of tools that you talked about, there was empathy and there was vulnerability. Vulnerability. And what was the, what was the third?

And gratitude.

Gratitude. Okay. So empathy, vulnerability, and gratitude. I love it. By the way, it also sounds like you're saying, don't give up all your other leadership skills, people. It's that women naturally use, maybe, maybe more naturally use those particular strengths and they help leaders. Is that, that's your point, right?

Exactly. I mean, I, my whole theory, having been a student of, of leadership for the past 20 years as a business reporter, it seems like there are these leadership styles that go in and out of fashion, right? You know, when I first started out, it was the, the GE management style, cut the, you know, Jeff Immelt, cut the bottom 10%. Um, leadership was very much authoritative, um, and, and top-down, right? And then when you think about the 2010 to 2020, it was Mark Zuckerberg was reigning king, and it was about the move fast and break things tech model. Launch products before they're ready, get them out there, innovate, innovate, you know, innovation, um, above all else. And now I see a different kind of, of leadership emerging and a leadership that really emphasizes and values a lot of these traits that women have always led with. And that's why I wanna elevate these positive traits that women lead with, because I think they're really essential for everyone of every gender right now. And now as we come outta the pandemic and we reckon with things like economic uncertainty, and we look at quiet quitting and all of these challenges of managing a company or running a company right now, there's so much uncertainty. And these traits which women have always had, this is what we need to be thinking about in a new and different way. How can we be empathetic? How can we leverage these skills and these traits to be more effective? And I do think that we all need to lead in ways that are authentic to us, right? And that are about figuring out our own skills and traits and even our traits that we might've thought of as flaws and figuring out how to flip those and make them our superpowers.

That's so true. That's so true. I wanna double-click on empathy because I think, first of all, the pandemic was kind of the age of empathy and we saw each other into each other's homes. And also managers and leaders had to recognize that there was a life going on over there. And at the same time, empathy, I think to many of my clients can still feel like, yeah, yeah, yeah, be nice to them and whatever. How do you think about empathy as a business imperative?

So being nice to them is not what empathy is. I think that's a miscalculation or mischaracterization of what empathy is. Empathy is literally the ability to put yourself into someone else's shoes, to understand what they're feeling. If you can understand what someone's feeling, you're going to be a better negotiator because you're going to know what they really want, not what they're saying they want, but what fundamentally they really want. Empathy can be such a superpower because you can understand my employees are not motivated. They're frustrated. If I can understand what they really want, I'll be able to get them to work harder. Partners. I'll be able to get my partners to be more efficient, more effective if I can understand where they're coming from. So I think this idea that empathy is about being nice is not true at all. Empathy can be deployed very selfishly for someone or a company to be far more efficient and more effective and get the most out of the people you're working with and partnering with.

Yes, I love it. You know, I had Mayal Gavai, who is the CEO of Techstars and also the author of Trampled by Unicorns on the podcast. And her big thing is that empathy is missing in Silicon Valley. And it's interesting to me that the, you know, these two women I've had on my podcast now are the ones who were emphasizing and talking about empathy. And I really agree with you. It's really about understanding what's going on over there to make better decisions, especially to your point in the days of like quiet quitting and, you know, sort of all the workforce issues that are going on.

So I really appreciate— Yeah, absolutely. It's not about being nice. Empathy is not about being nice. It's about understanding other people. And I think understanding other people is the best way, the best first step to getting more out of your relationships with them.

I totally agree. Now, I also want to ask you what you sort of just said as you were talking about those, is you also said to use your, I guess, perceived weaknesses as a strength. You sort of just like threw it out there. What do you mean by that? What do you mean by that?

