Learning to Lead from Setbacks

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Talent GTM podcast. I’m your host, Krissy Manzano. And today I have the lovely Stephanie Johnson, CEO of Ackland Avenue. Stephanie is an experienced and highly motivated celebrity C level executive specializing in technology and healthcare industries. As I mentioned, she is currently serving as the CEO of Acklen Avenue. She brings over two decades of leadership experience with the demonstrated ability to collaborate with boards and executive teams to achieve strategic business goals.

And throughout her career, Stephanie’s built and led both technical and client focused teams, fostering environments of trust, productivity, and innovation. She also founded JS Security Consulting, which is a firm that provides both armed and unarmed security solutions. She holds an MBA in management from Strayer University and a bachelor of science and healthcare administration and planning from Tennessee State University.

And outside of her professional endeavors, Stephanie has served on the board of the National Technology Council and two separate appointments and has been actively involved in Nashville’s healthcare community. Her blend of expertise and leadership technology and healthcare continues to position her as a transformative leader in the field.

So Stephanie, I am just so excited to have you here. Welcome. Every time I read these bios, I’m like, wow, I’ve got to step it up because y’all, especially the women on here are just crushing it with all your achievements. So,

Well, I’m happy to be here. And every time I hear somebody read it, I’m also, pause a little bit and go, is that, is that me? It’s me.

Right.

It’s weird to hear yourself, have your bio read and have youraccolades like stated out. So, but I’m really happy. I’m really happy to be here,

Yeah. It’s, it probably would be a good exercise, honestly, as I think about this for to, to write your own bio or bio, but in a way of list out all your accomplishments. Cause I think sometimes, especially for women, but I would just say, you know, professionals in general, you can really forget what you’ve done.

And I think, you know, as we kind of dive into this topic here, learning to lead from setbacks, that’s something that, you know, remind yourself of what you’ve done, what you’re capable of, no matter the circumstances. I’m excited to hop right into this. And I think, you know, it’s a really relevant topic because man, since, since COVID, and I feel like we’re beating a dead horse here, but everything has just been harder and like not normal. it feels, everything feels very heightened, whether it’s professionally, personally, politically, you’ve got, you know, we had that one spike at the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022 where buying and hiring and all that was crazy and even a little bit during 2020.

And then everything has just been a lot harder and we’re seeing what I believe to be a lot of transformative changes in how people buy, sell. hire, what long term looks like at jobs, you know, our full time positions, you know, are there as many as there were, a lot of people are doing fractional consulting, everything, or, you know, I’m in a really tough, toxic company, but going somewhere else doesn’t necessarily seem like that’ll fix that.

Right. And just, there’s a lot of challenges, no matter which way you look at it. And so I think figuring out, you know, how do I lean in To these setbacks and learn from them. And I’m so excited to do this topic with you because I can’t think of anyone who’s done it better. And so I’d love to start off with, if you can just tell us, you know, maybe about a significant set setback that you faced early on in your leadership journey, you know, what did that look like?

It’s interesting as I thought about that question, I kept coming back to this really, it might seem really, really silly and crazy, but I’m going to tell you the story. I feel like it’s, it’s one of those things that kind of set back my career, but it also was one of those things that I learned from I learned some things.

I’m going to tell you what it was. It was, I was working at, I was working at one of the, one of the companies that I’ve worked at in the past. I won’t name names. I had been encouraging our CEO, I was a manager at the time, I’ve been encouraging him to, back up our data, right? So to back up our data, so we were still saving things on a hard drive.

So I was like, if this crashes, everything that I worked on, everything that I’ve had is gonna go. and you know, this company was in early stages, so they decided not to do that. I ended up losing my laptop crash and I ended up losing everything on my laptop, everything on the hard drive, gone, couldn’t retrieve it.

And I went into work and I was like, so mad about it. Like I was mad. I was mad. You could tell that I was mad. I was like, really, like, really evil. About like, like I’ve been telling you that we needed to do this thing. And so my, my CEO pulled me to the side and he goes, you know, you’re bringing the whole entire company down right now. And I said, I don’t think I said anything. I went back into my office and I went home and I thought about it on my drive home and, and the thing that he was absolutely right, so the thing that I made a mistake is, was one is also the thing that made me understand where my power lie. And so my power of influence was super big to other people.

Right.

It is the first time that I ever learned that about myself, that, that I had, like how I reacted, how I dealt with adversity, how I dealt with obstacles, was very impactful to everybody who was working around me. And it was, it was a very significant lesson.

Yeah. I mean, I say this all the time. But what you’re talking about relates to, to this is, do you want to make a point or a difference? I think people have a really hard time separating the, out the fact that you, and I told my kids this, it’s okay to be mad. It’s okay to not, you know, like me one minute, not like someone.

