Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Learn more about Tammy on her firm’s website: https://careerwinnerscircle.com. Her book, Escaping the Career Trap, is available on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3V3yNiB (paperback), https://amzn.to/4alEw7P (Kindle), or https://amzn.to/44U4cYb (audiobook).

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5)
• Jilly Truit murder mysteries by Beverley McLachlin:
  • Full Disclosure – https://amzn.to/46TxW6Q (paperback) https://amzn.to/46VDL3Q (audiobook)
  • Denial – https://amzn.to/46YCbhs (paperback) https://amzn.to/3GJc0AA (audiobook)
• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Tammy Alvarez is the CEO of the Career Winners Circle and is also an author, professional keynote speaker, inspirational coach, trainer, and epic storyteller. As an award-winning entrepreneur and former corporate executive, Tammy believes leaders who inspire courage are at the heart of every successful business. Her spirited “Break All the Rules” approach blends decades of C-Suite experience with a pragmatic, results-based coaching style that helps business professionals create a big impact and love every Monday again.

Her recent book Escaping The Career Trap, Transform Your Apathy into Ambition and Never Hate Mondays Again is a self-leadership blueprint for high achievers who want to experience true career fulfillment. Tammy has an unwavering commitment to advancing ambitious business leaders so they can grow their careers as far as their drive will take them. She is the creator of the Career Success Blueprint – the ultimate executive career strategy framework, Own Your Power! – a pragmatic approach to advancing women leaders, and the CEO Advantage – helping small business owners scale without killing themselves in the process.

During her twenty-year corporate career, Tammy became renowned as a business transformation and turnaround expert on Wall Street. Her roles included Managing Director at AIG, First Senior Vice President at Bank Leumi USA, Chief Operating Officer at Genesis10, and Senior Vice President at Bank of America. Tammy delivers epic keynote speeches for companies worldwide and has been a colloquium lecturer on various leadership topics at Cornell University. She holds a degree in International Business Administration from American Intercontinental University.

Tammy and her partner Steve have adopted an ex-pat lifestyle and enjoy traveling to farflung places around the globe to hike and scuba dive. They currently reside in Mexico City.

Transcript
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Unknown Speaker 0:00
Here’s a question for you, do you hate Mondays? If you’re not all that keen about starting a new work week, that’s a red flag. It’s a good signal your career isn’t on the track you wanted. But there’s hope. Our guest in this episode, Tammy Alvarez, reveals the steps you can take to set the course you want for your leadership career. Even how viewing your career like a business instead of a wish list can make a huge difference in where your path goes. Best of all, you can start these steps right now, well right after you listen to the podcast, so you know what those steps are one step. We recommend take our free leadership assessment that will establish a baseline for you. It’s ready for you online now at B, i, t, dot, l, y, slash, assess leader. That’s bit.ly/as

Unknown Speaker 0:56
one word, assess leader.

