Cultivating a Growth Mindset: Strategies for Building High-Impact Teams – Interview with Sue Reynolds-Frost

High-impact talent is the driving force behind organizational innovation and long-term success in today’s competitive markets. But what sets the most successful leaders apart? Many attribute it to a growth mindset as a key differentiator in leadership effectiveness.

As part of our new Leadership Insider series, we explore this transformative concept with Sue Reynolds-Frost, a seasoned leadership development consultant and Vice President of Client Experience at Sloan Group International, a premier provider of leadership development programs for Fortune 500 companies and emerging entrepreneurial organizations. With decades of experience spanning technical training to executive coaching, Sue demystifies the concept of a growth mindset, explaining what it is and showing how leaders can foster environments where teams feel safe to learn from mistakes, embrace feedback, and continually develop.

In an era of rapid change, marked by hybrid work, AI integration, and digital transformation, a leadership mindset is more critical than ever. In the interview with Margaret Jaouadi, Sue highlights how leaders who embrace vulnerability, invest in employee development and tap into organizational resources cultivate cultures of psychological safety where innovation and high performance thrive. This interview is packed with practical insights and actionable strategies. It serves as a roadmap for leaders to develop growth mindsets in themselves and their teams, driving future success.

Margaret Jaouadi
Can you introduce yourself, describe your career journey, and describe your work in this space? Why are we talking today?

Sue Reynolds-Frost

My entire career revolved around learning and development, training, and leadership development, and I see it as having two key phases. The first phase was about becoming a practitioner. The second phase combined my varied experiences as a practitioner into a senior account executive/consultant role. If I overlay the concept of a growth mindset onto my career, the theme is that I always wanted to learn, grow, and push myself beyond my skills.

I began as a software trainer, teaching business professionals software applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint when desktop applications were still new. From there, I was recruited into Spencer Stuart, a global executive search firm, to help roll out their proprietary database.

While at Spencer Stuart, I realized I wasn’t a technical person at heart. Self-awareness, personal growth, and leadership development—how leaders build and support their teams- were the topics that fascinated me. I developed and delivered workshops in these areas towards the end of my tenure. After 10 years, I decided to use these skills externally in a client-facing capacity. Working with consultants and partners, responding to client needs, and shaping impactful proposals energized me. However, that kind of direct client impact can be limited in an internal corporate role. So, I took what I had learned and the programs I had developed and started my independent practice as a facilitator, trainer, and coach.

That transition happened in 2008, right as the housing crisis hit. The market was flooded with trainers, facilitators, and coaches seeking employment. However, that moment turned out to be pivotal because it introduced me to Karlin Sloan, the founder of Sloan Group International. I became a facilitator in that network, and during that time, I met Jeff Hornstein, with whom I partnered for nine years.

Jeff’s firm, The Speaker’s Choice, focused on presentation skills and executive presence—a niche coaching area in which I hadn’t yet specialized. I saw it as an incredible opportunity to develop a new skill set. Coaching leaders to have more confidence, executive presence, and high communication skills required me to embody those skills in spades! Jeff coached me to incorporate these skills, and over time, I partnered with corporate and higher education clients to deliver the work.

As I worked with Jeff, I helped expand his firm’s offerings beyond presentation skills to include topics such as self-awareness, communication skills, personality assessments, and conflict management related to emotional intelligence. During that time, Jeff started writing a book on mindset, and at a certain point, he asked me to collaborate on the project.

Our book, “Deliberate Mindset: How Thinking Differently Can Help You Succeed in High-Stakes Presentations and Conversations,” was developed based on our experiences coaching leaders in presentation skills. We found that learning the mechanics of effective communication, such as maintaining good posture, making eye contact, and avoiding filler words, wasn’t enough. A faltering or diminished mindset can override the mechanics in high-stakes situations, such as presenting to a board or senior management team. No matter how well-prepared someone is, their internal self-talk and mental state could derail them. The book explored how leaders could cultivate a deliberate mindset to stay confident and composed under pressure.

Ironically, just as the book was about to be published, Jeff and I decided to part ways. He wanted to focus solely on presentation skills coaching, but I wanted a broader scope of work. It was an amicable split, allowing me to explore new opportunities.

At this point, I reconnected with Karlin Sloan, and the second phase of my career began. She asked me to become a senior consultant for several of Sloan’s most prominent clients. What started as a part-time opportunity quickly turned into a full-time role.