It’s okay to have those feelings, but your actions have to be separate from those feelings, right? So, and that is. Really hard to play out. So, you know, you were right. What happened happened and it’s infuriating. But how do you make a difference with that? Versus like, let me make a point that I was right and potentially make the problem worse.

And I think that that’s something that’s really relatable, especially for people who aren’t. You know, as an example, getting jobs right now, where they almost start to attack folks because they don’t get the next interview and they make wrong assumptions, but look at all this stuff that I’ve done. And you know, it’s not that, unfortunately, that’s not how the world works.

Right. But kind of really separating out your feelings versus, you know, your actions, maybe

It’s how you respond to the obstacles and challenges. Like I could have handled that completely different, but you know, I feel it’s a little like you learn about yourself. And once you learn about yourself, you learn about, not only about the things that you can change, change in terms of how you are naturally responding to anything, but like how you are influential to other people.

How do you move things to get, to make a difference, to make them better as opposed to. You know, wallowing down in the dirt about a thing that happened. Right.

question for you, if I gave you a hypothetical scenario, because this is something I feel like a lot of folks are going. Okay. I have seen a lot of individuals join companies that were rocket ships and by all accounts are doing really well. And all of a sudden, months later, everything’s falling apart. they have quotas or goals that are not realistic.

They don’t have support and alignment with the, you know, exact team. They’re out of touch and they’re the ones making, you know, a lot of these decisions of like what quotas are going to be maybe forcing people to come back in an office that did not sign up for that. Right. And all these things. How in going to another company isn’t always as easy, right?

Or, you know, Hey, I just got here. I don’t want to look a good job. Hopper, how, especially for folks in leadership roles, you know, individuals that might be leading a, you know, a first line frontline manager or second line manager, that are leading teams. How would you approach? I know every situation is different.

A scenario like that, where you’re kind of stuck where you’re at for the time being. And there’s a lot of things that you aren’t able to control. And that in some ways can set you and your team up for failure. How do you manage that as a leader? Yeah,

You know, it’s, it’s definitely something that I can talk to from very recent, you know, it’s been a, like you said, a very rough couple of years. but the thing is, is that you said at the end was, you know, you don’t, you have to operate it from a leadership perspective. You have to operate as in what are the things that I have to set myself, my company up for success.

And sometimes those decisions are not going to be easy. Many times they’re not many times they may not be understood. So you think about like, how is this going to affect, I’m gonna have to make this big decision to cut here so we can survive to see another day. Right. Essentially. And so like those are the things that run through my mind when I know that like we’re on a trajectory.

But it’s still from a place of what can we do as opposed to it’s hope versus reality. You have to have reality with a little hope and how the leadership handles that is important. So for us, it’s like, everybody had a downturn, right, over the last couple of years, we all entered into recession or whatever they want to call it, like things dried up for us.

That’s the, that’s the biggest thing. And so like, even in Acklin, we had to make some really tough decisions. I had to make some really tough decisions about what, how, what do we need to do to change, to be able to survive the, until the, the, there was an upturn.

Yep.

And so, like, that’s how I look at it is like.

I don’t like, you don’t ever want to set anybody up for for failure. You set them up for success, but that does not mean that the decisions that you have to make. Cutting things here, reducing things there are not going to be hard. Right you do them with, you know, patients, you’re trying to make sure that your senior leadership leadership understands why you’re making those decisions so that they can be equipped.

To go communicate those out to the teams that are under them, to their managers. And so that takes more time because sometimes this is the thing I also know is like, I can see things. In the future, I’m already there, but what I’ve learned to do is I have to ensure that everybody else on my team. Is there so they can make sure that everybody below them is there too, and they understand the changes and sometimes those are not like the easiest conversations.

They’re tough conversations. Yeah.

Yeah. No, 100%. I think about, look, those are really tough spots to be in. And. The most important thing you can do for your team is help them focus. I think it’s, I don’t, you know, I, I think it’s okay to be transparent and say, listen, I’m asking you to do this. It wasn’t my decision. But here’s how we’re going to tackle it.

Versus even if it’s unfair, even if it’s not always realistic, right? Pick and choose your battles in that moment and understand, because if you get too negative, things can snowball, right? And if people are all talking with each other about how upset they are, things can snowball. And again, it’s not because it’s not valid.

It’s just, if you don’t have an immediate exit plan, You really have to remove those emotions because one, it’s going to help you stay under the radar because there’s people that won’t be able to and use data and facts to with the battles that you want. To to choose and pick, right? So, and go, Hey, we’re really trying all these things.

