Self-discovery is one of the most exciting and scary journeys, where we navigate through self-doubts and societal expectations to unveil the best in ourselves.

Our guest today is Dr. Helen Rothberg, a renowned Professor of Strategic Management and author of the book “The Perfect Mix,” in which she shares valuable lessons about management and leadership she learned while bartending.

Dr. Rothberg states that only after mastering the art of self-leadership can we authentically connect with and uplift those around us, fostering an environment of trust, growth, and collective success.

Join us in this episode of Pity Party Over to learn how leading ourselves is the first step toward leading others through change.

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TRANSCRIPT

 

Stephen Matini: You know, I'm curious to ask you something. Why did you get four different degrees? That's a lot!

 

Helen Rothberg: Oh, and nobody should do that. It's like a letter of salad. When I was coming up in the field of business, it was a time when there were really not many women at all in senior suite. There were almost no women in strategy at all. So there's two reasons. So I felt I needed more credibility than perhaps my male counterparts would need to prove that I was worthy of working at that upper echelon of management. 

 

I also found the whole education process patriarchal and very Darwinian. I went to all public institutions so they were kind of survival of the fittest. And most of my mentors were much older, cranky, older men. And I just didn't know if I'd be able to stomach it , you know? 

So if I couldn't finish, I at least wanted something along the way that I could use that would help me do what I wanted to do. But luckily, you know, Nietzsche says that which does not kill you makes you stronger. I got to the end of that rainbow and it's really been a golden career for me. So no complaints. But yeah, no one should ever get four graduate degrees. It's just, yeah.

 

Stephen Matini: So you did not have any female professors, just guys?

 

Helen Rothberg: In all of graduate school, I had one female professor. The majority of business faculty were men. Strategy wasn't even an area. That's one of my terminal degrees really until that time, you know. Michael Porter's book came out in 1980, “Competitive Strategy” and that became all their age. So I was kind of that first prop of strategy. PhDs. There was only one female, she didn't get tenure, so she left.

 

Stephen Matini: When did you decide what you wanna pursue professionally?

 

Helen Rothberg: That's a loaded question, right? So it sort of found me, but I kind of understood the kind of life I wanted to have when I was really young. Here's what I learned about myself. When it's 75 and sunny, I have to be outside. So I needed summers off. 

I also am the kind of person, I learned something pretty quickly and then I get bored and I need to learn something else. So when you put together what can you do that will give you freedom and the ability to always do new things? My two choices were consulting or academia and consulting had a lot more money attached to it. Really as a consultant, you make 10 x of what you make as a professor. But I realized two things about consulting. One, the consulting agency owns you, which means your clients own your time. Clients tend to believe everything is in emergency, so they don't care if it's at night or a weekend or a holiday.

I also wanted to do something bigger. I wanted to do something. I think it's important to help companies operate better. I've been a consultant and professor simultaneously for over three decades. I wound up doing both, but I chose being an academic as my full-time, not only because I could then have my summers, but because I could really influence the future. And to me the future is working with young minds. 

So that's how I kind of chose that. And business, I never took a business class until I got to graduate school and I fell into it by accident. I was pre-med as an undergraduate, I realized I didn't wanna do medicine, so I went into psychology and then I realized psychology had the same kind of chains on you, on your heart, you know, trying to help people who aren't getting better. And then I fell into something called industrial psychology, which I got bored with in about six seconds.

And then I found organizational behavior and that was really interesting to me because it was the same thing I did when I was a bartender. You're managing people and groups of people and all of their different needs. And then I found strategies. So, and I found it because it was one person I was working with as part of my fellowship for my doctorate who loved Michael Porter's book. And he said, read this, it'll change everything. And it did. 

So then I did a dual pathway of both behavioral science and strategy. So the strategy thing found me, but the decision to go into academia was about working with people who had hope in their eyes and believed the world would be a better place as opposed to only working with executives who were pretty whiny. And having my freedom and always having it change. Every a hundred days my life changes cuz the semester's over. And even if you teach the same course, the personalities are different. You know, the world is different. So I feel very blessed. It's been a great ride.

