402: Lisen Stromberg: Intentional Power Takes You from Control to Significance

In our latest episode of On the Brink with Andi Simon, we had the pleasure of hosting Lisen Stromberg, an award-winning author, speaker, and expert on leadership transformation. We delved into her groundbreaking new book, “Intentional Power,” and explored the seismic shift in business leadership in the U.S. Written with two other amazing leadership experts, JeanAnn Nichols, and Corey Jones, with extensive research into the changes taking place in our society today, this is generationally-driven change in how people lead and follow. Intentional Power is about changing our minds about how to lead, guide, facilitate, enable (all different words about leadership) others get to where they and we need to go.

Lisen’s extensive leadership background and commitment to fostering meaningful change shine through in her work. With a wealth of experience spanning corporate roles, entrepreneurship, and advocacy, she has become a leading voice in redefining effective Leadership in today’s dynamic business environment. She watches intentional leaders thrive, mobilizing the next generation of our workforce to aspire to higher purpose and profits.

The Move to Intentional Power: the HEART®  Model

The major drivers of these changes come from the way people value the actions of others. Lisen’s research found that leaders using Intentional Power do several things exceptionally well. They offer a new model of leadership, the HEARTI® model, built on six core competencies: Humility, Empathy, Accountability, Resiliency, Transparency, and Inclusivity.

During our conversation, Lisen highlighted a significant transformation in leadership styles. Traditional command-and-control hierarchies are giving way to more collaborative, facilitative, and supportive management approaches. This shift is not just a trend but a necessary evolution as today’s workforce seeks more than just power and results. Employees are looking for significance, purpose, and meaning in their work. Most importantly, business is moving from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism,

“Intentional Power” emphasizes the importance of leaders who inspire and engage their teams, creating environments where everyone feels valued and motivated. Lisen argues that more than the old top-down Leadership model is needed in a world where employees and stakeholders demand more transparency, empathy, and inclusivity.

Lisen Stromberg is an expert in human capital transformation, change management, and modern Leadership. She and her team consult with a wide range of companies, from tech start-ups to global Fortune 500s, on sustainable workforce innovation, with a focus on employee experience. She also coaches and advises global executives to help them up-level their Leadership and foster high-performing, purpose-driven cultures.

One of the key insights from our discussion was the need to balance the interests of shareholders with those of stakeholders, including employees and communities. Lisen points out that companies can only achieve sustainable success if they prioritize the well-being and development of all their stakeholders. This holistic approach to Leadership fosters a more resilient and innovative organization better equipped to navigate the complexities of the modern business landscape. This is the power of Intentional Leaders.

Lisen’s perspective aligns with the growing recognition that Leadership must evolve to meet the changing expectations of today’s workforce. By embracing intentional leaders, companies can create a culture that drives performance and nurtures the potential of every individual within the organization. I love her concept of moving from success to significance, as companies of purpose replace the sole focus on profits with those of people and the environment.

Our interview with Lisen Stromberg is a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of Leadership. Her insights offer a compelling roadmap for leaders seeking to impact their organizations positively and beyond. Please tune in to On the Brink with Andi Simon to hear more about Lisen’s journey and her vision for a more inclusive and purpose-driven approach to Leadership.

If you prefer to watch the On the Brink with Andi Simon Podcast, you can find Lisen Stromberg’s video here:

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Read the transcript of our podcast below: 

