In fast-changing markets, outdated leadership styles can hold businesses back. In this conversation, Brooke Struck joins Sarah Bundy to unpack why collective leadership—inviting diverse teams into strategic decision-making—is crucial for growth today. Brooke shares practical strategies for leaders looking to shift mindsets, tap into the full value of their teams, and create organizations that learn, adapt, and thrive.
Why listen:
- Learn why traditional strategy cycles no longer fit today’s business realities
- Discover how collective leadership builds faster, smarter organizations
- Understand tactical empathy and how it helps breakthrough systemic barriers
- Get practical advice for leaders and high-performing women navigating organizational change
The real challenge isn’t execution—it’s picking the right problems. |
“The difference between going from a 95 to a 97 on execution isn’t going to move the needle. It’s that we’re executing the wrong projects to begin with.” |
Why traditional strategy cycles fail today. |
“The impetus to do strategy because the old one is about to expire is not helpful. You can go through an entire strategy process and never actually do any strategy whatsoever.” |
The mindset shift leaders need to make. |
“Ditch the idea that you know what’s going on and get curious. If someone says something that sounds that off to you—and they’re reasonable—there’s something you haven’t understood yet.” |
How collective leadership creates strategic advantage. |
“We need everyone inside the organization to have a level of fluency with the strategy much higher than we did a generation ago. The market moves too fast now for a few people at the top to do it alone.” |
Tactical empathy for high-performing women navigating leadership barriers. |
“When we recognize that people’s feelings are a major inhibitor of decision-making, we can be tactical about helping them get to yes—without losing sight of our goals.” |
Strategy is about the habit of readiness, not static plans. |
“Plans may be useless, but planning is invaluable. It’s not about guessing right—it’s about building the habits to interpret, choose, and act better when reality surprises you.” |
Sarah Bundy
Hey, everybody, and welcome to the For Female Founders podcast series where we’re helping women in business learn to thrive, not just survive. I am your host, Sarah Bundy, and today my guest is Brooke Struck. He’s the founder and CEO of Converge, where he helps client leadership teams to align around their biggest challenges and the differentiated advantages that they’re going to use to solve them. His facilitation style focuses on asking great questions, providing the foundation to make great business decisions, and creating an atmosphere for everyone to participate meaningfully in those conversations. He teaches brands and executive leadership teams about the value and opportunity that is diversification in the workforce, especially within leadership teams, and especially inclusive of women, to drive more strategic and sustainable growth for businesses around the world.
Brooke, welcome to the show.
Brooke Struck
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
Sarah Bundy
It’s a pleasure. Today I’m excited because we’re going to be talking about collective leadership and how inviting teams into big decisions drive strategic growth.
So, Brooke, please tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into this, because I think you coined this idea of collective leadership. It’s fascinating you have a PhD that sort of led you to this. So please tell us a little bit more about you.
Brooke Struck
Yeah, for sure. So my PhD is in Philosophy and specifically the philosophy of science. So for a long time I spent spent my days thinking about methodologies and about what kinds of questions there are out there and different ways of answering them. During my PhD, I decided I didn’t want to continue in academia. Lots of kind of cultural reasons for that. The academic world just wasn’t a good fit for me.
And so after that, I got into innovation policy and then, you know, worked in the public sector for a little while and then got into private sector consulting. And something that I’ve seen over and over again in my career is there’s so much emphasis on executing projects well. They’ve got to be done on time, they’ve got to be done on budget, to, like, high degree of quality, all these kinds of things.
And yet, in spite of impeccable execution inside client teams from external vendors, these kinds of things, projects just way too often fail to deliver the impact that people are actually hoping for. And the reason for that is not that they weren’t executed well enough. Like, the difference between going from A, you know, 95 to a 97 on execution is not actually going to move the needle that much. It’s that actually we’re executing the wrong projects to begin with. There’s so much emphasis on like, well, don’t just Stand there, do something like we have to, you know, immediately jump into action. And we do that without thinking through what the problem is that we’re actually looking to solve and whether the solution is actually well calibrated to that problem.
So if there’s one red thread that’s run through my entire career, it’s basically I just keep showing up in different places and asking, that’s interesting. Why are you doing it that way? And not getting good answers? And so continuing to kind of poke and prod there has moved me further and further upstream into ultimately arriving in strategy. Because that’s where we get to have those conversations of like, what are we actually looking to solve?
