How did you get started?
A 30-year successful, miserable career.
OK.
So yeah, I've had a few different chapters
in my career.
The threads that have always connected,
I started working in early online communication
in the mid-'90s.
So it was very early internet.
And thank goodness, because that taught me
how to find communities of belonging,
how to foster community.
I was doing that back in the Usenet and Telnet days,
like Telnet VBSs.
And so that's really where this all started.
I went from working in technology
into a career in law.
I became a lawyer and practiced law for a while.
I loved the kind of counseling part of lawyering.
I didn't have the skills at the time
to manage my anxiety and imposter syndrome
around courtroom practice, which I did a lot of courtroom
practice, but it was at a really high personal expense.
So moved from there into work that fit me better.
I worked in creative agencies as a strategist for a few years.
That was where the foundations for this chapter were built,
working in super subjective environments
where opinion and ideas rule the day.
And I just saw a need for less biased, more objective,
more empirical, data-based ways of operating in all spaces,
including creative spaces.
And that personal experience laid the foundation
for the work I do today.
That is awesome.
That actually sounded really beautiful.
You said in the 30 years, I mean,
there's some good experiences and some learning experiences
and some not so good, but it led you to where you are today
and having a strategic plan and how
to help the people that you choose to help.
When it comes to all of this, tell me about your vision.
Yeah, my vision is a world of work where no one's suffering.
It's bigger than that because I want a world of work
where everyone is living their potential
and making the impact that changes our systems
that they want to make.
Like I said, I work a lot with neurodivergent people.
I think some of the big solutions
to problems in our society, the solutions
are going to come from people who not only think differently
but who are actually wired differently.
And so for me, autistic people are really underemployed.
Folks who are neurodivergent struggle in the workplace.
We're not always nurtured to become the career people
that we're capable of.
And my vision is that the tools that I work with,
the practices I work with, and the way that I do the work,
and expanding out.
I train coaches.
The book is getting out there, so more people
have access to this, these thoughts and these ways
of working and these ideas.
My vision is that no one suffers at work.
And we all have the tools we need
to build successful, rewarding careers.
Yeah.
In the 30 years, I hate to keep mentioning that,
but you're beautiful and you don't look like 30 years
of anything.
How have you seen things change?
This is big.
That's a good question.
Yeah, so I think I entered the workforce
in 1992.
I had two years of high school left, so I started early.
And it's hard to separate the macro from the micro.
My experience of my early career was
it was like I was an animal with antenna just trying
to understand the work world.
Trying to mind read my bosses.
Nothing was clear.
Client expectations were always, they'd say one thing,
and then a couple of days later, I'd deliver that,
and they'd be like, oh, no, that wasn't what I meant.
So I would really say up until as late as 2016,
so about eight years ago, I just thought that work
was trying to mind read.
And so as a strategist, I've got really high pattern
recognition.
I'm a really good researcher.
I was able to put together, and then the skills
I learned in law school, again, all of that kind of assembled
together to be able to work within workplaces,
even though it was with that totally external kind
of antenna approach.
And it was in 2016 I started.
I got really burned out.
I was leading people.
I was sitting at an executive level,
so I was managing relationships with the C-suite
and really big clients and leading a team of people.
And I realized I don't know that I've ever
set a goal for myself that I care about.
I've just opportunity to opportunity to opportunity
to opportunity in my career.
And so that was when I started experimenting
with self-set goals that I actually cared about.
And that led to here.
So that's the micro.
The macro is, I think, early in my career,
I was really deferential to power
and didn't recognize my own privilege,
didn't recognize the role that privilege pays in the workplace.
And so many of us have had learning journeys on that front
and come to understand those dynamics differently.
So the activism I work with now, if I
had tried to work with this activism early in my career,
I would have never worked.
Yeah, push back at its biggest.
Yes, exactly.
Where now it's not everywhere that we have this freedom,
but there are places where those of us who are more activist
can embed and make a difference where change really
has to happen, where human impacts, like most
of my clients are focused on revenue, yes,
but we improve our revenue by improving human experiences,
which that's really tough.
And so now there's, I think, in some spaces,
there's more acceptance of dissent
and more acceptance of we don't just talk about change.
We have to do hard things and navigate hard feelings
and give up power in order to make things change.
And I tell you, that's a perfect example
that when it's your time, it's your time.
We're often trying to lead the journey and make it our own.
But as you mentioned, in the 90s, late 90s,
it would not have played out to be anything like it is today.
And so also learning experiences, right?
And all these things that you went through
or had to go through, good, bad, ugly, happy, led you to here.
And I tell you, when I think about it,
I just get goose bumps because we often
want something quickly, right?
I still feel like this is the microwave generation.
