This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - How To Build Emotionally Mature Leaders with Dr. Christie Smith | 272

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

The lack of maturity we’ve come to tolerate in leadership today is astounding. Impulsiveness isn’t authenticity, volume isn’t strength, and tantrums definitely aren’t leadership. True leadership demands emotional maturity, and that’s exactly what we’re exploring in this episode of This Is Woman’s Work. Our guest, Dr. Christie Smith, is an author, international speaker, and advisor with over 35 years of experience guiding Fortune 500 C-Suite leaders on strategy, culture, and leadership. She’s held executive positions at Accenture, Deloitte, and Apple and is the founder of The Humanity Studio™, a media, research, and advisory institute revolutionizing the way we work to improve the way we live. Her new book, Essential: How Distributed Teams, Generative AI, and Global Shifts are Creating a New Human Powered Leader, just hit the shelves. Dr. Smith joins us to discuss how emotional maturity is a superpower for women in leadership. This conversation is an invitation to embrace the challenge of leadership—not just with confidence and capability but with presence, groundedness, and a willingness to grow. Because leadership isn’t about being powerful or perfect—it’s about being human. Connect with Dr. Christie Smith: Website: http://www.thehumanitystudio.com/  Book: https://www.smith-monahan.com/  Related Podcast Episodes: Lead Bigger with Anne Chow | 253 The Sixth Level Of Leadership with Dr. Stacy Feiner | 236 Who’s Entitled Now?! with Dr. Jessica Kriegel | 237 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

I am Nicole Kahlil and I gotta tell you, one of the things I feel we've lost in the age of social media, something we used to expect from adults and downright demand from leaders is maturity. I mean, come on. I love a good rant as much as anyone. I battle with judgment and arrogance frequently, especially when faced with somebody I wholeheartedly disagree with. But that's where maturity is supposed to come into play, right? I mean I've had to learn the skill of biting my tongue, of asking instead of telling, of choosing curiosity over assumption.

And even with all that practice, I still screw it up on occasion. And when I do, I get to own the consequences, communicate responsibly, ask for forgiveness, and commit to learning and doing better. Because that's the deal, or at least it should be the deal. Yet here we are. And I gotta tell you, the visible lack of maturity

we've come to accept from our leaders astounds me. I find it truly and utterly shocking, and friend, I'm not easily shocked. Emotional intelligence is important for sure, but isn't it time we bring maturity back into the leadership equation? We can't keep confusing impulsiveness with authenticity, mistaking volume for strength,

or equating tantrums with leadership. True leadership demands maturity, and it's more important now than ever. So on this episode of This is Woman's Work, we're gonna talk about how we, as women, can leverage maturity as a superpower. Our guest is Dr. Christy Smith, author, international speaker, and

advisor with over 35 years of experience advising the C-suite of Fortune 500 companies on strategy, leadership, culture, talent, and the impact of workforce technologies. She has held executive positions at Accenture, Deloitte, and Apple and is a founder of the Humanity Studio, a media research and advisory institute dedicated to improving the way we live by revolutionizing the way we work. Her new book, Essential, How Distributed Teams, Generative AI, and Global Shifts are Creating a New Human-Powered Leader, just hit the shelves. So, Kristi, it's an honor to have you on the show. And before I get into my questions,

I just love your reaction or thoughts on anything I said up to this point. Am I off base? Am I being immature? Is there anything you'd like to challenge or disagree with? You know, listen, you know, we live in a divided world today. We're dealing with multiple wars where family members are living or colleagues are living.

