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Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Step Into the Pivot.
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We're so happy to have you here again.
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Um, we have another great guest for you.
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So today we are welcoming Laurel Hart.
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Welcome, Laurel.
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It's nice to meet you.
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Thank you so much, Teresa.
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Hi, Laurel.
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So great to have you on the show.
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And as I was reminiscing as we were getting started uh and getting ready to hit the record button, it's a special honor to be here with you.
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It's a milestone for me because Laurel is um one of my very, very first mentors.
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I didn't um even quite understand the complexity of that word when we were first connecting Laurel, but here we are many years later.
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Thank you so much.
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That's so meaningful to me.
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I appreciate it.
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Talking about you as a mentor to begin with, it just really encapsulates what you did, regardless of I think what your roles were called.
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You have a tremendous amount of expertise as a consultant in the corporate setting, and as someone who, you know, didn't grow up in this country and didn't go to school in this country.
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It took me a long time to figure out what that all meant.
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And I remember when we were first introduced and somebody else was actually mentioning you in you know, third third party or third person.
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Um, I was like, what does that mean?
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She's a consultant.
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What does that mean?
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And then I was looking at your bio and you included a lovely list of it process improvement in the context that we were in, personnel development, leadership development, performance improvement, performance management, organizational development, like whoa, tall order.
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And as I said, you have a really long career uh behind you.
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We're speaking now from your seat in uh retirement, and uh so many lessons, wisdoms that it was just a natural yes to ask you to come on the show and talk to us about your your experiences and your professional and personal background.
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Thank you.
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I'm honored to be here.
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Thank you.
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So, without further ado, would you mind walking us through what you would consider to be a major pivot in your life, given everything that I just talked about, your big experience.
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I'm intentionally not talking about some of the specifics of your um resume because I believe it will surface in our in our conversation.
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So tell us about your pivot.
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I've had many, but the biggest one, which is what I think you were asking for, is when the company that I had worked for for 34 years was sold to another organization.
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And I knew that we had about a year of transition where my team was responsible for amalgamating the data centers of several of these uh subsidiary companies, and my team was responsible for that work.
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I had an employment contract as a part of this merger and acquisition kind of mania that was going on at the time that if they offered me a position that didn't fit with my life and I didn't want to do it, I had one year, 18 months, I guess it was, to accept this um offer that I had and walk away.
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So the next thing was after I left, I had no idea what I was going to do.
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And I was only 53 at the time.
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So, you know, I still had some career ahead of me.
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I wasn't ready to retire.
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And so I began a remodel of a vacation home that we have, and it was really wonderful because it was an opportunity to not get up at five o'clock in the morning, not have seven o'clock meetings, not be back to back to back to back with responsibility and obligations and things to do.
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It was a very cathartic experience, um, very peaceful, very calm.
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Uh it was just really, even though we worked hard at what we were doing, and it took almost a year, it it was very, very cathartic and much needed.
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And I didn't realize how tired I was till I found myself sleeping 13 hours a day.
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So it I'm I really needed it.
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So I'm I'm just minding my own business, doing the things I do.
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And I got a telephone call.
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Excuse me, I got a telephone call from a gal who used to work at my former company, and she managed a placement, placement for temporary senior executives.
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And she said, I've got this small company that needs someone to come and help them combine two IT departments because it was two businesses that merged.
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And she said, they just they just want one day of consulting.
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I said, Okay, sure.
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So I met with the senior team and um they began describing to me what their issues were with their current situation, which is what I really needed in order to evaluate what the next step might be.
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And so we were up there, you
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know, putting the things on the whiteboard and the flippad and all the things that you do.
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And at the end of the meeting, I told the person who um really kind of brokered this event that I needed a day or so to put all this together and then I'd come back and talk with him.
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And so I did, I made an appointment with him and came back and I said, you know, this isn't about me wanting more money.
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This isn't about me wanting to stay here longer than you want me to.
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It's about me giving you what you need.
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And in order for me to do that, I need some more time.
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And I laid out for him what I saw.
