What does it take to step away from a successful corporate career and build something more meaningful? In this episode of The SAFE Leader Podcast, host Mark McBride-Wright sits down with Trisha Daho, Founder and CEO of Empowered, to explore her journey from Big Four partner to cultural change leader. Trisha shares how a single question reshaped her path, why she built her business around a covenant of trust, and what it really means to empower people to thrive at work.
From tackling diversity challenges and creating cultures of safety to showing up with vulnerability and authenticity, Trisha offers bold insights for leaders ready to reimagine what’s possible. Whether you’re navigating leadership in a technical field or rethinking your company’s culture, this conversation will leave you inspired to lead with honesty, embrace transformation, and create lasting impact.
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:00
Mark, hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I am your host, Mark McBride-Wright, and today I’m joined by Tricia Dahl, who is the founder and CEO of empowered where she partners with companies to transform their cultures, develop empowered leaders and unlock business growth through people centric strategies. Former Big Four partner Tricia now works with mid market firms globally throughout her fractional Chief People Officer model, helping them design and implement inclusive high performance cultures that deliver measurable results. Her firm specializes in cultural assessment, talent acquisition strategy, onboarding, mentoring, program, design and leadership coaching across generations, from Gen Z to boomers. She’s particularly known for her work in culture, crisis management and merger integration, as well as her bold, energizing presence as a speaker and change leader with nearly two decades in executive leadership at Ernst and Young and SS and G Tricia has built multi million dollar businesses, led global teams and driven transformation in industries ranging from tax and legal to technology and professional services. Today, she brings that same strategic acumen and heart to help companies align people performance and purpose. Trisha, welcome to the podcast.
Trisha Daho 1:26
Thank you so much for having me. That sounds so much more impressive than I think I really am.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:31
Oh, come on. Don’t play those achievements that is absolutely well earned and hard graft. I am sure of it. I’m sure of it. So we love starting off on the safe leader by going back and finding out about the person in front of us. So, so let’s go back, you know, tell us about the young Trisha.
Trisha Daho 1:56
Well, what’s funny is that I, I went into law I started out in law I went to law school with every intention of being an attorney, and I imagined some very glamorous job as an international business attorney. Frankly, I didn’t like the professor in international business when I was in law school and just went into a completely different arena. I did a lot of study in tax law in law school, and went directly into a big four accounting firm,
Mark McBride-Wright 2:25
so interesting that the course of travel that what you were going to do was influenced by your relationship with someone. And yeah, you know whether you like them are not. It just shows you how powerful influencers are on how we make, make career choices.
Trisha Daho 2:47
Oh, absolutely. I think, honestly, it has a lot to do with where we end up in school, too. I I fell in love with tax law because an attorney, I mean, because of a professor named Leon gavinay. He was old when I was in law school, so he’s already gone. Unfortunately, I I went to college being pre law, but majoring in business and specifically marketing. Hated marketing ended up being falling in love with another professor that was an econ professor, very, very tough. So, yeah, it’s always been, can I connect to the person meaningfully to learn what I need to learn.
Mark McBride-Wright 3:28
Must admit, you’re in some moment ago I fell in love with tax law.
Trisha Daho 3:36
Yes, I know it’s a little weird, a little very much a geeky thing, but yes,
Mark McBride-Wright 3:41
but you know, mustard put you in good stead for moving into the big four.
Trisha Daho 3:46
Yeah, at the time, the Big Four was hiring lots of attorneys, so I got lucky, and I had a pretty accelerated career path at EY, and I made partner back in 2006 was, had been doing a lot of culture and dei work, you know, from about the year 2000 when I was moved to Detroit, where I made partner and fell in love with, you know, I’ve always loved people like truly, deeply loved people. I find them utterly fascinating, and I became completely enamored with the idea that if we give people what they need, they will show up powerfully, not only for our firm but for our for themselves. Oh, I
Mark McBride-Wright 4:32
love that. The talk we often talk about joyful, liberating transformation. Does that play into that philosophy? Then that you that you
Trisha Daho 4:40
lead with. Absolutely, I do think it’s possible.
Mark McBride-Wright 4:44
Is there an origin story there where you experience this moment of transcendence, or this aha moment of thinking all this number and tax stuff? Actually, it’s the people that I’m connected with, like take us on that x.
Trisha Daho 5:00
Idiots. So I was just chugging along and enjoying my career. You know, I like things that are complex. I like solving really complex problems. I loved working with gigantic companies, and I loved working with the giant teams that I had, working with me to do those things. And then I came to France in 2011 and I was overworked. I had been working, you know, 7080, hour weeks for most of my career. And I met my husband, hi. We were sitting at a cafe across from Notre Dame in Paris, and I was on a conference call while we were at the cafe or looking Notre Dame, and without any judgment at all, he looked at me when I was done, and he asked me if I really loved this work that
Mark McBride-Wright 5:56
much. Hang on. Is this the moment? Was he already your husband? Or is this like, literally happy I didn’t
Trisha Daho 6:04
meet him that day, but yes, it was the same. It was the second time I came to visit him, not married, and I I didn’t even know what to say. No one had ever asked me that question. And I went home and I thought to myself, Why have I believed all this time that I am only capable of doing this very specific thing? Why have I not thought about how I can take these same exact skills where I’ve been very successful and apply them to something much more meaningful to me personally? And then I contemplated that I probably could have a greater impact as a third party on people’s cultures and their experiences in work than I am as a partner in a giant firm. Yeah, so I made the leap.
Mark McBride-Wright 6:52
You made the leap. Then you founded your your business. You want to tell us about that?
Trisha Daho 6:58
Then, yeah, I started the business with the idea of one very powerful thing that I call a covenant. And to me, the covenant is this, if, if you come to work for us, then we promise to give you what you need to be fully supported, to do your best work, thrive with us and raise your fullest potential while you’re with us, and you as a new employee, come to us with the understanding that you will give your best to reach your best while you’re with us. And if we did that, if we just did that,
Trisha Daho 7:34
we would have something else to do. So that’s how that’s how I was born,
Mark McBride-Wright 7:40
and talk us through then the the you know you so you said about coming in and being a third party. How is that going? How are you finding that? What’s business been like? Tell us some of your ups and downs and key successes and moments where you were like, oh my goodness, I made that right decision in that cafe, and Notre Dame to pivot.
Trisha Daho 8:05
You know, first of all, I love what I do. I really everything every day is really a joyful transformation, and it’s worthy work to me. I spend a lot of time convincing people of their own extraordinary selves, even, you know, C suite level people, and what they’re capable of and how they should think about things differently. Frankly, if people could read a book on leadership, and there are millions of them, then we’d all be great leaders. And frankly, I can, I can put on one hand, the leaders I’ve had in my life, if you think about just my professional life, that were really great leaders. And so it’s a very personal journey that takes a ton of self reflection, and I love that work. Now, the challenging parts for me, I don’t like doing billing and administrative
Mark McBride-Wright 9:02
stuff like that, yeah, all businesses, yeah.
Trisha Daho 9:06
I do think that I am because of my personality. I’m a very straightforward person, especially for a woman, I get to tell the truth to people in a way where it’s difficult for them to hear it, but they can get they can absorb it and do something with it. And I think that is probably my special sauce,
Mark McBride-Wright 9:26
and you’ve created a context for yourself to really land that then, because what I find is that when you’re in a big corporate you can have all the aspirations in the world to make culture change, but you are fundamentally hindered by virtue of your place on the organogram, your that you are.
Trisha Daho 9:51
I was, I was a, I was in charge of about 50 to 75 people toward the end of my tenure, but I had very little power. To do anything, to change, anything, to make any kind of policy decisions about what happens to these people. And I felt honestly, I felt like not just me, but a lot of my fellow partners were only using about a third of our talent in the jobs that we were doing.
Mark McBride-Wright 10:18
And now I accumulate an experience across some bread in other organizations and helping other companies. You’re then, do you find you’re able to then see themes, common themes between different organizations, and you know, it becomes a sort of pattern, and you’re like, Oh, this isn’t any different. You think it’s unique and different to your entity in your cultural context. But actually, rest assured, I can help you.