We are dealing with the onslaught of technology we don't understand and we can't literally catch up to not only at work but in our lives. We're dealing with family still coming out of COVID. So we've got a lot of headwinds coming to us, but we're also living in a world of polarization where we have lost the art of having conversation in the middle of those polar opposite ideas. And so I think you're spot on. And it's part of why we've written this book is because we need different skills and capabilities,

not just as leaders, but as humans to reengage in conversation, community, and thriving, not only at work, but in our lives in general. And I think we've heard enough or quite a bit about emotional intelligence. I don't know that I've heard anybody talk about emotional maturity and leadership. And so I'd love if you'd be willing

to kind of share the distinction. What is the difference and what is it you're talking about when you say emotional maturity? Yeah, the fundamental difference is emotional intelligence, which is a phenomenal concept framework tool, really sought for us as leaders to understand ourselves, right? Emotional maturity is for leaders to understand the humanity in their workplace. So while one, you know, you could say that human intelligence is a prerequisite to human, to emotional maturity, right? Or emotional intelligence

to emotional maturity. So I think that we're really focused on, listen, it's not about you. It's about how you care for the people who work for you. Which sounds great, but I find is one of those things that sounds simple, but isn't, or, you know, sounds like something we should innately know how to do, but we don't. So how do we develop emotional maturity?

What does that even look like? Yeah, there are some key attributes and mindset shifts we need to make when we talk about emotional maturity. One is the suspension of self-interest. That very notion that I just mentioned is it's not about me. I may be under pressure on productivity numbers, on outcomes, on P&L, all of those things, right? And boy, do I feel sorry for people right now

because the expectations are very high, right? But the way that you excel in all of those measures is not about you and your performance, it's about the performance of your people. So this notion of suspension of self-interest in that kind of mindset shift is really critical. So what are the behaviors associated with that? Well, the number one behavior associated with that is insatiable curiosity. We need to be curious about the people

who work with us and for us. We need to understand at a deep level what motivates them, what drives them, what are their superpowers, what are the headwinds that they have in their lives that are distracting them in which they're coming to work with one hand tied behind their back. We need to have a better sense of what our team constellation is

and how to develop that team so that every individual is thriving. You only do that through curiosity. And so then the last thing, what that breeds is this culture of excellence, right? How do we build a culture that is about the team and not about any one individual. I was listening to a great podcast of a phenomenal leader, Coach K, who was the basketball coach legend from Duke University.

And he talked about the last game that he was coaching at Duke at home. And the outcome was not good. Duke lost. And he said he was upset because he was upset. They didn't win the game for him. And as he reflected on that, he admitted quite quickly that what am I doing? This isn't about me. This is about the team.

But what am I doing? This isn't about me. This is about the team. And he was almost embarrassed by the fact that he had this very human reaction. We all have these. But he was mature enough to catch himself in the moment and to say, how is my team doing? What did we not do together as a team that resulted in this? What did we do really well together as a team? And he very clearly, he admits this in public that he made it about him.

Leadership is just not about him. So what I love about that example is, yes, great example of emotional maturity. Also, confidence to be vulnerable about it. To say to people, oh, you know, this is what I learned. This is where I went wrong. And I love the expression insatiable curiosity. So the one thought that popped into my head

that I love to get your thoughts on is especially given that our audience is mostly women. one thought that popped into my head that I love to get your thoughts on is, especially given that our audience is mostly women. When we say suspension of self-interest, I worry that some women might take that too far, that they might become so others focused that they forget that there is an element of everybody gets to win or the result or the thing that we're working toward includes them. Any thoughts on that, you know, when we see women as leaders?

Yeah, we talk about this in the book. We talk about the fact that great leaders need to recover. They need to take time, just like a great athlete who needs to take, you needs to take time to recover, their body to recover, eat the right nutrition. All of those same principles apply to the workplace. And so the idea that me as a leader, I need to be mature enough to know that in order for me to suspend self-interest, be insatiably curious, build a culture where everyone can thrive,

and that we are holding each other accountable. We're not just holding each other accountable to the business outcomes. We're holding each other accountable to the wellness, to everyone's wellness, and that includes the leader themselves. So what I heard is that we can't tip this so far that we don't have the energy or capacity to be curious and empathetic and all of those things, which we do when we take it too far and burn out

and have nothing left to give and all of that. So it's an example of emotional maturity when we choose to take care of ourselves so that we can show up at our best. Is that? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You know, what we hear from leaders who are, you know, behaving in this way, who are emotionally mature mature leaders are what we often hear of mentors in the workplace. Is that actually they're getting more out of it than their mentees? We hear that all the time. Well, what we hear from emotional mature leaders who are taking these steps to understand the humanity in their workplace and solve for the humanity in their workplace is that it is energy giving, not sucking. And that they get more out of that than they would have imagined otherwise. So I was thinking in advance of our conversation,

