Women in Leadership: Alicia Nachman

Hello, and welcome to this week’s #TeamTuesdays post! Lately, I’ve been on a leadership journey: I’m finding my voice, learning from and with my team, and trying to understand the unique perspectives and challenges observed by Women in Leadership. I am so grateful to have gotten to chat with some inspiring and innovative women leaders at Verizon Connect, like Alexa Carleo , Michelle Morris CCXP , and Amelia Tilby (née Diggle) , and to get to share those conversations with you.?

This week, we get the honor of sitting down with the illustrious Alicia Nachman , our Director of UX at Verizon Connect! Alicia leads our X Team operations, user research, and service design functions. She is a unicorn of a leader: someone who truly sees and embraces others for who they are, and, as a result, empowers people to grow into who they want to be! Our entire team has immensely benefited from getting to work with and learn from her, and I’m so excited to share more about our conversation on Women in Leadership!

Leading Naturally

I kicked things off by asking Alicia what her first leadership role was. I got a classic Alicia response, one that gets to the root of the real questions, and shows how that root branches into a multitude of possibilities. And it was really eye-opening discussion about what parts of the journey can be intentional, what parts of the journey can feel more natural, and how being open to different experiences can help us carve our own paths.

“There’s different ways that I could interpret this question,” she reflected. “Initially, my thinking was having a title that indicates some kind of leadership position, or managing other people. But then I was like, ‘Well, wait a minute: leadership isn’t necessarily defined by that.’”

Leading Through Individual Contributions

In the beginning, Alicia shared how leadership opportunities naturally developed for her.

“There were times earlier in my career when I was put in a position or had the opportunity to play a leadership role without a title,” she expressed.?

One such time was during Alicia’s first role after graduating from college. She was a software engineer in Quality Assurance, or QA. In this role, Alicia created and ran assessments to find bugs or defects, to document problems, and to otherwise guarantee that their software solutions consistently performed at the highest industry standard. (You can learn more about the skills and work done by QA software engineers here and here !)?

Upon reflecting on her work, Alicia saw how this could be her true first leadership role: leading through her individual contributions.

“I was promoted to Lead QA,” she noted. “I thought, ‘Maybe that counts.’ I didn’t think about it at the time. I was completely naive. I was just like, ‘Oh, well, I’m just working, and then someone says you’re promoted, and that sounds good!’ It didn’t even clock as a leadership role.”

I loved how Alicia highlighted this point!?

As she has guided me in my own journey, and the more experience that I get as a people leader, the more I see how people naturally go with their strengths. And the more that I look for that potential in others, the more I realize that growth often happens in this intuitive way. Rather than overthinking and overplanning that progression, it’s more of that intrinsic motivation that directs people to doing leadership-quality work almost without realizing it.?

I haven’t been able to find specific research on this aspect (perhaps because I haven’t been able to word it properly in my searches) but I loved how writer Colt McAnlis described this phenomenon in their Medium article, “Getting promoted is easy. Doing the work isn’t ”. Here’s the quote:

Be very aware that in most job ladders, there’s usually an inflection point where progression becomes less about doing the work yourself, and more about leading others to do it. So doing more of the same typically results in a glass-ceiling moment in your career progression; Likewise not wanting to do that kind of work results in another glass-ceiling moment. Be honest and upfront about this with yourself.

And that’s what Alicia speaks about here with this example.

“Things like that are ways that you get recognized,” Alicia went on to say. “You’re already acting as a leader. You get recognized for that without striving for a certain label.”

Leading the Strategy by Leading One’s Self

Excelling as an individual contributor helped set Alicia for further success. She was able to take advantage of new opportunities and start to own a space. Case in point: Alicia’s tenure at Macmillan Publishing.?

“A year-ish in, I was a UX designer, and the reorganization that happened meant that I was moving into a new ventures group,” she described. “The group was a collective of start-ups that Macmillan purchased, and the idea was that they would have a leadership layer that would help all the start-ups grow, share information, best practices, things like that.”

Interestingly, Alicia was navigating this on her own.

“I didn’t have anyone reporting to me,” Alicia shared. “I was in this central leadership layer that was meant to work with the leaders of each of the start-ups to develop what they each needed to raise their user experience maturity. That was interesting because I never went through a progression [of roles], even to senior [manager]. It was just—”?

Alicia chuckled and mimed plucking herself out of thin air and placing her in a different space.

“Boom!”

Navigating that new opportunity and taking ownership of that space allowed her to fully define this role: leading the strategy.

