Our Outcomes & Omelettes thought leadership series returned in November, and we flipped the script a little bit. In this era of social distancing, we typically love to host our guests on a livestream to discuss each guest’s background and career journey. While we did hit on some of that this time, instead the focus was primarily dedicated to the hard-working N6Aers discussing challenges, best practices and insights related to the virtual workplace during the pandemic. But it wasn’t completely different — obviously our beloved make-your-own-omelette-station was still delivered to N6A-ers via a Seamless credit!

In this open and honest conversation, N6A CEO Matt Rizzetta was joined by Tania Luna, the co-CEO of LifeLabs Learning, a consultancy that specializes in training that provides rapid skill-building in leadership, inclusion, and collaboration. Luna’s work has been featured in dozens of media outlets including Psychology Today, Harvard Business Review, TIME, NPR, Wharton Business Radio, HuffPost, O Magazine, Mashable, and The Wall Street Journal and her TED talk has over 1.8 million views.

As a psychology researcher, leadership trainer, podcast host, and co-author of the book Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable & Engineer the Unexpected, Luna’s unique voice and perspective on both professional and personal development helped the N6A team see through the pandemic work/life balance more clearly.

Here are a few of the key takeaways from our livestreamed O&O session, which is also available to watch above.

Overcoming COVID Productivity Struggles

It’s difficult to think that we’ve been working during this pandemic for nine months, and as we’ve settled into the new normal the galvanized teamwork spirit that typified the early days has somewhat tapered off.  

Luna explained that the March/April period of the pandemic exemplified what she called an “acute stress” period, or a panic response with a flurry of activity. In the subsequent handful of months since then, a more dangerous fatigue of “chronic stress” may have set in. 

Without the variety and stimulation of a pre-COVID workday when our brains are tuned to regular intervals, there’s a sameness to the challenges day in and day out, which could lead you to ask how can one thrive, grow, and connect when so much is uncertain yet predictable at the same time.

Luna explained that it’s important to understand the sources of stress in dealing with a variety of challenges, including enacting some sort of stop and start ritual to your day when the physical workspace doesn’t change; establish dark-time boundaries where teams know not to email, Slack, or call; or even create mental progress markers where you take heed of the small wins you’ve accomplished on a daily basis.  

Being a More Successful Leader to Empower the Workforce

Luna saw the biggest differentiator for business leaders as making the implicit, explicit. It’s important to establish norms and be overt with parameters because, let’s face it, none of this is normal! It’s essential for leaders to embrace the underlying principle to talk about how to set norms so there’s a shared agreement, which is regularly much easier to do in person. 

It’s also equally important in this non-normal time to debrief on what isn’t going right so that there’s a collective cognitive off-loading and opening up of team issues. Luna stressed that this shouldn’t consist of constant complaint sessions, nor should it just be a collective wallowing, but should be an open environment that constructively acknowledges potential negatives.

In balancing realism versus hope, Luna cited the Stockdale Paradox, which said, “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose —with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

Normalizing Mental Health Resources

A silver lining of the pandemic has been the widespread openness and normalization of addressing mental health in the workplace, especially when companies focus on benefits, wellness days, and create team wellness exercises such as yoga sessions for any participants feeling stranded.

Luna also said the same goes for being a good corporate citizen. In the pandemic and beyond, it’s important for companies to lead the way by thinking about how each can change the system from within, and reimagine corporate entities as an inclusive reflection of what they feel the world should be like. 

Being a Better Professional After the Pandemic

Lastly, Luna spoke about the potential for hitting a wall with the monotony and the grind, but making it out as a better professional once the pandemic is over. She cited three constructive ingredients for professional growth.

1. Reconnect with Meaning: Luna explained that most people think burnout is all about overwork, but it’s mostly about the loss of meaning in your work, or what she called “an existential vacuum.” To move forward, Luna said, “Ask what’s important with me, what you want to leave behind, what experience you want to collect, and who you want to have an impact on.” 
2. Forecast Forward: Control about what you can become, what bad habits to break and skills to dig into. 
3. Look Backward: Luna’s last message was to give yourself a “visual evidence of growth,” and a sense of progress, even by doing something as simple as writing out where you started versus where you’ve gotten to since the pandemic began.

