As more and more businesses utilize digital tools to build their online presence, you can just imagine how tough it can be for a leader leading in that space. Carol Kaemmerer, an internationally recognized executive branding expert, speaker, and author of the award-winning book, LinkedIn for the Savvy Executive, joins host Dr. Tracey Jones to share what she has to say about paying the price of leadership. She taps into the cure for loneliness, weariness, and feelings of abandonment and shares what she does to stay focused and gain clarity for the next great thing. Join Carol in this episode, where she shares more timeless insights and truths that will surely provide comfort to those struggling with being a leader and more.
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Episode 113 – Carol Kaemmerer – Leaders on Leadership
Our guest is Carol Kaemmerer. You are going to love knowing what she has to say about paying the price of leadership. Carol is an internationally recognized executive branding expert, speaker and author of the award-winning book, LinkedIn for the Savvy Executive. Carol creates powerful brand messaging for senior executives and their companies to increase their visibility, influence and ability to steer their future. She is a member of the National Speakers Association and certified as a Virtual Presenter for eSpeakers. Carol presents on communicating personal brands and presence online. Carol, thank you for being on my podcast.
It's great to be with you. Thank you for inviting me.
You're welcome. For our guests out there, “The people you meet and the books you read,” my father always said. I joined this group called the C-Suite Network and Carol was one of the ones that I immediately connected with. She reached out to me, and she's a LinkedIn expert. We've been in each other spheres ever since then. Carol, I'm thrilled to know what you share about your career and everything that you've done.
Thank you. I am delighted too. The C-Suite Network has been good to us so far.
I will get ahead of myself with all your cool LinkedIn stuff. Carol will share at the end what her engagement is with that and her tremendous and remarkable book. First, Carol, it's not all books, songs, roses, and C-Suite Network. Being a leader is tough. My father gave a speech called The Price of Leadership many years ago. It's one of the speeches that have been the most often requested. It's the one he gave the most. He loved leadership but he also was pragmatic.
He talked about, “Leadership is wonderful, but it's also tough, and there's a price you're going to have to pay if you truly say that you're going to be leading people.” The first price he talked about was loneliness. We hear it's lonely at the top and we laugh. Can you explain to our leaders what it meant for you to be lonely as a leader when you experience loneliness? Maybe share a story and maybe some words of encouragement for some of our readers that may be in that season of loneliness right now.
It's almost hard to talk about. In 2011, it was like the nadir of my whole existence. The world died for me in 2011. I had been working as a marketing communications person for a Fortune 500 company. I've been working with them for twenty years. It was my only client and they kept my inbox full. All of a sudden, the phone stopped ringing and I couldn't understand it, so I began to call my clients. I would get on the other end, “The person you have reached is no longer working for the company,” over and over again.
I called someone higher in the company and I said, “Is something happening?” He said, “Carol, didn't anyone tell you?” What had happened was that the company had undergone an economic downturn. They did what many companies do, which is to outsource whole departments, and they outsourced the marketing communication department in both the divisions that I supported. That meant I had no clients and my friends were out of jobs. I had no pipeline at all for my work. I was done. My whole network for twenty years had been within that company.
I needed to recreate myself in order to ever work again. Something new had happened. I began to study LinkedIn because I knew I needed to build a new network that was not within that company. I wanted to showcase my personal brand in a way that would draw people to me because I was not used to picking up the phone and doing cold calls. My work just came from the sky. It always came. My pipeline was well-lubricated. I had never had to reach out in that way. Not never, but I wasn't used to it.
I began to find the most marvelous things about LinkedIn. I have found that you could get to know people from all over the world. That would be honest to goodness real colleagues, people that you communicate with daily who you might never ever meet in person because they live in a different country or a different part of the country. People that you could follow and they would follow you. There could be that magic of collegiality. I found that you could communicate in almost any way you wanted to on LinkedIn with regard to your personal brand.
While I was learning all of this, I was working hard to listen to every podcast, go to every webinar and read everything I could about this platform. I was learning these marvelous things, and I reached out to my former clients because they were all out of work and they were all hurting. I would say, “Let me help you with your profile because you will find this is impactful. You will find that you will get better traction.” I was giving at the same time that I was hoping to find my own new job. It wasn't long until they started referring their friends to me, people that I didn't know.
