Adrienne (00:04.45)
Hi, everybody, and welcome to the She Leads podcast. I'm so excited to share my next guest with you. She is an incredible woman. She is a connector. She's a friend. And I cannot wait for you to hear from her. Her name is Kim Carpenter, and she's a high-performance leadership and executive coach, a corporate trainer and speaker. And she partners with leaders and their teams to achieve breakthrough results.
People at the Center, a talent development consultancy dedicated to the cultivation of people-centric leadership. Using research-backed tools and proven practices, they help organizations shape leaders who don't just inspire their teams to go the extra mile, but also bring everyone together to tackle big challenges head on. In the past 20 years, Kim has trained over 3,000 professionals.
and coach top executive leaders at companies such as Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, and PBS. Welcome to the She Leads podcast, Kim.
Kim Carpenter (01:10.844)
Thank you so much Adrienne it is amazing to be here with you and everyone listening.
Adrienne (01:18.006)
Well, I am so excited. I mean, we have spoken so much over the past couple of years. You introduced me to one of my favorite people in the world, Leanne Rogers. And it has just been such a joy to get to know you, to get to know her through Leanne. I've met some other wonderful women. So Kim, you're a connector.
Kim Carpenter (01:40.884)
This is truly Ann, I love it connecting. And I remember that I got connected to you through our mutual friend Deb. And so it's just a frenzy of beautiful connections with women now all across the world.
Adrienne (01:57.194)
I love it. So Kim, let's talk about your company and sort of the work that you do. How did you get into working with companies and working with teams?
Kim Carpenter (02:11.508)
Well, I started my first career was in corporate and I lived in New York City and I worked first in advertising agencies and then transitioned into IT professional services firms. And I quickly rose up through the ranks, climbed the corporate ladder very fast. So by my early 30s, I had a team of almost 30 people reporting to me.
Adrienne (02:37.346)
Wow.
Kim Carpenter (02:37.412)
And I really didn't have very much of a clue about how to be a great leader or how to be a great manager. I just modeled what my managers did. There wasn't any formal training. And so I had some great practices and some not so great practices. And at one point I went through a big life transition. I went through a divorce. So as many of us can have experienced, those times cause us to reflect.
And I hired my first executive coach at that time and fell in love with coaching. I also had the experience of feeling frustrated inside of some of the corporate environments, feeling like it wasn't very people centric, that a lot of the management practices were just, you know, push people hard, push people as hard as you can.
Kim Carpenter (03:26.364)
And honestly, Adrienne, if I tell the truth, I wasn't a great manager in some ways, I did demand a lot. I was kind of a force, you know, and I expected a lot from my teams. We did have fun together. Often we were friends and would hang out after work, but in those days we were pulling a lot of all-nighters sometimes or very late hours, sometimes working on the weekends, things that, you know, yeah, make you cringe today.
Adrienne (03:34.079)
Oh yeah.
Kim Carpenter (03:54.056)
And so I learned firsthand that A, I didn't really wanna be that kind of a leader. B, those work environments weren't really working for me. And that's what caused me to leave corporate and start my own business. I really wanted to be able to touch many more lives than I could as a person just working in one company. I loved the coaching process and I grew and developed through that and I wanted to share that with others. So that's how it really got started.
And in the beginning, I was coaching more around life and coaching women than women entrepreneurs, and then coming full circle in the last decade, really coming back to working in corporate and providing a new kind of insight into how we can create more people-centric work environments and how we can help leaders be better leaders for themselves and for their teams.
Adrienne (04:51.57)
So good, such good stuff. And it's so interesting. I think so many people can relate to, I hear it from so many people that get interviewed on this podcast. We were in corporate, including myself, we were in corporate. We got to a point where we either wanted to impact more people or that we got super burned out, right? Or there was something that was happening that we didn't like.
And we thought, you know, if we could get here because we are driven, intelligent, wonderful people, then, you know, let's just start a business of our own. Right. So I know that comes with freedom, which is great. But sometimes freedom is not as free as we would we would like it to be. So have you experienced any challenges in sort of moving from the corporate world into the world of entrepreneurship.
