Why is it both? Can’t we simply refer to it as Leadership or as Management?

I think the proper answer is those are two different concepts, and they're both equally important. Organizations need leadership, and leadership is that force that inspires and motivates people to do their best work -- to want to do it. Management is the hard work of ensuring the coordinated execution of tasks that contribute to delivering value to the customer. So, it's more blocking and tackling. Managers are the people who have to do everything they can to develop, coach, engage, and help provide feedback to others so that they can do their jobs.

Also, the word leadership deserves a broader context. You can be a frontline associate and exercise leadership. If you're doing something that inspires or enables your colleagues to show up as a better version of themselves, you are demonstrating leadership. You're not necessarily ‘the leader’, but you are engaging in leadership. And so, I think any fairly senior role needs to be engaging in both leadership and management. If you're the CEO, you're leading the company, but you're also managing your top team.

And the question becomes, what percent of your time is, roughly speaking, engaged in leadership acts, and what percent is in management? The need for leadership and the percentage of time you should be spending on it is greater the higher you go. But, I still think it's always a mix. Through our research what I do believe to be true is that the pull of the management ‘hat’ can be overwhelming. It’s about getting things done. It's about that satisfaction from checking things off the list. The leadership hat? This is about articulating purpose and having a vision of the future. In other words, it will be hard to know if you've done a good job today being a leader for some years. And all of us are prone to the to-do list mentality, where we want to do things, and we're drawn to do the things that show us some sort of quicker turnaround. But leadership is not a quick turnaround game.

You recently released a new title, “Right Kind of Wrong, the Science of Failing Well”. As an entrepreneur, the title definitely shook me, and I looked at it for a while and was thinking, Do I need to read that? Do I want to read that? In the end, I was amazed at how brilliantly it repurposed failure into a necessary and meaningful element of the work. What were the core messages you were looking to impart in this book?

As you're probably aware, there's a lot of ‘happy talk’ about failure. There's a lot of what I'll call Silicon Valley talk, which is ‘fail fast, fail often’. For me, and through my research, that just isn't nuanced enough. It's sort of telling people, yes, you should love failing. But no, you shouldn't. Nobody loves failing! The point is you must be willing to fail in new territory. And if you're going to do something ambitious, you're going to be treading in new territory. Whether you're a champion tennis player, an entrepreneur, a scientist or even writing a book, you are, by definition, going into new territory. And if you're going to go into new territory, you have to accept the possibility that it won't all work out exactly the way you want it to.

So I wrote the book because, even though there has been a conversation about failure for more than a decade, I believed there was still a lot of confusion about the topic. Is failure good? Is failure bad? You know, people say, “Oh, yeah, that failure stuff. Well, not where I work. You know, where I work, failure is not an option.”

Well, hold on, I think, some failure is, in fact, not only an option, it's necessary! Only if you want to succeed, that is. And other failures are absolutely worth preventing. We do not want to have passenger airplanes going down. We don't want cardiac surgery procedures going awry. We want to do our very best work in familiar territory, to be vigilant in high risk territory, and we want to have the courage to try new things in new territory. Further, for ‘good failure,’ we have to have done our homework so that the risks we're taking, which we have to take, are good risks, not stupid risks. The idea is to understand the value of stress testing - small failures in safe contexts. It is not about betting the farm, but rather cautiously stress testing new ideas.

You write about so many companies and leaders and your own experiences with failure. What one company or individual impacted you most in writing this book?

I think the best way to answer that is not to focus on the period during which I wrote the book, which is relatively recent, but on the 25 years before writing the book, where these ideas were taking shape and percolating and getting support from case studies and systematic research. And for me, there are so many great companies, great stories, and great leaders. But the single most impactful company and case study on my thinking about failure was IDEO. That is almost a cliche statement, IDEO is, right? IDEO is a globally recognized innovation consultancy, and they're a pretty small company. But they were early proponents of this ethos of fail fast, learn faster. Early enthusiasts of how we need to fail to succeed. If your job is innovating and you’re not failing, you're not doing your job. Similarly, if you're a scientific researcher and all your experiments are supporting your hypotheses, you are not on the leading edge. You're doing “me too” work, and you need to shift to be more bold. In a top scientific laboratory, your experiments will be failing somewhere between 70%-90% of the time, because you're doing new, ambitious experiments.