sometimes I learn best by seeing what doesn't work or seeing examples of not. That sometimes helps me to understand more what it is, right? So what are some examples of emotional immaturity we're likely seeing at work or in the world today? So let me start with that question because I have a follow-up. Okay, I think that we see emotional immaturity in the sheer focus on productivity numbers

and on outcomes, right? Short-term outcomes, right? The notion that we are so myopic in getting to the goal that we leave scorched earth, we all have had bosses who scorched earth. I worked at an organization where the CEO on a call with the senior team one day said, about earnings, right? We were behind on the earnings. And the refrain from this individual was, this doesn't make me look good. You're not making me look good, right?

That's a prime example of emotional immaturity. Yeah. And I'm guessing everybody's motivation went to like nil in that moment. There's no question about it. And everybody was distracted by the comment for weeks, if not months. And what it does is, you know, trust in organizations and leaders is at an all-time low, Nicole. Right? 62% of people say that they have trust in leaders. Now, let me put that in context. That drops to 53% in the United States. The parameters of those numbers are skewed.

The 62% is skewed by countries like China and Saudi Arabia. They're very high percentages, but most Western nations are between on the trust level, between 37 and 53, the highest. So we just simply don't trust our leaders. And it's because of this behavior of it's about me, or I've always done it this way, I'm not going to change. Oh, I'm gonna ride things out until I retire.

We hear that from leaders all the time. Very few, less than 23% are saying, hey, I'm gonna do something different to in my own behavior and in my interactions with my people to engage them more. As you were talking, I was thinking, because it requires quite a bit, I think, of emotional maturity and courage to be willing to change,

to be willing to say, yes, this is how I've done it up to this point and it got me to here, but it's not going to get me to there. Or the world is changing or the environments are changing or people are changing and it is my obligation as a leader, as long as I choose to stay in a leadership position, to evolve and grow with it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you're spot on. Part of what we examined in the book

was the shift of expectations of employees, right? That led to we need a new model of leadership, an emotionally mature leader. Now, what we found in this research is there are four primary areas that employees have a fundamental expectation of leaders that leaders are not following through with. One is purpose, right?

Employees are simply calling leaders out and companies out, organizations out to say, your insides don't match your outsides. You have these wonderful statements on the walls. You've attracted me to come to you with all of these beautiful statements about what you're doing for the planet, what you're doing around inclusion and diversity, what you're doing in terms of making the world a better place. And yet, when I'm here, I experience something fundamentally differently. So employees are expecting and demanding that

their leaders and their companies live up to the purpose and the values that they state. That's number one. Number two- As we should, right? Right. 100%. Yeah. Which is why, again, we examine this in the book, the dark side of this is 23% of employees feel engaged at work globally. I mean, That's pathetic, to put it bluntly. It's costing us a lot of money. If you think about low engagement, it's $8.8 trillion a year.

That's Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple put together. Think about that. Right? So what we're seeing is so purpose and values is number one. Number two is a sense of agency. Right? Employees want to define how, where, and when they work within reason. Right? We've seen these return to office mandates by companies, and they're failing. They are either used as a ruse to let what they perceive as low performers go, which is really, I think, unethical, rather than just have layoffs and have them in and call it that. Or, you know, it's just simply not working. So the sense of agency that if you know me as a person,

if you are insatiably curious, you know me as an employee, you know what I want to work on, you know how I work, and it's more project-based, then people feel more agency. The other is agency around how I define myself. I don't want you defining me by a set of attributes that I don't even define myself as. At Apple, we rolled out something called You in Six Words across the company, which was, if people looked Christy Smith up, they would see she's white, she's been a senior executive,

she has a wife and two kids, right? I don't lead with being gay, I don't lead with being a woman, right? What defines me more than anything else is I'm the youngest of eight. I grew up in a competitive marketplace, I had to brand myself early. That has driven me more than anything else.

