Joe Boyd:
Today’s guest is Kathryn Valentine. She’s the founder of Worthmore Strategies, a company that helps women thrive. You’re gonna learn a lot. I know I did. She’s also an only child, just like me. We’re super special.
Joe Boyd (00:00):
Kathryn Valentine, welcome to the Leadercast Podcast. Super happy to have you here and we've already been chatting, we cheated. We've been chatting for the last 10 minutes, so I'm super excited to get to know you more. Thanks so much for being a part of this.
Kathryn Valentine (00:17):
Sorry about that. Keeping silent has never been one of my fortas.
Joe Boyd (00:22):
I'm an introvert, actually. I'm off the chart introvert on the Myers-Brigg and all that kind of stuff, but my whole life has been performing or in front of cameras or audiences, and my wife's an extrovert, so I say one of the things I love about her is I don't have to talk.
Kathryn Valentine (00:37):
Yeah, my husband's pretty much just along for the ride.
Joe Boyd (00:40):
Right. So this is perfect because these people don't come to hear me say anything else. We can hear it from you. I read a little bit on your website about you and you were introduced by a great friend of ours, so I would like to get back and just hear your story. But before we do that, can you just tell us a little more about what Worthmore is, what your company is, what you do these days?
Kathryn Valentine (01:03):
Yeah, so Worthmore Strategies helps other companies advance and retain women. So as I'm sure you're familiar with, we know from research over the past 15 years or so, that companies that are high in diversity tend to move higher into performance and companies are doing a pretty good job recruiting at least initial classes that are about 50 50. But we really fall down about 10 to 15 years into someone's career where we see a lot of women leaving and that puts companies in a really tough spot. They're losing a lot of the talent that they've invested in. Our mission is to solve that problem leveraging research from the top universities in the world. I have to say, I am used to being on podcasts to talk about content. This is the first podcast I've ever been on where someone wanted to talk about me. So I've been practicing becoming an interesting person and we'll see how that works.
Joe Boyd (02:01):
Well, it made me kind of sad for some reason. Of course, we want to know about you and don't look. Every story I feel like is a miracle that we're even here and we get a chance to live this life and do this thing and I'm absolutely positive you're downplaying how interesting you are, but I do want to just thank you for being willing to do that.
Kathryn Valentine (02:32):
But we'll see. The audience will let us know. Dear Joe, don't ever invite her back.
Joe Boyd (02:36):
No, no. Stop it. So when did you first have this self-doubt? I'm kidding. Let's go back into your, where'd you go? Don't leave.
Kathryn Valentine (02:48):
Well, Joe, it started when I was born. It was a Tuesday.
Joe Boyd (02:51):
Sure. Let's for real, go back to you as a little girl running around. Where'd you live? What were you into? One of the questions I love to ask early on, and for some folks it works, for some it doesn't, but I'm always interested in the first adventure story that captured your imagination. So it could have been a movie or a cartoon or a novel you were reading or anything like that. If you have that, go for it. But just tell us a little bit about what kind of kid you were growing up.
Kathryn Valentine (03:23):
Grew up, I was raised by a single mom and I grew up in a suburb of Charlotte. Yes, those do exist. And so it was an interesting way to grow up. So our big family was in south Texas and after my parents got divorced, my mom found a great job that happened to be 2000 miles away from her family and anything else that she knew. And so she lived on her savings, put herself through graduate school, and then made this big move. And so I spent during the school year with her in North Carolina and then in the summer I would get on an airplane and fly to Texas and live with my grandparents. It wasn't until college that I realized that that was an unusual situation. When I would make decisions, I would always think about what 85 year old Catherine would do, and it turns out not everyone makes decisions that way. They're much more fun than I was.
Joe Boyd (04:25):
So do you have siblings or are you an only child?
Kathryn Valentine (04:29):
Only child.
Joe Boyd (04:30):
Me too. See really how special we are.
Kathryn Valentine (04:34):
I know everyone says it's a bad thing. I actually really enjoyed it.
Joe Boyd (04:38):
I think it's certainly convenient when you are your own best friend. You know what I mean? There you go. I think I told this story before when I was eight years old. My mom came to me and was like, you should have some friends. And I didn't even occur to me. I was like, what? How do you
Kathryn Valentine (04:53):
Do that? And you were like, why? I'm great,
Joe Boyd (04:55):
So and it's interesting, of course you're going to devote at least this stage of your career to helping women in the workplace and here you are, the daughter of a single mom working pretty hard. What kind of work was your mom in? What brought her to, was it Charlotte, right? Yeah,
Kathryn Valentine (05:21):
So get this, when my parents got divorced, my mother was a librarian and then she had always gotten c's and then she realized that that was not necessarily going to work at this point in time, so she ended up putting herself through grad school. She graduated with straight A's and then was recruited to a role as a hospital administrator in North Carolina. When she retired, she was one of the VPs. And so that always to me was an interesting take on, oh, there are so many of us who have these great strengths and can do these great things. We just haven't had the right environment yet. And so it's kind of thinking about how do we put people in those situations where they can truly shine?
Joe Boyd (06:10):
There's something to just being a little bit older when you go to college, I remember when I was in, went to college right out of high school and there were these old guys that would go into our class and they would sit up front and they had a briefcase and they would take notes and looking back on it, they were like 28. They just felt old to an 18 year old. They had a
Kathryn Valentine (06:30):
Briefcase. I don't remember the last time I saw one of
Joe Boyd (06:32):
Those. This is back in the dark ages too, but I think about them a lot for some reason because sometimes you just need enough life experience or enough pain or failure or fear sometimes even to realize, oh, I'm going to go, I got to go do this. Basically like a grownup, right? I, there's no one else to rescue me. I'm going to find my own path.
Kathryn Valentine (06:56):
There's no safety net there, and I feel like I need to explain. Librarians are amazing. My mother was not a normal librarian. She was a librarian within a corporation, so it wasn't like she had all of the amazing credentials that most librarians have. This was kind of a different thing.
Joe Boyd (07:23):
Gotcha. So growing up, what kind of kid were you?
Kathryn Valentine (08:00):
I still don't know that I can answer that question. I was an all-American cheerleader. I was also a total nerd who skipped school to study for the SATs. Who does that, right? I think when I graduated I'd missed almost half of my senior school days to literally study in the library, which was I was a weird kid. I was a weird kid. I didn't find my place until college.
Joe Boyd (08:28):
I love skipping school because you're just not learning enough there.
Kathryn Valentine (08:32):
Right. Who does that? Yeah,
Joe Boyd (08:35):
Probably pretty successful people would do something like that. So you get to college and you just said something like you found yourself there. So what does that mean when you get there?
