Hi.
I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.
And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and courtse creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long.
Term career goals.
We want you to get the most out of life.
Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura.
This episode is airing at the end of May of twenty twenty five. I am going to be interviewing Lorena Yee, who is a senior partner at Mackenzie, the consulting firm, and who is also the co author of The Broken Wrung, which is a book about how fewer women than men get that first promotion into manager.
So I know there's been.
A lot of discussion out there of why are there not more women in senior leadership roles, and the authors of this book have done the research sort of tracing it back to that initial first promotion that women are significantly less likely to get.
And so the book talks about ways to deal with that. There's obviously a.
Lot that organizations can do, which they have suggestions for that, but also about what you can do personally to make sure that you are positioned as well as possible to be forefront of mind as people are considering promoting someone into management, how you can show that you have the experience to take on a new role, sort of some
strategic ways to organize your career with that in mind. So, Sarah, you've certainly observed there aren't even though women are what half of medical school classes now, I mean, there still aren't that many women in senior positions and like hospital leadership and things like that.
Yeah, it's interesting.
On the administrative side, I don't see that to be the case, meaning like the non physicians, we actually have a lot of like senior female leadership, which is cool. I don't feel like I see as many women kind of go the directorship role. I do feel like this has improved the ratios even in the time since I've been in practice.
And why might that be?
I mean, unfortunately, I think some of it is just like I mean, I think back to my division when I joined and they had one male amongst all women in my group, and he was like the director even though he was like almost fresh out of training, and I just think there's just such a and he was
a great guy, by the way. I don't think it was like a bad hire, but I do think there's like still this bias of like when you're looking around the room to see who should be in charge, like people instinctively tend to look for the y chromosomes, and like that's hopefully going to keep getting better and better because it's like disappointing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and hopefully that will change in a lot of places too. I'm curious you do a lot of forward looking planning. I know you've made like sort of ten year goals and five years old. Do you think a lot in terms of how to sort of strategically position your career to get to those things, you know, five and ten years in the future.
My story is a little different because I guess I sort of made the decision that I prefer not to be in a leadership role at least at this phase in my life, like within my medical career, like I enjoy more just being an individual contributor and like mentoring and trying to do the best I can. But like I don't like middle management, I guess, is what I learned, And I don't like trying to serve competing interests, like
I don't like not making people happy, I guess. So anyway, I like decided, you know what, I'd rather work for myself and have growth on that side, and then on the other side be more of a like contributor, a specialist, a worker. So I mean, I don't do that much
thinking about growth. I think more about what could maybe be different or new angles of expertise, Like I do love mentoring other physicians, and I know I've made a difference in some of my colleagues and like how they do their work and like their productivity, and like kind of how they feel about their work, and so I'm like, wow, that would be fun to kind of leverage that someday going forward. But I don't think a lot about like climbing a ladder, if that makes sense.
Yeah, well, there's no real ladder in my organization. As I were, I'm at the top wrong already.
But as I think about my career, I yes and no, do I think long term strategy about it. I do kind of think of sort of slow growth in lots of ways like keep building up the audience.
What could I do next to bring in the audience.
But a lot of it is just trying different things, and it's like the number of times at bat you can have right, Like I'll put this product out into the universe and see what people think of it, and then I'll try something else and maybe something will be amazing and take off. But I think it is good for us to spend some time thinking about it because part of taking our career seriously is think about, Okay, well I'm going to be in this long term, what
do I want it to look like. You know, I Am going to be doing something professionally ten years down the road, So let me treat it seriously and get to that point.
So I'm excited to see.
What Lorena has to say. So here we go with Lorena ye author of The Broken Wrong. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to have Lorena Yee joining us today.
Lorena, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm excited to have you here.
So maybe you could tell our listeners just a little bit about you, who you are, your career, that sort.
Of thing, sure.
