Despite the advanced thinking and newfound ideals of society, women leaders still struggle to break out of stereotypical thinking and discrimination within the business sector. They are still seen as inferior to men, tend to decide based on emotions alone, and are always judged based on their looks. Johanna Pagonis of Sinogap Solutions is on a mission to change all of these by empowering fellow women leaders to step up, get out of their comfort zones, and start doing something that will shake male-dominated realms. She sits down with Melanie Parish to discuss how keeping an authentic self, refusing to stay quiet most of the time, and striving to be a role model to others are the first essential steps towards bigger things for women in leadership. The two also share their own challenging experiences as businesswomen, particularly in the consulting industry.

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Listen to the podcast here

Empowering Women Leaders In The Business Scene With Johanna Pagonis

I’ve been thinking about leadership and I’ve been thinking about how women have their challenges that they need to overcome. As I was watching the inauguration, I noticed all the leaders showing up for the inauguration. I noticed that across the board, all the women were wearing high heels. They have to be poised. They have to be together. We talk about what they’re wearing. All of that is before we even start to see how they lead. I don’t know what to do with this because I don’t think there’s a way to make it fair. I do think that we should notice the challenges that women have as leaders. As women leaders, we shouldn’t contribute to it in our teams. We can look for ways that we can support the women in our organizations. We can influence as we become more seasoned leaders.

I’m here with Dr. Johanna Pagonis. She’s the owner of the leadership consulting firm, Sinogap Solutions. Johanna is an international speaker author, and the host of the podcast, Tackle Tuesday, which explores topics related to organizational cultures, such as leading with emotion, diversity, inclusion, and how to create resilient and agile work cultures. Johanna has 20 years of experience in leadership and organizational development, which she gained throughout her professional and academic career. Dr. Pagonis has worked in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. As an international speaker, having presented at Interpol conferences in the Caribbean and South America. Johanna’s firm specializes in developing employee engagement and leadership strategies that will transform people into confident and capable employees that achieve excellence and are a source of strategic value. It’s great to have Johanna on my show.

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It is great to have you on my show, Johanna. I’m happy that you’re here.

Thank you, Melanie. I’m excited.

Women Leaders: If you don’t know why or what you’re doing, it becomes hard to figure out your sales pitch.

I want to dive in and I want to hear, what are you thinking about? What are you up to as a leader right now?

Thank you. I was a formal leader when I worked for the government and in 2020, I took my side hustle because I’ve always been consulting part-time while I was working full time around leadership development, organizational effectiveness. It was always my dream to one day quit my job and do it full time. 2020 has been an interesting journey in terms of leadership development. Before when I was working for the government, I had a team and I had a very specific duty or roles and responsibilities when it came to leadership.

When you launch off onto your own and you have your own business, leadership takes on a different meaning or approach. Having to look inward around how to lead myself through tough times and not having necessarily a team that could support me, that I could go to and that I could talk to because my leadership style was very much leading with the heart, which is ingrained in relationships, developing those relationships, getting to know the people on your team and finding out what they need to succeed. If they succeed, we all succeed. That’s not only good for them, but it was soul-enriching for me as the manager of that team. I felt I created an environment where we were all working together. We all wanted to work together. We understood our strengths. We loved working with one another.

When I left and started my own business, I’m a consultant. I work solo. I work alone. Although I work in collaboration with other consultants, for the most part, it’s a very solitary, lonely experience. I lost my team. Why I became a leader? It’s because I wanted to help others. Now I’m doing that, not in the aspect of having a team, but doing that in regards to helping my clients, but still the journey’s quite lonely. I always say leadership is not only about understanding how to inspire and motivate others, but it starts with you first.

Do you know what your purpose is? How does that purpose guide you and sustain you during difficult times? I had to take all those lessons I shared with my team, that I say in my keynotes and apply them to myself. It was a crazy year. Sometimes I forgot that purpose, I forgot that message and I found myself getting a little lost. It’s been good, because it reminded me, don’t forget your purpose and apply what you teach others to yourself. When it comes to what’s up in my leadership style or approach, it’s trying to apply the learnings that I teach to others, to myself.