 

Stephen Matini: A friend of mine told me that years ago she said, I think you would like teaching. You know, teaching is for losers. That's what , that's what I said, you know? And then she said, no, no, no, no, I think you're gonna like this. And so she said gimme your resume. And she gave it to someone who administered the department, business department in a university here in Florence. And then after, I don't know, eight months, they called me and I taught the first class. And I remember the first second the students came, I fell in love with the whole thing. And I did not expect, you know, to feel the way. But there's something really genuine, open, you know, very vivacious about students that you do not find, you know, working with with all the people, you know.

 

Helen Rothberg: I agree a hundred percent. There's something magical that happens when people ask me, what do I do for my living? You know, what's my profession? I tell people, I help young people find what's magnificent in themselves. 

Because if they could find what's magnificent in themselves, they'll know they could do anything. 

And there's that moment, and I'm sure you've experienced this, you can have 30 60 students, it doesn't matter. But there's a moment where some of them get this like   in their eye, something clicks into place, everything changes in their outlook. And to me, this is the most addictive drug watching somebody wake up. You're right. And it keeps us vibrant and young. It makes sure we don't get stale. We always have to be contemporary. And I mean I learn as much from my students as they learn from me. I think.

 

Stephen Matini: Have you always known what is magnificent in you?

 

Helen Rothberg: No, I did not always know that. That's such a good question. You know, now there's a language for it. They call it imposter syndrome. But I always was very competent, go-getter happy go-lucky on the outside. And on the inside I always had self-doubt. I doubted my intelligence, I doubted my worthiness, you know, and that comes from a lot of our histories. I'm sure you know, I'm not the first person to talk about something like this. 

And even as I became more and more successful, you know, I was once accused by a student in my graduate program of you know, you get what you get because you're charming. It really smacked me between the eyes and you know, yeah, I was a bartender for 10 years and I know how to work with people, but I also, I don't think I got what I got cuz I was charming.

But it always was like that little voice you wanna smack but comes back. And to be honest with you, it wasn't until could tell you the exact moment. 2005 after my co-author and I, Scott Erickson published our first book called “Knowledge to Intelligence” and Harvard reviewed it and I got an email from somebody that Harvard, they have an online like subscription service also that, oh my God, Harvard just reviewed your book and I stared at that link for 20 minutes. 

I was so afraid to open it because even though I was a tenured professor and you know, I was going up for full professor, here it is, I'm gonna be exposed now. Right? And I opened the link and I cried because they liked the book. They thought the book was smart. I called my co-author who goes to bed early, oh my. And I'm crying hysterically thought like my cat died or something.

I'm like, they like the book. And it was the first moment I really understood that, yeah, I do know things and it's not just because I could be charming and it really helped me grow in every way professionally, spiritually, personally. 

I was confident in kind of a bullheaded way, but now I could have a soft confidence that I didn't have before. And it shifted how I taught a little bit. It shifted how I consulted. It made me feel more willing to try things I never did before. So I am the fearful strategy person in my school. You know, the kids who take me know they're gonna work really hard and that I'm tough. But I started reading a poem every Monday just because strategy, just like everything in life is art and science. You gotta open up your whole brain, your whole self. And I started taking completely different kind of risks that have paid off because that day I knew that maybe I knew something

 

Stephen Matini: Last time when we talked and I'm getting the same feeling this time. You gimme the feeling of someone who is at the beginning considering all the stuff that you have done. You will have all the rights to be a little bit pretentious considering your background, all the stuff that you accomplished. Instead, when you speak everything sounds like you're at the beginning. It sounds fresh, it sounds curious.

 

Helen Rothberg: I feel like you're looking into my solar right now. It's, I wish you were in America. Or maybe I'll have to come to Italy and we'll spend an entire weekend at the same cafe table talking. 

 

I'm just at the beginning of everything, right? There's so much to learn and understand about myself, about people, about nature, about how we can help people grow and find and come from what's best in themselves instead of always focusing on what's worst about themselves, right? That's the poison of social media, this compare and despair. I want people to always come from what they're best at. 

I feel like I'm still learning that even about every new thing I do, every new book I pick up, every new person I meet, there's something else there. So, you know, I don't know if we're reincarnated or not, I'd like to believe that your spirit comes back, but we don't remember anything.

So if we're not gonna remember anything and there's this big world to be part of and to see and to learn from, I wanna experience all of it. So I'm in my sixth decade, but to me, I'm like a child of the universe. So you're right. 

