Activating Greatness: A Leadership Podcast
Welcome to Activating Greatness — the show where we dig into what it really takes to lead with purpose, inspire performance, and create lasting impact. I’m your host, Alec McChesney, and every episode, we sit down with extraordinary leaders, thinkers, and changemakers who are unlocking potential in themselves, their teams, and their organizations. Here, we talk about the real stuff — leadership that drives culture, strategy that creates momentum, and the mindset that turns good intentions into game-changing results. Because greatness isn’t a title — it’s a choice. It’s something you activate every single day. Thank you for listening, for showing up, and for being part of a community of leaders who refuse to settle for “good enough.
Activating Greatness: A Leadership Podcast
Relentless Resilience: The Leadership Mindset That Drives Performance with Maggie Reed
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In this episode of Activating Greatness, Alec McChesney sits down with Maggie Reed, Vice President and Business Leader at Gilbane Building Company, to explore what it really means to lead with relentless resilience. Maggie breaks down how leaders can build resilience within themselves and their teams by embracing hard conversations, maintaining perspective under pressure, and creating environments where people feel supported to push forward. From the power of repeated communication to the importance of balancing resilience with awareness to avoid burnout, this conversation is packed with practical leadership insights for navigating high-stakes environments. If you’re a leader looking to strengthen your mindset, improve team performance, and lead through challenges with clarity and confidence, this episode delivers a powerful and actionable framework.
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of Activating Greatness, the show where we dig into what it really takes to lead with purpose, inspire performance, and create lasting impact. As always, I'm your host, Alec McChesney, and every episode we sit down with leaders, thinkers, and change makers who are unlocking potential in themselves, their teams, and their organizations. Here we talk about the real stuff: leadership that drives culture, strategy that creates momentum, and the mindset that turns good intentions into game-changing results. Because greatness, it isn't a title, it's a choice. It's something you activate every single day. So thank you. Thank you for listening, for showing up, and for being part of a community of leaders who refuse to settle for good enough. Now, let's dive in and meet today's incredible guest. Today's guest is Maggie Reid, vice president and business leader at Gilbane Building Company. With more than 20 years of experience across construction and design, Maggie has led complex projects in healthcare, laboratory, and higher education environments across the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast. Today, she leads Gilbane's Richmond, Virginia office, where she focuses on growing teams, strengthening client relationships, and delivering results in high-stake environments. She's known for her process-driven leadership style, her commitment to people, and her belief in what she calls relentless resilience, the ability to show up, solve problems, and move forward no matter the circumstances. And that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about what relentless resilience really means, how leaders build it, where it can go too far, and how authenticity and perspective shape leadership in one of the toughest industries there is. Maggie, I'm so excited for today's episode. And everybody that is listening knows that I can get away. I can get carried away. I want to just start asking you a ton of questions before we do that. I would love to have you, you know, maybe introduce yourself a little bit further for those who are not familiar with Maggie Reed yet.
SPEAKER_01Sure. One, thank you for having me on this podcast. It's awesome. I listened to a bunch of episodes earlier. Um, and there's a couple of people who've just uh had some absolute gems about the way in which they look at the world, the way that they think about it and how we deliver work, you know, no matter the industry. So I think it's really cool that you're finding people who kind of do things all over. And um, it's not about necessarily what it is that we all do uh exactly the same. It's about those threads that allow us to tie those things together in order to be better kind of as we grow. So um thanks for having this podcast. Thanks for having me on.
SPEAKER_00Oh, Maggie, I I didn't even pay you to say that. And I now that's uh it's a LinkedIn snippet right out of the gate that I am I am so excited to share. I appreciate it. And it's also one of the reasons why I was really excited to to have you on the podcast. I actually sent out a note to our team internally here at Velocity, and I said, Hey, everybody, it's it's Women in Construction Week. And I know that we have some fantastic clients within the construction industry, and there are fantastic women leaders at those organizations. Who can I interview? And one of our team members, Jennifer Ganley, instantly said, Here's Maggie's profile on LinkedIn. Go check her out, look at the content, and then have a prep call with her. And Jennifer was right. I instantly fell in love with your LinkedIn content, how consistent you are, the stories that you are telling. And then in our prep call, you hit me with something that I had never really heard of before and certainly not thought about in the way that you've described it, which is this phrase relentless resilience. And you used it to describe a little bit of your leadership style, but it also kind of feels like just a mantra that you can kind of look in the mirror and say, hey, it's time to be resilient. I'm curious for those who are listening, you know, what does that phrase actually mean to you? And how did that take shape over the course of your career?