Morag Barrett:
Well, good morning, everybody. My guest this week is the fabulous Wendy hall Bohling. Wendy is a thought leader, a corporate consultant on gender intelligence and inclusive leadership. She's the CEO and founder of Corporate Cowgirl Up, and author of the book we're going to be discussing Cowgirl Up! A Woman's Guide to Navigating the Corporate Frontier. She has more than 30 years experience as an executive in the corporate trenches. She has experienced gender discrimination in all its format. The book has some amazing stories, both from her own career and from the more than 50 leaders that she interviewed as part of her research. Wendy, I am so glad to have you here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Wendy Bohling:
I love it. And you know, you're one of my favorite people to talk to, Morag.

Morag Barrett:
So let's start with the book then. Corporate Cowgirl, or the company name Corporate Cowgirl.

Wendy Bohling:
Cowgirl Up.

Morag Barrett:
And the book Cowgirl Up. It may be given away with the accent. But why the title in the book?

Wendy Bohling:
Well, 20 years into my career. I went through a pretty tough issue where I was fired for reporting sexual harassment. And I was at a Fortune 100 company. Never really saw it coming, was at the top of my game. Thinking you're all that and a bag of chips climbing that ladder. And boy does it put you in your place. So I learned firsthand about going through something tough, that kind of a screeching halt to your career and having to rethink how you get past it. So it builds so much compassion, but when I was taking the six months to really grieve that change in my trajectory, I was feeling a little sorry for myself. I think I was probably clinically depressed looking back on it. But I was sitting down watching a movie at three o'clock in the afternoon, eating ice cream out the carton.
Didn't even get the bowl. And I ended up watching this great TNT movie called Eight Seconds about the first champion bronco rider. And in the movie he gets stomped on, Lane Frost is what the movie is based on. Great character, and he thinks he's not going to be able to do the championship ride. And his best buddy comes over and says to him, "Well, it's not like you've worked your whole life for this. It looks like you're done. Or you could cowboy up and show him what you made out of." And I thought, that's what I need to do. I need to cowgirl up and figure what to do with this. And that's when I started writing the book that night, the chapters are kind of fun on each topic, like the sexual harassment and how to deal with that is called Spitting Tobacco, and Other Disgusting Cowboy Habits.
So it's just, was such a cool way to, I think it was better than therapy to be honest. To write it and to be able to feel like I was putting the journey in perspective, and the 30 year career I'd had, in that kind of perspective.

Morag Barrett:
Yeah. I love the titles. Because you say Integrity, The Barbed Wire of Business. Or Visibility, From Bronco Rider to Calf Roper. So there's that theme that goes throughout.

Wendy Bohling:
Yes.

Morag Barrett:
And I just love the stories and it's always shocking to me when I read this that you've gone through this, I've gone through this. And one of the challenges is, I remember you talk about your jaw hitting the floor in one of the early stories, I've been there.

Wendy Bohling:
Yes.

Morag Barrett:
And you're so flabbergasted in the moment, and then it's the, how do I respond? So what advice do you have? Let's start there with somebody who experiences it in the moment. What can we do that doesn't inflame the situation?

Wendy Bohling:
Well, believe me. This happens every single day with us. It could be someone taking advantage of you at a car dealership. And in the moment you're so shocked, the good news is it gets easier, and you practice the responses, and it starts to become less of a shock. And you're able to come up with some pretty witty responses. Like for me, I was getting on a plane and I had become so aware of this kind of unconscious bias that was hitting me, that someone said to me, "Oh, you're traveling for work." I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, who's with your kids?" And I jokingly said, "Oh my gosh, let me figure that out. That's a good thing to figure out."
And it was so one of those things where I just got smarter and quicker and to have grace with yourself at the beginning, this is going to be hard because it is a shock, but you get better at responding.

Morag Barrett:
Yeah. And I think that's the hardest thing, because these unconscious biases weave their way through conversations all the time. And we're all doing them, but until we become aware of them, we can't affect change. And I know one of the things you're passionate about is the work that you're doing with senior leaders that top down influence for impacting cultures.

