59 - The Leadership Conversation with Rose Fass

Do you have your eye on a leadership position in your organization or perhaps you're well on your way climbing up that ladder, but you could use a mentor. Maybe you could use someone to help you communicate your leadership style a little bit better. Well, you're in luck today. My special guest is Rose Fass. One of Forbes Top 10 Women Business Leaders in New York, the CEO and founder of Fass Forward where her firm has been awarded the Inc. 500/5000 for three consecutive years. She has been a guest on CNBC is quoted in several bestselling business books and is the author of the Chocolate Conversation, Lead Bittersweet Change, Transform Your Business, with her second book launching this year, The Leadership Conversation – Make Bold Change, One Conversation at a Time.

 

Fass Forward is a consulting group wherein everyone who participates within the Fass Forward family or tribe is both a career corporate person who has become a consultant and is now able to do both the training, coaching, all the different things Fass Forward has to offer.  The key ingredient that separates Fass Forward from other consulting groups is that they don't hire any career consultants because they want individuals on their team who have actually been on the firing line, know what it's like to have to go into a quarterly business review or deal with a PNL, or engineers that are late delivering a product or any number of things that go on in business.

 

The Mission of Fass Forward is to help leaders not just communicate, but also translate.  Translate strategy into purposeful goals that allow people to not only execute on something that's going to be good for the business, but hopefully something that's going to be good for society.

 

At 73, years old, Rose has been in the business for 52 years.  Over the last 35 years she has been in executive positions in fortune 100 companies. She’s learned that “no matter how hard we try our institutions for some reason or another seem to fail us in terms of giving people a sense of security, a sense of safety, a sense of realizing that we're being honest and integrous and life is going to be, at least if it's messy, it'll be honest.”

 

She had an epiphany, 21 years ago that maybe the last value-added space was going to be business and that she would have an opportunity to uniquely impact the world. Her partner, Gavin McMahon, who's a classically trained engineer and Rose decided to look at three things that they could work on to bring value to the leadership space. One is leadership in and of itself. What does it mean to be a leader to storytelling? How do you take what it is you want people to do?  And also coaching, one-on-one opportunities for them to work with executives and leaders at all levels to help them move past their fears, push past their idiosyncrasies and begin to develop the capability of being a really good strong leader.

 

Rose believes that there are both natural born leaders and then there are those people that aspire to be good leaders that are outstanding at work and functional expertise management. At Fass Forward, Rose and her team work really hard at finding the natural inflection points that every human being has, that juices, that, that gets them excited. That then becomes the platform for whatever your leadership style moment is going to be.Rose believes that you can train people on certain techniques, but for the most part, you still must go with the natural DNA of an individual.

 

All leadership happens in the conversation, whether it's through an email, a text, face-to-face or a zoom meeting. And it's what you say and what you don't say that communicates to every person that you speak to. Rose often tells her C level executives, when she’s in a coaching relationship, “there are no casual conversations. Once you become the CEO, you can't just do a flyby. People take it too seriously. The conversations that we have with ourselves, it begins there. What are we telling ourselves?”

 

Rose is the daughter of a Marine, who taught her that she needed to be up at 6am, ready for company. Through her life she has had the great opportunity build confidence. Rose always says to people, we’re born into the world with our brilliance and our muddy shoes and if we understand that we can be great leaders, because leadership is messy. The first thing that Rose asks anybody who wants to be a leader is “are you willing to be messy?” Because if perfection is the goal, it’s not going to happen.  Leadership is not something you plan for; it happens in the moment.

 

Helpful Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosefass/

https://twitter.com/fassforward

https://www.fassforward.com