Trisha Daho 10:47
Yes, so I we spend primarily, all, most of our time in what I call professional services companies. So a lot of accounting firms and a lot of law firms primarily. And the exciting thing for me was to find out that the facts might be different, the solutions might be different because you’re sitting in different geographies with other external factors, but the issues are the same. And that was great, even though I moved to Europe and now I’m doing Europe as well as the US. The thing we do a lot of cultural surveys, and we always see the same trends over and over again, people feel a lack of transparency and communication. They often feel that they don’t know what their real career path is. There isn’t enough visibility around what the next step is and what to do. And feel like they want better performance feedback. People are very eager to learn more and be developed more. That’s huge. But yes, they’re always the same trending three or five items
Mark McBride-Wright 11:57
you’re making me think about often, the type of clients that I’ll work with are not that they’re big entities as well, but it’s a subculture that’s created with like an engineering construction program, where there’s a workforce that’s hived together to create a Project team that have sort of subcultures back at base, you know, in their parent organization. But then there’s this tension with the with the new entity, nor the new project. And you know, when you there are many large infrastructure projects that are happening now to help us try and meet Net Zero targets, so on and so forth. And it’s and actually, engineering has quite a high percentage of men working in sector, you know, over over 80% which in technical roles. It’s different when you look at support roles. And obviously there’s a big drive to try and diversify gender balance. And that’s like another piece of work. But then looking at the context as it is now, as a snapshot of the workforce that we have, are there any hints or tips that we could borrow from your work that you’ve been doing with professional services firms where you find you know that that context that I’m describing, about engineering, construction, manufacturing. Have you ever worked with any of those types of organizations and what? What advice would you give when there’s a gender imbalance in that place?
Trisha Daho 13:32
Well, so depending on the industry you’re looking at, you’re going to have different issues to start with. So if you’re if your desire is to have greater levels of diversity in your company, then that’s a whole other discussion as to how it’s functioning. Now, if you are, if you’re, let’s say you’re a construction company, and it’s 90% men and only women are in support roles. I would probably go in and say, What is, what is the potential trajectory for these women in these support roles, do they have trajectory? Because there’s usually a very in that, in that that obviously different scenario, where there’s very different experiences, you obviously see a different treatment. It’s unwritten, but there’s a different treatment of someone who’s in the actual client serving role and the support roles. So there’s all kinds of stuff going on there. I always tell people to focus on cleaning and amplifying and exemplifying what you want in your own house before you go out looking for greater levels of diversity to bring in, because you don’t want them to come into a house that is not ready for that. Yeah. So it comes down to what is possible here. How are we treating each other? Are we really good at understanding the differences in each other, no matter how homogeneous we look, what do we have in place? To make sure that happens the way we want it to. How are people evaluated? Who’s being rewarded, who’s getting coaching and tutelage, who’s not Who are we? What kind of people are we hiring? Where are we going to find them, to hire them? Do we have values that thread all the way from an interview selection question to deciding to promote someone to the highest levels of our company, and is everyone held accountable to that? So there’s a lot you can do to ready yourself. And then you think to yourself, what skill sets are really necessary, and where have I not even bothered to look for the highest qualified people so that I can get greater levels of diversity?
Speaker 1 15:39
Yeah, that latter point.
Mark McBride-Wright 15:43
My interest there as well, when you were saying about mapping out career trajectories for every level of the organization, and that trajectory doesn’t always need in the same lane, does it of having to be now being creative and thinking, what up filling me skilling. Could we do to move people across? I remember one client knew that they could backfill gender diversity easier in their support functions relative to their technical functions. What they did was run a upskill and rescaling and internal training program for women in the support functions, saying, hey, which of us would like to be our future construction managers or construction leaders? Or, you know, you’re doing program management up in the support world, like, Would you like to apply this to a live project? Come and do this qualification, etc, on job learning. And so whilst it wasn’t necessarily changing their percentages of it was increasing their percentages in a area of their organization that was harder to recruit in from from the outside. And I just, I just, you’ve made me think about some recent clients I’ve been working with, and thinking, are we actually doing that mapping for for everyone and and it’s particularly it’s interesting when you think about these projects where, like different organizations come together, almost like a shared talent pool solution, rather than being in competition with one another. Actually like pooling resources to them. Have have a group of a group of people. You mentioned that you offer fractional CPO service for mid market companies and that that that’s interesting. I read a book when on holiday was Richard Harkins book called How to make 1,000,000,009 steps. He founded a company called home serve in the UK, grew it and then sold it to a Canadian e firm for like, 4.1 billion pounds or something. He outlines in it some really interesting statistics about the composition of the UK market in that over 40% I’m going to get these wrong. I’m saying off my head like something like most people are employed. Over 40% of the workforce are employed in large employers. But large businesses, for those over you know, 250 people only account for something like 10% of all the companies in the UK, whereas nine, you know, most people and most businesses, sorry, are small medium enterprises, and like 90 odd percent. But when you look at that SME bracket, there’s a real spread of lots that are small and get a lot of support, start up, scale up, accelerators, but there’s an opportunity to positively influence GDP by looking at those medium sized enterprises, and try and get some of them up to the large, you know, the large size, and then generating massive, more relative revenues, you know. So I wonder is that is that sort of your target company size when you say mid market, and does mid market vary from us to Europe to the UK? Where do you find
Trisha Daho 19:27
being that different? So I’m typically working with firms that are between 50 people and probably around three or 400 people. Most of these firms are, they have an HR function that is, to me, a compliance function. It’s important. It’s really important, but it’s a compliance function. So we come in and say, your company doesn’t warrant having a full time executive level Chief People Officer role, but it does warrant. Someone with their eye all the time on CPO strategy and implementation and kind of setting you up to be an enterprise level firm. Yeah, that’s what we do.
Speaker 1 20:10
Interesting.
Mark McBride-Wright 20:13
And so how, like, how long is a piece of string? Is probably the answer to this question. But you know what? What sort of how much time do you find is typically required? Or, you know, if someone’s listening to this and thinking, I’m actually in that situation, I could do that. Oh, how much time is fractional in terms of me?
Trisha Daho 20:34
Okay, so we were typically working with our firms for about 25 hours a month to about 35 hours a month. Okay, that’s probably the sweet spot. And we do, you know, we start with assessments. It’s just like any other big strategic implementation. We start with assessments, we move into strategic planning, and how are we going to set the dashboard up to know we were successful? What are the metrics? And then we implement, and we also do the day to day. You know, we’ve got a situation, we’ve got a situation, we’ve got a situation, and we help them. We offload that from them so that they can actually do the stuff they really want to be doing. Because the leadership in these firms, especially the ones we’re working with that are professional service firms and kind of lead by committee, and everyone’s doing a lot of everything, it allows them to offload a lot of the stuff that we’re doing to us, so they can focus on the stuff that they’ve got to and we’re usually there for two to three years to set all this up, get it really amplified and optimized, and then we can hand The baton to someone who is not as executive level, but can implement, keep this stuff going that we put together.
Mark McBride-Wright 21:48
Nathan, what do you find? You’re often called in to support. Then, when a company’s in cultural crisis,
Trisha Daho 21:54
in crisis, it’s usually some triggering event that says, Oh no, we really have to do something about this now. So it could be anything from a C level person that created a toxic work environment all of a sudden to a disgruntled employee who cites something on social media and everything goes to hell. It could be all kinds of things. And we get called in, we usually work on a joint team. There’s usually an employment attorney involved. There’s a PR firm involved. And we work as a team to figure out what to do in the situation in the near term, and then I assess the situation for a people perspective. And then, just like we do everywhere else, we create strategies and limitation for how to fix it, how to get them on the road to fully healthy? Yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 22:47
So equal engineers and the safe leader, the podcast, the brand that I’m building, Safe is a leadership framework that stands for share, act, feel, empower. So I’m curious under share, how do you use your own story to model vulnerability and the transformation that your clients and leaders? You know the people that you coach, you use your own frame of reference to help inspire them.