What’s worth doing before we get all excited to run off to the races and just start executing.
Sarah Bundy
Yeah, and I loved, I loved when we first met because we were talking about the importance of asking why. Why are you doing it that way? Why are we doing it that way? Why are we doing this project? Why have we dedicated these resources to it? And what you have found in your years of running your business is that a lot of people actually don’t have the answer to that. They haven’t thought through the why, they just have gotten through the what and the how.
So can you tell us a little bit more about that and what is the challenge around that and why do you think that is?
Brooke Struck
Yeah, so ultimately, as I say, I think strategy conversations are where those why’s get to be explored or kind of, that’s the most natural space or container for that to happen. But the way that we do strategy in organizations is really not conducive to that.
So first of all, most people do strategy on a cyclical basis. Like the number of people who come and knock at my door and say, like, Brooke, can you help us build strategy? And I say, why? And they say, because we had a three year strategy two years and nine months ago, and, you know, we have three more months before the strategy elapses. Like, the impetus to do strategy because the old one is about to expire is not helpful.
It doesn’t actually push us into those conversations about, like, you know, what is worth achieving here. It tends to be like very, very superficial conversations. We can go through an entire, like, strategy process and never actually do any strategy whatsoever. We can stay at the level of, like, these are our goals and our values.
Like, here’s a laundry list of stuff that we think would be good to work on. Like, you know, we should just plaster innovation all over our walls. That’s going to somehow magically lead to outcomes that we haven’t very clearly defined. That kind of stuff happens really often.
So both the timing of the way that strategy is done and people’s experiences and expectations around strategy are not conducive to getting into these deeper conversations of like, what is it that’s going on in our situation either now or kind of foreseeably down the road. That is not okay. Like, that is for me, like that is the ultimate question to begin from.
Why is just continuing down our current trajectory not an acceptable option?
That’s where we start to understand, like, well, we would rather be here instead. Why is it that we don’t think that we’re getting there? And what are some of the things that we could do that are more likely to put us onto that trajectory than to keep us on the one that we’re on now?
Sarah Bundy
You make a really valid point about businesses focusing on a three year plan or a five year plan, or even a two year plan. And it’s interesting because if you think about how life actually works, it changes so quickly. You know, you’re, we’ve got new competitors entering the space all the time. You’ve got advancements in technology, you’ve got adjustments with AI, you’ve got new workforce coming in and new perspectives and new talent. And yet we’re still regimented to this three to five year plan.
And people don’t review it very often and maybe they’ll review it on a quarterly basis or you know, they, they pull it back up when it’s about to expire and, and as a result it could actually be detrimental to them falling behind to competition, to falling behind in consumer needs, desires and how they want to change. So how do you encourage businesses to tackle that?
Because to me, it’s a mindset and it’s an organizational practice that’s just kind of always been, yeah, so how do you help companies overcome that? Yeah, so it’s interesting that you talk about, you know, revisiting the strategy quarterly or things like this.
Brooke Struck
Often when people are revisiting strategy, actually what they’re doing in practice, when they get granular about it, is we’re looking at whether we are tracking to our KPIs, whether we’re making progress on our OKRs. We’re not actually asking ourselves the question like, are these still the relevant metrics to be paying attention to? And that Ultimately is what strategy is about, like making progress towards KPIs and OKRs.
Like that’s, that’s project management in a certain sense. There’s a lot of planning and budgeting that goes into that, but there isn’t like a revisiting of the question of like, what is our value proposition anyway? And how is that value proposition positioned relative to others out there in the market who are the kinds of consumers or clients that we have a disproportionate advantage to go and serve because we can create so much more value for them than other people can out there in space in virtue of these, this unique set of capabilities that we have that others would find difficult to replicate.
Sarah Bundy
And is it still relevant in the world today when it was relevant two years ago? Is it even still relevant?
Brooke Struck
Yeah, that’s right. So looking at how our, our capabilities have evolved since the last time we asked the question, looking at how our competitor set has evolved and also looking at how the needs and value drivers of the client base have evolved.
Sarah Bundy
Absolutely.
