Path to Leadership for the Modern Marketer with Hana Jacover

[00:00:00] From Individual Contributor to Leader: Key Moves in Initial 90 Days

[00:00:00] Jess: One of the reasons I call it Hype House is because it's all about finding your internal hype and like, unleashing that inner badass within you so you can really march towards your goals and also align with your values and purpose in life.
[00:00:18] Hana Jacover: Welcome to another episodes of Marketers Talking Marketing.
[00:00:22] Hana Jacover: Today we are joined by Hana and we are going to talk about marketing leadership, moving into leadership from an individual contributor.
[00:00:31] Hana Jacover: And specifically, when you start a new role with leadership in mind, what are those key important things to do in the first 90 days to really set yourself up for growth?
[00:00:41] Hana Jacover: So Hannah, do you want to tell the audience a little more about yourself and then we'll dive into the conversation?
[00:00:47] Unleashing the Inner Badass: A Conversation with Hana Jacover of Hype House Coaching

[00:00:47] Jess: Yes, I would love to.
[00:00:48] Jess: So my name is Hannah Jacob and I'm currently running my own show at Hype House Coaching.
[00:00:54] Jess: And previous to that, I spent a little over a decade in the world of B, two B, marketing and tech, and primarily working on the agency side for most of that, helping organizations from early stage startups all the way to enterprise businesses, the Google's, the Microsoft's of the world.
[00:01:13] Jess: And we were really helping them hone in on their demand gen, helping them with lead management, marketing operations, all that fun stuff that all of you do.
[00:01:23] Jess: And talking about it like early days, it was really early days, we were talking about things like ABM and reverse waterfall planning and lead scoring.
[00:01:30] Jess: So that for me was extremely helpful in learning and absorbing what was coming to kind of mainstream in the industry.
[00:01:40] Jess: Like, fast forward five, six years.
[00:01:44] Jess: So then I spent some time at a startup, Mad Kudu.
[00:01:47] Jess: I ran to Mangen there.
[00:01:49] Jess: Super amazing time.
[00:01:51] Jess: Love that company, love those founders.
[00:01:53] Jess: And in that time was just sort of a time for me.
[00:01:58] Jess: I was also going through some identity searching and some things going on in my personal life and just really looking to reclaim a lot of different things.
[00:02:08] Jess: And I think I was just a totally different person.
[00:02:11] Jess: I became a completely different human, just going through my own personal growth.
[00:02:16] Jess: And in that I was just searching for something new on the career side.
[00:02:20] Jess: And I think that I was like, wow, do I really want to just be known for being a great demand gen marketer?
[00:02:26] Jess: Is this really what I want to be doing?
[00:02:28] Jess: And obviously the answer was no.
[00:02:31] Jess: Here lies Hana, the marketer, it needed for me to be about helping others.
[00:02:37] Jess: And it was always about that marketing and me in my roles was always about helping others.
[00:02:42] Jess: And I think that's what drew me into the agency consulting side of things.
[00:02:46] Jess: But I wanted to go deeper with that impact and have that one on one conversation with individuals to really help them accelerate their growth.
[00:02:55] Jess: So that led me to coaching and the coaching company that I have started, Hype House Coaching.
[00:03:01] Jess: And yeah, it's been a journey.
[00:03:03] Jess: It's been really fulfilling.
[00:03:05] Jess: And I help others really just show up how they want to show up in all areas of their life and achieve their goals.
[00:03:14] Jess: And one of the reasons I call it Hype House is because it's all about finding your internal hype and unleashing that in their inner badass within you, so you can really march towards your goals and also align with your values and purpose in life.
[00:03:30] Hana Jacover: I love that.
[00:03:31] Hana Jacover: There is nothing, from my perspective, nothing more rewarding than seeing employees and former employees be successful and really almost step into their own going from I have some that started as, like, an intern, and then they become an account manager.
[00:03:49] Hana Jacover: And I remember there was one the first time it happened, he was an intern came an account manager, was on a call and was explaining something to a client.
[00:03:56] Hana Jacover: And I had this overwhelming feel of joy, and I was like, he's all growing up.
[00:04:01] Hana Jacover: They're listening to him, and now he's like, senior director at some tech company.
[00:04:07] Hana Jacover: Man, it's so rewarding to see people find that.
[00:04:10] Hana Jacover: And sometimes they just need an external party to help them find help them get there with it.
[00:04:18] Hana Jacover: Word vomited that whole last sentence, but.
[00:04:23] Jess: I was picking up what you were putting down.
