What Do You Need to Shed? Nicole Nelson on Leading Up Through the Ranks

Also making sure that you hold your calendar for that white space so you can be thinking about the future because you are the vision setter for the team. The work looks very different as you evolve and as you elevate throughout the company. I do think that looking less busy is one of the reasons that some leaders hang on to doing the work. Because it is tangible, they can show their teams.

I'm willing to roll up my sleeves just like you are. One of those questions you ask yourself as you get into every new role is, what do I need to shed? What is the work that I cannot do anymore because it is not my role, it is not my level. This is the work that I need to make sure that I am delegating all the time.

And then what is that work that I need to create space? Hi there and welcome to the Step up podcast. I'm your host, Kent Knievel. Every week I talk to experts who focus on helping leaders step up their leadership game and leaders telling their stories of growing up through the ranks.

If you're new to the show, do me a favor and subscribe so you never miss an episode. One last thing. As a leadership development consultant and executive coach, a focus area of mine is supporting newly promoted leaders. One in three promotions fail because we never teach newly minted VPs how to stop being a director or a newly promoted director how to stop being a manager.

If that's you, or if you support a leader who had been recently promoted, I encourage you to visit my website at Kent Coach Toolkit and download a free copy of the Promoted Leader Toolkit filled with practical advice and tools to help new leaders stick the landing and truly step up to their new leadership level. All right, I've dillied and dallied long enough. On with the show. Welcome, everybody.

I am really excited today. This is my first leader interview. And if you've been following along anything that I've been saying on LinkedIn about the podcast, I want to start interviewing leaders and hearing about their career stories and how they have kind of grown through the ranks and what each of those career transitions were really like. And I'm thrilled that my very first interview is Nicole Nelson.

She's Senior Director of Sales at CJ Schwan's. We met a handful of years ago and super thrilled that not only Nicole, you're. You're here today to be a part of this conversation and talk to us about you and your career, but that you were. You were willing to be my guinea pig in my very first interview.

So welcome thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Ah, stop.

Okay, so I would love to start with, you know, give us just kind of the. I'd love to hear about before we kind of dive in bit by bit. Would love to hear, you know, kind of the brief version of your career story and then, you know, we'll kind of dive into some of these leadership transitions. Great.

Yes. So briefly, I would say I didn't choose sales necessarily. I was a marketing major in college. Sales chose me.

I had a friend that worked at General Mills and said, hey, I could get you an internship. So I started as a sales intern at General Mills a million years ago and then happened to stay for a really, really long time. So I followed the very traditional career ladder, did my first sales roles, negotiated and cut my teeth for the first time, got kicked out of my first office, and then decided to jump into marketing in K through 12 when the regulation changes happened under the Obama administration.

And that was a super fun and interesting role. From there, went back out into a traditional sales management role. That was the first time that I managed people. Covered Southern California and Hawaii.

Not a terrible location to be placed. And then from there I really wanted to try something new. So I jumped over to the retail space and called on Walmart. That was really, and I'll talk through some formative experiences, but the negotiation part of that and using every moment to influence was a neat experience for me.

And I wanted to build my Swiss army knife once I had that big jump. And so the next couple of jumps that I took were really to build out my skillset so that I could be a multifaceted leader long term. So I did a sales operations and communications role. We were really the powerhouse center of the hive for all sales planning and sales operations for food service.

I jumped over to C Store for a little while. I jumped into what we called our convenience special markets channels, which is vending, front and hardware, pure play like Dashmart and GoPuff. And then I jumped over to run the retail perimeter as a sales director. So think Deli Produce Bakery.

And that was really my first P and L ownership experience and did that for a handful of years. Just before I conveyed over with YoPlay to Lactalis. Spent a very short period of time there as the VP of sales. It wasn't a great culture fit for me and then was able to come over to CJ Schwanz as the senior director of sales, distribution and sales planning over here.

So I brought together my customer experience and my sales Planning passion and love into a new role at a new company. Well, for those listening who maybe aren't as familiar with retail and food service, can you give us, just give us the very brief difference between the two, at least from your experience? Yes, yes. So retail, you went there to go buy food.

Food service, you didn't go there with the intention of eating or buying food, but you happened to get food while you were. So think hospital, a hotel, your work, school you mentioned. Exactly. Yep.