Unknown Speaker 1:02
You

Unknown Speaker 1:05
This is innovating leadership co creating our future. I’m your host. Maureen Metcalf, the founder and CEO of the innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready today. Tammy Alvarez, CEO of the career winners circle, is helping us on that mission. She’ll share her new book, escaping the career trap, transforming your apathy into ambition and never hate Mondays again. We’re also going to talk about her latest conference, disrupted the future of work Summit. So Tammy, welcome, thanks. Maureen, it’s great to be here again. Let’s jump into the summit, since that just ended on Friday, and for people who weren’t able to attend, we’re not telling you something that you can never hear again. Tammy will be making this available online for the next year. So what are some of your big takeaways from the summit? It was an amazing four days, and it was the first time we had done a summit. We had brought 24 epic speakers together. We had four tracks. The first track was about career strategy and career success and fulfillment. The second track, Maury, which you know because you were one of our guest speakers, was all about leadership and preparing to lead for the future. Our third track was all about business growth, whether you’re an entrepreneur or leading a large firm, how do you continue to grow in the headwinds that we’ve got with all the uncertainty? Right? So that was day three, and day four, which was surprising to me, because you know me, I’m not a kittens and bunnies kind of girl, but Day Four was mindset that had to have been one of the most epic days, we have to realize that we’re the only engine that drives our business, our careers, our lives, and if that engine isn’t in top performance, then everything else suffers. And so the conversations that we had, the keynote and all of the speakers that wrapped up day four were just fantastic in terms of really being able to combat all of the things that are coming at us every single day and stay in that optimal mindset. And the reason we put this summit together is because we really wanted to give people a road map on the future of work, all of these multi dimensional options that we brought together really had some fantastic speakers, some interesting thought leadership. Some of the biggest takeaways were from a career perspective, really understanding how you can take control when you feel you have none, especially in this economy where reductions and downsizing and layoffs are happening everywhere. From the leadership perspective, Maureen, you brought one of the more interesting points of view. And I’m not saying that just because we’re here, I have recorded you, but the concept of you’re not going to lose your job to AI, you’re going to lose your job to people who know AI. And I think that was very, very interesting. And then when we had the business growth piece, there was some great conversations around money mindset and around how to leverage video and other things like that to help grow your business and your presence on LinkedIn. And then mindset was really about how to keep that harmony. You know, we don’t really talk work life balance, because I don’t think that’s a thing, but we do have work life harmony, where things do work patiently together. We’re going to keep this available and run this on a consistent basis. It was a blend last week of live and on demand events, or, you know, speeches. So you could look at that however you wanted to, but everything is ready for you now. So we start every day with an epic keynote. You’ve got five amazing speakers that you can listen to their talks. And then we also had a round table that brought these speakers together at the end of each day to really bring it home and have some nice collaborative conversations and some insights. So all of it is absolutely binge worthy, and we’ll give you the show notes, so that way you’ve got that link and anybody can attend. I’m curious on the mindsets as you talk about that, because I also talk about both skill sets and mindsets, right? And same as you, I don’t do rainbows and unicorns. It’s not.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Magical thinking, it’s managing thinking. Yes, what are some of the mindsets that really struck you as crucial for leaders who are in transition resilience, and how to achieve that through an experimental mindset and getting comfortable with your relationship with failure. A lot of us fear failure and that we don’t see it as the other side of success. And you and I have had this conversation before, in that, you know, you have to fail to succeed, so if you avoid failure, you prevent success. And that continued to come through. I think some of the other things that came through were really shutting out all of the noise, right? We’ve got so much noise right now. You know, the pace of change has never been greater, and it will continue to sustain it at that rate, if not more. But then also, we’re in an election year, and we’ve got so much geopolitical instability, and we’ve got all this other stuff that’s going on, if you really don’t isolate yourself from this to some extent, not to be ignorant, but just to be protected, it’s very hard not to let all this fear mongering and negativity sink in. And so I think those were some of the bigger pieces. Was, how do you create a bubble, a well informed bubble, right? So you have that resilience, and you’re able to continue to move yourself and your organization forward. I love that. And most of the successful leaders I know struggle with the balance between staying well informed and not getting sucked into the drama, yeah, particularly because we can’t control most of it, or any of it, for that matter, right? And so for me, I like to read by news. I pick my sources and I read, and that’s it that way. It’s on my time. It’s areas I know, love and trust that works for me, in terms of really not sinking into just watching the same cycle every single day while I’m driving, I listen to serious radio on Ice Station hop. So if there’s something I don’t want to listen to, I bounce to the next one. It’s a range of voices. So it’s also not a single perspective reinforcing itself. Yes, because it’s basic, getting any level of balanced news is impossible, no matter where you sit, in terms of your you know, your beliefs. So to listen to all of it a little bit, it’s probably not a bad idea. I know you’re coming from Mexico City. I’m in the US, but I’m an avid listener of BBC. Yeah. I want something that is not US centric. So we do the same thing, Guardian, BBC, you know, the States, Canada, all over Europe, Asia, like, listen to all of it, or read all of it. Actually, we didn’t get into that type of conversation during the summit. But the concept of really just being incredibly intentional in how you take in information, being able to decide, you know, is this going to benefit me, or is this just going to stress me out more than I already am making those decisions I think are really important, especially now, from a mindset perspective, the World Economic Forum came out with their annual risk report beginning of 2024 they launched it at Davos, the biggest short term risk was mis and disinformation because of the election cycles with over half of the global population in the next two years. So it is also crucial for us, especially as leaders, to ensure that we are looking for valid sources, trusted sources, not Facebook and Twitter, right for actual news, yeah, because Mexico is in a presidential election year as well. So our election is on June 2, and we are guaranteed to have a female president. That’s