[00:04:27] Hana Jacover: Typically, do you predominantly work with marketers who are, like, midway through their career and kind of growing up that corporate path?
[00:04:35] Jess: Yeah.
[00:04:35] Jess: So primarily where my sweet spot is, is I'm working with emerging executives.
[00:04:42] Jess: So that could look like a lot.
[00:04:44] Jess: Right.
[00:04:45] Jess: If you self identify as an emerging executive or you've been told you're an emerging executive, if you are on that path, then I'm a person to work with.
[00:04:53] Jess: And also executives, current executives who are recognizing what's happening in the industry, they're recognizing that there's a generational shift happening right now.
[00:05:04] Jess: They're recognizing that what Gen Z and Millennials want is very different than what they grew up with in terms of traditional leadership and how organizations are ran.
[00:05:16] Jess: It's completely changing.
[00:05:18] Jess: And not only that, but we're seeing this generational shift of Millennials sitting in these decision making seats.
[00:05:25] Jess: And so, yeah, working with both of those entering into those seats because there's a huge gap there.
[00:05:31] Jess: And then the executives that want to improve the way that they relate to the future generations and those emerging executives and also just align with their own values and vision and purpose and live kind of a new executive life.
[00:05:51] Hana Jacover: That's interesting.
[00:05:52] Hana Jacover: There's definitely I personally raise your hand if you've been victimized by an executive who thinks you're too young to do anything, because there are definitely executives I've talked to where in past roles, I've done executive coaching and been on track for leadership, and there's been people are like, no, like, you're too young.
[00:06:16] Hana Jacover: You don't enough gray hair.
[00:06:17] Hana Jacover: Like, whoa, hold the horses.
[00:06:18] Hana Jacover: I have a massive impact in the organization.
[00:06:22] Hana Jacover: I've driven all these results and I've done it multiple times through multiple product launches and multiple iterations.
[00:06:28] Hana Jacover: What's going on here?
[00:06:28] Hana Jacover: And there's other executives who get it, and they're like, there's great talent.
[00:06:32] Hana Jacover: Let me foster that and bring them along.
[00:06:34] Hana Jacover: There definitely is people who are not getting in, and I can't imagine in five or ten years that they're still going to be leading at organizations that aren't embracing the way that the modern workforce wants to be led and be worked with, and those leaders want to be nurtured with it.
[00:06:52] Understanding the Lived Experience and its Impact in Business

[00:06:52] Jess: Yeah.
[00:06:53] Jess: And there's something to be said there, too, about lived experience, right?
[00:06:57] Jess: And that's something that I have a lot of unique lived experiences that I know a lot of people on this planet will never have.
[00:07:05] Jess: And when you have unique lived experiences, it's like dog years, right?
[00:07:12] Jess: You have to go through your own leaps and bounds to come out on the other side of some of those things.
[00:07:19] Jess: And I think we forget that.
[00:07:21] Jess: I think when we're in a business setting, we forget that, hey, just because you're a certain age does not mean that you don't have experience, lived experience, professional experience that don't necessarily equate to your age.
[00:07:35] Jess: And just because you're young doesn't mean that you can't have all of the experience to sit in those seats and make impactful change.
[00:07:47] Jess: I also think that we're stuck on this like millennials and Gen Z are young, right?
[00:07:52] Jess: That's false are like false, right?
[00:07:57] Jess: Like, what?
[00:07:57] Jess: Elder millennials are, what, in their 40s?
[00:07:59] Hana Jacover: God.
[00:08:00] Jess: Yeah.
[00:08:01] Insights on Adult Development and Life Experiences

[00:08:01] Hana Jacover: I had a call a little bit ago with a woman, and she wanted advice about being the youngest in the room.
[00:08:07] Hana Jacover: And I was like, I got you.
[00:08:09] Hana Jacover: That was a majority of my life.
[00:08:12] Hana Jacover: I was the youngest in the room, and I was often the only woman.
[00:08:14] Hana Jacover: I was the youngest shareholder at some companies I invested in.
[00:08:17] Hana Jacover: I remember I would go to annual meetings in elementary school and no one would talk to me.
[00:08:21] Hana Jacover: And I'd be like, I am the shareholder here.
[00:08:26] Hana Jacover: I was young, in my grade, graduated early, always found myself in spaces I probably shouldn't be in, but was able to get a seat at the table and so didn't ask why I got there, but just took advantage of it.
[00:08:37] Hana Jacover: And when I was talking to her, I had that moment of realization that we're not peers, like, coming together to collectively talk about our shared experience.