Trisha Daho 23:17
Well, a lot of it. A lot of my story feeds into all the things that leader other leaders go through. I have been an outsider most of my life. I’m a very gregarious person, very social, all that stuff. An extrovert, for sure. But I grew up in a neighborhood that was all Italian immigrants, except for us. I went to college where I was the only one, you know, one of the very few people that were not Jewish. I was in a when I went to the big four. I was, you know, I had been raised middle class, working class, and, you know, ascended into a completely different economic level, you know, with people. So I know what it feels like to be vulnerable because you feel like you don’t fit in. And I know what it feels like to someone to show you that you’re capable and that you you have the tools available to you right now. So I think that vulnerability in being completely honest with where you are, but also where you’re capable of going, is what makes us really successful. And everyone on my team is like that too. We’ve all got stories. We’ve all got imposter syndrome. We’ve all got, you know, how am I going to accomplish this gigantic thing, or how am I going to get out of this gigantic, you know, burden that I’ve got right now? I don’t know how to navigate it. We’ve all been there, and it’s not really an extraordinary talent. I understand and I can help you navigate this, because I know what exactly what you’re going through. Yeah, you’re
Speaker 1 25:00
having that intuition as well, isn’t it?
Mark McBride-Wright 25:04
Even if you can’t relate to them, making it relatable for them to another, and that’s the you you almost become a better consultant, a better leader, a better advisor, coach, whatever. Like, the more like, the more, more people you’ve helped, because you have, you have a larger sample size of challenges and trials and tribulations that people have been through, and that that comes back to that is a bit like that image I saw once, where it was a few scattered dots that said data, and then some lines between them that said knowledge and then wisdom was everything joined up seeing the picture, and you’re trying to bring that wisdom, aren’t you, to
Trisha Daho 25:51
absolutely and frankly, being a fractional Chief People Officer and working for several firms means I get to bring a greater bandwidth of potential, issues, challenges, aspirations, together and create solutions for everything. So it allows me to see much more going on and the intricacies and nuances of those things at the same time.
Mark McBride-Wright 26:14
Yeah, I wonder if there’s an opportunity to create a role with like a fractional Chief Safety Officer or chief. You know, a lot of my work, a lot of my work, people that I work with, often my customers, are technical teams, right? They’re working on design problems and design challenges, and they’re looking at physical hazards and physical risks and impact in the body and people and plant and equipment and what have you. And my drum beat is using that beautiful and cultural binding force, because it’s so strong in construction and engineering and extending that psychological safety stuff that we feel about, oh, that’s about 40, yeah.
Trisha Daho 27:12
You know, in my first in my first professional life, I interviewed probably 5000 engineers and scientists.
Speaker 1 27:19
We tell us about that. What did you find?
Trisha Daho 27:26
I was, it was for the purpose of finding tax credits, believe it or not. But what I found, well, they’re they love to talk about what they do. Yeah, they get very passionate about it. And that was the thing that kept me going, right? Because it could have been very dry and it wasn’t. They’re typically introverts. They’re not fantastic people, leaders, the way we think about it. I mean, neither accountants are lawyers a lot of the time. So it’s not like it’s peculiar. They like safety, they like stability. They like things not to change. Yeah. So I can imagine, if I had been there in the role of someone around culture, there would have been challenges related to that, because people assume change means negativity, yeah, positivity, yeah. So there’s a lot to be done there, I would guess, and how people interact with each other, and how you even inspire them to want to be interacting with each other instead of, you know, very closed in on a problem and how to solve it. But yeah, there’s a lot to work with there.
Mark McBride-Wright 28:38
There’s a lot I think I’m going to spend the rest of my career in that liver.
Trisha Daho 28:46
Because think about it, you take this very introverted, very technically driven person and you say, Okay, we’re tapping you on the shoulder. You’re now a leader, and you’re in charge of finding work out there
Trisha Daho 29:06
for even though that’s what you aspire to. So what do we do now?
Mark McBride-Wright 29:11
Well, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s what I’m trying to create and solve and get tapping into, like men being vulnerable and showing up in a different way being I’ve got this prop that my friend, my public speaking coach, gave me, Eduardo, and it’s a little lighthouse. And I always use the analogy because it’s something that’s engineered as well. You imagine a lighthouse on the coast that beams out its light. Come rain or shine, it’s there, it’s present. It’s sending out a signal, and that helps the boats, the vessels, the ships that are in arduous conditions, potentially still see a path. Think of these lighthouses as the metaphors for our stories. So if we have more people sharing our stories, it creates a great. Greater propensity for us all to create learned experience from one another’s lived experience, and then it makes some of the topics that we don’t talk about that are still taboo in the workplace get some oxygen, and then we can then interrelate with one another, because I find a lot of men pack down that stuff because it’s relevant. And as men were told, we can’t show up and share that so, you know.
Trisha Daho 30:24
And we have to get rewarded. They get rewarded for doing that. I mean, in a male dominated field where I made partner, it was the same for me. I had to be molded into a cookie cutter thing, a mold that was stoic most of the time, you know. And it took me a couple years of rediscovering who I really was. When I left that scenario, I recently
Mark McBride-Wright 30:48
had a client talk about, like, masculine energy and feminine energy. And I haven’t really sort of gone down that rabbit hole of energy levels ascribed to, like punch and stuff. I don’t know what my view is on it yet, you know, but what did you feel you relate to that when I say those words from the
Trisha Daho 31:09
absolutely, you had to be very masculine energy at work. And the funny thing is, women have to be, well, at least back in the day when I was in corporate, you had to be very masculine energy until you were supposed to back way down, because you’re female, you couldn’t be completely outspoken, but you had to conduct yourself in a very in a very masculine energy way. It’s very complicated. I’m certainly not the the PhD that would be able to give you a dissertation on it, but it was if you don’t, if you do not allow people to show up in the energy they already are, they will never feel safe, and they will never bring their best to the table.
Mark McBride-Wright 31:53
Yeah, like, you know some gay men that tap maybe more into their feminine energy, in relation to, you know, straight men, and that that leads to masking, covering, hiding, adopting different behaviors. And it’s ironic, isn’t it, that probably most of the straight guys are like, it’s so funny that the social script that people feel like they have to follow making small talk. You know, did you watch the game at the weekend and how,
Trisha Daho 32:25
let’s pretend that we like, you know, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 32:28
find out that actually neither of them won. And
Trisha Daho 32:31
it gets even deeper than that, if you look at how other, for example, racial groups or people who are disabled and having to mask the disability and the effects of that. They call it code switching in racial terms, so that you literally have to become have the attributes of someone different when you’re at work that is just really toxic, like you can’t be your best self in that scenario. There’s no way
Mark McBride-Wright 32:57
totally and I always use that analogy with my clients in terms of like an energy delta. And I’m like, you want people doing high risk, high hazard operations not just be physically present, but mentally abstinent. Want them to be fully present and mentally focused on the task in hand and not wasting energy, code switching, being someone who they’re not, or projecting a different version of themselves. And, you know, it’s surprising, actually, a lot of the white straight men, mask, cover, hide absolutely
Trisha Daho 33:30
and they’re just less aware of it because it aligns more with who they’re supposed to like who they are already.
Mark McBride-Wright 33:37
Yeah. How do we how do we undo that?
Trisha Daho 33:41
Well, it’s a long one thing I was thinking about as you were talking was one thing that would really help is a much deeper level of emotional intelligence applied to all those scenarios. I really think emotional intelligence is the key to a lot of this, in managing bias and managing your own emotions, and understanding your own emotions and how they interact with other people, being able to read the room and having situational awareness as it approaches people, all those things are extremely good because it forces you to slow down and understand what’s actually happening and decide intentionally what to do next.
Speaker 1 34:23
Absolutely love it that
Mark McBride-Wright 34:27
at scale, with every person working in a technical role, maybe we create a better a better humanity, a better absolutely, I just came back, actually, from living in New York for a year. So I lived in Brooklyn, and I was trying to make progress with with my work, and even with all the changes with the new administration and the, you know, regression on culture based work, yeah, and stuff. I still came to felt that there’s an opportunity for safety and safety focus to provide a continuation of this dialog. And, yeah, who knows? Maybe there’s, maybe there’s still some, some some momentum in that, but it’s, it’s hard, you know you’re talking about things here that cross cultural boundaries and are cross discipline and anything that’s across a singular thing, it makes it inherently harder, because there are more red tape and barriers and those egos that get in the way. You must have to have built quite a lot of resilience then to work at that breadth that you spoke about as a fractional CPO, yes.
Trisha Daho 35:51
And I love that part of it. I love that part of it, yeah. It’s ever changing and always complex. And I love that. Love it.