So away from home or at home, eating is really the key differentiator there. Yep. So you're either selling to a major. I mean since gender mills was in the conversation, let's say, you know, you were selling Cheerios.

Right. Or cereal. Right. You're talking to all the buyers at major retailers like a Target, Walmart like you mentioned, versus when you're in food service, your.

Who, who are you selling to on the food service side? Yes. It is a B2B business. Yep.

So you're either selling to a distributor like a Cisco US Foods pfg. Those are the, the big ones. And then they ship product to the operator who is the school, the college, the military base, the hospital, the restaurant, and then patrons then frequent those locations to eat the food. So you're one level connect, disconnected from the consumer in food service.

Yeah. So there's more influence points and it's so much more fragmented. On the retail side you sell to about 20 retailers that really run the world. On the food service side there's 1.

4 million operators. Yeah. And then sometimes. Right.

Cisco is both an operator and a. Some of them are operators and distributors too where they are also hired by the college to run their cafeteria. Or am I mistaken? So there's food management companies or food service management companies and GPOs, they actually go in and run.

Yep. The Daxo, Aramark Compass, they actually run the food service operation in like a college or a business. Yes, because it's complex. Making food is a hard, sweaty, burn your arms kind of job.

It's not the most glamorous space, but it is a like, you know, the industry would say it's a grittier space to work. Make it the hard working people that really love food and love what they do. And you worked a bit on the. So I, so I had some experience with food service at Cargill when I was there in the protein space.

And then I as where we met I was supporting food service at General Mills. I think the part that I always found to be most exciting is like the least known to most people. Which is the custom side, which I'm not. I can't remember if you touched that.

I think you did a little bit at Walmart, but, like, it was always fun to find. I'll give the Cargill example. Cause I'd love if you're free and able to throw out some of the weird things that you might not expect gender mold was doing. But Cargill had all the McMuffin egg business for the Globe, for example.

So if you're eating an egg McMuffin, that egg was, for lack of a tastier way to put it, designed and, you know, manufactured and whatnot by Cargill. And I always find those. Those were just so fun to find out. Like, I think at one point, Cargill made all the Olive Garden salad dressing, for example.

And you wouldn't know that. Right. Cause it's all branded as. So just for the fun of anybody who's still listening and hasn't gotten annoyed by my questions, what are some of the, like, things where you wouldn't have expected.

But that was General Mills. Yeah. No, this is always the fun part of food because you think as a consumer, they make everything there. And really, there's very few restaurants that make everything there.

So the taco shells at Taco Bell, those are made by General Mills. Thank old. I didn't know that. Yeah.

Yeah. They also make all the Pizza Hut pizzas, the Little Caesar pizza crusts. And in my new world here, if you go to, like, a P. F.

Chang, those dumplings are Bibi. Go Dumplings. Yeah. So it's everywhere.

Where most of it gets on that continuum of, like, your chef makes it from scratch to. All they did was heat it up and put it out. There's a lot of food service that is heated up and put it out. And it's because labor is challenging to upscale and make sure that they can do it correctly consistently every time.

So the consumer gets what they were hoping for and that they have a consistent experience at your restaurant. Yeah, yeah. Well, and my. My.

My initial experience, I think it's about a third of. At least in the US A third of the working population. Their first job was in food service in some way, shape or form. That's a fun fact.

And I learned that when I was at Buffalo Wild Wings. I think that was, you know, because they had a whole thing about, hey, we are training America's workforce. You know, 30% of people, you know, start in a restaurant, for example. Yeah, I know from my experience at.

And then we'll get it back to leadership in Just a second here, I promise. But you know, I feel like I kind of learned that at, at Olive Garden too, where you would be surprised, they're mostly assembling food as opposed to, and heating it. And, and you know, food safety is still a concern. And so some of the food is still going from raw to cooked, especially when it comes to proteins.

But those line chefs are primarily assembling food. And so, yeah, and so, yeah, that's why it was fun when I've, when I've supported food service to find out like, oh God. Because I think at one point gender Mills had all the subway bread business and I was a long, long time ago. And like, it was interesting to hear the most recent, you know, pizza crust businesses because I also, I think at one time they had Toppers pizza crusts too or something like that.