All of a sudden, I'm realizing, “I have a new area of subject matter expertise. I have a new market niche for myself.” What I would say about my period of loneliness was that even though I was hurting, I reached out to others who were hurting, and together, we made things better. When you are lonely is not a time to cut yourself off from resources. I found resources both across the world and right in my backyard. I reached out to people in various ways to share what I was learning so that they could find the value too, and through that sharing, I found a new me.
This period of loneliness was a pivotal period. It is a painful period to remember that feeling of loneliness and abandonment and all of those things. It feels bad to find that after twenty years, nobody bothers to tell you that you don't have a place in their organization. Of course, they'd have no reason to call me. It was hard. What I found was I found that I have a voice that's mine. My voice can shine my branding brilliance on products but now, it also shines branding brilliance on people, and that's what I'm doing. I'm doing the people part and it's fun. I work with C-Suite executives and senior-level leaders because they need the level of excellence that I bring to their text and their branding.
She did it for me. Check out my LinkedIn profile. She got right in there and I love it. I love that you were transparent about the fact that you spent twenty years there. That's longer than a lot of people are married. I tell people, “It's a job.” You’re going to leave and they're not going to ever remember you. We've had several other leaders talk about connecting, that were with companies for a long time. Every three years, I change. I know not of this longevity people talk about. Other than being in Tremendous Leadership for more than twelve years, that's the longest I've been anywhere my entire life.
They were talking about, “You’ve got to realize if you're in one company for a long haul, you need to create a network outside of your company. If you're gone, you're gone. You're not part of them anymore.” It's important. I love that you talked about the cure for loneliness is don't be alone. Get out there and reach out. Sometimes, loneliness is where you see the vision nobody else does so you go through that transition time. This happened with the pandemic for speakers. You're a lonely speaker when you don't get to travel.
Thank you, Carol, for your insight into loneliness. The next thing my dad talked about was weariness. We've talked about this with C-Suite and it's refreshing. It's tough out there because sometimes, we're pouring into things that don't materialize or people that are just takers. It's tough to get up every day and fight the good fight. Can you talk to me about what weariness means to you and how you combat weariness and stay refreshed?
For me as a solopreneur, I am both the strategy person and also the person that executes. This is good in some respects. I found that when people treated me as an order taker, I didn't like that at all. I can do any task that needs to be done if I have set the strategy because I know that every little piece fits in the strategy and every piece has meaning whether it's fun or not. It's hard sometimes to be alone in your business. One of the things that I am working hard on is identifying things that I can delegate to others and finding others to delegate to.
That's scary when you're used to being all in control and all of a sudden, you need more help, but will the person that you choose represent you well? What I have done is find technology that is helping, so that's exciting. Also, I did delegate my least favorite thing, and that was invoicing and taking care of my finances. I have not only a QuickBooks account but somebody else whose job it is to take care of it. The other thing that is fun is that QuickBooks allows you to have people auto-send money to you from their account to yours. It’s like, “Money is here.”
That's a careful weariness, isn't it?
It is. Another thing that I do to cure weariness is to walk. That is refreshing to me. I have friends that I talked to and make sure that I stay in touch with because when you lose your friends, you've lost your life.
The next one is abandonment. My father has that negative connotation, but he used it in a sense of, “We need to stop thinking about what we like and want to think about or do or conversations and focus on what we ought and need to, which sounds like what you did in 2011. I like a good crisis because you get clear on the conversations you need to have and the ones you don't need to have. How do you abandon and stay focused on you?
LinkedIn: If we're busy with our meetings and we fill up all of our empty spaces with someone else talking, we can't ever hear what we want to say to ourselves.
It's interesting. I have an incredible attention span but sometimes getting started is hard. Procrastination is something that I need to work with because once I start and the work is engaging, it continues. What I have to do is say, “We're going to look at emails just a couple of times a day.” I deliberately close lots of things. I close LinkedIn and my email. If I'm not waiting for a message for somebody, I close it down so that I can concentrate. You see a little message flow through and you go, “Oh.” It's not important that you have to wander from what you're doing. The things that I abandon are the things that catch your eye, the shiny thing, whether it's email or phone, or whatever. It’s like, “If I'm here with you, I'm here with you. If I'm working or I'm writing, that's the job for today.”
It’s interesting that getting started is the top thing for you. If you figure out, do you think once you get started, if you have picked the right thing to focus on, it naturally pulls you along?
Yes, it does.
