Are Leadership Skills Learned or Innate with Laura Berenstain
In today's conversation, we talk all about empowering women for promotions, changing the system to create more opportunities for those coming up behind us, defining success on your own terms, and the essential leadership skills.
Laura Berenstain joins me. Dr. Berenstain is a pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist interested in developing inclusive cultures and the relationship between professional development and well-being. Most recently, she was a Professor of Clinical Anesthesia at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, where she was also the first Director of Resiliency and Well-being. After completing training as a certified career and leadership coach, she is now coaching individual physicians and groups for career and leadership success. Dr. Berenstain is an Advisory Board member and coach for the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia's Women's Empowerment and Leadership Initiative and a member of the ASA Committees on Physician Well-being, Women Anesthesiologists, and Professional Development.
“What am I able to do, to leave my specialty better than I found it?" – Laura Berenstain
Listen on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube https://www.daniellecobo.com/podcast
Highlights
💫 1:32 A little about Laura's career journey
💫 5:15 Why it is so essential to create opportunities for those behind us
💫 7:51 Are leadership skills innate, or are they learned?
💫 10:03 The top 3 skills essential to leadership
💫 17:41 Break out of your regular group as often as possible
💫 21:09 Three takeaways from today's conversation
Connect with Featured Guest, Laura Berenstain
✳️ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-berenstain/
Breaking the Glass Ceiling
What we need is a system change. But at the same time, every day and every interaction matters – every single one – and so I really want to embrace the idea that this is going to be long and slow. This is not going to happen overnight. But until we are dedicated to saying, “Okay, we've gained ground; there are now 50% of medical students who are women.” But that has not translated into more women getting promoted and becoming leaders. So somewhere, we're still not playing on an even playing field there.
And you see that in medicine. And I also saw that in the corporate world, being in medical sales for 15 years, it was very similar. I worked for an organization where the consumers of our products was 90%, female. The majority of our sales force were women. However, the higher you go up the corporate ladder, the less the percentages of women in leadership roles. So whether you're in medicine, whether you're in corporate America, it's very similar. And it opens up the opportunity to start to have these discussions to start to have women, like you and me, who are making a difference; and supporting women to be able to create their career – that they want to thrive in their career, continue to climb up that corporate ladder, open up their business, whatever it is to thrive in their career.
A Deeper Meaning of Success and Leadership
I think another thing that I see in my world of academic medicine is that we arbitrarily define success. We define success as how many publications you have, or how many book chapters you've written, how many research grants you have, did you make professor, and those are all great, they're all valid, and they're all important. But they leave out a really important thing, which is, where are you in your life? And what do you want? How do you define success and what's important? And so I think the thing about women is we have transition points in life, we may have times right out of training, or right out of school, where we are consumed with young children in our life, right? That's not the moment we can go 110% in our career, but that doesn't mean that three or four years down the line, we won't be going 110%. And that's okay. So I love the idea of coaching women for the fact that success and leadership actually means being a leader in every phase of your life; Seeing what is most important to me right now, and embracing that with a view toward where I would like to be in five years, and what are the steps I need to get there.
I love how you say showing up as a leader in all areas of your life, because I'm a firm believer that leadership is not a title. It's how you show up at work. It's how you show up as a person in the world.
Are Leaders Born or Made?
I think that a good test taker never says always or never. I think there's some of both. There are obviously people who were born with a gift for leadership. One of my favorite examples, I just read the book leadership, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and she highlights former US presidents there. But when you read about Lincoln, you think this man had no background for this, but he's self-taught, right? So there is some innate skill there. But I think by and large, it's a learned thing. It's like anything else, I was not born knowing how to do cardiac anesthesia. I went through this really patient process to learn skills to help me do that. And I think leadership is the same way. We may start with certain strengths all of us as humans, we each have different strengths. But even once you've taken your strengths into account, then you need to say what do I need to succeed in this arena and how do I acquire the skills to do that thing.