And I'm not naive at all. I think it's because I've been through hard knocks that I understand the beauty and wonder of what this life brings us. You know, people always say to me, well do you see the glass is half empty or half full? And I always say, wrong question, where's the new glass? That's how I wanna look at it. 

So yeah, I feel the world, it's filled with wonder and sometimes it's hard to hold that. I mean, right now the world is really crazy. It's, you know, my country is nuts. Europe is a little nutty right now. You know, I, I've been through my some pretty hard knocks and I'm still here and I can breathe and I can tell if it's raining or sunny. Well I now have one good leg, I'll have two good legs soon cuz I have a foot injury. But I could stand on my own feet and make things happen. Everything else is manageable. So I think you're the same way though. I think you see the world as a big ball of wonder. So ...

 

Stephen Matini: A lot of things you're saying resonate with me, including the imposter syndrome. To give an example, when I graduated in Italy, back at the time, we had to write this long thesis, you know, so it took a couple of years to write the thesis and then here comes the day that you have to present the thesis in front of a committee. I presented it. 

Then they ask you to leave the room and they ring a bell. You come in and I remember everyone rose. I said, what's happening? And they gave me the the maximum grade. And at the moment, the first thought that I had in my head, I swear to God was, there must have been a mistake! . I fooled them, you know, there must have been a mistake. I must have been charming. I must have said things a certain way, whatever, whatever. It was never because I may have done something right, you know, somehow. 

So for the longest time I was always very doubtful of myself. And the blessing of age, you know, I am in my fifth decade is the fact that now I think things have unfolded the way they were supposed to. It is supposed to be a messy path. You know, you're not supposed to know everything all at once. It's about really trial and error and hopefully learning something from it. So I think now I'm just, I'm trying to enjoy the ride.

 

Helen Rothberg: I think that's beautiful language. I always say actually the world unfolds as it should. You might not choose what happens to you, but you choose how to respond. And you could choose to respond with wonder and joy and a little bit of oh. Or you could choose to feel beaten by it. And I'm glad you and I both have outgrown this self-doubt of, you know, why me? How could I be good? That whole imposter piece doesn't serve us well. 

If we're the role models for those that we guide, you know, we have to show them what's possible. And what's possible is believing in yourself. You know, none of us are perfect. And in a way that's what's perfect. There's this brilliant song master, he's since passed Leonard Cohen from Canada, I'll paraphrase from his song Anthem. He says, nothing is perfect, everything is cracked, but that's what lets the light in.

And I know for myself, I have grown the most from the things I tried that didn't work than the things that did. Because look what happened. You know, something didn't work. I failed at something. I didn't die. I didn't lose my kidney, you know, I felt bad. I cried a little, I took my  , brushed myself off, got up and did other, you know, stupid things, but never that one again, right? So we learn and we grow and, and how lucky are we that we live in a time and a place and a nation that gives us those opportunities to succeed and fail and move on. Really very fortunate. I think.

 

Stephen Matini: If someone said to you, I don't think I have a choice, you know that also we know it's part of how people view the world. You know, some people simply do not believe if they have control over what happens, how would you respond to them?

 

Helen Rothberg: I would take them in my arms and I would hug them very tightly. Just guarantee them that you have a choice. I didn't grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth. I grew up in a very, in America we have ways of grading, if you will, people's neighborhoods. So I was in a very lower, lower, lower working class neighborhood at a very dangerous time when there were race riots in New York. So we're talking about in the sixties and the seventies. 

I grew up to parents who never went to college, who never graduated high school, who really did, I'll call it menial, some menial work. We had no money, we didn't go hungry. You know, we had clothing, I had hand me downs for my cousins. It was clothing, you know, we didn't wear hungry. We had medical care, but not a lot else. My dad made a very deliberate decision.

He grew up in the mountains of New York. People think of New York as only a city, but we have gorgeous mountains. Not like your Dolomites, but pretty. And he decided no matter what, his kids were gonna grow up in the city because there were more opportunities. You know, there were a lot of choices along the way from me. A lot of my friends chose to become drug addicts. You know, some of my friends went to jail, some of my friends died of an overdose. 

Some of my friends were like me and decided that we were gonna just put our heads into education because the only way to get out of that neighborhood was going to be to get to better schools. You know, luckily growing up in New York, New York City has some schools where if you show potential you can test into them so you get a better education.