So it's interesting, you know, and also fascinating how the end product ends up turning out when Pizza Hut, Little Caesars, Toppers are all General Mills, you know, pizza crust, for example. And yet the. Where the experience is similar and different as a customer. I digress.

Interestingly enough, however much I like food, which is a story for a whole other day or meeting with my counselor, I don't know. But by no, after I left consulting, I somehow remained working in the food supply chain in some way, shape or form for all of my HR jobs by happenstance, which was odd. So anyway, taking it from the beginning. Yeah.

I want to wheel back to that very first people leadership role that you got where you were going. Going from being individual contributor to now managing people for the first time. How did you first and foremost, what was, you know, was it, was it a plan by you? Did you want to manage people?

You know, how did you then go about kind of landing that first role? Start us there. Yeah, it's a good place to start. The comment that I would make for all those like formative roles that lead up to your first people management role.

Because I wanted to run the show someday. My aspirations and my drive was ambition was really high. Those formative roles are so important to skin your knees, cut your teeth. It is a very low stakes environment.

So I wouldn't have traded those for the world. Even though they felt really lacking purpose in some, like some days, some weeks, some months. Yeah. So just underscoring the importance of some of those formative roles even because they're the steps and the groundwork that get you to the place that you need to be that first people management role, how I got there, because General Mills is one where you tend to lead people a lot later into your career trying to think.

I think I was probably six, seven years into my career before I actually managed people. And up until that point, I had been a mentor in a mentoring program. I had led the wellness committee to try to get into some of those quote unquote, people manager positions before it was formal. So you practice your skills in, again, a lower stakes environment.

So that when I became a region manager for the first time, I had a wonderful leader at the time that really sat me down and said, you only job is to lead and inspire your team. So you are shifting from doing 100% of the doing to 100% of unlocking the potential of your people. So it is a complete transformational shift and their success becomes your success. Right.

It's not my individual success anymore. It's me coaching them to be the best version of them. One of their isms, my leader's isms was you don't want to make them the best version of you because they'll be a very crappy version of you. I like that you want to unlock for them the best version of themselves.

I love that was a really neat role. I, you know, and we'll see where all of these, this, the collection of my business leader interviews go. But I have this feeling with my own experience that that experience might be very unique to you or General Mills. So I've got a couple questions for you.

One is how quickly did your manager, did your, your leader have that conversation with you about your job is to make your people excellent? And, and as now there's the conversation and then there's actually getting there. Right. Yourself, both sort of mentally and through how you go about your work.

Because that the transition of leaving behind. Now also the research would say one of the two hardest transitions is going from individual contributor, that very first one going from individual contributor to manager of people. Yes. So there was a conversation and there was a getting there.

So maybe we can talk a little bit about that for a second. And how early did your manager have that conversation with you? Was that very intentional on their part about your development, or was it a couple months in when they're seeing you struggle to leave the individual contributor thing behind? But I'd love to hear that conversation and like, how long did it take for you to get there?

Yeah, no, that. So I started under a different leader and I candidly struggled at first because I could do my people's jobs sometimes in my mind as well as they could, or sometimes better. So you start to Jump into the doing, because that's the part that feels natural and comfortable and easy. Right.

I got way into the weeds, and then I had a leader change. And that leader, day one, had the conversation with me because he saw me grow up in the organization. He knew I was a good doer. He knew that wasn't the job to be done.

And so he put me in check right away and said, you're not doing the job we hired you for. You're doing some of your people's jobs and you're doing it fine, but that's not the job. And so he had that conversation with me day one. Once I got a great mentor in place, he was a great leader.

Getting there was uncomfortable. It was re empowering my team when they were like, well, hey, you said you'd do that and you had done it before, so why do I have to do it now? And then it's coaching them to do that thing at the level of excellence that the company would. Would expect, require.

So all of that took a lot of time, a lot of time and patience with myself and with them. Yeah. How did that conversate? How did that first conversation with that new boss go?

How did you receive it? Was it really jarring? Did it make you question your life choices? Like, how did that.

Like, how'd that go? I respected him, so I think it went better than it could have gone. For somebody that's like, you're doing the job all wrong. Yeah.

So because I respected him and we had mutual trust, I was like, oh, gosh, you're totally right. And I think myself as a human being too, I tend to internally process and take feedback and I act on feedback. So I didn't put my ego up front first, which I think a lot of people that are managing folks, that's the reason they wanted to manage. They wanted to have the power.