Alicia recalled, “They described the role, and I asked, ‘What would the title be?’ Then they asked, ‘Well, what would you want it to be?’ So I said, ‘Director!’ And they were like, ‘Sure!’ This was the first time I felt I was in a nominally leadership role, and that the remit was leadership, even though it wasn’t in the sense of having a team, or what people generally think about.”

Alicia demonstrated how her servant leadership qualities also shone. Servant leadership defines its work by focusing on the support and resources that the team needs to operate and perform.

“It was the nature of what was going on in the business, and the role that they saw they needed,” she explained.?

I asked how it felt to advocate for herself in that moment.

“It was something I had to practice and get comfortable with, hype yourself up a little for it,” Alicia said. “That doesn’t always come naturally.”

This rare opportunity is also such a great example that illustrates one of the key strengths that leaders in this space need to practice: positive self-motivation!

Alicia continues to exemplify this in her own practice, and it’s something that people talk about regularly when it comes to career advancement. For example, here’s an Indeed article that talks about how it is necessary to practice consistent self-motivation in order to progress in one’s career.?

And to build upon that, check out this early 2007 study by Kark and Van Dijk published in the Academy of Management Review that discusses how leaders tend to lead teams based on their personal values. I’m perhaps oversimplifying the article here, but Kark and Van Dijk’s research essentially shows that leaders who personally value self-direction (i.e., empowerment) , and who prefer stimulating and rewarding work environments, often create dynamic, democratic, creative, and transformational teams. Essentially, if you have a positive, self-motivated leader like Alicia, your team will adopt that same, positive mindset, and you’ll see tons of benefits across the team!

(Check out these articles on Google Scholar to learn more about how psychologists, sociologists, and educational scientists are studying leadership! )

Leading with Intentionality

Leading a Team?

As Alicia established her influence and self-leadership, she started to consider her future as a people leader.

“The next role is when I actually became a manager, about a year after that,” she said. “I had the opportunity to grow a team. I got to hire somebody for the first time.”

By this time in Alicia’s career, she had had so many different leadership experiences. I asked her what taking on people management was like. Servant leadership and collaboration are skills that Alicia is fantastic at modeling. So it was surprising to hear that team management took a bit of time for her to get used to.?

“That was super scary!” Alicia admitted. “Comparing my first leadership role to my first manager role, it was a totally different ballgame. Being a director and [having] a role that was more consultative – that felt more natural to me. It was what I was already doing. When I had to manage someone and hire somebody, I all of a sudden felt imposter syndrome. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing! How am I supposed to manage someone?’”

To add to that? The person who Alicia ended up hiring was older than her.

“And she had experience managing people, so it was like, ‘Oh, this is way off! How can I manage this person, who has started their own business, and done all these different things, and has been a manager themselves?’ So, I think I was a terrible manager!” Alicia laughed. “I felt completely out of my depth. I did not like that feeling. But I learned a lot from it.”

This was such a wonderful moment, one in which Alicia showed her characteristic warmth, her power of self-reflection, and her honesty. I’m always inspired by Alicia’s ability to lead a team that has such a variety of experiences and backgrounds, but she always finds a way to keep us all connected. It was enlightening to learn that this was a process that Alicia reflected on as she became the leader that she is today. Alicia always finds a way to make these conversations into reflective – and teachable – moments for her team!?

Leading Somewhere New

As we talked more about that self-reflection, Alicia took note of other key moments that strongly impacted her opportunities for leadership.

“Before Macmillan, I was working as a designer. My manager, Susan, left the company,” Alicia said. Alicia was speaking of the incomparable Susan Michael S?rensen , our colleague, and a highly formative voice for our UX Research team!

Alicia’s experience with Susan also shows how leaders can step into new opportunities off of the heels of the impact made by leaders before them.

“At that point, I was like, ‘OK, I think I want to be a manager. I want to manage people.’ I had a specific goal. So, my leadership put me in an interim management position,” Alicia identified.

However, this interim management position came with added work, but no additional benefits in time or salary. And it made me think again of the glass cliff , a phenomenon in which women are promoted into positions of leadership during chaotic stress, which unfairly sets them up for failure.

“That ended up making me look for another job,” Alicia revealed. “I was already starting to think about moving on. I ended up leaving and getting another UX design role that was not management because that wasn’t the core thing that was important to me then, but that put into my mind that I do have interest in managing people at some point.”

Leading with Empathy

As you can see, Alicia’s trajectory has allowed her to survey what senior management looks like at different companies. Given that experience, I asked her how Director roles compare and contrast across the different companies and teams that she’s worked with.?

