WAYNE BROWN: Hello, I’m your host, Wayne Brown, and welcome to the ET project. We’re delighted to be delivering this podcast for executive talent all over the world, whom we’re affectionately referring to as ‘Team ET.’ Today, we’re in the city of Somers, New York, sitting down with a powerhouse leader who seamlessly transitioned from the corporate elite to the entrepreneurial world, Sarena Diamond. And with a storied career spanning decades of iconic companies like IBM, Accenture, and PepsiCo, Sarena’s journey is one of resilience, reinvention, and relentless empowerment. On paper, her career reads like a corporate dream, spearheading transformation and driving growth in Fortune 500 giants. But it was a pivotal moment that reshaped her path, leaving her to step into consulting, where she quickly made her mark guiding companies from $100 million to $1 billion in revenue. What sets Sarena apart, her uncanny ability to adapt, innovate, and thrive, even in the face of uncertainty. Yet, her journey hasn’t been without its challenges. As a single parent, she balanced raising children with building a career, all the while navigating professional betrayals that could have derailed her. Instead, these experiences forged her resilience, deepened her empathy, and fueled her mission to help others rewrite their own stories. Today, Sarena is a force for second chances, dedicated to empowering leaders to rise above obstacles and embrace change with confidence. She shares hard-won wisdom to inspire women forging their own paths. As a consultant, her approach isn’t about creating dependency, it’s about equipping teams with the tools to succeed long after she’s gone. In this episode, we’ll explore what it truly means to be a catalyst for change, in business and in life. From corporate boardrooms to the entrepreneurial arena, Sarena’s insights on agility, resilience, and authentic leadership are nothing short of transformative. Get ready, as this conversation is one you won’t want to miss.

INTRO: Welcome to the ET project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mentor, Wayne Brown, as we unpack an exciting future together.

WAYNE BROWN: Hello team, welcome again to this week’s episode, and what promises to be a powerful conversation about change. Now, not just managing it, but leading it through courage as well as clarity. And today I’m going to explore what it means to be a true change catalyst, both in business as well as in life, whether it’s from the corporate boardroom to the entrepreneurial ventures. Welcome Sarena Diamond to the show, I’m looking forward to our conversation.

SARENA DIAMOND: I appreciate that so much, Wayne, thanks for having me.

WAYNE BROWN: Let’s start with where I’m sure you start many of your podcast conversations, a little bit of background, what brought you to where we are today?

SARENA DIAMOND: So, I actually started my career in corporate at Accenture and doing consulting and systems development and really business transformation before it was called that for clients of Accenture. I moved from there to Pepsi doing systems development, and again, transforming the way IT was used in a well-known brand. A few other places I ended up my second chapter was at IBM and throughout the 18 years that I was there, all I did was focus on innovation, transformation, ways to help IBM or IBM’s clients be more innovative in transformation. When IBM and Kyndryl split, I knew I wanted to focus exclusively on helping leaders and organizations change more effectively. And so, I did a short stint at another company and then I went out on my own and I have not looked back, it has been an awesome three and a half years, I have been worked more, but loved it better than any day at corporate.

WAYNE BROWN: When did you first realize that you weren’t just managing change for corporations or with your clients, but actually serving more as a catalyst?

SARENA DIAMOND: Well, it was probably during my IBM years, it was funny, the joke people used to say to me is that I never got my blue lobotomy, that I wasn’t doing things the way everyone else was. And it was really because I figured out that somewhere along the process, my style, my natural style was not, you’ll do it because I said so, right? You’ll do it because this is what is required of us even with that. I was always about trying to align what it was we were doing to the purpose, to the company goals, to the client objectives, whatever that was. I was always looking for the purpose and the reason why we were doing things.

[00:05:00]

SARENA DIAMOND: But what I discovered was by doing that for myself, I also was building belief in the work that we were doing within my team, and that just changed everything. So, when I started with that concept of building belief around the chain, helping team members to understand and find their own purpose, their own path for that change, it changed the trajectory of the way I was leading change, the way I was driving transformations, and the way I now approach everything from every client engagement that I have, or even the workshops and the speaking engagements that I talk about.

WAYNE BROWN: How do you typically start the change process with a team or with a group?

