More Than Your Title — On The Other Side (S1E8)

This one is a little different.

After seven episodes of tracing organizational silence through policies, systems, and the people they affect, Dr. Ashley Newcomb steps back — and gets personal.

It started with a trip to Savannah, Georgia with two of her nieces. And what that trip reminded her of became the foundation for this episode: that the most resilient leaders and followers are never people whose entire identity lives inside their professional role. They are people who have built a life that is bigger than their career.

In this episode, Dr. Newcomb shares her own story — including the toxic leadership experience that sent her straight into a Master's program, and eventually a Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership. She talks about what it means to be more than your title. About the research on what happens to people who retire having identified only as their job. About the particular guilt that women carry when they choose to have both a career and a life. And about what personal resilience actually has to do with organizational resilience.

Because you cannot pour from an empty cup. And an organization full of empty cups is not resilient. It is one crisis away from collapse.

🎧 Listen now and grab free resources at inspiredcoaching.net

---

Topics covered in this episode:
Work-life balance | Personal resilience | Organizational resilience | Professional identity | Women in leadership | Leadership burnout | Personal development | Self-care for leaders | Retirement identity crisis | Permission to rest | Leadership sustainability | Followership wellbeing | Career and family | Mental health at work | Whole-person leadership

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Today I want to tell you something that on the surface looks like it has absolutely nothing to do with organizational theory. But when you get down to the nuts and bolts of what organizational theory really is, it has everything to do with it. So I just got back from Savannah, Georgia, and I took two of my nieces with me who happen to be two of my most favorite people in the entire world. And not just because they still think it's cool to hang out with their ancient aunt. Now, if you've ever been to Savannah, you already know what I'm about to say. There's just something magical about that city that slows you down in the best possible way. There's Spanish moss hanging from the oak trees along the squares, the smell of the river, the fresh seafood, the way that people just linger. They linger over food, over conversation, over nothing in particular. It's a city that doesn't apologize for taking its time. And spending a few days there with two people that I love, doing absolutely nothing that required a strategy or a deliverable or a follow-up email. It reminded me of something that I think most of us in professional life need to be reminded of more often than we actually are. We are more than our titles. I'm Dr. Ashley Newcomb, founder of Inspired Coaching and Leadership, and this is the Resilient Organization. Today's episode is going to be a little different. We're going to take a step back from organizational systems and structural silence and framework development, all of which we will absolutely return to next week. But today I want to talk about something that I believe is foundational to everything else we've been discussing this season. Something that doesn't show up on an org chart or in a performance review. Something that, in my personal and professional experience, is one of the most underestimated variables in organizational resilience. And that, my friends, is the personal resilience of the people inside of the organization, including and maybe even especially you. So what Savannah reminded me? The girls and I ate too much, we laughed a lot, we wandered around and got just lost enough to find something that we wouldn't have found otherwise. And at some point during that trip, sitting outside watching the city move at its own pace, I thought I really needed this. Not as a reward, not as recovery from burnout, just as a regular essential part of being a full human being who also just happens to have a career. And then I thought, how many people don't give themselves permission to have that? The leaders that I work with and the followers that I work with, those mid-level managers who haven't taken a full week of vacation in years because there's always something that doesn't feel like it can wait. The executives who are physically present at their child's recital, but mentally, they're still in that last meeting. The high performers who have quietly decided that their worth is entirely contingent on their output, and to be frank, who are running on empty in ways that they've learned to hide really well. You see, we talk a lot in the United States about work-life balance, and I think most of us, if we're going to be honest, which we are here, we know that we don't actually have it. Here's what I've observed personally. So we tend to swing between two extremes. Either we sacrifice everything for our career, we sacrifice relationships, our personal health, the rest, the joy, or we overcorrect and we sacrifice our career for everything else. What we rarely do is give ourselves permission to actually have both, to be a serious professional and a present parent or spouse or child or aunt or uncle. Basically, what I'm saying is sometimes we erroneously think that we have to choose between being a serious professional or a present person living a real life in the real world. We struggle as a society