Kathryn Valentine (08:45):
It was the first time I'd been in an environment where it was okay to be curious. I mean outside my family, but within growing up in North Carolina, where we grew up, it wasn't cool to be different and for me it wasn't cool to be interested in learning more. I think I really ticked off a number of my teachers by continually asking questions, and so my ticket out was to study as much as I could and to get a scholarship and to land myself in an environment where learning wasn't. I went to the University of Virginia and I remember my first semester out late partying. There was a guy at two in the morning who was definitely deep in the cups, deep, deep, deep in the, he had been drinking for a while and then the next morning at 8:00 AM I was running and I watched him walk to class with a professor discussing theology and I was like, what is this magical place? This is for me. Yeah.
Joe Boyd (09:50):
Yeah. So what were your studies? What was your degree in?
Kathryn Valentine (10:05):
Oh, fun story. My degree was in political economics. I'm the only person that ever graduated with that degree from the University of Virginia. The University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson. We've had quite a while to make it happen.
Joe Boyd (10:18):
And you're the only person ever. Did you make it up? How does that work? You make it up with your advisor or something, figure it out.
Kathryn Valentine (10:24):
Yeah, so actually it starts, but I was working on my thesis and at that point in time we just left our stuff everywhere and I went to get lunch and I came back and someone had stolen my computer and this was before the cloud when you definitely should have backed your stuff up, but nobody really did. And so I went to see my dean, who's the most incredible guy, and he was like, the final semester of your college experience is the lens through which you will interpret everything else that happens. Your answer right now is not to start over. I was six months into the thesis. He was like, your answer right now is not to start over. Your answer is for us to make up something for you to graduate with. And so he printed out the classes I'd taken and he was like, economics. A lot of economics. Oh politics. A lot of politics. Here we go. You'll be our first political economics major. Thank you.
Joe Boyd (11:20):
Wow. Like energy dust on an only child a little bit. So special. Anyway, so to be,
Kathryn Valentine (11:30):
Well also, his name was, well, I guess probably I shouldn't say his name. I don't know that what he did was totally on the up and up, but he was recovering from cancer at that point in time and he was just very into, life is so much bigger than our achievements and you my dear work too much. So go live a little.
Joe Boyd (11:50):
Well, did you listen?
Kathryn Valentine (11:52):
I did. I really did.
Joe Boyd (11:53):
What'd you do?
Kathryn Valentine (11:55):
I did all the things that I didn't do in the previous three years because I was working too much. Right. I went out on a Tuesday, which I never did before. Everyone else did. The cool kids did. I never did. We had the scavenger hunt that we did. We just basically hung out and drank too much and pontificated on nothing. We didn't know about anything at that point in time. Right.
Joe Boyd (12:19):
So what does one do with a political economic degree in the real world? Was that a journey to figure out?
Kathryn Valentine (12:30):
Not as much. So I got really lucky in that I was able to talk my way into a job at McKinsey coming right out. And the thing about working in consulting is it's perfect for somebody who has no idea what they want to do because across those two years I got to work in, I don't know, eight or nine different industries. So it was the perfect match in that way.
Joe Boyd (12:53):
So when you're doing that, are some of them starting to kind of seem way more interesting than the others? Are you discovering what you like at that point?
Kathryn Valentine (13:03):
Yes, and also my current conclusion is that it really doesn't matter as long as you're working with people that you enjoy. So I ended up really doubling down in oil and gas, which makes no sense, but the teams were phenomenal. I really enjoyed them.
Joe Boyd (13:21):
Could you talk about that a little more? I think can you say a little more about working with the people you like? How did you realize that? Why did that become so important to you?
Kathryn Valentine (13:34):
Well, I think it's sort of choosing the environment in which you can thrive in. So I did a little bit of work that inherently I thought that I would really enjoy. It was an education. I had done a lot of nonprofit education work in college. I'd taken classes in economics of education and everything like that. I thought this would be my place, but I didn't necessarily jive as much with those teams. So I always felt a little bit uncomfortable, surprised there were things that would happen that I didn't see coming versus when I got staffed to the oil and gas stuff, I didn't choose that it was chosen for me. I just enjoyed the teams. I understood their logic, I knew why they were making decisions. I really respected the fact that they wanted to do good work, but for them work was a part of the portfolio of their life.
(14:28)
And so for me, letting them know that I was going to take a day off to go be with family or to go celebrate a friend's birthday, that wasn't as foreign for them. That was something they supported. And so I think it was almost like selecting the environment in which you can thrive and recognizing that that's not every environment. I mean the failures on my resume are impressive in and of themselves. You're kind of like how did you mess up that bad? And so I think that in retrospect, it's one of those things that makes sense when you look back over it.
Joe Boyd (14:59):
Yeah. General working hypothesis of mine that I stole from people way smarter than me is that Richard Ward's a hero of mine and I was able to interview him. I don't know if you know who he is, but he says basically that we all sort of have a first half of life and for some people it can last 13 years. For some it could last 80 years, so half don't take half literal. And then we go through some amount of pain and failure and doesn't necessarily have to be our own doing, but it's coming out of that pain and failure that ushers us into what he calls the second half of life in which having survived that we become much more about other folks and if it works the way it should creates a lot of empathy and puts the ego more in its place. All those sorts of things. You mentioned some failures, so I'm curious as I explain as I explained that just as a working sort of metaphor first, second half, do you see that in your own story where you endorse,
Kathryn Valentine (16:13):
Oh, I have buckets of them.
Joe Boyd (16:17):
Does one or two come to mind that were more maybe personally transforming?
Kathryn Valentine (16:21):
Well, one is what this business came out of and I would say my professional purpose came out of. So when I was in business school, I was trying to get an internship and in business school the internship is critical because it's where most people end up getting their full-time job out of, right? So it's basically like you've now spent a quarter of a million dollars go get a job that justifies that. A lot of pressure on it. People really, really kind of overdo it a little bit. And I was one of those people and so I tried really hard. I found a job at a Fortune 100 that I was excited about and I was like, this is where I will be for the next 20 years. This is where I will make a career. And so during the internship I pushed myself to finish the project we were given to last 10 weeks.
(17:08)
I finished in about three and a half. My whole thing was like, this is great. Look at what I have done for you guys. This is wonderful. You'll hopefully want me on your team in the future. I ended up deciding that the right strategy here was to negotiate that I would be placed on another team halfway through the summer so that at the end of the year, well at the end of the cycle when they were discussing which interns would get job offers, that twice as many people would be able to vouch for me. And I thought that was going to be kind of the unlock to getting myself this strong. And so I spent all weekend practicing. This is back when Barnes and Nobles were everywhere, and so I went to the Barnes and Nobles, I got all these books about negotiating. I highlighted and underlined, I wrote a script again, very type a way over do things, wrote a script.