really exciting. Yeah, that’s very, very interesting. I’m just learning about politics in Mexico and just the different parties. And, you know, it was really fun to kind of talk and understand in my broken Spanish, more English and Spanish still, but just to kind of understand how it works here, the political systems and things like that. It’s an interesting time for the world, given the amount of countries that are in national election cycle. And so we’ll see what happens. Right? It’s going to be an interesting year, as you talk about the future of work and disrupted at a minimum, it creates uncertainty. The level of uncertainty supports the idea of resilience well and absolutely. And I think as business leaders, you know, we have to realize our teams are going through this same thing. We tend to forget that everyone else is going through it too. And so realizing that, you know, our teams are in the same news cycles and with the same distractions and with the same concerns, and at the same time, our teams don’t look at us as human necessarily, as leaders, right? So we’re supposed to be impervious to all this stuff and continue to lead all of that is interesting. And Steven Morris, who did the leadership keynote, had a really interesting analogy on leadership that I told was gonna steal like for the rest of my life, because it was just such a big breakthrough moment for me in terms of thinking about leadership in a different way. And we always talk about leading from the front. And Steve was talking about an analogy of the leader of a wolf pack, and that leader of a wolf pack does not leave.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
In the front, what that leader does is they circle the pack constantly, and they are trying to prevent threats. They’re making sure that no wolf is left behind, and they can be a quarter of a mile circumference. So that’s a lot of work. That’s how we need to be thinking as leaders, right in terms of surrounding our teams, making sure everyone’s still with us, and looking, you know, for external threats or opportunities. And that was such a really interesting way to think about leadership in terms of an analogy, that that was another big moment that came up. And I think it plays particularly well we talk about resilience, and how to make sure that our teams are able to have that same resilience that we want for ourselves, and to help them get there if they don’t. You know, it’s interesting, because we have the lead from the front. We’ve got the lead from behind, folks. And I like the idea that there are times that it is my role to absolutely lead from the front. Things don’t get done if I’m not setting the course. There are times that I should get out of the way and let my team take action. And there is also, to your point, making sure that when people are empowered and have autonomy, that they’re not wandering off out of safe space, and making sure others also don’t encroach inappropriately on our team, Sure absolutely. You know, I want to bring up one other topic, and you touched on it before we shift to your book, and that is the idea that leaders are often in uncharted territory. We talk about it as the mind of the scientist, and different people talk about it different ways. That when I’ve worked with clients who are researchers? They don’t look at an experiment that didn’t go as planned as failure. They look at it as learning. That’s right, if I am inaccurate, the quicker I disprove my hypothesis, the quicker I’m moving on to the next solution. I love seeing people shift from I have to have a plan, and I have to have it all thought out to what’s our experiment, because it accelerates their progress, and it removes that thing that, especially we as successful adults, have about we don’t want to be wrong. Too many organizations allow this culture to persist, and it’s going to kill them, and that’s this gotcha mentality. It’s the mentality that someone has to lose for you to win. It’s that inability to create a fail safe environment, where, from the top down, it is okay to experiment. I’ve always said that I’ve learned more from my failures than from my successes, but that came with a price right, that came with the political people who do nothing and sit on the sidelines and say, I told you this wasn’t going to work, right? It came from leaders who were very unsure about how to navigate the outcomes and the impact of things when they didn’t go properly. And so I think it’s an entire culture, corporate culture issue to create this environment, because you can have it in pockets, and those are the pockets that are going to be significantly more successful than leaders who don’t know how to manage this way. But at the end of the day, it’s a systemic issue, and if we can’t, as leaders and as top leaders within the organization, create this environment where you have an equal amount of accountability and empowerment to go along with it, right? Because I’ve yet to find many organizations that are really good at the accountability piece, right? Empowerment? Yes, accountability, that gets a little more difficult, and so it’s a complex problem to solve for. But if we can do that one leader at a time, if we can start with the top leaders to create that fail safe environment, to show vulnerability when they make mistakes. How many times have you ever heard an executive and a town hall saying I screwed up like we don’t hear that? We all know it. We’re not fooling anyone. They’re human. And let’s face it, the landscape is changing so rapidly that amazing decisions that are made in the moment could quickly go to the worst decision ever based on external conditions that you could never have anticipated or controlled. And so that’s my riff on this, right in terms of it’s great from a conceptual perspective. And you know, we see pockets of leadership doing that, but we’re hard pressed to find organizations that can do that in a holistic way that’s healthy and profitable, right? Because, at the end of the day, you don’t want mistakes to cost you too much money. That’s where I like the language again, of experimentation. Good scientists have not killed themselves in their labs, right? They’ve not blown themselves up. They’re not dead. Their equipment still persists. So we do controlled experiments and then we roll things out. And I love your point of there are cultures and systems. So our culture has to promote fail safe, and our performance management systems, our accountability systems, all of that structure around what we reward and what we punish and what we encourage and what we discourage has to also align with this idea and then the Wolf Pack.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Idea leaders need to lead from the top and say, This is what I want. This is what I expect. And here’s an example of where I succeeded, where I failed. Here are the experiments we’re running, and then ensure that again, the guardrails are appropriate and are being adjusted when conditions change. One thing that always worked well for me, because my background was a transformational expert. I was always working in the unknown, and whenever something was blowing up, my teams and I were running in I was an adrenaline junkie. So that served me really well, anticipating what could go wrong, and letting everyone know ahead of time. That’s important. And we, you know good businesses know how to risk manage, right? And they know how to do their FMEAs, other Fishbone diagrams, and all these other things to manage risk appropriately. But what too few leaders do is they don’t create a bailout plan ahead of time. So it’s like if everything goes to crap

