[00:00:00] Michael Pacheco: Hello everybody. Welcome once again to another episode of the remarkable coach podcast.
As always, I am your host, Michael Pacheco. And today with me, I have. For the second time for an Encore presentation which we’ve been doing a lot lately these days on the remarkable coach Maureen McKinnon. So a little bit about Maureen. She has been inspiring, coaching, teaching, and mentoring current and future leaders for over 20 years.
Her mission is to help more talented women gain leadership roles to balance gender equity in corporate leadership. She helps talented women get promoted and make. More moolah Maureen, welcome back to the remarkable coach.
[00:00:41] Maureen McKinnon: Thank you. Thank you so much, Michael. I really appreciate the time to spend with you again, date you on what’s been happening with the mission and what’s been happening with my business.
So I’m really thrilled. I’m honored that I’ve been nominated for the 31st annual Royal Canadian Royal Bank, Canada, Canadian woman entrepreneur awards. I’m a finalist. That’s amazing. Thank you. Thank you. My best friend recommended me nominated me actually, and she’s a branch manager for RBC on Vancouver Island and the award I’m going for a social change award with a regional impact.
Super, super cool. Yes. So the finalists will be announced in September and then there’s an awards gala in Toronto. So I think there’ll be a thousand people at the gala awards. So yes.
[00:01:35] Michael Pacheco: When is the awards gala?
[00:01:38] Maureen McKinnon: November 22nd.
[00:01:39] Michael Pacheco: November. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. By November, you may be able to celebrate a belated Maple Leaf Stanley Cup.
They made it to round two. Finally.
[00:01:52] Maureen McKinnon: Yes, they did. They did. We’ve got the Maple Leafs and we’ve got the Oilers in. We’re
[00:01:58] Michael Pacheco: all on the Oilers. My money’s on the
[00:02:00] Maureen McKinnon: Oilers. Yes, that’s most of my family. I’m one of my brothers in Alberta. So yes, we’re all behind the Oilers.
[00:02:07] Michael Pacheco: But that’s neither here nor there.
Tell us about the award here. Is there voting? Where can our viewers and listeners go and maybe cast a vote for you? Is it limited to Canadians only? Can us down to the
[00:02:21] Maureen McKinnon: South do it? As far as I know, it’s it’s an internal elimination kind of competition. I don’t have access to voting that I’ve been made aware of yet.
Of course, when I do, if that’s a possibility, I will be broadcasting it far and wide and loud.
[00:02:36] Michael Pacheco: Absolutely, definitely reach out to me and Kevin both, or just one of us really. And we’ll let the other one know and we’ll get that listed on the show notes page. We’ll put a link up on, on the show notes page for this.
Sure. Super. Yeah, so for those listening and watching, Maureen was on an episode. I don’t have the episode number in front of me, but it was the one released on November 9th, 2022, so not really, not too terribly long ago. So if you haven’t had a chance yet. Definitely I recommend you go back and take a listen to that first episode there.
I know on that episode we, Maureen shared a lot about what she did with corporate women wanting promotions businesses with women managers, that sort of thing. Maureen, why don’t you? Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about yourself and what it is you do in your own words for those of our listeners and viewers that haven’t had a chance yet to listen to that first episode.
[00:03:29] Maureen McKinnon: Okay. So I, as you mentioned in the beginning, I have been mentoring and coaching current leaders and future leaders for over 20 years. So I’ve been working with both men and women, but in the last five years, and particularly I focused on. Helping women to get promotions and making more money as a way to help solve the inequity that in the gender balance in the corporate world, I realized that was a problem.
And the way I could help was by helping more women get into leadership roles and reach those board members and stuff. So I. Do 2 things I do it through my business, working with clients and I also do it through my volunteer work. So I’m currently the Vancouver chapter co chair for the women and leadership foundation.
And I also have sat on the national advisory board for the women economic council of Canada. And as such, I’ve helped organize and either moderate or be a speaker at several different women organization events in the last year, or even since November. So 1 of them I’ve did was I helped support a student female student initiative from langara college.