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I used to tell people whenever I was on projects, uh, and then, you know, thinking about our clients, thinking about how we coach our people, communicating with our teams, that we've got to relentlessly communicate, right? Relentlessly communicate, and then we've got to find resilience. Um, and so that sort of is two very different feelings, right? Like we have to relentlessly communicate, but we've got to find resilience. Like it's a magical thing. Um, what I meant was in the face of avoiding a hard conversation or hoping someone or something might resolve before we show up, that just again, like the magic wand will get passed and we won't have to do it. Um, so instead, right, especially when it's hard news or it's difficult news or it's something that we're grappling with, you're probably gonna have to say it and then you might have to say it again. Then you might have to save it a third time, and then you may need to ask if anybody understood what you're saying and try again, right? So never being afraid to approach a conversation, continuously making sure that what you're hearing is what it is that somebody's saying, right? This idea of just relentlessly communicating. Um, you you see a closed door, that's okay, right? Find out why the door is closed. Maybe they're just not that interested in your talk today, and maybe you need to come back another day, right? But at the end of the day, you don't get to go away just because the door is closed. It's our responsibility to communicate what it is that we see. And that's what we owe our clients, ourselves, and our staff, right? So then paired with that, the number of times you got to run at a door, right? You gotta be a little resilient. Yeah. So um, if you find yourself in a situation where you're having a conversation um and you're like, man, I I've already said that, you got to be able to bounce back, right? So when you're rebuffed or the conversation doesn't go your way or have the outcome that you want. And and you gotta be assertive about that, right? So at the end of last year, I was writing what I hoped for myself for the next year while I was preparing for this awesome panel I got to be part of. Um DC has something called the Women in Construction Conference, and I got to be part of this panel that had a couple of different leaders from uh construction organizations. And, you know, fascinatingly, all of us had been at our companies our entire careers, which is interesting, right? You often hear you've got to move around to become leaders, but all of us had been at our respective companies for our entire careers. And um, as we were talking about it, uh, you know, the words relentlessly resilient sort of flowed out of my pen and it's actually written on the board behind me. Um and I was like, well, that's interesting, right? Because being relentlessly resilient captures all of those aspects in one thing, right? If you think about it from a sports analogy and rugby, when you get hit or when you hit somebody, if you knock the ball on, if somebody takes the ball away from you, right? You've got to get up and make a decision about what to do next. You don't just lay around, right? Go, oh, that sucked. I guess I'll just lay here, right? Sometimes you're hopping back up and joining the team. Sometimes you're stopping, you're looking for what space to move to next. Sometimes you're just sprinting as fast as you can to go make that try-stating tackle because you're not getting the ball stolen from you and they're gonna score. Like this is not what we're gonna do, right? So, how is it that you're going to make that decision because you have the belief that you can do something no matter what, and it's gonna be okay.
SPEAKER_00Whoo! And the rugby example, I'm like, let's just turn this into a rugby podcast right out of the gate. I I I adore this mindset, but you don't you don't just wake up with this uh one day. It it is something that is built, and certainly your your athletic career probably had a lot to do with it, but also you are uh a female leader, a woman leader in an industry that that is new to, right? That has not necessarily always been the case. So I'm curious, how did this take shape? Like we talked about this last year, and obviously the the words flowing from the pen and you got into that Zen space and you wrote it, but it feels like something that you've modeled your career off of. It's helped you get to this role. What was that like? You know, if you look back at Maggie 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, what were some of those things that you were learning to get to this level of resilience?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So um one, I've I've been dogged my whole life, right? There is a there is an element of that. My sister and I joke about it. Um, tell us we can't. I'm super excited to tell you how we can, right? Like there's a there's there is an innate nature to us that both of us feel that way. Um, I can remember uh when we were kids, we were at a ballpark and somebody took the football and like ran into the boys' room, and my sister's immediate reaction was running into the boys' room. Like I don't care. Um, so I know that there's uh there's a degree of uh comfort people have with that, which is important, right? Because especially whenever you're considering how you're gonna coach resilience, you've got to recognize what somebody's natural kind of sensibilities or comfort around this idea are. It's not to say that people aren't resilient. Some of the most quiet individuals are the most resilient individuals you've ever met, right? Yeah. But you can have aloud in your face, like, I'm going back out there, here I go. And you can have somebody who's like, I've written this letter, I've contemplated all of the ways in which this is correct. I'm gonna send it and then I'm gonna follow up with a meeting. I'm like, man, that is fantastic. Like that is a completely different way than I would go about it, but you are still approaching and taking care of the thing the same way. So I think to some degree, when I think about like what our teams do every day, where we're improving safety, reducing risk, creating spaces that support the communities that we live and work in, whether it's our trade contractors, ourselves, the actual places we're building for, right? It's those small choices where we come together and find positivity that tend to increase that ability to be resilient. So, like the example that I would give um, resilience is about right, protecting people. It's about maintaining quality, it's about making the right calls under pressure. And the hard part is you like think to yourself, what's the right call? Right. So I have this, I grabbed it, so I could bring it over here. This great little thing, and it says, uh, remember there is no such thing as failure. There is only learning. Sometimes you will end up learning what doesn't work and that's okay. And sometimes what seems like a terrible failure will turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you, and the result will be better than anything you have ever imagined. So freaking relaxed already. Um, which is amazing, right? And I bought it for myself after a really bad project where I was just like, man, I'm making terrible decisions. I am leading this team in the wrong way. I can't, and I mean, if I took a breath, right, gave myself some grace, it probably wasn't, but it felt right like there was failure all around. But I learned so much from that project, right? And we always joke, someone's like, hey, this project's fantastic, um, so good. And then you turn to somebody else and they're like, this project was awful. I can't believe it's on the project. Right. So, like, it's a perception of what you're in whenever you're in it, and how can you keep working on that mindset and helping people with that mindset? Um, you know, we're gonna start each morning with a stretch and flex where each trade contractor's employee is gonna choose the song because now they feel like a part of stretch and flex.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Right.