If you could give advice to someone who was a year back from you, they were thinking of going out on their own as a consultant. What advice would you have for them?

One of the first things is what is your purpose? Why do you want to become a consultant? What is the contribution that you want to give? How do you want to help others? We need to spend some time figuring that out because it also does help you figure out, what is my mission and purpose in terms of a consultant? What is my company meant to do? How do I articulate that to others in terms of the value that I have to offer them? If you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing, it becomes hard to figure out what your pitch is. It’s one of the first things I learned as a consultant was to know your pitch, have that elevator speech down-packed and talk about the impact that you’ll have.

Instead of saying what you do, explain what the outcome is, or the value add that you give to companies. Know what your purpose is and what that value add is, number one. Number two, get ready for a wild ride. I launched my business before the pandemic. I trained physically, mentally and emotionally for a marathon. I thought, “It’s going to be a long run and there are going to be unknowns, things that I don’t anticipate and that’s okay. I’m prepared for it.” All of a sudden, the pandemic hit, and my 42K turned into a 100K death race. I feel like I have wild animals chasing me. I don’t know whether I’m going to survive from one day to the next.

Many things I didn’t anticipate. Get ready for a lot of unknowns. Just When you think you figured it out, something changes and that is okay. Make sure that you have some good self-care practices that you can engage in and initiate when you need it. It can be very exhausting. It can be a very lonely experience. If you don’t know how to take care of yourself when you need it, it’s going to be hard to get through it.

What do you do for self-care?

Women Leaders: Figure out what your authentic leadership style is without following somebody else’s.

I work out. That’s how I start my day. Five days a week, I have a training regimen that I follow. I get into the groove I put in my earphones in, and then I sweat it out. When I sweat it out, it helps me release anxieties, insecurities. I focus on what it is that I’m meant to do. Why am I doing it? Through training, I feel energized and I feel there’s a lot of strength there. I do that. Every hour, I leave my computer and I walk around my house or I’ll go outside if it’s not horribly cold. Take a breath and not feel like, “But I have so much work.”

The work’s going to stay there. It’s not going anywhere. When you come back from your walk, it’ll still be there, but you’ll be more energized. I do that. I have an app, Aaptiv. I use Aaptiv for my workouts, but they also have meditations. Every morning, I’ll do a 5-minute meditation and they’re awesome meditations. There’s one on finding your inner strength. I’ll listen to that if I feel I need it or settle the mind, calm and relaxation, if I feel I need that, I’ll do that. It sets me up too. I’ll do it in the morning before my workout or throughout the day or in the evening if I feel like I need to unplug and breathe, I’ll do those. Breathing has been very helpful to take a moment going for a walk, doing a quick meditation and breathing through it. These are things that have helped me keep me going.

It’s important to me that when I am having leadership conversations with people that I also shine a light on what it’s like to be a woman in leadership and a person of color in leadership. I wonder if you have any light that you can shed on that. How’s it different to be a woman in leadership and what do you think people need to think about both yourself were in leadership? I’m not necessarily asking from that point of view, but I’m asking from your point of view as a consultant on leadership development.

I learned how to be a leader in a very male-dominated industry. When I became a consultant, I wanted to make sure that I shed a light on things that organizations need to do, but what you also need to do as an individual woman, as you go through your leadership journey. I gave a conference in 2020. It was the inaugural conference. It’s the first one they ever had and they’re doing it again in 2021. It’s called Women in Safety. It’s geared towards women professionals in the safety industry. They invited me to talk about a personal leadership style. What I talked about was authentic leadership as a woman. As a woman, in your leadership journey, you’re going to be confronted with a lot of challenging moments.

One of them is how to lead in a way that’s authentic to you. If there’s one idea I want to leave a woman with is to spend some time in figuring out your authentic leadership style and approaches, which means it’s following a leadership style that’s true to your inner being and not necessarily somebody else’s. We get bombarded with a lot of messages around what it takes to be a leader, courage. A lot of the leadership books I read, especially being in law enforcement, were all about generals, majors and eat last and things like that. It was very male geared. I had to discover on my own what it meant to be a leader and embrace my female traits and characteristics, which were centered around focusing on relationships.