It’s called empowering diversity in technology. And we did an event in March 16th, where we had a panelist of women who wanted to talk about how do we empower women in STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. One of our panelists was Kelsey priest, who is a senior structural engineering.
Her woman, and she not only is a role model inside her organization at Glotman Simpson, consulting engineers, but she co founded women and consulting engineers. Because she was the only role model in her company, and she started talking to other women in the field and discovered there wasn’t anything. So she decided to start 1 an association.
So that started in 2018 and she, they now have 500 members. Nice. Amazing. That’s great. Yes. And then we also, and one of the other panelists was Lauren Kelly, who is the director of sector transformation division. She’s working with technology companies with regard to challenges and obstacles for indigenous individuals, because she works at the 1st Nations Technology Council, so they’re trying to bring together those The that break open the whole thing about the technology industry and working with men and women who are 1st nations indigenous.
anD then we also had Rochelle grace and who’s well known in the technology industry here in Vancouver. She’s also an alumni college professor. She’s a digital executive and strategist, and she just launched the mosaic accelerator. Which is an early stage accelerator for non technical black, indigenous, latin, asian, non technical women, middle eastern, transgender, women with disabilities and immigrant women, the whole thing.
And she just launched that, yes, right at the end of May, April, and it’s to help these women build technology enabled ventures. Trying to get people to open up because you don’t necessarily have to be a technological person, meaning you don’t have to code or write software or stuff to be involved in technology because it’s still a business.
So there’s all the roles that any other business needs. And it’s also whatever your service and product. Promotes what is the end user getting and so this is how to, how do we enable technology, especially with all the discussion about AI going on. It’s a way to help other women think in bigger product in a bigger rod, broader range of entrepreneurship and get into businesses.
And then also in March, we also did a women in leadership event, which was speed coaching, speed career coaching. So we had an audience of women who had access to 3 professional coaches. 1 was Vita Thompson, and she’s a professional resume cover letter and interview. Person. That’s what she helps people do.
Then we had Janice Porter, who’s a specialist in LinkedIn profiles, because if you’re looking for a job, people are going to check you out on LinkedIn, see who you are. 100%. Absolutely. And then I also did the talking with women about the promotions and how you have to gain credibility. And increase your visibility in the organizations, which we had talked about before, so that people know who you are, what you can do, and then they can promote you, because they now know who you are and what you do.
Kind of idea. And then we have the women in the emerging women in technology, the empowerment of diversity and technology. We did an event. This is with the langara college students also. And that was the 1 I was talking to you about with 3 panelists. They’re planning on having a 2nd. Event. The idea is to help grow the conversations about what’s happening with how we empower women in STEM.
So they’re going to have a new, a different event, which is more about getting senior leaders in the same room to have a fireside chat or kitchen table talk. So that we can see if we can expand the conversations going on in other throughout the tech industry to help women. So that’s all very exciting.
I’m happy to say. Very cool. I’m trying to live up to this social change award.
[00:09:07] Michael Pacheco: It sounds to me it’s it’s going to be an easy decision.
[00:09:11] Maureen McKinnon: Thank you. Thank you. It’s I’ve discovered that I know enough people in the technology from the work I’ve been doing to be able to bring these kinds of people together and help launch these conversations and.
Help move them along, make the ripple effect, because it’s very timely. Obviously, there’s a lot of discussion about and I and what’s happening. So there’s, it’s really, I think, time. It’s I really feel it’s a relevant time that can help launch these conversations and in my private. Business my coaching business.
It’s been interesting. There’s a lot more activity going on. In fact, yesterday I had 3, I had 7 meetings yesterday. It was crazy, but 3 of those were with clients and they were all interview prep. They’ve all got interviews for this week, so one has an interview for a role in Switzerland, which is very interesting to talk about what’s happening in Europe.
I have another one who’s got three job interviews this week. Wow. Yes. And then the other one is, the other one was just had an interview, was expecting a second one. And in addition to three that I was working with interview prep, I have two expecting job offers. So it’s a very fabulous time.
[00:10:26] Michael Pacheco: What do you think is there something that you can point to that might be responsible for all this change and movement that seems to be happening this spring?