Kim Carpenter (05:50.724)
sure. I mean, who answers that question and says, No, Adrienne, there are no challenges. Of course, there's a lot of challenges. And I think right out of the gate, it was so humbling to be a quote unquote expert in advertising, marketing, business development, you know, I was the head of client services. So I was
Adrienne (05:51.618)
Hahaha
Adrienne (05:55.65)
No!
Kim Carpenter (06:17.476)
launching new brands all of the time and then to go, wait a minute, you know, record scratch. I've got to do this for myself and those strategies are not going to work for me. I don't have a multimillion dollar ad budget and marketing budget. How the heck am I going to do this? So right off the bat, well, honestly, I tried to go it alone for about a year and then I started learning about all these incredible business coaches and
Adrienne (06:23.938)
Yeah.
Kim Carpenter (06:45.78)
gurus and experts that I could learn from. But I think that was hard. It was also hard just coming around to talking about myself and feeling authentic in that expression. I also, for a long time, had terrible stage fright. And I worked with some other coaches. And in the very beginning, I would say, okay, let's go up on stage together.
And I'll feel more secure if we're both presenting, you know, you present this and then you can kind of save me or rescue me if I forget what I'm doing. I mean, I was really, really nervous. And it's funny when I tell people that now, like my hand would shake so terribly that I always asked for the wireless microphone because I didn't want people to see my hand shaking with the microphone. So a lot of strategies to try to, you know, I say.
Adrienne (07:15.692)
Oh gosh.
Adrienne (07:25.685)
Yeah.
Adrienne (07:37.518)
Gosh, wow.
Kim Carpenter (07:43.564)
Confidence builds confidence. So we just have to keep doing the thing that scares us until we get better at it. And this whole journey of entrepreneurship is a whole lot of pushing the comfort zone, pushing the boundary to try to see who am I gonna be tomorrow? The next speaking engagement, I'm gonna show up and I'm gonna improve in these ways.
Adrienne (08:07.561)
Yeah.
Kim Carpenter (08:11.888)
I think it's a constant evolutionary process.
Adrienne (08:12.227)
Mmm.
So from the beginning, you were thinking about how you could get out there and how you could get some speaking gigs. Not everybody does that, especially when they're starting a coaching business. So what was that thought process for you? Like, hey, of course, you don't have all the budgets behind you and everything. What made you think of speaking versus, let's say, buying Google Ads?
Kim Carpenter (08:41.6)
Oh yeah, that's such a good one. Um, I just saw people that I admired and what they were doing. And I'm also, I know as you are too, Adrienne, quite ambitious. So I knew that playing small or just having, you know, barely a lifestyle coaching business wasn't where I wanted to go. So I really.
Adrienne (08:50.542)
Hmm
Adrienne (08:56.197)
I'm sorry.
Kim Carpenter (09:09.748)
What's the impact I wanna make if I'm saying that I'm a stand for changing the face of work and having people love going to work and having workplaces be places that infused inspiration in people and gave them a sense of livelihood. I'm going to have to do something more than play small, put out Google ads or Facebook ads or just make some social media posts.
Adrienne (09:16.852)
Mmmm
Kim Carpenter (09:38.708)
I'm going to have to step out, be courageous, and have my voice be heard.
Adrienne (09:43.81)
I'm like, okay, that is like poster child for She Leads Media. It is what we encourage so many women to do. And yes, it is so scary and it pushes us out of our comfort zone, but the keeping at it, you're how many years in? 10 years in, 12 years in. Are your hands still shaking when you're holding the microphone?
Kim Carpenter (10:11.4)
No, not at all, not at all. In fact, I'm energized, I'm excited. Now there might be a little bit of shakiness, but it's I can't wait, I can't wait. Now I do a lot of practice, I practice my talks, my sweet husband, he listens to me all the time and gives me feedback. He's an educator, so he's really great at, you know.
Adrienne (10:14.238)
Ugh, this is so-
Adrienne (10:23.392)
Ugh.
Adrienne (10:29.454)
Really?
Adrienne (10:32.777)
haha
Kim Carpenter (10:39.66)
crafting a story, engaging an audience. Like he's gotta get teenagers to listen to him, right? So he's a great feedback person for me, also my other colleagues, people like you that, you know, I'm like, hey, we're going to the same conference, I'm speaking, can you give me some feedback after and tell me what could I improve? What am I doing or not doing? But now I'm excited about it and I've.
