We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sandhya Sudhakar a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Sandhya, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?
There are so many shifts happening right now in the leadership development and culture space. Here are three that I’m most involved in and excited about:
1. Making your professional development personal. For the majority of the leaders I work with, their transformational growth is happening in how they show up and lead their teams. It’s not about learning new “hard skills” like financial acumen. While that’s important, the really critical (and much harder) work is deepening your self awareness and building new skills around self-regulation and communication as a leader. This requires getting really honest with yourself about what’s driving your behaviors, where your biases misguide you, and what insecurities and “shoulds” you carry around that hold you back from being the leader your people need you to be. Often times, there can be a gap between how a leader believes they come across and how they are being received. You need to understand where these gaps are and find ways to narrow them, just like you would with the financial targets you are working towards. This is really personal work and I’ve been so energized by how many of my clients are willing to go there. Things that used to seem too fluffy or woo woo, like managing energy, emotional regulation, or guided visualizations in a coaching session, are becoming really common. These are all evidence-based practices that serve as great tools for leaders in and out of the workplace and I’m excited they are being embraced more broadly.
2. Building belonging by designing for differences. Great leaders are finding new ways to create more inclusive cultures on their teams in their day to day operations. First, I have to say that companies MUST be addressing systemic inequities around race and gender in their people systems, from recruiting and hiring to compensation and advancement. This is ongoing work and the price of entry for companies, in my opinion. Beyond that, there is still so much that an individual leader or manager can to do build inclusion and belonging in their own team practices by understanding and designing for the diversity of working, thinking, and communication styles of their people. The question is simple: What can I do to enable everyone’s best work? The answer is much more complex because you have to understand what each person needs, which means each person needs to tell you what they need. I see this everyday with the teams I work with – people generally know what they need deep down, but they don’t always know how to articulate it. This is where a framework or facilitated conversation can do wonders, giving your people a forum to understand themselves and explore and share their needs. After that, you can incorporate new practices to do things like recognize individuals the way they want to be recognized or re-design your meetings to ensure everyone brings their best thinking and has an opportunity to share it.
3. Getting creative about creating connection. There’s been a lot of talk about CEOs calling everyone back to the office because it’s the only way they know how to create a culture. It’s like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole – using an old model in a new world of work, and it just lacks creativity! As an alternative, I’m starting to see more companies reallocating budgets from permanent physical space to things like employee well-being resources and in-person off-sites or retreats. The reality is that personal connection is a core element of trust, which is required for a high-performing team. But instead of relying on informal lunchroom conversations or small talk between meetings, you can be purposeful about the culture you want to create and facilitate it through more effective (and connective!) in-person gatherings. I also think manager one-on-ones are a critical tool and should be taken very seriously. With the pace of change in companies and everything we have to deal with as humans outside of work, it’s so important for managers and employees to have time to connect and be fully present together. Trust building and team cohesion do take time, but they can be accelerated if you’re intentional about how you connect!
Sandhya, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m the founder of Self At Work and I’m a coach, facilitator, and speaker in the space of leadership development and culture. My focus is on cultivating authentic leadership and building belonging on teams. I believe there is a symbiotic relationship between authentic leaders and inclusive cultures – an inclusive culture can foster authenticity in your people AND leaders who show up authentically enable inclusive cultures. It requires doing both individual and collective work. What I do is help leaders create environments where their people can thrive and help individuals understand themselves better and bring more of themselves into their work. It’s really about building meaningful connections to yourself, your work, and your team, and I help facilitate those connections!
With my clients, I primarily do a combination of one-on-one coaching and team workshops. One of the main tools I use is the Enneagram framework, which creates a great foundation for emotional intelligence development with leaders and teams. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a personality framework that goes beyond the typical assessments out there by focusing on the “why” behind what we do and how we show up. Where most workplace personality tools focus on traits and behavior, the Enneagram focuses on our core motivations and helps us understand what’s intrinsically driving us in both positive and negative ways. Because of that, it serves as a tool for lifelong personal and professional growth that can meet you at whatever stage of development you are in. It also makes the insights you gain from the framework deeply personal, which makes it much more sticky and applicable to your life so that it doesn’t become one of those trainings you do and forget about the next week.
Another amazing thing about the Enneagram framework is that its rooted in many psychology and human development theories, so it can be applied in so many ways – at an individual level for things like helping someone understand and leverage their strengths, bringing awareness to their communication biases so they know when and how to flex their style, or catching themselves in the act when they go into a defensive pattern or get triggered, OR at a team level for things like enhancing collaboration by understanding each person’s best work styles, designing meetings in a more inclusive way, or to expanding the ways you recognize your team to meet everyone’s needs. It’s really versatile and comprehensive, and it’s been a game changer for so many leaders and teams that I have worked with, and for me personally! I love to take teams all the way from awareness and insights into practical action, by helping them create systems within their team that support belonging, inclusion, and well-being.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
The origin story of my business was actually also my biggest pivot.
