Episode 155 – Arrive and Thrive: Impactful Leadership Practices

The podcast by project managers for project managers. How to flourish in your leadership role as your best self, inspire excellence in your team, and lead a highly fulfilled life.  “Arriving” is everything required to get into a position, but to stay successful, it is necessary to embrace the skills needed to “thrive” in that position. Listen in for useful advice on how to Arrive and Thrive and succeed in your leadership role. Table of Contents 01:47 … Arrive and Thrive - The Book04:15 … Who Should Read this Book?04:38 … Co-authors and Collaborations05:54 … Skills to Thrive08:36 … The Harsh Inner Critic11:29 … The Self-Centering Practice15:19 … Thriving and Combating Systemic Barriers19:53 … Lead with Our Best Self22:37 … Cultivating Courage25:16 … Instill Courage in Others27:18 … Becoming More Self-Aware29:34 … Reflective Sense-Making31:44 … Susan’s Lessons Learned33:56 … Get in Touch with Susan34:57 … Closing SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  ... we can’t control and change other people.  It’s annoying, but it’s true.  People don’t like to be controlled.  But we can make choices about how we show up.  So what we want to do is we want to narrow the gap between the time we are triggered and the time we react, enough to take pause between stimulus and response.  That’s it.  WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This.  This is the podcast by project managers for project managers. I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates.  BILL YATES:  Yes.  Our guest is Susan Mackenty Brady.  She is the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Chair for Women and Leadership at Simmons University, and the first Chief Executive Officer of the Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership.  As a relationship expert, leadership well-being coach, author and speaker, our guest Susan educates leaders and executives globally on fostering self-awareness for optimal leadership. WENDY GROUNDS:  The reason we’re talking to Susan today is she has sent us a book called “Arrive and Thrive:  7 Impactful Practices for Women Navigating Leadership,” which she has co-authored with Janet Foutty and Lynn Perry Wooten.  You know, women who arrive at the top should be able to thrive at the top.  There’s a lot of talk about how to get there.  But then once you get there, are you just surviving, or are you thriving in those positions as women in leadership?  And so we hope that this is going to be a really helpful book and a helpful conversation to women who are project managers and trying to figure out how to flourish in leadership roles today. BILL YATES: Yeah, I can attest.  There’s great value in this book, regardless of male or female. WENDY GROUNDS: Susan, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest. SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  Thank you for having me. Arrive and Thrive - The Book WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, we’re excited to talk about this book. To start off, won’t you tell us why you wrote this book? SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  You know, there’s two answers to that question.  You want both?  There’s first a real answer about how it came to be, which was because I am not an academic.  I have been in business and specifically in leadership development.  I’ve been a student and teacher of leadership since I can recall.  I’ve a Master’s in Behavioral Science and Leadership Education.  And I have to say, when I came to Simmons University and was awarded the endowed chair, it’s the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Chair for Women in Leadership, my first question is what does one do to be worthy of an endowed chair in an academic environment?  Because I actually didn’t know that non-PhDs were awarded chairs.  Apparently it’s more common than we know. But my answer was whatever you want it to be. So it was actually around a talking circle with two senior partners from Deloitte and the current President of the University, who awarded me the chair.  And we’re all C-level.  We’ve run organizations.  We’ve run business units, or we’ve arrived in leadership in many ways.  And the conversation was actually about the morning that we all had and how still hard it is to sort of have your own feelings, navigate conflict, keep it all together, manage the home front in the morning, come to work, da da da da da da.  I said, “There’s no forum for senior women to have this conversation, and it’s lonelier at the top.”  You know? And one thing led to another, and I thought, maybe we need to do the next-generation book.  So I’ve written extensively about advancing women and what organizations can do to help equity across all identities, advance in leadership.  My former book, “Mastering Your Inner Critic and 7 Hurdles to Advancement” was about sort of the invisible hurdles women struggle with to advance.  This one came to be with my co-authors Janet Foutty, and Lynn Perry Wooten. And the three of us pretty quickly unearthed these seven practices about thriving.  