Adrienne (10:44.394)
Oh gosh.
Adrienne (11:04.004)
Mm.
Kim Carpenter (11:04.996)
I've got the confidence because I built the competence, the competency in doing this. And I know that's what you're really committed to. And it is so important. We need to have our voices be heard.
Adrienne (11:17.642)
Oh, yeah. I mean, I feel like I've been having this conversation lately, basically since the She Leads Conference, which happened at the end of November in 2023. But this idea of even if you are feeling the fear, it's important that you do it anyway. And you do not have to be perfect. You can shake.
say um every other word and you can forget while you're up there. But the more that you do it, even if no one listens to a word that you say, someone in the audience is going to be inspired by the fact that you have the boldness to get up there and at least try. And that is so, that is
Adrienne (12:17.57)
be perfect because that's why we get so afraid. We think we have to fit a certain mold, look a certain way, have certain cadence and tone to our voice. No, what we need to be is ourselves. And that is so inspiring. So the fact that you did that so early on is amazing. And I hope that anybody listening can say to themselves,
Kim Carpenter (12:20.236)
That's right.
Adrienne (12:47.102)
Listen, I might not know exactly what I'm doing, but I also am inspired by Kim's story and I'm gonna get out there and try to speak. So how this, I'm taking this a little into maybe some practical areas and I wanna go back to what your area of expertise is, what you do, how you help people, but I'm gonna just take it off a little bit because I'm so passionate about this. How do you...
find the places to speak at. And you have been very successful. You just shared with me before we got on that you have a full calendar of speaking for this year. How did you get those opportunities?
Kim Carpenter (13:30.881)
Yeah, it started a little slow and it started with my network. So I think having people like you, Adrienne, who are building networks, we can tap into the SheLeads network, other networks that I'm a part of. I just started asking people who are leading.
conferences that I could be a part of or who's interviewing somebody for a podcast? Could I be inter... a lot of people are doing LinkedIn live interviews or Facebook live interviews like could I just be interviewed? And that felt like a really low risk way to get into this because you can have your computer, you can have your computer camera, you can have notes on your computer right in front of you that you can refer to.
Adrienne (13:56.663)
Yeah.
Adrienne (14:06.062)
Yeah.
Adrienne (14:15.346)
Yeah.
Kim Carpenter (14:23.324)
So it's kind of like low bar to entry, right? Easy way to, so start somewhere. And then I got into these networks and I started saying, who else are speakers? So one important thing is to know as many other speakers who are doing what you want to do and start reaching out to them and saying, how can we align and amplify what each other's doing? Can I be...
a thought partner with you and vice versa. Could we share about gigs? Because here's the thing, a lot of conferences have a lot of consecutive sessions going on and it's easier to get booked as a speaker in those, but they usually only have one or two or three main keynote speakers. And if you speak at that conference once, you're not gonna get invited back to speak the next year because they're gonna want a new keynote.
So if you're trying to get keynotes, it's great to network with other keynote speakers because it's not very competitive. And it's very easy, I feel, to pass on opportunities I've had people pass my name on. So first, use your community. Then there are other platforms like Innovation Women is a paid platform that they list dozens every week of speaking.
Adrienne (15:21.742)
Hmm
Adrienne (15:30.2)
Mmm.
Kim Carpenter (15:45.004)
opportunities that are available, some paid, most non-paid, but I would say just start speaking. If you have a way for people to get onto your email list, a free offering, most places will let you offer that. And so for me, it's more valuable for me financially to speak for free and be able to get people onto my list so I can nurture them than it is for me to get.
Adrienne (16:12.291)
Hmm.
Kim Carpenter (16:13.76)
paid to speak and I can't talk about what I do. So, right, something to consider there. So there are lists. Also, I have some incredible interns that I've hired from this platform called Acadium, Acadium.com, and I pay for two interns. I think it ends up, they work for me 10 hours a week, and I've created some SOP, Standard Operating Procedures.
Adrienne (16:16.961)
Oh yeah.
Adrienne (16:29.346)
Yes? Mm-hmm.
