[00:00:00] Rosie: This is Show up as a leader, a show from People Forward Network, helping you maximize your positive impact on the world by becoming your best, fully authentic self.

Hey everyone. So if you happen to be listening and you identify as a female, you are gonna love some of the conversation that I had with Laura Rayak as we talk about moving away from mean girls stuff and really what does it mean to support one another as women and so much more. But I will get into that in a moment.

And if you are not, or don't identify as a female, but you. Women who identify as a female, this will also benefit you because there's a lot in this. When we think about women in the workplace, when we think about embracing our feminine qualities, there's just lots of good richness in this conversation. So if you're not familiar with who Laura is, she is an executive search professional who is the principal and owner of Reac executive Search, she's been doing this a long time.

Specializes with C-Suite, and board of directors position, and really about finding the right person, right seat, and really looking at the quality of leadership. And so just to give you some preview of some of the things that we talked about, we talk about. Something moving from, considering that there's a glass ceiling to actually being stuck in what she calls the sticky floor and really how we get in our own way.

We talk about that leadership is really about followship and are we paying attention to that and creating space for that. she talks about. recognizing that so many of us are really have scared children on the inside and we're showing up as this child version of ourself and how do we nurture that?

And really, she talks about a really critical difference of mentorship versus sponsorship. So I think there's a lot of little bites of wisdom and nuggets that I think will be helpful here and would love to know what you think.

Laura, I am super excited to be having this long overdue conversation and we're gonna talk about diversity,

People's awareness that diversity matters, that inclusion matters, that belonging matters. A lot of people are stuck of, well, what does that mean? And how do we actually move from like a check the box to what does that actually mean to have environments and teams that truly are inclusive, that truly are diverse, and how does that look in business practices?

And so say a little bit more about how you view it and what you've been doing to help teams and organizations move from great idea to practic.

[00:02:48] Laura Raynak: it starts with, understanding that we have a natural tendency towards bias. And so it's kinda like you have to check your bias at the door when you come to work. You have to understand what they are. and then you have to be able to check them when you're talking to other people.

And then you have to understand that people approach problems and, ways of communicating and handling conflict in different ways. And that is also part of, the work environment and bringing people together and just understanding those differences in building bridges. The biggest thing we have to keep in mind is that everybody's trying their very best every day, even though it doesn't look like what we would consider our the very best every day, and we have to encourage that.

And the overall arching thing is, I think we just have to align our teams to understanding that if you wanna go fast, you can go by yourself, but if you wanna go as a. , you go together. So you have to be inclusive, you have to bring people along with you. it's part of being very successful

[00:03:53] Rosie: I wanna piggyback on that because. Something you said when we met in preparation for thisyou said, if you wanna go fast, go alone, and if you wanna go further, go together. And I think sometimes there's this like everyone out for themselves type of thing. So how do you help teams really embrace that go together,

If we're gonna go further that it's not always about fast. because FAST doesn't necessarily have impact or fast isn't necessarily effective. Fast is fast. But how do you shift that mindset from fast to further and to impact?

[00:04:25] Laura Raynak: I think you have to remind everyone that we're all playing on the same team and you have to be very clear and succinct in your goals for that team or for each project So everybody has the goal for the project that you're working on at the moment

And then you have to understand that everybody has a key role and that they are important. you have to help your team members feel like they are individually each important to the project and how each role is integrated into the other roles and how we sort of interdependent on each other to get things done.

so it becomes a matter of, well, if I don't do this, it doesn't mean that I'm the only one I'm letting down. If I don't get this done, the team is getting let down and we can't. Our projects further, and we can't get to where we want to go. And then just getting alignment around, values around communicating how we're gonna communicate with each other, the tone we're gonna use when we communicate with each other, and then, for leaders, really taking a strong stance and nipping that, unproductive and unconstructive behavior in the butt, and not allowing that, like really just saying, Hey, , what you said in that meeting was inappropriate.

We need to address it. Please don't let it happen again. And if it does, there's a consequence. So people understand. They start to understand that you're building a communication and team system where people are, basically encouraged to collaborate. There's consequences if you don't, and. To understand that they're all in it together.

But back to this checking bias at the door, I think we all have sort of this inherent way of thinking that person's different than me. So it's because they're different, they're wrong or they're bad, or they're out to get me. And this inherent bias is part of our evolutions as humans, for us to survive in our tribal.

you know, as we grew together, there was stranger danger. The stranger could be taking our resources, the stranger could be, out to get us, the last couple of years in particular for people, very stressful. we had Covid in 2020, which created a lot of economic stress and we all had to learn how to work differently together.