When I was an Assistant Professor early in my career I had the chance to do a case study at IDEO. I was able to see how they lived it. It wasn’t a slogan on the wall. It wasn’t something the CEO said. The whole place was set up to encourage experimentation, to celebrate the failures, to celebrate the learning that comes from the failures, and all with just remarkable cheerfulness, and that, I would argue, accounts for their stunning success over a couple of decades. It wasn't a scary experience to embrace, talk about, and learn from failures. You weren't trying to hide them. And if you weren't having them, people looked at you askance. As if to say, ‘Can't you think of something daring to try?’

You are here not only to research and to add to this incredibly important area of business and life but also to teach and to educate the next generation. I saw that you dedicated the book to Jack and Nick, who are your sons. And I think as women who are active in life, whatever that role may be, sometimes it's as a parent, sometimes it's as a mentor, sometimes as an aunt, a daughter, a spouse, all these things, you bring such an amazing perspective in terms of career. What do you believe is most important to impart to Jack and Nick as they move ahead in life?

I think the answer to that is to take risks in the context of continually getting in touch with the nature of the contribution you feel moved to make. I'm very proud of both of them and in part, I'm very pleased that they're not following a cookie-cutter path -- either one of them. While they're not particularly motivated by financial success, I see them as quite ambitious, in a sense, to have an impact. So they are willing to try things, they are willing to experiment, to learn as much as they can about the various domains that are available to them. I am most proud that they are putting their time, their talents, and their energies into something that really moves them.

So you do speak all over the world. When I started Scarlett Chase, having been in finance, having put a book out on marketing, and having a perfectly safe and comfortable career, there was always this challenge of feeling put together, but not having that stability and confidence from the ground up. I felt, as many women do, that no matter what I put on my feet and walked to a meeting or on stage in, I was either uncomfortable and unsupported or I didn't feel put together. I didn't feel the confidence, the beautiful power, which is the message around our brand. So we're just very honored that you have worked with us to find solutions that give you that beautiful power and confidence on stage. I'm going to go back to the fallible human at the end of the day, how we feel, and how we're able to present ourselves in the world. The idea of not having obstacles that are in the way of our ability to focus on what matters. That's what Scarlett Chase is meant to do– to take an obstacle out of your way so you can do you, the best you can do it. So I'm curious about your thoughts on that when you're getting ready to go on stage and engage around leadership and management.

First of all, I love the metaphor that it’s the foundation, right? Your shoes! It's both literally and figuratively a metaphor for confidence and for feeling comfortable in your skin and your shoes. So, I love that, and it makes sense to me as a purpose for Scarlett Chase.

And then secondarily, I'll just echo what you said there, and, for me, I would say for years and years, I did not feel comfortable putting together a look that both felt like my own look and felt professional and appropriate in the setting. So I would, more often than not, as you just alluded, show up feeling like I was wearing the wrong thing, or that the shoes are uncomfortable, because most shoes are so uncomfortable for women. So, often, I'm just wearing, you know, my sneakers, and they're comfortable, but it looks goofy. For a long time, I tried not to care about clothes. But at a certain point, I can't tell you exactly when, I decided I do care, and I want to try to get it right. I want to look put together, but not contrived. I want to look the way I want to look. And I do think it makes a difference when you find clothes you think are flattering or appropriate or classic in some way, and shoes that do that but are also comfortable. You know, there’s a very small Venn diagram of overlap in there. Yet it is important as it helps keep the focus on the work - not on yourself -- and allows you to do the other things you're meant to do -- well and with confidence.