Can Authenticity Drive Workplace Culture? Insights from Sunny Myers

welcome to ask Ashley the podcast where we shine a light on the unsung heroes of the workplace I'm your host Ashley Russo financial AI board member thought leader and wealth management advisor each week we sit down with inspiring leaders exploring their journeys motivations and the real challenges they face from job insecurity to the evolving role of AI in a world where many feel overlooked these guests are building hope and connection for their colleagues join us as we uncover their stories and discover how they're making a difference one conversation at a time hello everybody I am sitting here with the incredible sunny I think everyone is gonna enjoy hearing from her her unique perspective her view on the world and life sunny would you introduce yourself to everyone awesome hey Ashley thank you thank you so much for having me my name is Sunny Myers my pronouns are she her I'm a proud member of the Lumbee and Saponi tribes of North Carolina I I currently reside in Raleigh Durham area North Carolina of the original um unceded territory of the TESCORA in Indian I am a mama bear of 4 adoptive kiddos a partner to Isaac um for my day job I am a senior manager for employee experience belong being um at fastly and really my heart work is as a community builder so I'm a founder and lead the strategy for the Auntie Tech Collective um which is um a space for indigenous women two spirit non binary and girls um in technology specifically as well as another other community work I'm just very thankful to be able to do that and be supported to do that and I'm a fried bread lover I love some really really good earrings um I am actually an engineer by trade so I'm total a nerd and a data geek so that comes up often where people are kind of caught off guard I have way more street cred in the engineering side and technical side than I do on the a dark side of human resources but it's kind of it sneaks up every now and then which is the way that my brain thinks which I do think is a unique superpower now and I do love a good sneaker collection I have a number I won't even name of sneakers but yeah they bring me joy and so between those are my earrings that's kind of advice so you can just tell we're gonna have so much fun today and for those who can't see obviously the earrings are fabulous they're pink they're gold they're long they're actually horse here so wow fabulous yeah fabulous well you have a unique path obviously moving from a highly technical role as an engineer to people focused so can you walk us through what motivated that type of transition and what are some of the key turning points that defined that move your career oh yeah if you would have asked me you know 15 years ago would I be on the human resources side I would say absolutely not I didn't even know what a path into HR was you know I have always been a math nerd I hate actually reading and so I just like to be in the numbers and to to kind of have my brain just process things and to build things and so just knowing that I was always had always have been in stem I also I actually thought I was gonna go to school or I did go to school for forensic science um and then through a chemistry minor I was like I actually hate this um and so I went to my advisor who um LED me into engineering and we were looking at engineering I looked at the salaries electrical engineering paid really well and I was like I'll go do that and so little did I know that was one of the hardest engineering degrees to get which is not the most especially for the least amount of women in that space especially women of color but some crazy thing with these things you couldn't see I was able to understand and articulate um I think through my mouth foundations and so I graduated with an engineering degree and then went shortly after straight into industry I was working for the dot in North Carolina as um fiber um optics designer engineer then I moved into building design and the m E P side and then I went to lighting and kind of a start up in in a large organization and then I was tapped to ask to build the first uh 8 inch semiconductor factory or fab in North America and so I didn't really remember much about some conductors except what I Learned in school which was a while ago from then and I said yes so I kept saying yes to those things and when I was doing that work at Wolfspeed I was also doing a lot of the front end work of um recruiting for our early talent pipeline I wanted to look around and see more folks like myself because I was the only indigenous woman engineer one of the only women of color engineers definitely the only woman period on my team and I just wanted to leave it better than I found it heavily involved with starting and sustaining our employee resource groups which were not a really big well known thing at the time um and then just really trying to change the workforce for for the better so that like you know I could have a better experience but others who came after me I could as well and using my voice and advocacy my also having really great sponsors and executive leadership who believed in me and so I really started kind of doing this work on the back end that didn't really have a title for this work and somewhere along the line Amazon saw me doing this work and said come do this for us full time and I almost crap my pants because I was so scared to leave a technical role in this really cool project and my manager was just like you can always come back to this space I will hire you immediately and he was the CEO at the time he was like but I cannot think of anybody better to go do this work than you and so he kind of kicked me out to go do it and I said yes to Amazon from Amazon I was at Palato Network doing the the work so through 2020 and