to successfully exchange that or with and. So instead of being either ambitious or rested, we can be both. We can be ambitious and rested. We can be driven and joyful. We can have a career that matters and a life that matters, and to believe, really believe, that one doesn't have to come at the expense of the other. Savannah didn't teach me anything that I didn't already know. It didn't teach me anything that I haven't preached time and time again to my clients. But Savannah did remind me. And I think a lot of us, including myself, need that reminder more than I need another productivity framework or change management model or anything else that teaches me anything other than how to balance self-care and my professional achievements. After seven episodes of discussing leadership theory and practice, I want to take this episode to do something a little different. I want to tell you a little bit about who I am when I'm not Dr. Ashley Newcomb, organizational leadership consultant and podcast host. Because I think it matters. And I want you to know this part of who I am. Because I think that one of the things that makes this work meaningful to me is that it's genuinely connected to my real life, not just my professional one. So I have four children, and I use that word without qualification because that's what they are to me. Three daughters and a son. And before you do the math on my biography, yes, my family was built in ways that don't always follow the traditional blueprint. And I wouldn't change a single piece of it. Some of my most important relationships, the ones that have really shaped me, came to me in ways that I didn't plan and couldn't have predicted. And I think that's true for a lot of us if we're honest about it. In addition to my four kids, I am proud to say that I have six grandchildren. Six. I say that number out loud sometimes just because it still surprises me in the best possible way. And I have nieces and a nephew and an honorary nephew who is a close friend's son who's decided entirely on his own that apparently I am his aunt grandma, his words, not mine, because I am the best of both worlds. And I keep that one really close to my heart. I believe in girls' nights, not occasionally, but intentionally and regularly, because there is something about the specific kind of connection that happens when you're sitting around a table with women that you trust when you can be unguarded and loud and a little ridiculous and completely yourself that refill something in me that nothing else quite reaches. And here's the part that I want you to hear clearly. None of that, not the grandkids, not the girls' nights, not the trip to Savannah, none of it makes me less of a professional. Nothing of it compromises my research or my credibility or my commitment to this work. If anything, it deepens it. Because I can't talk authentically about what it costs people when organizations drain their capacity and ignore their humanity if I'm not also paying attention to my own. You cannot pour from an empty cup. I know that phrase has become cliche at this point, but it became cliche because it's true. And I want to talk about what it actually looks like to keep the cup full, not as a luxury, but as a professional responsibility to you, to your organization, and to your followers. So, how I became interested in organizational leadership theory. I want to share something personal with you today that I don't talk about publicly very often. I'm sharing it because I think it's relevant to everything that we've been discussing this season and because I think you might recognize pieces of this in your own story. Before I earned my PhD, and really before I even thought about going back to school, I was a mid-level manager. I had a bachelor's degree in criminal justice, a solid track record, a genuine commitment to the work I was doing and to my organization. And as with this organization, oftentimes when you accepted a promotion, you actually had to promote out into another division. So I did transfer out, I accepted a promotion, went to another division, and then I came back to my original division in a different position. And that return, that decision is not one that I made lightly, but it created a dynamic with a supervisor that became genuinely toxic. I'm not going to dwell on her because she's not the point of the story. What I will say is this the leadership culture that I was operating inside of at that time had a significant gap between what it said it valued and what it actually practiced. And the person above me used the tools at her disposal to communicate something very clearly to me. I was not worth developing. To make a long story short, there was an opportunity for professional development and I applied for it. So she came back and told me that someone else had turned down my request to attend this development opportunity and told me that the nameless people didn't think that I had what it took. When I tried to figure out the details, people pointed fingers at one another. They frustrated my efforts to appeal the opportunity to attend the training. They gave me the runaround until I just gave up. I was emotionally exhausted. I felt like a worthless employee, and I just felt helpless. I felt like nothing that I did would matter, that I would be stuck with my wheels spinning for the rest of my professional career. So to give you a little insight into my personal personality, I was built with a little bit of sass and a whole lot of hard-headedness. So after I got that rejection and after I started feeling like my career was in the tank, I enrolled