“There’s more difference based on the stage of the company,” Alicia pointed out. “The work that I’ve done has varied based on where the business is and where the team is, and what the goals happen to be at that time.”

Here, Alicia modeled how to meet teams where they are at: the ultimate model of leading with empathy.?

She gave several examples of what goes through her mind when finding that out. “Is it a tiny start-up, or is it Verizon? Typically, what would go along with that is the maturity of the team, the size of the team. And what are you being asked to do with that role? Is it that you need to grow a team? Maybe they’re in a growth phase, and they have two people, and they’re wanting to build a team of 20 people. Or are you coming into an established team?”

This aligns well with the literature that supports understanding teams as dynamic organisms that go through phases. We covered different frameworks of those different team phases in a past #TeamTuesdays article. And the cool thing about frameworks is that they give you milestones to be on the lookout for in order to help you orient yourself to where people are coming from in the way they think about their work, and what they think about their team.

There are also differences in how teams interact within a system.

“Does the team work based on an in-house model, or according to different vendors?” Alicia asked. “Those things have made a difference in what I’d focus on day-to-day. And in smaller companies, some leaders are very hands-on. It varies so much.”

This highlighted a key point that we haven’t yet addressed. The S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment defines senior management as 2 levels away from CEO. But it doesn’t really talk about something very important: scale.

“A title doesn’t say much about what the person’s actually doing from a leadership role, or day-to-day, even,” Alicia offered. “In my last role, my title was VP, but realistically, I wouldn’t be a VP at most other companies. That’s interesting. You see that a lot in smaller companies, where there’s one designer, but they’re the director.”

Alicia places great emphasis on breaking down assumptions and understanding context. We can focus less on titles and prescriptive job responsibilities. We can focus more on the work that needs to be done, and understanding the needs of the team, we can create the best culture that will support the team doing that work!

Leading by (Human-Centered) Design

So, if leading effectively revolves around understanding the needs of the team, how do we learn more about those needs?

Well, I’ve been on a journey to learn more about how leaders define their voices and styles. Not to get too psychodynamic, but the more that I learn from others, the more I believe that our formative experiences play a central role. The frameworks that we learn early on, and the frameworks that resonate to our core beliefs as people, embed themselves into everything we do, including how we lead teams.

When I asked Alicia about her empathetic leadership approach, she illustrated this point so beautifully, and it aligned with some research I had done for the #TeamTuesdays article on human-centered leadership .?

“I think a lot of it comes from my orientation as a human-centered designer,” Alicia reflected. “It made sense to operate in this mode in a professional or corporate setting: you’ve gotta understand where people are coming from, and then design the best way to deal with things.”

Diversity

Human-centered design highly values a welcome and open environment. When we have diverse environments, we are able to design for more people! Alicia brings this into her work as well.

“There’s many different ways to be successful and for people to be happy,” she highlighted. “Everyone’s coming at it from different goals. Just seeing a lot of different types of people through managing, you learn about the diversity of how everyone thinks about their own career progression.”

This perspective helps in refocusing our work away from our core identities, and more into extensions of ourselves.?

“The job is not everything,” Alicia shared. “It’s really important for people to realize that earlier on. And people have more power in situations than they often realize. Really take advantage of that. Use all the resources to your advantage.”

Individuality?

This particular point shows how Alicia encourages our team to critically but respectfully challenge the status quo. This helps us think what intrinsically, individually motivates us as we work and grow.

“I feel like it’s important to encourage people to think about what they really want to get out of things,” Alicia shared. “Often, that’s what you should be spending your time thinking about, rather than, ‘How can I check all the boxes that are being put in front of me?’, or ‘How do I jump over all the hurdles being put in front of me?’ Because if you’re always jumping over them, they’re just going to put more in front of you. You’ll get stuck. ‘Do I really want to be jumping over this hurdle, or do I want to go over there?’”

It’s here that I’m reminded of a really formative conversation that Alicia and I had a couple of years ago. We were in the middle of the lockdown, and perhaps in response to that, I was approaching work in a rigid way. Alicia acknowledged my approach and showed empathy, but she also gently nudged me to think about the value that I was getting out of approaching the work in this rigid way. She then encouraged me not to work so hard to push against the blockers that were coming up, and rather, to find places where I could flow freely and still accomplish the heart of the goals that I was seeking to achieve.

That’s right: Alicia Nachman is my Bruce Lee!?

She showed me how to be water , emphasizing creativity, resourcefulness, collaboration, reprioritization, and redefinition as tools to help us when we’re stuck in a rut.

