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On today’s “Women in Sales Leadership,” show, Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership President Gina Stracuzzi interviewed Dr. Margie Warrell. She will be the keynote presenter at the October 9 Women in Sales Elevation Conference. Register here to attend the event.
Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here.
Find Margie on LinkedIn.
MARGIE’S TIP: “Think of one thing that you’re dealing with right now that’s causing you some stress, that’s creating some tension, that you are feeling some frustration around. Maybe you need to brave an awkward conversation. Maybe you need to put your hand up or speak up and risk rocking the boat. If you were really bringing the boldest version of you to the conversations you’re having, the interactions you’re having, the challenges that you are facing, what’s one thing that you would be doing more of, and do that. Just back yourself more because it is taking action that we come to discover, “You know what? I didn’t need to doubt myself to begin with.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Gina Stracuzzi: I am very excited to welcome my guest, Dr. Margie Warrell. Margie is going to be our keynote speaker at the Women in Sales Leadership Elevation Conference on October 9th. We are going to be talking about all things AI and women and our careers and how we are going to use AI to leverage them. Margie is the author of The Courage Gap, and this is such a great time for us to be talking about courage and AI at the same time. Before we get any further into the conversation, Margie, tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey and how you came to be where you are and the book you wrote.
Margie Warrell: My journey, you can probably tell from my accent, I didn’t grow up around here. I say I grew up in the deep south, south of the equator on the southern shores of Australia. Have had a very global career and journey over the last 30 odd years living and working around the world. I think I’m in my 15th year in the United States. This is my second stint.
I started out on a dairy farm in rural Australia in the Aussie bush. I think it was there while learning to ride horses that I think I internalized a principle that’s guided much of my life ever since, and that is that growth and comfort can’t ride the same horse. I feel like I’ve spent much of my adult life outside my comfort zone embracing a sense of adventure and saying, “Okay, why not? Let’s see where this goes.”
I started my career in the corporate world in marketing and then made a change in my 30s and trained as a coach, executive coach and leadership, and actually life coaching sometimes too. I’ve spent the last 20, 25 years helping people to really get out of their own way and bring their full quota of talents and skills to whatever it is that they want to be successful at. I’ve developed a particularly strong passion for empowering women leaders, because as a woman myself, as a mother too, I think so often we buy into the doubts and we let them call the shots and sometimes buy into some of the negative gender biases about women too. I think we can be our own harshest critics at times.
Gina Stracuzzi: By far.
Margie Warrell: That’s why I just said to you when you didn’t get my last name quite right, it was like, “Let’s just keep going,” because I think we so often get held back by a desire to have everything be done perfectly to feel like we have to be perfect at things before we move forward. I think that’s obviously very relevant to really harnessing the immense value and power of GenAI as it starts to revolutionize how we work and live. Because we tend to be sometimes a little more tentative, a little more cautious, less willing to wing it than the guys we spend our lives with. While that can have its upsides, it can also have its downsides too.
My own professional journey of saying yes to opportunities, even though I didn’t quite know what I was doing, and moving countries and continents while raising kids and forging a career is definitely parallels with some of the challenges and opportunities that we are facing today, given just the pace of change and the uncertainty and the risk factor around generative AI tools too.
Gina Stracuzzi: There’s enough to actually be cognizant of and leery of as we move into this AI everything world, that we don’t need to carry unnecessary fears with us, because it will hold us back. I know from your book that you get a lot of what I see in the Women in Sales Leadership Forum, just marvelous, incredibly bright women who stand on all of it for all the reasons you just articulated. I really want women to embrace the idea that this is not the time to be fearful for the same reasons. You can be a little leery of AI and make sure you’re doing ethical things, but talk to us a little bit about what you see happening to women on a regular basis and where you think that could hold women up in their use of AI.
Margie Warrell: The data also speaks as being numerous studies done, whether it’s by HBR or Deloitte, etc., that women have been slower to adopt generative AI tools. Anything I say here is not a better, worse, etc., but men generally have been quicker to just experiment with things. I didn’t touch on before, so much of the work I do is around this concept of courage. How do we teach courage? How do we cultivate that in ourselves and knowing that it is absolutely a learnable skill, and encourage just the two core pillars of that, is the willingness to take action even though we’re afraid and there’s a risk, and two, the management of our fear. Often, we are more afraid than we need to be.