in a Master of Organizational Leadership program. And a year after that, I started my Doctor of Philosophy in Organizational Leadership. And I'm going to be honest with you about my motivation at that point. Part of it was to prove them wrong. And I'm not embarrassed by that. Sometimes anger is a rocket fuel that gets you somewhere that you need to go. But what accidentally happened on the way to proving her wrong, I fell in love with the work. I fell in love with the organizational research, with the questions, with the realization that everything that I'd been experiencing inside of that organization had a name. It had a framework. It had decades of scholarly thought behind it. And the patterns I was living were not random and they were not personal. They were systemic. And they were costing organizations and the people inside of them enormously. That realization right there changed the trajectory of my career. And it changed something in me personally too. Because it gave me language for my own experience. And language, being able to name what's happening to you, is one of the most empowering things a person can possess. I left that agency. And I want to say something about what happened after I left because I think it's important. The patterns that had been directed at me didn't stop when I walked out the door. But I'd built something by that point that those patterns couldn't reach. I had an education that was mine, a direction that was mine, and a sense of who I was outside of any title or any organization's opinion of me. And that, that sense of self that exists independently of your professional role, that is what I want to talk to you about for the rest of this episode. Because here's what I've come to understand both personally and professionally. The most resilient leaders and the most resilient followers that I have ever worked with are people who know who they are outside of work. People who have built a life that is bigger than their career. Not people who work less or care less, but people who have invested in themselves as whole human beings. And that investment pays dividends inside of organization in ways that are hard to quantify but impossible to miss. So let's spend a moment right here talking about something that I don't think we talk about enough in a professional life. And that is the very real, very documented cost of over-identifying with your professional role to the exclusion of everything else. Research on retirement, and there is a significant body of it, consistently shows elevated rates of depression, loss of purpose, and identity crisis in people who've spent their entire careers defining themselves almost exclusively through their professional roles. Not because retirement is inherently difficult, but because something profound happens to your personal identity when the title goes away and the organization goes away and the calendar full of meetings goes away. I mean, after all that, what's left? Well, for people who've never really invested in themselves, the answer to that question can be quite devastating. And here's what I want you to really understand. This is not just a retirement problem. It shows up earlier. It shows up in the leader who can't disconnect on vacation because their sense of self requires constant professional validation. It shows up in the high performer who has quietly equated their worth with their output so that a bad quarter or failed project doesn't just feel like a professional setback. It feels like a personal failure. It shows up in the follower who pours everything into an organization that doesn't pour back. And who, when that organization finally disappears through downsizing or restructuring or their own decision to leave, finds themselves adrift in a way that they didn't anticipate. A resilient organization is built on resilient people, and resilient people, the ones who bounce back, who adapt, who bring their full capacity to the work, even when the work is hard, are almost never people whose entire identity lives inside of their professional role. They are people who have something to come back to, something that replenishes them, something that reminds them of who they are when no one is evaluating their performance. That something looks different for everyone. For me, it's my family. It's my girls' night. It's an impromptu trip to Savannah with two of my nieces. It's a commitment to learning that is about curiosity and growth, not just credentials. For you, it might be something entirely different. But I'd invite you to ask yourself this honestly. Do you have it? And if the honest answer is not really, I'd gently suggest that building it is not a distraction from your professional effectiveness. It's a prerequisite for it. You cannot pour from an empty cup. And an organization full of empty cups is not resilient. It's one crisis away from collapse. Now I want to say something directly to a few specific groups of people who might be listening today. To the leaders in this audience who haven't taken a real vacation in longer than you care to admit or maybe even can remember, that organization will not fall apart without you for one week. And if it will, that's a management problem, not a reason to stay. A leader whose organization can only function with them constantly present has built dependency, not resilience. Taking time away is not irresponsible. It is in some ways the most important diagnostic tool available to you. What breaks when you step back tells you exactly what you need to fix. To the women in this audience who are navigating careers and families, whether that's