into the later or early 2020s and then um left Palantir Network and uh had a short stint at a non profit as their chief operating officer just to kind of um internally clean up some things that they needed support with and then I knew I wanted to go back into tech I am a wild woman I guess to say this is where I want to be um and so I landed it fastly where I am now wow wow that's the journey that's OK so I have to ask this especially with what you shared there what are some of the experiences or challenges that inform what you do now in leadership and being an advocate yeah I think it's about we can do really hard technical things and we can be human focused and so I think like a lot of leaders were taught it's like one or the other or they were gonna sacrifice their humanity for their technical drive or their innovation and I think it's pivotal to be hand in hand and lockstep and if you sacrifice one for the other it's just not in balance and I think like seeing that standard be met of some of the best leaders that I've seen and also see where it wasn't being met and the you know they thought they were driving high performance you know and high powered teams but they were really just making people walk out the door and not want to do the work and so kind of just looking at leaders who really got it right and seeing what their leadership values were um also knowing a lot of our experiences were systemic issues and processes and understanding the data how do we look at this you can say that somebody feels this way which is really qualitative but when you look at the numbers around that when you look at the statistics around under representation in these areas like they're the data doesn't lie and so looking at the intersectionality of qualitative data with quantitative data I said if you can if you can spot check where that that both align that's where your core problems are and so just understanding where to really triple click down was really helpful because I wouldn't just show up and say I feel like we should do this or I think I'm hearing this it was really like here's what the data says here's what the people are saying and the like the the backup with the comments right or the input and then here's where I think um just very solutions minded and here's where I think we can go and how what we could do and also there wasn't a playbook for all of this right some of this was trial and error some of it was piloting you know you don't always we didn't know if some things were gonna work and that's okay I mean some of the greatest organizations and inventions that we've seen they didn't think it was gonna work they didn't know it was gonna work and so I just think it was just the the flexibility and the courage to say that out loud and then also minimizing your risk like if it doesn't work how long will it take when will we know what's our key indicators ultimately this work is also just good business practices everything we do is from a business mindset and embedded like with the business but also taking our business acumen and applying it to this work and I think you know on the flip side that's where I think some of this kind of got lost and I think as we look at the systems and our approaches we can be more operational and process driven in that and that's the sustainability of this work in my belief for the long term hmm I think this so this leads me to a a hot button question with all of that it sounds like obviously you're using um the data to help drive decisions that also have emotion tied to them right but in a moment like this where you know inclusion diversity topics community building it can be polarizing it can be politicized right how do you approach that at fastly how are you dealing with that yeah um one of our leaders always has a term where he's like keep fastly weird and at first I was like I don't understand it now I completely understand it fastly is really quirky in the most beautiful way um fastlians are loud and proud and fiercely protective of our organization but really our culture it's really hard to describe in kind of one sentence or a couple sentences they're really protective of our values but I also believe that they hold people accountable even at the highest levels of leadership accountable to those values and so I think that that's where you um where you see that the sustainability of the culture is when you are pressure tested and right now we are being pressure tested more than ever um our organization has had every opportunity to to be out of this work to to not be focused on this work and I think what's beautiful is it's where we've actually reinvested in this work where we've elevated this work where we said no we're in we're in this space I also think you know the pendulum swinging on you know one side very far and it's also swing swung on the other side very far and so I think now that we're seeing this swing it ultimately the arc of justice right always always wins I believe and so um I think seeing that you know at some point we come back around and seeing the companies that stay true to the word and stay true to their values'cause it's not just because our CEO believes or this or our executive leadership team it's literally who we are as an organization and embedded into what we do does this work look vastly different now absolutely yes is the work continuing to move forward absolutely yes we've just had to you know adjust what this looks like and we've embedded embedded a lot of this into an overarching employee experience right it does not based on your identity it's really based on you know do you feel like you belong when you come to work do you feel valued do you feel you can do your best work in the business do you feel like you can speak up in a room even when everybody's saying something opposite it's