Let’s talk a little bit about your idea of collective leadership. Because obviously when you’re making decisions, you’re making strategic decisions about the direction of a company and about changes that happen in a company. It involves a lot of brains, a lot of people to buy into the idea and a lot of people to be able to execute on that idea. So tell us a little bit about, a little bit more please, about collective leadership and how inviting your teams into the decision making process is actually better for strategic growth.
Brooke Struck
Yeah, so I want to hit pause on that for one second and talk about how we’ve arrived at where we are in kind of the world of strategy, because I think that’ll really shine a light on this collective leadership aspect.
So if we think about the practice of strategy as like really emerging in a corporate context in like the 1950s, and then you know, the formation of like BCG, Bain, McKinsey as like really the main service providers for strategy advice. Like that was back in the 1950s that the practice started to get off the ground. And then those firms were formed in the 1960s and 1970s.
The model at that time was like the way that you develop a strategy is you hire an external expert from one of these consulting firms and they’re going to come and I’ll be a little bit cynical here, they’re going to descend from on high and tell you what it is that you need to do. And around the 80s that started to shift. And what we saw is a change from like an external person building your strategy for you and then kind of like pushing it into the organization to more like strategic accompaniment. And this is where you see like the CEO and maybe one or two other people being kind of brought through this journey by their consultants.
Like, we’re going to take you for an off site or you know, we’re going to lock you in your office and kind of put you through this experience. But it was still very focused on that individual or a really small group of individuals at the top of the corporate pyramid who were setting strategy. And then they were basically responsible for turning around and selling that internally.
Because of course, lots of people inside the organization are responsible for implementing the strategy. And it’s not just a matter of like being able to, you know, chase after them quickly enough and wag your finger intensely enough to get them to do it. There are a lot of decisions that people lower down the hierarchy need to make, even at the front line. And this we see even more and more in service businesses.
Like when you’re interacting with human beings, when you’re interacting with people, the kind of degrees of freedom, freedom, the range of things you might do in interacting with a client is much, much higher compared to the way you might interact with a machine on a production line. So we need everyone inside the organization to become like much, much more aware of and kind of sensitized to what the strategy is.
And so that’s something that I’m seeing emerge now in the last, like in the last decade or so really, as we shift more and more towards service economies in North America and Western Europe. There are more of those kinds of human interactions and therefore like more choices that need to be made throughout the entire hierarchy of the organization.
And so we need everyone to have a level of fluency with the strategy that’s much, much higher than perhaps we did a generation ago when there was more kind of manufacturing going on. So that’s kind of the lead up to like, why collective leadership.
And the part that I’ve just talked about is like, why is it important in implementation to have everybody like, aware of the strategy and like fluent in it to be able to, to implement on it. But there’s another part of the story which is also like the, the increasing pace of change within the market.
So like, the most important signals for strategy are the things that you hear back from your clients. And that’s happening during marketing, during sales, during direct delivery, during customer service. Like the folks at the front line of your organization are an invaluable source of insight into what the market is doing and how you can be updating your positioning to continue to have a competitive advantage.
So that’s the other part.
Like not just once the strategy is set, we need people to help implement it. It’s even gathering the insights that are required to formulate a good strategy in the first place. Like the market is moving fast enough now that we can’t really expect that one person or a small handful of people will be able to see enough and make enough decisions to have the company evolve quickly enough to keep up with a market that moves at that pace.
So when you’re talking about collective leadership, you’re not necessarily just talking about executive leadership teams, you’re talking about inclusivity of the entire world, organization and organism and all of the people that are in it from top to bottom and back.
Sarah Bundy
So yeah, that makes sense. And actually it’s interesting thinking about the history of it too, because if you’re looking at the 50s, 60s, 80s, there wasn’t Internet to expedite the process, to expedite competition, to expedite changes. There wasn’t mobile, there wasn’t social media, right? So those three to five year plans that we’re talking about actually were very relevant back then because they didn’t have the same type of speed and insights. They could stick to the plan for three to five years.
Now we’re in a very different time, right? We’re at a different time, we have different challenges that we’re up against. The speed is different and what we’re exposed to has shifted.
Brooke Struck
There’s an interesting response to that that I hear often, which is like, while the world moves so fast, there’s no value to strategy anymore. Like, you know
Sarah Bundy
Do you agree with that?