So I think a lot of the characteristics and skills and traits I was just talking about are things that were never associated with leadership or certainly with power, right? When you think about power, power is about authoritative top-down power. But some of the most powerful people I've seen are the ones who know how to relate to other people, how to understand other people, and how to be vulnerable about their own foibles or failures. And so I think fundamentally, we need to reexamine what it means to be a strong leader. What is strength really in leadership? And I think about some of the women I interviewed who look and sound nothing like a traditional— like back to the old Jeff Immelt— traditional GE-style leader. And they figured out how to use their own strengths, some of which had traditionally been seen as flaws, to be successful. And what I, I'd wanna point out is this woman, Jennifer Holmgren, she's the CEO of a company called LanzaTech. Uh, it's a biotech company. They turn pollution into fuel or plastics. It sounds like magic. It's amazing. I've been to their lab outside of Chicago. And what's so interesting about her is she's a self-professed introvert. And part of her job as a CEO of this company is to sell this cutting-edge technology to factories so they could put their technology adjacent to the factory and take— capture the pollution, turn it into fuel. They also have to sell their fuel to people like Richard Branson, who now uses their fuel for Virgin Airlines. Now, this company just raised hundreds of millions of dollars. By every metric, Jennifer Holmgren is killing it. She has succeeded in selling this technology. But if you meet her, she's very soft-spoken. She was a Colombian immigrant. She speaks with a slight accent. And she'd rather not speak. And she talks about it. I interviewed her for TV and she talked about she hates doing interviews. And I said to her, Jennifer, how have you been so successful negotiating these huge deals and selling your technology if you don't like to get up in front of a room and talk? And she said, you know what? At first it was really hard, but then I figured out how to use it to my advantage. If I don't like to talk, I listen to other people speak. And I listen and I figure out what they really want, not what they say they want at first, but what they actually want. And if I can listen to them well enough and not try to interrupt them and get a word in edgewise, but really understand what they want, then I can be a better negotiator because I can suggest compromises that I realize are actually what they're going for. So she figured out how to take this introversion and totally use it to her advantage. It took her a while to figure it out, But ultimately, it's been incredibly successful.

I love that. So the idea is that you use your kind of superpower and even your superpowers, well, your distinctive characteristic. And even if that feels like it's a sort of, you know, weakness or it's going to get in your way. I also think you talk about resilience in the book, too. I think it's also so important to just be able to get out of our comfort zone because she can listen and listen, listen. That's great. But she hates being interviewed and she hates maybe presenting in public. She's going to have to learn to do it and then, of course, screw it up. Up and then be resilient and keep trying. Would you say that? What would you say about that?

Getting out of your comfort zone and pushing yourself to be better at whatever it is you need to get better at. One thing that every woman I interviewed had in common— and keep in mind, these women are incredibly different, very different backgrounds, different industries, different strategies, different strengths— the one thing they all had in common: they all pushed themselves to improve. No one was a successful leader right out of the gate. No one was good at anything right out of the gate. But they all had this sense of really knowing themselves, getting to know themselves, and what they were what they love doing, and figuring out how to use that to their advantage, but also understanding, this is what I'm not good at, and either building up those strengths or figuring out how to surround themselves with people who could compensate for their weaknesses. So I think, you know, I talked about humility a little bit earlier, but it's really self-knowledge and understanding how to push yourself is key. And I write a lot in the book about the importance of a growth mindset. And growth mindset, I mean, that is table stakes. Everyone needs to have a growth mindset. But to me, interviewing these amazing women who are so inspiring, I really saw how the growth mindset is a combination of humility and confidence. Humility to know what you don't know and what you need to learn, and confidence that you can learn it. And to me, the combination of those two things is the one constant among so many varied women.

I love that. That's a great formula, actually. And so, as you said, so good for everybody to just think about. I do wanna come back to power, 'cause another thing you talked about is power just now. And I, I keep thinking about Jeff, Jeff Pfeffer's, uh, work on power. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with, he's a Stanford professor. He just wrote the Seven Laws of Power. And actually he would say kind of the opposite. So he would say resilience is important. He would say certainly self-knowledge is important, but he would also say things like, do not show vulnerability. Don't apologize.

Right?

He always gives examples in the press how they see that guy apologize. You shouldn't have apologized. How do you square that circle?