[00:08:47] Hana Jacover: She's coming to me because I'm the adult, and she wants advice about how to navigate it from someone who's been through it and gone somewhere.
[00:08:54] Hana Jacover: And it just hit me, and I was like, oh, my God, I am a grown up.
[00:09:01] Jess: And there's a theory out there that I really love and actually really changed my perspective on a lot of my relationships.
[00:09:10] Jess: And it's keegan's adult development theory, and it's not correlated with age, right?
[00:09:16] Jess: I mean, there's a certain part of it that is right, because when we're born, we're all at this specific stage of adult development because we're adolescents.
[00:09:24] Jess: Right.
[00:09:25] Jess: But as you move through adulthood, you develop, right, and you have to get past certain points in your life where things aren't so they don't grip you so much.
[00:09:39] Jess: Right.
[00:09:39] Jess: Like, I'm not gripped by the fact that I have to perform in my role and I want others to like me and DA DA DA DA.
[00:09:44] Jess: Like, that's a specific adult development stage that you sit in.
[00:09:47] Jess: And until you can kind of get past that and look at it more objectively and take a step back and be like, oh, wow, this is not the point of this, all of this.
[00:09:58] Jess: Only then you can move into that next adult development stage.
[00:10:01] Jess: And a lot of adults, no matter how old they are, sit in one specific stage.
[00:10:07] Jess: 75% of adults sit in one specific stage and will never maybe even move on to that next stage.
[00:10:13] Jess: And again, it's not dependent on age.
[00:10:16] Hana Jacover: My mind is blown.
[00:10:20] Hana Jacover: That's an interesting approach to it, because definitely, 100%, there's someone specific that comes to mind where it's like, you do not know how to converse.
[00:10:31] Hana Jacover: You react very emotionally to everything we do.
[00:10:34] Hana Jacover: Yeah.
[00:10:34] Hana Jacover: That's interesting.
[00:10:36] Jess: Yeah.
[00:10:36] Jess: And if you think about, like, a five year old I have a five year old, right?
[00:10:40] Jess: He can't see the bigger picture.
[00:10:42] Jess: He cannot see it because he's in it so deep.
[00:10:46] Jess: He's in it so deep, and he's developmentally not ready to.
[00:10:49] Jess: But as you get older and the lessons you learn and the experience you have, you are able to zoom out and start to see the bigger picture and then start to kind of use that as a way out of that current developmental stage or I guess, like, a way to evolve from it.
[00:11:08] The Role of Adult Development Stages in Personal Growth

[00:11:08] Hana Jacover: Is that a tool?
[00:11:09] Hana Jacover: And we'll drop some links in the show notes below for everyone who's also like, whoa, let me go Google that, because I've never heard about that.
[00:11:16] Hana Jacover: Is that something where you would look at it and you would say, okay, I am self identifying in this stage, and my goal is to get to the next stage.
[00:11:23] Hana Jacover: And so how do I work on maybe some of the thought patterns I have or the way I'm looking at things?
[00:11:30] Hana Jacover: Like, what can I do to kind of progress upstage wise?
[00:11:33] Hana Jacover: Is that the goal?
[00:11:34] Hana Jacover: Or is it really more of here's a tool to assess how everyone around you, where they're at, where you're at, and how to best communicate?
[00:11:41] Hana Jacover: Or maybe both.
[00:11:43] Jess: Yeah, and I think it's both.
[00:11:45] Jess: And you also have to consider ethically, I would never be like, oh, hey, you're in this adult development stage, because that's not ethical.
[00:11:53] Jess: Right.
[00:11:54] Jess: I don't know that.
[00:11:55] Jess: I think it's a really great tool for individual personal growth.
[00:11:59] Jess: Right.
[00:12:00] Jess: If you can recognize what stage you're in, like, I am in the socialized mind stage, which means right.
[00:12:07] Jess: What does that mean to me?
[00:12:08] Jess: What does that mean with my communication?
[00:12:10] Jess: What does it mean with my cognitive abilities and my interpersonal skills?
[00:12:14] Jess: And how can I then work with that and identify what is keeping me in this stage?
[00:12:21] Jess: What can't I see?
[00:12:23] Jess: And using that to help yourself evolve into a self authoring mind, where you're going to have just more consciousness, more self regulation, like understanding the ideas and how things work together.
[00:12:36] Jess: And yeah, so I do think it's so powerful to use it as a tool for personal development.
[00:12:41] Jess: And, yeah, I do think it does help with relationships.
[00:12:45] Jess: Right?
[00:12:46] Jess: Like just understanding and keeping it to yourself.