Mark McBride-Wright 36:03
You’re making me. Yeah, you’re making me. Sort of question how I show up with regard to my role as a change agent. What I wonder if there’s something I could borrow from this idea of doing fractional work. Good for thought there.
Trisha Daho 36:20
I mean, you know, I started out consulting, like doing these big consulting projects, and what I learned really fast was that I was already doing this work along the way of implementing these projects, because it made the work much easier for me to be in it with them and helping them through the the I hate to say the pain, but the pain and challenges of the change. And so I said, Why don’t I just offer it as a solution, instead of doing, you know, keeping that barrier between consultant and, you know, client, why don’t I just become way more in the weeds with them, so I can get them through the whole thing much more easily
Mark McBride-Wright 37:00
this morning, summarized a meeting that I attended yesterday where I was invited to listen and observe, and I was sitting there thinking me pitching just some of our safe leader training and get a certificate. I’m like, I hasn’t gonna cut it. I’m like, this, this needs me to, like, pull my sleeves and get in there. So I’m like, How do I make that happen? And and I think it’s, it’s, it’s what you’re suggesting. Actually, I’m gonna have to get in it anyway to help me as well and broker a near term agreement where I am part of the team for a bit,
Speaker 1 37:41
and then that helps help
Mark McBride-Wright 37:45
looking ahead, then what are you in the work that you’re doing just now? What emerging workforce trends are you finding are coming up that people are most focused on solving in their organizational problems?
Trisha Daho 38:02
I Well, performance management still continues to be a big deal. I’m obsessed with leader accountability. I don’t think we’re changing fast enough, because leaders are not held accountable to the what they’re creating. We we we measure them on things that are very easy to measure, like revenue growth, etc, but we don’t measure them on how well their people are doing or what what culture they’re actually creating. I’m kind of obsessed with that. There’s a lot of talk in the industries I’m working in around AI and how that affects people and onboarding and and development and all those things. So that’s going to continue to be huge. There’s a giant influence of PE and PE firms in the industries that I’m working in. So that’s going to continue to be a strange conversation and how that works, and what you’re left with when they sell, and that kind of that kind of thing. So that’s kind of the stuff that people are talking about all the time. There’s still a massive focus on leader development, so we’ll continue to do a lot of that. But those are probably, you know, and there’s always a scarcity of talent. There’s less people going into accounting, there’s less people going into law. So what are we going to do differently? How are we going to get it done?
Mark McBride-Wright 39:19
You mentioned some reusing the wrong metric, perhaps, are there? What do you have base level? You know, what you prescribe in terms of like key metrics. What key metrics should someone have in their leadership, scoring, leadership scorecard for individuals.
Trisha Daho 39:43
So if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna start holding people accountable for the humans they lead, then how well are they being developed? Do we have evidence that you’re, you’re developing your people doing, evidence that they are having a positive experience? Science with us? Are they thriving? And you can measure that? Are we retaining them the best, highest performers, especially, how are you dealing with the low performers? There’s a there’s a way to do that that either amplifies your culture or destroys it. What are you doing? So there’s many ways to measure it’s you can use both quantitative and qualified qualitative data to do that.
Mark McBride-Wright 40:29
Yeah, like culture surveys, engagement survey,
Trisha Daho 40:32
360 feedback, which most people tried 15 years ago and abandoned quickly because they didn’t like it. There’s a there’s a tendency to not only be afraid of self reflection, yes, be afraid of the reflection of others onto us. And really, they’re just data points. They’re data points. If we if we accept that none of us are perfect, then why don’t we accept a greater understanding of how we can be better.
Speaker 1 41:00
Yeah, yeah, that might even be a sound right on this podcast.
Mark McBride-Wright 41:08
The edits the script. Love that. What legacy Are you hoping to leave? Then, through empowered, you didn’t say the name of your business, actually, for everyone on the call, tell us the name and about it, and, yeah,
Trisha Daho 41:22
I just saw, I saw most leaders being disempowered, right, including me. And I decided that was never going to be me again. And I chose empowered, because that, to me, was always the goal. Who are we going to empower? How am I going to empower myself and my team? And what kind of difference are we going to make? Because we’ve created empowered cultures.
Mark McBride-Wright 41:48
I love it. I love it. It’s actually what the E stands for in my state leader framework, where I feel empowered, and it’s such a powerful word. When I set up my LGBT organization inter engineering, the three words we chose were connect, inform and empower. Connection, bringing together the engineers that are want to make change but don’t know how to do it from within inform, running events to generate thought leadership pieces it could then use to influence internally and then empower. Because sometimes it gets hard. Sometimes you’re up against it when you’re trying to push that cultural change, and you just need a bit of raising up your hope and showing that there’s light and opportunity and potential and to learn from one another. And I think the great word for your leadership that you’re seeking to create, because leaders feel like that as well, right? You know, they they’re not perfect. To your point, if we accept that, I often find that leaders in fear of the shadow that they cast, or sorry they forget that they cast a leadership shadow across the organization, and for fear of getting it wrong, saying the wrong thing, or they shy away from even leaning into any the awkward topics or the intangible stuff. But they forget that if they did do it, and did lean in and were seen to be vulnerable and learning in real time. It has a massive ripple effect across the business, because it’s given permission for other leaders and other direct supports and stuff to be showing up in that way and leading and leading in a different way. But they need that empowerment, don’t they? And that’s exactly what you and your business is help and plug is that confidence and that state space for them to to learn and share and even your services for them to lean upon as they’re scaling and subject to all to the trends that you’re saying about PE pressure and business cycles and investment, the day to day stuff where it’s easy to forget about people side of things, yeah. What legacy Are you hoping to leave? Then I’ve
Trisha Daho 44:11
been thinking a lot about this recently, because we still are not seeing enough movement fast enough for my taste, right? And how can we combine, you know, collaborate with other organizations and other people to make a bigger impact faster. I probably have 13 years left before I retire. Okay, so what am I going to do in these next 13 years to make the biggest positive impact on the greatest number of people. So I’m really thinking about that, but really the legacy is simply the same as it’s always been, and that is, how do we give people the tools to be exactly the best person they’re supposed to be in the in the role they’re in? Or. Sure the role they’re next supposed to be
Mark McBride-Wright 45:01
in? Yeah, I love that. I love that just looking one step ahead and having active talent development strategies that can go across your business or diagonally or across and up rather than just up. That’s, that’s a good that’s, that’s a good way to think I like that. Hey, Quick Fire question round, are you ready? I am. Hey, what’s one leadership mantra you live by?
Trisha Daho 45:34
Always be self reflective,
Mark McBride-Wright 45:37
a cultural myth that needs debunking.
Trisha Daho 45:42
Vivek, that culture is not is not unintentional.
Mark McBride-Wright 45:48
What’s your go to coaching question that always gets results?
Trisha Daho 45:54
What are you most afraid of?
Mark McBride-Wright 45:57
What’s that book you gift or recommend the most
Trisha Daho 46:00
emotional intelligence.
Mark McBride-Wright 46:04
What’s your favorite way to unwind after a powerful workshop or Keynote?
Trisha Daho 46:08
My most powerful wife?
Mark McBride-Wright 46:10
Way to unwind? Unwind? Yeah,
Trisha Daho 46:14
I like to travel. Travel is always my best. Nothing more exhilarating to me than landing in a place where I don’t speak the language and having to figure it
Mark McBride-Wright 46:25
all out. What’s one word that describes your leadership style,
Trisha Daho 46:31
fully honest,
Mark McBride-Wright 46:33
what’s a generational stereotype that you love to break
Trisha Daho 46:39
that Gen Zs are actually incredibly inspired
Mark McBride-Wright 46:45
coffee tea or something celebratory. Your go to,
Trisha Daho 46:51
I am an American, so it’s iced coffee.
Speaker 1 46:56
Iced coffee. Okay, so you’re
Mark McBride-Wright 46:58
going to say drip coffee. And finally, what advice would you give your younger self entering leadership?
Trisha Daho 47:09
You’ve already got it. Girl,
Speaker 1 47:12
love it. Love it. That’s great. Well, Trisha,
Mark McBride-Wright 47:16
I’ve really, really enjoyed this chat. If people want to find out more about your business, or to get in touch with you. How should they do that?