(17:59)
Then I got on the phone with my mom and I made her practice it over and over and over again, which I think it turns out is actually how somebody loves you unconditionally is when they'll have the same five minute conversation for three hours. And so I went in on Monday, 10:00 AM was the meeting. By 10 0 3, I had managed to accidentally offend the coordinator. By 10 0 5, she was telling me I wasn't a culture fit. And by that point in time it was pretty clear that I wasn't going to get a job offer. So the internship didn't make sense anymore and by 10 0 8 I was being escorted out of the building by security because exactly right. So no job and you're like, well shoot, now I need to spend the rest of my summer finding an internship. I guess this doesn't work out. And their protocol was that anytime somebody quit their job or internship, they were escorted out of the office by security. So meeting starts at 10 o'clock, 10 0 8. I'm being escorted out by a police officer, which if you've noticed this general theme in my life, me and police officers don't have a lot of overlap. I really didn't get in trouble much.
(19:15)
And so I'm sitting in my car and I realized that in less time than it takes to get a latte at Starbucks, I have completely derailed my career. And there we are.
Joe Boyd (19:30):
It's like a scene in a movie. It's an actual scene in a lot of movies
Kathryn Valentine (19:35):
Where you're just sitting there car,
Joe Boyd (19:38):
You're holding the box and the security guard takes you down to your, with that
Kathryn Valentine (19:42):
One random plant in the box that no one has on their desk when they clean out their desk, it just shows up in the box. Yeah, that was it.
Joe Boyd (19:49):
And you were young, you were still very young obviously, and
Kathryn Valentine (19:52):
I was 30 wasn't that young I the people carrying briefcases except without the briefcase
Joe Boyd (20:00):
What I noticed with me is, and other actors have said this, casting agents love me and they got me, I'll just put the office over and over and over again. I was deadpan. I could do that whole thing
Kathryn Valentine (20:34):
That makes a lot of sense
Joe Boyd (20:36):
And I wanted it anything I ever wanted really bad, I didn't perform in the moment to my best. I wanted it and as a result, I got plenty of dog food commercials like stuff I didn't want because I would just go in there and do whatever. But it reminded me of that when you want something so badly sometimes that in and of itself has a way of being the block.
Kathryn Valentine (21:07):
Well, this is a slightly different story, which is that the 20 ish hours I put into preparing, I used the resources that were available and those resources have been written for men. They don't come with that disclaimer like, oh, this is written for men. But the research would show you that women are at a much higher rate of backlash when they negotiate, particularly when they use commonly available negotiation advice. Like the Wall Street Journal last year wrote an article in which they advised that you walk into your boss's office and say, I deserve that promotion. I didn't sleep for two days. Because if for women to do that, they're at a much higher rate of derailing their career than men are and we're not telling them that story.
Joe Boyd (21:56):
No, I never heard anyone say that. Is that how you offended the person in the first three minutes something? Is that what you basically what you
Kathryn Valentine (22:05):
It's I ended up using a competitive negotiation strategy, which is what's commonly taught and we know that that doesn't work for women. What I should have used is a collaborative approach with a relational asks. So this came out of Harvard in about 2013 showing that when women negotiate that way, they're significantly more successful, but they're also able to virtually eliminate the risk of backlash, which when you've heard the backlash stories I have from the hundred or so women that we did figuring out how to do this the right way matters and we're just not giving people those resources.
Joe Boyd (22:44):
Tell me the phrase you said again for what that kind of negotiation is and can you give me an example of that?
Kathryn Valentine (22:51):
Yeah, so a competitive negotiation is I deserve a promotion, right? It's you versus me, kind of stereotypical way that people think about a negotiation. A collaborative negotiation is us versus the problem and the problem is typically anything that keeps an employee for giving it their all. For example, big and small promotions. I'm in sales and I can't get as many sales done because I don't have the external credibility of this title or whatever it may be, right? The second piece to that is using a relational ask. And a relational ask is something that shows that what you're asking for is both legitimate and beneficial. So the way that we have taught women in the past to do this is using the formula, which is talk about your past performance plus the future vision and then make your ask in a way that demonstrates the impact on other people if you do that. So both of those are best practice negotiation things. If a man chooses not to use those, there is literally almost no downside. If a woman chooses not to use those, then she is at a pretty high risk of backlash, at least professionally.
Joe Boyd (24:09):
How long have you been doing this specific kind of work?
Kathryn Valentine (24:13):
So right after that story, I went back to business school and I had another year and I happened upon one of my negotiation professors who's very famous in negotiation. She's incredible. And I told her the story and I was like, what did I do wrong? I literally did everything by the book and she was like, I'm not sure, but Hannah Riley Bowles out of Harvard and Linda Babcock out of Carnegie Mellon are working on some new stuff that you should go look up. And they were at that point in time sort of pioneering gendered negotiation and that's the rabbit hole I fell into for the next year. Yeah.
Joe Boyd (24:49):
Was the next thing to build your company around that was that the next step the
Kathryn Valentine (24:56):
Unlock was companies are losing a lot of female talent. We're approaching it simply with top-down stuff, right? Oh, we need maternity rooms. Oh, we need to ship breast milk and we need to, and all these things are important and they're wonderful and they're part of the solution, but frankly, the second part of this is the bottoms up part. We need to equip women and actually even more now men, to be able to ask for what they need to be successful. Because top down programs inherently assume that I need the same thing that the person next to me needs and that I need the same thing now that I needed five years ago. Instead, if we equip women to identify and ask for what they need as individuals, then think about all that value you can pick up. Right.
Joe Boyd (25:48):
I want to ask the question. So any grace if I say this weird at all, I have some older women in my life the way
Kathryn Valentine (25:55):
Right back at you. Please give me all the grace listeners, please. All the grace.
Joe Boyd (25:59):
Yes, absolutely. I'm sitting here recognizing some of my privilege, but I'm thinking of three different women in their sixties now probably that had risen to the top of pretty big organizations and they each told me in their own way once I got to know them phrase one of them uses, I had to be more of a man than the men. And so their sort of philosophy to get, and I'm sure some of it was generational, was you think men are tough, I got to be tougher. They were clients, they were awful to negotiate with. They always won. And so I'm just, that popped in my head and I'm just curious how you would react to that. Is that kind of maybe a last generation way of thinking for women who want to be say C-level or something like that
Kathryn Valentine (27:00):
In that they need to be more of a men than the men?
Joe Boyd (27:03):
I think what I'm trying to say is when the advice you just gave around negotiating felt more sort of intuitive, empathic, heartfelt versus what I heard the women saying is, leave your emotions at the door, show up, be strong, that kind of thing.