I work at McKenzie and Company, and over the last twenty five years I've been working in the technology sector, really on client services, helping companies grow and innovate through
using technologies. And about fifteen years ago I started what was a side hustle project which clearly became a lot more, which was to use the tools and analytics in ways that we think about organizational change at mackenzie and apply it to one of the hardest questions in the world, which is how is it that we start with gender equity and education but don't land there in the workplace?
Yeah, and so you've been doing a lot of different research projects related to this, and this has actually sort of informed your career at mackenzie, right, I mean you led some of the early diversity and inclusion initiatives there.
Correct.
Absolutely so.
I co founded Women in the Workplace, which is one of the largest studies in the United States on the experiences of both men and women in the workplace, as well as a kind of benchmarking on representation. So really
kind of putting representation experience together. And as you say, Laura, this book is in some ways it's been over a decade in the making of pulling all of those perspectives together, as well as new research that we had on a concept of experience capital and the impact that has on women's careers, and really shifting the spotlight from what organizations can do to what, given that it's not a level playing field, what women can do to find ways to succeed in.
Spite of it all.
Yeah, and I thought that was a fascinating angle because it is one thing to point.
Out that the wrong is broken, as it were from.
The title of your book, Clay, But given that most of us are not in a position to change the world right now tomorrow, what can we do within that? So, I mean, why was that sort of a real conscious decision on your part to tackle that angle.
Absolutely, we're always looking for different ways to understand how to solve something that is actually quite of a systems level challenge. Right, It's not one action, it's multiple actions. The challenge with company level change is that it is slow. It takes a multi generational commitment of a company to truly go from the entry level all the way to the top and to the board level, where you have a really different type of representation of culture. And I
think for the average woman in the workplace. You just can't wait that long. So, whilst that's super interesting and we want committed companies to walk the talk, so to speak, we also need a set of tactics and strategies that we can employ if we're currently in the workforce.
Yeah, I mean, we just don't all have that kind of time exactly, I.
Don't have that time.
Well, let's start with let's say we've got a young woman who you know, we have lots of different people of different ages listening to this podcast, but let's talk about like a young woman newly out of school, perhaps looking around at the working world, figuring out how am I going to start?
What am I doing?
Are there things that she should be looking for in companies as she is looking to get in At the beginning, let me.
Say a couple of things that maybe aren't quite in the book, and then we'll talk about a couple specific strategies that she should be thinking of. The first thing is I think if you're starting a job search or you're in the earth stages of your career, one of the hardest things to do is find the self confidence without a ton of work experience to bet on yourself. But I think it's really important to bet on yourself, and that is kind of a mindset and a personal
journey that you have to be on. Now, let's talk about some of the tactics that you can apply to that. The first thing is knowing your facts, and we lay that out in a section called roots of the Problem, because I feel like a lot of women don't go in understanding the facts of what they're getting into. The fact is is that in the United States and globally in most countries, women outperform men in school in two measures, the percentage of the population that graduates with an undergraduate
degree and their GPAs. So here's the thing, ladies, you are doing amazing at school.
Congratulations.
Now we don't see that success at those same rates in terms of representation, promotion, velocity, and salary in the workplace. So how do we flip the strength of being amazing students at school to being amazing achievers at work? And that's where this concept of experienced capital comes in, which is close to fifty percent of your lifetime earnings comes from what you learn on the job. So what you learned in school only gets you about fifty percent of
the way there. Then, you have to take all that strength and confidence and resilience and pointed at work. So a tactical thing to get started with is pick a company, not just a job. If you're starting out and you feel fortunate, which I remember feeling just so grateful to be offered a job, that's amazing, But also ask some other questions. Make sure you're applying for jobs or you're comparing if you have the fortune to have two or three offers. How many women are at the leadership ranks
of that company. What are the policies and programs that advance fair workplaces in that company?
What are the things.