So agency is important. The third is wellness. So we spend a bunch of time talking about the need for wellness and having that for employees. And then lastly, connection. How do we develop and be creative about a connection in a distributed world. So these are the four demands of employees, of leaders, which requires a fundamentally different type of leader who focuses on these things

and the humanity of the workplace. I love that example of defining ourselves and having agency over it because what we deem as impactful or important might be entirely different than what other people might see or what might be visible, or what you might think. And it gives us the opportunity to let people know, like, what do you need to know about me? Yeah, it's also a way to find common ground, right? Right.

I mean, when I define myself by those six simple words, people always lean in. They go, oh, you must have grown up Catholic. Oh, how many boys, how many girls? Where did you grow up? It engages a dialogue rather than, oh, you're a woman, I'm a man, I don't understand you, I really don't understand you because you're gay.

And I have different opinions about that. That throws up a barrier. Not that I'm not proud of those things, I love those things about myself, but it's not how I define myself. Right, and also I think peaks curiosity around what the person is interested and open to talking about.

Like you kind of set a stage of this is what lights me up or this is what makes me who I am. So let's be curious about that versus trying to be curious about something that may not be as important or is You know something that people want to talk about as much. I don't know. Yeah, like I'm a mom I think people often want to talk to me about motherhood. It's not they don't want to talk about being a mom It's just not the highest. I

Know that sounds awful. So people are like, oh my god She can't believe she just said that out loud. But it's not where- I think a lot of people probably relate to you. I do think what we're trying to get across in this book is how do we fundamentally, I'll go back to the beginning of our conversation, hold conversations in the middle, right? Rather than these polar things, I need this from you, therefore you give me this, right? Rather than let's have a dialogue of, you know, how do we get to know each other?

How do we build trust? How does empathy and transparency play a role in that? Where does compassion come in? I mean, it's interesting, you hear from many CEOs, you're hearing this all over the place. I mean, Satya Nadella, obviously talking a lot about empathy. Jamie Dimon talking about insatiable curiosity. We did a study of 600 CEOs globally, where they said they knew that the traits or the attributes that they had to develop were trust, transparency, and compassion. So we know this as senior leaders, yet we are falling back on the traditional measures

of business and a scarcity mindset that really has led to, unfortunately, disengagement, disillusionment and distraction from most of your employee base. You know, I say all of this, I am not naive to the fact that we need to run our businesses, we need to grow, we need to make profit, we need to do all of those things, but there is a different way.

And that's what we put forward in Essential. Yeah, and I didn't hear you saying that this is about leadership just for the sake of leadership. It was, you know, this is about replacing some of that lost value along the way. And this is about how we get the best out of our teams for the profit. So I, it said that I had a follow-up question and my question about how we're seeing immaturity and being an emotionally immature leader, given that this podcast is called This is Woman's Work and the vast majority of our listeners identify as women, are there any differences as it relates to gender and emotional immaturity or maturity? Like

what are you seeing? Because I when you said scorched earth I hate to say it but you know I did think of personal experiences and they were 100% experiences with men. Now that's not necessarily true for other people but that I think that women are less likely to go the scorched earth model. Well, I don't know. I've had experiences just the opposite. So I think it can depend. I'm not a fan of gender stereotypes. I am not. I think there are, and as a psychologist, I've studied this, right? That there's a pool of attributes that we all pull from given any circumstance, right?

And any leader should pull from. Now, the reality is what we still have in our workplaces is a male archetype for leadership. is what we still have in our workplaces is a male archetype for leadership and what that should look like. And that is still a bias we carry in most of our organizations, right? What we have to do is dismantle that

and say, what is great leadership? And I think that is absolutely what we're trying to achieve in emotional maturity and in essential. I think that women and men both are required to lead with these attributes of trust, building trust, transparency, compassion, curiosity, insatiable curiosity, really looking at engagement and connection with their employees to understand then how do I get the best out of my employees, but more importantly, how do they feel the most fulfilled

about the work that they're doing? And how do I be the vessel for that? Those are the things that I think any leader, regardless of gender, needs to possess. So great answer. I agree. And I think what we often do, as I did, is we go back to our own personal experiences and we make

assumptions or whatever from there. One other thing that I have experienced that I can't imagine is, and this is not a gender thing, but I can't imagine it's just me that has experienced it, is companies tolerating people who are high producers or great salespeople are brilliant in some way that are also assholes in the workplace. Like what is the cost of tolerating people, leaders,

because they bring something to the table but then they are not at all emotionally mature? Yeah, age old problem exists everywhere in the workplace. I mean, when I am working with senior leaders, they often will give me multiple examples of these jerks that are in the workplace. And my one question to them is, well, are your insides going to match your outsides?