[00:12:48] Jess: If you were to say, okay, they're exhibiting these types of behaviors, maybe that means that I need to communicate with them in a different way and meet people where they're at.
[00:12:59] Hana Jacover: Yeah, that is, I think such a big part of success in any role as you're trying to grow into leadership is understanding how people want to be communicated with and communicating in a way that's going to be collaborative with them.
[00:13:12] Hana Jacover: Especially if you're like, I go back to the sales and marketing divide which exists in some organizations.
[00:13:18] Hana Jacover: Still doesn't exist in many organizations, which is great when you come in to talk to your sales partner about maybe you're under delivery on your number.
[00:13:26] Hana Jacover: But you need to talk to them about what they can do to help make sure, collectively that you still get above.
[00:13:31] Hana Jacover: There's ways to deliver that communication in a way that doesn't induce conflict.
[00:13:37] Hana Jacover: I think back to nonviolent communication for feedback too, and news like that, it's such a difference maker if you can really become well versed in how to do that.
[00:13:48] Hana Jacover: Yeah, I always tell people good news delivered poorly is worse than bad news delivered well.
[00:13:54] Jess: It's so true.
[00:13:56] Hana Jacover: Yeah.
[00:13:56] Hana Jacover: That's the right way to think through.
[00:13:59] Hana Jacover: That makes sense to me.
[00:14:02] Jess: I'm so happy you brought in nonviolent.
[00:14:04] Hana Jacover: Communication because that's a tool that I.
[00:14:06] Jess: Sometimes will help coaches see and use and they'll figure out how to use it in the challenges that they're experiencing.
[00:14:15] Understanding the Impact of Neuroscience and Trauma in Workplace

[00:14:15] Jess: Another thing I think about too is neuroscience, right?
[00:14:19] Jess: And I don't know why we don't want to talk about neuroscience.
[00:14:21] Jess: It really makes me upset because it's so important.
[00:14:25] Jess: It's so important our brain and the way that our bodies work.
[00:14:29] Jess: Like, hello.
[00:14:31] Jess: If you are leading a team, if you are in charge of humans and helping them grow and helping them develop and you don't understand the basics of how their brain works, you're going to be in trouble.
[00:14:44] Hana Jacover: There's this whole world of managers and leaders who and I'm going to say I think they tend to share some characteristics of individuals who are just promoted into leadership roles, who don't give a fuck about anyone on their team.
[00:15:02] Hana Jacover: They don't care about anyone.
[00:15:03] Hana Jacover: Whenever I'm interviewing, I always ask someone, what gets you most excited about running a team?
[00:15:08] Hana Jacover: And there's a ton of people who will be like they'll say things that are individual contributor work.
[00:15:13] Hana Jacover: They'll say things like I love building programs.
[00:15:19] Hana Jacover: Do you like nurturing the people that are coming to work for you as an early stage employee?
[00:15:24] Hana Jacover: If you have a bad manager that's not just impacting your career, that can fuck you up outside of work?
[00:15:30] Jess: Yes.
[00:15:31] Hana Jacover: That can do damage.
[00:15:33] Jess: Yes.
[00:15:33] Jess: And I think we also don't talk about that.
[00:15:35] Jess: We don't talk about workplace trauma because we have a tendency to also like trauma, like whatever.
[00:15:41] Jess: That's only for people who have serious big T traumas.
[00:15:45] Jess: But listen, y'all, there are big T traumas and there are little T traumas and we all have little T traumas and workplace trauma is one of those and we just don't talk about it.
[00:15:54] Jess: And when you're in a toxic workplace, that's trauma.
[00:15:59] Jess: That's trauma, and it does stay with you unless you know how to kind of work through that and release that, which can be really hard to do.
[00:16:07] Hana Jacover: Or it normalizes that as an acceptable experience in the corporate world.
[00:16:11] Hana Jacover: Coming up I'm sure you've had experiences, too, coming up in Tech and a lot of the bro tech culture stuff that we talk about today as like, oh, my God, they did.
[00:16:21] Hana Jacover: That was common for so long.
[00:16:24] Hana Jacover: And if you come in there as an intern and then you work for a company like that and your first ten years of working is that environment, it's really easy just to think that's normal and start perpetuating it.
[00:16:35] Hana Jacover: I think we collectively as a society feel very comfortable talking about all this.
[00:16:41] Hana Jacover: When it comes to personal life and personal relationships.
[00:16:45] Hana Jacover: When it comes to work, it's like this thing that you just don't touch.