And then in my day, you could go to university for free if you were poor and smart. And it was always a choice. So when my friends were choosing to go out and party on the weekends, you know, I would study and get a job. Even as I got older in college, when people were going out and partying, I would save all my money so I could backpack through Europe in the summer because I felt I'd learned more living in different cultures. 

I know I scrubbed toilets and made beds all over Europe, you know, with let's go Europe and my backpack and I slept in people's vineyards and I slept in, you wouldn't believe some of my experiences. But the bottom line of it was, it was all a choice. You know, it's whether or not you want something bad enough that you can taste it.

And I wanted freedom. And to me, freedom wasn't wealth. Freedom was choosing how to use my time and what I was gonna do. So it is a choice. You could be very rich, you could be very poor, you can have good parents, you can have bad parents. I was lucky, my parents weren’t crazy. They weren't educated, they were nutty, but they loved us. And that was winning the lottery right there. I had two loving parents. I think it's always a choice. 

You know, I think I said to you the first time, you know, you could look at things as s**t or fertilizer and to me it's always fertilizer, even bad things that happened to me and some really bad things happened along the way. It's part of life. It was like, what can I take from this? And whether it gave me my warrior spirits or whether it gave me compassion, I'll share a tough story.

So going through this graduate program, on one of the qualifying exams, one of the professors failed me and everybody has to agree to pass you. You know, it was the same thing, you walk out, you come back and the professor who failed me was the professor whose class I was in. So I had this choice, right? I had to show up to class, everybody knowing he failed me. 

I had to live that humiliation. But I also knew part of it was my own stupidity because I decided to take a qualifying exam before I finished this man's class. So, you know, that was not smart. That was kind of naive and young. But I also had to make sure everybody wasn't gonna hate him because in the end I still had to pass this class. And if you fail anything twice, you're out of the program.

You could never get your PhD from that school. And I looked at that as, you know what in this is mine. Why did this man really fail me? I did I earn it? Yeah, I deserved it. Could I have avoided it? Yeah, I could have been smarter. I also could have been advised better. I could have approached it differently. 

But I came back and over the years I wound up winning the award for the best dissertation in my whole university. And it was named for the man who failed me. And he gave me the award and he put it at me at my PhD. So you could take that battering and lie down and cry, or you could say F you man, I'm gonna show you what I'm made of. I'm gonna show you I'm better than you even understand. Was that a choice? Total choice.

A total choice. And maybe somewhere this older man who I hated understood that's what I needed to smack me into, Hey, think about what you're doing. It was a choice. And everybody wanted to hate this guy. And he gave me the lowest grade I ever got in graduate school out of my four graduate degrees. The lowest grade was from this man whose award I want. At the end, we all make choices. And you know, sometimes those tough things are put in front of you to help you grow. Nietzsche says that which does not kill you makes you stronger, right?

 

Stephen Matini: It seems to me that you're talking about we have a choice and the notion of freedom and they go hand in hand. And then as you were talking, it seems that everything is about really being accountable to yourself.

 

Helen Rothberg: And being honest. And that's hard. It's hard to look yourself in the mirror and say, this bad thing just happened to me. And it's very easy to blame somebody else and it's really hard to say what in this is mine. But not always. When a bad thing happens to you is a piece of it yours. Like sometimes you just have bad luck, right? Or you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

But sometimes there's an element in there that's yours. And if you could own that and live through the pain of that, you learn from it and you don't do that again. And you can grow from that. So I think once we accept the fact that we're not perfect and that's what's perfect, right? All the cracks are to help us become better if we choose. It's never easy to swallow bad things, but it can help you really grow in a different way.

And I think we have so much power Stephen, in that we don't even realize we're such powerful creatures. You know, throughout evolution, you know, here we are, we're the ones who can walk and breathe and see and sing and dance and love and hate. And that if we could just have more gratitude for the power that we have and use it in more positive ways, I think it's amazing what we can accomplish. I think a lot of the bad stuff we see around us as people acting out about thinking they don't have control, violence is an act because you don't think you have control when you really do. And I think sometimes people are more afraid of embracing their power than they are of not being powerful.

 

Stephen Matini: Is it difficult or easier than you thought to discover what makes you magnificent?