SPEAKER_01I can assure you that uh my superintendent, dressed literally as Jane Fonda, in like the biggest uh leg warmers you could see, like giving it a go in the morning to CNC Music Factory, was like not his first choice, right? He was not about it. But somebody basically said, if you do this, I will make the first floor by this date. Rock on, let's go, right? A challenge is a way to build resilience.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, a different, you know, a different thing is like a having a um a cook-off, right, between the people who are physically on the job site. And it gives you something to look forward to. And so while it's not like directly related to that um idea, it's a it's about building that team where you can feel supported, where you can understand, where you know you have safety, where you know you have somebody that you can trust, because building that trust is so important. It's not just blind stumbling to make progress. Um, because it's always gonna be hard, right? But you can find joy and fun and accomplishment in the hard. Um, and so whenever you do that, I think it helps you become more resilient because you're watching it be modeled.
SPEAKER_00I mean, Maggie, that is just that was just so much good in that answer. I'm like, I I there are so many directions that I want to take us, and I want to just throw away the outline that I sent you and ask like 17 bad podcast questions right out of the gate. Uh I I just adore your thought process right now, and I'm ready to run through a brick wall. I want, I want to ask a question. Uh, Michelle from John Hancock, we interviewed her earlier in the year and we talked about curiosity. And one of the questions that I asked her was can you teach, can you coach curiosity? And we went down this huge tangent about absolutely, there's different ways to teach it. Some people are gonna have it more innate to them, and others have never thought about being curious in their lives, and you have to pull that out of them. And we went down the disc in the bird style, all of this stuff. It brings me to this question to you. Yeah. How do you believe? I'm gonna start here. Do you believe that you as a leader can coach resilience even into those individuals who, at their core, have no interest in being resilient at the individual level? Do you believe that you can coach it?
SPEAKER_01So I think you can always coach um resilient patterns and that you can coach a team in particular to be resilient together. So you don't need every single person. I mean, think about it as a team, right? Yeah. I didn't need to be the fastest player on the field. I was not, I will never be, right? But I needed somebody who was fast on my team. So what you're looking for at times whenever you're building those teams is do you have the right mix of sort of, you know, you might have someone who sort of looks like a perennial Eeyore. That's okay because I can assure you that person is checking everything you put out and it's right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Right. I need that person because my eternal optimism of like walking in and being like, it's gonna be fantastic. Oh my god, you guys, no, it's not. Have you tried to fly to the moon before? Do you know how much fuel you'll need? Right? Like you do, you need every one of those characters in order to make sure that you're doing it correctly. But I think um you can coach resilient behaviors. For example, getting an answer that you don't want, right? Um, a project ends up being canceled and take business development, right? They're just an essentially, right, someone who needs to solve, do, achieve. And their project gets canceled, and they have now, in their mind, wasted hours and hours. On top of that, you know, it's gonna hit them in the pocket, right? There's a financial piece of this, like that's a lot of negative feeling that can exist. So, what can you tease out of that? You can tease out, all right, but you made connections with these people. As a result, we learned about this. We had the ability to do why. Can you give me something positive that came out of this? Right. So you can you can model conversational topics to try and help people. Um, we had a uh on that one project I was talking about, for example, we had a um agenda that looks like um, tell me something good that happened this week.
SPEAKER_02I love that.
SPEAKER_01Tell me something that you're stuck on, right? What can we do together to get past that? But you always started out with tell me something good because what are you stuck on could be like, right, 9,000 pages.
SPEAKER_02Right, right.
SPEAKER_01But if you if you keep recentering, right? We just did an event on Tuesday with Richmond Women in Design with these two incredible women, uh, Maggie Schubert, she uh runs a design house here, and Ashley uh Williams Hillman, who does this like wellness collective, so incredible. Um, both of them, you know, study yoga extensively, and they have this, you know, entire concept of like when you center yourself, like when you feel yourself getting out and you ground yourself in whatever it is that is your touch or your feeling or your breath pattern, like whatever it is that you do, and we're sort of talking about those skills. But the reality is, right, you find yourself in situations where you feel so panicked. In order to be resilient, you often have to take a step, take a breath, and then go run. I think we get confused sometimes that resilience is just popping back up and running, right? Yeah, but even in my original analogy, it's about making a decision for what to do next. And sometimes we forget that we have to make a decision about what to do next, not just repeatedly run into the wall. Right. Or continuously hit it to the shortstop who's gonna always beat me because I'm not very fast, right? Like that's not my best play. Yeah. Else I'm not a bunter.
SPEAKER_00I you know, it's interesting, Maggie, because your initial answer lended itself to saying, no, you don't have to coach it to everybody because you need these different, the, these different team members, which I loved the the infrastructure of the team. But then you kind of walk through a framework for everybody to have some version of resilience in them. I love the tell me something good, tell me something you're stuck on, and then how do we help? But also when we lose a project or we lose an opportunity or there are setbacks, you can build into the process of a debrief of a deconstruction of a project and say, okay, where did we go wrong? What happened? What could we have done better? And even through that process, you are going to naturally see some of those positive outlines within it. And, you know, I I grew up through journalism. And so I always joke that everybody hated me because if I tried to make a phone call at 9:30 at night to try to get a quote, they would tell me to shut up and hang up the phone. And now in sales, if I say that I get a hundred no's and one yes, that could be a I could I could be a rock star if I go one for a hundred and that one is the one that we need. And so anytime I go back to sometimes I'll teach here at Creighton or go back to school at Missouri State where I graduated and do a lecture. I'm like, go join one journalism class. Try to ask random people for quotes about stuff and have them yell at you and say, no, I'm not interested. And know that it's not personal. You just have to learn to understand that not every door is going to be open at the exact time that you're trying to open it. It might just not be the right time, or it might not be the right door, right? There's so many different angles within that. And I feel like within construction, that is an everyday. I mean, it's so complex and there's so much pressure. There's setbacks. And I feel like I can't see a single statistic about construction right now that doesn't have a little bit of a negative lens in terms of the amount of jobs that are available, the people, the off you know, we're off budget, we're off time. So, like you have to do this every I mean, this is like mandatory.