Each Outcomes & Omelettes session is an educational and interactive discussion on each guest’s background and career journey to engage and inspire the N6A team. Check back soon for our next guest! You don’t know who will show up from the worlds of business, media, philanthropy, and beyond.

The post Embracing the Unpredictable in the Virtual Workplace During COVID appeared first on N6 Powered by KRMA | Fully Integrated Digital Marketing.

Our Outcomes & Omelettes thought leadership series returned in September with some incredible leadership insights and some appropriate sports metaphors. Oh, and also, who could forget N6A’s make-your-own-omelette-station delivered via a Seamless credit!

N6A CEO Matt Rizzetta was joined this month by former CPG executive turned entrepreneur Keenan Beasley. Currently CEO of Supply Factory Brands, Beasley is also the founder and chairman of Venture Noire, a “venture catalyst” that helps founders from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds get in front of investors and VCs, providing support they might need in the early stages of business. Ultimately, the goal is to fuel the wealth-generating engine for historically disadvantaged communities.

The organization partners with industry experts across marketing, chain supply, and product development to design unique curriculums, and actively participates in entrepreneurial events focused on community building and education. One of its recent initiatives was partnering with the Walton Family Foundation on The BIG Pitch, a virtual pitch competition for entrepreneurs of color in Arkansas, which this year awarded $31,000 in grant funds in response to the current economic conditions.

Here are a few of the key takeaways from our latest livestreamed O&O session, which is also available to watch above. 

A Focus on Service 

For West Point grad former football player Beasley, his entrepreneurial spirit is rooted in a mission to lead through the lens of serving others. 

Recalling how this was instilled in him by his parents right through to his academic experience, Beasley noted that, “We’ve always done things to give back to the community at large, whether it was through church or feeding the homeless for Thanksgiving every year…it was always about the greater good.”

He explained that it’s a beneficial mindset that he still carries with him, and one that’s surprisingly easy to manage, even throughout the often difficult journey as an entrepreneur. “It takes all the pressure off me and removes any sense of ego,” he said. “It’s always about serving others, so I’ve continued that throughout my career.”

Creating an Inclusive Ecosystem

The main drive of Venture Noire’s mission revolves around closing the income inequality gap by helping to infuse much-needed funding into underrepresented groups within the community to create jobs, grow resource platforms, and subsequently create a shared resource ecosystem to create a continued cycle of success.

Beasley explained that the size of the gap is staggering. In fact, the average $171,000 net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of the $17,150 of a Black family. Considering that most businesses require around $10,000 to get started, someone risking over half of their personal net worth on their start-up idea is unrealistic.

Start-up funding is, unfortunately, still just as much about who you know as it is about what you know. In essence, the ecosystem is a more complex version of the type of networking focus that drove Beasley from the get-go.

“As an entrepreneur and building a business, it’s a lonely process at times, and you become isolated” he explained. “I saw that there was a chance to create an ecosystem for entrepreneurs of color so that we could start to build confidence in each other. I’m a firm believer that success begets success.”

Staying in the Game

It’s such an important, but complex vocation. Helping to create resources and support in the early-stage ecosystem of entrepreneurship exclusively available to Black founders, as well as developing programs to offset the socioeconomic issues that undermine Black innovation and business creation takes an incredible amount of time and effort. But Beasley pushes on toward these achievable goals. 

Using his football experience, he explained that we’re still in the “first quarter” of the hypothetical game. But, he offered an encouraging assessment of the future: “What’s good about that is that at least you’re in the game. A lot of progress has been made, and the digital environment has helped because it’s a lot easier now to start a business than it was 20 or 30 years ago.”   