Brooke Struck
I don’t, I don’t. And there’s an old saying that I think is really applicable here, which is like, plans may be useless, but planning is invaluable. Like it’s not about, you know, when you’re, when you’re putting together like risk and contingency plans, for instance, it’s not about necessarily making the right guess about, about which risk is going to materialize.
It’s about building the habits and building the kind of like sensibility, sensitivity and conversation around paying attention to things that are happening out there that like, you just become better at interpreting the data that’s coming at you, making choices and acting accordingly. If that’s the only thing that you get out of your risk planning, you have got something extremely valuable.
Even if none of the risks that you actually identified during that process ever come to pass?
Sarah Bundy
Well, it’s interesting because to your point, we need to find a new balance. I think you can’t have. You can’t move forward in business without a plan or planning, but you can’t be so married to your plan for such a long period of time that you become extinct. So please tell us a little bit more about what’s that balance?
How do you recommend businesses find that balance and how do you recommend businesses tackle creating those strategies today?
Brooke Struck
So, yeah, the strategy process that I work through with my clients tends to move faster than strategy processes that they’ve worked through before. In general, I think that there’s been such a focus on strategy. Becoming an analytical exercise like this is going to be really data heavy and we’re going to need to, you know, collect a bunch of information and synthesizing all of that is going to be like laborious and these kinds of things.
In fact, there, I think there’s much, much more value to be had by quickly getting people’s existing knowledge out onto the table and shared communally and working from that basis than going super, super, super deep on things. Because we tend to move very slowly when we go that deep. And we also tend to only go deep on a few questions. Like we choose a few things and then we go super deep on those. But there’s a range of questions and a range of possibilities that never even comes to light. And like, we don’t even think about those and those tend to be where the risks actually crop up.
Sarah Bundy
Let’s talk a little bit about diversification, because one of the reasons why you are a guest on this show is because we know, and you’ve been advocated and referred a billion times over from women that I trust how much you advocate for having strong female representation and diverse representation not only in the decision making process, but across the entire organization.
So can you tell us a little bit about why you are so pro diversification, pro feminine leadership and what it is that you teach and how you kind of overcome those gaps with companies.
Brooke Struck
Yeah. So let me first start out with why. And there are two answers to that question. One is because it makes good business sense.
You know, I talked about needing to have like that breadth of insight that really only like a fully kind of mobilized team can provide. And the more diverse your team is and the more that the people in that team are able to like share their asset knowledge, explicitly participate in integrating that knowledge into like a picture of your world, that makes sense, the more that people are able to Participate in that.
The, the better a picture you will get, the more like rich and creative and interesting and ultimately valuable business ideas will come from that. So, like, there’s a business case for it.
And then on the other side, it’s just the right thing to do. And I, I mean, I have my own kind of personal story towards that. Like, you know, growing up in my house, like at the dinner table, the stakes of the conversation was always like, how much does what you’re saying make sense and it doesn’t matter who says it.
And then I arrived out here in this professional world and I remember during my PhD, as I was articulating my research topic, one of my supervisors said, well, you can’t write on that. I said, why not? Like, I’m just picking up this work of this other guy. It’s like, yeah, he can say that because he’s done all of these things and he has all these accolades. You can’t do that.
And my response to that internally was like, no way. Like, if that’s, if that’s a thing that’s worth doing, it should be open to everybody to do it. And you know, I encountered that in my PhD. I encountered it in the professional world as well. It’s like, if you ask a good question, if you ask a valuable question, it shouldn’t matter what your job title is.
And I found myself moving further and further away from spaces where people say, like, you’re not senior enough to ask that question yet. You need to wait 40 more years before you’ll, you’ll be old enough that people will take that question seriously.
It’s like, no, no, no. The question is important. And so that’s something that I’m very attuned to. And I see it in workplaces all over.
I see it in the places where I have worked. I see it in my client organizations. There are very real differences in who gets to ask which kinds of questions. And like, I say that as like, you know, able-bodied, cisgender, white, straight dude.
Like, if I am feeling any kind of resistance there, it’s like, that only kind of opens my perspective to like, how much more held back other people must be who encounter any kind of difference along any of those dimensions that I just mentioned.
Sarah Bundy
So how do you help companies overcome that? Because to your point, it is a real thing and the people who are asking the right questions should have a voice at the table.
Brooke Struck
So ultimately, in a certain sense, the business case is the way that I pull that through. Like when I’m working with clients and just starting to have conversations with clients. You know, I mentioned folks come to me and say, like, Brooke, can you help us build the next three year strategy?