SPEAKER_01It's funny that you say that um one thing that we find ourselves in on a regular basis, right? So we'll we'll be having the best year we've ever had. Yeah, we'll be crushing in on this project. You'll walk in and you'll be like, hey, project team, walk me through uh what's happening right now. And out of the gate, it's like steel contractors behind. Okay, that's not what I asked.
SPEAKER_00That's not what you asked at all.
SPEAKER_01By contrast, right? Steel contractors way ahead, and as a result, no panels are behind. All right. Right? Like, cool. I'm sorry that that's and and again, right? It's the thing that's at because at our core, one of the things that makes construction really fascinating is it's a people problem-solving industry, right? To this day, we've never figured out. I mean, I say never, you'd still have to be suspended, but like the roof does not float in air, and then you build the walls underneath it, right? There is a process, it replicates itself time and time again.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01We have new facilities, new industries, new technology, new da-da-da. I mean, I just immediately, as I said, we don't suspend the roof. You could hold it with a drone in place, right? And then building, but like that's not really the same. You all still have to build it before the roof can come, right? So there's replicable processes, but uh, I mean, I build a project and I we talked about this a little bit, right? Where like leaders strongly disagree on what's possible, um, and kind of what that looks like, that concept. Um, it's it's fascinating, right? When somebody is wholly convinced this is not gonna work and somebody else is like, nah man, you gotta do it. Yeah, right, figured out.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00What does Maggie? I I'm I'm curious, as much as you want to share within that example, you have you have that on a job site, you have that on a project, and one person is saying, it does not matter, this is the expectation, and you have another person saying, it does not matter, it's not possible. Walk us through as much as you're willing to share on that example or just in generalities. How do we move forward? How do we actually test our resilience and get everybody to agree that there is a pathway forward and it's not what we're talking about here?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I um I have two people that I worked with who I just I loved, right? They they're both incredible. Uh, one is like one of the best bosses I've ever worked for, like kind of a walkthrough fire guy, right? Like if you were behind, he'd figure it out. He'd be like, we're having a RFI posting party. I'm buying pizza, everybody be here at 7 a.m. on Saturday. Maggie's behind. Now there was an element of Maggie's behind, isn't like, get your shit together, right? Like, let's go here. But at the same time, um, there was a we're gonna rally around this and we're not gonna leave her in the dust, right? We're gonna figure this out together.
SPEAKER_02I love that.
SPEAKER_01So he had been my boss prior to this project, and then I had a superintendent um who like is still on speed dial, right? Like I had a problem the other day, and I literally texted him and was like, yo, question about this thing. Um and to set the scene, right? Small trailer uh on a campus, and Mark is you know reading his paper and he's like a classic Philly superintendent. He wouldn't mind giving this caricature, but like reading his new newspaper, right? He's like, it's break, he's drinking a cup of coffee, he's got his newspaper. This is what he does at that time. And in comes Tony, and Tony wants to tell us some stuff about some stuff. And Mark and I had already informed Tony that, like, absolutely not, the deadline didn't make any sense. We were just making up deadlines for fun. Uh, we had a thousand reasons why the project couldn't get done by then. And Tony kept saying, Like, no, no, this is the deadline. And I was like, man, this is losing like he's crazy. He's a crazy. Like, why is this happening to me? Right. And so I'm sitting there listening to these two individuals who are both wicked smart, right? Like unbelievable talents in what they do. And they are just saying the same words. And so back to this idea of right, like just bashing act over and over again. And I remember like having a little aha moment of like, is Tony doing this so that we hate him?
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_01Like, is he trying to like be the evil? The coach style. Yeah, yeah. Right. So that like we have to rally together. And right, look, I've been coached by a lot of different people, right, over my career. And I was just, uh, I was still I might have still been blaming Rugby at the time. I might have been just about to retire. Um, but I was like, is that what he's doing? Like I had I did. I had this like, hmm, hmm. And he he goes, um, so I'm gonna give you till the end of the day to give me a plan to get back on schedule, and then leaves, leaves, which is not his style, right? Like it's back to this idea of like he's acting so different than what I knew him to be. So Mark and I both grouse and we throw a bunch of temperatantrums inside of the trailer and sort of you know march around, and then we get a piece of paper out and we start and we say, Well, because we're gonna prove to him all the ways this doesn't work, right? Like, here we go. And as we're working our way through it, we're like, if this happened, this could happen. If this happened, this could happen. Now, surprisingly, we didn't get to the date because we didn't want to. Um, but we got really close, right? We got within like a week and a half.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_01And uh then once that started to happen, right? We were like, well, you know, we could probably beat a date, right? So like there was a mindset shift, and in all reality, right? If I talked to Tony later, which I did, and I was like, tell me about this. He's like, you weren't giving me answers that were based in your best work. You were giving me answers in what you could see for the moment, right? And I I just I really remember thinking to myself, Tony had to step outside of himself, right? Here's a man who like loves to be part of the problem, loves to be a fixer. And he was just like, I'm not doing it, you're gonna do it, right? Like, so he had to stop what he was doing. And sometimes being a leader means that you have to choose a role that is uncomfortable for you, right? I do it every so often when I moved to Virginia um to run this office. I came from brash, loud organizations, right? Like I'd worked in Philly and New York and Baltimore and DC. And like the first thing I see is a conversation about working a Saturday on Tarrazzo, and they're so kind to each other. One guy's going, Well, I just really I'd appreciate it if you could work this Saturday. And the other guy's going, Well, sir, I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to work on Saturday. I understand where you're at. And I'm like, is this happening? Right? Like where I where I grew up working, I like it would have been a lot of F-bones, a lot of pointing, and then we would have stormed away. Both both resulted in us working on Saturday, by the way. It did. So, like sometimes you gotta play a role that you're not used to. Um, and I remember just being like, Well, that's fascinating, right?