Beasley stressed that businesses should actively seek diversity, and people with different points of view, which will not only help in the broader sense, but make businesses fundamentally better. To him, it’s about acknowledging that some things are not right but to continue to try shaping things moving forward.

Each Outcomes & Omelettes session is an educational and interactive discussion on each guest’s background and career journey to engage and inspire the N6A team. Check back soon for our next guest! You don’t know who will show up from the worlds of business, media, philanthropy, and beyond.

The post Entrepreneur Keenan Beasley on Diverse Leadership and Playing the Game appeared first on N6 Powered by KRMA | Fully Integrated Digital Marketing.

Our Outcomes & Omelettes thought leadership series returned in August with a jolt of equal parts caffeine and kindness. Oh, and don’t forget our beloved make-your-own-omelette-station was still delivered to N6A-ers via a Seamless credit!

We typically love to host our guests on the #EmbracethePace stage in our NYC HQ, but in the era of social distancing, N6A CEO Matt Rizzetta was joined on our very first livestream event by Elisabeth Cardiello, founder and CEO of Caffe Unimatic and the creator of B.R.A.V.E. Conversations Over Coffee. This latter initiative brings a wide range of people and audiences together in an attempt to overcome complex challenges through coffee conversations. 

Cardiello, who is featured in the Netflix documentary Coffee for All and is a two-time TEDx speaker, recounted her beginnings on Wall Street, and how her relationship with her late father inspired her to go into business and how that entrepreneurial spirit inspired her to create B.R.A.V.E.

Here are a few of the key takeaways from our livestreamed O&O session, which is also available to watch above. 

Counting Beans

After graduating with an MBA and heading to a Wall Street hedge fund, Cardiello’s world was turned upside down with the tragic passing of her father. Instead of toiling away at a job her heart wasn’t in, she decided her true path was to honor him and his old-world Italian entrepreneurial spirit to continue his cookware business. There was only one problem, she didn’t know how. 

A chance experience cleaning his office led to her discovery of a rare, 5,000-unit inventory of original Unimatic coffee pots, the only percolator in the world that uses a gravity-defying perking technique invented in 1962 to make particularly smooth cups of coffee. She realized this was both the perfect throwback to her memories of sitting around the breakfast table with family, and a way to kickstart that entrepreneurial spirit. 

“If you have the opportunity to give 5,000 families that same opportunity,” Cardiello said, “that’s what you’re going to do.”

Later, she reflected on how this fortuitous discovery led her on the right path. “I essentially landed in the coffee industry, not because I chose it — it very clearly chose me,” she said. “I always felt like I was put here to do something more with this.”

The Right Mindset

It was this feeling of wanting to do more that led her to reconcile her desire to be innovative with legacy in mind. She wanted her endeavour to be something more than just a morning caffeine fix. She wanted to bring the coffee experience together to help people listen in a way that can truly empower others to be seen and valued.

“I needed to find something that anchored me in my own values, and then take it on the journey of what you want to build in the world,” she said. “Build a version of what you need, but also do something that’s you.”

Having Brave Conversations

The way that she deployed that initiative — growing a company while realizing just how much she could take from those times of her Dad sitting around the family table drinking coffee in the morning — was to establish B.R.A.V.E. Conversations Over Coffee. 

“Us sitting at the table over that coffee pot — those conversations are what made me me, and what got me through,” She said. “They gave me my confidence, my resilience, and my curiosity.”

The initiative uses this cherished morning ritual as a tool to inspire transformational communication to build trust, engagement, connection, inclusion, creativity, and mental health across companies, colleges, and communities. 

“Just hearing perspectives in a very controlled space, opens up so much for people,” she said. “Because in the conversations you’re sharing brave listening, but then you’re also listening to people sharing — you’re giving and receiving at the same time — you can start putting it into practice.” 

Cardiello ended by noting her mantra throughout this journey to inspire transformational bravery: “What the mind can conceive, the mind can achieve.”