SARENA DIAMOND: I would love to say that I start at the beginning. Almost always, I am brought in when something is not going well, right? And there’s this old adage, Harvard and McKinsey, and I’ll talk about 70% of all organizational transformations of significance will fail, they will just fail straight on. And sometimes it’s failing holistically, sometimes it’s failing to achieve their target, the goal that they’re looking for. And when all of the studies and all the research look at why that failure happens, it’s always three reasons; it’s always lack of alignment and commitment, which looks like conflicting priorities, mixed messages, that kind of stuff or it is poor communication or engagement where people are feeling left out, they’re not clear about their path, they don’t know how they fit and then thirdly, it’s where they fail to address culture or behaviors that are keeping people from delivering against that. And through that time, through that, when I looked at those three categories, by working at addressing each of those, every time it always works. And it has become my hallmark, I talk about building belief, enabling behaviors, and sustaining change to target those three factors every time.

WAYNE BROWN: Right. Do you follow any of the traditional change methodologies? There are so many, I’m just curious. I also do a lot of change work and I tend to pick and choose, but more of a hybrid approach is my approach.

SARENA DIAMOND: A hundred percent. Actually, what I’ve done in some of the client engagements that I have led is that I actually blend Kotter’s eight steps with ADKAR because Kotter’s eight steps is really focused on an organizational level change and ADKAR is really a personal individual level change. And what I recognize is that that’s 13 things, it’s too much, it’s too much for everybody to understand, it’s too much for all to do. And I see that, especially from leaders, it’s just too many things to try and keep track of. So, what I have done is I break it down into three steps, people can understand three.

WAYNE BROWN: One of our approaches for change is to help people realize that during the change process, their role in the change may evolve as well. And as the change agent or the change catalyst, we have to be cognizant of that and support the people as they’re going through the process, do you find anything like that with the clients you work with?

SARENA DIAMOND: Actually, you’re spot on. I think that one of the things, especially today, leaders can’t possibly keep up with the rate and pace of change that’s coming, the teams can’t possibly. And so many times if the leaders can actually be approaching their teams as, I’m not the smartest one in the room and I don’t have all the answers, we’re going to co-create the future, that changes things. And when team members feel like they are part of the solution or part of the creation of the solution, even if the vision is very clear, this is where we need to get to. I don’t know how we’re getting there, but this is where we need to get to. When they’re part of that creation of the future, they are so much more engaged, they are so much more interested in what those outcomes are. And you know what? More people bring more brilliance. Leaders that approach a problem that they are the only ones that know the answers and they’ll dish out what people should be doing and how they should be doing it, I would love to say that they are all failing, they’re not all failing, but I do believe that the financials and the ROI on those investments are starting to show in too many places where it doesn’t work anymore, there’s no possible way. I joke with people about AI all the time and probably because I worked at IBM in the research center where cutting-edge innovative technology was every minute of every day, like all the time.

[00:10:00]

SARENA DIAMOND: So, while I look at AI differently because of that, I’ve been surrounded by people that are always pushing the envelope. I look at it as this is a really exciting time for a lot of people and leaders that are feeling like I have to be the one to know it all, they’re going to fail. But those that are supporting the growth of others and saying, “let’s all take a piece. Oh, what do you know? Oh, you found that.” It’s a different approach to leading through change, but it works. It’s resounding effect and people are finding really great success when they’re showing up saying, “I’m confident in what I’m bringing to the table and I’m supporting the growth of what you’re bringing to the table.”

WAYNE BROWN: You speak about the technology companies, and at least I have the vision that they’re more innovative, they’re more creative as part of their culture. There’s many very traditional industrialized companies out there who are less agile and flexible in that way and I think many of those leaders still struggle with that concept of letting go and not being the smartest leader in the room or smartest person in the room and bringing in that innovation for whatever reason, whether it’s fear of the unknown, fear of losing their power, whatever. But I imagine that is a large part of the reason why many of these change initiatives fail or don’t succeed to a level.