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And I said, What I see is that you, none of your projects come in on time, on budget, and deliver what you need because you don't have a development process.
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And he said, I don't understand what you're telling me.
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And I said, you have to have an architecture and a process to go through to design what it is you need, how it's going to be used, who is going to use it, and in order to even begin to develop the solutions that you're asking for.
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He calls the IT director in and he tells him what we're going to do.
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And you could tell he's like, oh boy, not another contractor, you know, oh man, you could just see the look on his face.
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And so he's walking me to the elevator and I said, you know, I know you don't want me here, and I don't blame you.
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But here's the deal.
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I'm here for you, and I'm here to help you.
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And I'm not going to just write you a prescription for all the things you need to do and then take my money and walk away, and you're stuck with a mess.
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That's not what I'm going to do.
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I was started on those, the those things.
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We developed an application development process, hired the people we needed to do the work, the quality assurance team, the testing team, everybody that needed to be involved in the process.
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Um, and during that time, I started working with the individuals.
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And this is where the kind of the mentoring came in because for many of them, this was the first time.
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You know, they've never been through anything like this.
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So it was really a lot of fun to watch them take baby steps and grow and be scared and try things and succeed and grow.
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And it was very, very rewarding for me.
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And it was, it was wonderful.
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And so it morphed into once all that that architecture was there, that infrastructure was there, um, they wanted me to continue on working with the people.
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And so I did.
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I discovered they didn't have any kind of a uh transition plan.
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If someone should leave, you know, there was no succession planning going on, there were no performance evaluations, so people didn't know what they needed to do in order to get better, where they could possibly grow.
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There was none of that kind of infrastructure in place either.
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So I helped them work on that, which was very important to me.
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So it's kind of a long answer to how I got there, but that was the big pivot.
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The big pivot was leaving an organization after 34 years, not having an idea what I was gonna do, and find myself with a one-day job that lasted 14 years.
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It was pretty crazy.
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Isn't that how life is?
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Like sometimes you have to be forced away to go to the next thing, to give yourself the time.
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You talked about, you know, that year and you know, taking that time for yourself and you know that you needed the rest and you didn't even really realize you needed the rest.
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And then you do this, and then you kind of start this new path that you know really works that way.
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And you know, I think the thing that I always think about is people sometimes would sit there, like, okay, you you loved what you did for 34 years.
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If that hadn't happened, or you know, what if you had accepted that other job?
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Would you have really been happy?
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You know, so I think sometimes those are the things we need to do to grow, but sometimes like the universe has to push us that way.
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Well, Teresa, I think you're absolutely right.
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And one of the things I learned early on in my career, and I mentioned this, I think at one point, not today, but in the information I provided to your team, is that I learned early on that when one door closes, another one opens, and that there is something there.
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And oftentimes they had bigger plans for me, and so they changed the job I was in.
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And I'm thinking, why are you why are you doing this to me?
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I'm feeling like, is this a penalty?
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Am I not performing well?
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Is there something you know that I anyway?
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But I learned that well, it was because they had a grander plan for me.
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I
just didn't know what it was.
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Yeah.
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So I stopped taking a front when somebody came, uh, we need to talk with you.
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Yeah.
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And here comes a change.
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But sometimes we get so like just stuck where we're at because we're afraid of all the other things.
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But you know, there's other opportunities, there's other ways we can use our our our own best selves that's more fulfilling to us and more fulfilling to the other people.
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So I love how you ended with how it was so fulfilling to work with all these people, uh, you know, that you may have never may have never crossed your path.
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I mean, I I don't know.
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That's that's how like everything you said, I I, you know, I'm a big believer in things happen for a reason.
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And sometimes that universe needs to push us that way.
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I agree.
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100%, Teresa.
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100%.
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I do.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And yeah, it's fun to hear you, Laurel, talk about, you know, they they had the bigger idea for me and it was expansive.
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And I also, you know, I think it's um sometimes even when things look like they're really not in our favor, one of the things that we've heard now, three years into the recording the show, is that these pivots that are unwanted, they really then so even if it's really not, oh my goodness, like they let me go.