Kim Carpenter (16:43.872)
for them to follow, so it's easy. Every three months I get some new interns and they go through the SOP and they're doing research online on speaking gigs. I also have Google Alerts set up for call for speakers, women's speakers, speaker applications. So all these keywords that come right into the inbox of the interns so they can be searching and applying and I'm not doing all of that.
tedious time-consuming legwork. And honestly, I think I end up paying like $3 an hour or something for these folks. Like it's incredibly cost-effective. I also have some team members who are located in the Philippines that do some of this research for me. And they're getting valuable work experience. They're learning about PR. They're on our team meetings.
every week where we're talking about everything we're doing for marketing and PR for the company. So it is a valuable win-win. But those are some of the ideas about how to get the gigs that come to mind when you ask that.
Adrienne (17:44.302)
Hmm.
Adrienne (17:48.568)
Mmm.
That is perfect, right? I mean, that's like A, B, C. And everything that you have just outlined, I think if people could follow that, they too would be successful in securing speaking gigs. I love that you mentioned Innovation Women, who was started by Bobbi Carlton, who is a friend of She Leads for a very long time since we started our conference in 2016.
So I love Bobbi and just to shout out what she's doing, because I love it, her mission is to eradicate the all male pale stale panels. And so that is why she puts forward all of those different opportunities. And yeah, it's something that if you dedicate yourself or like you're saying, hire people that can look through all of that, there are hundreds and hundreds of opportunities.
Kim Carpenter (18:33.484)
Hehehe
Adrienne (18:49.866)
So such great advice. And it's another alignment here is I actually am speaking to somebody from Acadium Tomorrow to hire some interns and understand that it's such a great service. And last, I just interviewed someone here on the She Leads podcast who is an expert Amazon seller. And she has a consulting business where she helps people.
Kim Carpenter (19:01.649)
Oh, wow.
Adrienne (19:19.998)
to if they get delisted, that's not the right word, but delisted from Amazon or a product gets delisted. And she has a team of people from the Philippines and she said that they are so well-educated and the amount of money that we give them is not that much for us, but it makes such a huge difference for them. So I like all of these different points of alignment.
Kim Carpenter (19:47.242)
Mm-hmm.
Adrienne (19:47.418)
There's something in the air where we should be listening to all of this great advice and employing it. Here you are, you have this company, you started out on your own, you have built a team, you have a team. Where are you going with your company, people at the center, in the future?
Kim Carpenter (20:09.952)
Hmm, thank you for asking that because I'm so excited about it. Yeah, the vision is really big. And I have support, I have women, mostly women around me who are telling me to go for it. And so the vision with people at the center is I wanna make a real no BS impact on the state of work.
Adrienne (20:38.222)
Hmm
Kim Carpenter (20:40.42)
I believe strongly that companies are the ones who are changing the world and running the world. It's no longer governments or nonprofits or NGOs, right? It is companies and companies are made of people. So people at the center is all about how can we put human beings at the center of the strategy and invest in the development and the nurturing of our people
Adrienne (20:48.215)
Agreed.
Adrienne (20:57.354)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Carpenter (21:10.784)
and have them show up as motivated, highly productive, engaged employees and leaders. What I see is that people don't want to quiet quit. They don't want to be slackers. All of this conversation that's going on now about, oh, the new generation and they don't wanna work hard. No, that's not true. They are showing us.
Adrienne (21:17.932)
Yeah.
Adrienne (21:25.227)
No.
Kim Carpenter (21:38.656)
that like I admitted back when I was in corporate, these crazy work hours and giving every single bit of yourself to the office and never going home and not spending time with your children, that's one of the biggest regrets that older people have when they're at their end of life. Nobody says I wish I spent more time at the office. They say, I wish I had more time with my family and the people that I love. Now, my goal is that
Adrienne (21:57.151)
Yeah.
now.
Kim Carpenter (22:05.864)
You actually are also working with people that you love working with. You don't have to be best friends with everyone, but how can we shift cultures to be inspiring and livening and places where people thrive versus hate going to work on Mondays and feel that their soul is being sucked by the organization. So that's our goal. And I don't know, I don't think we're gonna probably get there in my lifetime.