SARENA DIAMOND: A hundred percent. I have a lot of grace for leaders today, especially leaders that grew up and learned in a different mode. There’s that old poem that I had in my house for decades that children learn what they live, well, leaders learn what they experience as well. And so often the leaders before them only had one style and that style is what people experienced. So, you either did exactly what your leaders that you saw did and grew up through that or you completely abandoned it, saw it as toxic or something. But it’s hard, it’s hard. And what I’m seeing is the more leaders that are investing in themselves, in their own leadership development, as well as developing the next level. I’ve had two clients in the three and a half years where I was kind of taken aback at what I was brought in to do. I was standing up a function, an operational function and streamlining some processes. But more importantly, I was actually mentoring the leader that was going to take on that role. And at first when I took it, I was in the back of my head, certainly not to them, but I was a little concerned that the senior leader, the more senior leader that knew who the person was going to be wasn’t invested. They weren’t really dedicating themselves to growing that person, they were offloading it to me. But what I figured out pretty quickly is that wasn’t it at all, they recognized that they didn’t have the skills in their own toolbox to be able to develop the leader that that human needed to be. And I, in hindsight, gave them a ton of credit for saying that and saying, “you know what? I’ll learn alongside, but I don’t have the skills to teach them what they need to know.”

WAYNE BROWN: And I read somewhere where you say, “change is not merely managed, it’s led.” What do you mean by that? And how does that differ from being a true change agent from the traditional change manager?

SARENA DIAMOND: I love that you pulled out that quote. I truly do believe that when people think about change or change management, I tell people all the time, I am not a change management person because most people presume that is like project management. We’ll have a work plan, I’ll find somebody that will govern my schedule, we’ll hold people accountable, we’ll check on status, we’ll create great reports to my executive team. I can do that, but that’s managing an activity. Much like how people say you manage tasks and you lead people, you lead change because change is adopting new ways of working, change is about the organization, people the side of it, which is why I tell people all the time, I am an organizational change expert, I’m not the only one, luckily, there’s lots of us, but change is hard, the people side of it, adopting new ways of working, adopting new technologies, understanding what needs to happen as part of the change journey, all of those things are hard and you have to lead people through that. Just like you would guide on some, if you were trekking Mount Fuji, you’d want a guide.

[00:15:00]

SARENA DIAMOND: You’d want something, not to say that you can’t do it, but somebody that has been down the ropes and figured out which ways to step on the journey when you don’t want to be stopping here, where you want to be continuing through. And those are some of the really important kinds of things that I think lots of leaders sort of miss. This is the perfect time of year, right? We’re at mid-year, they’re looking at the strategic initiatives they were supposed to accomplish in 2025. They may be saying, “gosh, we’re not where we thought we were.” This is always when I get called, like this part of… this quarter, next quarter, it’s always like, “well, we’re going to miss what was expected of us,” and “can you fix it?” And almost always, the first set of things, of course we can get it right, but let’s look at what’s the highlighted value? What are the key things we need to accomplish? And let’s figure out how we’ve talked about those. Leading sometimes requires you to take a couple of steps back to be able to move forward a bit, especially when you’ve started without a real focus on leading the change as opposed to just project managing your way through it.

WAYNE BROWN: I was just wondering while you were speaking there. You mentioned AI and are you finding companies calling you now to help them with the onboarding of AI initiatives and how that’s requiring the people within the organization to make that change from their legacy systems to the new AI systems? Have you encountered that yet?