Since then, I’ve transitioned from being a facilitator, coach, and practitioner to managing our firm’s largest global clients. I consult our talent partners on leadership development and executive coaching strategies for their senior leaders. The role encompasses everything I’ve done thus far — from being a practitioner to running my practice, collaborating with Jeff, and writing the book.

Margaret Jaouadi
Conversations about leadership skills often reference the growth mindset. Can you explain how you define it and why it is crucial for creating high-impact teams?

Sue Reynolds-Frost  
Just as Daniel Goleman popularized the concept of emotional intelligence, Carol Dweck’s work on the growth mindset has had a similar impact. It puts a name to something we’ve long observed. When you examine the most successful and resilient individuals, you notice patterns in how they approach challenges, recover from setbacks, and continually push themselves beyond their inherent strengths.

To me, mindset is the lens through which you engage with the world. Having a growth mindset means operating with a broader perspective—not just relying on what you already know you’re capable of, but recognizing that genuine growth comes from stepping outside your comfort zone. This approach is essential in leadership because it directly shapes the environment you create for your team.

Leaders with a growth mindset cultivate workplaces where individuals feel secure in learning from mistakes, embracing feedback, and continually advancing in their careers. Without it, teams can become disengaged, hesitant, or even fearful of failure. Leaders who fail to model growth risk creating teams that lack cohesion, vision, and adaptability.

In today’s fast-changing business environment, adaptability isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a necessity. Change is constant, whether it’s a company restructuring, a shift in leadership, or evolving team dynamics. And the ability to navigate these transitions successfully isn’t always a straight path. A leader’s mindset sets the foundation for how they and their team respond. Are they resilient? Do they stay engaged despite uncertainty? Do they feel empowered to take on new challenges? A leader who embodies a growth mindset strengthens their leadership and enables their team to thrive, regardless of what comes their way.

Margaret Jaouadi
Your statement reminded me of Abe Salloum, who most recently served as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Tecomet and whom I enjoyed interviewing on ‘The Power of Cross-Industry Experience.’ He stated that the mindset of ‘being comfortable with being uncomfortable‘ is a critical leadership skill in today’s business environment. Is the growth mindset teachable?

Sue Reynolds-Frost  
Yes, absolutely. A growth mindset is teachable, just like emotional intelligence. Unlike IQ, which has traditionally been considered static (though emerging research is starting to challenge that idea), leaders can develop a growth mindset over time.

You mentioned something earlier that resonates: the idea that great executive coaches often emphasize—if you’re comfortable, you’re not learning or growing. That concept is crucial. Whether stepping into a leadership role, presenting in front of a group, or taking on a new challenge, growth requires discomfort.

In our leadership programs, we always tell people: don’t let comfort be your guide. If you only do what feels safe, you’ll avoid taking risks and miss opportunities for growth and development. So, while a growth mindset is a learnable skill, it requires a willingness to embrace uncertainty, take on challenges, and push beyond what feels easy. That openness to learning is what makes all the difference.

Margaret Jaouadi  
How can leaders start with themselves? What steps can they take to develop a growth mindset before expecting it from their teams?

Sue Reynolds-Frost  
Leaders have to walk the talk—there’s nothing worse than expecting something from your team that you’re not modeling yourself. We all have memories of teachers, coaches, or leaders who lacked alignment between what they preached and how they showed up. That disconnect erodes trust.

Developing a growth mindset starts with self-awareness. You can’t change what you’re unaware of, and you can’t grow in areas you haven’t recognized as necessary. The challenge is that today’s business climate is fast-paced, leaving little space for reflection. Everything is so on, all the time. However, just like exercising or eating well, self-reflection must become a regular practice—it won’t happen by accident, and it won’t happen simply by reading a book.

One of the key ideas from the book I co-authored with Jeff is that leaders must first examine their default mindsets—the perspectives they unconsciously operate from that may limit their effectiveness. Great executive coaches often start by helping leaders identify their most significant challenges for the next 3, 6, or 9 months. Once those challenges are laid out, the next step is to assess:

• What strengths and innate talents can I rely on to navigate these challenges?
• What skills or behaviors do I need to develop?
• What potential blind spots might hold me back?

For example, senior leaders transitioning into a global role often need to reestablish key stakeholder relationships, determine how to influence without direct authority, and drive a vision forward. Self-awareness helps them recognize whether they naturally excel at building trust and connections or need to strengthen those skills.

The next step is accountability. For many senior leaders, this means working with an executive coach or mentor who helps them carve out intentional time for self-reflection and development. Growth doesn’t happen in isolation.