 

Helen Rothberg: For the first three decades or me, it was difficult cuz it was trial after trial after trial. But at some point I think I surrendered, I surrendered to it. And that's when I really think I started understanding how much of it was really me, almost subconsciously sometimes creating things so that I could either test myself or I didn't think I was doing the same stupid thing, but I was, I used to call it same ice cream, new flavor. 

You know, at some point you decide I'm gonna just eat gelato, I'm not gonna eat ice cream anymore. You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have Italian ices, I'm not eating the ice cream anymore. Because if you keep walking down the same road that has potholes, you're gonna fall in them. So sometimes you choose a new road and I think it took me a while, I had success after success, but you know, that nagging feeling of one day they'll find out about us.

I think I just had to choose to do things differently and to embrace what was in my control, to be able to live life a little differently and begin to find that magnificence and to really own what was my magnificence. And I think what I discovered it was the ability to talk to people and help them understand, to help people learn. And as an educator, you know this, you have to understand something so well that you could make it simple. You can't say say things simply or teach it, you know, in a component way until you really understand. Once I got to that point of, oh, I get this, I get what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, I get what I need to take from this, I get that what I do best is not giving people 48 references for the same thing. It's about making it so simple that they can hold it in their hands and then I could pile on the references as we go and show them how that works. That everything just started turning around. Once I let go, once I surrendered, I found what it was in me and I found them how I could take what's in me and help others find what's in themselves.

 

Stephen Matini: Has this changed the way that you see strategy?

 

Helen Rothberg: Yeah, it has. I used to see strategy as a way of, and I still see it this way a bit, but you know, helping an organization or a person create something better for the future. But now I also see it as a way of managing complexity and uncertainty. We invent this thing called reality. We take all of this uncertainty and give it labels and pictures and schedule things because we're trying to create some certainty. 

We're trying to create an illusion of control in our lives. 

But what strategy taught me to do is take very complex situations and identify those areas of complexity and handle them one at a time and see what they're really about. And then once I understand all those different components, weave them together like a fabric to try to understand what's possible. So it really taught me how to critically think in a different way. And when I try to teach students and when I do this in, in organizations, that's really what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to help people take this complex thing, break it apart in manageable bites, but understand the essence of what's in each bite so that you could put that together and try to create some kind of certainty so you can plan and you know, use your resources in as best way as you can.

 

Stephen Matini: I do not know if I do what you are saying, I just want to see if I do. Meaning, based on everything you said, there are two words that stood out, which is surrendering, and then the other one is simplifying. And for me, surrendering for instance, the way that I manage my business is understanding that although business oftentimes is seen as a bunch of frameworks, everything very rational. 

Somehow the best insights is when I take a walk in the park, you know, I really, when I let it go, like I don't seek a solution. I'm not there on a table thinking super hard, collecting data. I mean I need that obviously, but then I let it go. I just simply completely let it go. And in the moment I get this amazing insight and it really feels like some sort of surrendering, you know, type of thing. 

And the other one simplifying is that for the longest time I thought that I could control my business somehow. And now instead I've noticed that it is s**t path of trial and error. And oftentimes the right answer is the simplest. It's not necessarily the most complicated, but it is the one that is the simplest, am I going the right direction with my thinking?

 

Helen Rothberg: 100%. And you said something really important about, you know, you live in these frameworks and then you go to take a walk in the park and you get an insight that's about getting out of your own way. The frameworks are trying to force something. You need that to help you organize the data. But the insight is gonna come when you take what you need from the frameworks, put it aside and then say, okay, what matters most? And that can only come to you when you clear your minds and you let go. And yeah, that's where that all comes from. So I agree, you totally have the essence of what I'm talking about.

I also ask students often and my clients like, what is your deep motivation in life? What really drives you? For me it's joy. I saw enough ugliness and I went through enough turmoil in my life to understand really the value of joy. And if I can't find some joy in what I'm doing, I don't wanna do it anymore. And can you beat joyous all the time? Of course not. But can you seek it and make it your end game for most things, absolutely. And for some people it's peace and for some people it's harmony. 

I just wanna be joyous. I just wanna get out there like you and take that walk in the park and notice, you know, the birds that are singing and that the sun is shining and take a deep breath and say, wow, how lucky am I? And you know, it's spring here in New York, upstate New York, you probably, you know, you might be a little ahead of us weather-wise, but right now we have these lilly of the valley that are blooming everywhere and they're these very small little white flowers.