SARENA DIAMOND: I haven’t seen a lot of leaders saying, “we’re switching over.” What I have seen is a lot of fear around how is AI going to affect us as an organization and what is it culturally going to do for us? How do we… and I come at that the same way I, for many years at IBM, I was doing enablement on new technologies and believe it or not, I worked at IBM when cloud was becoming the new thing, people think, “really!?” Like, “yes, I’m old.” But when we think about adopting something new, the most important thing, and like with AI, is to draw on whatever foundation the people have. And so, I would talk, I have a client who I talked a lot about the concept of big data because they were very comfortable with the concepts of big data. And so, I was able to draw the parallels for them to be able to see this is no different than managing and manipulating large amounts of data. It just so happens to be on available technology and open source. But it’s funny because if you find a way to ground the change in something that’s familiar, in this case, people can find their starting place. Too often it’s they don’t… and that’s this whole concept of building belief, they can’t find their solid footing to get started. So, inevitably a leader has been thinking about a strategic initiative or a merger or an acquisition, something big that’s going to change or rock the world of the team for months. It’s never, luckily the leader isn’t openly doing that, sharing it, but they’ll think about it for months and months and they’ll get to a place where they’re ready to announce it. Sometimes they even get their internal marketing or communications team to help them build beautiful decks and a town hall meeting, and it’s awesome. And they give it 45 minutes or better. My least favorite is, “we announced it on email.” And they’ve forgotten that the key parts of that is bringing people along. So, I always go back and I ask, “okay, how was things announced? What was the communications cascade?” One of the things that I’m a very big advocate for, “how did the second line and the third line managers help to support?” Almost always, I mention the word communication cascade, and then sometimes I have people say, “explain that a little more.” And I explain it and they’re like, “oh, yeah, no, I just did it myself. I told all 600 people in the town hall.” And so, I’m like, “right, one time?” And then they say, “oh no, no one time verbally and then I followed up with an email,” that’s best practice for them. And I say, “a good start, a good start. Now, how did you enable your senior leadership team, your first line and second line managers, how did you enable them to carry that message and localize it to their teams?” “Oh, I think we have some work to do.” And that’s… you know what? The good part is those kinds of situations are easily rectifiable. They’re not that hard to overcome, especially when you have a leader that has good intentions. That is not the flavor of the month.

[00:20:00]

SARENA DIAMOND: I have, unfortunately, a couple of clients that that is the feeling, that’s the sentiment amongst their organization that just wait this out because he’s going to have a new flavor of the month. The next month, it’ll be something different.

WAYNE BROWN: Yes.

SARENA DIAMOND: And that’s sad to me because what that does is it creates… It’s not even doubt. It’s just that there’s not the same level of respect for the hard work and the vision that the leader is putting into growing the company. And especially with AI, I’ve got a couple of leaders who are seeing the implications that AI is having in their industry because that’s their level of experience and insight that they bring. And they’re worried about the impact it could have on their actual offerings that they have as a company, but they don’t want to sound the alarm. So, they’re struggling with that balance of how do I take on the burden of that message and yet still keep us moving forward. So, what looks to the company as some one-off, fly-by-night initiative is actually a really, really smart decision that will help them to contradict some of the things they’re seeing in the industry. And I always say, “great, how do we talk about it?” Let’s talk about how you communicate that in a responsible way, never a fan of burdening the entire organization with the responsibilities of the leader. You don’t have to share everything, but you do have to paint that path forward so people see it.

WAYNE BROWN: Sure. And I think you just hit on one of the bigger reasons behind the failure of change is that lack of alignment from the senior leader to the next tier or maybe the next couple of tiers and therefore the execution falls over because there wasn’t that alignment to start with and then the engagement and desire to push out the change for whatever reason.

SARENA DIAMOND: Right, 100%. And they just don’t see how they’re supposed to do it.

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah.

SARENA DIAMOND: It’s funny, the first quarter of this year was when lots of my clients were setting organizational goals. And I used to ask people all the time, “so what is your boss’s goals?” “Well, I don’t know.” I was like, “no, no, you need to cascade them.” They’re like, “what does that mean?” And I said, so somebody sets those goals, those objectives, and then they cascade them to the next level that says, what part of this am I delivering on? Is my team delivering on? And the cascade each time takes a little piece of it each way. But it’s very funny because that I just took for granted. Maybe growing up in a big corporation, IBM, that’s how we did it every year. I’m always surprised at smaller or mid-sized companies that are still learning that it’s not an individual activity, it is actually intentional that if you put all the puzzle pieces together of goal-setting for every individual, it would paint a beautiful picture, but it really is an interlocking puzzle, not something that is just so happenstance that come together at the end of the year.

WAYNE BROWN: One of the things that I have seen recently with AI, not only AI, but technology in general, is people don’t see it as a change initiative. And therefore, they just make the initial execution, bring it in, and walk away from it, and just expect that it’s going to be picked up, people are going to endorse it and they’re going to accept it, I see that as a failing as well. Now, all these small things are still changed, there’s still people at the end of it who are going to feel some sort of emotional tug one way or the other, whether they can see it rationally, whether they can see the reason. But if you don’t take those steps, there’s a good chance there’s going to be a lot of resistance that doesn’t necessarily have to be there.

SARENA DIAMOND: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. And that resistance, as you pointed out, is almost always based in fear.

