The Emotional Labour Nobody Warns You About

Becca Chambers (00:00)
If you don’t have imposter syndrome, I don’t even know what you’re doing.

having high emotional intelligence will get you so much farther than just being smart.

one of my biggest failures was finally leaving a job because the emotional labor of insulating the team became too much for me to bear. I couldn’t do it anymore. I was psychologically roasted.

Kevin Rice (00:19)
Welcome back to CEOs and ABCs. My guest today is Becca Chambers. Becca is the chief marketing officer of Scale Venture Partners, and she’s also a LinkedIn top voice known for her honesty, vulnerability, and candid posts as an advocate for showing up as your most authentic self. In this episode, we talk about how to rebuild confidence after failure, how she’s built and retained teams that perform at a very high level, how her elementary school taught her EQ, which has been formative for her leadership and

and also how giving her kids autonomy, space, and guidelines has helped them grow into their own unique personalities. This is a conversation about authenticity and safety and culture and the power of being truly you.

Becca Chambers (01:02)
I remember having huge imposter syndrome identity crisis when I started a new role where I took over a team and had to replace people on the team and I had never done any firing before. I had never had to

figure out how to let someone go and then hire somebody else for the same position.

Kevin Rice (01:33)
Becca, thank you so much for being here.

Becca Chambers (01:36)
Hi, I’m happy to be here.

Kevin Rice (01:38)
Yeah, I’m excited to chat with you. I’ve been following you on LinkedIn for a while now, so I feel like I know you fairly personally because you’ve been just so generously candid about your thoughts and sharing about your personal life. But I’m excited to chat with you live now.

Becca Chambers (01:52)
Yeah, I know it’s fun to see people in real life because I don’t know you do form kind of parasocial relationships with people online Even if you don’t know them which is great but yeah nice to be here and my cat is happy to be here too.

Kevin Rice (02:00)
Yeah

You

Yeah, so I mentioned, I’ve been following your career for awhile and I’ve kind of gleaned this sort of underlying message and it seems like you’ve recognized that the world is kind of designed for standardized people.

And if you don’t fit that mold, the message that you might get is that something’s wrong with you, but you don’t subscribe to that. And so I wanted to hear your thoughts about like, how does that belief shape the way that you lead and how does it shape the way that you even parent at home?

Becca Chambers (02:32)
This is like you captured it so well and like articulated it more eloquently than I ever do. But you’re right. and I think more than anything, it was a survival mechanism. I spent so long trying to be a round peg in a square hole. I just always felt like I didn’t fit. Right. And like, you can’t live your whole life always feeling like an outsider or a failure. And at some point I was just like, okay.

something is wrong here and then I realized I do bring so much to the table. I am allowing this kind of world made for the average to narrate how I feel about myself. And so to your point, I don’t think I stopped subscribing to it so much as I just had to say, you know what? I’m gonna be myself and see how that works. And it turns out it works pretty well. It just comes with a lot of challenges that you have to…

either accept or create workarounds for. And I think my entire life is just a ⁓ collection of processes and workarounds and tools and strategies just to kind of keep everything going. But everyone’s life is like that, right? So it’s no different. For parenting though, I think this is where it’s become why it’s become so important to me because I don’t want my kids to go for the first 30 years of their life

Kevin Rice (03:44)
Yeah.

Becca Chambers (03:56)
as round pegs trying to squeeze into square holes. I just want them to round peg it up, right? Like go be round and weird or go be round and not weird, but like be who you are. Don’t try to be who everyone else wants you to be. And I want you to be comfortable with that. I want you to know your parents are happy with you like that. And I think the greatest gift my husband always tells me, cause my husband is a square peg in a square hole in all the best ways.

He always says, like, I’m so glad that you are the way you are because you get our kids and you’re able to kind of empower them with this, like, sense of you should be you. ⁓ And it’s not scary to him because he sees that, like, it all turns out fine if you give them the opportunity. for me, my motivator is how to create a world or how to at least create an environment where my kids feel like…

I’m just going to be me and I’m going to be cool with that even if it’s different than all the other kids around me.