Wendy Bohling:
Yes.

Morag Barrett:
Tell us more about that.

Wendy Bohling:
Well, and it's so amazing. I think a gender intelligent leader is one that starts out just wanting to have a good way to build great leaders in a company. So I always start with that piece, because developing people was one of my strengths and it's one of the things I love the most about the executive positions, I was able to hold in R and D and in sales. And so, but starting with that, those great leaders, those great thought leaders and companies, that can make such a change top down, it is so inspiring. They start out wanting to grow their leadership, and then starting to learn their own privilege that a lot of us, as white have. But also I've learned my own biases that I have of African American black women, and how I can never understand and actually have walked in their shoes. But I can start to want to hear those stories so that I can bring them to the table and use that white privilege that we tend to have.

Morag Barrett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So it seems like common sense. It's listening. It's being curious about other perspectives. Why is it then, so little has changed in the decades, whether we're looking at this by gender, by race, by any other discrimination that happens every single day.

Wendy Bohling:
So Morag, I think it comes down to, for people to have change that sticks, requires almost an emotional experience. It's just like I had. I never really understood retaliation and being harassed, until I had gone through it myself. So I think when you have that privilege, whatever, however you've got it. It could be an African American male that has privilege being a male instead of a female. But whatever it is, you have to actually have that emotional experience that gets you to start being aware of it as a part of how you show up. And that's a hard thing to have happen to you. And it's a hard thing to have that change to stick.

Morag Barrett:
It is hard to make it stick for sure. I know you're working on an app right now as a way of broadening that level of understanding and providing tools. Say more about the development and the inspiration behind that.

Wendy Bohling:
So it was so funny. I had a woman who said to me, she told her boyfriend, "I'm off to my male dominated work environment." And he said to her, "Why do you let this bother you? Why are you having such a hard time with this? Can't you just blow it off?" And she said, "Okay, I want you to understand what it's like to have to deal with this every single day in day out." Almost a death by a thousand cuts, she says, "I'm going to text you every single time someone... I go through some kind of bias, some kind of discrimination behavior." And so she text him and on the ninth day, he said, "You have to stop. I get so mad when you send me these texts. It's so unfair that you have to deal with this day in, day out."
And that's how I got the idea of creating stories that I could share with people and little drips of 90 seconds of content, three times a week and have 52 weeks of that kind of inspirational, walk in my shoes kind of experience.

Morag Barrett:
Wow. It sounds fascinating. That's a big undertaking, though. Where are you in the research process, the design, and when can we expect to be able to download that onto our phones?

Wendy Bohling:
Well, I'm hoping it'll be a different type of a training experience that companies can provide to their employees, as a way to look at the different types of discrimination and bias that are out there. So the first phase of the app will take on gender. But the second could take on the racial aspect, the sexual orientation aspect. So that even moms that get discriminated against in a culture, you could have that as part of the content of this.
So I'm working with some fabulous developers, as they're doing the look and feel of this. Because we all know a lot of that... We have the attention span of a gnat. So we have so much stuff coming at us. So can you take that 90 seconds and be able to use it to till the ground and to cultivate that kind of advocacy, and that kind of experiential learning experience. And so I'm working out the 52 weeks of content and I'm on the second phase of making sure that's mature and impactful. And we hope to be able to have betas of it in six to nine months.

Morag Barrett:
Okay. So it comes down to, as you say, bite size chunks, the fundamentals. So one of the chapters in your book is, You Can Lead a Horse to Water, Leadership 101. So, what's one of those leadership 101 things that we could all start doing right now that would make a difference?