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah.

SARENA DIAMOND: It’s based on, I don’t see where I fit, I’m concerned about how I can contribute. It is almost always like that. And most people, when you think about it from that perspective, unless you’re really a jerk, you don’t go, “well, get over your fear.” You say, “oh, as a leader, I need to back myself up and help them manage through that.” Now, I’m sure there are some jerks that are like, “get over it.”

WAYNE BROWN: When you decided to make the personal leap, so leaving the security of corporate life and launching into Diamond Solutions Group, personally, emotionally, professionally, it’s a huge transformation, what was the decision, the impetus that drove that shift?

[00:25:00]

SARENA DIAMOND: The expectation that I knew I wanted to be focused in organizational change was never a question. And when I left, when IBM was spinning off, I knew that that’s what I wanted to focus on. As I’ve said, and I’ve shared openly, I went to another company for six months, they were way over their skis. And so, I had help, I had six months into it, the decision that the function that I was doing wasn’t going to be done centrally, this change was going to be rolled back into the business. And so, I did have the cushion, one of the decisions for lots of people going into entrepreneurship is, but where am I getting my finances? How am I covering my insurance? So, I did have a financial cushion at that point, after years and years of working in corporate, because that’s what I needed to have, was that security. But that was secondary, really the biggest thing was that I knew that I needed to work for myself, somebody I could always trust to do the right thing, choose the right people to work with. And I will say the finding of talent sourcers, other people that are helping solopreneurs and consultants and experts find client engagements changed everything for me. I have about 80% of the work have come through some fabulous organizations that that’s all they do is help clients larger than me. Certainly, I used to joke, “I don’t care what my SEO is.” People aren’t finding Diamond Solutions Group on Google, right? Even AI probably isn’t finding Diamond Solutions Group, although maybe now because I’ve done enough podcasts and blogs and things that perhaps I’m a little more visible.

WAYNE BROWN: We all face different challenges, different hurdles as we go through the change process. In your case, is there anything that jumps to mind about the challenges you had to overcome as you made the transition?

SARENA DIAMOND: I think that my bigger challenge then thinking that I was going to have freedom because I knew I loved what I did. And so, I was always, I wouldn’t say I was a workaholic, but I was very much involved and loved what I did. It didn’t end at five o’clock for me, even in corporate. So that wasn’t as big a change. What was really a big change for me was, and I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me, but the common infrastructure, having resource, having that common calendar with people that you’re going to interact with. All of a sudden, I was sort of thinking, wait, how do people interact with each other when they can’t just look at a calendar, check on an email, check on… some of that same structure was a new innovation for me. And those kinds of things, once you get over it the first time, you figure it out, but I still am surprised that that surprised me.

WAYNE BROWN: How much have you been involved with the different project management methodologies, like coming out the technology world, I guess you use agile methodology with projects.

SARENA DIAMOND: Yes. And actually, I was involved with a large group at IBM that went from the standard waterfall into agile ways of working. And I did a very large deployment across IBM globally on helping people to do that. I think that when you know more, you do better and the more opportunities to do things, whether it’s agile or waterfall confidence level, it is about how do you approach change from a human-centric perspective. And I am a big fan of agile, but I’m also a big fan of co-creating and finding those stages for change.

WAYNE BROWN: Right. Is there, if you’re using agile and you’re coming to a more traditional company who may not be a technology-based company, is there a certain cultural shift that needs to take place, do you think?

SARENA DIAMOND: I don’t know that cultural shift may need to be there. One of the things that I see a lot is through the questions that I will ask and the approaches to figuring out where we’re at. I often see people surprised by alternatives because companies, especially ones that have been very traditional, either waterfall or just more traditional methodologies, don’t know that there are other ways. It’s not that they intentionally are trying to avoid some, oh, that newfangled agile stuff, but a lots of times they just don’t know. At IBM, the term, one of my favorite people that I worked for, used to call it ‘navel-gazing.’ If you look at your own belly long enough, you can’t see anything else. And his point was very well taken.