They wanted to have the title. I wasn't in it for that. I was looking for experiences and skills. So he did a wonderful job of coming to me in a trustworthy, authentic way of, I'm going to help you unlock the best manager that you can be.

That's cool. And I think because he approached it that way, I was able to absorb it. I was able to hear it. How lucky.

That's really cool, because I feel like what I see in here is a lot of people not having that conversation and ending up with a very frustrated leader 612 months down the road and having a tougher conversation that could have produced, as your experience maybe is showing, could have Produced very different results. Had that conversation been had very early one. You know, before I get to that, here's a question which is having to evolve the mathematics in your own head of what equals a full.

I'm kind of isolating it to this job now, but I have a feeling it will probably be a recurring thing that has to happen throughout your career as we dig into some of your other stories. But how was it or evolving the equation of what plus what plus what equaled a solid day's work or that feeling of accomplishment? Because I think that's one thing that pulls new leaders into doing the work is that struggling to kind of recalibrate what feel, you know, what does a solid day's worth of work look and feel like now?

And what does accomplishment look like in this new role for me? I'd love to hear your thoughts, you know, your thoughts on that, especially to this very first management job. Yes. Because the several years that you start in a career, it is very tangible.

You have priorities, you meet your goals. It's very measurable. You're doing work. It's very visible what you're doing as well.

I think the higher you go, the less busy you look, because you need time to think, to strategize, to absorb, to learn. Internal meetings. Yes, so many internal meetings. And also making sure that you hold your calendar for that white space so you can be thinking about the future because you are the vision setter for the team.

So the work looks very different as you evolve and as you elevate throughout the company or throughout roles that you take in different companies. I do think that looking less busy is one of the reasons that some leaders hang on to doing the work right, because it is tangible. They can show their teams. I'm willing to roll up my sleeves just like you are.

So one of those questions you ask yourself as you get into every new role is, what do I need to shed? What is the work that I cannot do anymore because it is not my role, it is not my level. This is the work that I need to make sure that I am delegating all the time. And then what is that work that I need to create space for on the other side?

So do I need to hold time on my calendar from 8 to 9 to just think about how to prioritize my day, my team's day, and make sure we're working on the right work? Because it does look less busy. But you have to shed in order to create the space, to become more elevated, more strategic thinking. I think I Bet it's, there's a, there's a unique challenge in sales too.

Right. Where you add some really strong relationships with some key clients. There's probably some tension both from them and you around having to shed those. And there's probably also some then tendency of the new person who has to take on that account to maybe be too eager to pull you in.

Like what's your experience been with that? That's happened to me a couple of times where I was in the team and then I left and came back to lead the team. That happened twice. And so specifically if I bring forward my Walmart example, I was negotiating with them directly and then a handful of years later came back to manage the person that was negotiating with them.

So it gave me an opportunity to elevate my connection and negotiate with the leaders of Walmart, which was something I always kind of craved from my leader at the time. But again it's so easy to get sucked into, well, I could do this or I could coach you on how to do this. And I think as a leader there's always this tendency to think that people should do it the way that you would do it. And that's a bit of a trap, right?

Yeah. If we allow them to try it their way and it's successful, then that way was just as successful as perhaps how we would have done it. So knowing and being open minded enough and like putting your ego in check enough that you know that there's many ways to do good work is one of the things that you have to like really let go of. Right.

To bring out their best self in that situation. But there is a lot of healthy tension on well I would do it this way but you don't have to. It's really a suggestion, it's not direction. As you're speaking about it from I think what sounds like I need more of an evolved seat today.

Sure. How's that journey been, you know, throughout the career of kind of learning to let go of the how. Right. And focus on just the what, you know, here's what you need to do and how you do it is kind of up to you.

And I'd imagine, let me just, let me just stop there and say how has that, you know, how has that gone from like an evolutionary perspective? Because I'd wager both, probably not great at that at first, but probably also having to recalibrate that each level promotion because now maybe this will help segue us into, you know, when you, when you went from people manager to the next level where now you're managing first time and people managers. As my wager is that you have to relearn those same lessons just at a different level every step of the way.