One of the first questions that I’m likely to ask them is like, well, what if you just didn’t have one? And some people react really negatively to that. They’re like, oh, my gosh, I’m not ready for a conversation like this. And those are just not my clients.
But the people who kind of lean forward and say, like, wait, hold on, like, something interesting just happened. Those people, like, if we start to dig and say like, well, okay, if you didn’t have a three year strategy, like, the board might be upset. Okay, well, what would they be upset about? Well, there are these risks that they’re worried about. There are these opportunities that really excite them.
Okay, so what you’re looking to do is mitigate these risks and get some, you know, some chance at, like, leaning into these opportunities. What else?
Well, our team might be uncoordinated. Okay, well, what if that happened? Well, costs of delivery might go up and, you know, like, all of these different things might happen in our business. Okay, so what you’re looking for is maintaining a certain level of quality to deliver to your clients and coordination, you know, turnover, all of those things.
Those are the outcomes you actually care about. Okay, great, we can work on those. And strategy is going to be a tool to get there.
And the collective leadership element that comes in there is, like, if those are the outcomes that you care about, are you, like, in a certain sense, how willing are you to work hard on those things in ways that make you feel uncomfortable? Like, are those things more important than your discomfort?
And if they are, then we’re on a really fruitful track.
Sarah Bundy
So let’s talk a little bit more and unravel this collective leadership concept a little further. What’s the relationship between collective leadership and those diverse teams? When you’re thinking about things like age and race and gender and perspective in life experience?
Brooke Struck
So if I can boil the idea of collective leadership down to one thing, it’s a tacit assumption, usually on the part of, like, the most senior leader, but essentially, like in command and control style environments, you’ll find lots of people who hold this tacit assumption.
And that assumption is, I know what’s going on. And that idea that they know what’s going on closes the door to any kind of curiosity about what other people might think. Because if I already know, like, what is the value to asking somebody else?
But once we remove that Assumption once we like, pivot to the notion that I’m seeing part of the picture, that opens up all of this space to, to say like, well, hold on, if I only see part of the picture, then these other people around me, like, they, they see part of the picture too. And we need to be operating from the same picture. And ideally we should be operating from the most like, complete and coherent picture that we can.
So we need to get away from this idea that like, I already know what the answer is and the optimal situation would be for me to just push that mental image of the world into all of your brains, that I didn’t need to explain it to you anymore and you could just be me in carbon copy and go out and do my bidding.
Sarah Bundy
So how do you, how do we shift our mindsets? How do we take those types of leaders and who have spent much of their lives thinking in that way and suddenly pause them and help them shift into this new collective leadership style?
Brooke Struck
Yeah, so there are two elements to my approach to doing that. One is kind of structural and programmatic. That’s like when I’m doing strategy work with clients.
I put them through a series of workshops where we’ve got a suite of activities that helps them to like, surface that tacit knowledge from around the table, integrate that together, and then make decisions on that basis.
So just to pause very quickly, compare that to the old fashioned version where you’ve either got an external consultant who’s building the strategy for you, or maybe they’re doing the in like they’re doing the kind of intel gathering from your internal team. If you’ve got an external consultant who’s going and interviewing all of your folks who work at the ground level and pulling that knowledge back into their organization and integrating it and bringing it back to you, they’re basically replacing one kind of totalistic mental model with another.
They’re saying, you used to think this, but now you should think that instead. But they’re not changing the mindset of like, your knowledge is always going to be incomplete. And so you always need to have this posture of curiosity towards like, huh, that’s strange. I wonder what that means.
And so the activities that I walk my clients through are about making sure that that process of like gathering that tacit knowledge and integrating it into a coherent picture is something that the clients do amongst themselves rather than having that done kind of behind the curtain and then just delivered back to them.
And so those activities are really an opportunity for people around the table to stare each other in the eye. And say, like, wow, you’re seeing something completely different from what I have seen. And you’re in, you know, like, you and I are staring at seemingly the same world and reaching completely different conclusions. And so the activities are set up for people to have that kind of experience.