SPEAKER_00Oh, wow. I I wanna I wanna highlight Tony in this example. And I is something that you said about you're you're not giving me these answers with your best work. You are saying this is not possible, but you haven't walked me through why it's not possible. And I think that's such uh, you know, it's such great leadership. And one of the things that we talk about when we do executive coaching or we do leadership development programs here at Velocity, so much of it is coaching team members how to be able to make their own decisions and how they need to approach decision making as well. And that involves hey, if there's a good idea or a bad idea, you can't just say it's a good idea or a bad idea. You have to be able to make that case. You have to be able to walk through the potential solutions, the potential, potential pros and cons of that. And I think that Tony doing that is probably what led to you guys being able to be so aggressive and almost have a chip on your shoulder about finding why it's not gonna work, and then in turn finding why it would work in one way or the other.
SPEAKER_01We did turn that project over early, by the way. Just as an exciting.
SPEAKER_00Oh my gosh. Yeah, just as a little humble brag to put on the checkboard, right? Like that's I love I love it. Of course you did. I'm not I'm not shocked at all uh in that. Um okay, Maggie. I this has been unbelievable. We're already 30 minutes in here, which I just looked down at the clock and I could talk to you for hours, but I I want to be respectful of your time. I do have to ask the flip side of resilience, right? We live in a culture right now where I feel like everybody I ask how they're doing, the word exhausted comes up in some way, shape, or form. Now, I I believe that the people who have resilience are able to bounce back on a consistent basis from this level of exhaustion. And they're able to avoid that dreaded burnout. But especially in an industry like construction, but in any industry, the burnout is at an all-time high. We have people leaving jobs just to leave. And there is a downside, right, to this thought process of resent relentless resilience.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Pushing too hard, uh, going for too long. How do you think about this balance? How do you coach towards this balance? And, you know, I can see and feel in your words that you view this as a completely healthy thing and have now created some boundaries. Um, I'm curious if that's always been the case. So just walk us through uh where does this fit in with, you know, trying to create balance and have some recovery into the high performance leadership that you have.
SPEAKER_01Sure. So um, you know, it's funny, when I think about Gilbane, we have a this people first approach, right? Focus on safety, focus on the long-term mindset. Um, it shapes how we lead and how teams perform. And I've been at Gilbane for a long time, right? So I think to some degree, the culture is sort of ingrained in me that we do what's right and we do it because it's gonna pay out in the long run. Um you can't be people first if you think that picking someone up and just endlessly throwing them back at the same problem with no support or coaching or change is resilience, right? That's just setting somebody up for failure, right? So as a result, uh, we often find ourselves burning out, I think. Um it isn't from resilience, it's because we're not trying to solve a new problem. We're trying to solve the same problem with the same skill set, with the same support, with the same, right? It we're we're not changing. There's no variable, right? And so when we just keep doing that, that's really frustrating. Like, I'm not gonna do that. That's a that's a terrible idea. Um, it's like um there's a lyric from an Andy DeFranco song. Um, they say goldfish have no memory. I guess their life, their lives are much like mine and the little plastic castles that surprise every time. If I turn the corner and that plastic castle is surprised, like how long have I been in this bowl for? Every single project, we need to top out steel. Why are we confused? Right? Like that can't be our confusion. What could be our confusion, though, is that when we, you know, hit the top of steel, this detail that we all thought made a ton of sense from a safety perspective isn't what we want to do. Well, that's we should have probably planned better, but we find ourselves in situations like that all the time, right? Uh something changed, something shifted, you know, all sorts of things happen. Well, now we're not solving, right, a problem that we were solving a minute ago. Now we're trying to solve a safety problem and a steel problem and a this. And so when we continuously approach problems as if they are the same problem without varying skills or thinking about it. So when we think about that coaching idea, right? If I have somebody who comes to me and says, um, I really have an issue with an employee. Uh every time I ask them to do something, uh, this is the result.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Cool. Uh, let's talk about how you're asking. Are you asking or are you telling? Are you asking in writing? Are you guys having a meeting? Is that person setting the agenda? Are you sending right? Like, there's a lot of detail. And as somebody who's not a huge fan of detail, right, whenever I got to get into like that real nitty-gritty with you, it normally means that it's because I can't understand how you're thinking about things. So if we try to beat the level of the game that we're playing and we continuously run into the lava instead of figuring out how to like right jump over it, that's that's probably on us, right? We're probably setting that employee up for failure, uh, which is gonna lead them to burn out, right? So what we got to do is we gotta step back and spack that that decision making, right? Like you just got hit, get back up, look at the field first. Is this employee who you keep telling the same thing, are they having a personal issue?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01I mean, you know, I have a couple of examples in in my recent career where somebody's house burned out. That's a really terrible thing to go through.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And if we're like, hey, I called him at six and he didn't know what I was talking about, because at six he was meeting the adjuster for the first time, right? Let's take a breath and bring it on down a notch.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Let like there's so many times that taking a step back is not an admission of failure. Taking a step back allows us to evaluate, see the field better, and then decide what to do. That being said, not deciding, not an option, right? We that's not that's just not in our lexicon. So we do that too. That's the other side of the burnout, I think. Yeah, is when we're just holding the object. I have a note somewhere around here that said, just decide already. I had an issue about something that's happening, and unlike me, I was holding that. Yeah, it's exhausting, right? For the third week in a row, and I go see my wonderful therapist who I love, and I'm like, X, Y, Z problem. And she was like, Cool. We've talked about this for four weeks in a row now.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01And I'm like, incorrect, right? Like, I'm like, ready to fight. It's not true. Uh and I call my sister who I like love her to death, she's the best. She's like, um, this is I'm like, did you want me? Did you want me to Yeah?