Kevin Rice (04:53)
I love that. And it’s also served you very well in what’s been an incredibly successful career, right? Your kind of career on paper reads like a classic, Silicon Valley tech success story. I mean, you started in PR and then you worked at some cybersecurity companies and now you’re the CMO of a venture firm. but LinkedIn doesn’t always tell the full story. And that’s kind of what I love about doing this podcast is getting to know what was life like behind the scenes. But as I was looking at your LinkedIn.

There was one piece of your career that looks like it was kind of left out and that was the startup that you founded after grad school. And I’d love for you to tell us about that experience, kind of what happened, what did it teach you, and maybe even what did it cost you personally as you went through that experience?

Becca Chambers (05:37)
So I don’t think I’ve ever actually told this story in a public setting, so this will be a first. And there’s a few reasons for that. So I finished grad school in the middle of the recession. was 2009 and I had been looking for a job already before grad school ended and no jobs were coming. a very good friend of mine from undergrad who lived nearby was a, I trusted him and his skillset.

He trusted me and my new found marketing knowledge. And so we teamed up and we were going to create this. What is essentially now like a corporate door dash, like a food delivery type service. And it was really cool. We had a great business plan and it fell apart for all sorts of reasons, but mainly just inexperience and people who thought that they could.

do things that we needed more help doing and more capital doing and blah blah blah blah blah. So it failed spectacularly within eight months maybe. we put in all this time, our heart, our souls, everything and then it just kind of imploded and the two of us went our separate ways. I don’t tell this story a lot because he has since died and it has left this like

scar on me because it was like we had a falling out after that and then we kind of started to reconcile and then he died suddenly so it was like we never kind of moved past it so it’s this thing and when you asked how did it like impact everything else it was my first job out of grad school I had worked in PR agencies before that but my first thing that I was doing for myself I failed at

And so I went into my career feeling like I have something to prove, not just to everybody else, but to myself because I’m a big fat failure from day one and look at me. And I couldn’t look at all of the success that I had had up until that point. All I could see was that failure. And that was it. That was my whole like frame of who Becca is. Screw all your skills. Screw all your personalities. Screw all the years you’ve put in in your two master’s degrees.

you failed at this thing so you are a failure. And then from there it was like, I’m not gonna fail anymore. I’m gonna succeed at all the things. And then that’s been my driver.

Kevin Rice (08:02)
That’s funny. So I started a little startup around the same time before I started my consulting firm Hathaway with my business partner, Jesse, and it was called why hire. And it was like an online hiring platform. were doing video interviewing in 2008 and we got to sit down with Tim Draper at the time, who still to this day is like pinnacle Silicon Valley investor and

Becca Chambers (08:16)
Okay.

You know, I went to high school with

his daughter and we were in the same grade in our 100 person high school. So fun fact. There you go.

Kevin Rice (08:31)
Amazing. Yeah. He, he sat down with us. Something wasn’t working with the projector. So we literally sat side by side with him on a little monitor and did our presentation. And he was going to, he was going to put in, ⁓ like 500,000. And at the time it was 2008, we were targeting college students, entry level positions. Cause

Becca Chambers (08:43)
cute.

Kevin Rice (08:54)
We had just graduated. That’s the only thing we knew. And that’s what everybody does, right? They build a business for what they know. And, we decided to not take the funding because we felt like just the market wasn’t the right time for this. And I think in a way we were afraid to fail. He was, he was bought in, he was going to make the investment, but we passed on it and we just said, like, I don’t think we can do this right now. We were afraid that if we took the money and we failed, would that hurt our reputation? And so.

Becca Chambers (08:57)
Yeah.

Kevin Rice (09:24)
You took that leap and I celebrate that. It almost like reminds me of the man in the arena quote.

