TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

Speaking with TJ Walker, dissecting the communication skills and practices of world class leaders. Climbing up the corporate ladder is tough enough if you have a full support team, you know, the wife at home, the whole support network, it's tough and frankly I never got that high in the corporate world. Our guest today has done it, but she's done it as a woman. Her new book out is called up the Ladder in a Skirt. Maggie Georgiompoulos not only was vastly successful in major corporations, but she did it in male dominated corporations, specifically the engineering and construction world. I can tell you from first hand experience when I've worked in major oil rigs, oil refineries, it is definitely a place where women are made to feel like a fish out of water. Maggie Georgiopolos, thanks for being our guest today.

Thank you for speaking to me today.

So tell us, how did you. You're not as old as I am, but you're not 17. How did you get into the world of engineering in the first place? In some ways it's, and I apologize, I say that because there were a lot of women in my generation where the engineering school where I went, it was probably 90% men at the time. It's more 50, 50 now. But it wasn't always that case.

Well, when I went, I was one of two females who went into mechanical engineering in my year and I was the only one that actually graduated at the end of the four and a half years which my course was. But I suppose I went into engineering because I was looking for something that would allow me to be creative while still using my mathematical skills, which I was quite strong at, and my physics skills, which I was quite strong at. So it made sense to me. Having said that, I actually started as an electrician with BHP Steel and I decided that I liked the mechanical stuff better than the electrical stuff which is why I went back to uni and did mechanical engineering.

So you graduated from college and like most people with engineering degrees, you start out in a company but everyone starts out at the bottom level. A lot of people get kicked out, a lot of people wash out, a lot of people retire, become a housewife or husbands and house husbands housewives. You kept on advancing. How did you do it?

In some ways I suppose it was by accident, but by the same time it was a little bit by design. What happened is the type of engineering course that I did was what's called a sandwich course in Australia. So we have to do a minimum of 12 months work based experience as part of our degree. So by not Even luck, I suppose I tend to say by luck, but by working hard and doing really well within my first block, because we did two six month blocks, I actually got hired on. So I continued to work as an engineer while I was completing my degree and managed to juggle a full time degree with 20 hours a week of work for the remaining three years of my degree at that point. And what happened is as a result of that, when I graduated I got hired into a non graduate position. So I started on a salary that was probably two to three times as much as most graduates started on. And it also meant that I started at a higher level within the organisation that I was working for. So my first job out of university was with a company called Toyota Australia, just a small, not really well known organization.

But within 10 years you were actually a chairman of an agricultural company. That seems like a big leap in a short period of time.

What actually happened from there was, I suppose I hit some of the fun things that happen as a female, including the fact that the HR manager got his facts messed up when we arrived and didn't realise that the female was the one that got hired off. One interview out of 160 candidates, not the mail that was coming in then. My direct report had actually been based in Tokyo at the time that I was hired. It was his manager that had hired me in and he messed up when he was splitting things out and gave me the lower level vehicles by giving the heavy vehicles that my expertise was in to the gentleman because he assumed that one of the two people coming in with the expertise in heavy vehicles was the male, not the female. And by the time they actually turned around and said to me, listen, if you stay we'll offer you a job anywhere in the company and you can move from there. I'd actually made the decision to move to a country town in Swan Hill and took up a position as an assistant production manager with a smaller company that built ploughs. But what it did is it started to step me up the management ladder and I was able to do that because I already had a fair bit of experience and going to a rural town from a big city like Melbourne, they liked the fact that I'd not just worked for Toyota, but had spent the years that I was getting my degree working for supplier organisations. So that gave me my first step up. And while I was there they got me to train apprentices, run training courses at the local technical college that led me moving into training and development a little bit more than engineering. And it just meant that I tended to leap a little bit rather than steadily step and moved into human resources. I was onto the Executive Board within a number of years and then became the Executive Chairman of the.

Now what? Time out.

One second.

Because a lot of our listeners are saying, wow, she went from engineering into hr. In at least the United States country I'm most familiar with, HR is often considered a backwater in the company. It's considered a place where you go to let your career die. I'm not saying always, but in most cases you get shifted from engineering to hr. Especially if you were a woman. It's almost as if you're seen as going back into a 1950s secretarial pool and it's extraordinarily rare to then advance up in management ranks. How did you pull that off?

Mainly because my expertise when I walked in was in Occupational Health and Safety. So within, I think, the first two months of being, you know, coming in to help build training within the organisation, I'd save them something like a quarter of a million dollars. I also, because I had my engineering background, I would go through the operational side of the business and I could see how things were working, including the fact that I did actually jam my foot ra solidly into my mouth within the first couple of days. Then when I turned around to the operations manager and asked him who the idiot was that designed the process line because it was actually damaging their produce, and it was very obvious as to why, only to discover that it was him.