Kathryn Valentine (27:23):
So the word I would use is authentic, which is that up to this point, well, up to 10 years ago, in order to be successful, you did have to figure out how to be more of a man than the men, I think. And then two things happened. One, these next generations started to put their foot down and say, I want to be able to be who I am. The other thing that happened is the research field I think really shot at, I mean the research field is 15 years ahead of us as practitioners and corporations. I think the research field really shot ahead and started to say, holy cow, look at all these traditional business skills. We tell people about negotiating, networking, career planning. We've only showed the male side of that. What happens when we start to show the female side of that? And what we've seen is that the best way to negotiate if you're a woman is different from if you're a man, but the male story is what we're saying.
(28:22)
The best way to network if you're a woman and what your network structure should look like is different. But we've only been telling the male side of that, which is as many connections as you can, career planning different, but we've only been telling one side. And so right now, if you're a woman who is really excited about your career, wants to be successful, and you're kind of a go-getter and you're like, Hey, I need to work on X, let me figure out how to do that, chances are you're going to get information that's based on, this is sort of like breast cancer was studied in men until the nineties. That's what we're catching up on I think in the corporate world right now.
Joe Boyd (28:59):
Do you have general best practice advice for men in leadership that would like to be better at this? Sure. Why don't you give us that? So
Kathryn Valentine (29:12):
There's three things that I would say. One is recognize that women are still under-resourced relative to men. So Lee and Craig just did this research last year showing that men are given teams that are 25 to 40% larger than women are to get the same job done. And we can tell this across the story, 13% less likely to receive additional resources, 80% less likely to get the same stock package. I can go through this for days. So for male leaders, it's one, recognize that we're still resourced ine equitably unless there is an intervention. And as a male leader, you're a great place for the intervention to happen. You can do a lot. The second thing is recognize that after we're resourced unequally, women are more likely to receive backlash asking for resources than men are. So I can't correct this problem because I'm more likely to get punished for correcting it.
(30:15)
A side note, actually, men are more likely to suffer backlash in gender incongruous negotiations. Like if you were to negotiate flexibility in that situation, you're at more risk. For us, it's any traditional career negotiation, promotions, resources, raises, all of that stuff is loaded. And then the third thing for male leaders to know is that you can equalize a decent amount of that by creating the space for your women employees to ask, which is when you're having a conversation about what their goals are and all of those things, ask the question and have the space and time for it of now that we've set your goals for the next quarter, what can I do to help you achieve those? And the things you'll uncover are I found out one woman that I managed needed a new chair. She had scoliosis. She had never declared it. She was a pretty average performer. When I asked that question, she said, well, actually, I need a new chair, which is a shocking thing. And when we gave her one, she shot up to the top performer on the team by far, and we just hadn't created the space for her to ask for that for six months. So those would be my three things.
Joe Boyd (31:30):
I love it.
Kathryn Valentine (31:33):
I can really talk about this for a while.
Joe Boyd (31:36):
Well, yeah, it's your thing. I would hope so. It's fascinating, and this is why we wanted to talk to you. I think in some ways, in some ways I'm a Gen Xer, which we do exist. They skip us all the time.
Kathryn Valentine (31:56):
We do get skipped a lot.
Joe Boyd (31:58):
The world just went from boomer to millennial, which is fine, but I think there's a perception that this new generation is coming to power, if you will, organizationally all over the us, the world, and this new generation is less bound by traditional gender roles. So I think naively, maybe there's a little hope. This all just kind of fixes itself for some folks because we have hope that they'll kind of grow out of some old fashioned thinking. I know that's naive, not true, but I think a lot of folks probably my age and older kind of have that in the back of their mind that this next generations, they're doing this right kind of thing.
Kathryn Valentine (32:40):
Well, I actually think what's going to happen is that we're going to see a shift. If I had to guess, so let's just do negotiations for a second, right? Because this is what I know before everyone negotiated like a man and some women suffered backlash, and we were always surprised until we weren't. Now, what I think is going to happen is when we look at how leadership is changing into a much more collaborative practice, I think if we project out 10 years, men are going to need to negotiate the way that women have to now. So I have to learn to do this so that I don't derail my career again. I think my children who are both boys will need to learn to do this, to be effective leaders.
Joe Boyd (33:28):
How old are your kids?
Kathryn Valentine (33:30):
Three and five. They're just a giant mess. Literally. My life is just a hurricane.
Joe Boyd (33:35):
God bless you. I have two boys. It's so fun. Same age difference. They're turning 24 this week and 21, and I'll sound like the oldest man ever and say, trust me, it'll feel like tomorrow when that happens. But that age difference is chaos for many years. Then they'll probably hate each other for a little bit, and then they'll be best friends. That's my prediction. I'm really
Kathryn Valentine (34:03):
Glad you told me that because the best friends part is what we were going for. That's why I put myself through that so quickly is I wanted, and maybe this was the only child thing, but I wanted them to have somebody else in the
Joe Boyd (34:14):
World. Exactly. Yeah. That's interesting that we're parallel there too. But the good thing about boys during puberty, they just locked themselves in the room for three years, so they'll come back out. They'll emerge as men. It's like a butterfly, and that's how it works. You'll see they'll come out with a beard. It'll be great. So don't take it personally when they don't talk to you for a while.
Kathryn Valentine (34:38):
So grateful we had this conversation.
Joe Boyd (34:40):
Yeah, this is really a parenting advice podcast, so you're totally welcome, Kathyn. I'm happy I could help you with that. We do it to wrap up. I've loved getting to speak with you. I think you're incredibly interesting and you're silly for saying otherwise. Your story is, well,
Kathryn Valentine (35:00):
I practiced.
Joe Boyd (35:01):
Yeah, good job. Of course you did. You're Type A and your work is important and more than noble, and thank you so much for doing it, for educating folks like me and for helping women get what they deserve. So if folks would like to connect with you or learn more about this, what's the best way to do that? Oh,
Kathryn Valentine (35:27):
Thank you for asking that, and thanks for the opportunity to just chat a little bit. Like I said, I've never done a podcast interview quite like this one, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Sure. For anyone that wants to learn more, you can go to Worthmore Strategies.com, and across the top is actually a banner where you can download 75 things that you can negotiate, which a lot of people only think there's one thing to negotiate right From there. That's actually going to shoot people into our support emails, so they'll get an email every month about the newest research on how to be successful as a woman in professional settings.
Joe Boyd (36:00):
Great. worthmorestrategies.com? Correct. All right. Thank you so much. You are now part of the leader, cast family, so welcome to that. Hey, that means I will ask you for Faith
Kathryn Valentine (36:12):
As an only child, how much I want to join families. Right?
Joe Boyd (36:15):
Right, exactly. Come on in. The weather's fine. Thank you so much for your time. It was a blast to talk to you.
Kathryn Valentine (36:22):
Thanks, Joe. Thanks.