One of the things I said at the conference was the first to figure out how we started our conversation all in is? Why do you want to be a leader in the first place? Figure that out and then focus on what your strengths are and what you’re good at because that will help you figure out how you want to lead. You can integrate those strengths in your leadership approach and try to not pay attention to too much of the noise that’s out there. I got as a woman leader, it wasn’t uncommon for my male counterparts to pull me into their office and then tell me how I needed to lead in a way that they were leading. I remember one conversation that was very distinct, I was like, “I noticed something about your team. I’d like to give you some advice. This is what I do for my team.” It’s unfortunate to be involved in those kinds of conversations.

I want to jump in here because there are some unspoken rules about women in leadership. What do you think those are? Why can’t you lead the way that the men in your organization lead? Why does that advice not work? I’m so curious about this thought.

It depends on what industry you work in as well. Here’s an example, was it the Tokyo Olympics head, Yoshiro Mori, who said that women talk too much and it’s one of the reasons why meetings go too long? There are many misconceptions biases and stereotypes about women in leadership that we grew up and listened to as we’re raised and start to develop our leadership journey or our career in a formal leadership position. We hear these messages throughout our lives. When we get into a leadership position, it does become a bit of a persona maybe a little bit. We get bombarded with other messages, like the confidence gap theory and how women are naturally less confident than men.

You hear all of these messages. When you become a leader, you’re like, “How much of this is true? How much do I let it impact, influence me and prevent me from going after what I want?” Being a mother, here’s another thing too. One woman approached me and said, “I want to go for that managerial position.” I’m like, “Great, go for it.” She’s like, “I don’t know.” I said, “How come?” She said, “I’m thinking of becoming a mother or starting a family, thinking about getting pregnant. I’m not even going to bother trying, because that’s not fair if I get pregnant to my team. Once again, these are the messages that we’re raised with. I’m like, “Being a mom, what a tough job that is? You’re faced with uncertainty every day. You have to figure out on the fly what you’re going to do. Isn’t that wonderful training to become a leader?” We value these experiences. Those are some of the challenges that women face.

I think of it as the big bitch conversation that every woman’s running in the back of her mind, “I don’t want anyone to think I’m a bitch.” Why? Who cares? Let them think that. That shouldn’t change your entire leadership style that someone might have thought about you. As women leaders, we have to wear high heels. We have to not be a bitch. All the research on talking women and talking in group situations is definitive. Women do not talk more than men in those situations. Basic data collection that even the thing that people are saying is false. How can women talk less when they’re not even talking enough?

Women Leaders: When women open their mouths where they are fearful, they will be labeled a bitch.

When we do open our mouths, we’re fearful we’ll be labeled a bitch.

Someone will say your idea again. Has that ever happened to you?

I have seen that happen so many times. You shared an idea with your male colleague. All of a sudden, you’re in a meeting and he’s sharing it as if it’s his own.

I’ve been in a meeting where I said something and no one said anything. A twenty-something intern said it an hour later and everybody went, “That’s a good idea.” At the time, I was a consultant on the clock getting many more dollars than his monthly salary for my one day. They still didn’t listen to me.

I love how you said that. I had a boss that said to me, “Johanna, this happens often. It’s okay because as long as the idea is out there and it helps the organization that’s all that matters.” I remember thinking that’s BS. It goes back to some of these challenges that were faced up against and why maybe we were afraid to exert our influence and our leadership style. That question you asked me earlier, it doesn’t matter if we don’t get credit. Why doesn’t it matter that we don’t get credit? I don’t understand why it’s such a bad thing to speak up and say, “That was my idea.” It’s okay to get credit for it. We always talk about recognize and reward your employees, but when it comes to us and our ideas and getting credit for them, we should stay quiet. That doesn’t make sense to me.