Unknown Speaker 15:56
and all of our assumptions, you know, are wrong in the worst possible way. Here is what we’re going to do to put an end to this. Because I remember, especially sitting in big companies, you would see these projects go on for years that everyone knew was dead on arrival. No one had the courage. It’s not the word I want to use to say we’re done here. We’re not going to do this anymore, because there’s so much political face that you lose by doing that, whereas if you reward that, saying, Stop wasting the company’s money, time, resources and efforts, and when things change, let’s call it, let’s call it quickly. That’s a quick way, an easy way to reward and incent the right mindset and the right behaviors and outcomes for an organization. So I found that that worked very, very well. When I pre published, we are going to stop this and say this was a bad idea. If this happens as we don’t want to go for two years, it’s check ins every quarter. How are we doing? What’s changing? What did we expect? What surprised us? And then adjust and continue to move. The thing that surprises me most about what I’m seeing in leadership culture is that we’ve adopted an agile methodology for software development, and we are all in right? No one just builds something behind a closed door and comes out a year later and says, This is great, but we’ve not adopted that level of agility in our management routines and in our business structure and how we think about initiatives. And I think that’s something that we all could use a lot more of in terms of how we manage just our Bau as well as the new initiatives and innovation that we’re trying to all create to stay viable. We wrote an article, probably now, a decade ago, on creating agile businesses. So not just agile software. So there is the software development methodology, there is the culture, there are the systems, and there is the leader mindset. And what we heard often was, it’s just too complicated. Can’t you simplify it? Not simple? Yes, exactly. It’s like sometimes you can’t, you know, but think about if people had listened 10 years ago, because now you don’t have a choice. You adapt to this or you die. Like there’s no middle and so as leaders, we no longer have the luxury of deciding if we’re going to operate from a fixed mindset or from an agile mindset. People have been practicing 10 years ago when you told them to then those are the ones that are probably in much better shape today than ones that realize, okay, now my back is against wool, and like most things, we don’t change until it hurts. It’s like, I know I should do this, but it doesn’t hurt, so I’m gonna wait, and now we’re in that it hurts time. The other thing we added in, actually, was lean methodology. So there are times you’re gonna quote agilize something, you can experiment and you can change. And then there are things like SEC regulations, and you really don’t get to be experimental with them. No, I think I’m going to interpret the regulations differently this week than I did last week. So part of what we did in this paper was explore the difference between Agile and Lean, because not everything should be agile. Yes, and many things you should just do without making a big deal out of it. We don’t need a whole committee to get something done that should take five minutes. I think we need to empower people to think and make decisions. They’re the ones closest to the business. Let’s just, you know, trust them to get it done and give them the tools to be successful. But yeah, we can geek out on this all day, right? Maureen, yes, we can.