Today’s guest is Kathryn Valentine. She’s the founder of Worthmore Strategies, a company that helps women thrive. You’re gonna learn a lot. I know I did. She’s also an only child, just like me. We’re super special.
Joe Boyd (00:00):
Kathryn Valentine, welcome to the Leadercast Podcast. Super happy to have you here and we've already been chatting, we cheated. We've been chatting for the last 10 minutes, so I'm super excited to get to know you more. Thanks so much for being a part of this.
Kathryn Valentine (00:17):
Sorry about that. Keeping silent has never been one of my fortas.
Joe Boyd (00:22):
I'm an introvert, actually. I'm off the chart introvert on the Myers-Brigg and all that kind of stuff, but my whole life has been performing or in front of cameras or audiences, and my wife's an extrovert, so I say one of the things I love about her is I don't have to talk.
Kathryn Valentine (00:37):
Yeah, my husband's pretty much just along for the ride.
Joe Boyd (00:40):
Right. So this is perfect because these people don't come to hear me say anything else. We can hear it from you. I read a little bit on your website about you and you were introduced by a great friend of ours, so I would like to get back and just hear your story. But before we do that, can you just tell us a little more about what Worthmore is, what your company is, what you do these days?
Kathryn Valentine (01:03):
Yeah, so Worthmore Strategies helps other companies advance and retain women. So as I'm sure you're familiar with, we know from research over the past 15 years or so, that companies that are high in diversity tend to move higher into performance and companies are doing a pretty good job recruiting at least initial classes that are about 50 50. But we really fall down about 10 to 15 years into someone's career where we see a lot of women leaving and that puts companies in a really tough spot. They're losing a lot of the talent that they've invested in. Our mission is to solve that problem leveraging research from the top universities in the world. I have to say, I am used to being on podcasts to talk about content. This is the first podcast I've ever been on where someone wanted to talk about me. So I've been practicing becoming an interesting person and we'll see how that works.
Joe Boyd (02:01):
Well, it made me kind of sad for some reason. Of course, we want to know about you and don't look. Every story I feel like is a miracle that we're even here and we get a chance to live this life and do this thing and I'm absolutely positive you're downplaying how interesting you are, but I do want to just thank you for being willing to do that.
Kathryn Valentine (02:32):
But we'll see. The audience will let us know. Dear Joe, don't ever invite her back.
Joe Boyd (02:36):
No, no. Stop it. So when did you first have this self-doubt? I'm kidding. Let's go back into your, where'd you go? Don't leave.
Kathryn Valentine (02:48):
Well, Joe, it started when I was born. It was a Tuesday.
Joe Boyd (02:51):
Sure. Let's for real, go back to you as a little girl running around. Where'd you live? What were you into? One of the questions I love to ask early on, and for some folks it works, for some it doesn't, but I'm always interested in the first adventure story that captured your imagination. So it could have been a movie or a cartoon or a novel you were reading or anything like that. If you have that, go for it. But just tell us a little bit about what kind of kid you were growing up.
Kathryn Valentine (03:23):
Grew up, I was raised by a single mom and I grew up in a suburb of Charlotte. Yes, those do exist. And so it was an interesting way to grow up. So our big family was in south Texas and after my parents got divorced, my mom found a great job that happened to be 2000 miles away from her family and anything else that she knew. And so she lived on her savings, put herself through graduate school, and then made this big move. And so I spent during the school year with her in North Carolina and then in the summer I would get on an airplane and fly to Texas and live with my grandparents. It wasn't until college that I realized that that was an unusual situation. When I would make decisions, I would always think about what 85 year old Catherine would do, and it turns out not everyone makes decisions that way. They're much more fun than I was.
Joe Boyd (04:25):
So do you have siblings or are you an only child?
Kathryn Valentine (04:29):
Only child.
Joe Boyd (04:30):
Me too. See really how special we are.
Kathryn Valentine (04:34):
I know everyone says it's a bad thing. I actually really enjoyed it.
Joe Boyd (04:38):
I think it's certainly convenient when you are your own best friend. You know what I mean? There you go. I think I told this story before when I was eight years old. My mom came to me and was like, you should have some friends. And I didn't even occur to me. I was like, what? How do you
Kathryn Valentine (04:53):
Do that? And you were like, why? I'm great,
Joe Boyd (04:55):
So and it's interesting, of course you're going to devote at least this stage of your career to helping women in the workplace and here you are, the daughter of a single mom working pretty hard. What kind of work was your mom in? What brought her to, was it Charlotte, right? Yeah,
Kathryn Valentine (05:21):
So get this, when my parents got divorced, my mother was a librarian and then she had always gotten c's and then she realized that that was not necessarily going to work at this point in time, so she ended up putting herself through grad school. She graduated with straight A's and then was recruited to a role as a hospital administrator in North Carolina. When she retired, she was one of the VPs. And so that always to me was an interesting take on, oh, there are so many of us who have these great strengths and can do these great things. We just haven't had the right environment yet. And so it's kind of thinking about how do we put people in those situations where they can truly shine?
Joe Boyd (06:10):
There's something to just being a little bit older when you go to college, I remember when I was in, went to college right out of high school and there were these old guys that would go into our class and they would sit up front and they had a briefcase and they would take notes and looking back on it, they were like 28. They just felt old to an 18 year old. They had a
Kathryn Valentine (06:30):
Briefcase. I don't remember the last time I saw one of
Joe Boyd (06:32):
Those. This is back in the dark ages too, but I think about them a lot for some reason because sometimes you just need enough life experience or enough pain or failure or fear sometimes even to realize, oh, I'm going to go, I got to go do this. Basically like a grownup, right? I, there's no one else to rescue me. I'm going to find my own path.
Kathryn Valentine (06:56):
There's no safety net there, and I feel like I need to explain. Librarians are amazing. My mother was not a normal librarian. She was a librarian within a corporation, so it wasn't like she had all of the amazing credentials that most librarians have. This was kind of a different thing.
Joe Boyd (07:23):
Gotcha. So growing up, what kind of kid were you?
Kathryn Valentine (08:00):
I still don't know that I can answer that question. I was an all-American cheerleader. I was also a total nerd who skipped school to study for the SATs. Who does that, right? I think when I graduated I'd missed almost half of my senior school days to literally study in the library, which was I was a weird kid. I was a weird kid. I didn't find my place until college.
Joe Boyd (08:28):
I love skipping school because you're just not learning enough there.
Kathryn Valentine (08:32):
Right. Who does that? Yeah,
Joe Boyd (08:35):
Probably pretty successful people would do something like that. So you get to college and you just said something like you found yourself there. So what does that mean when you get there?
