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In this episode, I have Beth Wonson; we discuss a couple of essential topics in leadership, ranging from her transition from being a team member to a leader, how to handle this transition, and becoming more self-aware.
Beth Wonson started her career out in public education, and she went into public education because she had two little kids at home; she wanted to be able to have summers off with them and weekends, but she quickly learned that public education was not for her because it didn’t work out the way she wanted. Hence, she went to work for a company that did corporate consulting, and organizational development work, and leadership training, and her career took off there. She went from being an entry-level employee to managing and running a pretty big department quickly.
Beth created Navigating Challenge dialogue out of her process of examining how traditional leadership skills fail organizations’ mission and goals. She studied how leaders working in isolation and staff working in competitive silos adversely affect the prosperity of the whole company.
Key Podcast Moments
[0:42]- Brief Background of Beth
[03:53]- The transition from being a team member to a leader
[10:28]- Self-awareness in leadership
[14:19]- Adult development in leadership
[16:03]- Finding your niche
[21:29]- How to become more self-aware
[22:16]- The power of paradox
[30:46]- Resources on how to contact Beth
[32:05]- Ideal people she works with
Explaining her transition, Beth said she was on a high-performing team, and she loved it because they were all great together and even had cocktails on Thursdays where they talked about leadership, so when she was asked to leave the team, she thought it was great. The first Thursday after she was promoted, she went from the usual cocktail, and then the team was all gone; this was her first self-awareness that she was now in management.
She realized that when you get in the position, and you have more awareness of bureaucracy and policy and how things work, you suddenly realize why a lot of those things didn’t weren’t as simple as they seem. So a big part of her work now is helping people along that same journey she had gone through.
When asked about her take on self-awareness, Beth stated that she developed a program called navigating challenging dialogue, which is the essence of all the work that I do and the thing that makes it different than many other things like Crucial Conversations or other models, is that it’s rooted in the idea of emotional self-awareness and emotional self-regulation. She went further to state that the reason she focused on that was that when she was leading that team, it was super effective, and they were getting so much stuff done and were doing great, but part of what was driving them was the fact that she was not always aware of my emotional impact. She states that it was vital for her to help people understand how to dive into self-awareness, do some self-coaching about the energy they bring to the room, and show up clean and clear for conversations.
Beth’s first point on becoming more self-aware is knowing the remedy to the power of paradox. She went further to explain that power politics tells us that the more you move up the leadership chain, the more you will lose self-awareness, the less you’ll be open to feedback. The result is you have a less authentic connection with people because now you’re at the top and feel protective. She states that the remedy is to sit down and listen to feedback—the second point to becoming self-aware understanding the assessment.
To learn more about Beth, you can contact her via the following;
Instagram: Beth_Wonson Facebook: BethWonson LinkedIn: /IN/BETHWONSON
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Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/mayapinion/message