[00:16:48] Hana Jacover: But what percentage of our day do we spend with coworkers at work doing work?
[00:16:55] Hana Jacover: It's a massive chunk.
[00:16:57] Hana Jacover: And so if you're not addressing your interpersonal relationships in the environment in which you may or may not have, say, working is very different than the dating relationship.
[00:17:09] Hana Jacover: You're in there, you're working for someone, ideally you're in there for a couple of years at least, maybe for the long I wouldn't say ideally for the long haul, but no one retires from a company anymore.
[00:17:20] Hana Jacover: But you're in there to do good work.
[00:17:22] Hana Jacover: And if you have a horrible relationship with your boss, that is going to impact everything, it's going to affect everything.
[00:17:28] Hana Jacover: And if your boss doesn't care about their employees and they only care about doing the work, they're not there, they're not shown up, they're not invested with you to resolve it.
[00:17:36] Jess: Yeah, and I do think too, I like to do a lot of systems thinking with my coaches because we have a tendency to place a lot of blame on individuals, right?
[00:17:50] Jess: And in some cases it's warranted, but in other cases it's like and we do this to ourselves too.
[00:17:55] Jess: We place blame on ourselves.
[00:17:57] Jess: And so it's like, zoom out.
[00:17:59] Jess: What are the difficult systems that you're navigating right now that may have an impact on this that you don't control?
[00:18:07] Jess: And so let's equalize some of where that blame may lay, even though, yes, you might not be able to control all of it, at least it takes some of that outside of yourself and say, as a system, as an industry, right, our industry, you could say that's a system.
[00:18:23] Addressing Leadership Development through Neuroscience

[00:18:23] Jess: What are we doing to help leaders develop right now?
[00:18:28] Jess: Not a lot.
[00:18:30] Jess: And this goes back to what you said too.
[00:18:31] Jess: Like, a lot of people who are really good at their jobs, they're really awesome individual contributors, and then they get promoted into manager positions.
[00:18:39] Jess: And only 10% of people actually naturally show leadership skills and qualities, and then only 20 more percent show additional abilities that could be nurtured into managerial skills, that could be nurtured into leadership skills.
[00:18:59] Jess: So there's like a sliver of people that are naturally good leaders and will show up that way.
[00:19:07] Jess: You have to be taught it is a skill.
[00:19:10] Jess: And I think a lot of people forget that and just think, yeah, I can shift right over.
[00:19:15] Jess: I've seen other people do it.
[00:19:17] Jess: I can do it too, when in reality, it is a skill.
[00:19:20] Jess: It is something that needs to be taught.
[00:19:22] Jess: And as a system, we also need to collectively change the way that we're thinking about leadership development and who we're promoting 100%.
[00:19:34] Hana Jacover: I almost always go back to personal antidotes, which has inherent bias in it just because it's like, my experience with it.
[00:19:44] Hana Jacover: I have a friend who has managed teams for almost a decade, and we were chatting a couple of weeks ago because they have an employee who's not performing well at all, and they're putting them on a Pip zoom.
[00:19:56] Hana Jacover: So they wanted feedback on some of the Pip language.
[00:19:58] Hana Jacover: And when I was talking to them, what did you say in their last performance review?
[00:20:02] Hana Jacover: Oh, we just do them once a year, and it was like a while ago.
[00:20:05] Hana Jacover: I don't know what I said.
[00:20:06] Hana Jacover: Do you give them feedback?
[00:20:07] Hana Jacover: Are you setting, like, how are you showing up to set this person up for success?
[00:20:13] Hana Jacover: And in talking through it, what came out is that they weren't they weren't clearly setting expectations for work.
[00:20:19] Hana Jacover: They weren't providing timely feedback.
[00:20:21] Hana Jacover: And so when they eventually did deliver the Pip, this person was shocked because they got no feedback at all.
[00:20:27] Hana Jacover: In that case, it's not your employee who's messing up.
[00:20:31] Hana Jacover: You have failed as a manager to show up properly for them.
[00:20:35] Hana Jacover: And it turned out that employee is neurodivergent and they need different accommodations at work in order to be set up for success.
[00:20:44] Hana Jacover: And that the manager had no clue because they never had a conversation where it would have been, like, sussed out the employee, never divulged it until after the Pip and they divulged HR.
[00:20:54] Hana Jacover: So you have this situation where a manager again.
[00:20:57] Hana Jacover: Decades of management experience, no training.
[00:20:59] Hana Jacover: No one's ever talked to them about it.
[00:21:01] Hana Jacover: No one's ever trained them on how to do it.