like the core values of being a good human and being a human that we all you know we all want to work beside and everybody holding each other accountable to that because I feel like when you can do that is when you can come up and thrive and I think that's where we get the best of of you which then results in high performing teams which then results in more you know organizational innovation um it's really like the secret sauce is that is that culture people want to people wanna be at fastly we have a long tenure and I just didn't get it at first I was like I don't understand this this is weird or these chats are fire people wow they said that and now I totally get that they feel empowered and seen to say that and so it's definitely quirky but it's it's beautifully quirky and I honestly wouldn't change anything about it so I have a question based off that that you seem you seem dedicated to the culture and the culture seems dedicated to itself which is beautiful right that creates a really good environment how do you handle the challenges of the environment that have to come to you that you have to be the you know the forefront too to then protect this beautiful culture right it's not just smooth waters I imagine you're likely actively protecting this beautiful space how do you handle that as a human how does that affect you personally yeah I feel like when I was entering this work I didn't understand the mental load this work and the emotional load this work would have on me I think I was extremely naive to that in fact coming from a technical space and pressure testing like how technical you are how smart how could you pivot how could you solve really hard problems but all from a technical lens and then I happened to have this people centric focus so I feel like I like had made all that work but then leaving this technical space and also using my technical ability in these spaces like I can create a process like no other I can ops anything I have seen I'm like oh that is this great I'll build it they're like what I was like oh yeah like I can just and they're like wow I was like yeah don't mess around with my spreadsheets like I you know I I love to be able to build but the emotional and um the mental load in this work was completely it was complete I was not ready for that and so I remember going to my therapist thank goodness for therapist Whoo in the world of AI uh therapists are more needed now than ever and I went to her and she said sunny if I you have to care for yourself and if I showed up today and I didn't care for myself if I didn't have high emotional like EQ right if I was coming to the space drained you would not be getting what you need out of me right now so and so you have to shift your mindset in order to be the best right in this role that also means that you have to center your own well being in order to do that and I it was just a pivotal moment of like I don't want my therapist that like you know depleted right I need her at that level so I can also get what I need to get and so I think it was a responsibility to this work means that I have to have a responsibility to myself and my well being so grounding looks different for everybody I had some amazing um coaches and friends and just folks who I've Learned from um it doesn't look the same like what fills my cup up doesn't fill your cup up Ashley and so just understanding what that is I spend a lot of time my free time and community yes sometimes it's challenging but it also fills my cup up right that give back cycle the 7 generations mindset really keeps me going I also ground myself and prepare myself for challenging conversations um I a lot you can see probably back there my smudging I smudge a lot I have a practice where if a conversation didn't go well but I don't need to own how the other person showed up they just didn't show up well I wash my hands immediately like I actually physically get up and go wash my hands so like I'm reflecting that that's on them like I might need to give them feedback but that was not on me um I think I have high discernment of what's mine to own and carry forward and with me and what is mine to leave behind my responsibility is literally not to solve all the world's problems I will die trying and so just understanding what problems are my responsibility also how can I still think big and try to solve maybe things that are outside of my realm but I cannot exhaust myself trying to solve the world's problems I have to kind of focus around what my what this area is and where my impact can be felt and so just that discernment the adjustment um I often take my shoes off and like my neighbors probably think I'm crazy but I just go stand in my front yard and ground myself I look up to the sun even if it's for five minutes and I do that prior to a challenging conversation I use a lot of friends as as coaches to say here's how I wanna frame this how do how do you think this would be received super thoughtful about intentional conversations I remove what I want to get across and focus it on more how the other person might receive when I'm trying to get across I would love to also say I practice this all the time and I don't I'm a human I have emotions I try as I get older and more wiser um I try to practice it more um and being really intentional but I don't always get it right and I don't always show up well but I know where that accountability lives now and what I need to do better and those like physical mental and emotional processes and practices really help me move through this work and the leader that I am today is not the same leader I was three years ago and it was because I've been really intentional about the way that I show up in my day to day work that doesn't mean that it's not hard that doesn't mean that I don't want to tell somebody off and