Oops. So how did he take it, being called an idiot?

Not real well, but after we got over the fact that I wasn't just some little girly telling him how to do his job, and he realized that I was an engineer and process lines were one of the things that I'd done over the years in process redesign and things like that, and the fact that what I was actually explaining to him actually made perfect sense, so they were able to fix up the process line and stop damaging as much of the produce as it was going down the line. And that made a difference. I think that in itself started to. The little communications blunder aside, and that was a very big lesson to me to watch how I word something when I'm asking a question.

Now, you pointed out the blunder, which is we appreciate you doing here, but I want to know more about the success of how did you actually communicate to people that you saved them a quarter of a million dollars? I mean, I tell my wife all the time, oh, I saved $30,000. I didn't buy A sports car. It's not persuasive with her. How did you actually persuade the management that you had in fact saved a quarter million?

I think, for starters, because they could honestly see that it wasn't going out of their bottom line anymore. They could see that, as I said, it was through a number of things. One was through we had a really large workcover bill and it was because it had been incorrectly rated because people didn't fully understand the nature of the business and how that worked. And workcover in Australia is the workers compensation that the company statutorily needs to pay into. And also they had a number of people that they hadn't been properly following up that were out of work. So I helped them put in processes that help them get back to work and also help, obviously the company not have to pay double for the same sort of role. So it helped to up morale, I suppose, for want of a better thing. And what I could actually do is I could actually show them the figures in black and white on a financial report. That said, before we implemented the following processes, this is what we were paying. This is what it was costing us in staff that we weren't properly looking after. This is what it was costing us in damaged produce. This is the various lists and the things that we're doing and here's what we actually saved. So I could actually put it into black and white for them so that they could really see what happened. And that made a huge difference, obviously, and made a huge difference to the role that I was continuing to undertake within the organisation as well.

We're speaking to Maggie Georgiopoulos. She's the author of up the Ladder In A Solidifying your Leadership, One Bold Step at a Time, available at Amazon and other finer bookstores. You can find out more about her and the book at up the Ladder in a Skirt. You can also send her a tweet to ask her questions or to tell her you appreciate her being on this show. She's on Twitter @MagSInspires. That's a G S I N S P I R E S. We'll include that in the show notes as well. By the way, if you're on Twitter, feel free to send me a tweet. J Walker, give us feedback on the show, suggestions for guests, questions, comments you have on anything communications related. Now, Maggie, I'm intrigued by the shift you made from pure engineering into the training part of your business, which I think of and most of our listeners think of as a heavy communications focus because so many Engineers take it almost as a badge of pride of honor to not be a good communicator. It's seen almost as anathema to being a good engineer. And you then shift it into something that is more communications related. How did that happen and what relative level of importance do you put on that to your overall success? I have a bias. Everyone has a bias. I try not to have a whole show that's about confirmation bias, but I do think that communication skills are really the most important and least talked about aspects of people who are wildly successful in a lot of different fields. But I don't want to try to lead you along. I want to hear from you.

In all honesty, with regards to stepping into training once again, it's a bit shocking in some ways it was a bit of an accident when I decided to move to the rural town and looking at a smaller company and the process management side of things, I got invited by the local technical college to come in and run some courses for them because they didn't have anyone within the town that had the technical expertise that I did as an engineer, which kind of surprised me because as you said, engineers generally have a reputation of not being that great communicating. And so I started running the local CAT courses in the evenings. And from that they asked me to actually then train their engineering apprentices. So people that were learning trades like welding, manufacturing, construction, those sort of things were actually did apprentices through the technical college. And I was asked to, to run training with them on site to help them actually get around the more academic side of the things that they had to do in order to get the piece of paper to say that they were able to do what we already knew they were able to do. And I guess that kind of came about because I've always, I'm not very good at keeping quiet and okay, I'm not necessarily, back then wasn't necessarily the best communicator. As I said, I had a habit of, you know, jamming my foot in my mouth occasionally because I'd speak and then think. Over the years through experience with having to deal with several people and obviously climbing up the leadership ladder, I've managed to refine that and I'm not quite as bad as I used to be. But just a little bit of that Aussie bluntness does still come out every now and then. But I think that really helped me the fact that I was involved in, you know, when I was at university and then when I, you know, move to various places, I would get involved in community type activities which meant that I had to get involved with people, talk with people, things like that. It helped grow my communication skills and it really made a difference to me as a trainer because I will honestly say when I first started training I wasn't necessarily that great. I did often miss the mark on trying to explain things properly because I was trying to explain it from how I saw things rather than trying to step in into somebody else's shoes and understand what their frustration or what it join the club.

I think I was guilty of that too.

