Question: Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

Answer: Path is such a neat and tidy word — follow the path to get somewhere. I feel like I’ve had less of a career path and more of a career ramble — I’ve never had a clear line to follow or a specific destination in mind, but I’ve said yes to a lot of different kinds of opportunities that have aggregated into a career for which I’m incredibly grateful. An instrumental moment for me that resulted in a significant pivot in my career was in my late 30s when I realized I was missing something in my understanding of the world, and specifically how business worked. I already had an MBA and a sound technical understanding of business in terms of finance, strategy, and technology. I had experience in many different industries, geographies, and functional areas. My most consistent observation was seeing leaders and their teams struggle to do what they said they were going to do. That led me to my Ph.D. program in Organizational Communication, which I did at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

By moving into social science I was exposed a whole new language and way of thinking about how humans relate to each other and work together to achieve shared goals. That has been instrumental in shaping the work we do at Karrikins Group, where we bring together deep business acumen, a social science lens, and a consultative approach to help leaders and teams to do better together on their most ambitious strategies and transformations.

Question: Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

Answer: One of the most interesting things that ever happened to me was when I was dismissed from a job I excelled at with a group of colleagues I loved and respected. I was somewhat expecting it because the senior leaders of the company had made it clear that they didn’t value me as a person or my contributions. I was fine with the decision they made, but I had no way of fully appreciating the degree to which I would feel the reality of a sudden severing from a community I valued so much.

I remember fielding phone calls from people all over the company, many of them in tears, asking me what had happened. I was honest in telling them that I felt like the leadership team had made a good decision based on where they wanted to take the company, and that I was going to be just fine.

And, I have been — since then, I’ve co-authored a book with another on the way, I’ve been able to develop groundbreaking frameworks, methodologies, and approaches that are consistently creating great results for clients, and I now co-own and run a wonderful consultancy that reflects the work that I always knew was possible to do. Even though it was hard to say goodbye to so many awesome people, I’m so glad I didn’t get stuck in a place that wouldn’t allow me to be creative, expansive, and forward-focused in doing more, better, for clients.

Question: Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?

Answer: A consistent theme for me is the importance of optimism as a leader. I think Alex Steffen said:

“Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better.”

For me, that’s a powerful reminder that the pull of ‘business as usual’ is so strong in companies, and there are people who benefit quite a lot from it. So, transformation has to be fueled by the energy to power through the inertia and the gravitational pull of BAU to provoke change. Doing that through positive energy instead of negative energy — what a friend of mine likes to call a burning ambition instead of a burning platform — is harder, but ultimately more sustainable. I choose to be optimistic about the world, our business, and my life, and I consider that to be a bold choice, not an uninformed one. I know how hard it is out there, and I also know my team and I have the resilience, the capabilities, and the fortitude to move forward.

Question: Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on your leadership style? Can you share a story or an example of that?

Answer: I feel incredibly fortunate that in the mid-1990s, early in my career, I had the opportunity to participate in a program that was based on The Leadership Challenge by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner. Their lessons in leadership have stuck with me all these years, especially the ideas of modeling the way and leading with heart. I still go back to their work when I feel like I need a tune up in my leadership!

As we were working on our Karrikins Group ways of working, which we call ‘how we roll’, we included a core belief of Start with Self: We answer the call and own the responsibility that comes with the opportunity to make an impact on people’s lives. For me, how I show up for this part of how we roll is heavily influenced by Kouzes and Posner’s work on leadership principles. I know that how I choose to show up is what I have the most control over, and so starting there provides me with a great foundation from which to work outwards.

Question: What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Answer: My most memorable sentiment from a client about Karrikins Group is that:

“Karrikins is unlike any other consultancy you will ever work with. The level of care, impact, and results they create is unparalleled. We are actually doing what we said we would, for the first time ever.”

My second favorite is “I wish I’d known about this earlier in my career”. I think both sentiments are emblematic of why we stand out. We know that leaders are typically pretty good at what they do, and we have a lot of respect for their expertise and experience. Our goal always is to leverage that power rather than sidelining it while we ‘do our thing’, which I think is where a lot of consultants get it wrong. We like to say that our work is not by us to you, it is with us for you. We bring our expertise, methodologies, and frameworks, and we put those in service to the outcomes you aspire to achieve through your talents, and together we go far.

Question: Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader?

Answer: Karrikins Group is a boutique consultancy with a laser focus on making HOW matter — we focus on helping teams figure out what they want to do and why, and then spending the same energy on understanding how to do it together. We know that it is often easy to agree on what to do, and much harder to align on how to do it, so our best contribution is to help teams overcome that challenge. The consulting industry is full of great generalists, and in that spirit, there is a lot of work we could take on outside of our sweet spot. In moments when we are looking at a tough quarter, it would be easy to take on projects like process improvement type work as a stopgap, leveraging the experience of our team in that space to close the revenue gap. But, that would also take our time, energy, and attention away from what our mission is. When we have that situation, we always make the decision through the lens of our strategy and goals, understanding the tradeoffs we are making. It can be tough to say no to short term revenue but more often than not, that’s what we decide to do.

Question: You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Answer:

Firstly, it is important to be comfortable and confident being in a positive space. I focus on what I call intentional optimism — being both pragmatic and future focused. That can be tricky sometimes, because it is safer to be pessimistic — to be the person saying that something can’t be done. From a reputation perspective, it is very safe to stay in the space where you can say ‘see, I told you so’. It is far riskier to be the person saying ‘I think this is possible’ and then doing the work to find out. But for me, that’s the right space to work from, especially as a CEO. [Check out our webinar here for more on intentional optimism]

Secondly, there are a lot of things that are phenomenally hard to do, and only a few things that are truly impossible. You simply have to choose if you are willing to do the hard work. If you are, then you just get after it, and be consistent over time. I think I’m good at being steady and putting in the work — I know that small things done consistently over time are often more powerful than big things done unpredictably and sporadically.

And third, I genuinely believe in the power of teams to do great things. I don’t gravitate towards individual superstars, nor do I want to be one myself. I look for people who make everyone around them better and I try to do that in our organization as well.

Want more on this topic?

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