Episode 53 - Female Leadership in a Male Dominated Industry - Tina Klaskala

Sometimes a small investment of time can reap huge benefits, taking a few minutes to reflect gratitude or to work out, or to listen to today's guest drop some song and advice for being successful at work. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 53 as the Resilience Think Tank presents the Resilience Journey podcast. I'm your host Mark Hoffman, and today we have some excellent advice for you. My guest this week has her roots in Homeland Security and has transitioned to the private sector. I'm joined by Tina Klaskella, and we're talking about what it takes to successfully lead as a woman working in a male-dominated industry. Listen as Tina and I discuss why it's time to flip the script and how to be your authentic self, even though you're imperfect. We'll get to my conversation with Tina after this from Lisa. Hi, I'm Lisa Jones, co-founder of the Resilience Think Tank. We're committed to ensuring diverse voices are included in making communities and organizations more resilient. We are spotlighting the next generation of resilience professionals. We will share videos, blog posts, and conduct interviews with rising stars in our profession. Also, we will discuss this topic at DRJFALL 2022 and on the Resilience Journey podcast. Want to be part of the conversation? Tag us on LinkedIn or Twitter with the hashtag Resilience Think Tank. You can also contact us at resiliencethink Tank.com. Tina, welcome to the podcast. Happy to have you here. Take a minute until the listeners a little bit about who you are. Thank you very much, Mark. I'm really glad to be with you today. So I've been in the Resilience business in several different forms now for just about 15 years. I got my start in state-level emergency management and a Homeland Security function. So I spent five years as a critical infrastructure protection analyst. And our infrastructure protection program in the state of Georgia was one of the first in the nation to implement federal level critical infrastructure protection guidance into local communities. And we did that partnering with local public safety partners and critical infrastructure owners and operators. And my transition into private sector was pretty natural. I ended up being recruited into an aerospace manufacturing company by one of their leaders who attended Coup or continuity of operations courses that were offered through my role at Jema. And that's really where my second chapter started. Since then, I've crossed sectors to find my current position at Southern Company. As an analyst supporting their business continuity and crisis management function for their system. You and I met recently at a conference. And I think the term that they would use is we've become fast friends. And I knew right away that you were interesting and someone that I thought would be a good guest on the podcast. So I'm really happy to have you here. One of the things that I want to talk to you about is it strikes me that some of the industries that you've been in. It seems to me that these are male dominated industries. And you are in a leadership role when it comes to emergency management. And our colleagues who are listening, understand the difficulties sometimes of trying to engage people and to move ideas forward and so forth. And that can be hard, I would think, or a woman in a male dominated industry. So talk about some of the challenges that you faced in that setting and what you have done to overcome them and to be successful. Sure. I mean, that's an excellent question. And you're not wrong in your statements. So I'm going to try and answer this in a couple different parts just to express some thoughts fully. So my advice for women first off is to make it a strength. I think it's time to flip the script for women in resilience. We do have unique abilities and those should be harnessed. And they should really be pushing us up front because the paradigm for transformational leadership is shifting. Soft skills provide a real competitive edge for companies. And I have seen across my past three companies that those have been included into leadership competencies. Soft skills are a big deal. And those are just a natural kind of strength that women harnessed for myself just to be candid for a moment. And I mean this as a genderless statement, Mark. I know when I say this, there's no shortage of egos out there. And being intimidated is a skill. To help build your confidence, I would say, and this is for anyone, know your why, right? Be able to say why you are passionate and get very comfortable with it. You need to be committed and be tenacious. I believe that for women in this field especially, we need a brand message that's polished enough for our leadership and then it's digestible enough to share with a true beginner. You know it's somebody who's just getting started. So we don't use the jargon and it's very tangible. Business continuity and crisis management do have standards but they remain as much an art as a practice, right? It's so important as a practitioner to stay true to your own style. We don't have to show up to trainings and exercises in this kind of robotic delivery box checking kind of form. You have to find out how you're comfortable and really embrace it. It's also important to remember that everybody has works and it's okay to show up as your authentic self. I have to remind myself of this as a daily basis, on a daily basis, right? It's my responsibility to show up as the intelligent, funny, sometimes awkward, wonderful energy that I am. And I think it's beneficial for people to embrace that. Show up imperfect and that's okay. As a matter of fact, the best statement that I've heard about that X-Factor quality that just makes somebody a lightning rod you want to be around them. It's not just our personality, it's humility. It's knowing that we always have something