That they do for early entry employees to help them gain the capabilities and skills to get to that next level. What do women who are too maybe promotions ahead of where you would be say about that company? Have you met women? Did you see them on the website? Did you meet them in the recruiting process? What did they
say in an authentic and genuine way. You have to ask a couple more questions, because remember, this is your career, and this is best exemplified by this incredible woman who if I take her towards thirty years after she started, she was the CEO of a major technology company in the valley. But when I asked her, what's the one story you want to share of all your stories, she said why. She chose IBM for her first job as a sales leader, and she chose it as to well,
not even a sales leader, sales rep. She chose IBM because she was admitted to a leadership program and that leadership program taught her negotiation taught her like business skills, taught her how to succeed, and that investment was worth more than just being a sales rep at a prestigious tech company.
Absolutely.
Yeah, there are certain companies that really take it seriously to train people, and I know a lot of companies these days are kind of weary of that because they're like, well, they'll just fly out the door, which they do.
I mean, IBM's great.
People go elsewhere eventually in many cases, but you know that they still find it worth it because it's the place that people then want to go. We're going to take a quick ad break and then I will be back with more from Loraena Ye. Well, I'm talking with Lorena Ye, who is the co author of the book The Broken Wrong, which looks at how the gap between
women getting that first promotion in the workplace. I believe Loreena was a number like eighty one women for every hundred men promoted to the first level.
Is that what it is?
Yeah, the odds of advancement are not equal. For every one hundred men who get that first promotion you're just a couple of years into work, only eighty one women will see that same set of opportunities. And that's been a number that's been pretty sticky for the last decade.
Yeah, And it's interesting because that's like, again at the beginning of people's careers, so not even necessarily have gotten into that whole thing of parenthood and all that, which we will get to in a minute. But let's talk a little bit about how we can build our own experience capital. So we're looking at this to say, Okay, well, one of the big things that's going to help my earning's going to help my promotion and possibilities is to
have more experience capital. If I'm like looking around at my life, what practically can I do to make sure I get more of that?
Sure, there are so many things, but maybe to say I'm at the beginning of my career. First of all, it goes unset.
You have to deliver the results.
So whatever the OKR nbos quotas expectations are, you have to deliver it. That is the main bowling alley. But as you learn how to deliver that, you are gaining a whole bunch of skills. Pop your nose up and ask a couple of questions. One, what are the broader set of capabilities that I need to be great at the next job, in the next job after, And how can I start to get experience at a project level within the role that I have to lean towards that. A second thing is how can I start to demonstrate
entrepreneurship really early. That's not about leaving and founding a company, although you're more than welcome to do that. I sit in Silicon Valley. That's a very popular thing to do. But entrepreneurship is also how do you take initiative and demonstrate leadership and forward thinking in the role you have. It could be as simple as you have fifteen minutes
with a mentor and you get some feedback. You share who you are, but you also bring three ideas to the tape and offer not just like problems but I could help by doing X, Y, and Z. I would be excited to try and do this to help us deliver a better product, a better merchandising experience, whatever it is that you happen to be doing. So, I think how you demonstrate that leadership and that extra quotion early
is not about working more. It's about building a set of capabilities you're going to need in the long run.
Yeah, And I find that interesting because that is a distinct thing from academic achievement in many ways, right, that you tend to get good grades by doing well on projects that have been assigned and tests that you know are going to happen, on material that it's spelled out, will be covered. Whereas that entrepreneurial mindset is looking for something new that wasn't even there, right, I mean, that's an entirely different.
Thing, exactly, And maybe one way to think about it is to turn on its head a kind of phrase that's often used, which is that women are promoted on performance and men on potential. And that is this very frustrating thing. It's something that's been discussed for decades, like, oh, women look at all the criteria for a next job, and they wait till they've exceeded on the all the criteria and men say, hey, two out of ten ain't bad. I'm gonna raise my hand, okay, and then they get
the job. Now instead of saying gosh, he doesn't deserve the job, maybe say how I mean it is what it is. I mean, don't worry about somebody else, worry about yourself. How do I bet on my potential? And so if I turn that around as something you can do, you can say, look, I'm two years into the job, the next job is exit. I would be really excited about what are the pieces that are part of my
potential that are important for that next job. How do I start to get some experience so that when I have maybe not two out of ten, when I've got seven out of ten, I can say, look, here's some of the things I'm doing towards the other three, and here's how I see it, and here's how I'm excited to grow. So kind of looking up and around the corner. We call that being strategic. I call that being practical.