But then the other component of that is really, like, the facilitative element. This is managing the social and cognitive dynamics of how that conversation is unfolding. Because that’s really destabilizing to have, you know, a worldview that you take to be very, like, fixed and correct. All of a sudden confronted with a bunch of different worldviews held by people that you respect, and all of a sudden you recognize, like, wait a second, we are seeing completely different things. And now we’re at this kind of, like, moment of crisis where we don’t know how to integrate these things.
So helping people to feel okay along that journey is a big part of it as well.
Sarah Bundy
It’s almost like having a counselor, family counselor, couples counseling, where sometimes you just need a mediator to hear all of the sides, make sure people can out loud process, and then have those pieces reiterated back so that everybody’s acknowledged, all of the perspectives are acknowledged, and then go back to what was the purpose here and why are we doing what we’re doing?
Brooke Struck
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So, first of all, a lot of people, somewhat tongue in cheek, thank me for the organizational therapy that I provide. And I was having a really interesting conversation with another facilitation coach yesterday, and he was saying he gets brought in often in these contexts where, like, there’s kind of an acrimonious relationship within a senior leadership team or perhaps between two individuals in the team.
And something that I was talking about with him and kind of, like, really shone light on this for me, the first time is, like, the fact that I am working on a project, and, like, we have a North Star, we have a direction to work towards in that space is so helpful because I feel like it would be so much more difficult to try to resolve those things if the context for the conversation, we’re just like, okay, let’s sit down and talk about why it is that you two can’t get along.
Like, I at least have the benefit of, like, you know, we’re all working towards that.
So, yeah, I see that you two are not getting along. But, like, do you think that we can do this together for something that’s more important than, like, can we put this aside? Can we get past this for something that’s more important than any individual sitting at this table.
Sarah Bundy
What do you recommend for people who are, say, middle to executive managers? And I’m going to use women as an example. And people aren’t hearing their voice, but they know that there is. They know they’re right or they know that their perspective should be heard and somehow they’re not breaking through.
What words of advice do you have for listeners like that today?
Brooke Struck
Right. So I encounter people like that very, very frequently, people in those kinds of situations. And something that I see often is that they have a solution in mind and they know that it’s a good solution and they’re trying to move that up the ladder and it’s just not making any progress. And, and what I advise in those situations is shift the conversation away from the solution and towards what the problem is and how we’re going to choose a solution.
Sarah Bundy
And can you give an example?
Brooke Struck
Yeah, absolutely. So I think that it’s really important that we. I think that it’s really important that we develop a new financial model for this program that we’re operating because I’m seeing changes in.
I’m seeing changes in our client base that’s making me think that, like, we’re not going to be able to win as many contracts, that we’re going to need to lower our prices, these kinds of things. And so we need to get ahead of this. Here’s what I think. Here’s how I think we should be pricing the service. Here’s how I think we should be changing things. And then there’s just like this. No, no, no.
So rather than saying, like, we really should be adopting this, we should be doing this, we need to change this. Just asking things like, well, what would make you worried that our current model isn’t working? If our current model were starting to run into problems, what would be the early signals that we should be paying attention to?
Sarah Bundy
That’s a good question. So bringing it back to what should we.
Or what should I be watching out for? To understand and identify when this could become problematic.
Brooke Struck
Right. And so what that does is it allows the leader to feel heard and understood. And especially when we mirror back and we say like, okay, you know, whatever the answer is to that question, like, if I’m hearing you correctly, it sounds like you’re saying if we saw X and Y and Z, then we would know that there’s a problem we should dig into further. Did I hear you right? That’s really valuable to make someone feel understood and that you’re not bulldozing them.
Which is Interesting, right? It’s like you’ve often got like these old white dude bosses who are so like, they play the bulldozing game so much, but they don’t like to feel bulldozed. So by helping them to feel understood and that they’re not being bulldozed, you get a better reception.
But you can also build commitment on the back end of that, which is like, okay, so now that I’m hearing you right, if we saw these things, we should worry.
So if I were to see some signals along the lines that we just described, how and when should I bring those to you for us to, to continue this conversation? And that’s where we build the commitment, right?
Sarah Bundy
It is. And it’s to your point. It’s a kind and diplomatic way of saying, hey, I noticed something is not 100%.Yeah, but I’m coming to you for advice. Feedback, perspective.
Asking for the assistance and the perspective so that it gives them permission to say, okay, I’m starting to see those things as you’ve said, is it okay if I bring them to you? And you’ve said in this time frame, bring them to you. Here I am bringing them to you.