So yeah, but you know, as I did more of it, I enjoyed it and I really liked or liked the wrong word. I love the feeling of working with people and helping them actually, you know, learn something and the sense of achievement they get out of that. And I think it was almost, to me, it became like another way of working with machinery. So, okay, I didn't get to design the actual thing that I was working with anymore. Now I got to work with a finished product and effectively help to refine it, so to speak. And I became really, really fascinated by the different ways that people learn, the different ways that people communicate depending on their person, personality types. And it became almost another thing that I felt this real need to pull apart and figure out how it worked, which can almost be a little bit rude to some people. And I say to them, my biggest fascination as a trainer is that I like to see how people work and I like to pull them almost into itty bitty pieces and see how they come together. But that's the engineering me coming out still.

Maggie, you mentioned different people communicate in different ways. I agree. And sometimes engineers communicate differently than liberal arts majors. People in Australia communicate different than loudmouth New York Americans. Women communicate differently than men do. Let's isolate just the communication aspect. What is your advice to women in how they communicate when working up the corporate ladder? Because the popular perception is, first of all, let me just say there is a lot of sexism in the world and there's a lot of sexism in corporate America. And while I don't think I have oppressed anyone, I can tell you I have certainly benefited from the sexism. I'll put that right out there. Having said all that, I don't think it's quite as simple as a man states his opinion, he's seen as forceful and strong. A women does and she's this awful thing that rhymes with which. But I won't say because I don't want us to get banned in India, not because I'm a prudent so if you could address the communication differences between how do you think women and men communicate in the corporate arena and what women need to do differently to advance and how not to get instantly pigeonholed as too harsh or too soft or.

Too anything, I suppose I would give exactly the same advice I would give to either sex. And having said that, I do understand that women do tend to run against societal stereotypes or prejudice. And when we say something in one way, it's often interpreted, as you said, very differently than when a male says it. But at the end of the day, in order to be able to communicate properly and communicate with your team in such a way that they actually see your communication for what it is, rather than put the overlay on it that is a stereotype, you need to understand how the individual members of your team prefer to communicate as well. Because quite often if I come out and I'm very abrupt in the information that I give to somebody and they're somebody who prefers to have a little bit of a conversation or someone to just ask them, you know, how they're going, just give them that little bit of personal contact in the context and I'm just throwing information out at them, they're automatically going to start to perceive me as a bad communicator anyway. Then they're going to put the overlay that says, she's a horrible person. Oh, look how shrew she is. You know, she screechy, whatever you want to label it as steering away from the more brutal words that we could use. If you manage to do that, then you start to speak in their language, so to speak. And that's another thing to watch. If you happen to be someone who tends to be very touchy feely in some ways in the way you talk or you always do ask personal things and you're communicating with someone who just wants to get to the bottom of it and is quite happy with a hi, Joe, I hope you're okay. I need to talk to you about something and then you're getting into it, then that's what you need to make sure that you're doing. Because if you're starting to get fluffy with Jo and ask him questions about, you know, how his day is or if she happens to be a she, Jo, how her day is, you're going to once again, again get her feeling or him feeling like you're not communicating with them properly because they're like, well, you're talking about stuff that's not relevant here. I need you to get down to what the real Important thing is, so at the end of the day it is the most important aspect of our communication is understanding our teams. And strangely enough, whilst a lot of large corporations do personality profiling and stuff like that, they don't go into it deeply enough with people to understand just what the significance is of preferences, introverted types versus extroverted types, feelers versus thinkers, and what that means in the way that we actually communicate and what it means when they're communicating back to us. And if we're not being aware of that and we're not paying attention to that, then we're giving people the excuse to put those stereotype overlays on us without even trying. And that's regardless of your gender. Unfortunately, as females, the stereotype will hit us harder than it does a male.

And one of the stereotypes is that men all love football and soccer and women like ice skating and talking about kids. That's the stereotype. What is your advice to women, especially those who do work in, in male dominated industries, engineering, hard construction. When it comes to small. Because I can tell I hate football and soccer. You couldn't pay me enough money to go to the World cup soccer. Now your colleagues in Australia will hate me and hit delete on this show. But same with American football. So I'm not good at that. But if I'm with a bunch of big burly engineers at an oil refinery, if I can't talk to them about football, I can all of a sudden say, well, last year when I was a judge at this European beauty pageant contest and boy, their eyes light up. And I'm not suggesting that's necessarily a good thing, but there are certain things that, that are going to be easy for me, even though I don't like football, to talk. Make small talk. What is your advice to women when they are in these social situations or the few minutes before a meeting starts, when everyone is having small talk, how do they deal with that?

My number one piece of advice is be yourself. Never try to pretend you're into something like something or do something that you don't do. You'll get caught out and then it'll be a hundred times worse than it.

Was to start with.