Andi Simon:  Welcome to On the Brink with Andi Simon. I’m Andi Simon, and as you know, I’m your host and your guide. On the brink is here to take you and help you get off the brink. As an anthropologist, I want you to step out and look at what’s happening, to see, feel and think in new ways so that you can begin to adapt and change. These are very fast changing times. No, we don’t have to argue about that. But if I can help you listen to people who have insights for you, you can begin to think about how you can apply this in your own world, whether it’s business or personal, so that every day becomes a gift, that you wake up and you say, I’m so glad I’m doing this now. So today I have Lisen Stromberg and Lisen, it’s always important to get our guest names right. So thank you. Let me tell you a little bit about why she’s so important to us. In March of 2021, she had a new book out.  It was called work, Pause and Thrive and I loved it. It filled exactly the kind of moment for all of us who are professional women, who are trying to build careers and have families and have a life, and it was wonderful. I want to tell you how that life has exploded. Lisen is an expert in human capital transformation, change management and modern and change management and modern leadership. She and her team consult with a vast number of companies, from tech startups to global Fortune 500 on sustainable workforce innovation, with a focus on employee experience. Now, I interviewed someone recently and they said, do you remember corporations are really people? And I said, yes. Sometimes I forget that, but there are only people. So how do we get people to really thrive in doing a job that we all need done? She coaches and advises global executives to help them uplevel their leadership in order to foster high performing, purpose driven cultures. She spent the first half of her career in marketing and advertising, and believes the best leaders in every industry understand that success is founded on doing well by doing good. She’s a three time social impact entrepreneur. She’s incubated and scaled businesses that drive positive change. Her most recent company, Prism Work, she and her team developed an award winning machine learning self-assessment tool for modern leaders, which is really quite fascinating. And she serves as a consulting partner to two AI fueled startups. And AI is today and our future. She speaks widely. She has two books. And today we’re going to talk about this new one, which is quite fascinating,Intentional Power. Interesting. I love the topic, in part because it is what she and I both believe is essential today. How do I help people step out and look at what’s happening, see it through a fresh lens, and then begin to understand how they themselves can rise above and as they do, lift everyone with them. Thank you for being here. We do enjoy just sharing time. I find the podcast is plain old fun. Exactly. Let’s have fun. Tell the listener or the viewer about you and your journey. I could read your resume, but you know when you tell it, it comes alive and you give it nuances that I can’t possibly put on it.

Lisen Stromberg: I love one thing you said, but I’ll start with, I was a woman who graduated from college. My mother did not go to college, so I was sort of channeling something she didn’t have the opportunity to do, which I was so proud and honored to be able to do. And I believed I was going to go right out of college and right straight up to that C-suite, and nothing was going to get in my way.

Andi Simon: Oh, I love that it is an opening saga.

Lisen Stromberg: And there you have it. Frankly, for a long time, it did go well. I was a brand manager, I was in marketing. So I worked my way up to a brand manager at Nestlé, and then I pivoted and I was the vice president of an advertising agency, and everything was going great.  And then I got pregnant happily. So I’d been married for a long time. My husband and I were ready to have children. We thought everything was going to be great, and I just was blindsided by what I now know was motherhood bias. But at the time I thought I was the problem. I had something wrong with me. Something wasn’t right. If I only did this, if I only did that, if I changed. And of course, as a result of all of that, I ended up leaving the paid workforce for a period of time, not that long, actually, pivoting and starting my own kind of consulting firm. Now, the great news, as I was in Silicon Valley, and they were just understanding this thing called marketing. And so that worked well for quite a long time. But I ended up looking at all of these incredible women and all of these women whose careers I watched and saw them navigating with me. And so many of us were facing these similar challenges. And so when Lean In came out, I said, So I’m reading the book. I’m like, wow, there’s a whole chapter, maybe actually a whole book missing about caregiving and motherhood. And now that I’m older, my daughter hood is impacting the workplace for women. So I went out and interviewed 1500 women or surveyed 5000 women. As you know, this is the work we do, sort of unpacking what the truth is. And I learned that women are deeply ambitious. And in order to actually manage all of their ambitions, it’s not just their careers. They have ambitions for great families and great communities and great worlds. And as a result of that, all of the women I talk to actually have these very nonlinear careers. So when we think about success, success can be linear. It certainly has been viewed as linear. But when we think about significance, significance is non-linear. You can have significance in so many different ways. So for me, that was the epiphany moment that brought me to my first book.  And then as a result of that first book, I ended up being called and asked to help companies figure out how to attract and retain great talent, primarily women, but not exclusively women. So what do we do to do that? Which led me down the path of what modern, best in class culture looks like? What does modern leadership look like? And that led me to teach a class at Stanford around modern leadership in the midst of Covid, because we were all trying to figure this stuff out and everything was changing, which is what led me to my next book or my most recent book, Intentional Power, and really trying to understand how leadership has changed and the challenges around that.