It's interesting how there are some people who may not have the background and leadership, but they just have that natural innate ability. I have four year old twin boys, and they're vastly different. Now we see they're two completely different kids that just happen to be born at the same time. I am already seeing one of my kids, as being a leader; I see him, he can walk into like a playground and all of a sudden, all the kids are following him as to whatever the game is going to be. While my other kid is a little bit more of a people pleaser. He's a little bit more kind of a follower in that sense, but he's also very mechanical and analytical. And so I'm already seeing those neat skills and differences between my boys at such an early age. And I also know that some of those conversations about teaching them leadership skills, goes beyond their innate abilities because we're constantly evolving and we're constantly learning new skills and how we communicate with each other. So what are the top three skills you believe are essential in a leader?
Top Three Skills that are Essential in a Leader
Communication
Communication really comes down to how you inspire your people and what's the tone that you set. Because people watch. And this is another way in which we're all leaders. I tell women I'm talking to this all the time: Look behind you, because you have no idea how many people are actually already watching you, seeing how you do this. So every time you communicate, how you choose to handle that thing, it matters. So can you communicate your vision? Can you communicate that you are true to yourself and your values?
Self-awareness
One of the things I absolutely love about coaching is – since life is a learning journey – you go to school, you think I want to be a coach, and what you don't realize is that you are about to embark on the biggest learning journey of your own life. Because to be a good coach, you have to continually work on your own self awareness. And so it gives a huge appreciation for this: not just what are you saying or what you think you're saying but how is it received. How do I make people feel my impact; not just my intent, but my impact. So I think self awareness is huge for women in particular, because we often fight with imposter syndrome; we have very fixed ideas in our mind of what we think our gaps are. And we kind of live by that. I couldn't do that. But the reality is, if we stop and look at all the things we're doing in our life, and if a friend or another person were to analyze these things, we are so much more competent than we give ourselves credit for. We're doing amazing things just juggling our lives. So I think self-awareness is being able to think about how you impact others and giving yourself fair credit for your abilities and the things you're doing, and also knowing where you want to grow – having the awareness to know that.
Agility
If you study different leadership styles, you always hear people talk about what is the best style.The answer is there is no best style, because the best style is what you need at that moment in your situation. And so you have to be able to be agile, you have to be able to know a lot of different things and move rather fluidly. And one of my favorite questions from women I coach when we talk about communication or conflict management is, and they say, "Well, I don't know if that feels authentic to me to be that way. When you think about it, are you being that way as you are able to learn a skill; would you then employ selectively as you need to in order to accomplish the goals you want to accomplish?" Well, yeah, absolutely, you can do that. So agility is learning lots of things and moving fluidly between them in order to do what you can do best.
I can see how those skills can be applied in so many areas in your life and what you're saying. I took a six month leadership course, and it was everything from overcoming the imposter syndrome, understanding the self awareness that you have communication skills, and how you show up. And when you learn these skills, and we have a self awareness to know where your true authentic self is, it opens up the doors to have conversations you've never imagined before. And to create those connections and to deepen your relationships with people. And those skills that you said, I think are really essential, whether you're an individual contributor, and it's a matter of just leading as a team member and leading in your life; or whether you're leading a particular team, those skills are essential in all areas of your life. And like you talked about, it's the whole person, it's how you show up at work and how you show up in life in your personal life. So what steps can women take to learn these skills?
Steps in Attaining Leadership Skills
Whatever resources are available to you, do some self-assessment. Find out more about what your values are, what your strengths are, what your personality style is, what works best for you, what motivates you, what stresses – figure out those things. And that will help inform not only what you feel comfortable doing, but what's a stretch for you and where you want to grow. So that will inform the skills you feel like you need to acquire in order to go to that next place. So the first thing I would say is, assess yourself and get ready to grow.
As much as you can, break out of your box or your silo. For us, one of the magic things about our women's empowerment initiative is it lets women from multiple academic institutions communicate with each other. Usually we're in this silo; the silo is called this is my department, this is my institution, this is my operating room. And that means we don't have the opportunity to really talk freely with a lot of other women to realize that they have the same challenges we do. And the very fact that that occurs means already here depersonalizing things that you might view as obstacles. It's not your obstacle, it is an obstacle, it is an obstacle that can be overcome.