[00:10:34] Maureen McKinnon: I think part of it is that there, of course, employers are still wrestling with back to work, on site working trying to deal with, remote work.
The reality is that we all worked remotely for two and a half plus years. So it’s not, you can’t really say it didn’t work otherwise business wouldn’t survive. And I think they’re surprised at how much pushback there is. From individuals who really like remote work and don’t want to have to commute anymore kind of idea.
I think some of the companies also laid off a bunch of people and I don’t think they necessarily understood that. Probably that some of those people they needed. And so now they’re realizing after having let many people go that there were some people in there, they needed. So now they’re looking to hire.
We hire those positions. And in some cases, they have actually gone back to the individuals and said, sorry. Whoops. Sorry. We did actually need you and you’re very good at what you do. Come back home. Yes, there has been some of that going on. And I think that people are if you’re confident in yourself and know that you are professional and you know what you bring to an organization, it’s so much easier to look out, to look at job postings, talk to your network about what’s out there and actually get what it is you want to do.
And that’s the difference is, I think the people that I’m working with, we’re looking at job search differently. We’re called, we’re a little bit more pro what I call proactive. So we don’t just look at the job postings that are out there. We look for the companies that were you that have the role that you want and then how do we find someone in the inside that company that, you know, or someone, knows so that you have access prior to the job posting, you can get it posted.
That you get to actually interview with somebody at the company about what it’s like to work there. And generally, what happens is, they will take your resume and bring it to the person who makes the decisions and people in employers, particularly still make the decision that they like to hire people that they know.
And and have been recommended over strangers.
[00:12:45] Michael Pacheco: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s an interesting topic. I think I’ve had this conversation with a number of leadership and executive coaches in the past, Oh, past couple months about the this, this hot button topic, of coming back into, An office essentially.
And maybe the hybrid workplace and people, employers, leaders, getting a little bit of pushback on that, because as it turns out, it’s real nice to work from home, if assuming that you have a happy home life, it’s nice to work from home with your spouse, maybe your kids are hanging around your.
If you’re getting all your work done, there’s no harm in that. And one of the, one of the points that, that I had brought up in, in a previous remarkable coach podcast with another coach who we were talking, we were discussing this is that I think especially for creative teams. There is something to be missed from the energy of being in the same room together.
And there’s, and that’s going to be an interesting balance to find for companies that are heavily leveraged in the creative space somehow.
[00:13:58] Maureen McKinnon: Correct. Correct. Although I think. I think that there has been more discussion with regard to hybrid in that hybrid could only could also be we bring people in once a month.
We bring people in once a quarter. We fly them somewhere because now there’s more opportunity again to open up and bring people together again. There’s more conferences happening again now and stuff like that. I think that might be a way for a company to do that with their creative ones.
And of course, if they’re if they claim to be global. Their teams are already in different countries. That’s not quite the same discussion because you decided to go global and you have all these teams that you put together from different countries and places. So that’s a moot point in that perspective.
[00:14:44] Michael Pacheco: Even, yeah, with global stuff, like I’ve got my team at Boxer is we’re a distributed team. We’re global. There’s a. Few of us in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. And then we’ve got, people as far away as Pakistan, full time employees, as far away as Pakistan and Philippines.
And one thing that I would like to start doing, we haven’t started doing it quite yet, but something that I would like to start doing is getting people together once a year for some kind of retreat and it’s just a team building, right? A culture thing. Culture is a bit it can be difficult to.
To build I think remotely as well,
[00:15:18] Maureen McKinnon: I would agree with that. I believe in, I believe that interaction and building relationships has a lot to do with having the chance to talk to someone face to face, get a better sense of who they are and who you are and how you can work together. And I think people, when you go globally, that people think differently in different countries because of the corporate culture or because of the culture of their, or their company.
Country anyway, right? So that’s always eye opening when all of a sudden you realize that not everybody does it the way you do it or the way you’ve been experienced it too, which I think broadens the minds of the individuals also, which is always good. I think the other thing about the home working from home is that we had a lot of younger professionals move away from the downtown core in Vancouver to not only just into the lower mainland, but they actually went into the interior, the Okanagan.