[00:30:00]

SARENA DIAMOND: But it was really an important aspect of being able to pick your head up, be able to look around. One of the things that I really appreciate that my clients appreciate in me is that I have a wide variety of industries that I’ve worked in. And I hate the term ‘industry agnostic’ because it sounds so watered down that you’re not, but then I… if a company employs people and the changes are needed to grow the company, I can help. And that’s so important, it doesn’t matter what the industry is. I’ve worked in healthcare, finance, hospitality. I’ve also worked in entertainment, equipment rental, and manufacturing. All of those had the same kind of challenges. I mean, I had two clients that were doing essentially a Quote-to-Cash business process transformation, they couldn’t have been farther apart in the industry solution, client approach, anything, even one was waterfall and one was already well into agile ways of working. And they were still struggling with the same thing, how do we adopt a consistent standard technology to support our business processes? How do we approach our business processes more streamlined with less approval requirements? The same challenges. And it was just the process from defining a client needs all the way through to getting paid for having delivered on instant. And I love to be able to bring other industry experiences to clients to talk about that. You know, if you’re in a professional services industry, you may not know what a manufacturing industry value other than the, you know, the six Toyota or Saturn cases that you can find on Harvard Business Review, you won’t know what else you could be missing. And when you start to open up that aperture to find new things, that’s where the real magic is for a lot of people.

WAYNE BROWN: When you start working with a new client, how do you bring that essence to the client to help them understand that need for the flexibility from the open mindedness? How do you get them on board with that?

SARENA DIAMOND: Lots of times I start with questions. I mean, that’s almost always my approach and the questions almost always look around what else has been done. What have we tried? How has that worked? What has worked from that? What hasn’t? Beyond your portion of the, if it’s a large enterprise, but beyond your portion of the organization, where else has this worked? I’m always surprised at the responses to those questions though. Because I don’t feel like I’m a rocket scientist. And so, when people are surprised at their own reactions to questions like, “you have a parallel organization in Europe, how are they doing it?” And they’re like, “gosh, we never thought to ask.” And that to me is stunning. But I think it’s because leadership is hard, change is hard, business as a whole is hard, besides the fact that there’s, you know, home life and distractions and all the other things going on in everybody’s head. So, if you can approach it with grace and say, so maybe we can set up some kind of parallel conversations. Let’s talk about, let’s look at some of the other places. When I tell people about, you know, be the water, not the rocks, there’s always, always blockers, barriers, things that aren’t going to work. And if you think about being water, water keeps moving. It does not matter how many rocks, boulders, small pebbles are in the way, water finds a way through. And the cool part about water is that it almost always, if there’s enough of it and the force is continuous, it will round off the rough edges of those rocks as it goes by, making them a little smoother, a little more polished and a little easier to deal with. And I think about all of the challenges, challenging people, lots of those rocks, people think about when I say this phrase, they often think of people, that one person who was going to be, “40 years in the company, and this is how we’ve always done it. And I don’t understand why we need to do something different.” I had somebody say, referred to some of the approaches as kindergarten games, approaches to getting people to adopt change. It was very funny because he was being critical and I truly believe as we dug through the rock that he was being, he was fearful. He had been doing the same thing for 38 of the 40 years he’d been with the company. He was looking forward to retiring, but not yet. And he didn’t want to have to do something different because change was hard.

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah.

[00:35:00]

SARENA DIAMOND: And I look at that and I think about six months after we had been through this process and he was not just a believer, but became an advocate and started telling other people in his location about this work from the, you know, six months before it was kindergarten games that we were doing. He showed me that the rough edges of that rock, they were based in fear, they were based in uncertainty because nobody had ever bothered to draw the line, which was pretty short from what he knew to what he needed to be knowing, nobody had bothered to even take him through that. So, they’re not all easy, some of them are very, very hard. And some of those curmudgeons are like, “you know what? I’m just not changing. This is how I’ve done it.” And in that case, maybe they’re not the right party to be in the boat as the boat is floating to the next shore. But those are few and far between in my experience with the right approaches from a leadership perspective.

WAYNE BROWN: What can larger organizations or let’s say a corporation learn, if anything, from the entrepreneur, the person out there, the small solo or small team entrepreneur when it comes to adapting to change? Is there much that they can bring to the table?