SPEAKER_00What what side do you want me to be on right now? Yeah, yeah, what role?
SPEAKER_01Like, give me the truth. And she was like, She's right, like you've talked to me about this at least six times.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_01And I was like, yikes, right? I didn't realize I was failing to decide. And I yeah, and I was, I was failing to decide about that thing. Um, to be clear, it's not it's not earth-shattering, it's not life-changing, right? Like uh, we I have a friend that worked in supply chain, and um, they had a mural on the back of their warehouse that said, we don't save lives, we just ship couches. The same thing is true in construction, right? We're not saving lives most of the time. Yeah, we're just building a building. It's not that deep.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So the stress and pressure that we're adding to ourselves in so many industries, right? Is because we're we're adding a layer to it. This is my Maggie reads unsolicited opinion. We're adding a layer to it that we are crushing ourselves with the need to be so at it all the time. When again, take a step back and reanalyze. Maybe you need to maybe you're not the right person to talk to that person, right? Maybe you just quite literally need to go have somebody else have a conversation with them about their work style. That person can translate it back to you better. And oh my God, all of a sudden we're so good, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, it just I think a lot of the time when we think about balance, we're like, that means we gotta stop and start, right? So you you asked about boundaries, just like way into that. Um, I've been terrible at boundaries many times, right? Like, again, I love to go. If I get to go, I get to go. I met a good friend here, she works in the economic development department. We met for coffee and she's like, I'm gonna ask you a question. It might sound weird. She's like, but you like your job. And I was like, I love my job. She's like, but you like jobs, like you like being employed. And I was like, I do, right? And so I joke, right? The idea that you like doing things. Um other friends who are like, stop saying yes to stuff. I'm like, what else would I do with my time? Right. So I I I do, I love that, but that's a lot, right? That's a lot for me. That's a lot for my family, that's a lot for my coworkers.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01That's a lot for my leadership team. Because all I ever do is go, we're gonna do this and we're gonna do this, and we're gonna do this. And I I love this idea, and right, so many amazing ideas, but there is a finite amount of time in the day, and there's a finite amount of energy that you can ask of other people, right? Right. So balancing all of those things and trying to like just then gut check yourself, which is again that taking a step back and being like, Am I doing this right?
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01Um, there's a lot of we joke that like being a leader is lonely at times because you gotta sit with your decisions. Right. That's okay. Sit with them, right? Think about them, and then decide if you want to keep doing it that way.
SPEAKER_00Whew, Maggie, you might have just solved burnout for like anybody that listened to this because I wanna, I want to, I wanna highlight a couple of things that you've said that that tied tied to that. One, every person's having their own background, their own story, the whole human being. We have to be a leader to the whole person, not to the set of hands that they bring to the table. I think that is absolutely important. You then talked about, okay, you've asked, you know, an employee comes to you and says, okay, every time I ask this person to do something, this is what happens. And then you kind of had these questions of, well, is it is it in writing? Is it a meeting? One of the things that I've learned through this podcast that I just absolutely adore is have you shown them what write looks like? Have you shown them what the actual expectation is, or are you just telling them that they're not doing it the right way? Because that is a completely different lens. And then you said something earlier that work is hard, but that you could still have in you could still have joy and fun while you're doing it. And I think that's such a beautiful way to look at work. I just interviewed yesterday one of our team members here at Velocity who is writing a book. His name's Patrick Manigal. He's writing a book called Humanity at Work. And it's all about how we have broken the system and frankly, broken each other through how we work. And we've just all accepted it. And there are enough people starting to raise their hands, like, hey, I don't have to hate work. I can I can be excited to go, I can build the right structure to be able to do that. And I think um, you know, there's there's really fun ways to talk about that, and it can get heavy and and and up here. And you you just brought that so down to earth on how to have better conversations. I will say, if you're not familiar with the disc uh assessment and birds, you are like the truest parrot eagle. I I am a parrot eagle.
SPEAKER_01Uh it's on my wall.