[00:21:02] Hana Jacover: And they've never been in a situation where they thought, maybe I'm doing this wrong and I should go seek outside resources to help me get better at doing it right until it blows up.
[00:21:11] Hana Jacover: And for that employee, that's probably a big T traumatizing experience for them just to get pipped out of nowhere, especially.
[00:21:18] Jess: If they're neurodivergent and there's multiple issues there, right?
[00:21:22] Jess: Like just the fact just thinking about neurodiversity and how neurodivergent individuals have to what they have to do to survive, right?
[00:21:34] Jess: Like in a workplace, I'm neurodivergent and that was a huge driving factor in me not being able to operate in the systems of a corporate world anymore and remove myself from that.
[00:21:45] Jess: And it's just because I couldn't find the accommodations that I needed.
[00:21:49] Jess: And yeah, it's super challenging, but yeah, on the manager side too.
[00:21:54] Jess: And I'll say this, like going back to just linking back to the neuroscience portion of this is we should all know if you're a leader.
[00:22:01] Jess: You should even know that when you say the word performance review, when you just say that word, the amygdala, like, what happens in the amygdala, just like fight or flight.
[00:22:13] Jess: Fight or flight.
[00:22:15] Jess: You've activated a response in that individual's brain where they are going to be dysregulated, right.
[00:22:22] Jess: Their nervous system is like, no, this is a situation where I feel there is a threat and I'm going to go into survival mode here and you stop processing new information, you cannot communicate clearly.
[00:22:35] Jess: So even just that word, like just saying we're going to have a performance review triggers that response.
[00:22:41] Jess: So learning language, that how can I communicate with my team and also work with their nervous system?
[00:22:50] Jess: Or at least create an environment where regulation and the ability to even co regulate in some instances is the norm.
[00:23:00] Jess: We're thinking about, okay, this type of language or these types of actions activate that response and we want to avoid them.
[00:23:09] Jess: If our goal is to cultivate growth and grow as a team, collaborate as a team, better communication, all of those great things, then understanding the brain and language and how it impacts trust.
[00:23:22] Jess: Things like trust, communication, belonging, those are very important things that the brain picks up on.
[00:23:28] Hana Jacover: Yeah.
[00:23:30] Hana Jacover: People I think, often undervalue the need for psychological safety in your team and work environment too.
[00:23:41] Jess: Absolutely.
[00:23:43] Hana Jacover: I've had employees in the past that are specifically coming to mind who had Add, who had come to me and told me because they were afraid that if the person that we reported into, if they found out, that they would be let go because that person had made comments that weren't great.
[00:24:02] Hana Jacover: I can understand how they would see that as a negative connotation of if I'm having challenges performing and taking care of all these little tiny details, which I know I suck at, that my job is at risk, instead of, hey, I'm not great at these tiny little details.
[00:24:18] Hana Jacover: What can we do to adjust that so I can be set up for success?
[00:24:21] Hana Jacover: And they had both been there quite a while and never shared it.
[00:24:27] Hana Jacover: And as their manager, it hurt me that they had been in a situation where they couldn't be their authentic true self and they couldn't share it because fear of repercussion.
[00:24:36] Hana Jacover: And I know that for both of them, they're five, six jobs into their working world.
[00:24:42] Hana Jacover: And so it's like, holy shit, that's a lot to carry with you.
[00:24:45] Hana Jacover: And it comes because they each had experiences where they had seen coworkers be terminated for performance, who operated similarly.
[00:24:56] Hana Jacover: And that is such a heavy thing to carry to every job and not be able to really talk about it.
[00:25:03] Hana Jacover: That's a lot.
[00:25:04] Hana Jacover: It makes me so as someone who's not neurodivergent, I feel like I can empathize, but I can't fully relate to it.
[00:25:11] Hana Jacover: But it makes me so sad that someone would operate in that world and it does so much damage and people don't care.
[00:25:19] Hana Jacover: I was going to ask, where do you think it starts?
[00:25:21] Hana Jacover: Is it managers speaking out and saying, hey, this is how I run my team.
[00:25:26] Hana Jacover: My team is high performing, other people should run teams like mine because businesses ultimately do care about revenue, like tie it into revenue.
[00:25:33] Hana Jacover: Or is it leadership saying, we're only going to hire people like this or we're going to invest in training to make our managers this way?
[00:25:41] Hana Jacover: Feels like there's so much to the system.
[00:25:44] Hana Jacover: Where does it start to make change?
[00:25:46] Jess: I think it has to be both.
[00:25:47] Jess: I think it's top down and bottoms up.