Kathryn Valentine (08:45):
It was the first time I'd been in an environment where it was okay to be curious. I mean outside my family, but within growing up in North Carolina, where we grew up, it wasn't cool to be different and for me it wasn't cool to be interested in learning more. I think I really ticked off a number of my teachers by continually asking questions, and so my ticket out was to study as much as I could and to get a scholarship and to land myself in an environment where learning wasn't. I went to the University of Virginia and I remember my first semester out late partying. There was a guy at two in the morning who was definitely deep in the cups, deep, deep, deep in the, he had been drinking for a while and then the next morning at 8:00 AM I was running and I watched him walk to class with a professor discussing theology and I was like, what is this magical place? This is for me. Yeah.
Joe Boyd (09:50):
Yeah. So what were your studies? What was your degree in?
Kathryn Valentine (10:05):
Oh, fun story. My degree was in political economics. I'm the only person that ever graduated with that degree from the University of Virginia. The University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson. We've had quite a while to make it happen.
Joe Boyd (10:18):
And you're the only person ever. Did you make it up? How does that work? You make it up with your advisor or something, figure it out.
Kathryn Valentine (10:24):
Yeah, so actually it starts, but I was working on my thesis and at that point in time we just left our stuff everywhere and I went to get lunch and I came back and someone had stolen my computer and this was before the cloud when you definitely should have backed your stuff up, but nobody really did. And so I went to see my dean, who's the most incredible guy, and he was like, the final semester of your college experience is the lens through which you will interpret everything else that happens. Your answer right now is not to start over. I was six months into the thesis. He was like, your answer right now is not to start over. Your answer is for us to make up something for you to graduate with. And so he printed out the classes I'd taken and he was like, economics. A lot of economics. Oh politics. A lot of politics. Here we go. You'll be our first political economics major. Thank you.
Joe Boyd (11:20):
Wow. Like energy dust on an only child a little bit. So special. Anyway, so to be,
Kathryn Valentine (11:30):
Well also, his name was, well, I guess probably I shouldn't say his name. I don't know that what he did was totally on the up and up, but he was recovering from cancer at that point in time and he was just very into, life is so much bigger than our achievements and you my dear work too much. So go live a little.
Joe Boyd (11:50):
Well, did you listen?
Kathryn Valentine (11:52):
I did. I really did.
Joe Boyd (11:53):
What'd you do?
Kathryn Valentine (11:55):
I did all the things that I didn't do in the previous three years because I was working too much. Right. I went out on a Tuesday, which I never did before. Everyone else did. The cool kids did. I never did. We had the scavenger hunt that we did. We just basically hung out and drank too much and pontificated on nothing. We didn't know about anything at that point in time. Right.
Joe Boyd (12:19):
So what does one do with a political economic degree in the real world? Was that a journey to figure out?
Kathryn Valentine (12:30):
Not as much. So I got really lucky in that I was able to talk my way into a job at McKinsey coming right out. And the thing about working in consulting is it's perfect for somebody who has no idea what they want to do because across those two years I got to work in, I don't know, eight or nine different industries. So it was the perfect match in that way.
Joe Boyd (12:53):
So when you're doing that, are some of them starting to kind of seem way more interesting than the others? Are you discovering what you like at that point?
Kathryn Valentine (13:03):
Yes, and also my current conclusion is that it really doesn't matter as long as you're working with people that you enjoy. So I ended up really doubling down in oil and gas, which makes no sense, but the teams were phenomenal. I really enjoyed them.
Joe Boyd (13:21):
Could you talk about that a little more? I think can you say a little more about working with the people you like? How did you realize that? Why did that become so important to you?
Kathryn Valentine (13:34):
Well, I think it's sort of choosing the environment in which you can thrive in. So I did a little bit of work that inherently I thought that I would really enjoy. It was an education. I had done a lot of nonprofit education work in college. I'd taken classes in economics of education and everything like that. I thought this would be my place, but I didn't necessarily jive as much with those teams. So I always felt a little bit uncomfortable, surprised there were things that would happen that I didn't see coming versus when I got staffed to the oil and gas stuff, I didn't choose that it was chosen for me. I just enjoyed the teams. I understood their logic, I knew why they were making decisions. I really respected the fact that they wanted to do good work, but for them work was a part of the portfolio of their life.
(14:28)
And so for me, letting them know that I was going to take a day off to go be with family or to go celebrate a friend's birthday, that wasn't as foreign for them. That was something they supported. And so I think it was almost like selecting the environment in which you can thrive and recognizing that that's not every environment. I mean the failures on my resume are impressive in and of themselves. You're kind of like how did you mess up that bad? And so I think that in retrospect, it's one of those things that makes sense when you look back over it.
Joe Boyd (14:59):
Yeah. General working hypothesis of mine that I stole from people way smarter than me is that Richard Ward's a hero of mine and I was able to interview him. I don't know if you know who he is, but he says basically that we all sort of have a first half of life and for some people it can last 13 years. For some it could last 80 years, so half don't take half literal. And then we go through some amount of pain and failure and doesn't necessarily have to be our own doing, but it's coming out of that pain and failure that ushers us into what he calls the second half of life in which having survived that we become much more about other folks and if it works the way it should creates a lot of empathy and puts the ego more in its place. All those sorts of things. You mentioned some failures, so I'm curious as I explain as I explained that just as a working sort of metaphor first, second half, do you see that in your own story where you endorse,
Kathryn Valentine (16:13):
Oh, I have buckets of them.
Joe Boyd (16:17):
Does one or two come to mind that were more maybe personally transforming?
Kathryn Valentine (16:21):
Well, one is what this business came out of and I would say my professional purpose came out of. So when I was in business school, I was trying to get an internship and in business school the internship is critical because it's where most people end up getting their full-time job out of, right? So it's basically like you've now spent a quarter of a million dollars go get a job that justifies that. A lot of pressure on it. People really, really kind of overdo it a little bit. And I was one of those people and so I tried really hard. I found a job at a Fortune 100 that I was excited about and I was like, this is where I will be for the next 20 years. This is where I will make a career. And so during the internship I pushed myself to finish the project we were given to last 10 weeks.
(17:08)
I finished in about three and a half. My whole thing was like, this is great. Look at what I have done for you guys. This is wonderful. You'll hopefully want me on your team in the future. I ended up deciding that the right strategy here was to negotiate that I would be placed on another team halfway through the summer so that at the end of the year, well at the end of the cycle when they were discussing which interns would get job offers, that twice as many people would be able to vouch for me. And I thought that was going to be kind of the unlock to getting myself this strong. And so I spent all weekend practicing. This is back when Barnes and Nobles were everywhere, and so I went to the Barnes and Nobles, I got all these books about negotiating. I highlighted and underlined, I wrote a script again, very type a way over do things, wrote a script.