Andi Simon: Well, you know, you said something extremely important. How is leadership changing and the pandemic? I used to say to my clients, if you want to hire me, have a crisis or create one. And because if I’m an anthropologist who helps companies change, the only way you’re going to pay attention is if you have to. I mean, I can take golf lessons, but unless I have to really stop that slice, I’m not paying attention. I’m blaming and the blame and complain game was really overwhelming. But here’s what the pandemic has done. It’s opened up our eyes to only so many different ways of getting the same things done.

Lisen Stromberg: And actually maybe even doing them better.

Andi Simon: And opened up ideas. You know, we’ve been evolving for a couple of million years and we’re still not doing it the way the cavemen did it. Sometimes I wonder, but it is in our nature to give meaning to things, and to change the way, and not to be put into boxes, particularly for square pegs in those rounds. But here’s the interesting part about intentional power. What does that mean? And how do we really get to be intentional about what we’re doing and see it in its beneficial ways? So, you know, what were you seeing and how did it come together into a book?

Lisen Stromberg: So it’s so interesting. While yes, I believe each of us individually have to understand our role, it also is imperative to understand the systems in which we operate. Well, yes, the pandemic really altered the US. Our ability to think how we work and how can work get done? It was happening beforehand. What’s happening? If you actually ladder up and just bear with me, I’m going to get a little wonky here. We’ve been operating for the last 50 years in a shareholder capitalistic environment. It’s all about profits. Profits matter. But in fact, towards the end 2019, we’re starting to see companies really understanding it’s not just about shareholder value. It’s not just about profits. It’s about stakeholder value. It’s about stakeholders. And yes, you can’t have a company if you don’t have profits. So let’s be clear. But it’s also how you treat your employees. How are you treating the communities in which you operate? How are you actually treating the planet?  So it’s a much broader way of looking at the world. And when you think about how you lead in that environment, it’s very different. It’s no longer take charge. It’s take care. It’s no longer I’m in. The power is centered around me. It’s how we distribute and offer power. So we’re really seeing this kind of traditional leadership, which is about power over transitioning to modern leadership, which is about power with and these new models of leadership, these new concepts, they’re hard as heck because we’ve come of age, many of the leaders right now at the top of their organizations have come away, come of age in a power over structure. But the next generation says that doesn’t work for me. I want to collaborate. I have a whole new perspective. I have skills that you might not have. What can we do together? And so I think that that mindset, understanding the bigger picture of the systems change and then understanding how to use our power with intention, was really fundamental to me, to why I wanted to write the book and why I wanted to provide leaders with those skills and that insight so they could actually say, oh, it’s changed.  I need to change if I want to be successful and if I actually want to have significance.

Andi Simon: As you’re thinking about that. So I’ll give you one illustration of the story because it’s just an imperfect one. I had a client in Mexico in the cement industry, and they kept having tremendous turnover. Everyone hired left. Everyone. Not everyone left. So. HR said, can you help us change the culture? There were silos and the young people coming in said, no way. I’m a soccer player. I’m a team player. I don’t have any interest in being in these silos, and they don’t talk to each other and they don’t collaborate. And it took them 90 days of a honeymoon to say thanks, but no thanks. And they said, what are we doing wrong? I said, well, everything you did worked, but everything you did isn’t going to work. So now it was very interesting and difficult because they had no idea how to change. So, give us some of the wisdom that you came up with. How do I, as a leader, begin to stop being a hierarchical command and control person to a collaborative, innovative entrepreneur who gets results?