In the summer of 2019, I quit my job with nothing lined up and no real plan whatsoever. Very out of character for the ambitious planner I always was! I had built a successful corporate career that started with 13 years at Procter & Gamble. Along the way, I realized I wanted something different, but I just didn’t know exactly what that was. At the time, I definitely DIDN’T think it was starting my own business. Eventually, I left P&G and spent the next three years at three different companies, leading teams through two acquisitions during that short time. I experienced a lot of high highs and low lows, with the lows being driven by some pretty bad company cultures and the lack of strong leadership.
I started feeling empty, disengaged, and unmotivated. I had always been someone who loves to work and I couldn’t even recognize myself anymore. I didn’t know it then, but I was burned out. It wasn’t the typical type of overworking to the point of physical exhaustion burnout. I wasn’t even working that hard or that much – I was emotionally burned out. I just wasn’t connected to the work I was doing or the people I was doing it with.
After leaving my job, I embarked on a journey to recover, reconnect with myself, and get inspired again. I decided I wouldn’t think about what’s next for my career and only do things that energized and excited me for at least a few months. Driven by my own curiosity, I immersed myself in tools that helped me better understand myself. All of this helped me ask myself the questions I had never slowed down to ask before.
During my sabbatical, I travelled to several different countries and met so many interesting people. Just for the fun of it, I began to host personal development workshops sharing one of the tools that had helped me the most in my own learning process – the Enneagram personality framework. I loved helping other people learn more about themselves too. And seeing people’s eyes light up as they had aha moments, discovering new things about themselves, and connecting so many dots in their lives, I had my own aha moment about what I wanted to do. I came back from my travels, and dove into a master’s program and a few certifications that helped me create and launch my business, Self At Work.
Since then, my business has evolved a lot. I think it will continue to evolve as I learn and feel inspired to share new things with new clients in new ways. So, I guess I could say I’m getting comfortable with pivoting as a way of life!
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
As I moved from the corporate world into entrepreneurship, I had work at redefining success and productivity for myself. As a “solopreneur”, or someone who primarily runs her own business without a team, I had to unlearn many of the old constructs of work. One of the best ideas I came across early on that helped me reframe the way I work was that productivity isn’t about how much effort you put in, but how well-aimed the effort is. Starting with the goal of maximizing impact and not output required me to blow up the old structure of Monday to Friday from 8 am to 5pm and the expectations I was placing on myself to do it all, and do it all the way I had learned to do it in the corporate world.
What I know now is that entrepreneurship is so much easier when you become an expert on yourself. Being a coach who focuses on emotional intelligence development, this is kind of my favorite thing in life. I love any type of tool for self-exploration and personal insight and I have leveraged so many of them, including the Enneagram (which is what I use most often with clients). I had to find ways to understand the work I love to do most, who I love to do it with, and the way I do it best. For example, a business model that worked to skyrocket one person’s business might not work for you – or it might in the short run, but it could end up burning you out. It can be really easy to get caught up in all of the advice on social media or the sea of business coaches out there who teach their own way of doing things. Now I lean into the activities that fill me with energy or feel easy as the main ways I market my business. And, I outsource things on a project basis that I know aren’t a great fit for me to do myself.
In the corporate world, I would sit in four hours of meetings where I was listening in or providing an update for just a few minutes. Now, my meetings are fully engaging my energy for the entire time – coaching a client, facilitating a team session, or building connections and community. My independent work time is more often deep thinking or creation versus transactional work like answering emails or filling out forms. My physical, mental, and emotional energy is being used completely differently now, so I have to rethink when and for how long I can work effectively. Managing my energy is entirely more important than managing my time these days.
Another thing I would add: In the corporate world, I was someone who was really motivated by external recognition from my manager or peers. For a long time, I actually thought I wasn’t cut out for entrepreneurship because that’s not something I would get if I worked for myself. Now, I capture client feedback or even record voice notes to myself after calls so I can refer back to them and remind myself of the impact I’m having on my clients’ lives when I need a boost. Or, I connect with fellow entrepreneurs to workshop ideas or fill my “bucket” with good emotional energy if I’m feeling drainer and need some motivation.
It’s really all about experimentation, and tuning into yourself to see what works and what doesn’t and making the necessary changes. I always come back to this when I’m stuck on one thing for a long time or something feels really difficult. Can I eliminate, delegate, or augment it? I ask myself if I can just not do this task, outsource it to someone else, or do it another way that doesn’t drain my energy.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.selfatwork.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/selfatworksandhya/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhya-sudhakar/