as a mother, a daughter, a sister, or an aunt, and the particular kind of guilt that seems to come standard issue when you try to do both, you have permission to have a career, a real one, an ambitious one, one that takes you to conference stages and graduate programs and places that require you to be away from home sometimes. That is not selfishness. That is modeling. The next generation, all of them, but especially your daughters and your nieces, they're watching you to see what it looks like to be a woman who takes herself seriously. And what they see you do will shape what they believe it's possible for themselves to do far more than anything that you tell them. Keep in mind that you are also helping define what your sons and nephews will see as normal and acceptable behavior from women. And to everyone listening, regardless of your role, your title, or where you are in your career, you are allowed to be more than what you do for a living. Your family, your friendships, your curiosity, your rest, your joy, these are not distractions from your professional effectiveness. They're a source of it. They're what keeps the cup full. And a full cup is what makes it possible to keep showing up for your organization, for your team, for the people who are counting on you to lead well. By now you know that I always try to leave you with three action items that you can use immediately to help put you on the path of recovery and resilience. This episode has that same goal with a slight twist. My points today are not organizational action items. They're personal ones. And I want you to take them as seriously as you would anything else I've offered this season. First, schedule something for yourself that has nothing to do with work and protect it like it's a board meeting. Not a maybe, not a someday, not a I'll get to it when things slow down. Put it on the calendar. Make a date with yourself this week. Have a dinner with a friend that you've been meaning to see. A morning walk, a day trip somewhere that makes you feel like a person and not a professional. Whatever that is for you, schedule it and safeguard it. And when something work-related tries to take that slot, let the work-related thing find another time. Because here's the truth the work will always expand to fill the space that you give it. You have to decide how much space that is. And you do get to make that decision. Second, identify one thing in your life outside of work that you've been putting off because you didn't feel like you've earned the time or the permission yet. Maybe it's going back to school, maybe it's a trip that you've been talking about taking for years. Maybe it's starting something creative that has nothing to do with your career. And then take one concrete step toward it today. Not tomorrow, today. Because the permission you've been waiting for isn't coming from anywhere outside of you. You are the one who gets to grant it. Third, the next time someone asks you how you're doing, give them a real answer. In the South, it is customary when someone says, How are you today? You say, I'm fine, thank you. It doesn't matter if your left arm is falling off and you're bleeding out of your jugular. You're still supposed to say that's fine. So let's start giving real answers. Not fine, not busy, not just hanging in there, but something true. I know that sounds something small, but I think one of the ways that we lose ourselves inside of our professional roles is by getting so practiced at the professional answer that we forget that there's another one. Now I don't mean let's overshare our personal lives with strangers at the grocery store, but what I do mean is find that one person, that safe space, and really, really let yourself open up and allow yourself to be vulnerable with that person that you trust. And that staying connected to what's actually true for you in your life, in your relationships, in your sense of self is one of the quietest and most important acts of personal resilience available to you. Now I didn't solve any organizational problems in Savannah. I didn't finish a single research paper or record a podcast or respond to any professional emails. I ate good food and I walked too many miles with those girls and laughed with them until my face hurt. But I did come home a better version of the professional that I'm trying to be because I came home reminded about who I am when the title isn't in the room. You see, sometimes we get so wrapped up in our professional image of that proposal that needs to be written and that deadline that needs to be met, and that new client that we need to have a kickoff meeting with, that we forget how completely refreshing and rejuvenating it can be to dip our toes in the ocean and eat too much seafood and prank two teenage girls when they're least expecting it. You see, the secret to true resilience isn't powering through a catastrophic event regardless of personal cost. It's taking care to build a life worth defending before the storm ever hits. In our next episode, we're going to return to the season arc with something that I think is going to be one of the most eye-opening episodes yet. The real concrete financial and human cost of a quiet organization. What silence is actually costing you in numbers that you can point to. That's episode nine. But until then, go do something that has absolutely nothing to do with work. Go be silly. Go be free. Go be a little crazy. Give yourself the permission that was always yours to give. This has been the Resilient Organization. I'm Dr. Ashley Newcomb. Thank you for being here. I'll see you next time.