Absolutely, it's really important. Yeah, and part of this might be switching jobs.
I think it can be easy and sort of comfortable to stay in jobs, and sometimes it's a good job. But I think what I read from what I took away from the Broken Wrung is sometimes even when things are good, if you feel like you're not growing enough, you really do need to keep looking around.
Absolutely so, I've seen this at junior levels. I've seen this also at senior levels, where women feel like, for specific reasons, the C suite is elusive. Maybe someone before them could be practical, someone before them who's a woman, just got that big CMO role, so it's not even something holding them back. Take your talent and consider should you go somewhere else? Now, Well, that doesn't you know people are like, oh, that's not loyal or whatnot. You
can still be loyal by doing an amazing job. You can still keep the network of people that you work with. You can be very authentic in your job. But you shouldn't turn down opportunities that would allow you to get to your full potential. There's a balance there.
Yeah, absolutely well.
One of the things I also found interesting in the book, you talked about a finding that women tend to get less actionable feedback than men. So as we're going about building our experience capital, having these conversations with the manager about what I need to know to be at the next level. How can you get a little bit more practical feedback on how you might improve.
Yeah, So there are two things that the data shows which I'm very focused on, like how do you turn something slightly depressing into something that is a practical point of action. So two things that are kind of depressing. One is that women tend to get less quote negative
or constructive feedback, both by male and female managers. So that is maybe you're like, oh, I only want cheerful feedback, but the challenge is is that actually negative or constructive or developmental feedback is some of the best ways you grow when someone If you make a mistake and someone is willing to tell you about that and help you get to the next place, that's a huge gift. So if you're getting less of that, that's actually not helpful.
The second thing is that women tend to have more narrow and more junior networks, so there are more, fewer, and let me just say it, less powerful people in the average women's network.
When you put those those things together, it is.
Hard to have around you that kind of village that propels you forward. So sometimes a woman may be sitting there like how is it that the guys know everybody? The you know what to do next? Like what meeting did I miss? And I think you didn't miss a meeting. It's a lot of these micro points that add up to a macro difference, and so seeking directly feedback and saying, hey, I didn't think that last project totally. I don't think
I hit it out of the park. Could you tell me two or three things that I should take with me to the next place.
So just de risk.
So it's easy for people to give you that feedback.
It requires confidence again to be like, look, it wasn't perfect, but tell me how to get to the next thing. I'm eager to get there. So seeking feedback out and then also consistently building out your networks. These don't just sort of happen to you. They are relationships that you have to build an investment in over time. It's part of your job.
Absolutely, yeah, it is part of your job.
It's not the extra stuff, it actually is a part of it. So yeah, this podcast is aimed at women who are building careers while also raising families, and of course that is one of the reasons that perhaps representation as we go up the ladder may not be equitable.
Is that many women wind up taking time out of.
The workforce to raise children, or they may be more responsible for the kids within a partnership or anything like that.
And so maybe we could.
Talk about how to address that elephant in their room, like what are some ways to make sure that if you are raising a family and want to spend time with your family and all that, that you are still moving your career forward and maybe even seeing parenthood not as a liability but as something that could be a potential moment of change in your career.
So I have two co authors, Maria and Quillon, and amongst the three of us, we have nine kids. Each of us have three. I would not say it's easy.
So first I think let's just call it as it is.
It is not easy to work at advance your career, do a great job in the current job, invest in your future job as well as Ray's incredibly important people young people to be wonderful adults like that the whole thing.