Becca Chambers (09:27)
But I didn’t,

I appreciate that, but here’s the difference. If somebody had offered me money to do it, I probably also would not have taken the money because it’s one thing to fail for yourself. It’s another thing to fail for somebody else. And I think that is also something that has become like, you know, I’ve had to become more comfortable with failing for myself because it’s like the consequences is you feel bad, but like that’s okay. If you don’t try, then what?

Kevin Rice (09:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that’s same with like, I’m doing some investing right now and people have asked me if I’m going to start a fund and I’m like, I don’t know if I want to invest with other people’s money. Cause if it’s my money, I can risk it. If I’m taking other people’s money, there’s a whole nother level of like stewardship involved that I don’t know if I want that responsibility.

Becca Chambers (09:59)
Yeah.

I feel that way about a lot of like, when I need to learn how to do something, I would rather go learn how to do it with personal projects than like a work project so that I can like, you know, tinker and mess up and whatever. And AI is a great example of that, right? Like I vibe coded a few app, like personal apps first on lovable and then went to like my corporate accounts and started doing stuff there so that I at least had a baseline. But

Kevin Rice (10:17)
⁓

Becca Chambers (10:34)
the having the mindset of at least I’m going to try knowing I might fail is everything in this world. So be that person.

Kevin Rice (10:43)
Totally. Yeah. And so what happened afterwards? how did you rebuild? What was kind of the first thing you started to do to rebuild your confidence?

Becca Chambers (10:51)
So actually that’s a really good question because what I did was I just started marketing my marketing services. So I know how to do these things. I know people who have a need, you know, it was a recession. So there was like a lot of people had laid off their staff. So there were pockets of this person needs somebody who can make, slides for their business. And this person, it was just kind of like a marketing bandaid. That’s kind of how I was marketing myself to people. And it was fine. And I was

starting to make money, but there was no joy in it for me. But what it did allow me to do was it allowed me to learn how to do new things. Like I became a PowerPoint guru. slide design just accidentally became something I was really, really good at because I wasn’t quite a graphic designer and I was a comms person. like making slide narratives turned out to be something I was really good at.

Then a job popped up in the Bay Area, which is where I’m from. I was in LA at the time. and the job was an executive communications manager and I had no idea what that meant. I just saw in the job description, it was a lot of making PowerPoint slides. So I applied for that job and they gave me a homework assignment that was make a PowerPoint deck about this is how this is going to date all of this about Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. Like

Kevin Rice (12:08)
Wow.

Becca Chambers (12:09)
way before, like when it was happening, right? So I did and they hired me because of my slide design. So what, the comeback was doing this thing I was not passionate about as like a marketing bandaid for people whose businesses weren’t that interesting to me. I was able to collect all these new skills that then are the thing that got me my next job. And I realized that has kind of been a constant throughout my career is being the

I’ll figure it out. I’ll figure out how to do that. And that thing is what got me my next role or helped get me promoted or whatever the case may be, because the I’ll figured out people are invaluable, right? Like we don’t all know how to.

Kevin Rice (12:46)
Yeah, especially right now, right?

Resourcefulness, ingenuity, those are the things that we need in this new world that we’re moving into, Memorizing, sure, ambition, yeah.

Becca Chambers (12:56)
Well, and a desire to do it, like not somebody saying you have to do it. Yeah. And I think that’s

not everybody is like that and not everybody needs to be like that. And like I said, my husband and I are totally different. And I admire him for so many of the things that he’s able to do that I absolutely cannot do. And he feels the same way about me, but we’re just cut from different cloth, right? That’s probably also why we work well together. But not everyone needs to be the same, but you do need to have those people on your team.

Or else your team’s gonna suck.

Kevin Rice (13:27)
Yeah. as you were rebuilding, you were developing new skills. Did you have any level of imposter syndrome setting in after kind of the failure of your first startup?