Secondly, you don't need to like football and you don't need to drop into sexist talk or even be crude or rude about the way that you talk in order to connect to people. And that's why I think it's important to start to get to know the people. I know a little bit of what it can be like working in the oil industry. I've consulted into companies in places like Iraq before and generally as a rule, I suppose I'm fairly lucky because I like, you know, I'm a mechanical engineering and I like heavy vehicles in particular. And the oil industry has an abundance of the really, really huge Tonka toys, as I call them. I can generally strike a decent conversation up with most of the blokes because they're happy to talk about the vehicles that they play with on a daily basis, form of a better description. So that will usually open a door. Another thing that generally works, particularly from a female perspective with a group of guys in some of these industries is nearly all of them have families or at least a lot of them do, and they are always happy to start a conversation about that. And that will usually give you an opening into getting to know a little bit more about them, being able to understand them a little bit more. Even if you're striking up a conversation that talks about what their ambitions are or where they're looking to go, they're safe topic areas. They start to help you to get to know the person. You also get to know whether or not they're really interested in having small talk around personal stuff or would like to stick to things that aren't personal. So once again it's about listening and really listening to what the person you're talking to saying, getting to know what it is that helps them or they're interested in what they communicate. And it's not about needing to be really keen on football. I mean, to be brutally honest, I know a hell of a lot of women that are into it and a lot of guys that aren't. And personally I'm not into football. So fortunately I don't have.

You haven't missed a thing.

Yeah, I know. My partner, however, is. So he talks about it and he generally gets that's where I'm really bad and I don't listen. It's sort of like, yes, hun, yes hun, that's really nice, hun. I don't advise you do that with a work colleague. I do advise you be a little bit more honest about the fact that it's not really something you're into.

I do think you're on safe ground talking about kids. If somebody asks to see a picture of my daughter and then says, oh, how beautiful, I now think that person's a genius. And the good moral character. So we are all susceptible to the ingratiating effects of some aspects of small talk. So how do you help individuals and companies now, because every company says we're for equal opportunity and we don't want to lose 50% of all of our resources, our people. And we want this to be completely equal opportunity. And then I'll do this sometimes with companies, if they face media issues when I'm training them, I'll say, okay, how many of the top 10 people in your corporation in terms of pay are women? And all of a sudden it's a lot of looking down to the ground and humming and hawing. Well, we had this one woman five years ago who. That's not going to really work. How do you help companies and individuals?

Well, the key behind my company and what I do is it's all about retaining female talent. And the idea behind that is I'm not looking to walk in and tell companies that they need to have a 50, 50 split in things. What I'm looking to do is work with companies to help them appreciate and understand that not just for women in the future, but for men. We need to create more flexible and more sustainable workplaces. Because quite often what's happening is women are leaving corporations and setting up their own enterprises because they believe it's the only thing they can do in order to create the lifestyle and the income they need in order to support their families. Whether that's just within a straight up partnership with no children or whether or not they do have children. Regardless of that, quite often they feel that's the only option they have available. Because we have this very competitive, still unfortunately badly trained way of determining whether or not someone's committed to an organisation in looking at long hours and being at your desk from X time to Y time and putting in that 90 hour week type thing. And look at me, I'm tough. I can do this and I can come home and chuck something kids over my shoulder and be really great. And it doesn't work for anyone anymore. I mean, men don't want to come home and not know their kids just as much as women don't. Yet we still seem to be missing this because we have this almost corporate culture that has been ingrained about the fact that the best productivity comes from us being in the workplace and doing the work every day rather than than that flexibility. My aim as a business and what I try to do when I go in there is get businesses or corporates to have a look more at the way their people work, what works best for them, how they become more productive, how they can potentially flex the workplace in order to get the best level of productivity out of their Staff. And as I said, I've got in particular a focus on women, because we are still bleeding female talent from companies, and they're going out and they're successfully setting up these small enterprises in order to do things, which I think is fantastic and wonderful, and I don't discourage it. But I would like those women who would rather stay within the corporate structure to have the ability to do so.

I think a lot of people, Maggie, a lot of people hear what you're saying, couldn't agree with you more. And a lot of business owners say that, but then they'll say, I agree with her 100%, but my industry is different. Let's look, for example, at the legal industry here in the United States. The whole compensation structure is based around billable hours. So even if you're wildly unproductive, even if you're half asleep, you can make a law firm a ton of money by billing hours. So you look at the top law schools these days, and for the most part, they are 50, 50 male, female. In some cases, more females are graduating from the elite schools than men. But you go down the street in New York City, the top Wall street law firms, and you look at the partner level, and a lot of times it's 70, 80, more than 90% men. And I happen to have friends who work there. And it is a different situation. All of the men are married, they make so much money, and they have nannies at home. Their wives don't work. Generally, they have a whole support network. Every vacation is completely planned, fun things on, every weekend trip all planned out for them. The women who get to the partner level at the law firms, for the most part unmarried, and I'm not saying everybody has to be married, but really do not have the same kind of support network. If you're running a big law firm, how do you change that structure? Because if you are, if you're not billing hours, you're not making money for the firm anymore.