And kids.
When your kids, you have multiple kids less than ten at home, this is challenging and it's challenging for both parents. But we do find year over year that when we look at even dual career families, the vast majority of the household burden or the workload in the home economy, irrespective of whether the woman is the prime bread winner or the secondary bread winner, tends to fall on women.
So I think, like we just kind of have to acknowledge first of all, that it's not an equal division of labor in many cases, and we also have seen from an economic perspective some of the challenges that really face So all that said, like you know, we shouldn't be afraid to say that it's not even that it is harder that women have and carry different loads, and I'm not saying which one is better or worse, but some of those loads have a lot more in the bag.
So with that, one of the things is I would say, how do you manage the tactics of your leave? And one of the things that I always talk about, and I this used to just be with women I mentored, and then more and more broadly, is pack a round trip ticket for yourself. Women do an amazing job planning to leave.
Okay, I've made sure that all.
The activities of my job that someone else has it all the projects are taken care of, all the checklists are there. If you're in a client service business like myself, I've talked to all my clients.
They've seen me. I'm going to be leaving at X date. I will be back.
You've done all all the things to prepare. You've done all the things to prepare for taking a certain amount of time off, no matter how long or short. That is. What we don't often see is that women take that same amount of care to Like what I say is like, write your round trip ticket back, what does the return
trip look like? And that may be getting in contact with your mentors and sponsors and your boss early, like you know, a month before you come back, thinking about the work you're going to do when you come back, thinking about the fact that other people were doing part of your job, how are you going to do that, Thinking about ways that you can lead, maybe even thinking about part time for a little bit of the beginning and then moving to full time, but like really architecting
with that same executive function skill to which you left, how you come back and thinking about how to do that. And sometimes what I have found anecdotally is that the first two or three months back aren't really that hard. It really starts to hit at six and nine months when you have the collective maybe the sleep deprivation times.
The chips and work.
Usually the first moments aren't as difficult as the sustaining model, to which you will have to work differently in a world where you have one, two, three kids at home and you are in a different stage of life and you still have all those work ambitions.
So I think there's.
Something about using the function there there. Second thing is about how you think about the skills you've learned. Some of the soft skills which we call soft skills, are hard skills. How some of those contribute as opposed to take away from your ability to be seen as a leader. And then I think the last thing is do you think about time differently? And maybe just to give you
one quick story, is one of my favorite stories. I mean there are lots of favorites, say like favorites every chapter, but one favorite story is this incredible lawyer and she was on the rise doing a amazing things at Yahoo at the time, and she had her first boy, and then she decided to be a full time mom. And I mean, if you saw her in action, you were like you took that on with the same gusto that
you took on being a lawyer. Then fourteen years later, she actually joined a reboarding group at LinkedIn, got back into the workforce, and is like thriving at LinkedIn in
legal department again. And I love this story because she's the same amazing leader, like you see it in her when she was at Yahoo, when she was a full time parent with her husband working full time, and then now she's back and I think, like you just imagine her kids, like her kids have seen all these different versions and this texture to their mom, and she still has so much energy in life and career left. And so sometimes we measure it in days and months, maybe
sometimes we measure it in years. But that takes a lot of personal courage and some companies that are willing to invest in women to help them get back up to speed.
Absolutely, Well, We're going to take one more quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Lorena Ye. Well, I am back with Loraina Yee, who is the co author of the book The Broken Wrung about what we can do as women to help our careers advance to overcome the problems of under representation, particularly in that first
managerial level. I want to talk a little bit though about the mental load and the load of carrying the household administration and work and all that that we mentioned earlier, that women tend to carry more of that, particularly in dual career couples. And you, guys, your co authors, and you are in a field that is known for longer hours,
for travel for client services. I'm curious if you guys, or you in particular, have anything that has found it made it easy to feel like you have the mental space to take on the job given what it entails.