Yes, no, absolutely. My original question, because I'm seeing you like Kent, what was the question? I'm seeing your eyes. The original question was like, how has the evolution of letting go of how people go about accomplishing their goals gone for you?

Like how. How have you really pushed yourself there? It has definitely been learning over time that instinct at first is to do it well for them. Fix their slides, fix the template.

Right. Set them up for success. I think that there was a moment when I noticed that a senior leader came in and they started to add periods or bullets or change the fonts on a slide and it's like, why are you spending your time on something like that? Is your time not more valuable?

And that was that aha moment for me of like, should I have the time to go back in and edit these little things? Right. Or is my time more valuable spent on something different? So that aha.

And again, it took. It took years, I'm sure. Right. And your instinct is to jump in and fix and do well because you were a high individual contributor.

I also think that not every great individual contributor is meant to, to lead and manage people. So there is this, I think this. I don't know how to say this. Like, there's a expectation that everyone should at some point, if they want to be a leader, manage a team.

And there's a lot of up and out cultures. Right. If you're not getting promoted, you're not doing your life well. There's this expectation that if you don't get promoted, you're not worth as much as others.

And yeah, there's even some organizations that if you don't continue to go up the ladder, they do intentionally push you out. So being satisfied where you are and also doing the self assessment of do I enjoy people leadership, do I enjoy helping people unlock the best version of themselves or do I really like doing the work? Right. Some people really like doing the work.

Let them be excellent, let them do that job until the end of time. Yeah, it's a really, it's a great observation to hear you say. Cause on the research side of things. Right.

If I think back to my consulting days when we were looking at how do we identify potential from an assessment pure data perspective though, there was two key factors that were looked at together and kind of in isolation from one another. One was leadership aspiration, which is Do I want to be a leader which might actually be quite confounded with pay and title. Like I want the pay and title that comes with that. The separate part that was kind of the mitigating factor is leadership drive, meaning I actually like the work of leading people.

And now when you have both, you know, that's one factor that can help kind of identify, aside from many, many, many other factors can help identify future leaders. Someone who likes the work leadership drive, but maybe doesn't value leadership aspiration, right. Doesn't necessarily want to be the CEO someday, those people can still be quite effective. But it's when it's leadership aspiration with no leadership drive, right, you, you find people, those people find their ceiling much faster.

Right? Because it's. They're the people where now you're managing, you're clearly managing someone who doesn't want to. You know, I'm thinking about kind of your next level now where you're managing people who are first time leaders.

You're probably seeing this directly. You are in it for the wrong reasons and probably struggling to recalibrate what success looks like and get the best out of your people compared to others that kind of have both. Which is my very fun way of segueing us to how did. So at what point did you see that you wanted to get to the next level up?

Right. And whether that was a senior manager title or a director title, you know, what was it that either made you decide? I think I'd like to now start managing managers. Right?

Managing supervisors, managing first time leaders compared to managing individual contributors. Was that a conscious decision or was that a tap on the shoulder of someone just saying, hey, I think you're ready to step up another level? Yeah, I think every organization will handle that differently. I was mentored very early on by an amazing mentor that I still meet with often that I had to build that Swiss army knife like focus on building skills, finding your breath, finding the edge of your capacity and really stretching your rubber band as far as you can go to see what you're capable of.

And as I tried on all of these different roles, I was able to have success in a lot of different places doing a lot of different work. And so in my case, it was really the results evidence that built the case for me a little bit of, well, she can be successful in all of these roles, let's try to give her something more. And so I had a lot of sponsors at the time that I had worked for across all of those different jobs. They were the voice in the room that I wasn't in.

And I was chosen to become a director, which at General Mills was a big step. There's very few. You were hand selected. It's not a role you apply for.

It's one that you work very hard to make sure people in a room say your voice enough and say your name enough that you're selected. And so shifting and transitioning into that job was a completely different experience because there's no training. Your manager is such a high level that they don't have time to onboard you into a new role. They don't have capacity to tell you what it is that you do with your day.

And so you have to bring in that history of experience of, okay, how do I onboard myself? Where do I seek knowledge and information? Who are the people that I need that are early trustworthy partners that I lean on to teach me, to support me? You build your powerhouse team around you that can support you because you're coming in.