We’ve tried this and here’s some information of like, why it’s not working. This is what I would propose that we do differently, right? It still might get shot down, but, you know, it will be more appreciated than, you know, others that are, you know, saying my team can’t do this. They’re all going to quit all these things.

And again, it’s not about it’s a balance of standing up for your team, but also helping them focus and, you know, keeping them from getting overwhelmed. And I think. Yeah. It’s a hard place to be, but it will make you an incredible leader. These moments are what make you incredible, right?

being able to come out of those moments and handling and tackling, I think is what is a difference,

Yep. It’s all learning.

It helps you, you know, prepare for times that might have been more challenging in the past. But, today it feels very manageable. I would love to kind of ask you what what strategies do you use to to reframe challenges as an opportunity for growth as we’re talking about it?

I kinda mentioned it before.We continue to have challenges. I have a no quit attitude. Absolutely a no quit attitude because I think that there is a way through every situation. Whether it’s like, it’s, it’s just how you’re going to get through it. But like, we don’t quit.

Like, that’s the one thing is, is we don’t quit. I coach, I coach girl’s softball team. And we have like a chant about not, we don’t quit. Like we might be behind, but we’re not, we’re not out of the game. And so for me, I just believe that like, you have to take, you know, if I’m going and talking to my CFO, I’m having a realistic conversation.

I need him to give me the real deal. Right. But I also need. To have hope it’s the reality of a situation with hope in it. And what that does is it focuses you on the solutions and how to get out of it versus like, woe is me. We’re going to be short 250, 000 this, this month because we don’t have the sales like and that, that works.

Like I have a lot of, and the team will probably tell you too. I have a lot of. Of, proof throughout the three years I’ve been at Acklin that like, we, like, we don’t give up. We, I don’t believe in quitting, even if it looks terrible, like say we lost a big client, right? We lost 500, 000, a million dollars or whatever.

I can point to those times in our history over the last three years. And I could tell you we’re still standing today, but it is because. My team. Has come to understand that, yes, this is bad news, but we need to focus our energy on how to solve for this. And it can be creative. You could throw out whatever, but we need to focus on the solution.

And we just need to work a little harder in some areas, right? Pay like highly focused in some areas to get out of whatever it is that we’re getting out of. And that has worked my team. You know, I couldn’t ask for a better leadership team. But they’ve also like, we spent the last three years understanding each other and something, you know, in the beginning, we didn’t always, we don’t always agree.

It’s like healthy conflict. But I, I think too, like that is how I enter every single thing that I do. I don’t believe that I can’t do something. I told, you know, I tell my founder that if I can envision the success, then it’s there for me to grab. And it’s there for me to make a reality. And I think that just having that attitude alone is what, it leaks out to your team.

It, it, it rubs off on them. Right. Because that’s what I need them to do. I don’t need to focus on the fact that we lost a half a million dollars in a deal. I need to focus on how do we replace that revenue and quickly,

Solutioning.

Solutioning. Right. And sometimes it’s like, you have to get your, I operate off of worst scenarios, Krissy, I operate out for worst.

And then I back, then I, then I just,backwards engineer from that very worst case. And that’s what I’m asking like my leadership team to do. And that has been very successful for us.

Great advice. I think well said and, and something that during challenging times is it’s so important on how you look at things and focus. I love the no quit piece. It just helps you not go down rabbit holes, right? Hold on. I know this happened, but like let’s solution and figure out how we move forward.

And how, how can leaders kind of cultivate a mindset that embrace challenges as part of the growth process? I know you talked a little bit about this, but just kind of diving deeper,

The mindset that actually embraces challenges as a part of like, it’s like, Hey, I’m, I’m ready for this versus, you know, I know I’m always like, Oh, I just want, I don’t want to have to deal with that.

I know,

how do you embrace it? Not in looking forward to bad things, right.

But how do you go, how do you embrace it to know that there’s something positive that will come out of this?

I, like I said, like, you know, my senior leadership team, we have gone through stages of them having to figure out me sometimes. And I know a lot of them are like, every time you come into a room, you’re absolutely positive, no matter what’s going on, you just emerge like exuding this energy, and. they’re wondering how I’m doing that. Even though they kind of know, like if there’s some bad thing going on, like, because I think it starts with the leader. I think it starts with, the leader has to show up with a calm approach that is also quite factual. So they have to slow things down. So if I get a call isn’t some bad information and, and like I will get a call from, you know, somebody and then I’ll get a call from another person on my SLT, right?

And, and so what I say is, listen, like, let me gather up some data. I’m hearing what you’re saying. You know, give 24 hours. And let’s talk. And that way I can, that gives me time to gather the real, the reality, the real deal. What’s the, what’s the impact? What’s the damage? but it comes from that kind of leader is to slow things down so that you can have time to think as a leader, you’re getting information from many people.