Unknown Speaker 19:13
You talked about your prior life, so where did you come from? That’s a good question. A lot of people asked me that when I was a corporate like, Where’d you come from? How’d you get here? So I spent 20 plus years of my corporate career in and around Wall Street, and the last 15 years I was a C level executive for some of the biggest Wall Street firms, and my role was primarily Chief Operating Officer, Chief of Staff, type roles for major multinational divisions. The reason the book is different and better, in my opinion, than a lot of them out there, personally speaking, is because my perspectives are untraditional. I came through the ranks in a very different way. Actually, for most of my career, it was my biggest, darkest secret, and I didn’t want anyone to know about it, because I had to look at Aflac.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Everyone else. When I was younger, my parents divorced. That wasn’t new news. Everything was fine. We were upper middle class family. Long story short, when my dad left about a month later, we ended up homeless, and so my mother was ill, equipped to handle this. She was got pregnant with me in high school. We had no money. My dad hadn’t paid the mortgage, and I don’t know how long, so the house was on foreclosure. We had to pick taxes in 10 years, so the IRS was at her front door. She didn’t even have a high school degree at that point, so it was not fun. I was 15, seeing my mom go through that and watching her struggle. It was a very strong inflection point for me. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I created this hyper sense of ambition, like I will never let this happen to me. And so I didn’t go to college right out of high school. I had no money, I had no ambition, and my grades sucked, so that wasn’t going to work. So I started just working right out of high school, and I kept getting promoted about every year and a half or so, kept getting new opportunities. I had the amazing fortune of having some tremendous mentors who saw things in me that I did not see. I was this 18 year old copy little girl from a country town in New Jersey that thought she could take on the world, and I did, in many cases, and I made a lot of mistakes. I didn’t get my degree until I was 40. So that’s just, you know, quick story on that. But so as I was coming through as a managing director at 35 leading hundreds, if not 1000s of people without this college degree. And I was a small country girl. Never traveled. I was just I didn’t belong on Wall Street. I didn’t think, first of all, as a female. Second, I was usually the youngest person on the leadership table. And my background was so different from everyone else’s, it was something I always tried to hide. It was something I always tried to protect in terms of that knowledge. Obviously, we never lied to HR, you know, and the executive sponsor had to fight like hell to get me in, because back in those days, you needed a degree. Today is a different story based on the sentiment of where things are going. But I’ll never forget the one moment where I was leading a major transformation effort, right during the financial crisis, and I needed something done in the EU and I had to talk to this executive who was a big shot, and we were in his office, and I’ll never forget, I mean, we were screaming, it was a cage match, because that’s how people communicated. It’s just like an Italian family at dinner, right? Everybody loud talks, and that’s just kind of how it goes. So we had this massive cage match, and I was terrified, but I, you know, shoulders back, I was strong all these things. Well, the phone rang, and so his admin puts it through, and I know he did this as a power play, but he put it on speaker, and as soon as I heard the voice on the other end of the phone, my jaw dropped. It was John McCain. He had just finished his debate the night before with Barack Obama the first one, and the conversation, I am absolutely paraphrasing here, basically when something like, Hey dude, how’d I do last night?