to learn. We should always be teachable. And we need to stay out of rooms where we're risk of being the smartest person in there, right? So lastly, I'm going to say get mentors. Because no matter in this way, I have been in that has been my saving grace. And I know you've heard it before. But get yourself some mentors. Don't be shy about networking, about collaborating. Every time you transition in your career, you want to seek out a couple like-minded people that you just naturally connect with. And built and trust, it can really be that easy. And they might come from formal or informal relationships. You want to maintain them within your industry, within your sector, and within your company across different corporate functions because believing you're going to have questions, especially when you're working something that happens on a blue sky day, right? You're going to have those questions. And mentors have been invaluable to me on my journey. And they certainly know who they are, but a special shout out. And thank you to those who have graced and influenced my path over these years. Tina, your answer is fantastic. And what I like about it in particular is this is not something that you can just sort of casually go about doing. It's intentional work, isn't it? It is. It is intentional. You have to have your own kind of personal objectives. Early on when I transitioned into the private sector, I attended a class and I believe it was at my first company. So I was employed by Gulf Stream Aerospace. And I went to a course with their HR about creating and promoting your own brand. And because I had taken over their business assurance program, it also was in a position when I came on board of meeting some revitalization. So I took that as a real personal call to action, right? It was a rebrand, but it was going to be a rebrand with whatever energy you bring to it. And I took that, I really took that to heart because you have to come up with your own mission statement and be ready to inject that kind of into your program. Is that leader? It's about leadership and influence. And again, I love that answer. You've talked a couple of times about the shift going from public sector at GMA into the private sector. And you're right, it was a natural transition by going into the aerospace industry. But did the background in the public sector help prepare you for private sector work? And if so, how would that have done that? You know, it did. It's a real common thing to hear that, you know, hindsight is 20-20. But that was so true for me because I didn't realize it fully until I'd been out long enough, right? To be able to reflect in my rear view mirror and see how those very unique skill sets were going to transition. And for anyone else that may be listening and who's ever done public service can really identify with this. Because even for GMA, I had several years in first responder roles, right? It's different. The objectives are life safety. and protection of, you know, protection of structures and infrastructure. It's not driven first by profits. Also, your team camaraderie is very, very unique. The level of trust and, you know, just coming together over those common goals. It's very, very unique. So moving to private from public is never going to be a direct translation. But I will say that, you know, my unique understanding of ICS, as well as understanding the benefits of building relationships across sectors and across agencies, have been huge. And as a crisis management, the real idea is know us before you need us, right? That's also true across sectors. You don't want to find yourself in an emergency where there's been a declaration and you don't know folks at responding agencies. Also, when you're a representative of an agency, you quickly understand the value and the delicacy of trust. And that quality is also going to always be true across sectors. You talked about ICS there. Was, did you sort of leave ICS behind when you moved into the private sector? Or do you still use some of the techniques from ICS? We do use some of the techniques from ICS, but I want to be very careful in my explanation here, because incident management in a corporate environment is never going to be a pure adoption of the NIMS incident-command system, right? The objective may be similar, but they remain different, surely because of the nature of corporate operations. For an example, and I wouldn't call this out if I haven't seen it in real life in plans in corporate crisis management. Your CEO or your highest-ranking executives should never be the incident commander or IC. This role is strategic, and it can be used to issue official messaging or they can consult on strategy that's coming from, you know, an incident team that's one or two tiers down, but never have detailed oversight of an incident, because they're going to have their own level of task to handle, depending on your industry, sometimes it will even be legally required reporting. Corporate response frameworks should be designed simple and agile. That means that your response IC may be, you know, our role as the BC manager, and it can be co-owned or shared by what we call incident owners or those representatives of impacted areas, but truly the function of good crisis management framework should bring the right people around the table to solve problems. Don't overthink it because it's very easy to do when you start looking at all the different business pillars and the shared services, but truly what you're looking to do is cover business-critical work groups and identify leaders within them to report within a meet break cadence. That essentially means you come together to identify problems, you break to work them and solution them, and then you come back to report status and do a reassignment, right, of new objectives. Ad hoc support, so you shared services, your facilities, if your corporation has an aerial services