Often, we are anxious about things not going well and what happens if this doesn’t work out, when actually we have all the resources we need to figure that out as we move along. We sell ourselves short sometimes and we hold back when actually the smartest thing to do would be to blunt forward, to give ourselves permission to figure it out as we go along. When it comes to AI, heck, no one has a playbook on how this is going to unfold. No one has. There is almost certainly going to be missteps, I use the word missteps as actually the Latin derivative of the word mistake, is to take a step in the wrong direction where you go, “Okay, that didn’t work so well. All right. Let me step back and move forward over here.”
The more willing we are to give ourselves permission to try things and get it wrong sometimes, but in our pursuit of trying to get it right, actually, the more we’re going to learn faster. In a world that’s changing just super-fast, you just think of 12 months ago, much less 5 years ago, gosh, and much less 10 years ago, where things are changing at lightning speed. How fast do we learn is in itself a massive competitive advantage, and also a business imperative. How do we speed up our pace for learning? We can’t speed up our pace for learning if we feel like we’ve got to be getting it right all the time. To me, our ability to thrive and to succeed and to excel in what you’re doing as a leader in the sales space, is going to be really dependent on your willingness to be getting it wrong constantly, but not wrong in massive ways.
I’m not talking about throwing caution to the wind and being reckless or stupid at all. Hopefully that goes without saying. But I am talking about saying, “Hey, I’m going to try this. Let’s see how this goes,” and doing lots of little micro experiments. “Let’s try this. Hey team, let’s try this.” But then how do we shorten those learning cycles so that we are continually getting the feedback and going, “Okay, that worked, that didn’t work.” It’s not something to be ashamed of or embarrassed about to go, “Hey, tried this, didn’t work, but here’s what I learned,” and let’s share that learning. It starts with ourselves.
Gina Stracuzzi: It’s interesting. Recently I was on a podcast with someone who is totally immersed in the AI world, and he told us that women are actually better at using AI because our prompts are more descriptive and they bring in context. The output is closer to what we want than a guy who might just say, “I need this.” Well, in what aspect and why do you need it? Women really have a strength there. I think as you alluded to, we are all coming into this at the same time, and that’s unusual. Nobody’s got a leg up necessarily. This is a great time to find your courage, as you’re going to be talking to us at the conference.
Let’s switch gears just a little bit. I want to talk about what led you to get your PhD, and tell us a little bit about what that’s in, because I think that is the basis for why you understand what you understand about women and why they need to be in the room on October 9th when you kick us off.
Margie Warrell: I was a mature student, let’s just say that, with my PhD. I didn’t actually finish my PhD and get my doctorate till I was in my 50s. I certainly wasn’t coming at it from a purely academic lens, as much as I call myself a pro academic. I had spent over 20 years coaching women around the world. I was actually living in Singapore when I started my PhD. The reason I wanted to do it is because I had so much data that I’d collected anecdotally, very experiential, lived experience, my own and also working with people. I wanted to have some academic rigor around it. How do I codify what I’m experiencing and what I’m seeing? How do I test my own hypothesis?
I did a master’s in org change and leadership development. My PhD was in human development, but my dissertation I did in women in leadership in what is it that differentiates women who reach the C-suite in multinational corporations. That was actually the dissertation topic. Interviewed women who had reached that level. They all had to be in P&L roles. Some of them were sales leaders. Some of them were operations, etc.. Not all were CEOs, as much as they were C-suite leaders.
The reason I feel so strongly about that is that I believe in, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “Women belong at all tables where decisions are made,” but not only that, as research shows, better decisions are made when women are involved in those decisions. Leadership teams that have more women, and at least 30% women at the table, make stronger decisions and are more profitable. They actually are. It’s not just a nice moral imperative of let’s have women there because it makes us all feel good and it’s fair. It’s actually good for business. It’s actually good for the world. It’s good for communities. It’s good in every sphere of influence.
I personally have a really deep passion to have more women sit at leadership tables. I do a lot of work with women moving into political leadership globally as well through my work with women’s democracy. I feel strongly about this across the board. What I know is this, women bring unique strengths. Women are naturally more empathetic and tuned in to what’s going on, the unspoken emotions and concerns of people, than our male counterparts often are. We’re naturally perceptive and tuned in at that very intuitive level.
Women have natural strength at bridging divides, at creating affiliation. We are great at building strong teams. We think about the us, the we, and leading from that place. There’s many strengths that women bring to the table that complement the strengths of men. This isn’t better than, worse than, it’s that we are stronger and decisions are better and companies are better when women and men work in partnership together. How do we leverage the full quota of strengths and diversity of perspectives, and also experiences? Just recognizing all of that.