SARENA DIAMOND: I do think, you know, it’s funny. I say to people probably too much that large corporations or a lot of small corporations come together, right? Because it’s still a leadership base. And when you think about the leaders in those organizations, the continuous improvement, the wanting to learn, the wanting to be more and different. I think that transcends the size of the organization in some leaders that I’m seeing and I’m interacting with today. Some of those organizations have resources that the smaller organizations don’t. So, there can be more waste in some of those, what we’re trying. But I do think that it is about leadership in regardless of what location, what size, environment you’re in, that if the leader is dedicated to developing their own skills and continuously growing their leadership, it doesn’t matter what size of the organization they’re in, they will make a difference. And that’s what we’re all here for, right? Nobody is getting out of this at the end of the day without hopefully making a difference in the lives of other people.

WAYNE BROWN: Aside from what you just mentioned, is there one thing or a multitude of things you would advise leaders to think about as they approach the next change activity?

SARENA DIAMOND: For me, it is always about what have you built from a belief perspective around the change that you’re trying to do. What have you communicated? What have you shared? How have you communicated it? I will tell people, you know you’re done communicating the beliefs and the whys and the value of what we’re doing when you think to yourself, “oh my God, if I have to say this one more time…” then you’re one time left, right? You have one more time because you really aren’t… you can never over-advocate for people building that belief, building the buy-in, helping them to understand the why. When somebody says, “I get it, I get it, this is going to be a game changer for us.” Then you can move on to, “okay, how can I help you execute on this? How can I help you adopt?”

WAYNE BROWN: Any final ideas about what the future holds for all of us as we continually move ever faster on the technology bandwagon? We’re now talking about longevity. How do leaders make change something that’s not their enemy, but it’s actually part of their DNA?

SARENA DIAMOND: And it’s such a good question, Wayne. It does have to be part of everybody’s DNA, if it is not part of your daily activity to ask good questions, to find ways to change, improve, grow, you’re going to be left behind. I know people say, if you’re not doing AI, you’re going to be left behind or outside, whatever that analogy is, I say that about growth. If you are not continuously growing, your brain is atrophying in your head every day. So, what is it? And I actually told the leader in a recent workshop, put it in your calendar, 15 minutes, I’m not saying it needs to be the whole day, but the first 15 minutes with a cup of coffee, what are you learning? What are you growing? Who are you appreciating? What kinds of questions are you asking? I could do a 30-day calendar of people that, how do you get that growth mindset just part of your DNA?

[00:40:00]

SARENA DIAMOND: I don’t believe that it only takes adults 21 days anymore, I think it’s longer because I think there’s too much going on. But make it a habit to say, “how am I learning? What am I growing? What is different and new for me today than for yesterday?” Because I do believe every single person comes to work with great anticipation of what they’re going to do today. And as a leader, you want them to go home at the end of the day, whether that be virtual home or actual leaving the office home with a sense of accomplishment. And if you can give that to each person and to yourself as a leader, anticipating the day and delivering and feeling accomplished at the end of the day, you’ve done a really good thing. And that’s what we’re all here for, right? It to at the end of the day make it better for all of us to be able to contribute something meaningful in our one precious life.

WAYNE BROWN: For the majority anyway. I agree. Where is the best place for people to connect with you or follow you?

SARENA DIAMOND: The best place is actually LinkedIn. If you spell my name right, the way my mom intended, Sarena with an S-A-R-E-N-A Diamond. I am the only Sarena Diamond on LinkedIn. A billion people and I’m one in a billion there with that spelling.

WAYNE BROWN: Interesting. How else do you spell it?

SARENA DIAMOND: Lots of people spell it like Serena Williams spells it with S-E-R-E-N-A, but that’s not how my mom intended. And I always say my mom was right, and moms are always right, as I tell my own children. But I never knew there was another way to spell it for the longest time, and there’s lots of Serena Diamonds spelled the other way on LinkedIn. But I’m the only one, well, as of last week, I haven’t checked this week, but.

WAYNE BROWN: Sarena, thank you for the conversation. I always enjoy talking with people about change and no exclusion here with our conversation. So, much appreciated and I look forward to staying connected.

SARENA DIAMOND: Thank you, Wayne, very much.

OUTRO: Thank you for joining us on the ET project, a show for executive talent development, until next time, check out our site for free videos, eBooks, webinars, and blogs at ‘coaching4companies.com.’

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