function, those should participate in the framework and flex as directed by the impacts, right. It's all about what you need. Ad hoc, they're trained, they're ready to flex and if they're needed and if not, they don't have to be brought into the response. As a program leader, it really falls to us to make sure that those roles are assigned and trained. So I've said it before, but I recommend getting creative. Training doesn't always have to be a standalone effort. It can be coupled in with exercises or it can be delivered in a method that feels less like checking a box. And I always find that those are well received. There's some real practical advice in there and I'm actually quite excited about some of the things that you said because it ties very closely into some projects I'm currently working on. And we all talk about how we can learn from each other. And there's perfect example of me learning from you on something. Actually, you validated an approach that I had just implemented for a client. So thank you for that. Now, you've worked in a number of pretty critical, highly critical industries with some organizations that have a real major dependency on uptime. You think about power generation, for example, everyone notices when the power is out. So talk about how those environments have maybe sharpened your overall level of resilience and what you've learned maybe from one employer that you can take to the next. So in my roles, I have found my biggest strength is I know what I know what I do know, but I also am keenly aware of what I don't know and who I need subject matter expertise on speed down for. Right. So this may be an obvious answer. And if it is, I apologize, but DR is not always going to be DR, I mean disaster recovery. It's not always within the same organization as your business continuity program and then can cause collaboration to feel disjointed. So familiarize yourself with how the DR program is structured within your company. Companies of different sizes, this can look different and their engagement can look different. So, you know, don't let that throw you off when you look at something and think this is not what I expected. But understand how the technology organization incident response works. Get your hands on their plan. Read their plan. Be familiar with the severity ratings when they are having an outage or things go down and know the definitions so that you can process impact in real time. If you have mobilization and activation of business continuity plans, right. You need to be as fluent as possible with their language. And at Southern, we have a role called the technology business partner. And I don't know if that's a common term for other large companies. I have seen them before, but not at every company. But if you have personnel that have that responsibility, create and maintain relationships with technology business partners. Because for the bulk of organizations that are larger, T.O. is a standalone pillar. And as a business continuity and crisis management person, it's our responsibility to not only know our BC plan owners for business critical processes, but also needing to have a relationship with representatives of T.O. Those business side partners who role it is essentially to translate often complicated DR implications to impacted business critical functions. And two, this might be unconventional, but I've seen great results when including these representatives into the required technology and applications portion of a business impact analysis. Because they provide the context to identify those applications and technology that are deal breakers versus, well, it'd be nice if it didn't break. I mean, we've all heard that before. Right. And I'll encourage this include them in tabletop exercises. Because this is something that I currently do at Southern company. Because these technology business partners have the legitimacy to correct expectations that are false or conflicting. And these are business pillar leaders around the table. So having the legitimacy to challenge during those discussions is a deal. Because it brings reality into current situations, maybe projects that are ongoing. And you can use that opportunity to create mutual learnings among leadership. As I've said, I've seen it in action. This is the second year that we're doing this across our operating companies. And it's very much appreciated. Often, you know, folks speak up more and ask more questions when they have that level of subject matter expertise at the table. In doing it in a tabletop exercise, we'll replicate how you're going to do it in a real life event. So you practice like you play. So I really like that. Hey, I'll get you out of here on this. I know you're always interested in building your network. You talked about that right at the top. So what's the best way for people to connect with you? You know, LinkedIn is good. I do try to check it every couple of weeks at a minimum. But as you've said, I give a lot of tangible takeaways because that's what I'm all about. If folks have specific questions, I recommend email. That's really the best way to, you know, get a timely response from me. That sounds great. Tina, I knew you're going to be a good guest. And you certainly didn't disappoint. Thanks for being here on the resilient journey. And thanks for spending some time today. It's my pleasure, Mark. Thank you. I want to thank Tina Klasskella for joining me this weekend for providing her excellent advice regarding ways that we can all excel and demonstrate leadership in the resilience role. Thanks as always to the resilience think tank for sponsoring the Resilient Journey Podcast. Stay in touch with the think tank at resiliencethinktank.com. Please share our work with younger professionals as we work to strengthen the future of our industry. We have another excellent guest lined up next week so join us, won't you, as we continue our Resilient Journey.