And in my case, I was coming in without a lot of experience with the customers and the business I was leading. So I had to learn a lot. And so instead of leading the team, one of the approaches that I took, and I've kind of continued to take as I've gone into new companies is I try to lead alongside. So it's a, I'm next to you, learning with you, doing with you, helping guide you, having your back, not trying to tell you what to do top down.

So we're organically leading together. It can, if you start that way, make it a little harder to offer feedback and crucial conversations because you're seeing as like, oh, you're working alongside me. Why are you now auditing how I did it. But I think it built early trust that I was willing to do the hard work with them, be there for them and have their back.

When it went sideways. I would always take the blame, right? And that's really my mantra around no bad teams, only bad leaders. So leading alongside them.

And then when you start to build your skill set and you understand the business more, I think that's when you can then elevate and empower them clearly to do all of the work. But then that creates the space of like, I'm knowledgeable enough now to look up and look out, try to see the fit, try to the future, try to, you know, envision where we want to go. And that's when you start to develop the strategy. Once you've learned enough, but without the base, you might do something risky, you might do something that's uneducated, you might do something that's just, you know, you dragging yourself through the mud.

So you have to be a student of your business before you can lead the business. I so many really important things that I think you just said too. Right. One is when you got to that next level.

And I think I might not. I don't know that I articulate this enough. Right. The boss, you're reporting to every level, that person's at another level.

And the amount of time they have to teach you how to do your job is less and less. And I think you're kind of isolating the director level at General Mills. So. And what I heard you say was, I think kind of two kind of things that I wanted to put in my own words for a second.

One is how you took peers as mentors to probably help teach you how to do the job. Which I'm sure you have to be kind of careful which peer you're identifying at that level, like which one's actually leading at the direct director level. That can help me figure out how to be a director. But especially if you've moved functions.

Right. If you're not literally just stepping up within that team, you kind of have to take your new direct reports as functional peers. Sounds like too right. Where they need to teach you what you need to know about the specific space.

Which also leads to some navigational issues around. I'm taking you as a peer to teach me this exact zone, this domain. But I'm still your manager, if I'm hearing you correct. I want to dig into a couple things here and this might just.

As I'm looking at time, we might not get to the next sort of move or level. But I think. Yeah, that's. I wanna talk about these relationship evolutions for a second.

So first there's managing former peers. It sounds like you've had a couple of experiences where you've moved or where you said you had kind of come back to. Now managing a team you used to be on. I'd imagine that's happened more than once or at least someone else has moved and now you're there.

So I mean, in some way, shape or form, the chess pieces have moved to where you've probably managed former peers a number of times. How have you managed though? Like to kind of recast those relationships in a way, you know, balancing keeping what of those relationships you want and need to keep, but also finding that appropriate separation as their manager. I'd love to hear how you've navigated.

That and really tricky. So it's a great question that I hope you ask a lot of different people so I can continue to learn as I listen to your podcast. Yeah, it's been really tricky because there's some where they were very good friends and all of a sudden they're reporting to me and we have performance issues we have to talk through or, you know, they're coming into a role where they're not exactly sure how to do the work. So there's a lot of coaching that goes alongside of it.

I would say I had to be very open to changing my own style to fit how they needed me to show up. So a leader that's willing to adjust and change who they are again to bring out the best of the person that they're working with. It wasn't always smooth sailing like there. There was a time when I went in to manage the team in Southern California where again, they were the people that trained me how to be a salesperson.

Just six, six years prior to that, I came in as a fresh green salesperson. They trained me how to do my job. And then I came back a few years later to manage the team. There was some conflict and we had to work through it by again, just like sitting down one on one, building trust, breaking down the barriers and saying, this is awkward, this is uncomfortable for both of us.

Saying that out loud. Yes. Like, say it out loud and just call it for what it is. Because unless you put the bear on the table, like, you can't face it.

So once we were able to face it together, I think it was like, I will stay out of your way. I will not try to be a barrier in any way. And if anything, please use me as wind in your sails. So, like, what do you need as motivation?

What do you need as barrier removal? What do you need as support? What does support look like? What does recognition look like?

I want to do those things in the way that you value. And so as long as you're leading from that place of making them shine and taking the hard messages and being willing to take the bullet when it's come in our direction, I think you build trust over time and it will not be instant. It takes a lot of hard work. Have you had consistency?

