CB LIVE! Courage to Leap & Lead with Sally Helgesen: part 2 - Episode 124

You've got courage to leap, courage to lead.

Be brave and be bold. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Let it roar.

Welcome to the Courage to Leap and Lead podcast, where each of our guests share the stories of courage that helped them become powerful leaders. Before we start today's show, please remember to visit courageconsulting.com where you can find all of the episodes and lots of other excellent resources. That's courageconsulting.com. Now, here's your host, Leadership Courage Coach CB Bowman.

So my question to you is, how do you identify Peer coach, especially because the peer coaches that you may want to have have been so successful that they don't have time to be a peer coach.

Well, I don't think success comes into it that much here. I mean, my peer coach was not necessarily someone who had been successful in the career space. Her life— she was someone whose life had been shattered by tragedy and who was very, very active in things she did but had a profound sadness. But I think the primary thing in peer coaching is, number one, work with someone you trust and who trusts you. That's the issue. And I think when you're looking at it, a peer coach is not a mentor. A peer coach is not someone who gives you advice, and that's usually going to be someone who's more successful than you are, or who is at a level of success that you aspire to. But a peer coach is someone you trust so that you can identify what you need to work on. And we used Marshall's overall template, which was, okay, What do I want to work on in the next month, in the next 3 months? What do I need to work on? And, you know, for her it would be like procrastination. It was, you know, not falling into absolute despair when this, that, or the other happens, when I'm reminded of what happened. For me, it was more, how do I keep going? How do I keep my morale up enough to do this? And then certain things would become apparent to me, which were, for example, okay, I'd written books people found were very valuable. I'd learned to be a good speaker. And even in some cases, this is sort of my strength now, but it was very beginning there. develop workshops, but I'm horrible at marketing of any kind. So once we identified that, then she said, I think the key for you is going to be to work on marketing and work on self-marketing and work on how you not just talk about yourself, but how you get known in the world. And, you know, I'm not that comfortable with that, or, you know, The usual stuff like you read in my book. You know, I, I'm not that kind of person. I'm not self-promotional. Nice. So she held me to account to work on that because it was, as I began to realize through that process, it was an important reason that I was in the situation that I was in. I was just, you know, If you build it, they will come. I was in that mode. So I learned so much, but I don't think— I think that thinking, oh, as a peer coach, I want somebody who is like I aspire to be, or, you know, who's on my level, whatever that is, or who has similar career aspirations. I don't think—

yeah, yeah, I, I get that. So Sally, here's the $64,000 question.

If—

well, first of all, I think you've given so many answers to that. Okay, all right, so let's go back to marketing. And that's very profound what she said and what you said, the realization that If your marketing was stronger, then things would have been different. And so you didn't lull in that, well, woe is me, you know, if I had done this, I had done that, you know. You took some actions.

Mm-hmm.

Are you introverted, Sally?

Yes.

Okay, so we can talk.

Okay.

How in the world did you get from A to Z in terms of marketing yourself as an introvert?

Uh, first of all—

And this assumes you did not have money to hire a publicist, a PR person. Oh, Lord, no. Okay.