Ultimately, seeking feedback is one of the most effective ways to cultivate self-awareness. Many top organizations conduct annual 360-degree reviews as part of leadership development, but if your company doesn’t, you can still proactively solicit feedback. We all have blind spots, and the willingness to listen, reflect, and act on feedback is critical to developing a growth mindset.

Margaret Jaouadi
What would you say about using leadership or skills assessments as a starting point? Given your experience with leadership assessments, would you recommend them to raise self-awareness?

Sometimes, leaders lack individuals around them who feel comfortable providing honest feedback, or they may not have created an environment where it feels safe. An objective tool or structured process could be a valuable first step in those cases. What are your thoughts on that?

Sue Reynolds-Frost
To build on your last point, I rarely encounter an organization with a robust culture of feedback. The larger and more matrixed a company is, the harder it becomes. You hear it all the time—the higher you go, the less feedback you receive.

So, leaders committed to self-improvement must find ways to gather meaningful insights. Self-assessments are a good starting point, but it’s essential to recognize their limitations—after all, they reflect only your perception of yourself. Tools like DISC or Myers-Briggs can provide valuable insights into your natural tendencies—why you make decisions the way you do, why you might take longer to process information, or how those tendencies might help or hinder you in certain situations. However, external feedback is essential to get a complete picture.

Many organizations offer 360-degree assessments, and executive coaches also conduct them. These allow leaders to select colleagues within their ecosystem to provide candid, confidential feedback, helping to reveal blind spots. Because, as I said, you can’t change what you’re unaware of.

And sometimes, the most minor things make the most significant difference. A behavior that turns people off might be straightforward to fix—if only you knew about it.

One typical example is when leaders struggle to transition from being individual high performers to effectively leading a team. Take someone who’s results-driven and hands-on—this is especially common in consulting or problem-solving environments where personal accountability is high. If they move into a leadership role but fail to adjust their approach, they may unintentionally micromanage or step on their team’s toes, creating the perception that they don’t trust others.

Feedback becomes crucial in such instances. Realizing, “Oh, I had no idea that’s how I was coming across,” can be a pivotal moment. From there, it’s about learning to delegate, rebuilding trust, and shifting focus to empowering others.

As leaders advance, these dynamics evolve. A frontline manager leads an intact team, moves to managing managers, and eventually oversees multiple teams while reporting to the board or CEO. With each step, the stakes rise, responsibilities shift, and the ability to lead through others, not just alongside them, becomes even more critical.

Margaret Jaouadi  
Leading by example is crucial in shaping a team’s culture. What behaviors or habits should leaders adopt to demonstrate a proper growth mindset?

Sue Reynolds-Frost  
Learning to demonstrate vulnerability with your team or colleagues is essential. Brené Brown’s work on Dare to Lead has influenced many organizations; however, vulnerability can still be misunderstood, primarily due to the generation in which one grew up. Some have historically seen it as a weakness. That’s why I’d recommend exploring what vulnerability in leadership truly means—and what it doesn’t.

It means showing up as a whole person, not pretending to be infallible or immune to mistakes. It’s about being willing to express emotions, whether acknowledging a setback with your team or celebrating a win together. That kind of openness fosters authenticity, which younger generations, especially Gen Z, actively seek in leaders. They don’t want a distant, authoritative figure who always seems perfect—they want a real person who leads with honesty and relatability.

So, how can leaders demonstrate vulnerability in a meaningful way? One of the most effective methods is storytelling. Sharing personal experiences—both successes and failures—creates connection and trust. While it may not always be appropriate in a group setting, one-on-one conversations with team members can be highly effective. For instance, sharing your experiences with failure and growth can have a profound impact on someone who is struggling with a setback. Instead of focusing on the failure, you can frame it as I wouldn’t be where I am today if that hadn’t happened. Such examples turn the conversation into a valuable learning moment rather than a motivational cliché.

Another key aspect of vulnerability in leadership is how to handle mistakes. Of course, immediate triage is necessary, depending on the situation, but once the dust settles, the focus should be on learning and adapting. You often hear phrases like fail fast, but what does that mean in practice? It means creating an environment where teams feel safe to take risks, knowing they can reflect, pivot, and move forward if something doesn’t work. And that reflection process—What did we learn? What will we do differently next time?—should be intentional and built into the culture.

That leads to another crucial element: regular, in-the-moment feedback. Leaders shouldn’t reserve it for annual performance reviews; instead, they should provide it continuously. People crave feedback, but how it is framed makes all the difference. Punitive feedback shuts people down. Developmental feedback—focusing on growth rather than blame—empowers people to improve.