Becca Chambers (13:36)
If you don’t have imposter syndrome, I don’t even know what you’re doing.

yes, is the answer to that. I’ve never not had imposter syndrome. And anytime there has been one moment in my life, post pandemic, when I remember saying out loud to, I think my mom or somebody in my family, this is the first time in my life I don’t feel just overwhelming imposter syndrome. And it’s very disconcerting and uncomfortable. And what I realized is it just meant that

I needed to go do something else where I was learning more and pushing myself and not pushing myself for the sake of being uncomfortable, but pushing myself for the sake of if I’m not having imposter syndrome, it means that I have like fully grown into whatever I’m doing. And now it’s time for me to grow into the next thing, right? once you’ve grown into your pair of shoes and you’re a child,

You’re going to buy the next bigger size, right? You’re not just going to keep buying the same size. And I guess I feel like imposter syndrome is just the sign that you are doing something that you’re learning while you’re doing it. And that’s what we should all be doing all the time.

Kevin Rice (14:39)
I love that. I remember very vividly having that realization of sitting in a room, feeling the imposter syndrome and realizing I’m in the exact right room where I need to be right now. Because if I don’t feel imposter syndrome, I’m not in a place where I’m uncomfortable and I’m pushing myself. And I’m, one those people that just, always want to be growing and learning. And so was like, ⁓ this is actually the right feeling. This is exactly what I need to be feeling right now because it’s

Becca Chambers (14:50)
Yeah.

Kevin Rice (15:06)
pushing me out of my comfort zone, and that’s how I’m gonna grow.

Becca Chambers (15:08)
Yeah.

I also think going back to feeling like around Peggy in a square hole my whole life, my whole life has been imposter syndrome. It’s like, how do you harness the imposter syndrome to

push yourself to do better rather than to feel bad about yourself and find all the reasons why you’re a failure because nobody’s great at everything from day one.

Kevin Rice (15:28)
really interesting too. Cause it makes me think of being a chameleon, right? fitting in with one group by changing yourself and your identity or the way you carry yourself and then fitting in with a different group. And then all of you kind of get lost and you’re like, wait, who am I going back to your original point of just, everybody is unique and has their own skillsets and just be yourself. cause if you’re just trying to fit in, then you kind of lose who you truly are at your own core.

Becca Chambers (15:52)
Well, here’s like a perfect example. We all hate AI slop, right? AI slop is just the average of all of the written things of all time, right? So really what it is is like well-written stuff. We all just are sick of the same cadence of whatever because we are used to human writing that has all of this diversity of the way that people write. So if we’re all trying to get to the average, the whole world is just

AI slop, but like, real world slop because being it when everyone is the same, there is nothing interesting. And I guess it took me way too long in life to realize that like you need the round pegs. If you don’t have the round pegs, everyone’s just doing the same thing. It sucks. So I actually find and I think there’s now research about this, but neurodivergent people

flock with neurodivergent people, we find each other and I’ve found over the years, a lot of the people that I’ve hired have turned out to be ADHD or autistic or dyslexic or whatever. And it makes sense because I’m looking for all of the round pegs and square pegs so that we can all just jumble up and bring all of those unique things, because my ideas certainly aren’t always the best. But

know, Joe’s ideas aren’t always the best either. Like you need everyone and their weird to show up to make things break through, to make things differentiated, to make things matter.

Kevin Rice (17:20)
Yeah, yeah. I, everybody has their own comparative advantages. I think that’s one of the things that worked really well with me and my business partner is we were very different and a lot of people would comment and be like, you’re kind of the yin to each other’s yang. but if we were the same and we had the same perspectives, then what’s the point of having a two of us there.

Becca Chambers (17:36)
Well, that’s why it’s hard when you know that there are certain criteria people have like, I only want to hire people if they’ve worked at these four companies, or I only want to hire people who’ve gone to these universities. And I get the, filtering mindset But when you do that, you really do end up kind of limiting your options. And I don’t know. I think that the

the personality piece of what people bring to the table is stuff that you don’t see on paper matters just as much as the stuff that you see on paper. You can’t see on paper if somebody’s an all figure it out person, right? You can just tell if that person’s a high achiever or not. They might be boring as hell. They might not be good at figuring out anything. They may need to have to have someone teach them how to do things like professor on a stage in order to get something done. Whereas like,

You just need to give me 12 hours and access to the internet and I could figure out how to do brain surgery.