Unknown Speaker 22:48
Like, are you kidding me? Like, I don’t belong here. And so I sat there and I listened to 20 minutes of him getting feedback on the debate, and then he hung up the manager, and I continued to argue. Obviously, I lost and I ran into my boss’s office, out of my mind, close the door, pacing like a lunatic. Of course, there’s glass walls, so I’m sure it looked like I was about right below my top and you know, I’m like, I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t belong here. Like I was just out of my mind, and she’s laughing at me when I started to cool down. She’s like, you done? Like, yeah, she was okay. You were here because you’re not part of the problem. You are here because you’re different. You are here because you’re not afraid to ask the hard questions and hold people accountable to get the solution. You’re here because you don’t fit. And had I known that earlier, had I not spent so many decades trying to hide the fact that I was different and that I came through the ranks differently, then I think it would have been a lot easier for me in terms of emotional I think I had the imposter syndrome before it even had a name, but that was such a profound moment in terms of knowing my space. And so that’s primarily why I wrote this book, is because I see so many people who have come through the ranks who do what they’re supposed to, who do everything the way they’re supposed to do. And then they look around, they’re like, is this it? Why am I here? Then they feel stuck, and there’s such amazing talent that’s sitting on the sidelines. And I wrote this book to give those people a path forward, to give those people who have played by the rules their whole lives, who have done all the things they’re supposed to do, went to all the colleges, did all the things, took all the jobs, and hate Mondays. And so this book is written for anyone who hates Mondays. So it should be a billion copy seller by the end of the year, in terms of the disenfranchised worker these days. But because of that background, the perspective of the book is different. The objective of the book is different.

Unknown Speaker 24:39
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Unknown Speaker 25:39
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Unknown Speaker 25:54
and I’m really proud of how it turned out. The people I want to speak to at this moment are people who are also able to disrupt and navigate uncertainty. People who do what you did step into places that they feel like they don’t belong, and take charge and move things forward, especially when there is no roadmap. So let’s talk from that lens about how your book helps people make sense of the world. Again, I think there’s two big themes in the book that resonate and relate to the audience that you’re talking about. One of them should be dead simple, and that is treating your career like a business. We have all the things that we do to run our business. We have strategy and vision we execute. We’ve got a great sales team and marketing teams, and we measure and we adjust, and we do all these things without even thinking about it right in terms of running our business. But we don’t apply those same principles to how we manage our career. And if we start to do that, because those skills are already there, they’re in your DNA. If you start to look at yourself as the CEO of you incorporated, and that your business is your career, and you start to make decisions the same way you make decisions in the office for the company who pays you. It’s a completely different way to think about things, and very few people actually do so I think that’s one thing, especially for leaders who you know are used to all these things, like you have strategy. Let’s do that. One good example is, you know, I think about strategy and vision and execution. It’s like, you think about it. It’s like, if you decide you want to take a five hour road trip, so you decide to go to the beach or the mountains or whatever, that’s your vision. And then you decide, okay, how am I going to get there? Am I going to take the fastest route? Am I going to avoid toll roads? Are there some points of interest I want to see along the way? And then you set your navigation system, and that’s your strategy. Then you load the car, and you go, and that’s your execution. But what happens when you’re on this five hour road trip? Something’s going to happen. Your nav is going to say, Hang on a second, there’s construction, there’s an accident, something is happening ahead that’s going to slow you down. What would you like to do? And in two seconds, without even thinking about it, we hit the button and we’re on a different way. Yet with our careers, we turn around and go home. It’s like, why are we doing this? Right? We don’t just say, Oh, hang on a second. I’m not going to get there the way I thought, or maybe when I thought, but I am going to get there. The more we can kind of use that car trip analogy in running our careers like a business, then that resilience will help be there. The other fundamental shift that will help leaders who have been sidelined, who don’t love Mondays and who want to make that impact, because typically, what we’re finding is that leaders who are disenfranchised, it’s not about the title, the money or being sidelined, to some extent. What it’s about is the impact they’re no longer able to make the impact on the organization and to their teams that they used to be and they don’t know how to get that back. The way you get this back is by shifting your mindset, even as senior leaders, from being paid for what you do to being paid for what you know. Because when you can bring your knowledge, your skills, your experience, to an organization that does not organically have it. It’s magic. There’s a great example that I use. I’ve done it myself five times. Several of my clients do this as well. That’s how they can pivot to something they’ve never done before and make, on average, 20% more. And they’re high earners, so there’s gold in them. They’re ills, that’s for sure, if you know how to do this right. Good example is one of my clients was career financial services. And in financial services, you fire 20% of your people every year. You just do, you hire about 5% back by the time you’re back. But this cycle happens, and despite the reductions in force, you still have to have motivated teams. You have to be innovative, you have to get work done, and you have to do all the things. And when you spend your career there, it becomes autopilot. Financial Services is no longer fun, so you wanted to do something that was fun, and so you looked into an opportunity with a startup that had gone into hyper growth mode. This startup had been the land of milk and honey. Anytime there was a problem, it was here’s more money with the VC investors.