It's interesting that, but people still believe that in order to bill hours, you need to be in the office. I've known a lot of very successful women who've actually stepped out and set up their own law companies over here in the United Kingdom. And I know the system is a little bit different in both countries and in Australia as well. And they're successfully running businesses running the same level of client contact and approach, yet they're doing it from a home base, which allows them to flex around what they need to do with their families. And quite often, I think that's part of the problem. We've got this entrenched system in legal firms and don't even get me started on oil and gas. That seems to say that in order for you to be successful at the partner level, you need to be able to be in the office or chatting with a client between these hours every day of the week. If you can't chuck out a 10 or 12 hour day, then you're just not going to be able to do what we need you to do. And the point is, you can. It just doesn't necessarily have to be between those hours. You can still be working on client things and be doing it after you've picked the kids up from school, got them fed and put them to bed. That sort of flexibility needs to be allowed and the only way we're going to be able to change that is basically one small step at a time. Organisations need to be willing to try something different and see how it works. Because if they're not willing to do that, then the change is not going to happen. And unfortunately I won't be able to help them either.

We're being helped today by Maggie Georgiopolis. She's the author of up the Ladder in a Skirt. The book is now available at Amazon and finer bookstores around the globe. We'll link to that book in the show notes. You can click below and see more of it. Plus her website is up the Ladder in a skirt dot com. You can also reach her on Twitter magsinspires. Her Twitter handle M A G S I N S P I R E S. You're listening to Speaking with TJ Walker. We appreciate you listening. If you are clicking into this from my website, my newsletter blog, welcome. Appreciate you but please take the time to actually subscribe. You can go to itunes and type in Speaking with TJ Walker. Click there in your podcast app and you can also what I'd really love for you to do, frankly is go to the App Store and download the Speaking with TJ Walker app. Then you'll have a little icon right on your cell phone every single show every day of the week, Monday through Friday plus a bonus on Saturday will come to you and you won't have to think about it. It'll be right there at your fingertips. Maggie, put your consultant's cap on for a moment. Imagine that I and this is for Harper people to imagine. Imagine I'm 25 year old woman. I've just graduated from an elite business school. I've just gotten my first job at a major Wall street firm. I'm in the training program. It's a heavily male environment. It is an environment. It is macho about. Oh, I got to the office at 6 o'. Clock, you were there at 6:15am so you were lazy and sleeping in. What is your advice to me as a woman if I tell you, look, I want to go as high as I can. I want to be the CEO of a major Wall street bank. What's your advice to me?

My advice is obviously, first of all, go for it. Then you need to set up your work life in a way that works for you. To help you do that, you need to look at what it is you want out of your life. If you want a family, then you need to be able to put program that into your climb and what it may affect. I also advise that they watch Pursuit of Happiness with Will Smith because he managed to, in that movie, which is apparently based on a true story, look after a young child as a single father with no income and get himself into a brokerage firm. And he did that not working the the same length of hours as the younger people. So there is actually male example of not working those long hours and running that macho type thing that says that just because you're not in there from 6 o' clock in the morning to 10 o' clock at night doesn't mean that you're not actually doing the work that's needed. And I think it's really important that you try to step outside of that showmanship, so to speak, or that whole cycle of aren't I wonderful and great? Because I spent 14 hours in the workplace of which, if I'm brutally honest, eight of them have been totally unproductive. But that shows how committed I am to coming into actually using your actual outcome of the work that you actually do. My advice is always focus on your job. Get the job done that you need to do. Highlight what you get done in the time that you're in there, not what time you're in there. And that advice goes for anyone, but in particular a woman who wants to basically get herself out there. Make sure you're making the right connections and you're speaking to the right people. Get yourself a mentor, get yourself a coach. Because the only way that you're actually going to work your way through is not by trying to join the macho club and tell them what they're doing, is by taking your own path, working through with people who have expertise and understand what they're doing and getting yourself there in the best way possible. Whilst achieving the best that you can in those roles, because that is ultimately what the organisations are looking for.

What's your advice to someone who says, look, I want to be successful, I want to have a meaningful impact, I want to make a lot of money? I'm not quite sure why, what the best vehicle is, whether it is with a large publicly traded company or not. Because you look at the last decade, the best selling book is not how to become Chairman of ge. The best selling business book has been the four Hour Work Week. We live in a culture where more and more people are bragging about how little they work, how they've got their laptop at the beach and do women, do you even advise women to try to compete in the heavily macho culture places that are all about 18 hour work days? Or is that stupid? Are you better off just starting your own business, being entrepreneurial and focusing on productivity? From day one, I always advise people.