But I would say vulnerability is not the same thing as apologize. Vulnerability is admitting what you don't know. Vulnerability is saying, "Look, I'm really good at this one thing. This is my expertise, but I really don't know about this other thing, or I really haven't figured out this other thing." And I think if you don't have that vulnerability, you're not gonna have people wanna come work with you because they're never gonna think that you're gonna let them take the lead. The other thing is there's some interesting work around this idea of treating confidence like it's on a dial. And here's what I mean by that, 'cause this is something I think about all the time. There is an author named Therese Houston. I hope I'm pronouncing her name properly, but she writes about this idea that you should treat confidence like it's on a dial and understand that you could turn it up and down. And when you're making decisions, you will be better off if you're not overly confident. So when you're making decisions, you should turn down your confidence, gather information perspectives from as wide and diverse an array of, of sources as possible, and use that lowered confidence to reconsider all your assumptions. That's when you should not be overly confident and admit that you don't know. But then once you have all that data, use that data to build your decision. And once you've come to your decision and you know you've done so with the widest assortment of data possible, then you turn back up your confidence to execute and to communicate around the execution. But I think this idea that you should be confident all the time and say you know all the answers all the time is gonna end up getting people in trouble. And if one thing that the pandemic taught us is that admitting when you don't know something, um, is incredibly valuable. You're gonna be better equipped to find solutions if you acknowledge what you don't know.

Yes. Oh my God. I love it. The confidence style is very powerful. That's fantastic.

I love that.

I think that you mentioned that also in the book as it relates to imposter syndrome. So just to say that many, many, many founders experience imposter syndrome. I know you talk about the, the prevalence of imposter syndrome for women, Why, and I think what your point was in the book, and please expand on this, why is imposter syndrome sometimes a good thing?

Well, I think the reality is, is that women are far more likely to experience imposter syndrome than men are. And that's not a good thing. Women should not feel like imposters. But imposter syndrome really indicates that you don't feel like you've earned your position. You don't think you've earned your seat at the table. To me, and I have suffered from imposter syndrome, despite the fact that I should not ever have suffered from imposter syndrome, to me it was always a clue that I needed to go off and do more homework. And I needed to remind myself why I had the right to be there and had the right to be doing the interview with the CEO or whatever it was. And I think the same thing ties together between the imposter syndrome and turning down your confidence. If you're not fully confident, you're going to be less likely to take major risks and put your company at risk. And there's a lot of data about how having women on boards prevents companies from taking undue risks. And I think that's really worth acknowledging and realizing how valuable that is.

Yes.

And that being, and not being overly, so while men, while women are more likely to suffer from imposter syndrome, men are more likely to be overly confident, which is not a good thing. That's when you put your company at risk. And so, I think it's this balance of, I mean, I hope that ultimately women grow out of this imposter syndrome and realize how ridiculous it is, and that they certainly have every right to have a seat at the table. But I also think that enabling people and normalizing admitting what you don't know will help get rid of imposter syndrome. And back to your ideas of the laws of power, I think that confidence and vulnerability don't have anything to do with saying, "I'm sorry." If you're confident and you feel comfortable being vulnerable, you're not apologizing. You don't have anything to apologize for if you don't have all the answers. Of course you don't have all the answers. I don't have to apologize for the fact that I don't have the answers. I'm going to admit to you what I don't know. I'm going to invite people to come help me. And being vulnerable isn't saying, "I'm sorry." It's saying, "This thing went wrong. Here's the role I played in it." I'm no more apologetic than I need to be, but I want people to come help me with it. So I actually think that vulnerability— we shouldn't confuse these two things. Vulnerability isn't weakness. It's simply admitting what you don't know.

Totally. One of my favorite expressions is, "The confident can afford to be vulnerable." Exactly.

Exactly. It's a sign of strength. It's a sign of strength.

Yeah.

I love it.

So you talked to all these amazing women and you had these amazing stories in the book. Did you learn any bad news? I mean, you had these great qualities and these wonderful success stories. Was there any bad news that came to light?