Adrienne (22:26.359)
Yeah.
Oh.
Kim Carpenter (22:33.812)
but it is a purpose worth dedicating my life to. And so we have big things coming up. I've got a book series in the works. As I said, I'm speaking everywhere. The goal is to build the team. I have a group of coaches and human resource consultants and business partners on my team now. Also, we're collaborating on different initiatives.
Adrienne (22:38.595)
Hmm.
Adrienne (22:44.576)
Um...
Kim Carpenter (23:01.96)
So I'm in growth mode and it's super exciting. And Adrienne, I'm just so excited to be telling you about it particularly. I feel like you're on the support team and I'm on yours. And that's so moving too.
Adrienne (23:14.094)
Oh my gosh. Ugh. I'm so happy to hear this. I almost have tears in my eyes because this is a big vision and it's such an important vision and I can just feel your passion for it and it makes me so happy and you're the right person to be doing this. I could not agree with you more that corporate is our
It's almost like our guiding post. And I don't think that we gave corporate permission to have that role. And it got out of control a bit. And I think that the exchange of what it used to mean to work within a corporation went haywire.
Kim Carpenter (23:56.084)
Right, no.
Adrienne (24:12.35)
And so that's why there is all of this burnout and like, oh, corporate sucks and all of it. And I have a very, it's similar, but different type of thought about it because I think I love that you are doing work to make corporate more human, right? Make it about the people because it is made up of the people. Where did that go wrong?
Kim Carpenter (24:41.896)
Where do we lose that?
Adrienne (24:43.03)
Where did we lose that? But we did lose that. And even creating, my focus is on creating a new type of corporate structure that is people-centric, right? Because it's going to take both. We need to create new companies that put people at the center and that are human-focused. And we also need to do a lot of work.
Kim Carpenter (24:57.704)
Yes.
Adrienne (25:10.89)
to change the existing structures so that people, when they do get a job and they're working for 10, 15, 20 years, that they don't want to run out the door screaming and then have to go to Siberia to recover. Rehab. It's so true. It is true. So what...
Kim Carpenter (25:29.616)
Rehab.
Adrienne (25:38.958)
are, and I love this vision and then all of it, what are some of the tools that you're using to help to change the corporate to be more human? What are you doing now? And then, you know, maybe even what are some of those things that you're going to really lean into with this larger vision for the future?
Kim Carpenter (26:00.38)
Mm, thank you for asking that. Oh, there's a lot of tools. And I would say at the heart of it all is communication. So the heartbeat of all the work we do is connected communication. And so a lot of our work is very conversational. We're not just putting out like I think a lot of
Adrienne (26:11.559)
Mmm.
Adrienne (26:18.973)
Mmm.
Adrienne (26:24.462)
Hmm
Kim Carpenter (26:28.876)
coaching and training companies are like micro learning modules. You know, we do have that to supplement what we do, but we find that transformation occurs in conversations. And we use a lot of foundational principles of neuroscience and how people's brains work. The work of Judith Glazer, conversational intelligence has been a big inspiration for me.
Adrienne (26:34.637)
Yeah.
Adrienne (26:42.754)
Hmm
Adrienne (26:49.441)
Mmmm
Kim Carpenter (26:57.872)
And so having people understand, look, we've got a brain that works in a certain way. When we get stressed out or scared, certain things happen that cause us to be disconnected in our communication. We stop listening. Our brains can't actually function the way they can when we're feeling peaceful. And some studies show that we're even 10 to 12 IQ points lower.
Adrienne (27:12.106)
Mm-hmm.
Adrienne (27:26.538)
No way.
Kim Carpenter (27:27.62)
we have this what's called amygdala hijack. So in the stress response, fight, flight, freeze, or appease, yes, we're actually less smart. So if you have a work culture that's constantly hijacking people's amygdalas and making them afraid, not feel psychologically safe, feel like they need to protect themselves against the people, the culture, other people, their managers, you're going to create a workforce that's not as smart.
And do any of us want that? No. So we start with this foundation of connected communication, understanding the neuroscience of communication, and starting to rebuild how we talk to each other, how we work with each other. I think in companies, a lot of the focus is on what are you going to do? So what are your OKRs? How are you going to KPIs? How are you going to accomplish your goals? What are the goals? Have you met the...