They look like bells it, if there is a heaven, it smells like li of the valley and you just have to open your window and you take a breath and all of a sudden this beautiful fragrance comes into your home. What's better than that? So here I am, the last two weeks grading 86, not masterpieces, okay to finish my semester and I could have been wallowing in, oh my God, I'm wasting what's left of my brain on this. 

Or wow the lily of the valley are coming into the room and it smells great. I'm gonna stick with that one as much as I can because you're not gonna get the time back that you sit there suffering, you know? So I graded a bunch of papers and it helps me understand that I have one more year of doing this and then I'm moving on to the next chapter of my life where I'm gonna put my energy in a different place.

Everything has, its, its space and time. And if we could keep our perspective and understand what wants to motivate us. Here's my true secret Stephen. I'm really a 12 year old in an older woman's body. I wanna learn and read and play with my friends and climb mountains and skin my knees and you know, go swimming and get on my bicycle. I just wanna enjoy that simpler time when you just feel joyous. 

I'm a grownup. I mean I own a house and I've gotta keep it going. And I have a business like as do you, I'm also an entrepreneur and but you know what, if I can't do it with joy, I'm gonna do something else. And I think that's what we all have to discover is you know what matters most to us. And for some people it's security and some people are in love with money.

It's interesting, these people in love with money, cuz I work with a bunch of 'em. Here's what I discovered about them and some of them are really rich. I mean, I'll just tell you, there's one person I know, his wife doesn't like to drive backwards, so she pulls into the garage and in the garage there's a turntable to turn the car around for her so she won't have to back out. This is crazy wealth. Right? 

And are these the happiest people I know? No, I think these people who are in love with money are trying to fill a hole in themselves that you can't fill with the money. So the more things they buy, the bigger the hole gets. So they buy more things and they're happy for six seconds and the hole gets bigger because there's something deeper that's hungry, right? That's not being fulfilled. 

Having money is nice, it's nice to not worry about money, it's, you know, but after a certain point, do you really need more? Who needs five televisions and four homes and you know, you gotta mow the grass everywhere. It's like work. You know, just the pursuit of that to me makes me feel sad for some of these people that they're not feeling that thing in themselves, whatever it is that could help them feel fulfilled. Right.

 

Stephen Matini: Pretend that you and I now are in a room with, I don't know, 15 different managers, right? Or different ages. Some of them nod as you're talking because they've been there, they relate to you a hundred percent. But then some of the younger managers may be, you know, 30 years old, look at you like whatever.

 

Helen Rothberg: They roll their eyes.

 

Stephen Matini: Yes. . . How could you verbalize this to them in a way? No, no, no, no, no. What I'm telling you it is the truth. You're going to find out one day. What would you tell them?

 

Helen Rothberg: You know what I like to do with the younger crowd is I like to ask them, I always start with what do they think they're best at and they're achieving well And then what's giving them struggle? I kind of read the room a little when I do it, but as they talk about what they struggle with, I then ask them, what is the ultimate thing you're looking to get at the bottom of that struggle? What are you trying to get out of what you're struggling with? What are you you hoping for? 

And I try to help through a very circuitous maze, but focusing totally on them and their needs, help them identify that thing that matters most to them. And then they're like, oh I get it. You know? And I think sometimes the things that motivate you change over time, right? So when I was much younger, you know, coming from a a less advantage to background financially I wanted security and I was motivated by security and I would sometimes, you know, the way I invested my money, even for my retirement was very secure.

I knew this is all I'm gonna have. I don't take big risks, you know, I think we understand what motivates us as we go if we're asked the right questions. So I help them understand what's driving them in that moment and what their ultimate is. 

Ask them, if you had a crystal ball, what exactly would you be doing? How would you invest your time? What would you be doing if you could do anything? And what does that make you feel like? And I help them back their way into, oh, so there is this thing that matters a lot to me that I should always have in my mind that I'm trying to achieve for myself. Because I think sometimes the younger generation gets lost and we're supposed to, right when we were younger, come on, you and I, I rebelled against everything and everyone on the planet, you know, from my parents to the Vietnam War, to whoever, you know, it was just part of how you're supposed to mature.