Oh, the bad news is that women are judged more harshly and face dozens of different types of double standards. And in fact, um, I was starting to gather research, um, on all the ways in which women are judged more harshly. And I figured I would have a couple of examples, a couple of studies, and instead I ended up with a stack of about 50 studies of all the different ways women are judged more harshly than men. And I really, at first, really struggled to make sense of it, or to how to write about in a way that just wasn't going to be so depressing. I'll give you a couple of examples. Women are judged more harshly than men if they succeed in a male-dominated field. They're judged more harshly if they fail in a female-dominated field. They're judged more harshly if they show any emotion in the workplace, if they show humor. If women make jokes in the workplace, they're judged more harshly, which seems really ridiculous. You should be judged on the quality of your joke, not on whether or not you're making them. Good jokes, we want to hear them.

Good jokes.

Yeah. Good jokes only. Um, they're judged if they show anger. There's been a lot of talk about that. Women are perceived as talking more than they actually do. They're perceived as being overly confident when they're demonstrating any confidence. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. That is the bad news. Further bad news. The percentages of women in positions of power and controlling money have not really budged, period. And I think there is this perception of progress. Of women in the workplace. There's been a little progress, but in terms of the top ranks of power, the people who really control the money and the influence, the progress has been incredibly slow. And I have been questioned by a number of men while on my book tour of like, how this is even possible. What do you mean only 8.5% of the Fortune 500 has a female CEO?

Really?

Where did you get those numbers? I'll tell you where I got those numbers, the Fortune 500. You could go count the women yourself. So the progress has been really slow. So 8.5% of the Fortune 500 has a female CEO. There's new data showing there are women leaving the VP level and above in record numbers. This is a new study out of McKinsey and Lean In. Women are leaving because they're feeling frustrated about being underestimated, undervalued, and having other people take credit for their work, which particularly stings. If you look at the VC space, $330 billion in venture capital was deployed last year. 2% of that went to female-led companies. 2021, 2% to female-led companies.

It is quite shocking. And I think it's, it's actually getting worse, not better in VC.

Well, so that's the thing. That's actually down from an average of 3% over the prior decade. So the numbers are bad. And I've actually found on this book tour that the, the disconnect between how bad things really are and how bad people understand them to be is pretty massive. People don't realize how bad they are. And the reasons for that are very complex and it takes a long time for these things to change. So on one hand, the numbers are really, really bad. The double standards are crazy. But on the other hand, if you look at what happens when women raise money and when women are in leadership positions in business, the outcomes are remarkable. There are a number of studies showing that female-led companies in the startup space are far more profitable and they return, they yield their returns to investors a year earlier on average. If you look at the corporate space, female CEOs tend to outperform. Companies with female CFOs tend to outperform. Companies with women on their boards, they perform better too. There's a breadth and depth of, of data on the advantages of diversity in leadership. By the way, female diversity, I mean adding women, um, and, uh, having gender diversity, but also racial diversity. And yet there's not been a lot of progress. So I would say the data is negative. But the, the, but there's also data about how positive, um, the outcomes can be, which to me indicates that I should be optimistic because ultimately I think people are greedy and wanna make money. Investors wanna make money as they should. And if they follow the data, they'll invest more in women. I was at just at an event and I was talking about some of the data and this, um, this investor said to me afterwards, he said, gee, it sounds like an arbitrage opportunity, an undervalued opportunity. I said, exactly. That's exactly what it is. Follow the data. Don't get distracted by the bias. And yes, it is an arbitrage opportunity.

Yeah, I love this as an arbitrage opportunity. That's such a great— that's a great way to frame it for sure. So I'm not going to ask you to fix this problem. I'm not going to say, Julia, how do we fix this problem? But I am going to ask you this. If you think about all the founders and other leaders and coaches who listen to this podcast, how should they think about building their own skills? Like, what advice do you have for people to build humility, to build resilience, adaptability, all the things you talk about, what are your specific pieces of advice?