Have you had to manage someone who you also knew was in consideration for the job themselves or had applied for the job themselves? Yeah. How to. Of what you're wanting to share, I would just love, like, how.

How. When you've managed that the best, what did you do to. Yeah. Make that successful and maybe I'm an oversharer, but I remember telling that person, you could do the job as well as I can.

Right. For whatever reason, they picked me. And I know how valuable you are and how you're going to make me better working with you. And so I was very conscious to tell them when they were sharpening my saw and was trying to do my very best to sharpen their saw.

At the same time, I think it's really important to have your ego in check as a leader. And I know I've said that a couple times now, but the title doesn't mean anything, right? You don't get respect because of the title. You earn the respect of others by how you treat them.

And so just being conscious of how you're treating everyone, regardless of title, knowing everyone's name, it's how you do your work that I think earns. Earns trust over time. And so eventually. Right.

Just being really honest with that person specifically, we stayed friends. He made me better, and I told him all the time when he made me better, and I hopefully made him a little better too. Yeah. There's a humility you're bringing to these stories too, where, because you have to sort of, on the one hand, most of us want to be liked, right.

And there's some level of. That you kind of have to let go of. And perhaps it's a. I know for me, it's a perpetual journey.

And I remember my first director role, I was in hr. Men are outnumbered in hr. And at the time when I wasn't, before I'd become the director, this was at Buffalo Wild Wings, there was a men in HRs like, monthly breakfast group. Like, it was a small number, probably less than 10 men in HR and they would meet, you know, monthly for breakfast next door to the.

Next door to the office. And when I became a director, I saw a cancellation come through on my calendar and I reached out to the guy who coordinated as I was like, hey, are these moving or did they cancel? And he just was like, no, you're a director now. You're.

You're no longer invited. We need to be able to talk about you like the royal. The royal you. But you know, and I remember like the sting of like, I got it.

I was like, like that, you know, was a really, you know, so there's also just those, those connections. You have to be able to let go of two. Right? Because there are certain, certain conversations that you like.

You just have to remember, hey, we. I talked about my managers with these people too. And now I'm one. And they need to be able to, you know, have their own relationships that don't include me.

The relationship I'm curious about is because I. And I know, I know specifically that General Mill's very big on mentorship. Right. Lots of people have many mentors.

So the other kind of relationship calibration I'm kind of curious about is when you were suddenly now the peer of people who were your mentors. Right. Who have been historically a level or more above you, how did you manage to sort of establish yourself solidly on solid footing as their peer now? Because I had those relationships get even, you know, those peer level relationships get even more important.

Every level up, you know, that you go and how those peers interact when it comes to the work getting done or strategic work happening at the leadership team level. So I'd love to hear, you know, how have you, well, or not, managed sort of recasting those peer level relationships when you've been promoted? Yeah. Well, they were the voice in the room that I wasn't in that said my name.

They were important, powerful people in my life. It's so true. And now they're no longer above you. Right?

Right. No, it's tricky. And for one of them specifically, I think I worked under them three or four different times. And so initially when I came into my director role, I used them as a mentor still.

Right. Just pure mentorship of please help me not suck at this. You felt that I was capable of being here and what you mentioned, that loneliness of leadership. It's so true.

Because the people that you grew up in the organization with, they no longer can be your quote unquote, like kind of very close friends where you can share anything about the business. The people. You have to be more closed vest on so many more things. And that's the appropriate way to handle the situation.

So I think I leaned on them as continuing to be my mentors. They were really special people. And so they would even open the door for me. Like, Nicole, do you have an opinion on this?

When we're in a room where they know I have an opinion because I'm an introvert, I like when people express that they want to hear my opinion. I'm not going to be the first one to jump in and say, oh my gosh, guess what I'm thinking. So I think because I had built that trust over time, they were helping me become the best version in that new role. My manager didn't have time for that.

I really attribute my success as I Became a director to the couple of mentors that were my voice in the room, that helped me know who to talk to, know who to call, how to digest the P and L, how to set the vision for the team. If I were you, I would do things like this. They were my suggestion box and they were my early success measures, too. I mean, this might be a testament to you and how, you know, you have a relational style.

Did you. But did you bump into anyone who had a harder time accepting you as their new peer that. And that needed to be managed a little bit? Yes.