Look for ways to either get involved with other women in other organizations, group coaching – anything you can – just to try to find what's going on with other people and how you can benefit from that.
You speak to what we called at the company where I worked at as an individual development plan. And it first started with, where do you want your career to go? Where do you see your career trajectory for the next three to five years? What are your core strengths? Because those are what we want to continue to enhance. What are maybe some three areas that you want to develop? And then what does it look like to develop those skills? Is it listening to podcasts? Is it reading books? Is it aligning yourself with a career coach or a mentor? Is it getting involved in special projects? And then from there, it's creating SMART goals which are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound, so that you're holding yourself accountable to where you want to go in your career.
And I like how you talked about values, because when you understand your "why" – there's a book by Simon Sinek that you've mentioned, I'm sure you've probably read it, "Start with Why" – and when you know your true core values, that is essential in knowing what you're passionate about and how to take that a step further. I liked how you talked about motivation – what motivates you. There's a book called, "Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace" by Gary Chapman. I mean he's got the love languages that he's most common for, but I really like those languages because it understands not only how you are motivated but how you feel when you're appreciated. If you are a listener and you're in a leadership role, I would invite you to take that assessment with your team. And like you said, it was understanding the different personalities to know the different personalities of everybody on your team and knowing what they're driven by, what they're motivated by, what they feel appreciated by, because it goes beyond the just "How are you doing today?" Leadership is truly understanding what your team members' vision is, what keeps them up at night, what they're passionate about, where do they want their career to go? It's essential that we are developing the people on our team.
When people feel that they matter, they want to be in that place.
Three Important Takeaways
Never ever give up.
I think there came a moment when, as one very wise person put it, you move from mastery to impact. And that to me speaks to what is your "why", what at the end of the day is most important to you. And so I guess the thing that I would want to leave people with is never, never, ever give up. Even when you think the story is written. And you know how it's going? Nope, there's another term, there's another path. There's always something and if you feel really stuck, get a coach, ask the questions. That's what happened for me. And that's finally, what helped me say, "It seems like in my world, there's only one path." But that's not actually true. There is another path. And that's the path I'm on now.
Dream big.
Because again, I thought I knew how the story was written but I didn't. I decided three and a half years ago that there needed to be a textbook for pediatric cardiac anesthesia. And it hasn't been written yet, so somebody needed to write it. That somebody needed to be me, because nobody else was doing it. And I did it. So if you had looked at me even five or six years ago and said, "Do you think this is going to happen?" I would have laughed. But the fact of it is, the fact that had happened means obviously it could happen. So it was never about potential, ever. It was about what I believed and what I thought I could do. So never give up. Never think you know the story; ask more questions, be curious. And don't be afraid to say what you really want. What is really important to you? Because this is it, this is your life. You get to do it the way you want to do it.
If you would have asked me two years ago where I'd be today, I would have said absolutely not I thought it was going to follow – living in corporate and just climbing the corporate ladder. And here I am owning a business, being a leadership coach, a career coach, writing a TED Talk, writing a book. I mean, there's no way I would have said two years ago that I would be where I'm at today. So if you are a listener, I love what Laura is saying, which is really to create the story. The story of where you've been may not be where it always is tomorrow. Be open to ideas, step and lean into that uncomfortable zone because that's when you grow the most.
More Words of Wisdom
In honor of the word burnout in medicine which is a very real word and a place I have been, I want to acknowledge that in saying what I just said, for everybody who's listening and who is thinking, "Yeah, but that couldn't be me." I want to tell you, I have had my face down in the mud. And I have thought I don't know how this story gets different. So I just want to absolutely honor that your perseverance is important. And I'm that girl, I do persevere. But I persevered even when I wasn't sure why I was persevering or what it was for. And sometimes things can be hard. Minimize that things can be hard. But we have what it takes, and with patience and asking the right questions, we can find that place that is right for us. And when you do, it makes it that much sweeter. Because you know that it did not come easy; it came because you had the grit and the resilience, and you asked the questions, and you did what was important to you.