Let’s see if we can come up with a few tips to deal with these things. You’re a consultant. I coach and consult in the leadership space. I wrote a book in the leadership space. What would be some best practices for women grappling with these challenges?

My first thought is, it’s not easy. First of all, being in a situation like that is not easy. We have to admit that and say, “It’s unfortunate that we are in these positions, but we have two choices.” We either don’t do anything and keep our mouth quiet. We don’t disrupt the delicate balance of whatever we think that balance needs to look like and feel like. If we do follow that approach, we don’t only do a disservice to us and other women or our other female colleagues, but we do a disservice to even the men that are in the room. We set up this precedence or we perpetuate it by not challenging the status quo. The best organizations embrace conflict on some level and say, “If we’re going to improve, we have to give people space, the brave space to be able to speak up.”

The alternative is you don’t say anything and you keep quiet, but what does that do for you? How does that benefit your organization? I do encourage women to speak up, but I say that cautiously because I don’t know your situation and I don’t know where you’re at. You have to determine what your level of comfort or risk is and ask yourself, “If I say nothing, will I be comfortable with that? Will I still enjoy coming to work every day? Is this a place where I want to be?” If you say, “No, I need to speak up,” figure out how you’re going to say that. I’ve been in situations like that. Sometimes I won’t give it much thought. I speak up and say, “Hold on a second. I need to address something.” I do it in a respectful way. I don’t lose my cool, but I state the facts.

It’s happened to me once where I turned around and I said, “I’m going to stop the conversation for a moment because I need to state something that is an actual fact.” I needed to do that to protect myself and my team. The consequences were not bad at all. There were no consequences. What ended up happening is the other managers in the room turned and said that they learned something from that. The one individual who did it to me, we had a one-on-one conversation afterward, where I sought to understand why he did that. Did he even know he did that and make him aware of what he did? It worked in my favor. We developed a better relationship and it didn’t happen again. The other thing to add to that is to seek, to understand why it’s happening. Is this person intentionally trying to undermine you or does this individual lack the awareness of what it is that they’re doing? What is your role to create more of that awareness? What are your thoughts? What have you done?

When we think of ourselves as leaders, we often think of ourselves as fighting for our own leadership space. As leaders, we have teams. Our biggest influence might be on changing the culture down as leaders. We often don’t think about that. We are so used to being scrappy in the leadership world that we don’t think, “How do we make sure that our hiring practices are fair and equitable and we’re bringing on diversity? How do we speak up when this message comes from within our team and we’re the leader above?” Sometimes shifting and filling our own leadership roles and looking for how we can influence from where we already stand, the seat we already have at the table, rather than trying to manage up and picturing how we shore up our own leadership. We have to do both, but I think that we’re probably more effective down.

Women Leaders: As leaders, you have to think about the needs of the organization and how you’re going to navigate through that.

Like what you said, Melanie made me think of something too. My leadership approach is developing relationships. If I see something that happens that I think is not right or lack certain self-awareness, I see it as an opportunity to seek to understand. I don’t want to destroy this relationship. I want to build it. Instead of being upset and assuming the worst, what is the steps that I need to seek, understand and bring awareness to that person? Bottom down, so role modeling that for my team because we’re role models too as leaders. It’s an opportunity to role model it across your level, but also throughout the organization. I like how you said that. As leaders, you have to think about the needs of the organization, the needs of your people and how you’re going to navigate through that.

I still remember in Spring of 2002, I interviewed for an international leadership position for a nonprofit organization. In the interview, they asked me an illegal question. They asked me what my family thought of all the travel I would have to do. I don’t have very many regrets in my life, but that one has haunted me because the other two candidates were male. I didn’t get chosen. Not only did that question was it illegal, but it threw me because I knew it was illegal when they asked it. I realized I had a real opportunity after thinking about it for about three years because that still bugs me to this day. I had this opportunity to step fully into my leadership shoes and say, “I know you intend no ill will, but you asked me an illegal question. One of the things I can bring to this role is that kind of knowledge to make sure that we are following the standards that we say we embrace.”