The primary thing I did was I tried— remember, I had this great resource that I was part of the Learning Network. this group. It was a very small group. So what I decided to do was to identify who in that group was really good with marketing and self-marketing and then learn from them, ask them questions. You know, hey, Chris, you know, you're really good at self-marketing. I think one of the reasons that I'm struggling so in my business right now— they all knew I was. I didn't talk about it, but they knew. They could tell. One of the reasons is I have not been very effective at this. I'd like to learn from you. You know, could we talk sometime? And, and, you know, could we schedule a phone call, whatever? You're gonna be in New York. I'll come in into the city. Lives out on the West Coast. Most of these people do. So I got very curious about learning from my colleagues. Now, I'm gonna tell you a story. So obviously, among these colleagues, The 2 people I knew who were best at self-marketing were Tom Peters and Marshall. I had more access to Marshall because I saw him on a regular basis. I recognized something interesting. I published this book, The Female Vision: Women's Real Power at Work, in 2010, and it was— it's a wonderful book and it made a great workshop. But it didn't sell particularly well, and I got very low advance. And anybody who's published a book knows that your— the budget for the book is tied to the size of your advance. And since that book, you know, I'd had a couple books that hadn't done well, I thought, well, I am never going to get a book contract based on my track record, no matter how respected I am in the publishing industry. I therefore need to collaborate with somebody who has been very successful in writing, you know, has— can command a good budget, a good advance, and a good advance will translate into commitment from the publisher. And I also need to collaborate with somebody who is good at marketing and promotion. Because on the Female Vision, I collaborated with a colleague and friend who was worse than I was at self-marketing. So that wasn't a very good idea. And so I said, I need to do that and I'm going to need to collaborate. So I had the idea that, you know, hitting the jackpot would be getting Marshall to collaborate with me on taking what he had done in What Got You Here Won't Get You There, an incredibly successful book, and working on it so that it would be more appropriate for women. Because I felt that it wasn't, and I worked with a lot of women who felt that. And lo and behold, which I didn't know, Marshall had had that feedback. So I had this idea, let's take that brilliant model You know, what got you here won't get you there. The habits and behaviors that got you to where you are will not necessarily serve you as you move forward. Let's take that model, adapt it for women. Look at the habits that trip women up, not the habits— some of the habits he has in there, such as don't always talk about how great you are, etc., or learn to apologize. No, that's, that's not what women need to work on to get out of their own way. So I had that idea. But I sat with that idea. You know, here I was at that point, say this is 2015, I was in my late 60s and I'd had a lot of success, etc., etc. I was well on my way from recovering from this catastrophe, although not there, this financial catastrophe, and I could not bring myself to ask Marshall if he wanted to do this. Now, why couldn't I bring myself? Because I felt like he would think, oh, she's trying to use me. She's trying to use me because I've got, you know, a million LinkedIn followers, because, you know, I sold a million copies of What Got You Here. She's trying to use me. Oh, I thought Sally was a friend, blah, blah, blah. So I could not bring myself to ask him. Now, here's the thing. He and I were in some kind of workshop for people who do what we do. And we're all in it. And we were— there was a kind of a breakout. I mean, it was in person, but you know what we now call a breakout. It was an exercise where we had— we drew names out of a hat. And whoever's name we drew We had to go up to them and say, what can I do for you? And then we would change, you know, half the people, their names were in the hat, something like that. Anyway, the point is, he drew my name. He drew my name. Accident of fate. If his finger had, had gone in another direction, it might never have happened. And he came up to me and he said, Sally, what can I do to help you? So I just said, Marshall, you can collaborate with me on a book about blah blah blah. Because I thought, you know, who gets a chance like this? I mean, this is the universe saying, honey, step up, it's time. You know, here he is saying— so I just said that. And Here's what he said. It was a great lesson. It's a great lesson for a lot of women. He didn't think, oh, she's trying to use me. No, his thought was, what a great idea. And he said this, he said, what a great idea. I've had feedback from women who don't seem to feel that it exactly works for them because the behaviors I look at are off. So he saw it, in other words, as a win-win. as something that, of course, would benefit me. He knew that. He recognized it. But he also saw it as something that would benefit him potentially. He said, you know, I've got a lot more women in my audiences now, and I think collaborating with you would give me a lot of credibility with them. Went on and on about ways it was a win for him. This was a great lesson. Don't assume what someone's going to think of your request and recognize that, you know, they can always say no. So this was really how this happened. And this was a key part, obviously, of the recovery from all the issues. But it also— I learned, I thought, I want to collaborate with him more than anything because I want to learn to be good. at marketing in the space we're in, the, the writing thought leadership. I want to learn how to be good at it. He's the best person I know, so I'm putting myself in a position where I can learn from him. And I was explicit about that also with him. So it was— I learned so much, and all this kind of fed into where I am. In other words, it hasn't been easy. And I've learned a lot, and I've learned a lot that I think is of value. So that's why I am determined to share it.

Sally, I'm not sure how many questions I can ask at once. I actually— I had a very similar situation to me, which is how I got into MG100. And you were there at the time. It was in London. When he drew my name out of the hat. Suppose you don't have a Marshall in your corner.

Oh, yeah.

Then what? And what next?