SPEAKER_00What are you? What are you? Okay, I'm so glad I nailed that as well. Uh, for those who aren't watching, parrot eagle. Um, everything that you just walked through, I was like, okay, Maggie is 100% parrot eagle. And and I love, but I love how authentically you are in this process. And then still admitting, like, okay, it might not be me who needs to have that conversation. I might need to have somebody who can flex on the owl or flex on the dove to be able to do that. I have a sense that that authenticity growing up playing rugby, it sounds like your sister and you were trying to take over the world, uh, working in Philly and DC and these different areas within construction that you've always worn yourself on the sleeves. Like you've always been authentically yourself. Uh, I'm curious, how did you grow into that? And certainly when we talk about that perspective being a woman in the construction industry, how has that shaped how you lead, how you communicate, how you build trust, how you coach other women in the industry? Like, was that a leap of faith that you had to take and say this is gonna work? Or did somebody give you permission or did you ask for permission later? Walk us through that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So it's interesting. Um, you know, uh my my entire like adult career has been at Gilbane.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um so I knocked on a trailer door and asked if they were hiring, and I am now the vice president of a construction company, right? Um so it's a there's a degree of like, this is if you don't ask, no one's ever gonna tell you yes. Right. So like there's been a there's been certainly from both my parents, you know, my dad um was sort of a journeyman person. Um he was more of a mill right, he worked with large um transmission of gas, so very big gas and safety and construction, and like everybody else in my family is medical, fascinatingly, like everyone. And my mom's a social worker, and my mom really instilled this idea that like we must care about people, we have to do what's right for people, and we've got to bring people along with us. So um I think whenever my sister and I like kind of look at the world, we're like, well, we gotta do stuff the right way, the end, right? There's not another option. And when we do it, we must do it in such a way that like first do no harm, right? Like we must impact in a positive manner. So I think the combination of those two things, whenever we, whenever we think about it, whenever I'm thinking about my experiences in the industry, like it's not always been easy, right? The reality is there are people who were probably not all that jazzed that I was wandering up and being like, hey man, first of all, you got to deal with that, right? Like it is 7 a.m. I am being confused about your safety glasses.
SPEAKER_00And the parrot is coming.
SPEAKER_01I don't drink caffeine, like this is just me naturally. Can you imagine what it was like at 6 45 a.m. for that poor safety guy? Right? Like, here she comes, right? Like it's coming. Um, so I know that there's a degree of like just sort of the way in which I I get joy, right? Which is that kind of outcome. Um, that being said, there are plenty of times when um being authentic by uh being too much didn't serve the need, right? And so having to work through, you know, I can remember going back to Tony, I can remember a really specific time where I'm like laying on the floor, just imagine this. I'm a paid adult employee laying on the floor, coloring drawings with colored pencils, because I couldn't get my head around like how it worked. And he was like, number one, get up off the floor. Number two, right? Like, what are you doing? Right. And I was like, Oh, I think this is not what we do, right? Like in my head, this is the perfect solution. But so I've I have I've had coaches who were willing to be honest with me, and when I say coaches, either managers or you know, mentors or coworkers who are just like, but I think that came from being willing to be receptive to feedback, right? So um I would say that one of the things I try to help, especially whenever I sort of coach other women in the industry, is that you have to be receptive to the feedback. Doesn't mean you have to agree with it. There's plenty of feedback that I've received that I'm like, that is trash, uninterested. Um, but you have to be willing to hear perspective and think about whether there's reality in it. Um, you know, we focus again, right? Like from a Galeman perspective, we focus on how we build strong relationships, how we take accountability, how we deliver with consistency, right? Like those are kind of the core ways in which we think about what it is. And for me, that aligns perfectly, right, with the way in which I look at delivery and how I how I build it. Because if I if I don't take accountability, if I'm not being honest, right, if I'm not being authentic around what it is that I'm doing, then I'm not gonna be consistent. I'm gonna be all over the place, right? You're gonna get a different version of Maggie every day, and that is not gonna be helpful for anybody, right? Nobody's gonna know what's a good thing.
SPEAKER_00So oh my goodness, Maggie. I I I love the the you have to be willing to hear that perspective. Uh, a recent episode that we just published with Carolina Alarco over at Latinos in Bio. We talked about the difference between feedback and noise. And as you grow in your career, you know which is feedback. And hey, I need to take that to heart. And that's noise. I can flush it and and move on. I this is this is one of the most uh fun episodes that I have had to date, Maggie. I I knew this episode was gonna be fun, um, but you are you are brilliant, and I am I'm so thankful that you have taken the time out of your day in order to share all of this with us. I cannot let you go without asking the rapid fire questions and the closing questions. So let's let's jump into the rapid fire leadership round. We ask the same four questions to every leader that we interview. 30 seconds each, quick hitters. I won't time you, but I will boo if you go over the time limit. Um ready. Question number one What is one leadership habit that you rely on every day, no matter what?
SPEAKER_01Fact or feeling. So the idea that when something is said, is it a fact or is it a feeling? And then you gotta work it through, right? Uh there are times, no joke, there's times that my sister and I text each other and I'm like, exercise you're she's texting back a feelings wheel. I'm like trash, right? Like, not interested in this. But the reality is, right? If I am sitting with something, is it a fact or is it a feeling?
SPEAKER_00Whew that needs to go on a wall. I absolutely love that. I have never heard anybody describe that. Fact or feeling. I love it. Question number two What's the most underrated skill that a leader needs to be successful today?