Even if I’m just talking about SLT, I’m getting information from many people and they all have a different perspective, right? I take time to get to the actual, I take in everything that they’re telling me, but I need to get to the actual problem. Without, because they have emotions, they’re dealing with things that are different.

They’re coming from different perspectives, but I think a leader has to slow things down, understand the emotion, emotional responses that you can get from your team, how they’re feeling about it. And then you have to just go in with like, let me find out what the real deal is by also considering everything that everybody’s told me, but I need facts and I need data, operate off of data,

Yes.

highly off of data.

Which is so hard to do, right? When you have an opinion on something and then you go through and you’re like, actually, this doesn’t support how intense I thought this was.

But you allow, like as a leader, I allow my, my team to come to me with however they’re feeling about something. Right. And because like they have an emotional response, you have an emotional response. If you lose a deal, you have an emotional response. If you lose a person, you, you, you know, if you, you’ve been working on something and it falls through the cracks and it’s just happens to be this big thing, but I think the leader has to show and exude confidence and, and calmness and a commitment to.

To finding out what’s real and then taking that back to the team to say, listen, this is the reality of, of what we’re facing right now with facts. And so here, and then also like, all right, guys, we need to focus on like, how do we overcome this? Can this be overcome? I’m pretty sure it can be. sometimes I have an opportunity to include them on those conversations.

And sometimes I’m making that decision. This is how I’m going to handle this moving forward. Like, you know, so that it’s leading them out of that negative space and into a positive one because, they’re in a negative space. No one is focusing on the solution. They’re focusing on the problem and all their energy spent on that.

And I need to immediately transfer that energy over to positive energy and hope

Yeah.

works every time.

I often think about when I’m going through a hard time, something that’s helped me. I wish I’d done this later in life is I look back at all the hard times I’ve gone through and I can see almost like what the lesson was there. Oh, okay. Like, I don’t want to go relive that again. Okay. But I see how much stronger I was when I came out of this, or I see what I learned from this, right?

Not that it was easy or didn’t have, you know, challenges in some cases crippling, but I see how this has built me and I see that path. And so I think what I try, which is hard, but, you know, when I’m going through something, okay, what’s the lesson here, right? There’s something that I can’t see, but I’ve been through this before that, you know, this isn’t life or at least in these cases, right?

Like I will be okay. It’s hard. But like, there’s a lesson here or there’s something that I’m going to be so glad that, you know, this was stalled because it wouldn’t have ever led me to X, you know?

Exactly. Like there’s always a reason. I know you know, you talked to your grandma or something. There’s like the universe always has a reason. I, I do believe that sometimes losses are the best thing that could happen to

Yeah, totally. Totally. And I know in some cases it’s like, you don’t want to say like, there’s a reason that happened. It’s not to say like they’re with tragic, horrible things that that’s, you know, I would ever give that advice, but it’s more when you’re, you know, going through There still is growth in everything, right?

And so I think Reminding yourself of that can also, you know, help you embrace, Hey, this is going to be tough, but I know I’m going to be stronger when I get out of this. And I just have to, you know, know that my whole life, like there’s always been lessons through that. coming to the end of our episode today, but what would you say if you were giving someone just, you know, the best advice for this market or how to get through, especially leaders, you’ve already given a ton of great advice, but what would you say?

Is like the number one thing you tell people to focus on in a market that’s tough like this, if they’re leading teams and, you know, the company’s struggling, the market’s struggling, right?

Yes. I think that, you have to really adopt and I know I’m going to, it feels like I might be repeating myself, but I feel like you really have to adopt a no quit attitude. Right. A no quit attitude. And I would say that reality is a level set. And hope is real.

I love that. I love that. I’m glad you said it again because, we need to hear it. So, well, that’s all the time we have for today, but. You know, hopefully this is an episode. If you’ve listened all the way through, you’re getting some advice. That’s maybe not always rocket science, but relates and can help you kind of reset and, and know that you’re going to make it through this.

we’re all in it together here and. we can do hard things, especially when we have to, you can do anything when you have to do it, right. When you’re forced to do it. And so embrace that, we’ll get through this, but Stephanie, thank you for joining us. you all go check out Aklan Avenue.

They’re an amazing company that does outsource software development work, with near shore teams who are wonderful. So. If you’re starting a company or in tech and looking to be, a little bit more cost effective, but with organizations that are going to do brilliant work as if you hired the best of the best here, they are definitely your go to until next time, we will see you later, but thanks for being on the podcast today, Stephanie, and

Thank you. My pleasure.

Make sure to follow us and subscribe to our, Talent GTM channels on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or our website, so you never miss an episode. Until next time. We’ll see you later. Bye.

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