Lisen Stromberg: Well, Andi, I love your example and I’d love to kind of drill down a little bit into your example because we talk about change management changes hard, right? It brings up all of our, you know, fear and anxiety. You know, it’s literally in the brain. We’re risk avoidant. We don’t want change. And so all of this change can be scary. One of the things I can say is that we’re always changing. So that ability to navigate change, the resiliency that we need to have is so foundational. And I love the example you gave because to change they have to be resilient. So what we did was we went out and did research around what modern leadership really looks like and who am I?  These 3500 leaders around the globe, we built an assessment model to understand. And what came out were sort of six fundamental skills. And they are like humility. Now, humility doesn’t mean that you’re not willing to say, I’m really darn good. Humility is curiosity. How can I learn from you? How can we partner? How can I collaborate? Humility is not about command and control. It’s about caring and collaboration. Empathy. We all know how important empathy is, right? Accountability.  But it’s not just accountability. If I’m going to get my job done, it’s accountability for your team. How can I amplify others so that they can get their job done, so that we can do the things that we want to do as a company, as a team, as a company. So accountability is more than just me. It’s kind of we call it 300% accountability, kind of how you ladder out. Then it’s resiliency, which we just talked about. How agile am I? How can I fail, learn from that failure and keep moving forward? You know, we love Angela Duckworth’s work on grit, but at the end of the day, grit can also be a recipe for failure. Resiliency allows you to fail, but learn from that failure and sort of move forward in the growth from that transparency, which is boy, is that challenging for so many leaders. What do we share? What if somebody else finds that oh my gosh, how do we navigate that. So transparency is really tough. And of course you can’t be a modern leader without being inclusive. And you know, inclusivity is at every level. And it’s not just about diversity, although that’s so fundamentally important, but it’s about creating those spaces where people can actually bring their talents and abilities. That’s what inclusion delivers. So all of those six skills ladder up to a term we call hearty and hearty, are those six essential skills from modern leaders. And when you actually drill down to each of them and start asking, how are you doing that? That actually helps them unpack. Oh, well, I might be really good at one thing, but not so great at another. But in my team, we might as a team be hardy. And that’s where real power happens.

Andi Simon:  But you know, I’m going to ask you for a case study or an illustration if you can, in a moment. But think about this. And this isn’t about the rules rule. This isn’t the oh, the constant. This is the way we do things here, the rituals of habits. This isn’t, you know, obedience and it’s not conformity. It’s all the antithesis of the things that business has relied on. Your point about us is no longer just the shareholders. It’s the stakeholders. But it’s thinking about people differently. It’s a fundamental transformation that these aren’t things that are easily replaced. These are really complex humans that have been well trained, and if you hire, your talent will really want to help the business thrive. Now the question is these are not easy behaviors. And as you know, culture is behavior. Not just so I can stay hardy, but how do I humble and how am I empathetic? You know, EQ is so fascinating because good leaders are full of EQ, but nobody knows what it is. and the accountability part. Who am I accountable to and for what? And how do I get celebrated? Because I got it done on time. I mean it was so interesting. Behaviors resilience I gave two talks in May and June on resilience on women that came out of our book, Women Mean Business.  And these women all had to overcome major personal traumas to be resilient and thrive. But they didn’t talk about it when they shared it with us. They just told us about it. It was interesting. Transparency is an interesting word. How much do I share? And inclusivity is something I’m very concerned about because humans are herd animals and they want to belong. But when things are going through change, they don’t know who the good guys are. So who do I hang my hat with? This is really interesting. So let’s start. Is there a case study or something you can share?

Lisen Stromberg: Well, of course we try and keep everything, or I certainly do with my clients confidential. But I can tell you that one of the examples is a cybersecurity firm that we were working with. But they were venture funded. They wanted to go public and they knew that they actually had to have certain things. Nasdaq has now required you to have a diverse board. And now they’re pushing down to say you have to have, kind of diversity at your executive level. So those are external drivers that are creating, forcing functions, right, to force change. And you could argue that’s a good or bad thing. I would actually say right now it’s a good thing because why change if you’re not forced to write? It’s convenient. It’s comfortable, maintains the status quo, which keeps me in power. So why would I change? It must be good, right? Must be good for me. Good. So the CEO, who was incredible. I would think of as an incredibly modern leader, he certainly embodied many of these things. He ended up bringing us on to help them look at their systems across the company. What were their systems, their culture systems? What was stated in their HR practices and what do they need? And then also what were the hidden systems? Things were happening culturally that they didn’t want to have. So we did an assessment and put them on kind of what we call the crawl, walk, run strategy of change. It doesn’t happen all at once. You have to get people on board and such. But then he got sick and he had to be replaced and the investors replaced him. Lovely man. Luckily, he’s doing well now. The investors replaced him with a shareholder capitalist, not a stakeholder capitalist. And within six months, every positive movement that we had changed, which, by the way, was helping them attract great talent, they were getting them from all of the big firms. I mean, this company was on fire within literally six months. They were losing talent. They were not meeting their numbers and eventually the company didn’t do as well as it might have wanted. We’ll just leave with that. And it certainly hasn’t gone public yet. That’s a classic example of the shareholders, the investors making the mistake of not understanding what was working and putting the wrong leader in place.  And that leader literally decimated a culture that actually was doing quite well. And they were meeting all their business imperatives, their business deadlines, etc.. That’s just one example. I love the most recent example, which I did not work on, which is Sephora came out recently around its culture and what it wants to do, and it’s had all of these incredible results because it’s forward thinking around modern leadership on modern culture. As we’re seeing more and more companies come out and say, this is how we’re operating, and here’s how it’s connecting to the bottom line. We’re starting to be able to have proof points in case studies to your point that are really thriving. So that’s kind of a company example that I love to give. We can also talk about individual examples, right? We can talk about how we’re individuals showing up. And again back to that. We’re trained, the careers are linear and that success is linear and that this is the only way to do it. But we’re at that tipping point moment where a company or people are starting to say, wait a minute, is success enough? Isn’t it time for significance? And I had one client, one executive that I was working with, and he was at a startup, Silicon Valley tech startup.  I do a lot of work in other places, but this happens to a lot.  I live in Palo Alto, so I’m doing a lot of stuff there. He had been brought on to turn around and company, and he was able to turn it around and sell it, which was great. But he came to me because he said I was successful, but I wasn’t significant. What can I do to make a change? How can I make sure that the next job I have, the next role I have, really allows me to have the impact that I want, the legacy I want. I love it when people realize you are more than just your title. You’re more than just where you are on the ladder. You are literally an opportunity to make an impact. And by the way, it’s not just at the senior level. I believe leaders happen at every level. It’s how you choose to operate with the power that you do have.

