Leadership Curveballs, Blind Spots and Black Holes, Episode 6

Because of the pandemic, and the unique challenges it is presenting for business leaders, we’re conducting a special series of extended In the Fire Segments featuring executives who are managing through the biggest curveball many have seen in their lifetimes, COVID 19.

In this episode, we’re featuring Erin Baudo Felter, Vice President of Social Impact at Okta, leading Okta for Good, who shares with us how the pandemic has affected her role as a leader, her biggest challenges, and her thoughts on “what’s next.”

Podcast Transcript

Hi everyone, this is Bobbie LaPorte, your host of Executive Aid Stations, Leadership Curve Balls, Blind Spots, and Black Holes Podcast. Each week we help busy leaders navigate through complex and versatile times with practical solutions for real-life challenges.

Today’s episode is not in our usual format because of the pandemic and the unique challenges it’s presenting for business leaders. We’re conducting a series of extended, what we call, in the fire segments, featuring executives who are managing through the biggest curveball many have seen in their lifetimes, COVID-19.

And today we have a very special guest joining us, Erin Baudo Felter. who will share with us how the pandemic has affected her role as a leader, her biggest challenge, and her thoughts on what’s next.

So let me tell you a little bit about Erin. Erin is the vice-president of social impact and leads Okta for Good, Okta’s corporate social impact initiative.

She’s charged with leveraging Okta’s most important assets. it’s people, product, and company resources to accelerate the impact of mission-driven organizations around the world. Erin has worked at the intersection of business and social impact for over a decade and has held various corporate social impact roles at Zynga, Yahoo, and Warner Brothers, and is now also part of a group of leaders, transforming tech philanthropy, redefining the relationships between companies and communities through radical collaboration with partners in every sector.

So, Erin, I want to welcome you to this special COVID-19 edition of our podcast. I know that you felt the impact of the pandemic in your company at Okta and with the new community partners and also in your family. So I’m very pleased to see you again and to have you join us.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

So let’s start with this question, what has been your biggest challenge during the pandemic? I’m sure there’s been many, but what’s been your biggest challenge.

Sure, there have been many for all of us and, you know, I’ll just add that not only with the pandemic, I think we’re now in the midst of another crisis, right?

Which is the crisis of racial injustice and protests and sort of unrest in our country around things that have been going on for a long time. So. It’s been hard and relentless what we’ve sort of all had to deal with and what we’ve gone through.

And I think for, for myself, going through these crises back to back in a role like mine, where we’re, as you said, myself, my team, we’re thinking about not just the company, not just our business and our long-term impact, not just our employees, but actually our communities as well, and be very connected to that.

I think what the hardest thing has been, is taking care of myself and my team while also trying to help everybody around us inside of our company respond and take action. So there’s many levels to that.

You know, I’m a big believer that none of us can help anybody if we, if we don’t take care of ourselves first.
And, for many of us, it’s been very challenging. For me personally, I’ve got a three and a six-year-old at home. Full-time job husband with a full-time job and all of that. And so that was very, very challenging just to sort of navigate, like, how do I even get my work done? How do I even find the hours in the day to get my work done?

Then you think about, you know, the team, right? So my team, small team, there’s four of us right now, but everybody’s feeling impacts of what’s going on in different ways. Some people are parents, some people are single and living at home, everybody’s dealing with that. And so how do you make space for that?

How do you take care of the team and then how do you do the next piece, which is what we’re really sort of existed our company at Okta to do, which is find ways to help the organization process what’s happening. Find ways for the organization to respond, and sort of hold all that for each and every one of our employees and for our executives. And turn that, that feeling and that anxiety and that desire for change into some actionable steps.

That’s right. There’s no question. I think you have a much bigger stage of players and stakeholders to deal with and probably the typical executive because you not only have your team, and then you also have from a personal perspective, also you have your family, but just because of the nature of your role, I mean, you really, in this environment, as you said, you have community partners outside that you’re supporting, that’s the real focus of your social impact initiative. You have the employees, so you’re trying to help them navigate through.

So, I know you have big shoulders, but I also know, that’s a lot to take on. So I’m hoping now that as things hopefully settle down a little bit coming out of this, that it won’t be such a stress for you.

Yeah.

But lots of different definitely appreciate that. There’s so many different types of audiences and stakeholders, internal and external that you’re trying to care for during this environment.

Yeah, you know, look, it’s a stress and anxiety for sure, but it’s also such a privilege and an opportunity too, you know? I may feel like I accomplished nothing on my to-do list at the end of a day, you know, in this time. But, there’s usually at least one thing, one conversation, one connection made, one moment where I can it’s okay, at least, what we did there, what I did there helps somebody through this in some small way.