And so, I have to tell you guys, there’s been so much survival lately.  We survived the pandemic, unless of course we had loss.  Everybody’s fatigued.  It was so joyful to think about what is thriving and how can we help women in particular step in and thrive more, as opposed to just surviving? BILL YATES:  That’s good. SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  Long answer. Who Should Read this Book? BILL YATES:  No, that’s good.  So who should read this book? SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  This was a debate I had with my co-authors.  Look, the book’s title says “7 Practices for Women Navigating Leadership.”  There is nothing in this book that a man would read and not think, “Well, I could probably use that, too.”  So look... BILL YATES:  Yeah, very practical. SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  It’s written for women.  And I hope allies of all genders read it. BILL YATES:  Excellent, absolutely. Co-authors and Collaborations  WENDY GROUNDS:  Susan, tell us a bit about your collaboration on the book.  Who were your co-authors, and how did you team up to write this book? SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  Janet doesn’t like I say this, but collectively we’ve got 85 years of leadership experience, the three of us.  Janet Foutty is – so you know that Deloitte’s a partnership.  Janet Foutty is the executive chair.  She runs  the U.S. operation for Deloitte.  It’s a huge job.  And she has really made it in a very male-dominated industry and has a very unique point of view about business and about the kind of business that Deloitte is and how her leadership was impacted by that. Lynn Perry Wooten is a scholar and an academic.  She was at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan before she went to Cornell to lead there.  She is one of few African American women who preside at the top job at a University.  And she is well published.  So it was such an honor to partner with Janet and Lynn.  I learned a lot from the two of them, writing this book.  I played somewhat lead author.  They were collaborators, and they took lead on some of the practices because frankly it was more their expertise than mine.  It was a total collaboration in the end.  And a village of people helped us to create this. Skills to Thrive WENDY GROUNDS:  There’s a distinction between arriving, which is everything required to get into that position.  And then you need to stay successful once you’ve got your position.  You need to embrace what you call the “skills to thrive” in that situation.  So can you take this personal now and highlight one or two of your skills that have helped you thrive in your position? SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  Well, it didn’t come easy, but I suppose I’ve done a better job of listening.  My grandmother used to say, “God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason, Susan.”  For an extroverted expressive, I have to tell you, leadership can be tricky because we can miss nuance, right, and interpersonal nuance.  I would say I’ve had a focused intention on developing my own emotional intelligence and narrowing the gap between my intention and my impact, which I’m happy to dive into because leadership is a relationship.  It’s a social construct.  And so there’s all this room for subjectivity. What I find is a lot of smart, well-intended leaders get involved in whatever they’re doing because of technical interest in whatever their functional area is.  And they get annoyed with and/or struggle with the subjectivity of relationships, which is obviously mastering some of those skills as leadership.  So that’s the student and teacher in me.  I’ve been working on that stuff for a while.  That’s number one.  So that’s interpersonal between me and others. The other, I’d say the second thing that has helped me a great deal is my relationship with myself, which is how do I manage my thoughts and feelings such that I can come from a place of warm regard and respect, even if I disagree with you.  Not just for you, but also for me; right?  So I think we get triggered out of feeling good enough about ourselves, and we get triggered into feeling like other people are disappointing us.  All day, every day.  Like it is what it is to be human.  You should have seen me with my daughter this morning.  So learning the speed of the return to healthy warm regard or compassionate center, or your best, most grounded, centered, aligned self.  Doing that consciously and quickly will help you navigate all relationships in your life, not just work. So I’ve taken those two things on:  intrapersonal, understanding my thoughts and feelings and how they impact my actions; and interpersonal.  I’m a learner.  There’s no perfection at this, guys, because people are unique and different.  And so what works with an approach with one person you work with probably might not work with another person.  And so this is tricky business.  But I think that those two things have both aided me and been my – they’re my vocation, my interest. The Harsh Inner Critic BILL YATES:  Yeah, it’s like, and to your point,