Andi Simon: So, you know, you’re really crafting a new story.

Lisen Stromberg:  Exactly.

Andi Simon:  And we live the story in our mind.

Lisen Stromberg: Yes.

Andi Simon: And I love the fact that you have pulled it together in a way that people can begin to mimic others. I mean, they look to see because nobody likes to be an outlier. Sometimes you have to be. But this is a story of transformation that is timely. It is fascinating because to your point, it isn’t just at the senior level. We need to bring it all the way down below. So we talk about purpose and meaning. Significance is a great word. And how do I do it through and with others? And I have a hunch this whole inversion of the hierarchy is exactly what you’re seeing. Where I’m an enabler and facilitator, I’m a celebrator, but I don’t control anything without all of you delivering on the goods we can’t get anywhere. So how do we get there? And it’s a visionary.

Lisen Stromberg: I’ll share with you about one of my co-authors for the book, Jean Nichols.  She and I teach this class at Stanford or at one of the classes on Mont Alicia at Stanford. And she tells the story in both the book and in our class of how she was a very senior executive in sales at Intel. She’d been there for a very, very long time, built her career there, and a very, very junior coder on her team recognized that there was a security glitch. In fact, if they installed this next system, hello cloud strike, that there would be problems and people would be able to access some technology and things that they didn’t want. So he literally was able, because she had created this transparent environment, to ladder it up and say, let me work on this. I think I can solve it. He ended up saving the company so much money. He was an independent individual contributor. He wasn’t a very senior person at all, but he saw a problem and he brought it to the attention of his teammates. His teammates flattered it. And together, he literally saved that company, or at least that division’s work. And I love that because if she and her team had not created that environment, that might not have happened. Because oftentimes the front line really does know what’s going on. And if we’re not listening at every level, the organization, then we’re missing out on innovative opportunities, risks, all of this. You know.

Andi Simon:  So I’ll give you a case study. I had several clients in India that came about by chance. We were working on blue ocean strategy with them and coaching them, and they were developing software for the ophthalmology industry, and they rolled out new software and it failed. And going back to the quality system, as I probe deeper and deeper, the quality folks were all theoretically related in some fashion. And so for them, if they squealed on each other, you tried to mess up code, then the person might not have a job. and in a different culture. I won’t say it was an Indian culture or otherwise. It could be anywhere. without trusting that identifying the problem was something noble and important as opposed to squealing, they allowed the glitch to go through.

Lisen Stromberg: Right. Because the purpose, when you start getting clarity on corporate purpose and you convey that across and aren’t having people compete against each other for that linear rise and actually are collaborating for a mutually beneficial purpose than intentional power at every level matters. So that’s a great example.

