We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful June Carter. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with June below.

Hi June, thanks for joining us today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

My parents did their best to instill a love of adventure in all of us, and particularly in me – their only daughter. (I have 2 younger brothers.) They never wanted me to feel limited by my gender, my lack of experience or my fears, so they frequently challenged me to try new things and to take some risks. They demonstrated this in countless ways: I received my own toolbox and set of tools when I was 8, and was encouraged partner with my dad on home improvement projects. We went camping, hiking, canoeing and white water rafting. When I was 12, my dad started teaching me how to do my own car repairs from oil changes to brakes.

When I graduated 8th grade, my parents gifted me with a month-long cycling trip to France. I had studied French for 3 years, however I didn’t know anyone from the youth group and had never even been to summer camp! I was one of the youngest in the group of 20, was not much of cyclist and lacked self-confidence. Their decision to send me to France changed my life. I learned to navigate with minimal guidance, how to make friends across cultures, and became physically stronger than I had ever been.

These experiences and others helped me realize I could make mistakes and recover, that asking for help was smart not shameful, and that it was OK to try something new then decide whether I would or would not like to do that again. These experiences really developed my courage, shaped my willingness to try almost anything once, and honed my growth mindset to recover quickly from failure, learn from mistakes and keep going.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I worked in the financial services industry for more than 30 years. I started as a bank teller in high school, continued with part-time jobs in banking throughout college, then after college moved into positions in commercial real estate lending. I loved working in the financial services industry as I saw how important it was to consumer, business and community thriving. After yet another bank merger, I chose to leave my role as COO and become a senior strategy consultant focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion culture change for employees, vendors and customers. I had become known as a developer of top diverse talent, and I realized I would become even more effective at leading organizational change efforts by learning to coach, so I pursued coach training and certification. I have been coaching and consulting to executives and leadership teams to achieve higher performance and greater success, helping them navigate and thrive through the complexities of their roles and businesses, for the last 15 years.

Three years ago, I left corporate life and started my own business, Tango Leadership. My firm is a network of highly experienced coaches and consultants, each with 20 or more years of diverse business and industry experience, most of whom run their own independent businesses. For larger scale projects, we centralize our operations and contract our services as Tango Leadership. This model allows us to offer a greater range of services and offerings while providing scalability and agility to meet a broad array of client needs. Our clients enjoy one primary point of contact for all projects and services, creating ease and consistency of experience, while knowing we have a wealth of resources at our fingertips to support their project needs. Our team is amazingly and wonderfully diverse by ethnicity, race, gender, age, ability, sexual orientation, geography, language, culture and other differences. We also prioritize working with other small minority-, women-, veteran- and disabled-owned businesses as our vendors. In fact, we’re proud to say they represent over 86% of our vendor spend.

Our clients are often the C-Suite of mid-sized businesses who leverage us as a partner to their leadership and HR teams to deliver executive coaching, leadership team coaching, and organization development consulting. Our clients appreciate how we work alongside them to truly understand their challenges and goals then design customized solutions that leverage their strengths to solve their needs. We help organizations develop their leaders particularly during times of transition and change, improve intra- and inter-team communication, increase employee engagement & retention, and develop greater agility & resilience. We’re also proud of the amount of work we do to support educational institutions and not-for-profit organizations with similar leader development needs.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When we were just starting out, a potential client was referred to us who wanted to hire us to deliver a very specific solution. They had conducted an employee survey, gathered a ton of feedback, and wanted to hire us to conduct in-person focus groups as a follow-up to the survey. This kind of work is absolutely in our wheelhouse, and frankly, this would have been a significant body of profitable work for us. As we started to review the survey results to inform our focus group question set, we realized that the focus groups were unlikely to give the client any new data or perspective. They had rich and robust suggestions right there in the report and not acting on it before conducting focus groups would have eroded employee trust in the organization. Although we needed and wanted the business, we knew we could not deliver the ROI the client was hoping for, so instead we explained all of this to the client and made some recommendations on next steps, none of which included hiring us at this time. It was scary to walk away from this job as we needed the revenue, yet we also knew it could damage our early reputation. 18 months later, this client came back to us. On our advice, they had launched several new programs, taken some action to address employee concerns, and were ready to advance their strategy. We’ve been partnering with them ever since.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Our best source of new clients continues to be referrals. We’ve been actively building our social media presence and telling our story, and ultimately nearly every client we’ve worked with has been a referral or prior relationship. We are in leadership, which is a relationship business. CEOs of mid-size businesses talk with other CEOs of mid-size businesses, and CHROs talk with other CHROs, so our focus has been to make it easy for the people who already know us to help tell our story to the people they know.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://tangoleadershipcoaching.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tangoleadershipcoaching/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TangoLeadershipCoaching
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tango-leadership/
• Other: https://www.pinterest.com/tangoleadership/https://www.linkedin.com/in/junemcarter/