[00:25:49] Jess: I think it's one interesting thing.
[00:25:52] Jess: The International Coaching Federation has a really great study where they have noticed that millennials are the highest in terms of adopting coaching.
[00:26:03] Jess: So the millennials are like, yes, we want this.
[00:26:07] Jess: We want professional development and we're not getting it.
[00:26:09] Jess: We're not getting it from our employees, so we'll go get it ourselves.
[00:26:13] Jess: We'll use whatever stipends we have, whatever benefits we can squeeze out, we will use it.
[00:26:19] Jess: So I think it is that almost like kind of doing it yourself, right?
[00:26:24] Jess: Like where you can and investing in yourself, if that's possible for you.
[00:26:28] Jess: And I do think it's also very much the responsibility for leadership to set the tone and to reevaluate some of these things.
[00:26:36] Jess: I was at an organization where there was a quote unquote bad hire.
[00:26:40] Jess: And it was interesting, like just kind of observing that situation where and watching it evolve.
[00:26:45] Jess: And I worked with the individual and we made really great progress just because we were starting to understand the needs and how they worked and what the preferences were and just spending time and then building trust around that.
[00:27:00] Jess: And then leadership is still kind of watching all of this and not really seeing the value quick enough when in reality it's like they were also responsible for bringing that individual on board and what was the expectations missed there?
[00:27:18] Jess: They literally made the decision to bring that individual on board but there was a clear miss in expectations.
[00:27:25] Jess: So who is responsible for defining those expectations and for communicating those expectations and making sure everybody understands is on the same page?
[00:27:34] Jess: And I think same goes for development programs is what are you doing to foster and nurture your future leadership and your current leadership?
[00:27:46] Jess: Who's in charge of hiring?
[00:27:48] Jess: Who's in charge of promoting?
[00:27:49] Jess: Because today we just sometimes very haphazardly throw different people on the committees and they may not be the best people to suss out, hey, is this person a good leader?
[00:28:03] Jess: Do they have leadership skills and qualities that can evolve and help us grow as a company?
[00:28:10] Jess: So I think it is very much like bottoms up, tops down approach.
[00:28:15] Jess: Isn't what's needed.
[00:28:17] Balancing Culture and Growth in Business

[00:28:17] Hana Jacover: Well, even in the interview panel coaching to look for those things, it seems like as companies oftentimes they hire to fill roles versus hiring to fill a team and to bring on people who are going to fit into I heard the phrase once, it wasn't like I think the phrase was like a cultural ad.
[00:28:41] Hana Jacover: So not someone who's a culture fit but someone who's a culture ad that brings also like unique perspective or another vantage point to the table and thinking about how you're structuring the whole team and the organization.
[00:28:51] Hana Jacover: Not just like, looking for someone to do work to get to an end goal.
[00:28:55] Hana Jacover: And there are still companies that think about people as resources to get them to that end goal, versus you're investing in building a team and setting everyone up for success and being open and acknowledging that you need to give back to your employees.
[00:29:13] Hana Jacover: I fear through the recession that the first program budgets to get cut are learning and development, too, and coaching with it, which just puts us in a worse situation, because now you have employees that are potentially coming in.
[00:29:26] Hana Jacover: From being laid off at their last role or having a couple layoffs, because this has been going on for a while, and so they're coming in with some trauma, and then you're putting them into a situation where maybe they're not going to be set up for success.
[00:29:39] Hana Jacover: We're part to a manager who is an individual contributor who doesn't know how to manage.
[00:29:44] Hana Jacover: It's just a recipe for disaster.
[00:29:46] Jess: Yeah.
[00:29:47] Jess: And we're seeing that, we're seeing learning and development teams being cut back, their budget being cut back, the teams themselves being laid off as kind of like the first ones to go.
[00:29:59] Jess: But what we're also seeing is an increase in internal coaching.
[00:30:04] Jess: So companies are recognizing that it's important.
[00:30:08] Jess: And I think sometimes what we also conflate I guess is the learning and development teams.
[00:30:15] Hana Jacover: It's about.
[00:30:16] Jess: Kind of like that collective.
[00:30:17] Jess: Like as a collective, how are we nurturing the team?
[00:30:21] Jess: What are we doing to provide these opportunities?
[00:30:24] Jess: And very rarely does that often incorporate one on one coaching.
[00:30:30] Jess: And that is where the development of a leader happens.
[00:30:36] Jess: You can go to all the trainings in the world, all the group workshops and all of that stuff, which I'm a big proponent of in the right setting and the right modality.