Because they could buy a home there where they didn’t see that happening here. So now if you call them back from work, they don’t live 30 minutes from the office anymore. They live five hours from the office. So now what are you going to do? Because that’s still set that you needed. And some, and then there’s the discussion is about the employers who think that if you’re going to be living in those locations away from the big cities, we shouldn’t have to pay you as much, which is a really.
Dicey topic to try to justify.
[00:16:42] Michael Pacheco: Yeah, that’s an interesting 1. yeah I can see that. That’s literally what my family did. What I did during during cobit, we bought 30 acres in the Washington state cascades and built a big house completely off grid, where we’re 45 minutes from the closest town let alone the city’s even further away.
It’s. So it’s without Starlink yeah, God bless Elon Musk and Starlink, otherwise I wouldn’t have any internet. But yeah, you do what you can. It’s an interesting topic.
[00:17:11] Maureen McKinnon: It is,
[00:17:11] Michael Pacheco: Maureen, is there anything anything else that, that you would like to chat about that we haven’t had an opportunity to touch upon yet, anything else that’s new?
I know it sounds like you’ve got a ton going on this spring. I can’t imagine. That you have a lot of free time on your hands. I want to definitely thank you for making time to chat with me today.
[00:17:28] Maureen McKinnon: I do have something else that I’m launching in my business as, as far as it’s, I would, I’ve been I’ve been recruited over the years for, by several different companies, but one, because I spoke with you last time about wanting to maybe getting to group coaching.
I’ve been recruited by what’s called the tech, the executive committee. , GEC Canada, to set up to build a group advisory, peer advisory group of entrepreneurs. . For me that’s really exciting. So that I would be the facilitator, I would be the organizer of the group. And then I would also be a one-on-one coach with the group.
So we would meet every second month as far as the group goes, and then I would coach them each month. Cool. I, yeah. The idea behind peer advisory is that if you get more minds together, more perspectives to share an issue or a challenge, or perhaps 1 of the entrepreneurs has already been through the challenge that you’re going through That more voices to make decisions from you as the entrepreneur, then have, 10 other people telling you what they think or what they believe experience and you then get to take that away and make the decision yourself.
So that’s really exciting for me.
[00:18:38] Michael Pacheco: Yeah, I love that. It’s essentially a mastermind right or a, in each individual, each person that is a member of that group has their own board of advisors, which is super, super helpful to have other. Other brains with fresh ears and fresh eyes on your specific business problems.
And then, of course, you get the opportunity to help all the others in the group. I think that’s great.
[00:19:00] Maureen McKinnon: Yes. And my vision is to bring together a group of visionary doers. People who are actually visionary leaders, but have a track record of doing things to help solve problems in today’s world and in the future.
And I’ve worked with several of them individually over the years. And now I’m trying to rope them all in to come together as a group and become a force. I
[00:19:26] Michael Pacheco: love it. Thank you. I love it. That is fantastic. Maureen, again, thank you for making time to chat with me, little old me. Michael, this has been great.
I appreciate it. Yeah. Where can our listeners and viewers connect with you online?
[00:19:41] Maureen McKinnon: Obviously at LinkedIn through Maureen McKinnon. Online through Maureen at McKinnon Executive Coaching dot com and my website, McKinnon Executive Coaching. You can also go there and send me a message or book an appointment with me to talk about your career and what you’d like to do.
[00:20:00] Michael Pacheco: Awesome. We’ll get of course, we’ll get all those links on our show notes page as well. Maureen for the third time, thank you so much for making time in your busy schedule. I appreciate it. And yeah let’s catch back up again. If you hear anything about voting, definitely let us know, we’ll let you know.
Absolutely. And we’ll add a link to the show notes page. So yeah, other than that,
[00:20:22] Maureen McKinnon: cool. Yeah. Appreciate it. Thank you. And I’ll let you know what the end result is, of course, with regard to the competition and then my launch with
[00:20:29] Michael Pacheco: my group. Awesome. Fantastic. Thank you again. Thank you to our listeners and viewers.
You guys are fantastic. We will see y’all next time. Take care.