(17:59)
Then I got on the phone with my mom and I made her practice it over and over and over again, which I think it turns out is actually how somebody loves you unconditionally is when they'll have the same five minute conversation for three hours. And so I went in on Monday, 10:00 AM was the meeting. By 10 0 3, I had managed to accidentally offend the coordinator. By 10 0 5, she was telling me I wasn't a culture fit. And by that point in time it was pretty clear that I wasn't going to get a job offer. So the internship didn't make sense anymore and by 10 0 8 I was being escorted out of the building by security because exactly right. So no job and you're like, well shoot, now I need to spend the rest of my summer finding an internship. I guess this doesn't work out. And their protocol was that anytime somebody quit their job or internship, they were escorted out of the office by security. So meeting starts at 10 o'clock, 10 0 8. I'm being escorted out by a police officer, which if you've noticed this general theme in my life, me and police officers don't have a lot of overlap. I really didn't get in trouble much.
(19:15)
And so I'm sitting in my car and I realized that in less time than it takes to get a latte at Starbucks, I have completely derailed my career. And there we are.
Joe Boyd (19:30):
It's like a scene in a movie. It's an actual scene in a lot of movies
Kathryn Valentine (19:35):
Where you're just sitting there car,
Joe Boyd (19:38):
You're holding the box and the security guard takes you down to your, with that
Kathryn Valentine (19:42):
One random plant in the box that no one has on their desk when they clean out their desk, it just shows up in the box. Yeah, that was it.
Joe Boyd (19:49):
And you were young, you were still very young obviously, and
Kathryn Valentine (19:52):
I was 30 wasn't that young I the people carrying briefcases except without the briefcase
Joe Boyd (20:00):
What I noticed with me is, and other actors have said this, casting agents love me and they got me, I'll just put the office over and over and over again. I was deadpan. I could do that whole thing
Kathryn Valentine (20:34):
That makes a lot of sense
Joe Boyd (20:36):
And I wanted it anything I ever wanted really bad, I didn't perform in the moment to my best. I wanted it and as a result, I got plenty of dog food commercials like stuff I didn't want because I would just go in there and do whatever. But it reminded me of that when you want something so badly sometimes that in and of itself has a way of being the block.
Kathryn Valentine (21:07):
Well, this is a slightly different story, which is that the 20 ish hours I put into preparing, I used the resources that were available and those resources have been written for men. They don't come with that disclaimer like, oh, this is written for men. But the research would show you that women are at a much higher rate of backlash when they negotiate, particularly when they use commonly available negotiation advice. Like the Wall Street Journal last year wrote an article in which they advised that you walk into your boss's office and say, I deserve that promotion. I didn't sleep for two days. Because if for women to do that, they're at a much higher rate of derailing their career than men are and we're not telling them that story.
Joe Boyd (21:56):
No, I never heard anyone say that. Is that how you offended the person in the first three minutes something? Is that what you basically what you
Kathryn Valentine (22:05):
It's I ended up using a competitive negotiation strategy, which is what's commonly taught and we know that that doesn't work for women. What I should have used is a collaborative approach with a relational asks. So this came out of Harvard in about 2013 showing that when women negotiate that way, they're significantly more successful, but they're also able to virtually eliminate the risk of backlash, which when you've heard the backlash stories I have from the hundred or so women that we did figuring out how to do this the right way matters and we're just not giving people those resources.
Joe Boyd (22:44):
Tell me the phrase you said again for what that kind of negotiation is and can you give me an example of that?
Kathryn Valentine (22:51):
Yeah, so a competitive negotiation is I deserve a promotion, right? It's you versus me, kind of stereotypical way that people think about a negotiation. A collaborative negotiation is us versus the problem and the problem is typically anything that keeps an employee for giving it their all. For example, big and small promotions. I'm in sales and I can't get as many sales done because I don't have the external credibility of this title or whatever it may be, right? The second piece to that is using a relational ask. And a relational ask is something that shows that what you're asking for is both legitimate and beneficial. So the way that we have taught women in the past to do this is using the formula, which is talk about your past performance plus the future vision and then make your ask in a way that demonstrates the impact on other people if you do that. So both of those are best practice negotiation things. If a man chooses not to use those, there is literally almost no downside. If a woman chooses not to use those, then she is at a pretty high risk of backlash, at least professionally.
Joe Boyd (24:09):
How long have you been doing this specific kind of work?
Kathryn Valentine (24:13):
So right after that story, I went back to business school and I had another year and I happened upon one of my negotiation professors who's very famous in negotiation. She's incredible. And I told her the story and I was like, what did I do wrong? I literally did everything by the book and she was like, I'm not sure, but Hannah Riley Bowles out of Harvard and Linda Babcock out of Carnegie Mellon are working on some new stuff that you should go look up. And they were at that point in time sort of pioneering gendered negotiation and that's the rabbit hole I fell into for the next year. Yeah.
Joe Boyd (24:49):
Was the next thing to build your company around that was that the next step the
Kathryn Valentine (24:56):
Unlock was companies are losing a lot of female talent. We're approaching it simply with top-down stuff, right? Oh, we need maternity rooms. Oh, we need to ship breast milk and we need to, and all these things are important and they're wonderful and they're part of the solution, but frankly, the second part of this is the bottoms up part. We need to equip women and actually even more now men, to be able to ask for what they need to be successful. Because top down programs inherently assume that I need the same thing that the person next to me needs and that I need the same thing now that I needed five years ago. Instead, if we equip women to identify and ask for what they need as individuals, then think about all that value you can pick up. Right.
Joe Boyd (25:48):
I want to ask the question. So any grace if I say this weird at all, I have some older women in my life the way
Kathryn Valentine (25:55):
Right back at you. Please give me all the grace listeners, please. All the grace.
Joe Boyd (25:59):
Yes, absolutely. I'm sitting here recognizing some of my privilege, but I'm thinking of three different women in their sixties now probably that had risen to the top of pretty big organizations and they each told me in their own way once I got to know them phrase one of them uses, I had to be more of a man than the men. And so their sort of philosophy to get, and I'm sure some of it was generational, was you think men are tough, I got to be tougher. They were clients, they were awful to negotiate with. They always won. And so I'm just, that popped in my head and I'm just curious how you would react to that. Is that kind of maybe a last generation way of thinking for women who want to be say C-level or something like that
Kathryn Valentine (27:00):
In that they need to be more of a men than the men?
Joe Boyd (27:03):
I think what I'm trying to say is when the advice you just gave around negotiating felt more sort of intuitive, empathic, heartfelt versus what I heard the women saying is, leave your emotions at the door, show up, be strong, that kind of thing.