Wendy Bohling:
It's so funny because as I've continued to coach executive leaders and talk to my own fiance who's struggling with his own set of leaders during this pandemic. I've noticed that people either step up to lead even stronger or they need to be led. So I've always tried to coach people. What is your stress response? Because, and how do you lead when you're stressed? Because that's kind of your worst. So what I've tried to get across is how can we look at how we're responding to all Zoom calls instead of face to face meetings? How are we responding to not having control over the next quarter's financials, or whether we're going to have to downsize? And that stress response, to understand how you... To really get awareness of how you lead and not just let it happen, you can manage that response.
So for instance, one of the leaders I've been coaching is a little bit of a micromanager, and a big conflict averse. So to understand that those characteristics are going to get worse since you're under stress, and to become aware of them, you'll start to make sure you have clear expectations. You made sure you don't talk a subject to death. Instead of having three Zoom meetings to talk something to death, you make sure you limit yourself to, we're going to discuss this for 20 minutes. And then I'm the one that has to make the decision with all the input that you've given me. Is that, sound like a great, everybody going to be able to live with that outcome? And that's a different way to be, than just the natural, I just don't have enough data ever, to make a decision.

Morag Barrett:
We talk about that in my first book, Cultivate in terms of making the implicit explicit. And especially now, as we're all working with distributed teams, as we're all working virtually articulating expectations, how decision making may have changed, what timelines have changed, just avoid people feeling excluded rather than included. And then making sure that we're working to those same end goals.

Wendy Bohling:
Yes.

Morag Barrett:
Yeah. So checklist, you have a checklist for the trail ride. How do people get hold of that? I mean, they ought to be ordering the book, et cetera. How do they get a copy of a Cowgirl Up, and what are some of the first steps on the checklist?

Wendy Bohling:
So of course the best thing is just to go to Amazon. That's the easiest one. So it's Kindle or the paper back version. And I would love for them in the front of the book is the checklist. That's kind of the highlights of all of the, each of the chapters and the skills of a leader.
Correct. And then I have a fabulous second leadership journal and it's really where the book of bad-ass and it's all inspirational. It's like a notebook. It's inspirational quotes, and ways that as you go through and take notes at your different meetings, you'll hit one of these inspirational quotes and will just speak to you in that moment. So I got the idea because a friend of mine gave me a set of little quotes that I was supposed to pull out every day. And I thought, how could I incorporate this in our way of taking notes at every... I take notes in every meeting and one of the best things that's ever, talk about CYA, to be able to have notes after meetings, and then to send them out. This is what we decided has saved me more than once, Morag.

Morag Barrett:
Yeah, yep.

Wendy Bohling:
So I would love for people to check out both of those resources.

Morag Barrett:
All right. And I know, again, you're an active keynote speaker. You have an event coming up shortly.

Wendy Bohling:
Yes.

Morag Barrett:
Talk to me about some of the favorite themes that organizations are bringing you in to talk about.

Wendy Bohling:
Well, one of the biggest ones right now is of course, resilience. I think it's one of the underappreciated skills that great leaders have is that flexibility, that being able to pivot. And Chris, my fiance is a bit of a structure baby. He was the type that needed to kind of go down to sleep at the same time, eat at the same time. And we don't have a lot of that structure nowadays with what's happening in the world, especially the business world, and even our everyday world. So how do we build our resilience muscle? So it's the build... The name of that topic is Bend, Don't Break, building resilience during uncertainty. That's a great topic.
The other is I think a lot of us go through feeling like we're at the mercy of our career instead of in charge of it. So I have a great talk about being the trail boss of your career. And how you actually are intentional about where you go next, and what you try next. And some of us get a little settled. The devil we know is better than the devil we don't know. So I know you've felt this in your own life. So that's a fabulous talk. It's been really fun to see what has attracted people the most, the subjects.

Morag Barrett:
Okay, Wendy, you are an inspiration. Author, keynote speaker, consultant. So for people listening, who want to talk to you and understand their own diversity landscape, how do they get in touch with you?

Wendy Bohling:
I love it. So wendy@corporatecowgirlup.com and the website is of course, Corporatecowgirlup.com. And I would love to be able to talk to you about what you want to see different in your next step, in your next career, as an executive. Or entry-level leaders, the sooner you jump on these things, the faster you learn, the tough lessons that help you to not struggle as much in your day to day growth of your own leadership skills.

Morag Barrett:
Wendy, thank you for your time today. It's been a pleasure. I've enjoyed the conversation. Look forward to seeing you for cocktails soon.

Wendy Bohling:
I love it.