Well, I think the first thing goes back to the self-knowledge. So, so we can talk about the structural, you know, societal issues and how we won't be able to fix those. But on a personal level, I think people will benefit if they understand what they're really good at and what they feel confident doing and what they don't feel confident doing. And really mapping out your strengths and your weaknesses and your benchmarks. Everyone will succeed if they set themselves on their own path for success and, um, understanding what you wanna do to make progress. So there's some interesting data I write about in the book, in When Women Lead, about sports, about athletics, and how there's a correlation between people who do athletics in high school and college and those who have success in the business world, particularly women. Athletics really gives women an advantage in the business landscape. So, I was really curious about this research in no small part because I did not do sports in high school, and I wish I had, having seen all this data, to understand what we could learn from this. What is it about athletics? Is it that it trains people to compete with other teams? Is it about sort of fostering a group team mentality to compete against others? And in digging into this research, which I write about this, that's not it at all. The thing that makes athletes so successful is, A, frequent failure. You're constantly getting pushed outside your comfort zone, competing against teams or other athletes who are better than you are, and you fail. And every game, every match, whether you fail or succeed, you go back and you review the tape, sometimes literally, and sometimes you just talk about it with your coach. You look at what went wrong, what you did well, what was entirely out of your control, and what you should do differently next time. So, to me, that mentality of being an athlete is how we should all approach all of our work all of the time, which means lay out your strengths and failures. Every experience, every interaction, whether it's a pitch meeting or it's a project or it's an— for me, it could be an interview with a big CEO to understand, okay, let's go back and review the tape. One of the CEOs I talked to says she does these what they call after-event reviews reviews, but they don't call them postmortems because nobody died. And if you talk about something like a postmortem, that sounds like a really scary, terrible thing. "Oh, postmortem. Oh my God, who died this time?" It's not a postmortem. We all need to get accustomed to having these after-event reviews. Any occasion, whether it's a failure or a success, don't rush on to the next thing. That is the instinct, always going on to the next thing, moving on. Take the moment, take the time, invest the time in yourself. To understand how you could be better next time. And I think that is the first step towards understanding your own skills and strengths. You could say, "OK, in this situation, what did I do well at? What did I do poorly at? And what was out of my control?" And I also think this understanding of, like, what are the things that are out of your control and how should you be interacting with them or around them is also really important. So I think that's the main thing to sort of set yourself on a course to understand your strengths and weaknesses.

I love that so much. I love that it's a postmortem. It's not a postmortem because nobody died. It's a normal experience of being a human and things didn't always go so well, or they did go well. And then as you always have to review the tape, either emotionally or actually to get better. I love that. What about empathy? How, what's your advice for people to build empathy?

So it's funny because there's this test, um, that you can do online, which I think is really fun. I have a link to it on my website, juliaborsten.com, and it allows allows you to test how good you are at guessing someone's emotion or determining someone's emotion based on a black and white picture only of their eyes. So I did this test, I scored really high on it, and I asked my husband to take it, and he did not score so high. And afterwards, um, I, I went back through with him. I said, why did you not guess these, these emotions? Like, to me it's so obvious. This person is concerned, this person's nervous, this person's elated, you know. And we had a very different experience of trying to assess these emotions. Now obviously your chances of determining feelings from a black and white picture of someone's eyes is not really indicative of how well you're going to deal with empathy in the workplace. But I think there's this sense of reframing what you talked about as empathy as being nice. I think empathy is about really understanding what your counterparty needs. And I say counterparty is a term you normally use in negotiation, right? But your counterparty could be someone you're negotiating with. It could be your employee. It could be a fellow team member. It could be your boss. If you could take a moment before every interaction to say, what does this person really want? What position are they coming from? For me, as I interview people, I always want to understand where someone's coming from because then I'll be able to frame my questions in a way that'll be more meaningful, right? If I know a CEO is coming out of a really bad quarter of earnings, you could guess how they're going to be trying to frame things. That'll help me position my questions to make sure I'm really getting to the heart of the matter. Or if you're about to go into a meeting with your investors and they're feeling very anxious because the economy's tanking, And you want to both reassure them, but also understand, try to figure out what their priorities are. You're going to be more effective in whatever you do if before every interaction you say, "Wait a second, I know where I'm coming from. Let me just check where I'm coming from here. I'm coming from a place of strength, a place of insecurity, a place of nervousness, but let's figure out where this other person's coming from so I can approach them in a way that's going to be most effective." I love the way you frame it as negotiation, which does make it feel a little more like this is a hard skill.