Then I think you very clearly try to identify what is one thing I could work on that would be of benefit in my situation right now? What is that one thing, and who in the circle of people I actually know and people who I believe, you know, could be help— would be willing to be helpful to me and who I might have something to contribute to? Who do I know?

Whoa, whoa, whoa. You just said something very powerful.

Yeah.

You said, and who I can contribute to.

Yes.

If you're feeling less than, how can you get your mind to the point of thinking, I have something to contribute?

I think you really want to think it through. Now, I didn't do that with Marshall. You know, I didn't think that I had anything to contribute. And what I learned is you kind of always got, you've always got something that you can contribute, even if you're feeling like you don't, you do. So you want to, and here's a good peer coaching exercise. You know, I've decided, let's just take, we're talking about self-marketing. I've decided that I really need to work on my self-marketing. I've identified a couple people who might be able to give me some ideas, not to rescue me, not to be the be-all and end-all, who might be able to give me some ideas, what do you think that I could contribute to them? Now, this isn't something you articulate. This isn't a quid pro quo. It is going in with the feeling that you have something to contribute. So you want to be able to articulate that just in your mind. You don't want to say, and I'll do this for you. You know, that, that's not the idea. The idea is you want to inhabit the space of, you know, I know there are things I can do for you, and if I can't do them now, I'll be able to do them down the line. This is how a lot of very successful men operate. I've watched it. Even if they feel there's nothing they could give now, it's like, oh well, that guy's really lucky that I asked him. to do this because I'm going to be very successful going forward, so he'll, you know, have a chip with me. So we want to think, you know, okay, if I feel like there's not much I could do now, in the future, you know, who knows? And we don't know. You know, we might live next door to somebody that they want on their board in 10 years. You know, anything can happen. So we just want to go through that, that kind of exercise.

And so is it okay to ask what could you do for that person?

You can, but it kind of muddies the water. I, I will tell you this, because since that happened, and since, you know, things worked out really well for me, I've had a lot of people make these kinds of requests for me. You know, I'd like to, you know, talk to you about how I can whatever, you know, how you know, getting a publisher for my book, you know, structuring my book, you know, marketing, you know, etc., etc. So a lot of people ask me these questions. And what I see is that from my own reaction, here are the things that make me responsive. If they— and it's not ever them saying, and I'll introduce you to so-and-so or anything like that. It's not, you know, we're not, you know, we're not dealing with, you know, Donald Trump and Zelensky, you know, do me a favor here. We're being very You know, we're asking, we're asking. Where I find myself responding is when people are really specific. I've had people, I'd like to talk with you about getting, you know, better at whatever. And I'll say, okay. And then I get on the call and they want everything. You know, it's like, well, and I feel, and I don't feel like I've got enough friends and my colleagues and oh, my boyfriend left me and I seem to always choose the wrong man. You know, okay, fine, whatever. Find somebody else.

We call that whining.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, find someone else. But, you know, very specific. Then if people are real specific, then I'll— I can either think of something to tell them, or I can think of, you know, this isn't really my wheelhouse, but my colleague so-and-so, see if they could give you, you know, do a short call with you and share some of their thoughts. So you want to be really, really specific. And it's a good discipline anyway, because you want to be specific in your own mind about what you're going to ask.

Mm-hmm.

What you need, you know, what, what is that one tactical thing that would be of benefit to helping pull you out of where you are and begin to change your situation? What's that one thing? And it can be really small. It can be really small. I need a better accountant. You know, it can be larger, like, you know, I need to get better at self-marketing.

Mm-hmm.

That's, that's something that's got lots of steps, whereas finding the right accountant might take you a few tries, but it's a fairly simple process.

And what do you do? Tough question. If you're down in the dumps and you identify somebody who you think could assist you in something very specific and they say no, yeah, how do you— that's like a double hit. How do you handle that?