Kevin Rice (18:29)
and that really helps describe, I think your kind of leadership philosophy, right? bring the smartest people into the room and then let them operate. So at what point in your career did you become a leader of people? Cause that’s when I first really started feeling imposter syndrome was when I all of a sudden had two or three direct reports and I had no training. Nobody taught me how to do it. when did you become a leader of people and what did you have to figure out

Becca Chambers (18:49)
Yes.

Kevin Rice (18:54)
quickly when you started in that role.

Becca Chambers (18:56)
So the first time I was ever a people leader, I was the manager of an intern when I worked at McAfee. And it was the best like segue into leadership ever because I got to just kind of be the leader that I thought would be a good leader and then get feedback from this very young person who had never been in an office before. And I saved the letter she wrote when she left because she wrote me this very long one page thing that has totally set the tone for my leadership for the rest of my career, which

essentially she was saying that I provided psychological safety, but she didn’t use those words, but just saying she felt like she could bring her whole self and didn’t have to pretend to be something she wasn’t. And as somebody coming straight out of college, I helped with her imposter syndrome. And it was just like this very warm and thankful letter that made me feel like, my God, I actually impacted this person in a positive way by doing leadership in the way that I think it should be done. So it was

validating my strategy, And then my next role after that,

I remember having huge imposter syndrome identity crisis when I started a new role where I took over a team and had to replace people on the team and I had never done any firing before. I had never had to

figure out how to let someone go and then hire somebody else for the same position.

it was just like a whole, I had to figure it out for myself. And it ended up being, I was so ⁓ anxious about it that I spent so much time working on it that I ended up building like the best ever team. And I still, I’m very close with.

people who are on that team and I would hire them again in a heartbeat. because I was so focused on making the team strong, I put in a ton of emotional labor into building this great team And again, it then validated my strategy of, it’s not about being friends with the people you work with, but it’s about building a level of trust that even people you would never hang out with in real life could come to the team and feel like I just.

can be myself, it doesn’t really matter if none of us would be friends outside of work. And it made us so productive, because it’s just like, the way that you do with your spouse, you just start to operate on the same wavelength and you guys are all rowing together because there’s not competition on the team and there’s not bad juju and

I’m like, if somebody on my team does something great, isn’t that a positive reflection of me too? Like go be great, Anyway, so after that, that I had to build a team of like 25, it went from like, I yes and it was during COVID and

Kevin Rice (21:24)
That’s a big jump.

Becca Chambers (21:29)
There was no in-person anything and ⁓ that team was just one of the best ever. I was very confident after that in my ability to hire and build a team and build camaraderie. No matter what the overarching environment that we were working in, which usually was pretty challenging, we were tight and we all trusted each other and we all had each other’s backs.

you never had that horrible feeling of going to work and being like, God, I hate my life. Because at least we have our unit that is solid and good and productive and happy.

Kevin Rice (22:08)
Yeah. how does that translate into the way that you, you know, lead your children and parent your kids?

Becca Chambers (22:15)
You know, I’ve never really thought about it in that term, in those terms, but I’m sure it’s the same. My kids just told me last night, they were comparing me to one of their friends’ moms, and they were like, you’re so much better. And I was like, well, I don’t know if that makes me so much better. And then I hear my daughter from the other room, no, you’re so much better. And the reason why is because, I don’t yell at them if they swear. I yell at them if they swear if we’re out in public and there are other kids around.

because that’s not an appropriate place for them to be swearing. If my kid is playing video games with his friend in the other room and I hear him be like, shit, I don’t care. Like, and I don’t say anything, but that creates a sense of my child knows the boundaries of what’s okay and what’s not okay. He starts to learn context switching, right? Like who am I allowed to do this around? Not just swearing, but all sorts of things.