Yes. I can think of one specifically. And I think her trajectory was probably going to be farther and longer than mine. And so there was this moment where it was almost an assessment of like, can I trust you?

Are we people that can be arm in arm together to fight a topic together? I tried to make her an early compadre. Right. Or like an early.

Let's be together on this topic. Do you agree with me? Good. Okay, let's go to the end of the meeting with this opinion together and see if we can sway the group.

But yes, like, there, there is depending on the culture of the company, competition more than cooperation. And you have only sometimes gotten to where you have gotten because you've been willing to compete at the highest levels. I would say that's not everywhere, especially coming over to CJSWAN's and it's a much more eastern culture because now they're owned by a South Korean company. It's one table, one team.

You win when I win, I win when you win. If I step on you to win, that helps no one. But culturally, I think every company just feels a little different that way too. But it's like inherent to try to be better than others when you're in that hierarchical, I want to keep getting promoted kind of race.

Yeah. Yeah. Am I winning? Am I not winning?

Yeah, well, I'm watching. I didn't care if I was winning. I'm watching the time here. And I warned you we were going to lose track of time and I was going to have to give us a violent shove into our advice column.

So as I'm. As we wind it down for today, and I might have to have you back for all kinds of other topics another time. What's one piece of advice you have for leaders who are seeking that next leadership promotion to go from people manager to manager manager or manager manager to director managers. What's one piece of advice you have for those who are looking for that sort of Runway and next level Yeah,.

I would say especially for. And I'm going to speak from a woman in food service where I tended to be the exception, not the rule. Self assurance is your best ally. I don't like the phrase imposter syndrome.

I felt like that was, you know, it's, it's steeped in I'm not good enough to be here anyway kind of thinking. So if you can just come into every role saying, I was chosen for this, I was seen as being the best candidate. And then you fully embrace it. Like, yes, you might have internal dialogue that disagrees with you, but that intentional taking up of space, leading authentically.

I mentioned a couple of times, I had to just claim the moment where I was like, this sucks for both of us, or I'm not doing as good a job as you would want me to do. I think when you can really show up for people and say the thing that they're thinking or the thing that you're thinking, it builds trust. And if you're bringing your whole self to work, you're going to bring the best leadership that you can to your team. When you get to be your whole self, you're unlocking the best.

And if that doesn't fit with the company, what I'll say is you can find a better fit for your strengths somewhere else. Yeah. So I always led big and bold because if it didn't fit for the company I was at, I knew another company would value those strengths from me. You do.

You do lead big and bold, as evidenced by the three pieces of advice you just gave me when I asked for just one, it's. But, so what's one piece of advice you have for someone who this is like day one or month one, they've just been promoted up a level. What's your biggest, best piece of advice for those people who have. Have just up leveled.

Ooh. Oh, man. Our interview is full of one. So I'm.

I'm gonna pin you down. I know. I'm trying to think of which one I would wanna, like, touch on. Okay.

One. The one piece of advice for somebody new to leadership that I would suggest because you're starting to lose that feedback loop of managers or peers that aren't necessarily gonna be giving you consciousness to how you're showing up consciousness to how your decisions are impacting people. I always picked a feedback partner and it was always a peer. It was somebody that was in the rooms that I was in that I trusted their opinion, I trusted their judgment.

They were a feedback loop for me to say, hey, when you said that, like, people got really ruffled or when you said that to our boss. He told me about it the next day and here's how he took it. So that feedback loop is super important. Yep.

I love that. That's brilliant. Well, we're going to leave it there this time. I do.

I think that's great advice. Always take a feedback partner. I recommend that in my assessment and coaching work all the time, too. Nicole, thank you so much for coming on today.

This is a conversation we haven't had before, which is very fun. And thanks for being my guinea pig, my very first leader interview. Appreciate it so much. Of course.

Kent, you're the best. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate you. See ya.

All right, that brings us to the end of our episode. Thank you for listening. I'd encourage you to head on over to my website, Kent Coach, and start a conversation with me there. Or check out my promoted leader toolkit at Kent Coach Toolkit.

Before you go on with your day, please take a moment to leave a rating and a review. Wherever you listen to podcasts, click the five stars. That helps put this podcast in front of more ears. Till next time, take it easy.

Ra.