You ask someone else. You ask someone else. Because it's like, you know, I often think that, you know, for women, this is harder. You know, we didn't— I mean, there are guys who go into a bar and, you know, it's like, I'm gonna play the numbers. You know, I'll see if I can get to first base with 10 women. Maybe one of them will say yes. And so it's not a painful rejection. We often haven't had that kind of experience. So, you know, You know, we feel rejected or take it personally. And I think that the 2 things here, this is a good time to do a mini script rewrite. Not, oh, he said no, no one's ever gonna say yes. You know, it's because I feel bad, or, you know, I asked someone who was too powerful, he has no interest in me. Tell yourself a different story. Tell yourself a more, Hopeful story. You know, you know, he's probably overwhelmed with his own work right now and can't take someone else on, or whatever it is. You know, just rewrite the script a little bit in your own mind and then find someone else. Just don't even hang out there. Because sometimes this takes multiple tries. It's not that obvious. You know, with, with the thing with Marshall, that was my first hope. But I had 2 other ideas of people I could collaborate on books that would be helpful to me in this way because they had— they could help me get a decent advance that would get me support from the publisher. And there was an idea that was interesting and I could learn from them about self-marketing. I had 2 other ideas. This wasn't the only one. And all of them You know, I, I could— couldn't bring myself to ask. And, and it happened with Marshall because he drew my name. Really.

I love it. Have Plan B. Yeah. Okay. Now, Sally, Rising Together. What do you mean by that?

What I mean by Rising—

Show your book. Show your book.

Oh, okay.

Show both books. How Women Rise, and then this one.

Well, Rising Together. Very proud of this. You'll notice similarities in the design. This is—

I was so glad you did that.

Yeah, very intentional. Rising Together is really when I, I was, it was very specific the reason I wrote it. And I tell this story in the book, but I was asked to give a workshop, a women's leadership workshop at the Construction Super Conference in Las Vegas. This is shortly before the pandemic. We were all in person. And so I flew out there. It's a huge conference, takes both Wynn hotels, if you know the Wynn. And so I went to my session and I thought, okay, I'm going to have— they said, you know, you probably have about 100. Last year, the woman who did this had 75, but we think you'll bring in more. So say 100, maybe 125 people, women will be there. So I went down. And guess what? There were 300 people there. It was standing room only. And most of them were men. It was about 70% men.

Wow.

So, you know, my prepared remarks were completely inappropriate. So to sort of stall for time, buy myself some time, I started asking them, you know, why are you here? Why are you in a women's leadership I heard stuff that I was not surprised at, you know, like, well, we, you know, it's a talent pool is more diverse. We have to get better at attracting and retaining women. We lose them, etc., etc. This is also true for, you know, African Americans. And, you know, we, we have a pretty staid culture, and we need to adapt that so we can be more competitive in the talent race. So yeah, that makes sense. I've heard that. I'm not surprised. But then one guy stood up and he said something I can never forget it. He said, please do not waste your time or ours telling us why we need to do this. We know. We get it. But we have no idea how to do it. We have no idea. How to become the kind of culture that is appealing to a wider range of, you know, the old white guys who've been running this thing for all these years. We don't know how to do it. And we need you to tell us how. And I— so I thought, okay, not really prepared to do that right now. You know, I stumbled around. But as I left the room, I thought, Whoa, I make it clear this is my next book. I want to look at how organizations— 2 things— how organizations can get better at actually building cultures of inclusion, cultures of belonging, not talking about it but doing it. And then also as an ancillary, how we as individuals can get better at building relationships with people that we may perceive as different from ourselves or feel awkward around, because that's also an issue. And I think there's too much talking about— too much talking about it, too much using talking therapies. You know, let's have a session where we all, you know, air our unconscious biases and tell on ourselves. more talking, and very little, you know, how we're gonna do this. I quote this Mike Kaufman at— who was the CEO of Cardinal Health. And he said, you know, we did a lot of these programs, he said, and it was all aha moment, now what? So I wanted to do the now what and look at the specifics of how we could address this. What gets in the way? Looked at the model, the structural model for how women rise. What Gets in the Way? In How Women Rise, I look at the habits and behaviors most likely to undermine women as they seek to move forward. In Rising Together, I look at what is most likely to trigger responses that undermine either our efforts to build a culture of belonging or our individual efforts to build a broader range of relationships. And do that with skill and intention. And then the second half of the book looks specifically at inclusive behaviors that we can practice. So again, very tactical, very how-to-based. None of the theory, none of the language. You know, I've been at these things where I've sat in these things where they spend 2 hours talking about gender pronouns. Okay, that's nice. That's fine. I don't know. what that's doing for anybody. It's, you know, we're in a debate. Well, it makes me a little uncomfortable. And what percentage of people don't identify as he or she? This is a, you know, I'm not saying it's a waste of time, but it doesn't get us to where we want to be. And I think there's some frustration out there because it doesn't. And people feel we should be further along, and we certainly should. And so I have worked to try to bring together techniques for addressing this by— from my own experience, which is now many, many decades. It is in line with an earlier book I wrote called The Web of Inclusion, which is the first time the language of inclusion was used in regard to the workplace or to business. So it comes out of that, but it's really widening the lens away specifically from women And looking again, you know, at how this happens across gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, values, experiences, etc. What's required? So that's, that's what this book is about.