Let me tell you what happened to me. It makes me feel unsettled when you asked that question. I know that you think it’s a friendly question, but it does change the game for me as an interviewee. This is the first time I ever get to say it out loud. I’ve always wished I had said that because I could step into this leadership shoes because people at the board level say, “We want diversity. We want women in leadership. We want all that.” We silenced them at every level in the organization. To take up space and to teach, there is really power there.

I love how you said that. It goes back to the earlier question you said too, how do women do that? It takes some guts. It takes some courage, but the alternative is if you don’t do it, can you live with that with peace in your heart? As you said, you’re so excited that you finally got to say that out loud because it’s something that you lived with for three years.

Illegal questions happen all the time in interviews.

As a woman myself, I want to take a step up and stay. Sometimes I’ve had stereotypes that have influenced the way I perceived female candidates in interviews. I remember one time an HR consultant after the interview, I verbalized what I thought. She was like, “You can’t do that. You can’t say that.” She educated me. I’m like, “That is a stereotype that I grew up with.”

There’s good data right now on looking at resumes without looking at the name. Having somebody trim the name and put a number on the bottom so that you’re not getting ethnic references in the name or the gender of the candidate. That you’re equating the playing field at the hiring level so that you can overcome your own bias. We all have it. It doesn’t go away. We can learn, we can grow, but we can also take it out of our processes.

To make it a bit easier and continually work at trying to figure out what those biases are that we have by getting feedback from others. We try to minimize how it influences our decisions in a negative way that may be negative towards others. Let me ask you another question too. I was thinking about it because I was speaking to somebody this morning about being a female consultant in the leadership world and who my competitors are. I always say like, “The leadership consulting world is big enough. There’s enough business out there for everybody. We can collaborate and work together.” I find as a woman in this industry too, it’s quite challenging. First, trying to be a leader in an organizational setting, in a male-dominated industry. Now leaving, starting my own business and I still feel the leadership management consulting world is still very much male-dominated.

I see fewer women us doing this and I intentionally seek them out to connect with them, learn from them and see how we can work together. More often than not, I see a lot of other males doing this. I wonder sometimes there may be unknown barriers or things like, “What do people think when they see me? Do they want to contact me? Do they think I’m credible?” or they’re like, “She’s a woman. She looks young. I’m going to go with this old white guy over here who retired as a chief of police from this organization. He’s more credible.”

Sometimes I wonder, is that a challenge or a barrier that I’m up against? To be honest, I assume it is. Sometimes I lose out contracts to some of these competitors, although we’re submitting almost the same proposals. I wonder sometimes how that’s impacting my business. I was wondering your thoughts on that because you’re on the other side of the country. You’re also in leadership development. You’re a woman too. What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered?

Women Leaders: Collaborate with other women leaders who complement your strengths to provide better value to your work.

When I do a contract with an organization, it’s because of a relationship with a leader within the organization and I work with their team. Sometimes I get threaded around through the organization in different ways. I usually feel like it’s because they like the quality of my work. I have a bias after years of consulting. I did some sales for an IT consulting firm, in early 2010, like 2013, 2014, and took them into a Fortune 50 company in their IT Department. I did some work there with them as well. I have this bias toward $10,000 contracts, $49,000 contracts, below where a leader can sign off without a lot of approval. I find that you can get as much business with a one-pager as a full proposal.

In many cases, I only do our RFPs if they’re collaborative and somebody on the team is going to help me write the RFP. When we went into this Fortune 50 company, they had a $250,000 limit that they could do without having to go through purchasing. They kept saying bigger, which is funny. Here I am, “Let’s do a quick and dirty. We see if we like working together.” They were like, “No. We need a big contract.” You have to deliver it and it has to make sense. It’s weird. It’s not easy to do a contract that’s bigger than what you can see either. I find that the longer I go, the more I see contracts and the more I see RFPs as a collaborative process.