Because those jerks are going to be held account in social media. They're going to impact your brand. They're going to impact the people that you're able to attract or that you lose. And we can show the evidence in that when we come in and look at this as a study, right? What the very question that you're asking, we need leaders to have the courage to say, yes, come tell me, what is the impact of this jerk? Really the impact of this jerk,

not just their numbers on employee engagement survey. Right? Yeah. I often think about it from the like, are you willing to sacrifice all the people they interact with, their psychological safety, their excitement to be at work, their productivity for the one?

Because that's often the choice we inadvertently are making. Which again,, people leave organizations or become disengaged because of the leaders that they're working with. And again, I go back to the very fact that we have the lowest employee engagement at 23% that's causing $8.8 trillion a year to our economies, right? $355 billion a year on burnout, right?

Or mental health issues on top of that. So something has got to give because we can't keep spending this kind of money or losing this kind of money in losing this kind of money in our economies, in our organizations. Yeah. So I guess for anybody who's like, yes, this is what we need.

And we do often have a tendency to think about the people we interact with and go, this is what they need. And I am inviting all of us to go internal, right? To be insatiably curious about ourselves first. So if we want to grow in our own emotional maturity, what might be the next best step? What might be something to work on or any advice you'd have to give? Yeah, I think there are a couple of things.

One is, I think, take time. I think you need, we are, every leader I talk to, and you're probably like this as I can tend to be, but I've stopped, which is from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m., back to back to back to back to back. Literally no time to think, to recover, to reflect, time to think, to recover, to reflect, to simply say, did I handle that situation well? Do I need to go back to repair something? Do I need to rethink how to do something moving forward?

Number one is time. And that could be 15 minutes. It could be make the commitment that your calls are 45 minutes. You do that during the day. You've given yourself hours to reflect, to think, to recover. So that's number one. Number two is perspective. Go get perspective.

Go to a conference. Go to the opera. Just go volunteer somewhere. Now it sounds like, Christy, you're adding another to do. Yes, I am and I'm not. I'm trying to, if we don't gain perspective, I go to a great conference. I never miss it every year called Makers. It is what fills my soul. I go, I see other women at Makers. I gain perspective from them. I learn, right? I also go on sister weekends because I gain perspective from those five sisters I have.

So I think the second is invest in your own learning, development, and perspective. And then third is take time to go five levels down in the organization and just have some coffee with people. Because you're young ones. I mean, I wrote this book, I'm a boomer with a millennial, right? It's amazing how much common ground we have, but boy, the perspectives are very different. Go learn from gen Z's. We have vilified every generation that's come before us. And this is a real sticking point for me. That's just patently immature.

We need to go have conversations with those young people because those are the ones that are gonna show us a different way. Great advice, thank you. All right, I know people are gonna wanna learn more. So the book again is called Essential. You can grab it on Amazon or go to your local bookstore, maybe grab a few copies for the leaders in your life

or your team. And Christy's website is thehumanitystudio.com. We'll put all the links and show notes. Christy, thank you for an incredible conversation. Nicole, thank you. I really loved being with you today. It was my pleasure. Okay, so friend, it's time to embrace

the challenge of leadership. Yes, to be confident, growth-oriented and capable, but also emotionally mature. Because leadership at its core is less about being powerful or perfect and more about being present, grounded, and willing to do the work, both on ourselves and with the people we lead.

So I'll leave you with this thought. Maturity may not always be the loudest voice in the room, but it will be the one that people trust to lead them out of the noise. So let's lead, because that is woman's work.