Andi Simon:  I wish they had had a different epiphany before the problem. And I said to him, you know, you have to have a crisis sometimes to see what’s right in front of you. But nobody was standing up to say, this isn’t going to work. And it didn’t work well.

Lisen Stromberg: And let’s take Boeing. There were people standing up and saying, this isn’t going to work. And Boeing had switched to a shareholder focus. Boeing used to be a stakeholder capitalist environment and they switched and they about 30 years ago, literally 30 years ago. And that took time. But it laddered down to the engineers and the quality control people and to the manufacturing floor. And it was all about just getting it out. That’s a classic example of a failure that just didn’t need to happen. It just didn’t need to happen.

Andi Simon: The interesting part is you and I are talking is that even Boeing is not invisible. And you can see where the problem is. It’s not the people, it’s the culture.

Lisen Strombe:  Yes, exactly. Right, right.  And that we respond to the culture we’re in by either leaving there, or by silence ourselves.

Andi Simon: Well, if you don’t have one, you make one up and you make it up where you are the hero. And you can try, the idea that most people have is that at least it’s me. If not, we and I prefer it to be OE. But what’s interesting as we’re talking is that you are beginning to pick up a transformation, a dot at a time, to begin to see your crawl and then walk and then run.  I see the crawl part. You’re beginning to see the walk part. Is it momentum that’s coming? People are going to conferences coming back and want to have a cultural change.

Lisen Stromberg: Well, I’ll tell you how we know it’s happening. How we know it’s happening is because we’re seeing a real resistance from the traditional leaders. You’re seeing a slew of leaders saying, oh, no, no, it’s all about getting back in. Butts in chairs in the office. It’s got to be this way. Even if our profitability and productivity was way up in this, this remote environment. Oh, no. No, it’s all going to be back here backing together because that’s not how I know to lead. That’s how I know to be successful. Right. We don’t need new skills and tools and it’s so hard to learn them. And it’s so hard to trust when we can no longer be the command and control leader. So I think it’s because of our resistance. The strength of that resistance tells me that we’re seeing a significant change and it’s happening anyways. And look, you hear this, people, many of the executives I advise who are again, a certain generation and our older who really are struggling with how to navigate and interact with younger millennials and Gen Z. My answer is, oh my God, you’ve got the best mentors in your company. Go and listen to them, take your humility and go and learn something that they’re trying to communicate, because this generation is going to be driving stakeholder capitalism. We know the research and it’s all in the book, and you can read it at length. You know, 90% of millennials will refuse to work with a company that isn’t, either diverse or purpose driven. We’ve got all the data in there telling us that this is what they’re expecting. This is what they want from their workforces.

Andi Simon: Family firm leaders who are in workshops, what’s clear is that the next generation in the family firm are hitting a glass ceiling. That’s not women or men. It’s age And they want to know, how do I push my father and my brother and all of those guys out so we can drive the company, or I’m not going to stay home. And the family feuds that emerge are multiple levels of culture. And I work with one family firm and he said, well, we try not to talk business when we have Thanksgiving but the tensions are keen because the elders see it. Remember, the words we use create the worlds we live in. Welcome to humans. And if you give me a new word and I don’t know what they mean, I don’t know what to do. Right. We’re going through translation.

Lisen Stromberg: You know, you asked me. Do I see it changing? And I’ll give you another example. That’s so exciting. I’ve been working with a number of PE firms, so PE firms are now realizing the culture of the companies they acquire are only going to be successful.  You can’t just strip them out, right? They’re only going to be successful if they actually create a culture that is about creating an environment where people want to be, where people can actually do their best work. It sounds cliche, but it’s actually a business imperative. So when I say, are we seeing change? That’s just another example of yes. They’re starting to realize that if you argue, P is probably the most classic example of a bottom line. Command and control, but also bottom line business. And yet the savvy ones are changing. And I love seeing that.

Andi Simon:  And so is it in Europe, where they are beginning to evaluate a company in part because their culture has become a valuation process too.