Do you think if you start to fade out that maybe you need to re-hone your focus? We’re only working through this on singularity on getting clear. I could start a new thing every second of every day. My thing isn't getting started. My thing is getting focus. Sometimes, I find if I start drifting on my focus right away, perhaps I need to go back and recalibrate or delimit what I'm focusing because otherwise, it's too broad. I love that you close stuff down to keep yourself focused.
That sounds like a good strategy. One of the things that I find is that when I'm trying to write something new or I'm creating, I need to crunch something. First, I try raw almonds and get back to work. If that isn't sufficient, then I get myself a bunch of baby carrots and I crunch. It's just part of it. What I am trying to do is to make sure that the things that I crunch are not deleterious to my overall nutrition. The things that I've picked are just fine.
I never heard that before, but I'm like that too. That's why I like popcorn, no salt, no butter. That's why I got that SkinnyPop. “Here are 100 calories. Just do this.” If I'm thinking, I immediately get the urge and I never thought I'm a crusher too.
I just know that that's part of me. I have these strategies for making sure that it's not a harmful part of me. You’ve developed your strategy too.
I like that because some people are like, “I put on music,” and I'm like, “If I put on music, it’s over. I don't know what's going on.” The crunching of popcorn is part of my strategy. My dentist isn't happy about it. He's like, “Can you lay off?” Carol, we talked about loneliness and weariness. Thank you for sharing your strategies for abandonment. The last point we're talking about is vision. My father always said that vision is nothing more than seeing what needs to be done and then doing it. You talked about 2011 but now, everybody is at home focusing on LinkedIn. How do you keep gaining clarity for the next great thing that is going to define Carol?
To keep my vision strong, especially during this COVID period, I have used silence as a way to inform myself, “Where am I going? What do I want to do?” It used to be that I would jump out of bed and turn on the Today show and listen to that while I was getting my makeup on, and then I would go and eat and I have more talking to me. Anytime I was preparing food, I would have the TV on, whether there was anything informative to watch or not. I would be listening. I’m always double tasking with the listening and the doing something else. Now, I have silence. I get up and I don't turn anything on. The things that I was turning on we're bringing bad news.
It's not that I have no news in my life, but do I need to start my day that way? Before I jump out of bed, I'm thinking about, what are my intentions for the day? As I'm putting on my makeup, I'm thinking, what is the number one thing that must be done now? What are the other things that would be nice to accomplish around my meetings? I'm taking the time to listen to me. Instead of going to an exercise class, listening to a lot of music, and being in the community, I'm spending time walking in my neighborhood. I'm spending time connecting with the physical world around me, hearing the birds, and giving myself time to process.
Listening to other things robs us of time to process our own thoughts. If we're busy with our meetings and we fill up all of our empty spaces with someone else talking, we can't ever hear what we want to say to ourselves. There's no time. I've given myself the gifts of time in silence to focus. I'm also enjoying reading, visiting with friends and all of that. One of the biggest things that I've changed since COVID is to reduce the input of mindless yammering. Not that the Today show is not a lovely show, but I can do without it and I'm glad to do without it.
That's part of your abandonment. You realize, “This is something that I don't need anymore.” Hasn't this been a beautiful time to do that?
Yes.
It lets people know, “You don't need all this going on all the time.”
The news is such downer stuff. Maybe it always is, but when you're afraid for your life, it’s like, “Let's not have that in our face from the beginning of the day.”
Talk about a vision killer. Carol, we covered loneliness, weariness, abandonment, and vision. Is there anything else that you would like to share with our leaders out there as far as your journey, what you encountered, or some truce or anything you want to leave them with?
One of the things that’s important is that we should realize that we are all bigger than whatever job it is that we're doing right now. The reason that that is important is that the jobs that we're doing right now can disappear. For some of us, they have. Especially for those people who are not currently able to work in their job. The notion that you are bigger than the job that you held can be helpful. We all have skills. They don't have to be used in the same way over and over again. We can use our skills in such different ways and we can reinvent ourselves.
That's what that period of loneliness did for me. It was my time to reinvent myself and to realize that I was bigger than the jobs that I was doing. I could do more. I was a writer, not just of material that someone else told me needed to be written. I could generate things that I thought were important to be told. I was able to write my book, LinkedIn for the Savvy Executive. I also write every month an article about LinkedIn, how to use it graciously and how to use it effectively.
I add a post every Monday called #LittleLinkedInLesson. That is such fun. I usually take a slide from one of my presentations and I talk about one concept. I put up this slide as my image, and then I share why this is important. It's just a little bite, a little LinkedIn lesson. It is fun to envision my material in different ways. It's like, “You can learn lots of things about LinkedIn.” “What's under this button. What could you do with that?”