Trisha Daho 47:25
They can email me at Tricia T, R, I, S, H, A, at empowered, l, c.com, or find me on LinkedIn at Tricia Dow, D, A, H, O, fantastic.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:36
Well, thank you so much. You really made me think and tell them some perspective. I appreciate it.
Trisha Daho 47:42
Thank you for having me. This was great. I.
E040: The Power of Empowered Leadership
Podcast Description
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:00
Mark, hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I am your host, Mark McBride-Wright, and today I’m joined by Tricia Dahl, who is the founder and CEO of empowered where she partners with companies to transform their cultures, develop empowered leaders and unlock business growth through people centric strategies. Former Big Four partner Tricia now works with mid market firms globally throughout her fractional Chief People Officer model, helping them design and implement inclusive high performance cultures that deliver measurable results. Her firm specializes in cultural assessment, talent acquisition strategy, onboarding, mentoring, program, design and leadership coaching across generations, from Gen Z to boomers. She’s particularly known for her work in culture, crisis management and merger integration, as well as her bold, energizing presence as a speaker and change leader with nearly two decades in executive leadership at Ernst and Young and SS and G Tricia has built multi million dollar businesses, led global teams and driven transformation in industries ranging from tax and legal to technology and professional services. Today, she brings that same strategic acumen and heart to help companies align people performance and purpose. Trisha, welcome to the podcast.
Trisha Daho 1:26
Thank you so much for having me. That sounds so much more impressive than I think I really am.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:31
Oh, come on. Don’t play those achievements that is absolutely well earned and hard graft. I am sure of it. I’m sure of it. So we love starting off on the safe leader by going back and finding out about the person in front of us. So, so let’s go back, you know, tell us about the young Trisha.
Trisha Daho 1:56
Well, what’s funny is that I, I went into law I started out in law I went to law school with every intention of being an attorney, and I imagined some very glamorous job as an international business attorney. Frankly, I didn’t like the professor in international business when I was in law school and just went into a completely different arena. I did a lot of study in tax law in law school, and went directly into a big four accounting firm,
Mark McBride-Wright 2:25
so interesting that the course of travel that what you were going to do was influenced by your relationship with someone. And yeah, you know whether you like them are not. It just shows you how powerful influencers are on how we make, make career choices.
Trisha Daho 2:47
Oh, absolutely. I think, honestly, it has a lot to do with where we end up in school, too. I I fell in love with tax law because an attorney, I mean, because of a professor named Leon gavinay. He was old when I was in law school, so he’s already gone. Unfortunately, I I went to college being pre law, but majoring in business and specifically marketing. Hated marketing ended up being falling in love with another professor that was an econ professor, very, very tough. So, yeah, it’s always been, can I connect to the person meaningfully to learn what I need to learn.
Mark McBride-Wright 3:28
Must admit, you’re in some moment ago I fell in love with tax law.
Trisha Daho 3:36
Yes, I know it’s a little weird, a little very much a geeky thing, but yes,
Mark McBride-Wright 3:41
but you know, mustard put you in good stead for moving into the big four.
Trisha Daho 3:46
Yeah, at the time, the Big Four was hiring lots of attorneys, so I got lucky, and I had a pretty accelerated career path at EY, and I made partner back in 2006 was, had been doing a lot of culture and dei work, you know, from about the year 2000 when I was moved to Detroit, where I made partner and fell in love with, you know, I’ve always loved people like truly, deeply loved people. I find them utterly fascinating, and I became completely enamored with the idea that if we give people what they need, they will show up powerfully, not only for our firm but for our for themselves. Oh, I
Mark McBride-Wright 4:32
love that. The talk we often talk about joyful, liberating transformation. Does that play into that philosophy? Then that you that you
Trisha Daho 4:40
lead with. Absolutely, I do think it’s possible.
Mark McBride-Wright 4:44
Is there an origin story there where you experience this moment of transcendence, or this aha moment of thinking all this number and tax stuff? Actually, it’s the people that I’m connected with, like take us on that x.
Trisha Daho 5:00
Idiots. So I was just chugging along and enjoying my career. You know, I like things that are complex. I like solving really complex problems. I loved working with gigantic companies, and I loved working with the giant teams that I had, working with me to do those things. And then I came to France in 2011 and I was overworked. I had been working, you know, 7080, hour weeks for most of my career. And I met my husband, hi. We were sitting at a cafe across from Notre Dame in Paris, and I was on a conference call while we were at the cafe or looking Notre Dame, and without any judgment at all, he looked at me when I was done, and he asked me if I really loved this work that
Mark McBride-Wright 5:56
much. Hang on. Is this the moment? Was he already your husband? Or is this like, literally happy I didn’t
Trisha Daho 6:04
meet him that day, but yes, it was the same. It was the second time I came to visit him, not married, and I I didn’t even know what to say. No one had ever asked me that question. And I went home and I thought to myself, Why have I believed all this time that I am only capable of doing this very specific thing? Why have I not thought about how I can take these same exact skills where I’ve been very successful and apply them to something much more meaningful to me personally? And then I contemplated that I probably could have a greater impact as a third party on people’s cultures and their experiences in work than I am as a partner in a giant firm. Yeah, so I made the leap.
Mark McBride-Wright 6:52
You made the leap. Then you founded your your business. You want to tell us about that?
Trisha Daho 6:58
Then, yeah, I started the business with the idea of one very powerful thing that I call a covenant. And to me, the covenant is this, if, if you come to work for us, then we promise to give you what you need to be fully supported, to do your best work, thrive with us and raise your fullest potential while you’re with us, and you as a new employee, come to us with the understanding that you will give your best to reach your best while you’re with us. And if we did that, if we just did that,
Trisha Daho 7:34
we would have something else to do. So that’s how that’s how I was born,
Mark McBride-Wright 7:40
and talk us through then the the you know you so you said about coming in and being a third party. How is that going? How are you finding that? What’s business been like? Tell us some of your ups and downs and key successes and moments where you were like, oh my goodness, I made that right decision in that cafe, and Notre Dame to pivot.
Trisha Daho 8:05
You know, first of all, I love what I do. I really everything every day is really a joyful transformation, and it’s worthy work to me. I spend a lot of time convincing people of their own extraordinary selves, even, you know, C suite level people, and what they’re capable of and how they should think about things differently. Frankly, if people could read a book on leadership, and there are millions of them, then we’d all be great leaders. And frankly, I can, I can put on one hand, the leaders I’ve had in my life, if you think about just my professional life, that were really great leaders. And so it’s a very personal journey that takes a ton of self reflection, and I love that work. Now, the challenging parts for me, I don’t like doing billing and administrative
Mark McBride-Wright 9:02
stuff like that, yeah, all businesses, yeah.
Trisha Daho 9:06
I do think that I am because of my personality. I’m a very straightforward person, especially for a woman, I get to tell the truth to people in a way where it’s difficult for them to hear it, but they can get they can absorb it and do something with it. And I think that is probably my special sauce,
Mark McBride-Wright 9:26
and you’ve created a context for yourself to really land that then, because what I find is that when you’re in a big corporate you can have all the aspirations in the world to make culture change, but you are fundamentally hindered by virtue of your place on the organogram, your that you are.
Trisha Daho 9:51
I was, I was a, I was in charge of about 50 to 75 people toward the end of my tenure, but I had very little power. To do anything, to change, anything, to make any kind of policy decisions about what happens to these people. And I felt honestly, I felt like not just me, but a lot of my fellow partners were only using about a third of our talent in the jobs that we were doing.
Mark McBride-Wright 10:18
And now I accumulate an experience across some bread in other organizations and helping other companies. You’re then, do you find you’re able to then see themes, common themes between different organizations, and you know, it becomes a sort of pattern, and you’re like, Oh, this isn’t any different. You think it’s unique and different to your entity in your cultural context. But actually, rest assured, I can help you.