Unknown Speaker 30:00
You know, here’s more people, here’s more tools, here’s more toys. No one ever told them no, the CEO and three levels down, started the phone, started the company, and continued to grow with it. So now fast forward, they went public, their sector went to crap, and their competition got their act together. They were losing money hand over fist, and everyone was out of their mind. But despite their best efforts, that leadership team was ill equipped to do more with less. No one knew how they’re smart, ideally educated, dedicated to the cause. They had all the things except the experience. So my client goes over there now the things that are so natural to him, are like awe inspiring moments to everyone around them, because they don’t have that organic experience when he added not just doing that for his group, but took a service mindset and showed everyone else how to do it too. Then he became a rock star. So these are the moments that are out there every single day for leaders to take, because during times of chaos, there is always opportunity. And if you can find your sweet spot and know where that is in high demand and in short supply, that’s how you make that shift from being paid for what you do to being paid for what you know. I love the idea of finding the opportunity in chaos, because most of us are seeing chaos. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, rather than picking that even in the worst of times. This is my superpower. What is it and who needs this thing? Yes, and you don’t even have to leave the company to do it like that example, one of the things I would always do, it does require a bit of bravery, just saying. But I would always take on during times of chaos. I would always take on what I called the third rail projects. Now I’m a New Yorker, and in the subway system, the third rail, if you touch it, you die. So if you you know those projects not the doormat ones that no one wants or cares about, but the ones that are systemic to the organization, that have been a sense of pain for so long, and it requires multiple divisions, and it’s hard and it’s global. I would take those because no one would have the courage to do it. And the best known secret is that you don’t even have to succeed to win, because if no one touches it, all you have to do is get, like, 80% of the way there, and you’re done. And because you have to collaborate, because it’s complicated, and because you get some great minds around it, my leadership style was I was never the smartest one in the room. See our earlier story on why I felt that way. So you’re leveraging the brilliance of everyone who are not used to being heard, let alone deferred to, and you’re bringing these amazing things forward that are directly in alignment with the company’s priorities. And so you don’t have to change jobs to do this. If you look around, I guarantee you will see these opportunities everywhere. I love that. I’m just thinking of my clients. Every one of them has big projects that have gone undone. Walking around, everyone can say, we need that thing. Those things are brilliant opportunities for different people in the organization to gain skills, to gain credibility, to gain visibility. And I love the idea that you don’t have to succeed. You have to move the needle. And you’re not following someone who did it brilliantly before you, you’re following nothing. So again, it’s not a rookie move. You’ve got to really have a strong sense of collaborative leadership style and a voice that the organization already listens to, you know, to some extent, but what that allows you to do as an individual person is get back to making that impact that lights you up every day. Get back to doing something that matters so you don’t have to change jobs, especially in this economy, right? It’s a bit risky to do that, if not difficult, but there are opportunities everywhere, and so instead of heading under your desk hoping you don’t get fired, how about you step out and just do something brave and fun slash terrifying at the same time, tell us how the book is structured and why this is different than every other book with a similar title. Fair enough, right? Well, first of all, mine has handcuffs on it, and it’s not a mystery novel, so that’s kind of fun, but really, the book is structured in a very conversational tone. It’s as if I was sitting there talking to you, and a good reason for that. And Maureen, you’ve written so many books, which you know, I’m completely and all over. I’m not a writer. I don’t pretend to be. I’m a great editor, but I have all these ideas and I have this experience and this perspectives that it needs to get out in written form, and so in many cases, I just ripped into a microphone and then kind of took it from there in terms of our ideas. And the book is based on my corporate experience, that the issue is, I’ve been in the boardroom, I’ve been behind closed doors. I know how decisions are made, and I tell you all of it in this book. So when you’re looking at them and wondering why they aren’t connected and what they are thinking. I tell you, and I tell you what to do and how to show up differently based on that insider knowledge. So it’s conversational, easy read, but it’s also broken down into four steps. The first is to really focus on aligning when you think about what you’re doing.