I think I might have tried something different at every season, every phase, So I think I've been still in search of when the kids were younger. So my kids are I have a twenty two year old and eighteen year old and a ten year old. So for quick math, and I talk about this quite openly, McKinsey had won
every decade, every tenure. So one thing I've found is that there are different types of tactics at different types of tenure that are required because your responsibilities and also your learning curve and your team and everything is a bit different. So I don't think there's one way to do it. I do think it's a bit custom built to where you are. The second thing is there are a couple of things that have helped, though the specifics
may have been different. One is I used to think I was very well organized, but when you are overwhelmed, sometimes you present is disorganized. So I found that having some quiet time to think ahead three days three months or three days three weeks three months is really really helpful. I found that making to do lists that entail work and home and looking at them together, as opposed to I do all my work stuff and then I try
to get to my home stuff or vice versa. I think there's something about just kind of letting it all be on a sheet of paper. I know that sounds incredibly tactical, but there is something about organizing in your operating model, and that's a fancy way for saying all the things that you have to get done. A second category is I think over time, and it was really
hard for me at the beginning. I think I've gotten a little bit better at just saying I'm not good at that, or I'm having a hard time with this, and then that entails getting some help or maybe even just signaling like this.
Is gonna be a little bit sixty forty, not even eighty.
Twenty, or just maybe giving myself more time to do something or not expecting that same level of thoroughness, and that's less like work deliverables. But I think we add on a lot of things at home. So there's something about just knowing where you're at and saying, look, this is a little too much for me. And it's amazing how many people want to help you. And it's amazing when you have a community around you, both at work
and at home. And then I think the last thing that's a little bit tactical and helpful is as the kids have grown up, you realize all the idioms that you know are real. It's a really it's a marathon, not a race. And part of this is being there at the milestones in the like seventeenth lap and the eighteenth lap and the twenty second lap. And it's like such an honor for me to be my kid's mom.
And I feel like it may not accelerate my promotions in all cases, and I think that's real and it has real economic value to it, so I want to discount it, but it definitely accelerates my totalness as a person in life.
Absolutely well. And you've gotten a lot of promotions too. So let's let's be clear. Do you think I'm very curious? Do you think you have more control of your time now? I mean, you had the last child than when you are quite higher up versus the first one.
I think it might.
Have been easier. It might have been oddly easier with the first one.
Oh, you're younger than too.
I mean, who knows, well, well, I was younger, I had a boundless energy.
I still do, but I had more energy.
But I also I do think there's a real difference when you're managing yourself and the things that you're working on, Like you're an individual contributor, even if you manage two or three people, but you're largely an individual contributor versus managing like a whole function. And so I definitely felt a different level of responsibility when you work on a project basis as an individual contributor. If you leave your work,
you give it to someone else. You can go away from it and then you can come back from it. That's an amazing gift for maternity leave or printal leave. When you manage whole teams like that's a little more complicated. So I think like the texture of what's hard is a little different each time, which is why I think investing in your round trip ticket and that that's a long journey with a couple of stops is quite helpful.
Okay, all right, well, good to know, good to know.
Well, Lorena, we always end with a love of the week, So this is anything that is making your life better right now? This is gonna be a funny one, but I've visited a friend over the weekend who happens to have a farm and left with many, many eggs, which is just sort of a funny thing now because they're ridiculously expensive, but they're also really really good to have these eggs, like straight from the chicken. My breakfast has been amazing this week. So that is that is my
love of the week. What's good for you right now?
Well, I would say if I had fresh eggs, I would make carbonara sauce.
Just kidding, scrambled're going straight to the pasta.