I love that you hone in on that because people get burnt out on social media, but LinkedIn is a phenomenal tool. Like podcasts, it's for professionals and it's for leaders. There’s great stuff out there and a great connection. I even noticed since I tweaked my profile different things I'm getting coming in, different messages and different everything. It’s one of the greatest things you can use. #LittleLinkedInLesson is making people's lives completely different.
LinkedIn for the Savvy Executive
It is fun and I enjoy being able to share this material. When you write a long-form post or an article on LinkedIn, it doesn't necessarily get a whole lot of views. People don't like to consume long things. When somebody says, “I'm having such a hard time with people that I don't want to hear from showing up in my inbox,” and I go, “Let me send you my article about that.” I have a whole compendium of things that can answer any question. When a new question comes up, I'm going, “That's what I'll write about for next month.”
Listen to people and what they're experiencing. How do people get your book? Tell us the name of your book and where people can pick it up. I got my copy.
The book is called LinkedIn for the Savvy Executive. You can find it online at Amazon and BarnesAndNoble.com. You can also find me in every place if you know how to spell my name. This is a tough one. Carol, that's the easy part. The last name has twice as many letters as it needs, Kaemmerer. If you know how to spell my name, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and you can find my company page, which is CarolKaemmerer.com. On my company page, I don't post other people's material. I only repost my own articles and my own #LittleLinkedInLesson. Also, my podcast and things that I am speaking out about. You'll see all of my stuff there. Spelling my name is important but after you got it, you've got a connection to me.
Carol Kaemmerer, you are tremendous.
Thank you, tremendous Tracey Jones. I appreciate it.
Thank you for the insights you shared. It’s some great, timeless truths about what it takes and I love your authenticity. What you shared is what we all go through but that's okay. As my dad used to say, “The job doesn't make you. You make the job.” Wherever you’re in, the leaders out there, it is a time of transition. It will be okay because it's you and wherever you go, you bring you. Thank you for reinforcing that truth to us.
It is important for us to realize that we are bigger than any job that we hold.
To our tremendous readers, if you like what you’ve read, please hit the like and the subscribe button. Do us the honor of a five-star rating and be sure and send us a note. Carol answers all the time. I watch her and she watches me. We are active out there. Please check out her site, pick up her book, and do her the honor of a review too, and follow her podcast as well. To our tremendous readers out there, thank you for paying the price of leadership, and have a tremendous rest of the day.
Important Links:
LinkedIn - Tracey Jones
LinkedIn for the Savvy Executive - Amazon
BarnesandNoble.com - LinkedIn for the Savvy Executive
LinkedIn - Carol Kaemmerer
About Carol Kaemmerer
An internationally recognized personal branding expert and professional speaker, I am author of the best-selling book LinkedIn for the Savvy Executive. In addition to professional speaking and corporate workshops on personal brand and LinkedIn, I work one-on-one with senior leaders, C-Suite executives and their companies to express their authentic brand on LinkedIn to increase their visibility and influence, engage with their ideal audiences and cultivate reputations as thought leaders.
WHY personal brand and LinkedIn?
People may form their first impressions of us by viewing our LinkedIn profile. And, nearly every recruiter uses LinkedIn in their sourcing and vetting process. We can either manage our brand and sow the seeds of “know, like and trust” into our profiles to propel us forward in the world of work, or we can bury our head in the sand and pretend that a poor profile doesn’t hurt us. My goal is to make LinkedIn understandable so that we use it effectively.
HOW did I become an expert on personal branding and LinkedIn?
In 2011, my 20-year stent as a marketing communications consultant to a Fortune 500 medical device company came to an abrupt end when the company downsized by outsourcing its marketing communications function. During my intensive study of the LinkedIn platform following my job loss, I discovered the strategies which, when executed with skill, resulted in being found for other opportunities. While helping friends in transition, I discovered that my writing expertise combined with my deep understanding of the LinkedIn platform would be the key to the next chapter in my career: shining my branding brilliance on people rather than products.
Contact me: carol@carolkaemmerer.com for
• Speaking and training
• Executive branding and LinkedIn coaching
• Corporate services
CliftonStrengths top themes: empathy, maximizer, relator, developer, individualization, achiever
Contact me: carol@carolkaemmerer.com