So I’m sure there’s parts of every day that can be really satisfying for you.

So how has your role as a leader changed? We’ve alluded to that a little bit when you talk about all the different constituencies that you’re dealing with, both from your team and internally, but how do you think as a leader you’ve evolved during this time?

There’s a couple of things. First, back to sort of being a parent of young kids in this. It’s just like realizing and acknowledging my own limitations of, what is possible to achieve in a day, you know? And that was really hard in the first few weeks and months of this, of just not adjusting, not adjusting down my expectations for my own output in my own self.

It’s a little bit easier now, but the other one is, and, this is new, for me, but I think it’s really good. It’s just like saying, I don’t know. And being really honest about that. And in particular, I think with what’s going on with the protests and the racial injustice issues in this country and in our organization and how that’s manifesting in conversation is a lot of me saying, I just don’t know. I don’t have an answer here.

I had a meeting with my team a few days ago, sort of an emergency meeting to get on the phone and get their take on some things we were looking at around a response. And I could tell sort of halfway through that they were sort of responding to me as if they thought I had an answer already to my question and that I just wanted to them to give me some feedback or something.

And I finally said to them guys, I’m asking you, I pulled you on this call because I have no idea what to do here. And I need you to think with me, about all the pieces of this, and I need your ideas. I don’t have an answer and I’m not trying to influence you one way or the other. I really don’t know. We got to figure this out together and that’s new.

And I’ve seen that in lots of conversations with lots of different leaders at my company recently, I think there’s something really kind of wonderful about being able to say, I don’t know, and being able to throw up your hands and say, help, help me figure this out. Let’s communicate, let’s have a conversation about it.

And that, that is wonderful. And I think in these uncertain times, that’s a real sign of, vulnerability for leaders to basically say, you know what? I don’t have the answers. I don’t know. Let’s figure this out together because the days of leaders like standing up there at the top of the organization saying, here’s what we should do or here’s what we’re going to do, or here’s what I need you to do. That’s long gone because the world is changing so quickly. No one has the answers anymore.

That’s right. That’s right.

So sometimes it takes a situation like this to have people realize it’s okay to say, I don’t know.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Because that absolutely builds trust with your team. So, last question, given everything we’ve talked about, directionally, the future, the next phases we’re heading into, how are you in your organization thinking about what’s next?

It’s hard. It’s really hard to even imagine what’s next.

I’ve sort of shifted from a conversation with my team about, what’s next in terms of the content of our strategy, the content of our work, what we will do, what we will execute, what we deliver. From that into a conversation of more how so we may not know what the future will look like, and we may not know what our work will look like, but I do know that if nothing else, we need to maintain an incredible focus on empathy and agility as this thing evolves.

If we fail at one or both of those things, then we cannot do our jobs. Right? So on the empathy piece, you know, we are, we are sort of the big beating heart of our organization in so many ways because we’ve built that empathy muscle. We have all these different stakeholders. We deal with the community. We deal with employees. We deal with, Leadership and everybody in between.

And so we can actually model empathy for the company right now in a lot of really wonderful ways and help the company build that muscle. Right. And empathy is going to be how we get to the answer of what we want to do or what we should do when it comes time to make decisions on strategy and on the program and on investments in resourcing.

So I think that’s key and that’s always been important, but especially now, and then the other piece is, agility, which our CEO, Todd McKinnon has talked about a lot, through this crisis as being sort of a core, Guiding principles of how we need to show up, because, as hard as this is, and as, difficult as, what we’re seeing is for all of us, there are also tremendous opportunities for innovation here.

Yes.

Innovation for our business innovation for, in my case, like how we actually solve social problems and how we attack these issues, in different ways, especially because a lot of what we’ve been doing, isn’t working clearly. And so there’s opportunity for innovation. If we, again with our empathy muscle, listen to the needs of our stakeholders and listen to the needs out there and adjust, and then be agile to actually find those moments of innovation.

We come out of this better, stronger. By the way, business does great too, hopefully, and that’s good too, but there’s a bigger picture here. So anyway, that’s really how I’ve been framing it for myself, for my team. And, there’s still a lot of unknowns, but it really helps to program yourself.

Yes, yes, there are. But agility and empathy. I love that you’re in a very enviable position in your company to really foster that. And for it to have many benefits and outcomes.

So thank you. Thank you so much, for being a guest and sharing your insights and advice and to our listeners, we hope this week’s episode of Leadership, Curveballs, Blind Spots, and Black Holes provide you with some practical solutions and insights to the challenges you face as you navigate your own leadership journey through the new normal.

Be sure to join us next week for another episode. And in the meantime, stay safe and be well.