I would just go to the pasta and the panchetta and some oil. I mean, what a difference fresh eggs make in panchetta pasta. But I think my enjoy for the week is so I was listening and I've been reading and thinking a lot more as I spent a lot of time in AI about robotics and kind of robotics powered by AI level reasoning. And it's really interesting because one of the things that humanoid AI robots are making progress in are like basic house tasks. And that's
not the exciting part. What was the exciting part is I was listening to one of the engineers breakdown how hard it is to get a robot to do things like to clear the dishes and put them away. And what I thought was, Yes, there is complexity in what seem or with ours like discounted simple things, and so I just thought it was great that, like there was complexity in terms of making a essentially a computer and a physical object do this kind of the way mow
for the house. But I also thought, in the long run, I love the promise that AI could help take some of the toil which really sits on both parents away, because what matters most like why are we working so hard? We're working so hard so we can be at our best and have quality time with our colleagues and our people that we work with. And quality time with our families, and so you know, if there could be a real sea change in that, that makes me really optimistic for the future.
Also, it would be really cool to have a robot empty the dishwasher. I would enjoy that quite a bit. Yeah, but the dishes, it.
Seems like gonna be very high.
There's a lot of judgment. You need a judgment involved us. Well, Lorena, thank you so much for joining us. If people want to learn more, where can they go?
They can go to Broken Wrong.
You can find it on the McKinsey dot com website, as well as Amazon and all other places that you buy books. It's in my local bookstore, and I found out that it was actually at a stock so they had to writing more, which was probably the greatest compliment.
Hopefully, it wasn't just my kids buying the book.
It's just your family buys it and then it's like, but it's out of stock. Now I've done that, Like that was the last copy I bought it.
Well, all right, Laura, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you so much for hosting all Right.
Well, that was awesome and probably inspiring to lots of our listeners. So we now have a question that is tangentially related. Someone asked they got promoted into a major leadership role, and this actually came from one of our Patreon subscribers, but hopefully she won't mine is getting shared even more widely. And she said she was going to be working with an administrative assistant for the first time.
So do we have advice on how to make sure this is a productive partnership and one that helps her be more effective in her role?
Yeah, well, I think definitely thinking about that last part, Like, this person's role is to help you be more effective, So you need to think about where are the places where support would really allow me to spend my time on my highest value skills and the.
Things that I uniquely can do.
And especially if you are in a major leadership role, this is probably working with the senior people who are reporting directly to you, spending time with those people and making sure they know what they're doing leading the organization right, providing the motivation for everyone, and encouragement in the direction broadly for the group. And so what can this person do to make sure that you can devote as much
of your time as possible to those things? So I think it would really really help to track your time as you are doing this, to look at how your work hours get spent, and then to sort of go through and say, well, which one of those things were the ones that were my highest value use, what were the things that somebody else could do, and then try to kind of over time put more and more of those with your administrative assistant.
And I think also recognizing that it is something that is going to.
Take time to build a relationship because both of you are going to have to figure out how to work together. So don't take anything that happens in the first few weeks as set like it can change.
This person will have ideas, you'll have ideas. You'll work together to make it work.
But you could also especially if you are getting someone who has a lot of experience in this, which I'm hoping that you are, Like maybe they were supporting the previous person in your role, or it's somebody who's been hired who's been a long time executive assistant, has worked with people in major leadership roles. Before ask this person, what do you do that has been most helpful? Like,
what have you done that has been transformative? What would you see looking at what you know of my role that you would like to support me on and you think would work best, and they'll probably have ideas that you might not have thought of.
I like that.
I think what you said earlier about like taking time is important because it can be It may feel laborious at first to get someone really used to the way you like things done, or maybe they do something and you want to give feedback, and that all takes time,
like it's going to come up the works. But at the end of the day, if that person is someone who's going to be staying, it's so where it's spending that time to have him or her understand how you do things, because again, that's like over and over again,
that's going to pay time dividends. I also like what you said about like things that are the most value of your time, But I also think kind of thinking about like what do I least want to spend my time doing that I'm doing right now, and figuring out how you can template that out to have that person help with those extremely low value tasks.
Absolutely, all right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking about the broken wrong getting that first promotion into management and settings people up for.
Success in that. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.
Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you.
Can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.