To know themselves first. And the reason why I advise that is a good example. And this is why sometimes I feel it's a little bit hard, because here I am, all these years after effectively retiring, setting up my own business and running it, and telling people that they can work in a corporate world rather than stepping out and being entrepreneurs. But whether they choose to step out or whether they choose to stay within the corporate world, the first thing is you need to know yourself. Because until you actually know yourself, whatever path you're following may not be the right path because you may be following someone else's path, you may be trying to put together someone else's idea of success. And it's really hard to explain that to a 25 year old because as we know from when we were 25 year olds, we know everything and we don't need to be told stuff quite often. But honestly, if you start to understand what makes you tick, what you really enjoy when you're doing things, what you really don't enjoy, what you struggle to do, what aspects of your job you leave to the last minute and even longer, if you can get away with it, what aspects of your job you'll pick up and do right now, even though they don't need to be done for a month. If you start to understand those sort of things and understand how you as an individual work and like to work, you can start to figure out what is actually best for you.

You.

Because quite often, regardless of these books about the wonderful four hour work week, and I'd really like to meet these people and get the story about how many hours they had to put in before they got to their four hour work week. Regardless of those books, anything we do takes an effort to start with. Anything we do takes an effort to start with. Once we put that effort in and get things in the right place and are going down the right track, that that effort, it'll start to ease off and it will become something that's a lot simpler to do. Or we can come down to those time frames where we're working less and making more, so to speak. Trying to make a decision on what the best thing is for you to do without knowing who you are is ridiculous. It's like buying a pair of shoes or something without getting the correct shoe size. It's just not something you would do.

How do you advise or coach people when they are making the transition? Let's say they have a great 15 year run at corporations, have respect in their industry, have a real expertise, and it's frankly the perfect time for them to start their own consulting firm or their own niche boutique where they can work from home and be in control of their schedule. The single biggest problem I see with people who are trying to make that transition, this applies to men and women, is that when they worked for bigger corporations, the paycheck just came, but they didn't have to ask for it. If you want to be your own company and be your own boss and take time out to run errands or do things, you have to be able to to either look people in the face or over the phone and say, you have got to pay me this amount today or you don't get any work. I find that's the hardest thing for a lot of people who were successful in the corporate world. For me, it was easy because I was never that successful in the corporate world. And if I didn't want to starve to death, I had to get over that reluctance to ask people for money.

I must admit I can speak from personal experience on this one. Having been quite successful in the corporate world, I do struggle. I still struggle even now after all these years of having had a business. I struggle with this idea that I don't have a regular income and you don't initially. It is something that you need to be able to to reconcile the idea that I'm okay with the fact that I might bring in 5,001 month, 200 the next month, and 20,000 the next. Regardless of depending on how your business is running, you need to be able to be comfortable with that and be able to set your systems up in order to do that. Which is why when I'm talking to people about the idea of stepping out and setting up their own business, businesses, I do discuss things like that. You know, how prepared are you to potentially have no income for a period of time? Because some people are fortunate enough and they step straight out with these lovely contracts in place because they've literally stepped out with them from whatever business they were walking into. And then they'll hit a wall maybe one, maybe two, maybe even three years down the track where they suddenly realize they've got to go out and try and generate business from the themselves. And because they haven't had to do that, it becomes a struggle and it becomes this really hard thing to get over because suddenly it's like, oh dear, I've actually got to ask people to pay me to do stuff rather than it just happening.

I have found that there's almost an inverse proportionality to how successful someone is in the corporate world when they switch over to the entrepreneurial world. Because they just. I see that every day where news anchors who make millions of dollars a year, vastly more successful than I ever was as news anchors, news host, they retire, they quit, they lose their contract and they say, I'm quitting my job to start my own media training firm. And they do one training the first year, they never do another. I never have to compete with them because they never learned how to ask for money. That was the job of sort of the dirty, unkempt ad sales guys on the other end of the hall that they didn't have to associate with.

And this is why my argument always is that whilst I have no issues over people stepping into their own business, I'd be a hypocrite if I said that to starters, but I don't. It needs to be something that you're genuinely interested in. And if it is something you're genuinely interested in, you need to make an absolute, no kidding yourself, totally honest assessment of where your strengths lie and where your gaps are. If you are going to go out and you're going to start your own training company or own consultancy firm and you are not or never have had to go out and ask for the money, then you need to be setting up a partnership with somebody or have some sort of company come in and help you, or hire an individual, however you choose to do it, somebody who is able to do that. Because if you don't have that, then you're not making money. It's that simple.