Ultimately, leaders who embrace vulnerability create a culture of trust, learning, and continuous development, where individuals feel secure enough to take risks, make mistakes, and grow stronger.

Margaret Jaouadi  
What are some common barriers leaders face when shifting from a fixed to a growth mindset? And how can they overcome them?

Sue Reynolds-Frost  
The speed of change arguably presents one of the most significant challenges for leaders today. Multiple demands pull them in different directions, often leaving them without time to pause and regulate their responses. This constant pressure makes emotional regulation—a key aspect of effective leadership—more critical than ever.

One of the fundamental principles of emotional regulation is recognizing personal triggers to manage reactions proactively. For example, suppose I know I’m about to walk into a meeting with a peer I’ve had tension with and anticipate that discussing our collaboration will cause me frustration. In that case, I need to prepare myself before entering that conversation. The key question is: What outcome am I trying to achieve? While I can’t control everything, I can control how I react.

However, when everything is moving quickly, self-regulation often takes a backseat. Leaders may revert to old habits, reacting defensively rather than responding intentionally. That’s why carving out time for reflection is crucial—it helps prevent knee-jerk responses that could undermine relationships and decision-making.

Another challenge that often emerges in times of change is impostor syndrome. Leaders may find themselves suddenly taking on new responsibilities, whether due to a promotion, restructuring, or unexpected shifts in workload. In these moments, self-doubt can creep in. A fixed mindset might cause someone to think, I’m not ready for this or I can’t handle this challenge. But a growth mindset reframes that narrative: I can learn and adapt. It won’t be easy, but I can push through the challenges.

The key is recognizing defensiveness or doubt and leaning into resilience instead. Leaders who embrace a growth mindset continually seek solutions rather than shutting themselves down. It’s about finding the right strategies to stay engaged, confident, and adaptable—especially when the pace of change feels overwhelming.

Margaret Jaouadi  
How can leaders create a psychologically safe environment where team members feel encouraged to take risks and view failure as a learning opportunity?

Sue Reynolds-Frost  
That goes back to the earlier question about demonstrating a degree of vulnerability yourself. However, I also believe that a couple of frameworks closely linked to fostering psychological safety come to mind when creating high-performing teams. One is Timothy Clark’s work, which he describes in his book The Four Stages of Psychological Safety. As a leader, not everyone on your team is the same—they’re at different stages with varying levels of competence and confidence.

It’s similar to parenting; you can’t parent all your children the same way, and you can’t lead every team member in the same manner. You must recognize when to be directive when a little support will suffice, and when you can fully delegate. This approach is known as situational leadership, and extensive research is available on how it enables leaders to adapt to various circumstances and individual needs.

Building a high-performing team requires guiding people through the different stages of development, which hinges on creating an environment of psychological safety. That starts with inclusion—do people feel like they belong? As new team members join or move on, do you celebrate wins? Do individuals feel like their voices and views matter? It can be incredibly challenging in hybrid or dispersed work environments, so leaders need to make extra efforts, for example, during weekly team huddles, to encourage sharing. It might seem small, but asking about someone’s weekend or acknowledging personal milestones, like a team member’s child graduating, helps foster connection, safety, and acceptance.

Another key aspect of psychological safety is whether people feel free to learn without fear of making mistakes. If you have an eager team member who lacks specific skills, you must stay close enough to help them bridge that competence gap, reassuring them that it’s okay to learn as they go. That might involve providing direct support or pairing them with someone who can offer guidance.

It’s also about whether people feel safe enough to share their perspectives in meetings rather than just sitting back, waiting to be told what to do. Are you creating opportunities for brainstorming at the beginning of a project to encourage people to contribute ideas? Do they believe they can challenge the status quo without fear of repercussions? How you run meetings, develop relationships, and support your team’s growth significantly influences the environment you create.

Depending on your organization’s size, formal structures may exist to facilitate development planning and feedback; however, you can also create these structures for yourself, even if they are not in place. I think people sometimes misunderstand the concept of psychological safety. Some hear the term and think it’s just a buzzword or something overly soft as if they must be excessively nurturing or emotional. But that’s not what it’s about.

For example, if you, as a leader, tell your team, “We’re going to take an experimental approach, fail fast, and pivot when needed,” but then you only check in with them six weeks later and reprimand them for something that didn’t work, you’re not creating psychological safety. That sends a mixed message. People will quickly pick up on that inconsistency if you say one thing but react differently when challenges arise. If team members don’t feel it’s safe to be honest about what’s working and what isn’t, they’ll start playing it safe, doing only the bare minimum to avoid being singled out or blamed.