Have you met the milestone for the goal? But we don't talk as much as we need to around how are we going to do that work together? How are we agreeing to be with each other when we have problems, challenges, when we need to give hard feedback, when we need to argue through and debate through something and get to the other side of it? How are we going to do that? Mostly we suppress things, push feelings down.
you know, freeze people out, stop inviting them to meetings, right? All of that bad behavior that causes disconnection. So, so our foundational tools are looking for where there's disconnection. How can we recreate connection? How can we rebuild trust? How can we create cultures of psychological safety? That's in a team. And if you look for yourself as an individual leader.
Where do I feel disconnected? Disconnected from myself, from what I value, from what's important to me, from the work that I'm doing, disconnected from others, my team, who I report to, disconnected from the culture, disconnected from the work. So we look at there and then we start to repair the connections with various research-backed tools and methodologies, and that really is the foundation. So I know that's not giving like one specific tool.
Adrienne (29:37.559)
Yeah.
Adrienne (29:51.986)
It's brilliant. Um, yeah.
Kim Carpenter (29:52.568)
But it's a body of work that really works together.
Adrienne (29:57.578)
It's brilliant. And I'm listening to you. And of course, putting myself back in those situations and scenarios where maybe I was the one that was uninvited to a meeting or where I uninvited someone else to a meeting. And these things do happen. When I was at a particular company, we used to talk about how it felt like high school, right?
And like the cool kids are the ones that get to go to the meetings. And if you're not in with the right crowd, then you're out. And that is not a scenario that we should be recreating in a corporate environment. One of the things that I think about so much is so much of the culture of a company is set from the top, right? When, when certain people behave in a certain way.
Kim Carpenter (30:22.59)
Yeah.
Adrienne (30:50.662)
it often trickles down through the organization. So, and oftentimes, I don't know, I'm making this up. I would imagine that the very people that are kind of causing these toxic environments, to use that word, don't even realize that they're actually doing it. So how does an organization bring you in?
identify that they have an issue at all, and then say, we need help. What are some of those triggering events or results that companies are getting that make them say, hey, we've got a problem, we don't know what it is, and we need help?
Kim Carpenter (31:36.176)
Yeah, I think that thankfully a lot of the HR processes, especially coming out of a pandemic, when they could see and feel in a real tangible financial sense, the deterioration of the workforce and the product, they're more and more companies are really implementing
Adrienne (31:45.974)
Mmm.
Adrienne (31:54.514)
Mmmm
Adrienne (32:05.602)
Hmm
Kim Carpenter (32:05.844)
You know, that is just a standard now. And so through those surveys and eliciting that feedback and listening to people, they'll start to see, oh, there's this anonymous comment or a hundred people are saying the same thing in the organization. Maybe it's time for us to do something about it. I do get called in to support people who just aren't communicating in a way that works.
Adrienne (32:24.155)
Hmm
Kim Carpenter (32:34.824)
And I talk a lot about creating workability, right? There's no good and bad, right, wrong. It's just, is the way we're working workable? Like, are we actually able to accomplish what we say we wanna do with however we're being with each other or the processes that we're using? And so usually it is somebody coming to speak to a manager or to HR and saying, the way that this person's talking to me doesn't feel respectful.
It doesn't feel workable. And then how can we change that? So oftentimes they'll try with some interventions first, HR facilitated conversation. Sometimes that helps, sometimes that doesn't. So often I'm brought in after there have been several touch points and ways of trying to change something that they'll say, okay, we're at a loss here internally.
Adrienne (33:32.246)
Yeah.
Kim Carpenter (33:33.384)
And sometimes internally you're just too close to the problem or you're not an impartial person, right? So HR is not impartial, right? Or if I'm the manager of someone, I'm not impartial. But I know as long as the person wants support, they wanna learn and grow, that coaching could really help. And I require an interview, both me and the coachee have to feel like it's the right fit.
Adrienne (33:42.575)
Yeah.
Adrienne (33:53.71)
Mmm.