It can be a big problem. And talking about the difference of the sexes Here, I remember 20 years ago, I was doing freelance PR work for New York City based PR firms, investor relations firms, doing some media training, but also just general PR work. And I remember one small firm in particular run by a man. The office was sort of dumpy. He smoked in the office, was a little rough around the edges, but he had no problem telling prospects, okay, you will pay me $10,000 a month. And that was, you know, back then, that was even now, that's not a bad monthly fee. You will pay the first month in advance, you will pay the last month in advance, you will pay one full month to offset expenses for, you know, mail, FedEx at the time, shipping, things like that. So he was very, very, he was sloppy in everything else he did. And the offices kind of looked trashy, but boy, oh boy, 30,000 came in before the first second of work was done. I also worked with a number of female owned, female run PR firms and they typically had beautiful offices, fantastic decor, there was no smoking in the office. They were polite, they were nice, they were doing creative, they were doing better work. And several of those firms just went out of business because they just didn't ask people for money. And money, no matter how much your clients love you, they're not going to send you money if you don't ask them or invoice them or bill them or get them committed to in the first place. So I saw a very stark difference there. Now I will say again, I'm going to get, some of you are going to say TJ's trying to be too politically correct and too left wing. Some of you might say. What I'm about to say is sort of reactionary right wing, that the men who charged a lot typically had children, ex wives, they were supporters of current wives who maybe didn't work, and they really, really had a lot of pressure on them. The women I know who shut down their PR firms had husbands who were very successful and made a lot of money. And while it wasn't my business to find out their whole family finances, it was obvious that there wasn't going to be anything that would really harm their lifestyle if they just shut their business down and didn't make any money. And I'm not saying that as an excuse for them being paid less, but at some level, if you don't have the motivation, it is, I think it's easier to not ask for money. Is that a fair assessment or am I just rationalizing sexism?

Well, to some level, you rationalize sexism only because I do know males and Females that have done both of those things. But it is a fair assessment. Quite often, if we don't have enough incentive to actually go out there and make that money come in, then it's not going to happen. And if you look at all of the success stories out there, whether they're big organisations, people with their small companies that are running along at that lower level that suits them fine, every single one of them is successful because the person behind it has had the motivation to bring the money in that keeps the business running. You need that. Why you need that, for want of a better description, your sense of obligation or sense of responsibility to someone other than yourself. Because quite often, if my responsibility within my business is just to myself, I tend to not push as hard. Whereas if I have a responsibility to my partner, because I don't like the idea that he might have to support me, if I don't make this work, or I have a responsibility to a family, or I even have a responsibility that I've set in place that may be my major wife for running my business to helping out community organisations, then I am going to work harder in order to bring that income in so that I meet that obligation. Whereas if I don't have that, where if it's something that, well, you know, I'll give this a go, and if it doesn't quite work well, then I've always got a money in the bank, the partner who has a job with a regular income, you know, mum or dad to pick it up for me. Whatever you your reasoning is, regardless of your gender, if that's what's sitting behind you, if you don't have any real incentive to go out there and bring that money in, then you're not going to do it. Some people will, just because they're those sort of people. Their incentive is purely and simply to prove that they can do it. But at the end of the day, they have an incentive.

Maggie, in our remaining time, could you share with our audience final tips you have? And they can be for men or women, but if there's any specific to women, all the better on how they can communicate more effectively. Whether it's giving a speech to the board of directors, whether it is speaking at an annual trade show convention in front of 10,000 people, or just speaking at that very first initial job interview.

The first tip I would give is be prepared. And it makes so much sense and it seems so basic and it seems so obvious, yet so many of us will roll up to a job interview or to give a presentation and think that we don't need to prepare for it because we know stuff. And that's often a big mistake because if we don't do the basic research and make sure we know about the company that we're interviewing for and what's going on in the interview process, process, if we don't actually make sure we know the people that we're presenting to and what they're specifically looking for, we're not necessarily going to communicate the right information across to them, which could end up being a major disaster for ourselves. They're the days when you walk out of the company with people going, well, you didn't bother to find out what this organisation was all about, so why should I give you a job?

Or nothing's worse than a job applicant saying, so what do you do here telling me about your company?

And it's a basic thing to do. I mean, even for this conversation with you, before I even sent the initial email, I checked out your YouTube channel, looked at your website, had a look at what you actually did, and that was because I wanted to make sure that I was sending something off to somebody that I felt I had a connection with and also I was connecting with the right person, so to speak.

Well, you're not the one who wrote that comment on YouTube channel saying, I am beady eyed, bald and fat, are you?

So you're safe.

I do get comments like that, as anyone does.