That has a huge impact, especially when things are moving fast and teams are under constant pressure. Without psychological safety, people will hesitate to take risks, share ideas, or push boundaries—all essential for innovation and high performance.

Margaret Jaouadi  
What are the top three practical steps leaders can take today to cultivate a team’s growth mindset?

Sue Reynolds-Frost  
The first step is to lead by example. As a leader, you must cultivate a growth mindset first, just as you would put on your oxygen mask before helping others. If you’re struggling, seek out a coach or mentor. Establishing a firm foundation is crucial so that your team sees someone stable who leads by example.

The second step is to prioritize employee development. One-on-one meetings shouldn’t just be about project updates; they should include conversations about growth. Check in on their development, give them space to share their struggles, and encourage learning from past mistakes. You can’t cultivate a growth mindset if you don’t provide opportunities for people to connect their innate strengths to how they can expand and improve. Discussing successes and failures is crucial to this process.

The third step is to leverage the organizational support available within your company. We work with organizations of all sizes, and often, leaders aren’t aware of the tools and resources at their disposal. Whether it’s talent management, learning and development, or leadership programs, there are often more opportunities than people realize. That could mean reaching out for help, facilitating a team alignment meeting before launching a new project, or tapping into resources designed to support leadership development. Leaders don’t have to have all the answers—they need to know where to find support.

And one last point about leading by example: having a growth mindset isn’t a one-time achievement. It’s not linear or something you can check off a list. The other day, I read a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article highlighting how growth mindsets shift over time. You might have a growth mindset in one area of your life but a fixed mindset in another. For example, as a parent, you might encourage your young child to take risks, falling off the bike and getting back on. However, when they’re a teenager, and the stakes feel higher, you may instinctively become more cautious. Leadership works the same way. Different situations, transformations, and challenges will ebb and flow, and because of that, it’s essential to step back and reassess your mindset regularly.

Margaret Jaouadi
When I offer advice, my son says I’m micromanaging him, and he’s probably right. My first instinct is to get upset, but then I realize it’s my anxiety about him growing up and becoming independent. In a way, I’m glad he calls it out because it reminds me that things are shifting again, and I need to adjust.

Sue Reynolds-Frost  
That’s an excellent correlation. It happens constantly with leaders—they feel the pressure and transfer that anxiety onto their teams. They try to control everything or micromanage because they believe mistakes can’t happen. But by doing this, they unintentionally send the message that their team can’t succeed without them. One of the top coaching goals for leaders transitioning into higher roles, such as managing director or C-suite, is learning to let go. They can no longer stay in the weeds or know everything, but making that shift is challenging if they haven’t practiced it earlier in their leadership journey.

Margaret Jaouadi
Someone once told me you must stop doing things yourself when you reach a certain level. You suddenly have a 10,000-foot view, and you shouldn’t be focused on the details or getting involved in the day-to-day tasks. Your role is to guide, not to do.

Sue Reynolds-Frost
Consider the importance of this for high-impact, high-performing teams. You need empowered and trustworthy team leaders within your ecosystem to operate strategically. You should be able to train them to funnel the most critical information to you, knowing they’ll handle all the other aspects of the teams they lead.

Margaret Jaouadi  
Can you share an example of an organization or leader who has adopted a growth mindset and its resulting impact?

Sue Reynolds-Frost  
Here’s an example of an organization that took a proactive, growth mindset approach to developing its top leaders rather than a reactive, fixed mindset approach of doing things the same way.

We analyzed aggregate coaching goals for 100s of leaders we coached in a top global financial services client. We identified the most common development areas leaders need to grow and develop throughout their career trajectory: executive presence, influencing across and up and down the organization, and communicating vision and strategy. These three areas consistently emerged at various levels of leadership and across divisions in the data.

As a result of this data, they shifted from a reactionary (fixed mindset) approach to a more proactive one: How can we help leaders develop their innate strengths in these key areas earlier in their careers? How can we create opportunities to unite cohorts of leaders facing similar challenges?

We begin enrolling leaders in our Executive Presence and Influence coaching program, which addresses the top three development areas we identified. We also created targeted executive coaching interventions utilizing our Executive Presence framework. Organizations with the opposite approach often wait for something to break and then say, “This leader is ‘broken,’ fix them with a coach.” It doesn’t work.

