Leaders for an Intentional Future: Q&A with Ginny Clarke

As part of our efforts to amplify equity and create space for dialogue, a dedicated group of employees at Puppet has begun hosting a series of internal fireside chats with leaders and thinkers from across the industry. I’ve found these conversations motivating and moving, and would like to extend these chats beyond the company walls. 

This is the first of a series on how leaders in business and technology can and must integrate diversity, equity and accessibility into their corporate cultures and their products in order to shape a more holistic and equitable future. I will talk with leaders on a variety of topics -- from the importance of tapping into our vulnerabilities to motivating ourselves to be more accountable in delivering conscious capitalism to the technology industry and at large. 

Ginny Clarke, our first guest speaker, runs a leadership consulting group and is also a consultant, keynote speaker, author, and podcaster. I touched on her fireside chat briefly in this post but I wanted to dig a bit deeper into Ginny’s expertise, especially after I read her book, Career Mapping: Charting Your Course in the New World of Work. I learned so much from her story and I found her writing and advice to be extremely practical no matter where you are on your career journey.

Q: One thing that struck me most in your book is how transparent and open you are about your personal life as it relates to your career journey. What was the intention behind including this within your book?

There were two major reasons for this. First, as a partner at a global search firm, I was breathing extremely rarified air and getting access to career understanding and advice that not a lot of people get access to. It struck me that there are a lot of people who are so passive about their next job and I had the opportunity to shift this mindset. 

Secondly, as a Black woman and single mother, there are so few people who look like me at the leadership level. I wanted to offer especially women and people of color a way to think of themselves and the future of their lives differently. So often people look at leaders in a magazine and they have specific assumptions about how someone got to where they are. Everyone has a full story to tell, so it was essential for me to share my full story because I didn’t have a traditional path, and I wanted to give people a non-traditional blueprint. 

Q: I think vulnerability at the leadership level is so important, which is something I know you share. I’d love to get your take on why vulnerability is essential as a leader and how folks can tap into their vulnerability to make a difference. 

The word vulnerability is a catchall term for me, within it are different elements that speak to the mindset of a leader -- self-awareness, empathy, accountability, to name a few. The vulnerability mindset is a practice that allows them to shift the dynamics of their organization to empower their team to operate to their full potential. 

The best leaders I have encountered have a deep level of self-awareness. These are leaders who say things like “I don’t know.” This statement gives them space to be vulnerable, but most importantly, it allows space for the leader's direct reports to speak up and share their knowledge and expertise to solve problems. It can be extremely demoralizing and non-inclusive when you head into a meeting and your boss tells everyone what to do; it makes the group question why they are even in the room - weren’t you hired for your potential and expertise?

When a leader shows this sense of vulnerability -- this self-awareness-- it trickles down and gives other people the ability to be vulnerable and give space to others. Again, this is when company dynamics change for the better. 

It’s important to remember that leaders don’t know everything -- in fact, that is a harmful assumption to make for our leaders. Leaders shouldn’t be expected to be omniscient and omnipotent. There is no perfect leader, it’s all contextual.

Q: You hear a lot of leaders (especially in tech) talk about only hiring folks from Ivy League schools, but elite education doesn’t necessarily make for top talent. Could you expand on why hiring for competencies is just as, if not more, important?

Hiring purely based on where someone went to school, which companies they’ve worked for, or titles is an ineffective and lazy way to hire. These characteristics are not correlated to one’s success. We’ve all been in situations where someone has the titles, experience, and/or a school on their resume that suggest they are capable and competent, but they are not. They might not possess some of the competencies and personal characteristics that are required to be effective. 

There are smart and qualified candidates who didn’t have financial resources or social capital to operate in the Ivy League. There’s a bifurcated socioeconomic system that infiltrates our education system. Similarly,  underrepresented individuals who go to these elite education systems are not always treated in the same way as their non-minority peers. There’s bias in most hiring processes and we need to acknowledge this bias. 

Now, as someone who is an executive recruiter and an expert in this space, I believe that competencies are the way to assess talent. Competencies level the playing field, not just for diversity’s sake, but for top talent’s sake. If you get competencies right, everything else should take care of itself from a diversity and representation standpoint, but it will take time. This, of course, is presuming you have strong leaders who know how to assess on the basis of competency and you’ve de-biased other components of the hiring and talent assessment system.

I do think it’s important to clarify what competencies are, as people can mistake what a competency is and how it should function when hiring, progressing and promoting talent. Competencies are skills, but they are always in the context of something. For example, someone might be analytical but analytical how? Competencies address “how” someone does something and in what context. They should know how their analytical mind will function within your company and if it will help drive value within their role. This is why it’s important for someone who is hiring talent to ask competency-based questions. 

Q: How should leaders start thinking about competencies more in what they do when it comes to hiring and building talent?

Water rises to its own level; if someone who is mediocre is interviewing/assessing someone who is extraordinary, they may not allow themselves to see it out of fear of feeling insecure. They might just fall back on the background and personal characteristics they feel comfortable with. This perpetuates mediocrity and exclusion within your talent pool and it hurts those at your company. Competency assessment has to be modeled from the top of the organization, and leaders must hold their direct reports accountable for using competencies when hiring as well as during regular assessments. 

Leaders must remember that people are not static -- they are dynamic in mindset  and capabilities. A leader must constantly seek to assess and develop individuals within the organizations or they are not optimizing their team for greatness. This is how a great coach operates: they spot talent potential and give them opportunities to shine, grow and get better.  

Q: Accountability at the leadership level is essential in building a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable workforce. Could you share what you believe is where a lot of leaders make mistakes when it comes to DEI initiatives, and what they need to do on both personal and professional levels to start making improvements around accountability?

Accountability also connects back to vulnerability, and it must start with the individual. Companies are throwing away billions in intellectual capital because they do not hold leaders accountable for finding or optimizing  the talent that exists in their organizations. Leaders must be accountable for their own behavior and that of their directs, and that includes diversity of thought and representation. It means being able to spot or grow talent that doesn’t look like them. It has to start at the top.

If leaders start holding themselves accountable, stop hiring based on relationships and nepotism, and start hiring based on competencies, you are going to see the dynamics inside of an organization change for the better. 

When you don’t have representation of women and people of color in your organization that is at parity with the demographics of your country it’s not an HR problem, it’s a leadership problem. It has to start with us as leaders being accountable and assessing based on competencies. 

Q: Any parting thoughts you want to share with leaders?

I think it’s important that leaders give themselves grace. COVID has made us all vulnerable. These are unprecedented times and everyone is having to take stock of where we are going to actively and intentionally make change in the world. We as leaders have the opportunity to make choices about how we want to lead differently. And I’m talking about all leaders here; you can be the leader in your household, church -- this is not just for leaders of companies that have 1,000+ employees. 

I personally don’t think you can separate who you are from what you do. Who you are, your beliefs, your values and lived experiences, invariably  come out in how you lead. If you are not leading benevolently, then you are likely suffering as an individual, and the team you are leading is missing out on goodness, humanity, and the opportunity to thrive.