take my earrings off sometimes and just give it to him but like I often think about the outcome I'm trying to achieve first before the reaction and so that's really been helpful I think what's so there's so many takeaways in what you just said so so so many takeaways what's interesting for people to hear one is you're human often we would hear something like what you're saying which sounds so aspirational I I wanna be like this I wanna do this I wanna be this incredible human who can realize to get the energy off her and not necessarily take it in but I love what you called out there which is it's not perfect all the time so that's okay we also don't need to put that on ourselves you're human too so thank you for calling that out the idea of not taking on things that we don't need to take on so we free it more space within ourselves to accept the good things too those are all just such beautiful call outs I have to ask as as a mom myself so in terms of practicing this with kiddos in terms of kiddos impacting your practice informing it even I'm just so curious to ask asking for a friend what's what's the the experience there yeah so I parent extremes right now so I have two 18 year old seniors about to graduate and then I have two littles both of the Littles have disabilities and so the parenting looks vastly different parenting our twins they're just such brilliant amazing humans who are a gift to the world and also I'm their parent not their best friend I have enjoyed going into seasons of life where we have better connection like some of my favorite moments are late night when they come home where we're just sitting around and laughing in the kitchen silliness listening to music that we can't play when the littles are awake I I love this like adult parent season we're in um and I think I've just used this word multiple times already but looking at things as seasons not forever has really helped me I mean there are days and even more lately that I have just felt depleted and defeated and just straight up just I'm a crier um and so I've cried and I really think like we didn't get here overnight with the twins and so recognizing that we really were in the trenches especially parenting adopted kiddos or you don't have a playbook and so learning as kind of we go with them but as we look at the littles um you know just recognizing that because of their disabilities I think number one first of all getting support though we are very fortunate fastly to have great benefits and so I've really leaned in the benefits and getting answers getting multiple levels of support from professionals has been just honestly I felt like really gaslit for a while I was gaslighting myself with like what's going on and so just to have that reassurance of like this parenting might look different but it is actually the best parenting techniques for your kids I think also when I'm not getting it right being held accountable or being guided from the professionals who you know are experts in this area and then having somebody just to listen to you when you're parenting special needs kids you feel really alone there's a lot of honestly resentment where I look at other families and I'm like oh my goodness they can just travel it's so easy they're not having a breakdown they don't have to consider going to IEP meetings and psychological meetings and psychiatrist and all of these things it's just so much again like I love that I work remotely have a lot of flexibility to go to my kids appointments I was in a 4 hour IEP meeting yesterday so just also having a really compassionate leader a manager who knows that and I can share that I can block my calendar about it and knowing that I'm gonna be drained from that but feeling I also have the capacity and support to go through those and then yeah recognizing that there's a lot of areas in my life that are just pulling from me and so that means that I need to find areas of respite um that means honestly going to the beach spending time in the sand in the water that's restoration girls night out is one of my favorite things even though I'm like oh I gotta put on real pants you know I still you know it's a whole thing I I like listen I love the work from home life and not having to put on real pants and so you know what does that look like I also think like sometimes it's having girlfriends come over and just having a porch wine night and just kind of unloading sometimes it looks like it's calling my best friend and having a virtual wine and just kind of being there for each other my one favorite restoration technique is the memes right now they just give me so much life I have a like multiple friend groups that like or folks that I'm just really close with and like we just send memes we don't even have to say anything we just send memes back and forth to each other and I feel like I feel seen they're so funny my friends are really funny but like it just helps resonate that we're all going through a lot I'm peri menopause so the peri menopause means are just giving me life so just knowing that like there is relation there that there is community and that this is a season that that just looks vastly different I'm not going away on this week long girls weekend you know for a number of reasons but I am finding respite in the small spaces that are definitely resetting that soul so that I can be there my best self for the kids the other thing I think with parenting for me is I have not got it right I look back at my parents and I never have want to have resentment for them for things that they didn't they didn't have the tools and they weren't equipped for and so I don't want my kids to get older and resent us because we didn't literally have the tools or we weren't equipped for these things so just giving my own like self Grace of like as we as there's