Trisha Daho 10:47
Yes, so I we spend primarily, all, most of our time in what I call professional services companies. So a lot of accounting firms and a lot of law firms primarily. And the exciting thing for me was to find out that the facts might be different, the solutions might be different because you’re sitting in different geographies with other external factors, but the issues are the same. And that was great, even though I moved to Europe and now I’m doing Europe as well as the US. The thing we do a lot of cultural surveys, and we always see the same trends over and over again, people feel a lack of transparency and communication. They often feel that they don’t know what their real career path is. There isn’t enough visibility around what the next step is and what to do. And feel like they want better performance feedback. People are very eager to learn more and be developed more. That’s huge. But yes, they’re always the same trending three or five items
Mark McBride-Wright 11:57
you’re making me think about often, the type of clients that I’ll work with are not that they’re big entities as well, but it’s a subculture that’s created with like an engineering construction program, where there’s a workforce that’s hived together to create a Project team that have sort of subcultures back at base, you know, in their parent organization. But then there’s this tension with the with the new entity, nor the new project. And you know, when you there are many large infrastructure projects that are happening now to help us try and meet Net Zero targets, so on and so forth. And it’s and actually, engineering has quite a high percentage of men working in sector, you know, over over 80% which in technical roles. It’s different when you look at support roles. And obviously there’s a big drive to try and diversify gender balance. And that’s like another piece of work. But then looking at the context as it is now, as a snapshot of the workforce that we have, are there any hints or tips that we could borrow from your work that you’ve been doing with professional services firms where you find you know that that context that I’m describing, about engineering, construction, manufacturing. Have you ever worked with any of those types of organizations and what? What advice would you give when there’s a gender imbalance in that place?
Trisha Daho 13:32
Well, so depending on the industry you’re looking at, you’re going to have different issues to start with. So if you’re if your desire is to have greater levels of diversity in your company, then that’s a whole other discussion as to how it’s functioning. Now, if you are, if you’re, let’s say you’re a construction company, and it’s 90% men and only women are in support roles. I would probably go in and say, What is, what is the potential trajectory for these women in these support roles, do they have trajectory? Because there’s usually a very in that, in that that obviously different scenario, where there’s very different experiences, you obviously see a different treatment. It’s unwritten, but there’s a different treatment of someone who’s in the actual client serving role and the support roles. So there’s all kinds of stuff going on there. I always tell people to focus on cleaning and amplifying and exemplifying what you want in your own house before you go out looking for greater levels of diversity to bring in, because you don’t want them to come into a house that is not ready for that. Yeah. So it comes down to what is possible here. How are we treating each other? Are we really good at understanding the differences in each other, no matter how homogeneous we look, what do we have in place? To make sure that happens the way we want it to. How are people evaluated? Who’s being rewarded, who’s getting coaching and tutelage, who’s not Who are we? What kind of people are we hiring? Where are we going to find them, to hire them? Do we have values that thread all the way from an interview selection question to deciding to promote someone to the highest levels of our company, and is everyone held accountable to that? So there’s a lot you can do to ready yourself. And then you think to yourself, what skill sets are really necessary, and where have I not even bothered to look for the highest qualified people so that I can get greater levels of diversity?
Speaker 1 15:39
Yeah, that latter point.
Mark McBride-Wright 15:43
My interest there as well, when you were saying about mapping out career trajectories for every level of the organization, and that trajectory doesn’t always need in the same lane, does it of having to be now being creative and thinking, what up filling me skilling. Could we do to move people across? I remember one client knew that they could backfill gender diversity easier in their support functions relative to their technical functions. What they did was run a upskill and rescaling and internal training program for women in the support functions, saying, hey, which of us would like to be our future construction managers or construction leaders? Or, you know, you’re doing program management up in the support world, like, Would you like to apply this to a live project? Come and do this qualification, etc, on job learning. And so whilst it wasn’t necessarily changing their percentages of it was increasing their percentages in a area of their organization that was harder to recruit in from from the outside. And I just, I just, you’ve made me think about some recent clients I’ve been working with, and thinking, are we actually doing that mapping for for everyone and and it’s particularly it’s interesting when you think about these projects where, like different organizations come together, almost like a shared talent pool solution, rather than being in competition with one another. Actually like pooling resources to them. Have have a group of a group of people. You mentioned that you offer fractional CPO service for mid market companies and that that that’s interesting. I read a book when on holiday was Richard Harkins book called How to make 1,000,000,009 steps. He founded a company called home serve in the UK, grew it and then sold it to a Canadian e firm for like, 4.1 billion pounds or something. He outlines in it some really interesting statistics about the composition of the UK market in that over 40% I’m going to get these wrong. I’m saying off my head like something like most people are employed. Over 40% of the workforce are employed in large employers. But large businesses, for those over you know, 250 people only account for something like 10% of all the companies in the UK, whereas nine, you know, most people and most businesses, sorry, are small medium enterprises, and like 90 odd percent. But when you look at that SME bracket, there’s a real spread of lots that are small and get a lot of support, start up, scale up, accelerators, but there’s an opportunity to positively influence GDP by looking at those medium sized enterprises, and try and get some of them up to the large, you know, the large size, and then generating massive, more relative revenues, you know. So I wonder is that is that sort of your target company size when you say mid market, and does mid market vary from us to Europe to the UK? Where do you find
Trisha Daho 19:27
being that different? So I’m typically working with firms that are between 50 people and probably around three or 400 people. Most of these firms are, they have an HR function that is, to me, a compliance function. It’s important. It’s really important, but it’s a compliance function. So we come in and say, your company doesn’t warrant having a full time executive level Chief People Officer role, but it does warrant. Someone with their eye all the time on CPO strategy and implementation and kind of setting you up to be an enterprise level firm. Yeah, that’s what we do.
Speaker 1 20:10
Interesting.
Mark McBride-Wright 20:13
And so how, like, how long is a piece of string? Is probably the answer to this question. But you know what? What sort of how much time do you find is typically required? Or, you know, if someone’s listening to this and thinking, I’m actually in that situation, I could do that. Oh, how much time is fractional in terms of me?
Trisha Daho 20:34
Okay, so we were typically working with our firms for about 25 hours a month to about 35 hours a month. Okay, that’s probably the sweet spot. And we do, you know, we start with assessments. It’s just like any other big strategic implementation. We start with assessments, we move into strategic planning, and how are we going to set the dashboard up to know we were successful? What are the metrics? And then we implement, and we also do the day to day. You know, we’ve got a situation, we’ve got a situation, we’ve got a situation, and we help them. We offload that from them so that they can actually do the stuff they really want to be doing. Because the leadership in these firms, especially the ones we’re working with that are professional service firms and kind of lead by committee, and everyone’s doing a lot of everything, it allows them to offload a lot of the stuff that we’re doing to us, so they can focus on the stuff that they’ve got to and we’re usually there for two to three years to set all this up, get it really amplified and optimized, and then we can hand The baton to someone who is not as executive level, but can implement, keep this stuff going that we put together.
Mark McBride-Wright 21:48
Nathan, what do you find? You’re often called in to support. Then, when a company’s in cultural crisis,
Trisha Daho 21:54
in crisis, it’s usually some triggering event that says, Oh no, we really have to do something about this now. So it could be anything from a C level person that created a toxic work environment all of a sudden to a disgruntled employee who cites something on social media and everything goes to hell. It could be all kinds of things. And we get called in, we usually work on a joint team. There’s usually an employment attorney involved. There’s a PR firm involved. And we work as a team to figure out what to do in the situation in the near term, and then I assess the situation for a people perspective. And then, just like we do everywhere else, we create strategies and limitation for how to fix it, how to get them on the road to fully healthy? Yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 22:47
So equal engineers and the safe leader, the podcast, the brand that I’m building, Safe is a leadership framework that stands for share, act, feel, empower. So I’m curious under share, how do you use your own story to model vulnerability and the transformation that your clients and leaders? You know the people that you coach, you use your own frame of reference to help inspire them.
Trisha Daho 23:17
Well, a lot of it. A lot of my story feeds into all the things that leader other leaders go through. I have been an outsider most of my life. I’m a very gregarious person, very social, all that stuff. An extrovert, for sure. But I grew up in a neighborhood that was all Italian immigrants, except for us. I went to college where I was the only one, you know, one of the very few people that were not Jewish. I was in a when I went to the big four. I was, you know, I had been raised middle class, working class, and, you know, ascended into a completely different economic level, you know, with people. So I know what it feels like to be vulnerable because you feel like you don’t fit in. And I know what it feels like to someone to show you that you’re capable and that you you have the tools available to you right now. So I think that vulnerability in being completely honest with where you are, but also where you’re capable of going, is what makes us really successful. And everyone on my team is like that too. We’ve all got stories. We’ve all got imposter syndrome. We’ve all got, you know, how am I going to accomplish this gigantic thing, or how am I going to get out of this gigantic, you know, burden that I’ve got right now? I don’t know how to navigate it. We’ve all been there, and it’s not really an extraordinary talent. I understand and I can help you navigate this, because I know what exactly what you’re going through. Yeah, you’re
Speaker 1 25:00
having that intuition as well, isn’t it?