You know, Sally, as I'm listening to you, it strikes me when, when I was coming along younger, there were so many how-to books out there. And then all of a sudden, and I don't know what caused it, we went from how-to to just do it. Maybe it was Nike's fault, right? Yeah, I think so. And we see a whole sea of books of telling us what the problem is.

Yeah.

And we have lost that ability to say, this is the way, this is the how-to. to solve it. Here are the specific steps you could take. I know when I wrote my book, which will be out in May, June, on courage, at first I thought, okay, well, nobody's writing about courage. And knock, knock.

Exactly.

Hello. Here's the master writer on courage. And I said, whoa. I'm going to go— it doesn't matter if it's 1 person or 20 million people. I'm going up against a giant here. And a lot of people have said, you know, I can't write that book because somebody else has written it, blah, blah, blah. And I said to my mentor, I can't, I can't touch coverage. One of our colleagues who we know in MG100, he's all about the coverage. And my mentor said to me, CB, nobody, but nobody can talk about courage the way you can. Just really. And I— and it was that peer coaching. I said to myself, what does that mean? What does that mean? I mean, and suddenly it hit me. It meant that here's an opportunity to tell my story But not just the woe is me story, but how did I move from failure to success? Really sit down and examine it. We're, we're missing that in society. We want to go to the solution.

Yes.

Immediately without saying, okay, I may have the answers, but how specifically can I ask somebody else to do what I did in a way that works for them. Yes.

Yeah, exactly. And I agree that that's missing. And I think with the getting into the whole— well, I've been there for 25 years, but with the whole diversity and inclusion business, it was also, you know, I'd sat through too many conferences where someone who supposedly had some answers got up there and said, let me show you my leadership model. And then they Put up a bunch of slides or PowerPoints or whatever deck or— and start sharing a theoretical model. And it's so extremely unhelpful. And I think that especially in the diversity space, there's been a good amount of that because people are, you know, they feel awkward or they don't know what to say or, you know, nobody's holding them to account saying, that's fine, that's nice, that sounds good. Now what do I do? You know, that whole— you know, it was all insight. It's all aha moment. No, now what?

And one of the things I love about you, Sally— don't take this negatively and don't get a swollen head— is that you have taken on the race issue in a way that complements your work.

Hmm.

What it occurs to me, and I'm bothered by this a lot, is when I see people talking about race who are not in the category. You may have something great to say, but you don't have that personal experience, and that I find disturbing. What you've done is you've taken it, and it's based upon your experience and your awareness That these are the steps we can take to be together, to rise together. Yeah. And so with that, I thank you.

Thank you, CB. I so enjoy being with you. This has been a fantastic opportunity. I have— I've enjoyed this so much. I always do talking to you, but this one, this has really been good.

Thank you. I love you. I enjoy your brain and I enjoy you as a woman. You are just— you're somebody that when we see, we can smile about. Because you've made us all, regardless of the race or religion or the sexual orientation, you've made us feel like contenders, Sally.

Oh, what a great thing to say. Thank you.

Thank you. And with this audience, you'll see I'll need to break it up into 2 parts, 2 wonderful parts. So make sure that you see Part A and Part B. And guess what? I'm gonna wrangle it so that she comes back again.

Oh, okay.

But I'll have to do it around her insane schedule. Sally, thank you. We so appreciate you.

You are a treasure, CB.

Thank you. Audience, bye now. Until next week, see you then.