You know, and not just soft skill. And also, um, the idea of it being strategic, as in like you are more likely to get what you want if you stop and think about it and put yourself in their shoes or just kind of think about where they're coming from. You're gonna be more effective with your employees, with your investors, with whoever it is. I really love that.

And also to identify opportunities. Maybe your customers want something totally different now than they did a year ago because inflation is higher. Put yourself in their shoes. Put yourself in the shoes. If you're a marketer, how will I better relate to these people? It's all about empathy. Empathy is totally a strategic skill, and there's so much to be gained from deploying it very intentionally.

Yes. I love it so much. This is so great. Now, Julia, I always ask the same two questions at the end of my podcast, and you're not a founder, but I'm still gonna ask you the same questions and we'll see where we go with this. What do you wish you had known personally you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

Well, I would say when I was a young journalist, I wish I had known that I could have been a, a founder, an entrepreneur. And I think there's so many women out there who are intimidated about the startup process, about the leadership process. They don't— by the way, half of the women in my, in my book who ended up being CEOs of phenomenal companies, when they start off, they never would've dreamed that they could have been a CEO. And I think that, um, I wish I had known that we were all capable of being leaders. And here I am now thinking of myself as a leader. I think I just wish I had had more role models and examples to destigmatize what it means to really be a leader in business. So there's that. I mean, I guess that's what it is in terms of a personal journey. But then on the journey of this book, I wish I could have known how many women, as I've discovered, really need this. I think that women need it to see that there are other women who could be role models for them and inspirations for them. And men need it because everyone needs to be broken out of this very— stiff, staid model, this box of what leaders look and sound like. I think when I started this project at the very beginning of the pandemic, I didn't realize how much of a transformation in leadership we were going to see and how much opportunity there would be for everyone to understand we're at the beginning of a new cycle right now where people can lead in ways that are far more authentic to them and be more successful by being true to who they really are. So now it's been great to discover, but I don't think I could have ever anticipated how much the pandemic and the economic uncertainty would really reshape the business and also leadership landscape.

Wow, that's really well said. And I totally get that, especially because we all need role models. We need to be able to see ourselves, otherwise we can't be that. But then to your point, everyone stuck in a box of leadership is just not gonna be their best leader. They're just not. So, like, the notion of having more flexibility in leadership is very powerful.

And that— those boxes are so outdated. We need a wide variety of boxes and no one needs to fit into anything.

Totally. In a new shape, a new shape. Okay. My last question. What advice do you have for founders as they embark on their journey to grow into leaders?

They already are leaders. They just don't realize it yet. And I think they need to realize that no one is born a great leader. And every CEO I've ever interviewed is constantly on a path of self-discovery, iteration, pushing themselves, and that those after-event reviews. So I think, um, I think founders thinking about being great leaders need to, A, understand the importance of their team and supporting their team and finding a team that's complimentary. A couple of CEOs said at the beginning they struggled because their team didn't feel like their boss wanted them to, you know, to challenge them or to succeed. But we all are better leaders if the people around us are constantly pushing us and challenging us. And I think it's really important to create an environment where you're gonna get the best out of your team, including being challenged by them. And then I think creating their own benchmarks for success, not just how much money you're going to raise or what kind of product you're going to launch, but you as a leader, is it about becoming a better team builder? Is it about, um, uh, uh, you know, figuring out how to create more diversity within your groups and draw the most out of those teams? But I think understanding separate benchmarks beyond just your business for you as a leader, the more you take your leadership and your management of people as an entirely different and skill, sometimes that can get put to the side when people are so focused on building their business, but understand that those skills are also essential for long-term success.

Beautiful. I love it. Wow, Julia, so much wisdom here. I so appreciate it. It was great to have you on this podcast, and everyone should go out and buy a copy of When Women Lead by Julia Borsten. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much, Alisa Cohn.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.