We were lucky to catch up with Julianne Wolfe recently and have shared our conversation below.
Julianne, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
I’d say the most significant realization to building my confidence came when I accepted that my version of success is the only one that matters in life. This applied both professionally and personally. So long I had tied my self-worth and my self esteem to success stories that others or society had painted for me. I finally recognized after a troubling period in my life that what truly was making me frustrated and unhappy was the version of success I was trying to attain. I did much self-reflection during this time, identified my personal values, and grew resolve around defining and educating those around me about what success looks like to me. I have goals and aspirations, but they are now mine and achieving them gives me the ultimate motivation to succeed.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I started my company, Skill Mavens LLC, after recognizing through years in project management that there are significant amounts of unnecessary conflict which can be traced back to unchecked assumptions and poor or underdeveloped social skills.
A little bit of back story to help you understand how a chemist turned project manager ends up being an entrepreneur…
I focused the early part of my career on laboratory management. Working in a scientific discipline elevated my problem-solving skills and the experience of problem solving across multiple disciplines enables me to think outside of the box. As I gained leadership responsibility, I discovered that helping others live up to their fullest potential was insanely rewarding and I knew I wanted to continue to do that for the rest of my career.
Enter the next career chapter when looking for better ways to lead my team, I stumbled across formal project management. The way this profession clicked with my brain completely blew my mind! At the cusp of establishing myself a global industry expert, I did what most told me was a horrible idea and made a career change from scientist to project manager. It was a challenging move, but the change allowed me to live my passion in my work.
Since this career change, I have been fortunate enough to have opportunities in project, program and portfolio management as well as PMO leadership in scientific research, manufacturing, information technology and healthcare industries. I have applied my skills in various situations from small process improvement projects to large scale, global transformations. Through all these experiences, I learned something very valuable about myself. I possess inherent talent and am an expert in essential skills (aka soft skills or people skills).
More recently, my career has veered me away from something I’m extremely passionate about, helping others to hone these skills. Not having an outlet for this passion left me feeling professionally unfulfilled. It is during this time I decided to start Skill Mavens to provide an outlet for this passion. I saw so many people living in negative emotions like frustration, fear, anxiety or anger day after day. I knew I could use my talent to start chipping away at this problem. This is why our mission at Skill Mavens is to create workplaces that minimize negative conflict, nurture a culture of respect, and have teams consistently delivering on business objectives through essential skill mastery. We provide coaching and professional speaking services to fulfill this mission.
Having a full-time job, balancing a family, and growing a side hustle is challenging at times but it allows me to be a provider, help others, and nurtures the best version of myself because I am fulfilled in helping others.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
There are a few areas of knowledge that stand out which have helped me weather various storms in my professional and personal life. First and foremost is identifying my personal values. This exercise really helped me identify my true north. It helped me analyze what really motivates me and is important to me. It helped me define how I wanted to show up to the world. I go back to these values almost every day as I’m faced with decisions, emotions, or hurdles. My number one value is balance for example. Any time I am faced with some kind of opportunity, I always consider whether I will be able to retain balance in my life before deciding. If I’m unable to maintain balance, that helps me understand that I should decline the opportunity or eliminate other things to make room for it.
When I became a mom, I don’t think I was fully prepared for the social pressures that befall working mothers. Society will tell us that we must have career perfection, body perfection, motherhood perfection, and countless other perfections. I felt like I had to be everything to everyone (this was before I defined my personal values!). I remember encountering a couple of circumstances where I had to make some excruciating choices between events for my children and events to further my career. In this conflict, I had a realization that strengths I used to navigate my professional life could help me in this situation. I’m a project management professional who has managed projects and portfolios. When I encountered conflict in portfolio management, I’d always open a discussion with my stakeholders. So why not do that here? I remember sitting down with my children and explaining to them that I wanted to be there for them but there was also this other side of me that was important. Society told me that was selfish but the project manager in me defined it differently. I asked them to always tell me what was most important to them and that I’d always make sure to be at important events. I had never looked at being a mom like prioritizing a portfolio before. And what put the icing on the cake? They were totally supportive even at their young ages! So the lesson in this to me was twofold: use my strengths in all aspects of my life and more importantly don’t be pressured to be everything.
The third thing that has really helped me is to build relationships with people who are pursuing similar objectives. I have always been motivated by helping people achieve goals that they didn’t think were possible. For example, helping someone grow into a leader or overcome their fear of public speaking. A few years back, I found myself with a mountain of career knowledge but no outlet to use that knowledge to help others in this way. I had thought about diving into entrepreneurship and becoming a professional public speaker but quickly talked myself out of this because quitting my full-time job was simply not an option for me. I had assumed that it was either working professional or entrepreneur. Around this time, I had become involved with a global professional community (The PMO Leader) and what I found in that community was a bunch of people like me, working professionals who wanted to help others with their knowledge. Many of them had started their own companies as “side hustles” and grew their business into full time endeavors. It made me realize a different path, a way that I can have my cake and eat it to so to speak. The knowledge and confidence I gained from this group helped inspire me to start Skill Mavens. I’m forever grateful that I serendipitously stumbled into this group of individuals who were pursuing the same dreams as me and who so thoughtfully encouraged me. My family will always be there, my long-term friends will always be there but now, I always look to find others that are living a circumstance or goal that I want to achieve. They can teach you so many things just by sharing their experiences.
I’d advise anyone beginning in their journey toward a goal to consider these tactics. They can bring focus, clarity, and encouragement in ways you can’t even imagine!
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I think the best strategy is to employ both tactics. I would not advise anyone to go all in on their strengths as this can minimize the ability to adapt and eliminate opportunities to gain fresh perspectives. Investing effort in improving weak areas can be good but also carries risks of overextension and mediocrity if taken too far. So, I advise a mixed approach where individuals are focusing mainly on their strengths but also leave a little room to address growth areas. I believe firmly in this strategy because I’ve seen firsthand how successful it can make teams, and individuals, particularly leaders.
I’m extremely fortunate to have been a member of more than one high performing team in my career. Truly high performing teams are anomalous. They are not just good teams to work in but ecosystems of positivity, support, and significant success. Members of these teams are usually put in their roles due to individual strengths and that is what they primarily employ to achieve goals. Our strengths are frequently areas where we have natural talent or significant skills making us efficient, productive, and motivated. We all have different lived experiences and talents also making our strengths diverse. A collection of efficient, productive, and motivated individuals with diverse strengths has high performance potential. Teams capitalized on this potential by nurturing a culture of trust and by unknowingly capitalizing on social learning. When we are around individuals with particular strengths, we learn by observation and exposure, in other words, social learning. And since our strengths are diverse, we are learning about things we may not be strong in ourselves, making us well rounded. This why I so firmly believe in this mixed approach to create success.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.skillmavens.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/skill-mavens
- Other: [email protected]
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