Lisen Stromberg: Well, it is, and actually I think we can talk a lot about what we’re seeing in the US. We have a term for evaluating a company’s financial well-being that is called ESG: environmental, social and governance behavior that has been getting a lot of pushback and a lot of threat. And what’s fascinating to me is that so many of our clients, my clients, they’re still doing all the things that ESG is. They’re just not calling it ESG because they know that’s just a political firebomb, but they’re still making sure that their work is good for the environment. What they do, they’re producing things about as best as they can.They’re still in the social. They’re still focused on making sure that their employees and the communities they work in are working, and they still want to make sure that the governance, the policies and practices around governance are ethically right. And so it’s happening in Europe. It was happening in the US. And what’s happened, it’s become a political firebomb because there’s so much resistance against the trend that’s already happening anyway. So call it what you will. It’s already changing.

Andi Simon:  Well and I love that. I mean, we can almost end on that because it’s already changing. You can deny it. You can put it in a box. You can see it and you can hope that the elders eventually move on. But it is a time of change, and I don’t think it’s ever been easy any time in our life to change. As humans, the brain hates to change and immediately sends up cortisol and says, get out of here. Yeah, you’re in danger. There’s a lion around the bush. They’re going to eat you. but I think that your book opens up an opportunity to share your thoughts more broadly and to get people to begin to embrace a new way of seeing. And if you can see it, we decide with the eyes and then the heart if it feels right and you need to see others doing it. And if there’s a conference coming up of those who are transformational leaders, let me know. I have folks I might like to bring along because I got to meet with other people who say, yeah, I did this, and it works, right? You know.

Lisen Stromberg: Well, I’m a huge fan of the work of the B Corporation. The intention to do that, that’s great. And they do have conferences and they’re local. My co-founder, Corey Jones, is on the board of the Texas B local. So they’re trying to make sure more Texas corporations become, sort of stakeholder focused. I spoke yesterday with Dave Seidman. He’s the CEO of the How Institute. He’s the founder. It’s a nonprofit, How institute. He’s also a very successful businessman with a company called LNN. Long story short, Dove is pulling together conversations around how do leaders show up differently today? And how is how we do it? Doug and I were talking at length about power in the new dynamic and I was sharing with him some of the stuff that I’m seeing, the research that shows that power as we know it is threefold. It’s personal power, it’s situational power, and it’s relational power. And if you can and there’s so many other powers, but those are the three key ones that I think if we as individuals can understand that right. Personal power focusing, getting clear on your purpose, getting clear on kind of how you show up, what you do, capitalizing on your strengths, building out some of your vulnerabilities, if you will.  That’s the personal power. The situational power is understanding the environment, the systems in which you’re operating in and understanding where are the power dynamics within your organization. How are those change agents? One of the really wonderful things I’ve been doing with one client is helping them see which teams are really successful, and then tracking the skills in those teams and then building other teams around that to say, okay, that’s working in marketing. Well, I want that to work over here in manufacturing. What skills can be transferable? How can we help them do that? So really tracking as best you can what is a high performing team. And that’s also the system beyond just the teams but the system in which you’re offering. And then lastly relational power. How can I collaborate to make change? How can Andi and Lisen get out there and collaborate to make change amongst our teams, with our clients in the world at large, having all those things and knowing it, those are the keys to intentional power.

Andi Simon:  You know, think about it though. We have our six parties and we have our three changes to our personal power, and the future is coming at us fast and furiously. And people want flexibility and they want purpose and meaning. Man, there’s a whole new fire hose.

Lisen Stromberg:  It’s a fire hose. But it’s not different than it’s ever been. I believe we’ve been seeing change happen all the time. It’s just at lights faster.

Andi Simon:  I don’t know if it’s faster, but I do know that it’s here, and it is extremely important. As we’re talking, I keep thinking about our audience of listeners or viewers. Think about your own organizations, how you are a leader there? I usually ask, what were three things you’d like them to remember? I think you just gave them to us.

Lisen Stromberg :  I give them nine!

Andi Simon: So I’ll sort of summarize what I’m taking away from this conversation and that is the times they are changing.

Lisen Stromberg: Yes.

Andi Simon: And Dylan sang that a long time ago in the 60s. I grew up in the 60s. The times were changing and we marched against the Vietnam War. Times are changing and they are changing again, hopefully not from war. But here’s the joyful part: I love change. All the folks I touch and work with begin to see it as growing and opportunities and not knowing and sharing and watching what’s coming next. It’ll be much better for our children and grandchildren. And they can live in worlds that are full where they aren’t obedient, but they are creative, and they can be curious and to share great ideas and make things better, not to celebrate the fact that they were broken. I’ll never forget the GM story, where everybody was putting bad stuff into all the cars, even sandwiches, so that it smelled. Toyota came in at Fremont and turned it into a great place.