The growth mindset organizational approach states: We have these exceptionally talented leaders, and these are the challenges they will face. Here’s a group of high-potential leaders who will need to be ready to move to higher levels within the next 18 months, and they won’t get there with the wave of a magic wand.

Our program transitioned from one-off deliveries to being integrated into the organization’s development offerings. Leaders at a certain level will undergo this program as part of their professional development journey.

When we examine the ROI, we compare leaders at that level who have completed the program with leaders at similar levels who did not participate in the program and did not receive coaching in those areas. Still, those who deliberately adopted a mindset of developing their natural gifts to meet current challenges positioned themselves for success in their next role.

We have clients of all shapes and sizes. The proactive ones—those that look to develop their leaders at various career levels and consider leadership beyond hard skills —align them with mentors and/or excellent executive coaches and specific leadership programs. These organizations experience much greater rotations of leaders and achieve much greater success.

It doesn’t mean they don’t have challenges, but the organizations I only hear from once or twice a year typically have a poorly performing leader. Our coaches report that their teams are more fractured and struggling with change. Often, they’ll reach the end of a coaching engagement, and the leader won’t be able to make the necessary shift, so they leave. That becomes a self-reinforcing mindset for those organizations because they think, “Well, I spent all this money on this leader, and nothing changed.”

At the senior level within talent and the very top of an organization, those senior leaders need to make that commitment as well—that investing in their leaders as they grow is critical to all the metrics they’re looking for in the P&L.

Margaret Jaouadi
I like that approach. It’s acknowledging that people will inevitably need these skills when they reach certain leadership levels. So why wait until there’s a problem if you can invest earlier and prepare them properly?

Sue Reynolds-Frost  
Exactly – a proactive approach pays big dividends. I would also say that cohort learning is powerful and reinforces a growth mindset amongst peer groups. We have one organization with which we do a six-month Leadership Accelerator program, culminating in team presentations on projects to the executive team. But that’s just the milestone—the real value is in the leadership journey of working together with leaders cross-functionally whom you’ve never worked with before.

Margaret Jaouadi  
And the last question: With workplace hybrid models, AI, and digital transformation evolving, how do you see a leadership mindset developing in the future?

Sue Reynolds-Frost  
At Sloan, we’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of what we offer our clients about AI and all the transformation that’s underway. You often hear about chatbots taking over as coaches or discussing non-human interactions, with people losing jobs to automation. A significant amount of upskilling is occurring in organizations to prepare their workforce for the diverse range of skills they will need. This approach generates considerable fear and uncertainty.

From a leadership perspective, it goes back to reevaluating: What does that fear trigger within me? Does it push me back to a fixed mindset where I won’t take risks? Do I think the only thing I’m good at is the only thing that will propel me through this? Is it causing me to contract, or must I rechallenge myself as a leader?

Every organization we’re talking to or working with is experiencing varying degrees of AI, automation, and integration, which impact the pace of change. However, leaders and organizations that manage it best create space to acknowledge that it is an uncertain time and provide peer groups with which to share those experiences. I would say that just being curious is key.

One of the things I’m doing right now is going on a journey to learn what I don’t know. I don’t want to be afraid of change and pretend it won’t happen because it is happening. So, I seek out experts in my lane to learn from and then take a step back. Once I gather the information, I think about the impact and how we can better support our clients. We can walk alongside them, rather than hiding from them, pulling the covers over our heads, hoping it’ll just happen and we’ll somehow seamlessly transition.

This method requires being proactive and knowing your current position. Returning to what we said at the beginning, I will examine and reflect from a self-awareness perspective. Where do I feel more constricted, and how can I challenge myself? We need a growth mindset that involves expanding, taking risks, and learning, even when venturing into the unknown. Being brave enough and knowing that we’re not alone—we have support, and many people and companies are going through the same thing. Even within the organization, some individuals share the same sentiment. So, building that support network and leaning into it together is crucial.

I also think this goes back to what you discussed in the parenting example—what do I want to do when I feel out of control, worried, or scared? I want to micromanage. Regarding AI, I’ve heard from various leaders that some make significant decisions out of fear because they feel compelled to act. They’re not taking a step back and thinking about where this is going.

If you’re client-facing or a service organization, you need to learn and understand what your clients need and the impact it will have on them. As a leader, you need to consider the impact on your team and create that dialogue. Because then you’re going to get the best out of everybody and their ideas about what to tackle, what’s manageable, and what’s not.

Margaret Jaouadi
Thank you, Sue, for this enlightening conversation and for clarifying this critical topic.

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