Unknown Speaker 35:00
Doing, and how you focus, and all of those things. The most important thing we don’t do is align to who we are as ourselves. And then we wonder why it’s not a good fit, right? So, but when you put yourself first, then everything else kind of comes in, right? So we break that down into and this is important for people who are leading organizations and people who are navigating them. That’s interesting. So I do keynote speeches on this book as well. And what I think is really interesting is that the companies that I talk about that are so dysfunctional are also hiring me to speak

Unknown Speaker 35:30
because they want their people to have this perspective. You too many times people put their hands up and say that it’s a company’s job and it’s not right, and I lied. The first part is reveal, right? So that reveal piece is all about the dysfunction. It’s about, you know, how we’ve never layered more tech into the hiring and people management process, and it’s the only thing I can think of in my career where we’ve added more tech to the extent that is insane. That’s only gotten worse, right? The hiring, the people management, all that stuff is a hot mess. We talk about that and how to navigate in our current environments. It’s not going to change. You know, you’ve got a few companies that are, you know, doing things differently, but generally speaking, this is what we got. So let’s figure out how to succeed. Then the second part of the book is a line, and that is where you prioritize your vision. That is where you learn how to play to your strengths, instead of going through all the toxic self improvement stuff about not good enough, not enough, that kind of stuff. Then we focus on disrupting. You know, I’m a rule breaker, so how do we break all the rules yet not get fired? How do we do that to really step into our own best self, and then last but not least, it’s thriving. And then, how do you become that CEO of your career? How do you pave the way forward for others. How do you make an environment where it’s not just about equality, it’s about equity of opportunity? And so those are the four steps of the book, and each chapter gives you three things and gives you my perspective. You know the inside track, I share a story, either mine or we’ve got 30 other contributors. And so Maureen, you shared your story in this book as well. But then I also have brain candy, and then brain candy is your opportunity to reflect on what you just learned and what you just heard. So I give you things to think about, right? We have the ABCs of you know, of transformation. So you’re going to assess, you’re going to baseline, and then you’re going to figure out what’s your next step, and how are you really going to thrive? At the end of each section really gives you that opportunity to internalize all the things. So I take you on this journey so it’s not just a read a book. Oh, that felt good, and then move on, right? It’s read the book and make the small steps today that are going to lead to massive transformation into your career, your whole life, fulfillment tomorrow, and that’s how you get back to loving Mondays again. Tammy, thank you so much. I really appreciate your insights. Where would listeners find your book? Find more about your keynotes. The best place to go is escaping the career trap.com

Unknown Speaker 37:50
From there, you’re going to be able to access the book. We’ve got everything you could want. You get a sign, hard cover with all kinds of special goodies directly from my website, and then you can hit Amazon for the soft cover, the ebook and the audio book. So that’s all out there and ready to go. And then also, you’ll see everything about my speaking opportunity as well, whether it’s a keynote workshop, anything that we need in between, I am here and available to really help edutain The groups that you need to make sure that you’re helping move through our times of chaos right now. And then the last thing is the conference. How would people learn about the conference disrupted? You’ll get that through the career winners circle website, right, which is our coaching business website. I don’t have that URL at the top of my head. That will definitely be in your show notes, and so that’ll be available and open for registration all year long. Beautiful. Thank you, Tammy, for sharing your wisdom, for helping leaders who are so committed to making an impact and doing good work in their life find a path forward to continue during times that are pretty uncertain. Thank you. This is such a great conversation again, and like I said, you know you and I can go for days on this stuff, right? So thank you so much for the opportunity to share the information about the book and the summit and speaking engagements and all that stuff. I really appreciate the opportunity until next time. Yes, thanks.

Unknown Speaker 39:18
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Unknown Speaker 39:49
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Unknown Speaker 40:00
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Unknown Speaker 40:18
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