If I feel like they’re going to lowball me, it’s like, “How much can we put in here that you’re going to agree to? How much money can I put in here that’s going to make sense to you. You’re not going to push back?” You know this, every consultant that exist, they’re buying time. It’s like, “My time costs this much per hour. How much of it do you want me to put in the contract? I can tell you what we’re going to do with that time, but it’s not rocket science.” Unless it’s a rocket science contract, so I always try to be super collaborative with anyone I’m doing a proposal for.

That’s my approach too. When people are like, “What do you offer that’s different?” I’m purposely fighting against a traditional consulting model, which is I call the parachute in jet out. You parachute in. You give them a bunch of nifty tools and you jet out as fast as you can because it’s about billable hours. You’re going to give the same tools to million other companies and you don’t care about their outcome. I’m like, “I want to collaborate and partner with the organization. I almost want to be onboarded into the organization to get a sense of who you are and what it is that you need. If I feel there is an area that we need to focus on to get you to achieve that vision of yours or mission or outcome, and I don’t necessarily have that expertise, I am going to collaborate with another consultant who compliments my strengths. We’re going to tag-team this. We’re going to give you a wrap-around approach to what you need.” I think that’s a better value to the company. I love what you’re saying. It’s about collaboration.

I also love starting with interviews and some assessments where if you do ten hours of interviews with the key stakeholders in an organization, you know so much more than you did when they said, “Can you come to solve our problem?” Selling that package and then creating a collaborative step-by-step process forward that you are on the clock to create is a good model. You’re developing those relationships along the way, being a woman is less likely. I don’t look who people think a consultant is. They have that old guy in the brown suit, blue suit, whatever white collar. That’s not me. When they talk to me, they’re always like, “She knows stuff.” It’s always a surprise as a woman that I know stuff. You may have that feeling as well.

You answered that question earlier. What are some of the challenges you encounter as a woman consultant because I’m discovering these in my first year? Some of them are more blatant and others are like, “I think maybe I’m being discriminated against. I’m not sure, but it seems like it.” I was wanting to know about your experience. One person came up to me and I’m not sure exactly how she said it, but it was something to the effect of “Do people not take you seriously because you’re pretty?” I was like, “What? We’re bringing my looks into this conversation.” Once I opened my mouth, people will have a different opinion of me, but their opinion is I’m an airhead because my hair is blonde. I’m like, “I don’t know if I want to work with them.”

I love for you to be able to tell people where to find you.

My company is called Sinogap Solutions. You can go to my website. You can take a look and see what I have to offer there and also LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great way to connect with me because through LinkedIn, you can send me messages. You can get the link to my website there. That’s a good way. I would say, start with LinkedIn and then you’ll have access to my website. I have a YouTube channel, so you can even Google my name through there. If you went on Google and Googled my name, you’ll see everything that I have to offer in terms of free resources, my website.

I’m doing a new campaign now, through my banking institution, it’s called ATB Build Her Business. If you go onto LinkedIn and find me, you’ll see all the links to my campaign. I encourage you to go and take a look at it and start getting towards emerging leaders. People who are not necessarily in a formal leadership position, but want the skills, the mindset, and the confidence to enter into the leadership arena, are targeted for you. If you are looking for some support in that area of your growth, take a look at what I have to offer.

It’s been such a pleasure to have you on. It was a pleasure to get to know you and best of luck as a consultant. Maybe you won’t have a global pandemic for 2021.

I hope not. Thank you so much, Melanie. I enjoyed this conversation. It was wonderful for me as well.

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Talking to Dr. Johanna Pagonis and we’ve been dishing about leadership. I work in leadership. I think about leadership all the time. The challenges women face are different than the challenges men face. One of the things women can benefit from is having better feedback loops, creating relationships, deepening their connection to their teams. That’s all part of becoming an experimental leader. Those feedback loops help them have good information. It’s not all about appearing to be the stuffed shirt at the front of the room, but it’s about leading the team with relationship and from inside. It’s been great having Johanna on my show. Go experiment.

Important Links:

• Aaptiv
• Sinogap Solutions
• Tackle Tuesday
• LinkedIn – Dr. Johanna Pagonis
• YouTube – Dr. Johanna Pagonis
• ATB Build Her Business

About Dr. Johanna Pagonis