This pandemic has not only been a masterclass in leadership but also helping people to figure out how to truly take care of themselves and honor their humanness. There’s a nice intersection that I chatted about with Kristine Sloan, Executive Director of Leadership Triangle
This pandemic has not only been a masterclass in leadership but also helping people to figure out how to truly take care of themselves and honor their humanness. There’s a nice intersection that I chatted about with Kristine Sloan, Executive Director of Leadership Triangle
In this episode, we cover…
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00:00 Kenneth Brown Jr: The past year and a half, I have been learning and leaning into the idea that some things aren’t simply an “either/or” but can be a “both/and” realizing that we can see the same thing in different ways and it helps us to see all sides of a topic. Kristine Sloan sits in this space understanding that pivoting can occur in both big and small ways and leading is not just leading others but also about leading self.
Music: “A Path Unwinding” by blue dot sessions
Kristine Sloan: Any shift and I think it can be really small, I think the time that maybe we're in a conversation and we would typically respond in a particular way but we take a breath. Yeah, I think that's a pivot. It could be very big. It could be a huge thing but I often find that the most interesting 01:00 or powerful pivots are the smallest.
KS: Strong leaders are doing the most work at leading themselves. I think that where that becomes something that people look to is in doing that kind of focusing on self, you create the space for both people to do that as well.
KBJ: I’m Kenneth Brown Jr and this is Pivots, a podcast on navigating transitions, negotiating change, and reimagining our world. Today our guest is Kristine Sloan Executive Director of Leadership Triangle, a nonprofit working to support regionalism in the counties of Durham, Wake, Orange, and Chatham, the Triangle, while providing leadership development programs to help groups and individuals engage in issues facing the region. Our conversation explores how our notions and systems of work and leadership are changing in front of our very 02:00 eyes.
Speaking of change, Kristine started in the summer of 2020, when life was changing by the day and many people were getting a masterclass of how to lead in an emergency.
KBJ: So, you transition jobs one, starting in the middle of a pandemic but also going from a more globally-focused organization to a more local-focused organization, so I was wondering if you could describe what that pivot was like?
KS: Yeah, I think personally for me. I was very intentional when I was looking for my next role and really wanted a role that was centered in the triangle community. This is where I'm from born and raised and I was excited about the 03:00 opportunity to do deep community leadership development work here. So, that was actually one of my, kind of as I was in a transition moment, a pivot moment personally, that were some of the elements that were really important to me. Then stepping into the role in July, I think to some extent I had it, maybe, easier than other people because at least I went in eyes wide open like "Alright, surely things will have to change. Surely, there are going to be some elements of this that are like never been done before." So, it wasn't like "Hey, let me take this idea that I had about this role and completely change it up." had I started in February maybe. Instead, I think maybe good for me was that I came in and was like "Ok, I absolutely know that things will have to change." 04:00 and one of the big elements for Leadership Triangle is that we have been an in-person, events, gathering, workshop-based organization for 28 years. So, one of the questions that we held; myself, the faculty, the board was "How do we continue to create value for our alumni in a virtual environment? and how can we create a program, translate a program that is typically in-person into a virtual environment and make sure that we're doing it well?" You know Kenneth, but we did our Transforming Leaders program in the Fall for the first time all virtual and it wasn't as simple as "Let's take all the content we had and turn it into something that's online." It was "Hey, this content doesn't work anymore." So we need to bring new content in. It was like my first month and I'm talking to our faculty 05:00 like "Hi, very nice to meet you. Do you have experience doing virtual workshops because we're about to do 35 hours of them?" It was kind of fun
Kenneth and Kristine laughs
KBJ: Yea, for those who don't know I was in Transforming Leaders in the fall of 2020 and just graduated in December and it was definitely different. Just being on zoom and definitely missed some of that in-person energy that you just get naturally which was tough. I was wondering, how have you helped managed or still try to create or have that same energy online that typically has in person? How has that been?
KS: One of the aspects of my prior work experience before Leadership Triangle was 06:00 creating and developing content for five-day leadership development conferences and I think we pulled on a lot of those elements of experience design. The content and the curriculum we have to get that right but in terms of experience design, it's how do you design around the people who are going to be in the program? So, how do you create a structure for a program that is human, that is responsive to the needs of human beings. One of the elements that we had done in the past send a bunch of emails to people with pre-work and all of these things and we were like "No, we need something that feels more like a community platform, more like a community space, so people can be integrating, processing information, asking questions." So we moved from email to Slack this year. Another thing is just knowing people and attention spans, we did a lot of work to try and get out content 07:00 down into no more than fifteen-minute chunks before we put people into breakout rooms. So, you probably kind of felt that was like putting you into breakout rooms pretty quickly because we wanted to make sure that everyone in the class was staying engaged because if you're not engaged, then you're not retaining the content and it's hard then to process and integrate into your work-life which is the point of the program. The other thing that we did is we offered at least one time for people to come together. We rented out through our partners at the Durham Bulls Stadium. We rented out the athletics park and had everyone come. You know a huge space with 25 people, plenty of room and just had the opportunity for folks to engage outside, socially-distant, with masks. We felt like we at least wanted to have one space where people were able to meet one another face-to-face to kind of build that sense of trust and connection that is really irreplaceable in person.
08:00 KBJ: How do you define a pivot?
KS: I think it's any shift and I think it can be really small, I think the time that maybe we're in a conversation and we would typically respond in a particular way but we take a breath. Yeah, I think that's a pivot. It could be very big. It could be a huge thing but I often find that the most interesting or powerful pivots are the smallest.
KBJ: That's interesting. How did you come across that or was it some type of "yes, big things are pivots but this is also a pivot too?"
KS: It's probably my background in working with leadership development and facilitation but I have noticed and in the things, 09:00 that have been impactful for me, and my career have been those small things. The things I work on with my coach in a one-on-one session. They are often not the very, very big things but you know the ways that we can stay present or stay, that we can regulate ourselves. Those are really critical moments of inflection in how we change, how we show up for ourselves and for other people. I also, there's an author who I love, who you have definitely heard me talk about but adrienne marie brown, she talks about in the book "Emergent Strategies" she talks about the importance of really paying attention to the small, that she says "small is all" and then she also says "What you pay attention to grows." I think both of those combined together have really resonated for me as I've been thinking about what are the shifts 10:00 and changes in my career.
KBJ: Yeah, how have you been paying attention to the small things?
KS: Oh my gosh. I had this quote that I was saying in the beginning of the pandemic which is "small moments of profound delight." I was like "Everything in the world is a cluster right now." It's not fun and I have this thing of like "Ok, what you pay attention to grows." It's over my desk. I'm like "How am I going to find these things?" and it's not going to be the big things most likely. So, it's going to have to be these small things. So even when we started in the first stay-at-home order, I usually go to the gym or I would go to Umstead and go walking but both closed. So, I was talking around my neighborhood on a regular basis and I was seeing the same thing, it's like the same loop 11:00 every day and, but I started to notice things. I was like "Oh my gosh, these people have amazing flowers in your front yard" or "Look what these people did. They power washed their house." Like, these are very simple things but just the kind of noticing in a more minute way and finding appreciation of those things. It actually reminds me of Leadership Triangle's THRiVE 2019 summit, Jes, she had made the theme of thrive that year this quote from Mary Oliver which was "Pay Attention. Be Astonished. Tell About It." It is kind of in that way, pay attention to what is small and be astonished.
KBJ: Nice, I have definitely learned too about the importance of paying attention to the small things.
KS: What are some of those things that you pay attention to?
KBJ: laughs I think for me 12:00 just being outside. Whether it's walking around my apartment or going to Dix Park and every week, at least this summer I have went to go see the sunrise at Dix Park. And so you're out there and you can see the stars fading away and the moon in the background but also the sun rise. You just pay attention to all the little things going on. You can hear the city waking up. You just see birds being themselves, pay attention to the trees and the wind and you just, at least for me, I've become more aware of my surroundings. A friend..for some reason I've managed to get a couple of friends to wake up that early. They decided to wake up that early.
KS: I'm not surprised. If you described it like that 13:00, I'd be like "Oh, ok I wanna come."
KBJ: Yea, well we were out there one morning and we were watching the sun rise and it's a different experience when you see the sun literally rise over the skyline but she was talking about how in this moment the sun teaches s come into spaces with gusto, this big fall of fire brightening up the space, but also with grace, it just rose. We didn't notice it until it captured our attention
KS: Oh my goodness. Also, with gusto and grace, what a way to be, That's like how I want to be in this way.
KBJ: Yes, gotta shout out my friend Lexy Roberts
Music: “Night Light” by blue dot sessions
14:00
KBJ: I want to talk about leadership and I want to talk about what is your definition of leadership and is that different now than before the pandemic?
KS: No, it's not different. I think about leadership. I come at it, I think, as a facilitator and one of the things we often say about good facilitation is that leadership is helping groups of people or systems, organizations, do their best work, be their best selves, do their best think and I also think that for me a lot of leadership is about 15:00 leading self. It's very, not self-absorbed, but I think strong leaders are doing the most work at leading themselves. I think that where that becomes something that people look to is in doing that kind of focusing on self, you create the space for both people to do that as well. I think for me leading myself well is a lot of self-awareness, a lot of self-regulation, incorporating power-consciousness into myself, understanding what being trauma-informed means for myself, You know there's a lot of work there but I think often when we talk about leadership it's focused on other people and really for me leadership is more of that 16:00 "How can I show up well?" and "How can I show up well so this system can be at it's best?"
KBJ: Yeah, that's one thing I've been learning especially heightened during leadership triangle and during the program, just about it's important to lead yourself as much as you're leading all of these other things because we lead with our whole person but a lot of society and culture is like leadership is always about the others, and the issues, and the challenges at hand and then you kind of put yourself on the backburner. So, do you see more people learning how to become better leaders (s) of themselves? Do you think this time has made more people aware that leadership also includes how I am and how I'm feeling and what I'm doing?
KS: I hope so. I don't want to speak for anybody else's experience but I think a lot of people are really, you know when you're working from home and you are much more so 17:00 responsible for your own schedule, responsible for how you show up, I think it's easier to get into the conversation with yourself. Any time that I think our routines are shaken up or we're in the moment of a pivot we have the opportunity to become more self-aware and become more intentional around our own leadership and leadership style. Whether people are doing that en masse, I hope so. The conditions are right for that to be happening.
KBJ: Continuing in this vein of, from...in the work that you do, what have you been learning? Yea, what have you been learning?
KS: Hmm, in the last year?
KBJ: Yeah laughs
KS: That, you know...18:00 A lot of the people who are in my space are thinking about leadership or org. design really have been saying for a long time that we were going to mostly remote workplaces. I think we are seeing that experiment play out en masse. One of the things I'm learning is that unless we are intentional we can replicate the same systems even in remote workplaces. If you, I'm a micromanager, I can be at home and be a micromanager but oh my gosh, why? How am I going to be doing that? Am I emailing? And I do kind of see people replicating the same behavior and saying "Oh, this thing that I was doing when I'm in the office was harmful" and you have to kind of take that and acknowledge it and then say "And I'm not going to replicate it in this online environment." But that 19:00 where I think that maybe I was thinking "Oh, these would be natural results of moving to a remote workplace, we'll have less micromanagement." I don't know if that necessarily happened. The other thing, I continue to bolster and learn within myself, is the importance of strong public systems as supplements to our private sector lives. It is impossible to ask someone to manage their children's schooling, become a teacher, be a parent, be online for 40 hours a week, also somehow manage a household, somehow, it's actually an impossible ask right?! So what are 20:00 the public sector interventions that are, that keep us healthy and whole? and what does it look like to even bolster them after the pandemic to be better than they were before the pandemic. Continuing to see that without things like a living wage, without things like universal childcare, without things like good public education, it is, it's not even a humane ask to say "Hey, can you show up fully in the workplace?"
KBJ: Yeah, so going off of that, what do you hope sticks around whenever the pandemic ends?
KS: I think one thing I have really appreciated about the pandemic is the ways in which we have learned our argument for someone has to be in the office. I hope that I don't hear that argument as much. 21:00 I think the elements in terms of accessibility and for the disability community to be able to work from home and have that be an option and opening up so many kinds of opportunities, that's really exciting to me. I do hope that sticks. I also hope our sense of understanding that people are people and they have whole, rich, beautiful lives outside of the workplace, where we now see it because they're right behind us and we can kind of like "Oh, there's your living room. Oh, there's your child. Oh, there's your dog" right, like those things still exist even when they are working in an office and getting kind of that holistic sense of people and really seeing people as people and not just workers, I hope that sticks.
KBJ: Where does this...I don't know if it's an urge or a 22:00 calling or a motivation to kind of radically transform our current systems. Where does that come from?
KS: So, I was in third grade when I staged my first protest. I didn't feel that the teacher was being fair (laughs) so I was like "Well, we're not going to do our homework. Nobody do their homework. We're gonna go on a homework strike." I remember I get into the principal's office and I'm like "You know I'm glad I'm here. I need to talk to you about this teacher." and just like who, you know, little eight-year-old, so obnoxious. So, I think some of that is ingrained. I also think my parents were entrepreneurs when I was growing up and they very much, we didn't have a lot of rules or structure in my household and if there were going to be a rule or structure, it was like "Why is this happening? What is the purpose? What is the intent?" and so I kind of grew up with the lens of 23:00 the way that we traditionally do things, if it's not aligned with our values, our morals, our ethics, it must be transformed, it must, it must be changed otherwise we're living in a state of, you know we're never going to have perfect integrity or perfect alignment but let's get closer collectively. So, I think it's probably nature and nurture coming in there from me.
KBJ: Well, that lens is coming in handy now (laughs) when everything is all in flux, just asking why and why does it have to be this way? Speaking of your upbringing, I know when people go through pivots they have experiences or just things they've seen growing up that they kind of latch on to or help gets them through a shift or a change, so whenever you go through a pivot, are there just moments from your experience, personally/professionally, that you kind of hold to 24:00 or you remind yourself of that you will get through it
KS: You know in my magnanimous and mature moments, sure yeah (laughs) there are also moments where I'm like "Oh, this is terrible. I didn't want it to go this way. Why is it happening this way?" There is my favorite author of all time, Octavia Butler, and she says "God is change" and the point being that everything changes at all times, get used to it. I think some of the things that help me pivot, honestly, at this point in my life are knowing that I've done it before. Knowing, I worked in international development. I got a master's degree to work in international development for almost a decade and I came back, I left my job, bought a van, traveled around the U.S. living in my van just like "What am I going to do next?" And I landed at my last 25:00 job, was there for five years. That was in leadership development. I'm still in leadership development. I'm incredibly happy in development. I think the more you go through these periods of significant influx, the less...the less intense they feel over a sustained duration of time. They still feel intense, it's just a shorter period of time and I also know "Oh, I'm feeling this way. What are my practices? What are my habits? What's going to help me come back down? What's going to help me feel better?" right! How am I going to move this through? How can I accept it? I think building through that muscle memory and then building up also the list of whatever it is or you, for me that is helpful to move through those things.
KBJ: What message would you give someone going through a major transition? Would that be one of the things you would tell someone? 26:00 That they've been through a change before or is there something else that comes to mind?
KS: No, I think it's so different for every person. I sometimes feel that generic advice is kind of harmful. I think,you know, for people who are going through transition, it's being as right-sized as possible or what is it that's going help them. What do they know that might help them feel more calm or steady or clear? Who can they call? Who do they trust to be able to talk through that with? Leaning on relationships, leaving on support systems is really critical in points of transition 27:00 and acknowledging that googling "The eight things to do when you're in a state of career transitions." may be helpful but may not be, that everybody has a different experience of a pivot or a transition and it could just be somebody to say "Yea, this sucks. I'm sorry."
KBJ: Yeah, that's real. What gives you hope?
KS: So, many things. I'm a hopeful person. I'm an optimistic person by nature. I fundamentally believe in people. I think if you look back in history and look at the history of humankind, it's kind of like "Oh, this is not good. A lot of violence, a lot of war, a lot of brutality." But the Martin Luther King Jr quote "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends 28:00 towards justice." I hold that as a, not as an inevitability but a charge. I see that moral arc bending toward justice in the long scope of history and I think often like how do we make that more urgent and how do we make that bend faster (both laugh) and I find a lot of hope in the Longview of time, I think is the shorter condensed version. Sometimes, I think looking at a punctuated version of time is like "Oh, gosh. This is all bad." But stepping out and trying to see the Longview of time and the progress that has been made or the progress that hasn't been made but the work that people still do and the work of how people continue to show up for that work 29:00 over the long, a long period of time, it gives me hope. It gives me, also a sense of commitment.
KBJ: Awesome
Music: “Home Home at Last” by blue dot sessions
KBJ: Kristine Sloan is the Executive Director of Leadership Triangle. You can learn more about the organization by going to their website Leadership Triangle dot org or connecting with them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Medium but here’s an even better way to learn more
KS: You know someone who has gone through a Leadership Triangle program in your life, talk to them about the program, talk to them about what they got out of it, and what they get out of being a Goodmon Fellow in the alumni community.
KBJ: Leadership Triangle alum, right here. You’ve been listening to Pivots, a podcast on navigating transition, negotiating change, and reimagining our world. Pivots is a project the A.J Fletcher 30:00 Foundation produced and hosted by me Kenneth Brown Jr. Our music is composed by blue dot sessions. You can hear this episode and more anytime wherever you listen to podcasts or go to our show page at www dot pivots-a-j-f dot simplecast dot com.
See you next time.