Kathryn Valentine (27:23):
So the word I would use is authentic, which is that up to this point, well, up to 10 years ago, in order to be successful, you did have to figure out how to be more of a man than the men, I think. And then two things happened. One, these next generations started to put their foot down and say, I want to be able to be who I am. The other thing that happened is the research field I think really shot at, I mean the research field is 15 years ahead of us as practitioners and corporations. I think the research field really shot ahead and started to say, holy cow, look at all these traditional business skills. We tell people about negotiating, networking, career planning. We've only showed the male side of that. What happens when we start to show the female side of that? And what we've seen is that the best way to negotiate if you're a woman is different from if you're a man, but the male story is what we're saying.
(28:22)
The best way to network if you're a woman and what your network structure should look like is different. But we've only been telling the male side of that, which is as many connections as you can, career planning different, but we've only been telling one side. And so right now, if you're a woman who is really excited about your career, wants to be successful, and you're kind of a go-getter and you're like, Hey, I need to work on X, let me figure out how to do that, chances are you're going to get information that's based on, this is sort of like breast cancer was studied in men until the nineties. That's what we're catching up on I think in the corporate world right now.
Joe Boyd (28:59):
Do you have general best practice advice for men in leadership that would like to be better at this? Sure. Why don't you give us that? So
Kathryn Valentine (29:12):
There's three things that I would say. One is recognize that women are still under-resourced relative to men. So Lee and Craig just did this research last year showing that men are given teams that are 25 to 40% larger than women are to get the same job done. And we can tell this across the story, 13% less likely to receive additional resources, 80% less likely to get the same stock package. I can go through this for days. So for male leaders, it's one, recognize that we're still resourced ine equitably unless there is an intervention. And as a male leader, you're a great place for the intervention to happen. You can do a lot. The second thing is recognize that after we're resourced unequally, women are more likely to receive backlash asking for resources than men are. So I can't correct this problem because I'm more likely to get punished for correcting it.
(30:15)
A side note, actually, men are more likely to suffer backlash in gender incongruous negotiations. Like if you were to negotiate flexibility in that situation, you're at more risk. For us, it's any traditional career negotiation, promotions, resources, raises, all of that stuff is loaded. And then the third thing for male leaders to know is that you can equalize a decent amount of that by creating the space for your women employees to ask, which is when you're having a conversation about what their goals are and all of those things, ask the question and have the space and time for it of now that we've set your goals for the next quarter, what can I do to help you achieve those? And the things you'll uncover are I found out one woman that I managed needed a new chair. She had scoliosis. She had never declared it. She was a pretty average performer. When I asked that question, she said, well, actually, I need a new chair, which is a shocking thing. And when we gave her one, she shot up to the top performer on the team by far, and we just hadn't created the space for her to ask for that for six months. So those would be my three things.
Joe Boyd (31:30):
I love it.
Kathryn Valentine (31:33):
I can really talk about this for a while.
Joe Boyd (31:36):
Well, yeah, it's your thing. I would hope so. It's fascinating, and this is why we wanted to talk to you. I think in some ways, in some ways I'm a Gen Xer, which we do exist. They skip us all the time.
Kathryn Valentine (31:56):
We do get skipped a lot.
Joe Boyd (31:58):
The world just went from boomer to millennial, which is fine, but I think there's a perception that this new generation is coming to power, if you will, organizationally all over the us, the world, and this new generation is less bound by traditional gender roles. So I think naively, maybe there's a little hope. This all just kind of fixes itself for some folks because we have hope that they'll kind of grow out of some old fashioned thinking. I know that's naive, not true, but I think a lot of folks probably my age and older kind of have that in the back of their mind that this next generations, they're doing this right kind of thing.
Kathryn Valentine (32:40):
Well, I actually think what's going to happen is that we're going to see a shift. If I had to guess, so let's just do negotiations for a second, right? Because this is what I know before everyone negotiated like a man and some women suffered backlash, and we were always surprised until we weren't. Now, what I think is going to happen is when we look at how leadership is changing into a much more collaborative practice, I think if we project out 10 years, men are going to need to negotiate the way that women have to now. So I have to learn to do this so that I don't derail my career again. I think my children who are both boys will need to learn to do this, to be effective leaders.
Joe Boyd (33:28):
How old are your kids?
Kathryn Valentine (33:30):
Three and five. They're just a giant mess. Literally. My life is just a hurricane.
Joe Boyd (33:35):
God bless you. I have two boys. It's so fun. Same age difference. They're turning 24 this week and 21, and I'll sound like the oldest man ever and say, trust me, it'll feel like tomorrow when that happens. But that age difference is chaos for many years. Then they'll probably hate each other for a little bit, and then they'll be best friends. That's my prediction. I'm really
Kathryn Valentine (34:03):
Glad you told me that because the best friends part is what we were going for. That's why I put myself through that so quickly is I wanted, and maybe this was the only child thing, but I wanted them to have somebody else in the
Joe Boyd (34:14):
World. Exactly. Yeah. That's interesting that we're parallel there too. But the good thing about boys during puberty, they just locked themselves in the room for three years, so they'll come back out. They'll emerge as men. It's like a butterfly, and that's how it works. You'll see they'll come out with a beard. It'll be great. So don't take it personally when they don't talk to you for a while.
Kathryn Valentine (34:38):
So grateful we had this conversation.
Joe Boyd (34:40):
Yeah, this is really a parenting advice podcast, so you're totally welcome, Kathyn. I'm happy I could help you with that. We do it to wrap up. I've loved getting to speak with you. I think you're incredibly interesting and you're silly for saying otherwise. Your story is, well,
Kathryn Valentine (35:00):
I practiced.
Joe Boyd (35:01):
Yeah, good job. Of course you did. You're Type A and your work is important and more than noble, and thank you so much for doing it, for educating folks like me and for helping women get what they deserve. So if folks would like to connect with you or learn more about this, what's the best way to do that? Oh,
Kathryn Valentine (35:27):
Thank you for asking that, and thanks for the opportunity to just chat a little bit. Like I said, I've never done a podcast interview quite like this one, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Sure. For anyone that wants to learn more, you can go to Worthmore Strategies.com, and across the top is actually a banner where you can download 75 things that you can negotiate, which a lot of people only think there's one thing to negotiate right From there. That's actually going to shoot people into our support emails, so they'll get an email every month about the newest research on how to be successful as a woman in professional settings.
Joe Boyd (36:00):
Great. worthmorestrategies.com? Correct. All right. Thank you so much. You are now part of the leader, cast family, so welcome to that. Hey, that means I will ask you for Faith
Kathryn Valentine (36:12):
As an only child, how much I want to join families. Right?
Joe Boyd (36:15):
Right, exactly. Come on in. The weather's fine. Thank you so much for your time. It was a blast to talk to you.
Kathryn Valentine (36:22):
Thanks, Joe. Thanks.