Brooke Struck
Yeah, exactly.
Sarah Bundy
They’ve received, not only they’ve received permission while also accomplishing the goal. But now they actually can execute. They can act on what that need is.
Brooke Struck
And, and let’s pause and note that that is so different from approaching a boss and saying like, I don’t know how to solve this problem. And that’s something I often hear, you know, like employees who come to me, you know, direct reports, often like sitting just below the CEO or just below the C suite and they say, you know, every time that I go and ask for help or I ask for advice or these kinds of things, like there’s kind of this, you know, this turn it around, back around on me kind of thing that happens where it’s like, well, what do you think you should do?
And you know, especially like a lot of the high performing professional women that I know, it’s like they’ve already thought through. You know, they didn’t just show up because they were like, oh, I’m encountering some resistance. Like they have worked on this and you know, they’re, they’re showing up here is already a signal that like those things have been done, this needs to be taken seriously.
And so they often get that kind of turnabout of like, okay, well, it just gets put right back on me. Anyway, it’s not that helpful. When we approach in this way, saying, like, what is it? What are the criteria that matter to you?
It’s not about saying, like, help me to do my job. You know, I need you, the CEO, to basically, like, moonlight doing my job too, because I’m not up to it. It’s much more that what you’re communicating is, like, I want to make sure that the highest priorities are feeding into my work. It’s not just, I need to know how to do my job, it’s that I need to make sure that the way I’m doing my job is optimally calibrated to what is going on across this company.
Sarah Bundy
That’s fantastic insight and absolutely true and a really valid and helpful example. So thank you, Brooke, for that.
We are sadly out of time. I feel like I could talk to you all day long and maybe we need to schedule another time to do some more podcasting with you because you come with very valuable insights and perspective. And I think it’s so helpful having somebody who can speak to both sides and understand both sides and create actionable examples. Education, training, learning, shifting, and mindsets. For men who are working with women, high performance women who need to let them come in so they can run better companies, and women who are hitting glass ceilings not knowing how to communicate in the right way.
So I think it’s wonderful that we have a little bit of a sneak peek of how we can sort of accomplish and overcome those things. For today’s podcast, final words of advice, at least for this particular show.
If you’re a leader running an organization, what words of advice do you have for them? And if you’re a high performance woman in an organization, what words of advice do you have for them? For closing.
Brooke Struck
Right. So for a high performance leader, ditch the idea that you know what’s going on and get curious about, like, anytime someone tells you something that makes you feel uncomfortable or makes you feel like, you know, that sounds crazy, get curious about that thing. Like, you know, the people around me are very reasonable.
If someone says something that sounds that off to me and, and it’s a reasonable person who’s saying that there must be something that I haven’t understood. So that is my advice.
For people who are leading organizations who want to become more inclusive and get the business benefits that come from that.
For women who are looking to break through those glass ceilings, sadly, a lot of what I described in that example before is kind of doing emotional labor for people who are not, like, managing their own emotions. Right. Like, it sucks to say, but this is just more emotional labor that falls to the people who are constantly called on to do it right.
But when we recognize that, like, people’s feelings are a major inhibitor of them making decisions we need them to make, we can be much more tactical in understanding their perspective.
Chris Voss has this great expression, tactical empathy. Like, we can deploy tactical empathy really effectively to understand what will move the needle for somebody and what will actually get them to, Yes. And then it’s just a matter of coming back with the thing that they have asked us for and given us permission to bring forward to them to get to the conversation that we want to have.
Sarah Bundy
And I think you combine those two things and on either side, people are just trying to do a good job. They’re trying to trying to solve problems or trying to work together. They’re trying to build something great.
So we thank you, Brooke, for your time today. Thank you for your perspective and your insights.
What’s the best way for people to contact you if they wish to reach out?
Brooke Struck
People can find me on LinkedIn Brooke Struck, or you can find me at www.convergehere.com.
Sarah Bundy
Thank you, Brooke. Appreciate having you today.
Brooke Struck
Sounds great.
Sarah Bundy
Thanks for listening to the For Female Founders podcast series. If you enjoyed this episode, please go ahead and hit subscribe like or comment below so we can continue to support women in business by helping them thrive, not just survive.
We’ll see you on the next show.
Leave A Comment