Authenticity and Adaptability

I set out to discuss issues that women may face when stepping into leadership roles, but I’m increasingly realizing that Being Water is particularly important for anyone, regardless of identity, who is trying to do something that doesn’t fit any sort of template.?

This kind of reframing is so crucial to protect against the kind of negative stereotypes or low self-worth that we might feel when things don’t seem to be aligning in our work or teams. There are simply too many external factors for our identities to be driven by any one aspect of our lives. And that lesson helped me realize that I could contain multitudes not just as a researcher, but as a full, whole person.

And Alicia brings this perspective on adaptability into her practice as well.

“I’m happy to naturally model being a woman leader. If they need that, that’s possible,” she shared. “I’ve had other women tell me that they learned just by watching me and getting to know me that there isn’t just one way to be a leader. You don’t have to be that typical stereotype of the male, dominating, loud person. But I’m just being me, really. It’s not something that I’m consciously thinking about.”

From Leading to Empowering

How She Empowers Women

One of my favorite parts of my conversation with Alicia was a refreshing reevaluation of the Lean In phenomenon that led us to spotlight women’s issues in particular.

She said, “I was like, you know what? I wanna lean out! I had my own personal backlash to this. I’m in my Lean Out phase, and I’m OK with that!”

Alicia and I shared a warm, empathetic laugh about that! During my time with Amelia, we had a similar conversation about millennial hustle culture and how exhausting and toxic that has felt to us in the aftermath.

“It’s so much sometimes!” Alicia agreed. “I want to encourage anyone who has only been fed that message that you have to have balance.”

It has been great to see the Lean In messaging spotlighting that some aspects can be specific to women’s issues in the workplace, but at this point, especially after having experienced the Covid pandemic, we can start to rethink where Leaning In can get overwhelming, and unbalanced.?

Here, Alicia drove the point home that it’s not about robbing yourself or other women of opportunity, but being clear about the motivations that are driving you forward, and judicious about the experiences that you decide to take on.

She shared, “Sometimes, you need to recognize when to lean out. And, sometimes, that’s how to support other women. Sometimes you have to lean out so that someone else can lean in – knowing what you want to lean into is very personal. I think that’s the most important message to take away.”

How She Empowers Her Entire Team

On that note, I wondered if Alicia also had insight into how she approaches leadership similarly or differently depending on certain factors, like gender. And though Alicia acknowledges there are particular gender-based gaps that she works more proactively to address, she truly is the type of leader who empowers everyone on her team.

“I don’t think that I approach it differently,” Alicia reflected. “A lot of times, when we have conversations about supporting women in leadership, some of these leadership-oriented session topics are about how to speak up for yourself, or about confidence, or about imposter syndrome. It can get a little cringe-y. That’s not necessarily just a women thing. I’ve worked with men who have extreme imposter syndrome, and they may need different kinds of encouragement to overcome that.”

I loved this particular aspect – we all experience imposter syndrome, and crises of identity, and frustration in the workplace. Having the strength and awareness to hold space for those experiences is something that Alicia is always generous with, and keen to amplify throughout our team.

This thinking also gives her room to empower people in the best way possible for them.

“What I don’t like to do is just assume that all women are going to encounter the same issues, and those are the ones we need to focus on. I think it’s more individualized, and everyone needs something a little different,” Alicia shared. “In that sense, I’m not necessarily doing all the same things for all of the women I work with; if I see a woman having particular issues, I want to help them overcome that.”

Alicia has worked specifically on an extremely impactful issue for women and other marginalized communities.

Pay gaps.

“One thing that I try to be proactive on is keeping an eye on pay for women,” Alicia stated, “making sure that women are not below where they should be compared to male counterparts. That’s something that is unfortunately baked into our society. And that’s not something that everyone gets access to; you don’t always get to see what everyone else on the team is making, but people in my position or leadership positions have a view over a larger group. And I do it for everyone, people who have different backgrounds. That’s the thing that jumps out at me as something I do more consciously and proactively.”

How She Empowers The Future

Another passion of Alicia’s? Sustainability!

Impressively, Alicia is completing her MBA in the Bard Graduate Programs in Sustainability , which has been ranked as the #1 Green MBA for the 4th year in a row.

I asked Alicia what was motivating her to pursue this amazing degree. Three things stood out to her: the MBA itself, her focus on sustainability, and the continued aspect of Alicia’s signature, human-centered design core.

“Part of it is the MBA itself and becoming a more well-rounded leader,” she expressed. “I’d like to add that business, pragmatic thinking to the tech and design skill set that I already have.”

