Voices of Inclusion

September, 2024

A few years ago, my friend Deborah Riegel introduced me to the wonderful people at Electives and in short order, a beautiful relationship was born. Electives does fabulous work by bringing together top industry leaders to share their wisdom with other businesses and participants all around the world. I was so impressed with their cadre of instructors and thrilled that they wanted to include me in their ranks. Their brilliant Co-Founder, Jason Lavender was my guest on the September issue of Voices of Inclusion.

As usual, it got personal. It got real. Jason shares his stumbles and learnings in a way that inspires and makes it easy to understand ourselves. I'm lucky to know and work with leaders like Jason, and I hope you'll find some inspiration in his insights. As always, we are sharing 3 takeaways in his own words. Thanks, Jason.

Takeaway #1: Nothing in life is transactional.

It’s easier for me to know what kind of leader I'm not than what kind of leader I am. I'm not the most vocal leader. I'm certainly not a rah, rah, loud voice in the room type of leader. I think I'm more of a kind of empathetic listener and I like to try to lead by action over words. There are moments in time when words are the most important, but I think in general, people typically kind of look to me to see what is Jason going to do versus what is Jason going to say? I think that has just kind of embodied so much of how I think about leadership. Nothing in life is transactional. There's no finite ending to these relationships and we should always be thinking in that kind of infinite lens.?

One of my mentors recently passed away and I was reflecting on how impactful he was to me. I started to have a kind of what first felt like a counterproductive thought of, I actually didn't spend that much time with him. I started to reflect, I was like, there's probably thousands of people who are saying, you know, one of my mentors just passed away. That started to cause this reflection of, it wasn't about the quantity of time spent with this particular person. The quality of time was just so good that he touched so many people in really, really impactful ways. The time spent was valuable. It was authentic. Again, it wasn't transactional. Even if you spend an hour with someone, if you think of them as a mentor that quickly, what a powerful relationship that you've created.

Takeaway #2: Learning is growth. It’s really valuable to realize when you are or are not developing your knowledge further, both at work and in general.

I am a learner. I always feel like there's more to learn every day. From a career perspective, when I was in consulting, I remember I was there for 10 plus years. I got promoted to partner, which at the time was like, the dream, you know, like everyone who started out of school was like, how do I get to partner? And I've told the story in the past where there was something they threw a party for me in the Boston office to congratulate me and I was the only one who wasn't super excited. Everyone was like toasting champagne and there was just something inside of me that was like, is this what I've been chasing over the last 10 years?

I just kind of felt like my learning had flatlined. I didn't feel like I was making the impact that I kind of perceived that I would in the earlier days. It was a super easy decision for me to just say, I've kind of stopped developing, it's time for me to move on. It wasn't a financial decision. It wasn't a people decision. It was something I could feel internally that was different.?

When I was at a healthcare startup, I ended up leaving and I kind of took a step back. It was similar in the sense that I stopped learning, but there was this kind of like nugget of an idea for Electives. There was just part of me that was like, even if we try this for a year, you know, what's the worst thing that could happen? Thousands of people take classes from interesting people and we can’t sustain the business, but a ton of people learn? That's not a bad thing. I just had to kind of framed it as that. The incentive all along for me has been to get more people learning every day. If we focus on that, all kinds of other good things will come out of it.?

Takeaway #3: You simply can’t give 100% of your time to everything in your life. It’s important to remember to invest your energy equally, as much as possible, between all the aspects of your life that you value.?

As a founder, I pour 120% into everything Electives. In the back of my head, there's just this question of, if I'm doing that consistently, other places in my life are getting less than 100%. I've been a little bit more cognizant, I would say, of where there are opportunities that I can pour more into things outside of Electives without, you know, impacting the trajectory of the company in any way. The slight crossroads I'm in is about what other things can I be doing outside of Electives that helps me as an individual? Last October, I joined the board of a nonprofit in Boston. It's only been a few hours a month, but it's like totally filling my cup. I love what the organization is doing. I think I'm just asking myself more of those types of questions. What are other things that I can do, and not impact the business, but just do a little self-care and make sure the other parts of my life are feeling that same kind of filling of the cup.?

The visual that has helped me a lot, actually, in the last couple of years is one of our instructors, who's the former CEO of Panera, he taught this whole class on empathetic leadership. He had everyone write the important things in their life in a circle. You're a son to somebody. You're an entrepreneur to somebody. You’re a father to somebody. I'm writing down all my different personas. Then he said, imagine spokes on a wheel that connect to those different identities. If you visualize one to ten, how much effort you're kind of investing in that kind of persona, draw a line that far out. Not surprisingly, there were some that went out to 10. Then there were some that went out to two, and it created this really jaggedy looking wheel. His lesson was that the wheel of life is not going to roll very far. It's actually going to go nowhere. So I always picture that because you have the best intentions to be a 10 everywhere, but that's just not realistic. I think doing fives or sixes in a lot of places is a good thing.?

Thanks for reading! We love hearing from you, and whenever you share your questions and insights, we update our Voices of Inclusion to keep the learning alive.

If you are interested in being part of this series, please email us at [email protected] .

See you in October!