Mark McBride-Wright 25:04
Even if you can’t relate to them, making it relatable for them to another, and that’s the you you almost become a better consultant, a better leader, a better advisor, coach, whatever. Like, the more like, the more, more people you’ve helped, because you have, you have a larger sample size of challenges and trials and tribulations that people have been through, and that that comes back to that is a bit like that image I saw once, where it was a few scattered dots that said data, and then some lines between them that said knowledge and then wisdom was everything joined up seeing the picture, and you’re trying to bring that wisdom, aren’t you, to
Trisha Daho 25:51
absolutely and frankly, being a fractional Chief People Officer and working for several firms means I get to bring a greater bandwidth of potential, issues, challenges, aspirations, together and create solutions for everything. So it allows me to see much more going on and the intricacies and nuances of those things at the same time.
Mark McBride-Wright 26:14
Yeah, I wonder if there’s an opportunity to create a role with like a fractional Chief Safety Officer or chief. You know, a lot of my work, a lot of my work, people that I work with, often my customers, are technical teams, right? They’re working on design problems and design challenges, and they’re looking at physical hazards and physical risks and impact in the body and people and plant and equipment and what have you. And my drum beat is using that beautiful and cultural binding force, because it’s so strong in construction and engineering and extending that psychological safety stuff that we feel about, oh, that’s about 40, yeah.
Trisha Daho 27:12
You know, in my first in my first professional life, I interviewed probably 5000 engineers and scientists.
Speaker 1 27:19
We tell us about that. What did you find?
Trisha Daho 27:26
I was, it was for the purpose of finding tax credits, believe it or not. But what I found, well, they’re they love to talk about what they do. Yeah, they get very passionate about it. And that was the thing that kept me going, right? Because it could have been very dry and it wasn’t. They’re typically introverts. They’re not fantastic people, leaders, the way we think about it. I mean, neither accountants are lawyers a lot of the time. So it’s not like it’s peculiar. They like safety, they like stability. They like things not to change. Yeah. So I can imagine, if I had been there in the role of someone around culture, there would have been challenges related to that, because people assume change means negativity, yeah, positivity, yeah. So there’s a lot to be done there, I would guess, and how people interact with each other, and how you even inspire them to want to be interacting with each other instead of, you know, very closed in on a problem and how to solve it. But yeah, there’s a lot to work with there.
Mark McBride-Wright 28:38
There’s a lot I think I’m going to spend the rest of my career in that liver.
Trisha Daho 28:46
Because think about it, you take this very introverted, very technically driven person and you say, Okay, we’re tapping you on the shoulder. You’re now a leader, and you’re in charge of finding work out there
Trisha Daho 29:06
for even though that’s what you aspire to. So what do we do now?
Mark McBride-Wright 29:11
Well, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s what I’m trying to create and solve and get tapping into, like men being vulnerable and showing up in a different way being I’ve got this prop that my friend, my public speaking coach, gave me, Eduardo, and it’s a little lighthouse. And I always use the analogy because it’s something that’s engineered as well. You imagine a lighthouse on the coast that beams out its light. Come rain or shine, it’s there, it’s present. It’s sending out a signal, and that helps the boats, the vessels, the ships that are in arduous conditions, potentially still see a path. Think of these lighthouses as the metaphors for our stories. So if we have more people sharing our stories, it creates a great. Greater propensity for us all to create learned experience from one another’s lived experience, and then it makes some of the topics that we don’t talk about that are still taboo in the workplace get some oxygen, and then we can then interrelate with one another, because I find a lot of men pack down that stuff because it’s relevant. And as men were told, we can’t show up and share that so, you know.
Trisha Daho 30:24
And we have to get rewarded. They get rewarded for doing that. I mean, in a male dominated field where I made partner, it was the same for me. I had to be molded into a cookie cutter thing, a mold that was stoic most of the time, you know. And it took me a couple years of rediscovering who I really was. When I left that scenario, I recently
Mark McBride-Wright 30:48
had a client talk about, like, masculine energy and feminine energy. And I haven’t really sort of gone down that rabbit hole of energy levels ascribed to, like punch and stuff. I don’t know what my view is on it yet, you know, but what did you feel you relate to that when I say those words from the
Trisha Daho 31:09
absolutely, you had to be very masculine energy at work. And the funny thing is, women have to be, well, at least back in the day when I was in corporate, you had to be very masculine energy until you were supposed to back way down, because you’re female, you couldn’t be completely outspoken, but you had to conduct yourself in a very in a very masculine energy way. It’s very complicated. I’m certainly not the the PhD that would be able to give you a dissertation on it, but it was if you don’t, if you do not allow people to show up in the energy they already are, they will never feel safe, and they will never bring their best to the table.
Mark McBride-Wright 31:53
Yeah, like, you know some gay men that tap maybe more into their feminine energy, in relation to, you know, straight men, and that that leads to masking, covering, hiding, adopting different behaviors. And it’s ironic, isn’t it, that probably most of the straight guys are like, it’s so funny that the social script that people feel like they have to follow making small talk. You know, did you watch the game at the weekend and how,
Trisha Daho 32:25
let’s pretend that we like, you know, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 32:28
find out that actually neither of them won. And
Trisha Daho 32:31
it gets even deeper than that, if you look at how other, for example, racial groups or people who are disabled and having to mask the disability and the effects of that. They call it code switching in racial terms, so that you literally have to become have the attributes of someone different when you’re at work that is just really toxic, like you can’t be your best self in that scenario. There’s no way
Mark McBride-Wright 32:57
totally and I always use that analogy with my clients in terms of like an energy delta. And I’m like, you want people doing high risk, high hazard operations not just be physically present, but mentally abstinent. Want them to be fully present and mentally focused on the task in hand and not wasting energy, code switching, being someone who they’re not, or projecting a different version of themselves. And, you know, it’s surprising, actually, a lot of the white straight men, mask, cover, hide absolutely
Trisha Daho 33:30
and they’re just less aware of it because it aligns more with who they’re supposed to like who they are already.
Mark McBride-Wright 33:37
Yeah. How do we how do we undo that?
Trisha Daho 33:41
Well, it’s a long one thing I was thinking about as you were talking was one thing that would really help is a much deeper level of emotional intelligence applied to all those scenarios. I really think emotional intelligence is the key to a lot of this, in managing bias and managing your own emotions, and understanding your own emotions and how they interact with other people, being able to read the room and having situational awareness as it approaches people, all those things are extremely good because it forces you to slow down and understand what’s actually happening and decide intentionally what to do next.
Speaker 1 34:23
Absolutely love it that
Mark McBride-Wright 34:27
at scale, with every person working in a technical role, maybe we create a better a better humanity, a better absolutely, I just came back, actually, from living in New York for a year. So I lived in Brooklyn, and I was trying to make progress with with my work, and even with all the changes with the new administration and the, you know, regression on culture based work, yeah, and stuff. I still came to felt that there’s an opportunity for safety and safety focus to provide a continuation of this dialog. And, yeah, who knows? Maybe there’s, maybe there’s still some, some some momentum in that, but it’s, it’s hard, you know you’re talking about things here that cross cultural boundaries and are cross discipline and anything that’s across a singular thing, it makes it inherently harder, because there are more red tape and barriers and those egos that get in the way. You must have to have built quite a lot of resilience then to work at that breadth that you spoke about as a fractional CPO, yes.
Trisha Daho 35:51
And I love that part of it. I love that part of it, yeah. It’s ever changing and always complex. And I love that. Love it.
Mark McBride-Wright 36:03
You’re making me. Yeah, you’re making me. Sort of question how I show up with regard to my role as a change agent. What I wonder if there’s something I could borrow from this idea of doing fractional work. Good for thought there.