And at some point, even in all of that rebellion, you've gotta understand a little bit of what you are moving toward. And I think social media has made that very hard for younger people to understand because they think what they see is real and it's not a lot of what you see even on reality. TV is scripted, it's not real. 

You know, I always tell my students, this might be a very American reference, but there's this family called the Kardashians. I don't know if you have this garbage in Europe too. These people aren't real. They're put together with money, you know, they're not real and their lives aren't real and, and you shouldn't aspire to that cuz it's not real. So at some point I think it's our job as let's say the Yodas, cuz you are one, two my friend, cuz you have this wonderful podcast.

We have to help people understand what's real and it's different for each person. But I think social media has blurred that boundary. We had the luxury of not being polluted in that way. There was no 24 hour news cycle and there was no social media. Boy we're we lucky. And I think that 30 year old manager who's rolling their eyes, I think some of them look at us and say, you're so outdated, you don't understand. And some of them are rolling their eyes because they're insecure, because they know they don't understand. So we help them find their way. That's our job.

 

Stephen Matini: And sometimes I wish to make them understand that you know what, it was yesterday that I was 40, it was yesterday that I was 30. I mean that time goes by so fast. And I know it's such a cliche to say that ,you know, I'm still the same person, I'm still the same person who actually thinks like you, but I have this extra benefit of experience on time. They gave me the perspective. Last time you said something that it got stuck in my head and you said that for you, leadership and management are different.

 

Helen Rothberg: So management is about getting things done and planning, organizing, controlling, getting things done, and getting things done through people. Leadership is about providing a vision. So people want to get those things done with you. It's really very different. I always say a manager could get things done in the dark, but a leader turns on the light. And what leadership does, in addition to providing vision, is it provides people an emotional connection to what they're trying to do. Even if you're a person on an assembly line, all you're doing is tightening the rivet on a tire in a car that gets built over and over and over again. 

If you have a leader who helps you understand the role that tire plays in the future of that car and the role that car will play in somebody's life and how important it is for it to be safe and make sure that you understand the entire line and what the product looks like at the end and who buys it and takes the time to help you understand how you contribute to a greater good.

To me, that's leadership, as opposed to get it done my way, now . That's management and that's poor management sometimes, right? Because sometimes the people doing the work understand a lot more about the work than the person above them cuz they don't do the work, they just tell them to do the work. 

And leadership, you know, it's interesting, we have all these training programs to train leaders. I'm not sure that's what we do. I think we train people to be better managers. You know, I think we train people how to work with people better and how to manage time better and how to manage difficult conversations better. But I think leadership is a very different thing. 

I think it's about being able to touch people's hearts and desire to be part of something bigger than themselves. I'm not saying leaders are born and they are good and bad, but I think that as we can unlock what's inside people themselves, right in that driver for themselves and what they think is possible, what we were talking about before, I think that helps the leadership in them come out.

Because if you don't know where you are going and what you want, it's very hard to bring anybody else along with you, right? So you need to have some of that self-knowledge and self-belief and then we could give you the tools about maybe how to deliver that better and work with that better. 

I'm a big believer in leadership. You have to lead yourself before you could lead anybody else. So you have to be really awaken and open to who you are and what you wanna achieve and why and how before you can even simplify that so that you can bring people along with you.

 

Stephen Matini: Everything that you have said, you know today really is about leadership from accountability, the joy discovering what's magnificent in you. It's interesting when I do leadership development path, the most terrifying thing that people go through, you know they look at me, is now the first step to become a good leader is to spend some time with yourself. So you cannot just simply jump from activity to another and busy, busy, busy, busy, but you need to declutter and to start spending some time with you because that relationship, as you said, is going to become the one that hopefully other people are going to mirror. And that's a really a scary thought for a lot of people.

 

Helen Rothberg: It is because they don't know who they are and they don't know what they're capable of and they're afraid of disappointing themselves. You know, my next chapter are creating, I call them gateways to human potential. Helping people find the “IT” in themselves, whether they call it spiritual, career path, personal path, I don't care, it doesn't matter. 

Because once you help people get out of their own way and face their fear, fear creates control. And control is what holds you back. Once you can show them that you can put your foot in the water and it might be really cold, but you're not gonna drown, maybe they'll go swimming the next time, then they're gonna find that magnificence and go forward. So it's really a tough thing because sometimes for people to see who they really are and what their potential really is, they have to let go of all of these old scripts they had about themselves.