SPEAKER_01The ability to ask a clarifying question that is not leading the witness. So you can ask a question that gives you the answer. You want, or you can ask a question that gives you information. You get to choose that every time, right? So I can walk in and be like, hey, I've been thinking about this idea. I'm really interested in your opinion about my idea that I'm bringing to you. Separately. We're trying to solve this issue. I don't know if you've ever thought about this. Well, how would you solve it? Two different answers. Likely.
SPEAKER_00Way different.
SPEAKER_01Whew.
SPEAKER_00Both under 30 seconds. Both unbelievable answers here to start. And two answers that nobody has ever given before. We'll see if you if you keep that train up here with questions three and four. Question number three on the opposite side of the underrated skill, we're gonna go to what you believe, or what what is one thing you believe that great leaders should stop doing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, beating yourself up for a decision that went wrong. Because for me, the only bad decision is refusing to make a decision.
SPEAKER_02Right?
SPEAKER_01Because that in and of itself is still a decision. You just haven't done it. Like you took no active role in that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Spoken like a true eagle right there, Maggie. I I I love the I I wanna there's two parts to that. Um, to that lesson, though. The first is we gotta be better at giving ourselves grace in general. Um, we are very hard on ourselves. A lot of the pressure is put on at the individual level. Uh, and then also I everybody needs to get better at decision making, even eagles, but certainly as we talk about, you know, the three different the three other personality styles in any situation, analysis paralysis is uh something that is impossible to learn from. Decide, learn, decide again. So I love it. Uh the last question here what's the best leadership advice that you've ever received, Maggie?
SPEAKER_01Um, so the only person that you have to own up to is the face that you look in the mirror. At the end of the day, that's the person that you have to be willing to live with. So everybody else, right? They're not in your control.
SPEAKER_00All right. Listen, three out of the four, you might be one of the few people. Three out of the four have never been said before, all under 30 seconds. I might put an asterisk in the book at the end of the year that you you you absolutely crushed it. Um, the last question, and then I'm gonna give you a chance to wrap up with something fun. But the last question is who do we interview next, Maggie? We, you know, we we're building this Activating Greatness podcast. There's been so many great leaders, as you mentioned in your in your intro that have been on the podcast. Who is somebody that is doing great and meaningful work that others can learn from that we should interview?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so Utibe Bassi, she is the vice president of customer experience at Dominion Energy. She wrote this really cool book called Love is a KPI. And uh, you know, basically the concept is um it's evident in what we prioritize and optimize, right? Uh, if you're a product manager, it if you choose um what genuinely adds value to the user, you're doing it from a place of love, from capturing what it is that it means, not just because it's speed, right? So the way in which she talks about right, the idea that kind of back to your comment about humanity, right? Love is in fact a KPI. Um and I find her fascinating. I love everything that she says.
SPEAKER_00I I love it. Well, I hope that she's gonna love this video because I'm gonna send her a little clip of you hyping up the book and love is a KPI. I I absolutely adore that. Maggie, before I get you out of here, what's the 30-second takeaway that you would offer to people? What's the message that you would like to leave with the activating greatness audience? We talked about a lot of fantastic stuff today. The relentless resilience. We talked about how to work with a team and how to understand feedback. I mean, really anything and everything, but where would you send people? Uh, what's that takeaway that you would really want someone to have from listening to this episode?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I think um the number one thing that I would want people to take away is the idea that um you can define, right, what makes you resilient. Uh, you have the ability to choose kind of how you narrate that to yourself. And then your bounce back story is yours because you're the face that you're gonna look at at the end of the day and you're gonna be happy with yourself because you've made that choice.
SPEAKER_00Maggie, it was like soundbite after soundbite on this episode. Everybody that's listening, everybody that's listening to the full-length podcast is like taking notes this entire time. But I might have seven videos that I'm posting to LinkedIn in in promotion and preparation.
SPEAKER_01You know, I'll repost. I love LinkedIn posts.
SPEAKER_00Hey, I know you do. I know you do. And I can't wait to share this with the world. This is why we wanted to create this podcast in the first place. Shout out to Jennifer Gainley on the Velocity team for suggesting you because um she's gonna get a couple extra bonus points. Uh, because this was such a fun episode. It's why we wanted to create the show in the first place. Everybody that is listening to this, we are now, this comes out during our construction month, which is gonna be the second week of May. Uh, we're gonna have a bunch of construction episodes in a row. Make sure you go and follow Maggie on LinkedIn, connect with her, send her a note that the Activating Greatness podcast is where you found her, what you liked about the episode. And then while you're doing that, make sure you sign up to receive the podcast. Make sure you leave it a five-star review. Somehow, some way. Maggie's episode is going to be episode 33. Uh, we our goal was 20 uh to start the year, and and now we're on pace for for close to 80. The only way that's possible is the wonderful and brilliant guests like Maggie, but also the awesome audience that we have and the feedback that we continue to get and the response that we have to each episode, but I still have to prove that it works. So, you downloading, you commenting, you reaching out to Maggie, leaving a five-star review wherever you get your podcast, Amazon, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, that goes a long way. Uh, and the only reason we're able to do this is because of the community of leaders like you who refuse to settle for good enough. So, Maggie, one last time, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Super fun day.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Well, I love it. For everybody else, thank you so much for listening to another episode of Activating Greatness, and we'll see you on the next episode.