Kim Carpenter (34:01.184)
because the person has to trust me and trust that I'm working in their best interest to support them. But sometimes the support that I give is, you're the problem, you know? And how are you responsible for what's happening now and what are you willing to do? Now, a lot of people just have that self-awareness, Adrienne, and they know because they've probably gotten negative feedback or negative reviews or they've been spoken to. I work with a lot of women executives actually,
Adrienne (34:05.742)
Hmm.
Adrienne (34:11.666)
Yeah.
Adrienne (34:17.203)
Mmm.
Kim Carpenter (34:31.176)
It's a tricky situation because a lot of them are being criticized for things that if they were a man, they would not be criticized for, right? Having pointy elbows or not having executive presence or being too much or turning people off where if a man did the same thing, they would just be seen as decisive and strong. And so it's an interesting thing to learn how to... How do we...
Adrienne (34:38.092)
Yeah.
Kim Carpenter (35:00.832)
set women up and frankly, anyone who is not typically in that leadership seat, right? People who are underserved inside of that corporate realm, how do we set them up for success? And so a lot of people will come to me because they know that they need to shift something but they don't know how to do it. They're too close to it or they've received some criticism and they're saying, I don't
Adrienne (35:10.091)
Yeah, right.
Adrienne (35:22.801)
Mm-hmm.
Kim Carpenter (35:28.74)
I don't know how to fix this and the people at work aren't helping me do it. So I'm going to request a coach to my HR department, or I'm just going to hire you outright because maybe the result of the coaching is I end up leaving that company, you know, and I'm not going to ask them right. Exactly.
Adrienne (35:43.39)
Right. It might not be the right fit. Right. Yeah. Oh, so such good stuff. And you opened up a whole other aspect of corporate and humanizing it and having people who aren't typically, or at least to date, who have not held those positions of leadership. And does that person have to change to fit?
the existing corporate environment or do they need to leave and either create something or find a different organization where they do fit? And I think all of us need to ask ourselves those questions, but that's why some of the existing corporate structures need to change and maybe some of them won't. And then that's why it's so important, I think especially for
you know, women and other people like we're talking about who may not have, you know, fit into, um, the, the traditional corporate leadership model. It's important for them to start businesses that do, you know, put other people in positions of leadership so that we can see that it can be done.
And so I just think that in general, everything that you're doing is so important. The way that you do it, I mean, anybody that gets to work with you is lucky. You are brilliant, you are kind, you are fun. I mean, you're just an all around incredible person and I just appreciate you being on the SheLeads podcast, formerly sugar-coated, to have this conversation and-
I would just love to have you back when your book series comes out, when corporate does change because it will be in your lifetime. I know it, in my lifetime. Yes. Let's do it. Oh my gosh, Kim. So if people listening, a lot of them are women entrepreneurs, but a lot of them have people that are working in corporate. How can people?
Kim Carpenter (37:36.04)
Yes. All right, sister. I'll, I'm buying that. Yes. I'm saying yes to that.
Adrienne (37:53.442)
get in touch with you, how can they invite you to speak? Tell us how we can just connect with you in general.
Kim Carpenter (38:00.192)
Well, as you said at the very beginning, I am a connector and I love to connect. And my team tells me I spend too much time connecting, but I say, no, I don't care. Um, so I would love to connect with you. And I guess the best way is our website. That's people at the center.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn and it's linkedin.com forward slash in forward slash Kim carpenter, all one word. So pretty easy to find. Um.
Adrienne (38:07.566)
I'm sorry.
Kim Carpenter (38:29.684)
I'm really committed to publishing great free content often so you can hop onto our email list or grab our newsletter and subscribe on LinkedIn. But finding out about us, everything's on the site. There's a speaking page that has our favorite speaking topics but I'm also happy to customize something for you or your group, we do a lot of bespoke speaking.
So I'd be happy to chat with you. Just reach out and definitely let me know that you heard me on the She Leads podcast.
Adrienne (39:01.986)
Thank you so much, Kim, and thank you for just sharing all your expertise and wisdom, both about your area of expertise and also just the growth and the journey of your business. I know that the She Leads podcast audience is going to be so thrilled to listen to this episode.
Kim Carpenter (39:20.588)
Thank you so much, Adrienne. It's been a pleasure.