education about parenting you know children with special needs and adoptive parenting and what that looks like like we're learning and then repairing the harm when we didn't get it right I think of just going to our kids being really transparent saying like I messed up here like you know I'm learning and just asking for their Grace and forgiveness in that space and leading with that humility is modeling who I want them to be as as parents humans but then as if they become parents cause I don't ever want to put that pressure on them um you know they also can see that they could ask for Grace and forgiveness and have um hopefully they give their own self that space and Grace too you know what I I just appreciate myself and I know that others will appreciate hearing what you just said you're a leader you're a highly accomplished individual and you're vulnerable and you're real and there are things that bring you joy there are things that are tough just being so genuinely real and honest it's refreshing right it's not the Instagram filter truly yeah I definitely don't have that yeah in fact my kids will be like oh you're pretty real real yeah I don't I have never had that probably to a fault sometimes because that cannot that's not always received well in professional settings but I I do who I show up in my day to day is who I show up in my professional life I I do know how to code switch I'm a champ at it but I do try to pull that level of authenticity that comes through when people know me and they see me in my community they see me in my tribal community they see me with my friends there might be a little bit more fire and spice that comes out but like they're gonna they're gonna know me I mean I wear the same big earrings I am pretty loud and high energy in all the spaces I come in and so I hope that people don't see the difference they really know that this is this is who I am and I'm always wanting to change and and be better but I'm also really proud of the human I am and I'm really like settling into my core values and really modeling the way that I show up around my core values and almost now they're I mean not almost they are now non negotiable I'm also really good at protecting what doesn't serve me so or I guess protecting the space and getting rid of what doesn't serve me probably to a fault but my bandwidth for the BS is out of very big minimum love it hear it love it embrace it feel it myself here's my final question it's my favorite question to ask and I'm very curious how you'd answer this with all of your experience my goodness friend professionally personally life all of it if you can say something to your younger self knowing what you know now what would you say I think for me personally is I always thought that bigger circles were always better that meant that I was more open that I was more giving that I was more true and unfortunately I had just gotten burned by being way more giving and not because I wasn't receiving it's because I think I aligned expectations with people and didn't have a higher bar for the way that people showed up when we were in our trenches for when we needed community and so I was very selfless about my time and space and energy and I think in the back of my mind I had this like oh well it's reciprocal this is just what people do cause it's the way that me and my partner show up we are just community humans who are on the ground doing the work and recognizing that that's not core values of everybody and so as I've gotten older I've recognized that I've recognized it and tightened my circles not everybody deserves that same same amount of me and so you know and I really again want to protect that and so um I think like looking back is I think I would have been more protective of that one of the things I love about my daughter is she is wildly protective of who gets access to her and at first I was like well it's and I got so like you're missing out and what about this and I realized that I actually really respect that now and I've Learned from her and she doesn't have FOMO about like oh I didn't get invited this thing or I'm not doing this thing she's just like no my like I wanna bring around people who are my rider dies and who get this you know access to this space and through and I've seen her really shine and thrive and she's had literally will have lifelong friends from that and so I think like as I move into this season actually having smaller circles knowing who my ride or dies are pouring every the same amount of energy but into just them has really been allowed me to be more sustainable and honestly a lot more joyful a lot more just happy and and and genuinely happy um and it's allowed me to kind of like when I do need to unload or I'm not showing up well or I'm in the trenches I never have to worry who has my back right they're recognizing that they're coming they're coming and meeting me there um and I think that that's been a really beautiful shift in the way that I've Learned through my own kiddos and something that I wish I would have shifted early on versus having to kind of learn the hard way well you are nodding along as I'm agreeing with all this going to implement some of this so thank you for that thank you for being just a transparent open authentic human being who is leading inside out I mean truly it just your energy just is felt um and I appreciate knowing you I know those listening will appreciate again your honesty and transparency and the fact that it's work right you're you're constantly doing the work you're constantly showing up and willing to do the work and not only are you creating that impact in your personal communities but you're creating that impact in your corporate communities too and it's just an honor to know you thank you for sharing your voice thanks Ashley appreciate you