Trisha Daho 36:20
I mean, you know, I started out consulting, like doing these big consulting projects, and what I learned really fast was that I was already doing this work along the way of implementing these projects, because it made the work much easier for me to be in it with them and helping them through the the I hate to say the pain, but the pain and challenges of the change. And so I said, Why don’t I just offer it as a solution, instead of doing, you know, keeping that barrier between consultant and, you know, client, why don’t I just become way more in the weeds with them, so I can get them through the whole thing much more easily
Mark McBride-Wright 37:00
this morning, summarized a meeting that I attended yesterday where I was invited to listen and observe, and I was sitting there thinking me pitching just some of our safe leader training and get a certificate. I’m like, I hasn’t gonna cut it. I’m like, this, this needs me to, like, pull my sleeves and get in there. So I’m like, How do I make that happen? And and I think it’s, it’s, it’s what you’re suggesting. Actually, I’m gonna have to get in it anyway to help me as well and broker a near term agreement where I am part of the team for a bit,
Speaker 1 37:41
and then that helps help
Mark McBride-Wright 37:45
looking ahead, then what are you in the work that you’re doing just now? What emerging workforce trends are you finding are coming up that people are most focused on solving in their organizational problems?
Trisha Daho 38:02
I Well, performance management still continues to be a big deal. I’m obsessed with leader accountability. I don’t think we’re changing fast enough, because leaders are not held accountable to the what they’re creating. We we we measure them on things that are very easy to measure, like revenue growth, etc, but we don’t measure them on how well their people are doing or what what culture they’re actually creating. I’m kind of obsessed with that. There’s a lot of talk in the industries I’m working in around AI and how that affects people and onboarding and and development and all those things. So that’s going to continue to be huge. There’s a giant influence of PE and PE firms in the industries that I’m working in. So that’s going to continue to be a strange conversation and how that works, and what you’re left with when they sell, and that kind of that kind of thing. So that’s kind of the stuff that people are talking about all the time. There’s still a massive focus on leader development, so we’ll continue to do a lot of that. But those are probably, you know, and there’s always a scarcity of talent. There’s less people going into accounting, there’s less people going into law. So what are we going to do differently? How are we going to get it done?
Mark McBride-Wright 39:19
You mentioned some reusing the wrong metric, perhaps, are there? What do you have base level? You know, what you prescribe in terms of like key metrics. What key metrics should someone have in their leadership, scoring, leadership scorecard for individuals.
Trisha Daho 39:43
So if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna start holding people accountable for the humans they lead, then how well are they being developed? Do we have evidence that you’re, you’re developing your people doing, evidence that they are having a positive experience? Science with us? Are they thriving? And you can measure that? Are we retaining them the best, highest performers, especially, how are you dealing with the low performers? There’s a there’s a way to do that that either amplifies your culture or destroys it. What are you doing? So there’s many ways to measure it’s you can use both quantitative and qualified qualitative data to do that.
Mark McBride-Wright 40:29
Yeah, like culture surveys, engagement survey,
Trisha Daho 40:32
360 feedback, which most people tried 15 years ago and abandoned quickly because they didn’t like it. There’s a there’s a tendency to not only be afraid of self reflection, yes, be afraid of the reflection of others onto us. And really, they’re just data points. They’re data points. If we if we accept that none of us are perfect, then why don’t we accept a greater understanding of how we can be better.
Speaker 1 41:00
Yeah, yeah, that might even be a sound right on this podcast.
Mark McBride-Wright 41:08
The edits the script. Love that. What legacy Are you hoping to leave? Then, through empowered, you didn’t say the name of your business, actually, for everyone on the call, tell us the name and about it, and, yeah,
Trisha Daho 41:22
I just saw, I saw most leaders being disempowered, right, including me. And I decided that was never going to be me again. And I chose empowered, because that, to me, was always the goal. Who are we going to empower? How am I going to empower myself and my team? And what kind of difference are we going to make? Because we’ve created empowered cultures.
Mark McBride-Wright 41:48
I love it. I love it. It’s actually what the E stands for in my state leader framework, where I feel empowered, and it’s such a powerful word. When I set up my LGBT organization inter engineering, the three words we chose were connect, inform and empower. Connection, bringing together the engineers that are want to make change but don’t know how to do it from within inform, running events to generate thought leadership pieces it could then use to influence internally and then empower. Because sometimes it gets hard. Sometimes you’re up against it when you’re trying to push that cultural change, and you just need a bit of raising up your hope and showing that there’s light and opportunity and potential and to learn from one another. And I think the great word for your leadership that you’re seeking to create, because leaders feel like that as well, right? You know, they they’re not perfect. To your point, if we accept that, I often find that leaders in fear of the shadow that they cast, or sorry they forget that they cast a leadership shadow across the organization, and for fear of getting it wrong, saying the wrong thing, or they shy away from even leaning into any the awkward topics or the intangible stuff. But they forget that if they did do it, and did lean in and were seen to be vulnerable and learning in real time. It has a massive ripple effect across the business, because it’s given permission for other leaders and other direct supports and stuff to be showing up in that way and leading and leading in a different way. But they need that empowerment, don’t they? And that’s exactly what you and your business is help and plug is that confidence and that state space for them to to learn and share and even your services for them to lean upon as they’re scaling and subject to all to the trends that you’re saying about PE pressure and business cycles and investment, the day to day stuff where it’s easy to forget about people side of things, yeah. What legacy Are you hoping to leave? Then I’ve
Trisha Daho 44:11
been thinking a lot about this recently, because we still are not seeing enough movement fast enough for my taste, right? And how can we combine, you know, collaborate with other organizations and other people to make a bigger impact faster. I probably have 13 years left before I retire. Okay, so what am I going to do in these next 13 years to make the biggest positive impact on the greatest number of people. So I’m really thinking about that, but really the legacy is simply the same as it’s always been, and that is, how do we give people the tools to be exactly the best person they’re supposed to be in the in the role they’re in? Or. Sure the role they’re next supposed to be
Mark McBride-Wright 45:01
in? Yeah, I love that. I love that just looking one step ahead and having active talent development strategies that can go across your business or diagonally or across and up rather than just up. That’s, that’s a good that’s, that’s a good way to think I like that. Hey, Quick Fire question round, are you ready? I am. Hey, what’s one leadership mantra you live by?
Trisha Daho 45:34
Always be self reflective,
Mark McBride-Wright 45:37
a cultural myth that needs debunking.
Trisha Daho 45:42
Vivek, that culture is not is not unintentional.
Mark McBride-Wright 45:48
What’s your go to coaching question that always gets results?
Trisha Daho 45:54
What are you most afraid of?
Mark McBride-Wright 45:57
What’s that book you gift or recommend the most
Trisha Daho 46:00
emotional intelligence.
Mark McBride-Wright 46:04
What’s your favorite way to unwind after a powerful workshop or Keynote?
Trisha Daho 46:08
My most powerful wife?
Mark McBride-Wright 46:10
Way to unwind? Unwind? Yeah,
Trisha Daho 46:14
I like to travel. Travel is always my best. Nothing more exhilarating to me than landing in a place where I don’t speak the language and having to figure it
Mark McBride-Wright 46:25
all out. What’s one word that describes your leadership style,
Trisha Daho 46:31
fully honest,
Mark McBride-Wright 46:33
what’s a generational stereotype that you love to break
Trisha Daho 46:39
that Gen Zs are actually incredibly inspired
Mark McBride-Wright 46:45
coffee tea or something celebratory. Your go to,
Trisha Daho 46:51
I am an American, so it’s iced coffee.
Speaker 1 46:56
Iced coffee. Okay, so you’re
Mark McBride-Wright 46:58
going to say drip coffee. And finally, what advice would you give your younger self entering leadership?
Trisha Daho 47:09
You’ve already got it. Girl,
Speaker 1 47:12
love it. Love it. That’s great. Well, Trisha,
Mark McBride-Wright 47:16
I’ve really, really enjoyed this chat. If people want to find out more about your business, or to get in touch with you. How should they do that?
Trisha Daho 47:25
They can email me at Tricia T, R, I, S, H, A, at empowered, l, c.com, or find me on LinkedIn at Tricia Dow, D, A, H, O, fantastic.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:36
Well, thank you so much. You really made me think and tell them some perspective. I appreciate it.
Trisha Daho 47:42
Thank you for having me. This was great. I.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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