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So like they didn't have a bigger idea for me.
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I'm thinking about some of our guests who were on the show and talked about the resignation, the resignation or the termination or the unexpected end of the employment, then ends up um being a catalyst for something that is more expansive and that is you know more in service of the of the higher good for everyone involved.
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Yes.
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And one of the things I'm curious about that you haven't really talked about explicitly yet, but it was it's been you know with us since you started.
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Um being a woman in tech, being a woman in leadership, being, uh I know also from your resume, from your bio, starting off really young inside of an organization that you know did have some um opinions about that and what that meant for your career.
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Because 30 34 years, right?
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You you've seen a lot and you've experienced a lot.
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Could you share a bit about that entire aspect of the journey and maybe with that also, you know, what did that mean for your own personal growth, mental, emotional development?
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Sure.
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I'm happy to I'm happy to do that.
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Yes, I went to work right out of high school and thinking that that was a stepping stone to perhaps to college, and that's not what happened.
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Um, and I went to work in a division that was for a company that's highly male, highly male dominated at the time.
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The gentleman that I went to work for saw something in me right away.
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He knew that I wanted to do more, I wanted to be more, I wanted to have more responsibility, I wanted to help more.
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I think it was within a year I became an assistant manager and um, you know, one of the youngest uh ever.
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And it was just really an honor to be able to have a mentor that I did.
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She was just wonderful.
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And she was asked to transfer to another store, and she said she wouldn't go unless she could take me, which was really fun.
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But then that led me to another thing, lesson that I learned, which is the difference between personal power and the power of position.
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And uh I was transferred into the store as an assistant manager, and there was a lady there who thought she was should have gotten that job.
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And I understood, you know, how she would have felt.
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It made sense that she would be resentful toward me.
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And my position didn't give me any power with her.
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I knew that.
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What I needed to do was have her see what I could do, have her see what I knew, begin to get to know me as a person so that she could respect me as an individual and and then want to follow me as a leader when I was in charge, not because of my positional power, but because she respected me in what I do and had and could do and had confidence in me.
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And that was that was a lesson that I've learned many times.
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That the position, because I was so young, um, I was a store manager at 22, the youngest ever in the chain.
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And there were people who had no idea that I could do the job and doubted it.
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But typically, first promotions for people are because they're good at doing things, getting things done.
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And you get a lot of things done and you get the promotion, and you get a lot of things done, and maybe you get the next promotion.
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But there's a totally different thing about leading and and leading people and doing things.
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So unless you're helping that person that's so good at
getting things done, understand, hey, there's this whole other side of work that you need to be paying attention to because you have to learn how to do more than just run the checklist.
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You have got to help people understand how they fit and why they matter.
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Yeah, and I still think we need to do a better job of training our leaders how to be leaders, right?
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And and and I don't really love that word training the leaders to be leaders, but you know, bringing them forward and making them really understand the impact they can make on others.
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Because, like you, nothing makes me happier than to see somebody that I've coached or somebody that succeeds.
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That is that is the ultimate, it's the ultimate ultimate, it's it absolutely is.
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Yeah, I just as a checklist girl, I'm right there with you.
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So I know where you're going with that.
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So well, I still got it, but I don't necessarily take it out of my back pocket first thing.
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Not anymore.
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And as a checklist girl, uh Teresa, I know you're also paying attention to the time and the use recordings.
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No, they go no apology necessary.
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That's one of the things we also talk about.
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It's um that in that spirit, and it's a pun completely intended.
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I'm looking at our checklist and the questions that we have to ask before we run out of time.
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But I want to, based on everything we're talking about today, I actually I would love to take uh a slight um deviation from our typical last question.
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So our last question is, and we're gonna ask it, uh, how was the pivot you talked about?
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So your big transition from, you know, when the career change happened, how was the pivot for you a step forward?
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What I'd like to ask you, because of your experience with tech and with people management, how do you see your pivots being a step forward today in this time when the AI atmosphere is inside of every conversation, where the discussion about you know robots and people and technology and people is everywhere from every daily new newsletter to one-on-ones inside of organizations to you know dinner chats.