Put it in a microwave, make it happen,
make it happen right now.
And I think when I come on here to VisionPros Live
and I speak with individuals and leaders like yourself,
this isn't microwave.
This isn't microwavable.
This is like, as we talked about earlier, cooking.
This is like oven set on like 100.
Low.
Low and low.
Yeah.
Low and low.
And I really love that because now it
sounds like you found your passion as well, too.
Yeah, I mean, improving the workplace
has always been my passion.
Like I just think back about how my entire career led me
to what I do right now.
I also knew in 2001 during the first part of my technology
career that I wanted to be a career coach.
Like I knew that far back.
And I became a labor and employment attorney instead.
And so it's been a long journey of self-acceptance
of my self-knowledge.
And then the chapter that I'm in right now literally
in the last couple of weeks is shifting
from more corporate positioning that's
about improving performance to telling the truth about who
I do this for and my own neurodivergence
and the role that's played in my work
and in evolving the practices that I work with.
And it's really scary.
Every voice in my head my whole life, my conditioning,
has said stay in the background.
Be seen, not heard.
It's not safe.
So there's all those voices.
And at a certain point, if I listen to those,
and I've listened to those voices for 30 years,
and that's kept me a very effective number two player,
like a very effective behind the scenes chief of staff,
speechwriter, campaign manager.
And it's really scary to step into the number one spot.
But I don't know how to do it anymore unless I do that.
Like I don't have it in me to stay in that box.
And so it's scary to make that step into being like, ta-da.
Here's what we're really, Trojan horse.
Here's what we're really doing here.
But it was really the book, the You Are a Strategist book
that made that pivot.
I knew when that book went from being a how to guide about OKRs
to becoming a love letter to neurodivergent people
and square pegs in the workplace.
I knew that was the shift that I was going to have to make.
And so now I'm making it.
And it took me back to, I don't know who it is or who said it,
but it says do something that scares you every day.
So you're doing it every day.
And I think that that is the best way.
And so many people are scared to jump because they're
scared to fly, I mean to fall.
But what if you literally, what if actually there's a landing
and you just thought it was a big dip.
And so now you're flying with this.
And speaking of leaders, how can leaders
better unlock the potential of neurodivergent
and unconventional professional?
I'm so glad you asked that because it
is really incredibly simple.
There's a lot more behind it.
But neurodivergent team members just
need consistent information and objective information
that is able to be digested and understood.
So every person has a different threshold
for how much information they need to feel confident
to go get to work.
Some people have a really low threshold.
They're like, I'll figure it out.
But a lot of people who are neurodivergent,
partly because we've been beaten up for our performance
our whole lives, want all the information
so that then we feel safe and we understand
what's expected in order to get to work.
And the practices that I work with around setting objectives
and identifying empirically measurable key results,
so key results that are not subject to bias,
they're just fact based.
They're like, what are the truths
about what's important for us to try to achieve together?
It's not a magic bullet.
But just enunciating those two goal types
closes the information gap hugely, hugely for people.
And so there's more to it.
But that, I'd say, just enunciating actual key results
that requires us to make some decisions
and get aligned together about a few key questions,
like are these committed?
Are these stretch?
Are we safe to fail?
Are we not?
And so some of those things that lead to ambiguity
and to the moving goal posts and even gas lighting
in the workplace that disproportionately
affect neurodivergent people, OKR's
done in the way that I work with them,
is like insurance against all of that.
It's just a paper trail that both communicates
your expectations.
And the good thing is, for leaders, it benefits everyone.
It's especially helpful for neurodivergent reports,
but it benefits everyone.
Yeah.
Well, and that's definitely good to know,
because I would love to know the questions.
Because our leader is not asking the right questions.
Like you were saying, you have to maybe sometimes overly
define or figure out.
But I think it's also, Sarah, if I'm not mistaken,
it's just about conversation and being human and talking
and listening more than you do talk to finding out
the need of the individual and then creating an expectation
and meeting the goals that are set together
and not just with the expectations of the leader.
Yeah.
Yeah, I see OKR's, it's a starting place.
We go from a situation where leaders
think they're being clear, but really they're
being clear as mud to the people who have to implement,
including their neurotypical reports.
If leaders take that one extra step to have that,
I call it the alignment layer, to create objectives
and key results in that alignment layer,
then those are created.
They can be created through conversations.
Leaders can write them on their own,
but if leaders write them on their own,
then they align them with their reports.
So it's just wild how many books get written,
how many people are there, and incredible experts
in the field of OKRs.
And it's really just so simple.
It's such a simple practice.
The behavior and the feelings and the systems
can be quite challenging.
But what's important, why does it matter?
And when we say success, what do we mean measurably?
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.