Lisen Stromberg: It can be done. I’ll share something that I learned recently that I know you’re going to resonate with Andi. We’ve been thinking about IQ and even EQ, emotional intelligence, if you will, empathy quotient.  But I learned a new term. It’s transitional intelligence. How capable are we to adapt to change? What are the things we need to build? What are those resiliency muscles we need to build? And it’s those transitional intelligence that I did some research with the Billie Jean King Leadership Institute and an organization called Information Around Women of Color in Corporate America. And what we saw is that so many of the women of color were really good at transitional intelligence, although at the time we didn’t have the term for it. Now I know what I saw because they had to adapt to transitions all the time. They were code switching either in there, as you have it right, immigrants are really good at transitional intelligence. They’re forced to do that. So how can all of us learn to be transactionally intelligent so that if change is happening all the time, we can actually ride the wave, not get crashed on top of it?

Andi Simon:  I love that, and you’re right, I mean, my doctoral work was on immigrants and they all were transactionally intelligent. They had to take the old name and adapt it to new. It was always interesting. If you’ve heard Shelly’s Alice’s Ted Talk, and she’s a person who’s in our book, Women Mean Business, and has been very helpful. She calls it the Fck the Feminine.  I’m not going to say it’s women bringing this to our markets, but there is something in the way we see things that really is more hardy.

Lisen Stromberg:  And we certainly saw that in the research is really validated. We saw that in the midst of the pandemic. The truth of the matter is that there’s no aspersions for men. In fact, many of my best clients are men because they actually are ready to show up to be these amazing leaders we all want them to be. So let me be very clear. That said, the research during Covid was that female leaders actually were the ones who truly created environments where people could thrive in the midst of that transition. Why? Well, we can do all the anthropological studies and sociological studies we want, but I think we are literally socialized. I don’t think it’s nature. I really do believe it’s nurture. We’re socialized to be taking care, not taking command. And if we’re taking care, then we’re actually doing what needs to be done in these traditionally vibrant times.

Andi Simon: Yeah. I won’t argue whether it’s nature or nurture. I do think it’s both. But having said that, without nature, there’s no nurture. And when you watch how women and men are raised, they are raised differently. But the fact that they rose, remember the women who were in power during the pandemic in Germany and in New Zealand, people were saying, what are they doing that’s working so much better than the guys? Well they care.  And they’re coming out caring. It’s not a bad thing. I think you and I need to say goodbye as much as I could stay on with you for as long as we could.

Lisen Stromberg:. So enjoy speaking with you Andi. It’s always so much, I learn so much.

Andi Simon:  Well I, I think that this is truly splendid. This is terrific. I’m going to perhaps include my Intentional Power book. Your Intentional Power book in my leadership academies. And I passed it along. and this podcast will be part of it, too, because I think what you’re explaining to them is a vision of today and of tomorrow, which is a different one. And if they don’t see it, they can’t be it. And I can preach it. But it’s nice to have another sound besides my own voice. So thank you for joining me. It’s been so nice. I truly wish all my listeners and my viewers a great day.  Remember, your job is to take your observations, be curious and turn them into innovations. Open your mind. Think about, you know, being hearty. How can you be humble and yet empathetic? Think about all the things that are being asked of us today, which we can do, but we now need to know that we ought to do, and it creates an environment where people can really thrive. Also, remember that my books are all on Amazon and they’re here to help you. On the Brink has 11 case studies of companies that were stuck or stalled. You don’t have to be! Rethink: Smashing the Myths of Women in Business was my second book, won an award, sold out many times, and it’s about how women are smashing the myths of business or women and business. Little like we’re talking about. Women Mean Business. Our newest book, 102 women have shared their wisdom, and they’d like you to know more about how they have thrived. People keep asking me, when’s your next book? I said, I don’t know.  I’m happy to enjoy the ones I have and share those. Goodbye everybody. Goodbye, Lisen and take care. Have a great thank you.

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