Each Outcomes & Omelettes session is an educational and interactive discussion on each guest’s background and career journey to engage and inspire the N6A team. Check back soon for our next guest! You don’t know who will show up from the worlds of business, media, philanthropy, and beyond.

The post CEO Elisabeth Cardiello on Overcoming Complex Challenges Over Coffee appeared first on N6 Powered by KRMA | Fully Integrated Digital Marketing.

After kicking off in January  and rolling into February, life threw the Outcomes & Omelettes thought leadership series a curveball. The COVID-19 pandemic put the kibosh on a session in March, but N6A banded together (with a little help from video conferencing technology) to come back strong in April. We typically love to host our guests on the #EmbracethePace stage in our NYC HQ. But in the era of social distancing, we decided to move April’s event online to a virtual interview (along with our beloved make-your-own-omelette-station delivered to attendees via a Seamless credit!) This month, N6A CEO Matt Rizzetta featured Mike White, former CEO of DirecTV and CFO of PepsiCo, and a veteran business leader with expertise in international relations, finance and strategic planning. 

The conversation focused on the theme of leading during a crisis, with White drawing on his Pepsi experience leading the restructuring of its international business in the 1990s, navigating the impact of SARS on its Asia business in 2003, and his perspective on how the CEOs of companies like Bank of America, Kimberly-Clark, and Whirlpool are managing the COVID-19 pandemic.

White’s inspiring insights on how to focus amid the chaos, leadership behaviors that matter and the critical role of communication, as well as immediate priorities and long-term opportunities, galvanized the team over the nearly hour-long discussion. Here are a few of the key takeaways from our first virtual O&O session. 

Practice Realistic Optimism

In his previous executive level roles, White has steered businesses through stormy seas. But White was quick to note that COVID-19 is unlike any crisis any executive has dealt with before. That said, he emphasized the strategies to combat these extraordinary times are just as effective as they are in any crisis.

The main response, from the top down, should be what he called “realistic optimism.” 

Though a lack of control is the new normal, he explained that we are “only at mile-five of a marathon.” This means that planning for the worst and hoping for the best in the long-run is an effective means of tackling new challenges each day head-on. Business leaders should be truthful and honest, and explore a variety of scenarios that could affect the business while never losing sight of the realities for your workforce.   

Commit to a “Head, Hearts, Hands” Mentality

White explained that employees “don’t care what you know until they know that you care.” This statement followed the portion of the discussion with Rizzetta about how communication is key at a time like this, and that “leadership at 10,000 feet is useless.” 

Now is the time for business leaders to stay calm, communicate, and support their teams with what he called a “head, heart, and hands” mentality. 

Having a good head means quickly setting an agenda, and pulling the company together to walk through next steps with a sense of confidence; leading with your heart meant executives must lead with empathy and energize their workforce as a united front; and using your hands means addressing these uncertain times with a practical and trustworthy message  to be as transparent as possible.

Stay Focused, But Stay Together

Despite the confusion around us, leaders must act decisively and employees must persevere by focusing on the job at hand. But White noted that managing your wellbeing once you switch off for the day is just as important as when you’re switched on.

Having navigated some stressful professional situations himself, like negotiating one of the biggest mergers in history with AT&T and helping to launch Sunday Ticket with the NFL, White emphasized the importance of staying centered.  

We’re in a period of uncertainty for the foreseeable future, so workers must maintain a balance between pressures and stresses in their own way — whether it’s exercise, yoga, meditation, or more. At the same time, teams need to project a sense of unity. It’s essential to create structure and confidence in a high-stress and rapidly changing environment, especially if the workforce is working from home without the direct connections that normally power teamwork everyday.

Each Outcomes & Omelettes session is an educational and interactive discussion on each guest’s background and career journey to engage and inspire the team. Check back soon for our next guest! You don’t know who will show up from the worlds of business, media, philanthropy, and beyond.

The post Former DirecTV & PepsiCo CEO Mike White on Leading in Times of Crisis appeared first on N6 Powered by KRMA | Fully Integrated Digital Marketing.