And even if the old scripts are wrong, it created certainty. It created what they knew and they knew how to behave when they're that person. And maybe it was successful to hear, but if they're gonna really climb that mountain and get to see the beautiful view on the top, they gotta start shedding those scripts and that could be very painful. It's scary. 

So ... as you guide them, which I'm sure you are a very empathetic and skillful guide, it's letting them feel their pain and letting them know that there'll be a sunny day on the other side of it. And what more opens to them when they let go of that script about themselves. And that's really, really hard to do. But boy is it the good work.

 

Stephen Matini: It's really interesting that you're saying multiple times getting out of the way. Because I said the same thing this morning to a group, I did a training this morning, we were talking about how you connect with people, you know, how you connect with people when you present, when you train and when you're a manager. What I was trying to say is, and actually I gave this example of a good actor, I asked, you know, what would you consider to be a good actor? They said, well Tom Hanks, they said, yes, that's a phenomenal actor with the tremendous technical skills, but a good actor knows to get out of the way so that the character, the story shines through it. You know, the same thing. Although you're very central, although you have the authority, you have the position, but at some point you really, it's about people connecting with the story and with the vision, you know? And that to me, really that's what a leader does essentially.

 

Helen Rothberg: Yeah. So you just opened up another door because that's also about allowing yourself to be vulnerable. Because when you start to get out of the way and you start to strip off those scripts and you start to reveal yourself to others, maybe even share their stories and share their failures and tell them about your own, you become more believable to them and more real to them. 

But it's risky cuz now you're vulnerable, you've shown your soft side and it takes a lot of trust, not just in those people, but really in the process to be able to do that. And I think the reason you're able to do this with people, you do have a vulnerable side to yourself and I think you're willing to share you and your experiences and that's what people learn the most from. They wanna hear what happened to you and how did you manage that?

How did you make it happen? That's why I shared my story even just before about, you know, failing that first qualifying, you have to be willing to reveal all the parts of what it takes to make leadership of yourself happen. 

I've been talking a lot with a very, very successful, more senior than me person who's trying to, you know, write a book and train people. And although his organization was magnificent, he's having a hard time. People aren't connecting to him. And I keep telling him, you're not sharing your stories. 

You have to share more about you and how you made this work. And he just refuses and it doesn't work. And it's very different than this other brilliant leader I know his name is Doug Connan. He was the CEO of Campbell Soup for many, many years. This is a man who I admire so much.

He would write personal notes to people, you know, thanking them. And even if he had to lay people off, he would bring them together and help them understand why. And that it wasn't them, it was the business. And he'd explain things and he would explain some of the things that happened to him in his life that were not pleasant, but how it helped him move to other places. He would always make sure the people he laid off had services to find their next job and they had support and he was vulnerable and powerful at the same time. This other leader who's more Machiavelli, if you will, is afraid to let go of any of that outward mask of power. And that's why nobody connects to him. So you have to have that soft and strong balance to help people feel that you're credible in helping guide them in how they could get outta their own way. Right.

 

Stephen Matini: We talked about a lot of different things. They all interconnected. Is there something that you believe it would be important for our listeners to take away from this? There's a lot to take away, but if you have to point out one thing that you deem to be really crucial, what would that be?

 

Helen Rothberg: I'm gonna paraphrase Oscar Wild. Might as well be who you really are because everybody else is already taken. Don't be afraid of who you are and what you believe you're good at and what you believe you can accomplish. It's not conceit, it's confidence. 

And confidence is very different except what you're good at. And always work from your strength. You know the things you're really not good at. If someone else can do, hire them. Let it go. Don't keep training yourself. That's what I do. 

I think the best leaders know what they're good at and hire the people who are really good at what they're not good at. And then they create a smart team. Right? I would say embrace who you really are. Don't be afraid to take risks with who you really are. Enjoy the ride.

 

Stephen Matini: I'm happy that I met you at the beginning of your ride. Thank you Helen.

 

Helen Rothberg: Thank you. And likewise, likewise.

 

Stephen Matini: Thank you. This is fantastic. I'm really, really happy to have had the the time to hear you.

 

Helen Rothberg: And thank you for being so insightful. What I talk about is only as good as the questions you ask and the way you drive the boat.

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