Alicia continued, “It’s also that focus on sustainability. I’m following my own interests and passions, and the things that I think are important. I think there are a lot of ways that design and human-centered research show up in systems thinking and wicked problems.”?

The term “wicked problems” actually has a specific definition with regard to sustainability and public policy. There are 10 core tenets that define wicked problems. For instance, Rittel and Webber describe these kinds of complex business problems as unique problems that have untestable solutions, can only be characterized as “good” or “bad”, and cannot be studied through trial and error. (You can learn more about the sustainable, systems-thinking approach to wicked problems here , and here !)

As you can see, it will take a strong generation of leaders like Alicia to find solutions for these wicked problems. Here’s how she sees the big picture.

“It’s a progression in my career, going from designing interfaces and products, to then designing teams, moving up in leadership levels to get that vantage point, and then the next challenge that interests me is redesigning how business is done,” she noted. “And that has a lot to do with thinking about sustainability and the future of humane work, liveable planets, and things that feel pretty existential, but there are lots of ways to bring it down into practicality.”

This next challenge, redefining how business is sustainably done, is something Alicia has started to encourage us to think about, from sharing her perspectives in collaborative meetings, to highlighting where?

She outlined, “Part of the final year of the program is a capstone where we get to explore independent study. I’ll be spending the next semester doing a lot of networking and talking to folks who are in the industry about how tech shows up in the future of sustainable business. That’s my next exploratory avenue.”

How We Can Empower Leaders Like Alicia!

Alicia has done so much to empower our team, and she aims to solve such complex problems for our future! But it certainly hasn’t come without its challenges.

“You often hear that leadership is very lonely, and I definitely have felt that over time in different ways. When you’re in a leadership position, you really have to rely on peers for that connection,” Alicia shared.?

We’ve discussed this previously in our #TeamTuesdays articles, with research from Forbes and Harvard Business Review highlighting how leadership can be incredibly isolating.

“I would say that that’s not something that I’ve cracked. I still have that question,” Alicia shared. “You just have to experience it, and I don’t think it’s a reason to not pursue [leadership].”

It’s here where clearer expectations through experience can help us refine our view on what leadership roles truly are.

“You may feel, ‘Hey, this isn’t as awesome as I thought it was going to be’,” Alicia shared, which evoked the conversation Amelia and I had as newer leaders in our own right. “I see that in people who think [a title] will unlock a new sphere of influence. I think that’s the biggest myth that needs to be debunked about leadership. You just go through the door into the next room that has different constraints on your influence. I try to talk people out of that when they have a singular goal, the title, and they can’t really articulate why or what’s underneath that, to where they won’t really be fulfilled in their role. I hope people find that, but it’s definitely a challenge.”

So, finally, I wondered what teams could do to share some of that empowerment back with her.? I find it to be an incredibly important question, especially as I personally sometimes feel further away from the research work that I used to define myself by. How do we ensure our leaders can also feel supported?

“When I’ve had a really good partner, it makes a world of difference. And of course, having a really strong team under you, which I have now, definitely, and great managers above, always helps anyone,” Alicia pointed out. “If you don’t have someone that you’re connecting with in that way, then you potentially have less of a network to draw on, or maybe a better way to put it would be that you have to work harder to make that happen.”

Summary

Even after spending this time connecting with Alicia and reflecting on all the lessons she’s taught me over the years, I still can’t say enough amazing things about getting to be on her team!

Alicia naturally empowers leadership qualities in everyone around her, regardless of what role we play on the team, and that, in turn, elevates the entire team. She brings forth her core in human-centered design and truly leads from a human-centered practice. And, notably, she is often cited as the first manager that many of us have had that created a safe space for us to lay down the trappings of the hustle culture that we found ourselves in order to really explore who we are as people and teammates. Personally, she has taught me how to get to the core of what my own motivations are. And she consistently teaches our leaders to lead not because it is a step forward in some hypothetical and mythical plan, but because we can serve our teams, our users, and a greater purpose, all from a genuine and authentic place.

I sincerely hope that anyone who reads this gets the chance to work with someone like Alicia! And if you do, I genuinely encourage you to share a thank you to all those transformative leaders in your life!

Take that moment now! Reach out to a leader, whether they’re currently in your life, or part of an earlier chapter in your journey, and send a thank you to them for the lessons they’ve shared with you. If you like, you can even share those stories and thank yous below!

Of course, we’ll keep the gratitude just keeps on coming – keep reading #TeamTuesdays for more profiles with our leaders, like upcoming interviews with April Durrett and Kinnera Angadi and more thoughts about leadership! Thanks for reading, and see you next week!