[00:30:46] Jess: But I think that you have to develop yourself as a leader first.
[00:30:51] Jess: And that involves some hardcore one on one work.
[00:30:56] Jess: So you can see so you can zoom out and you can see everything in front of you and really work through that and really kind of come to your own design, your own solutions on how best to move.
[00:31:10] Jess: Forward or how best to communicate or how best to achieve a goal that's not going to happen in a group workshop or like, a team training.
[00:31:19] Jess: You know what I mean?
[00:31:20] Hana Jacover: Yeah.
[00:31:21] Hana Jacover: There is a great book I read called Reboot.
[00:31:24] Hana Jacover: I cannot remember the author.
[00:31:25] Jess: Yes, I think I have it back there somewhere.
[00:31:27] Hana Jacover: Yeah, I love books that dive into kind of the cognitive engineering side of why we do what we do on it.
[00:31:37] Hana Jacover: And I was expecting a nice read book and I listened to audiobooks and I was driving and I think he was like three or four sentences in and I start crying because he was like, the leaders of today are just like the broken children of yesterday.
[00:31:55] Hana Jacover: And when your executive is screaming at you, it's because their mother is just going into this example and I just start crying.
[00:32:05] Hana Jacover: But he talks about how a lot of times how we show up in work is a reflection of what we've been through.
[00:32:11] Hana Jacover: It all kind of builds as a person.
[00:32:13] Hana Jacover: And so to be a really effective leader, you often need to work through your child with a trauma and heal from a lot of it.
[00:32:20] Hana Jacover: And I'm going to throw work traumas in there too, because that stuff is sometimes on par worse than non work traumas for a lot of people.
[00:32:31] Jess: Yeah.
[00:32:32] Jess: Our external is a reflection, right?
[00:32:35] Jess: It's a reflection of what's going on inside of us.
[00:32:39] Jess: And if you have traumas, if you have things that you've chosen to just stuff deep down in there and not deal with it, it's going to show up.
[00:32:49] Jess: It's going to show up and you're going to sit there and you're going to wonder, why can't I move past this?
[00:32:54] Jess: Why is this so challenging?
[00:32:55] Jess: Why does this keep happening?
[00:32:56] Jess: And guarantee you there is a deeply rooted issue there that you've got to work through.
[00:33:03] Hana Jacover: Yeah.
[00:33:04] The Importance of Self-Acquaintance in Aspiring Leaders

[00:33:04] Hana Jacover: So for wrapping it all together, for people who are emerging, leaders on the leadership track want to become leaders someday, it sounds like starting point is learn yourself, learn where you're at.
[00:33:19] Hana Jacover: Can you share again the name of.
[00:33:21] Jess: The adult development oh, yeah, it's Keegan's adult development theory.
[00:33:26] Hana Jacover: Yeah, I'm going to Google that after this call.
[00:33:29] Jess: Yes, it's a really great framework.
[00:33:33] Jess: And again, I would also say there so I went to an evidence based coaching program, which is amazing because we learn theories and models and things that are backed by a lot of research and science, neuroscience in some cases, too.
[00:33:51] Jess: And at the same time, theories are meant to be proven wrong, right?
[00:33:55] Jess: Theories are meant to be disproven.
[00:33:57] Jess: That's the whole point of a theory.
[00:33:59] Jess: And so when I look at the adult development theory, I also look at it through the neurodivergent lens of there are some individuals that may not have the ability to actually see these things.
[00:34:12] Jess: Their brain will not let them.
[00:34:14] Jess: So that's the other thing that I'll say about any theory that I throw out there to anybody is I always think of it from that context of does it work for you and your specific context, does it work for a neurodivergent individual?
[00:34:29] Jess: Does it work for a BIPOC individual considering everything else?
[00:34:33] Jess: Because it may not.
[00:34:34] Jess: There may be some things in there that are like no.
[00:34:38] Jess: So I think using the theories, using the evidence as like, yeah, like a good framework, a good place to kind of get things going and then considering all of those external factors and the systems and things that are actually possible versus not.
[00:34:53] Hana Jacover: Awesome.
[00:34:54] Hana Jacover: Well, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:34:56] Hana Jacover: It's really such a great conversation.
[00:34:58] Hana Jacover: We'll link in the show notes below, links out to your coaching resources, the book I mentioned that I may have messed the name up, of link it all below.
[00:35:10] Hana Jacover: And Hannah, thank you for joining.
[00:35:12] Hana Jacover: And we'll see everyone on the next episode.
[00:35:14] Jess: Thank you for having me.