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How do you see what you've been through and all you know about what it's like to manage people?
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How are these pivots a step forward in today's AI-heavy environment?
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Oi, that's a heavy question.
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That's really a heavy question, and not one I've given any thought to.
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I suspect that you would want to approach it with some of the same principles that you use when there was any other kind of change.
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I remember when email first came along.
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I remember, I mean, there was a tremendous change in our culture when email and information was readily available, the things that we could do.
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Um, I think you would have to uh learn, have people in your organization learn enough about what it is to be able to work with people to help them go to where they are again and bring them up to speed on what that means to them and help a life fears about how it's going to impact their job.
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Because even with things like self-checkout, you know, you you look at what that did to cashier jobs, and or you look at uh drive up teller, or you look at any other things that technology enabled, and you see how it affected people.
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And somehow, some way, the impact on each individual with with this change in technology needs to be evaluated as it pertains to them and what they can do to better prepare for their own future.
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But that's a that's a tough one.
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Yeah, I mean you're yeah, I think you're right on.
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I think for me, my my thought about that is that right, like that that kind of technology should take away some of the monotony so we can really be the uh people instead of getting caught in the everyday stuff, that there's some stuff that we can use that technology, that AI, that other thing to do to free us up to be, you know, those consultants that we want to be or those things.
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I I think that's the conversation that I like to have with people.
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But you you I think you and I are right on because I remember when we switched from fax machines and phone calls to emails.
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And I and I kind of like the, you know, there was there was something about the phone call that you miss, right?
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In an email.
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Um so, but I think I think that we're on the same page with that, right?
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Like there's a lot of great with it, and if we use it in the right way, we can actually become better and spend time on things that really do matter.
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I mean, one thing that just I was thinking again about writing a schedule where you've got X amount of work that needs to be done and X amount of people to get it done in, and you know, what does your traffic pattern look like and all that kind of thing, and be able to feed all that into a model and let that model do all that work for you so that you can go out be on the sales floor with your team, with customers, look going compet competitive shopping, seeing what other organizations are doing, uh growing yourself.
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To me, that would be that would be wonderful to your point.
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Take that mundane work and let the AI do.
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Give to the robot.
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Yep.
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Yep.
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Absolutely.
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Oh my gosh, Laurel, this is you know, thank you for taking me up on the uh the question that you, as you say, you didn't consider, but this is the whole point of all the wisdom that you've collected, right?
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You're you just did it in front of us.
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You utilized all of the experience and the expertise to think through a challenging question and get oriented in a matter of moments, you know.
00:22:29.500 --> 00:22:38.540
And if we had more time, we could go into all the you know, the seven habits and all the other lessons you've learned and see how they would, you know, be applicable.
00:22:38.540 --> 00:22:42.300
And maybe that is a conversation to to have next time.
00:22:42.700 --> 00:22:43.100
Thank you.
00:22:43.100 --> 00:22:43.580
You know?
00:22:43.580 --> 00:22:45.660
So yeah, for sure.
00:22:45.660 --> 00:22:49.019
Well, thank you, Laurel, again for being with us today.
00:22:49.019 --> 00:22:51.420
I think there was a lot of great takeaways.
00:22:51.420 --> 00:22:53.019
I loved the stories.
00:22:53.019 --> 00:23:02.540
Um, I think that they say a lot about who we are and and you know, and and things haven't changed, you know, things have changed and things haven't changed, right?
00:23:02.540 --> 00:23:03.980
It kind of works both ways.
00:23:03.980 --> 00:23:06.620
So thank you so much again for being here.
00:23:06.620 --> 00:23:08.140
We really do appreciate it.
00:23:08.140 --> 00:23:10.060
Thank you as always, uh, Evie.
00:23:10.060 --> 00:23:13.900
I appreciate you and kind of bringing it all together.
00:23:13.900 --> 00:23:18.460
And uh to our listeners, we will be back in a couple of weeks with another episode.
00:23:18.460 --> 00:23:21.740
And remember, if you have a pivot, step into it.