I have a very strong passion around that. That’s why I did my PhD in it. Bringing those insights to the work that I do, coaching women in senior roles, and honestly, also coaching men. I had three and a half years, I finished up at the end of last year, as a senior partner in board and CEO succession at Korn Ferry. Not in the recruitment side, but in the executive leadership development side, consulting side. How do we help leaders scale their impact? How do we help them build stronger teams? How do we help them to create stronger cultures that unlock the potential and creativity and abilities with people within the whole organization?
During that time, I got to see these incredibly smart capable people, men and women, who didn’t always do the very things they were capable of doing that would’ve served the organization, because fear in some guys got in the way. When I talk about some guys, I’m not talking about, “I’m anxious and I’m scared I’ll fail.” I’m talking about ego, being terrified of not looking good, hubris. I’m talking about the insecure overachievers who are brilliantly smart and hyper-driven and achieve immense results. But once they get to these top levels, they’re terrified of being found out as inadequate. They’re terrified of losing that status and so they become incredibly risk averse.
I’ve seen that with men and women, and honestly, so often when women reach those top echelons of power and influence and decision making, they’ve had to work twice as hard and be twice really good at what they do, and yet sometimes can still not use their own power with full force, and still doubt themselves. Still sometimes that imposterhood kicks in like, “Heck, I don’t know how I got here. When will people realize?” and still feeling that they have to prove something.
Obviously, this year there’s been a massive pushback on all things diversity, equity, and inclusion, and I think some women have felt like they have to prove themselves all over again. That they’re there because of their gender. I would say this is not the time to feel like you have to prove something, but to really step into your power and use it fully and harness all of that knowledge, that hard-won wisdom that you’ve gained. To me, what I’m passionate about, and obviously the message I’ll be sharing, and this obviously relates to how we are embracing AI, because we have some, obviously you just pointed out that, and I didn’t know that, that we are great at putting in the descriptions of what we want from it. How do we bring the full quota of our talents, our knowledge, all of the experiences we’ve had, including the really tough ones, to the moment at hand, and how can we seize the opportunities right now?
Disruption is never easy. Our brains are wired for certainty. We want to make plans on a future that we can predict with some level of confidence. But it’s actually in these times when there is so much disruption, when there is immense uncertainty, no one knows what’s coming. Whether it’s with technology on that landscape or whether it’s with the global, the geopolitics with policy, on every direction we have a lot of unknowns. No one knows what’s coming. It’s what differentiates those who are able to seize opportunities are those who are constantly moving forward amid the unknowns. Expanding our capacity to make decisions amid all the ambiguity and amid the uncertainty, instead of feeling overwhelmed, how do we expand our capacity, our own bandwidth to just move forward amid all of the things that might otherwise drive us to paralysis.
Gina Stracuzzi: We are going to explore all of that. I would like to just quickly, before I ask you for your final thought on things that people can put into place today, and I hope you’ll say go and register for the conference, because that is going to be something that every woman needs for her career. But your point about the collaborative nature, the creativity, the empathy, all of that, if we are not at the table when strategies are put into place, when information is fed into AI for our companies, we are going to be left out. Because as we know, AI is only as good as what you put in it. If our voices, if our brilliance is not in there, we are going to get left behind. Yes, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but we know it’s going to happen. We can either be there lock-armed with our sisters, or we can get left behind. I am so incredibly excited to hear your speech and have you kick off October 9th. It is really going to be an incredible day. All that said, what would you like to leave us with?
Margie Warrell: I would just say to everyone listening right now, firstly, in the realm of AI, pick one tool this week and just give yourself 20 minutes to play with it. I use the word play incredibly intentionally. Play with it, experiment with it. You’re not trying to get an outcome. All you’re there is to learn. Just play with things. There is no wrong outcome. It is just you doing it that grows your learning.
Secondly, I would just say back yourself this week and not your doubts. Think of one thing that you’re dealing with right now that’s causing you some stress, that’s creating some tension, that you are feeling some frustration around. Maybe you need to brave an awkward conversation. Maybe you need to put your hand up or speak up and risk rocking the boat. But I would just say, if you were really bringing the boldest version of you to the conversations you’re having, the interactions you’re having, the challenges that you are facing, what’s one thing that you would be doing more of, and do that. Just back yourself more because it is taking action that we come to discover, “You know what? I didn’t need to doubt myself to begin with.”
Gina Stracuzzi: Wow. That is such powerful advice. I cannot thank you enough, Dr. Warrell. I look forward to seeing you and everyone listening at the Women in Sales Leadership Elevation Conference on October 9th. Thanks so much.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo