Season 3; Episode 6: You Have To Go First with Lindsey Saletta

Lindsey Saletta is the Chief Operating Officer at west~bourne, a food and lifestyle brand that began as the first zero-waste neighborhood restaurant in New York City and is now piloting conscious capitalism in the food industry. Lindsey is an experienced multichannel consumer goods business leader with a focus on organizations experiencing transformational change. She’s also a strategic systems thinker and customer-centric leader ruthlessly focused on profitable revenue growth and cost optimization. I love Lindsey’s clarity on her own strengths and how those same strengths can sometimes be barriers to growth. Lindsey is that ambitious and vibrant leader you wish you could call to help you navigate your own career. So, here’s your chance!

Key Takeaways from this Episode:

You have to go first. Be vulnerable.

·       When a relationship isn’t working, you have to go first to make change happen. But it’s also a two-way relationship. 

·       Learn to ask and check in with people about how you’re doing. It’s powerful because it allows people to accept the change you’re working on and create more safety in the relationship.

The problem might be you.

·       You have tremendous room for growth when you realize you've exhausted every one of your tools and you're still not through the problem and you realize that the problem might be you. 

·       When you go inside yourself and rearrange some of the things about yourself and then come back to whatever that external problem was many times you can realize, “Oh, I can solve this now!”.

Be open to the idea that your personality can change. 

·       I just saw myself as somebody who had a strong personality and that was never going to change. I realized that if I'm not going to change, this is as far as I go, and that was not an acceptable outcome. But I could learn to have these skills. The big breakthrough for me was that empathy was something that can be learned and practiced and improved upon.

·       I'm an ENTJ (Myers-Briggs) and that is 100% who I am, but you can learn the skills that are out of preference. It dramatically improved my relationships at work because I was able to decenter myself, set my ego aside just a little bit, and I was able to open myself up to the possibility that I could be softer. 

Listen first.

·       Don't necessarily be the first to speak in that board meeting or in that conference room. If you wait, you listen, you understand the context. You have a little empathy for the other people in the room, and then you speak with a more informed perspective. 

Don't judge the messenger, judge the information.

·       It is important to get as much information as possible to make the best decision you can. It doesn't matter where or who that is coming from. What's important is that you get the information. 

·       I was creating a toxic relationship between me and an advisor because I was so focused on letting her know my perspective. She felt like she had to fight to get her opinion heard, and then I didn't like her opinion and I shut it down. But if I kept my mouth shut, she might say something that I didn't know, and I could benefit from it. She doesn't make the decisions. I make the decisions. What is her opinion other than something I can learn from? 

It's okay if you're not the only shiny one.

·       Hire people smarter than you. You don't need to be afraid of someone out-shining you. There is room for all of us. It makes everybody better if everyone shines just as brightly as they possibly can. 

·       I'm very much in the mindset of operating from a space of abundance rather than scarcity, when it comes to how many people we can have at the top.

A career is a long game, you can only go so far by yourself.

·       There's a saying that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. That saying is right for a reason, you really need to be able to learn to bring other people with you. If you end up working so hard to get all these things done that you found yourself alone at the end, that's a very quick way to burn out. 

·       If you're doing everything by yourself, you're often doing it with brute force and burning all of your political capital. If you run into an area where you need help and someone could make it easier for you, are they going to volunteer to help when you've steamrolled them over the last four meetings? No, absolutely not. That's when you start getting in your own way. 

At the end of the day, it's all supposed to be fun. 

·       If it's going to be this hard, if we're going to work this hard on something, it also has to be fun.

Resources

·       Camilla Marcus

·       Global Brands Group

·       Li&Fung

·       Principles by Ray Dalio 

To learn more about my work in executive coaching, leadership development and team effectiveness check out my website, connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at winnie@winnifred.org.  

Reach out and tell me what was helpful about today’s episode or any suggestions you have for my show.

Please leave a review and tell someone else about this show; look below for some instructions on how to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

I look forward to sharing another transformative conversation with you next week!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How to leave a rating or review in Apple Podcasts (on an iOS device)

1.      Open the Podcasts app. 

2.      Choose “Search” from the bottom row of icons and enter the name of the show (i.e., “Transformative Leadership Conversations”) into the search field

3.      Select the show under Shows (not under Episodes)

4.      Scroll down past the first few episodes until you see Ratings & Reviews

5.      Click “Write a Review” underneath the displayed reviews from other listeners. You’ll then have the option to rate us on a 5-star scale, and write a review if you choose (you can rate without writing, if you’d prefer)