Yeah. And that's one of those unfortunate aspects of putting yourself in the public sphere. And you know, that goes with if you're going out to give speeches and stuff, if you're invited to give a keynote speech or run a training session for an organisation, you can't walk in there not having done some research on the organisation. You need to know who your audience is, you need to know what they're potentially looking for and you need to know a way that you can connect with your audience and you can't do that without preparing. So as obvious and simple as it seems, it seems to be the number one mistake we make. Regardless of whether it's a job interview, a speech we're giving, a board presentation or a training course. That seems to be the number one mistake people make.

Now, I wasn't going to go there, but I accidentally stumbled in it. The YouTube comment you mentioned, putting yourself out there. I'm of the school of thought that most people are horrible speakers and boring in the corporate world, men and women. So if you're a man or a woman, it's actually pretty easy to be seen as Great if you just do a few things. Well, but having said that, there are some differences when it comes to putting yourself out there in more public arenas, on TV, YouTube. I mean, I. Not as much now with the content that I do, but I used to do political commentary and this is a highly politicized, polarized world in the United States. So quite often any opinion I said, if it offended somebody in another camp, they wouldn't just say, you're wrong because of this fact, this fact, this fact. I would literally get death threats, death threats and nasty comments about sexuality. What they perceived as nasty comments about sexuality. Looks, my hair, my. And just nasty bile and as nasty as was for me. I know for a fact that any woman who's in at least the political commentary vein, it's a thousand times worse than the viciousness, the physical threats they receive just for stating an opinion. And is that, that's a double standard. But is that also a reason why some women don't want higher positions of leadership because the attacks are just so much nastier?

It could be. It really honestly could be. And all you've got to look at is the way we comment on women in the media. We look at what they're wearing, we check out whether or not their shoes match the dress they're wearing. Another example is if I was to walk on stage in a pair of slacks and a shirt with the brand up the ladder in a skirt, the number of comments that would come out about what I'm wearing would totally override anything I ever said. So suddenly, because I have a brand, if I don't match that brand, I'm open for flat. Just because I make a clothing choice one day that doesn't involve a dress or a skirt.

You'll like this or hate this, but share this anecdote with your clients who question sexism. Certainly I have clients who are criticized for what they wear, their hairstyle and politics. Hillary Clanton can't face a 2 mile an hour wind without there being 10 comments about her hair. I once as an experiment wore basically essentially the same jacket, tie and shirt every day for a year on YouTube and to see if anyone would notice because I have it right in my own home based studio and I can keep my shorts or swimsuit on. No one knows. But I wondered, well, you know, after a week, after two weeks, will somebody say, hey tj wear a different tie? At least it was a year before anyone noticed. And that was only one person and she didn't. I mean, it was someone I personally knew. She sent Me a personal email. No one wrote a comment on the YouTube channel of Gosh, TJ must be poor and unsuccessful. He's wearing the same thing.

Oh, that is amazing. I don't get away. If I wore the same thing two days in a row, I would receive a comment.

It would be scandalous.

Actually, we had a conversation about it in a presentation skills course I did not that long ago. And I actually raised the fact that these are things, unfortunately, that women in particular have to pay more attention to. And one of a couple of the people in the course actually admitted one of the first things they checked was whether or not my shoes went with my outfit. Yet I would never check that on a guy.

I would. And go, okay, I shouldn't even say this. One time I'm giving a. Conducting a media training and, you know, an image building presentation training class. I think I was working with one or two women. I looked down, I'm giving them advice. I look down and I realize my shoes don't match. I don't mean they don't match my slacks. I mean they don't match each other. I had somehow, you know, gotten dressed in a hurry. It was dark. I had two different shoes on. I thought, oh, this is humiliating. I hope they don't notice. Let me push my feet back. It couldn't get worse than this. Then I looked down and I'm like, oh, my God, I'm wearing two different colors of socks. I'm glad this is the end of the program. I really don't want to most people to hear this. And then this is really humiliating. I'm giving this person is paying me a lot of money to coach them on how to have a great image and look at me. And then I looked down. I had a coffee stain on my shirt, and I was able to sort of hide that with my tie and kept my feet under the chair. The client never noticed or was nice enough not to comment, and they paid in full. It is an unfair world. There's no doubt you've been more than fair with your time with us, Maggie. We really appreciate it. Again, the book is up the Ladder in a Skirt by Maggie Georgiopolis. Solidifying your leadership one bold step at a time. We'll link to the page where you can buy this on Amazon. You may also want to check out her website, which we've linked to up the ladderinaskirt.com and why don't you send a note to Maggie saying you enjoyed some of her insights and appreciate her being on the show. Just send her a note at twitter magsinspires. That's M A G S inspires.com Maggie thanks again for being our guest.

Thank you very much. I've really enjoyed myself today.

Thanks for listening to speaking with TJ Walker where the communication skills in practice practices of world class leaders are dissected.