And then also my mom is not going to just get on my ass about whatever. She’s going to have boundaries about things that matter. And I think that’s the thing that my kids respect the most about me is like when I say no, they know that there’s a reason because I’m not just saying no all the time. There are plenty of things that I say no to that they’re like, why? I’m like, because I’m the mom and I say so, because I do allow them, think some amount of

just freedom to be themselves and I encourage them to be themselves and I don’t over-program them with after school extracurriculars and all of that. I think they do feel this sense of mutual trust, right? Like I’m not just the parent saying, have to do what I say because I’m the parent. I give them some amount of individual input into how their life is run.

And I remind them of that too, so that they understand that not all parents are like that. And now that they’re spending more time with other people’s parents, I think they’re starting to appreciate it more. But I will tell them, you know, Hey man, when my son gets mad, cause I make him get off his iPad. I’m like, look, I let you play on your iPad for an hour every single night. I guarantee you. And then I’ll drop seven names. Those kids don’t get to be on their iPads at all. And my point isn’t to be like, compared to your friends. My point is to be like,

you get this awesome thing, don’t push it to the point that you don’t get to have it anymore, right? And then he realizes, okay, yeah, that does make sense. Okay, I’ll get off my iPad.

Kevin Rice (24:34)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think this is a great example of where leadership does translate to the home. And that’s kind of what I’ve been spending a lot of my time thinking about is the similarities and the differences, but you’re, you’re offering autonomy. You’re offering boundaries and guidelines and space. these are all the things that we do as leaders too. and I’ve loved hearing you talk about your philosophy on leadership. One of the things I always questioned about myself.

because I didn’t have a lot of feedback. Nobody wrote me a letter telling me I was a great leader. It was just like, how do you know you’re doing a good job? for you personally, what’s your internal scorecard to know that I’m doing a good job right now leading my team?

Becca Chambers (25:18)
vibes. It’s like so hard to quantify what you’re asking, but I know when my team is functional and when it’s not, I just know. And I think, I think the team knows, I think everybody can feel when we’re all in that rhythm together and when it’s not happening. and I think that’s part of what the magic of it is, is we are so open with each other

Here’s a perfect metric. And if somebody on my team sees this, I hope they’re not mad that I shared. Yesterday in our team meeting, I was like coming in all frazzled because I was booked back to back all day. And she was like, can I lead off the meeting with something? And I was like, yeah. She was like, I just wanted to give a shout out to people. And she went one at a time and gave a gratitude statement to everybody on the team. And to me, she thanked me for

creating psychological safety on the team and she’s like, I haven’t had a place where I felt like I could bring my whole self and just be myself. And you’ve helped create that. And that is the metric, right? there’s nothing better than hearing that from somebody that works on your team that you’ve hired and brought into the fold. I think it’s that, it’s the vibes.

Kevin Rice (26:25)
Yeah. Yeah. I

mean, the, the vibes, the culture, those are the intrinsics that are hard to put a number around. I just think back to when I was running teams, I would have always been, well, how are we measuring this? What is the number? mean, you could obviously say like a retention, right? And I imagine that the way that you lead your team, you’ve probably had pretty good retention with your, your team members.

Becca Chambers (26:37)
yeah.

Yeah, the second person who’s ever quit on my team ever was happened just a few weeks ago and we are very good terms. I love this person. So no, no hard feelings at all. Other than I’m just so sad to have somebody quit because I’m not used to that happening. Like people usually stick around.

And actually I had a boss once, a CEO who hired me. So I was going to report to the CEO and they told me that one of the reasons they hired me was because of the, ⁓ followership that I had, not online followership. I didn’t have that at the time. She meant the people who followed me from one company to another company.

from team to team and she was like for me, that’s the metric of a strong leader and sadly most of the people I had always hired are We were all remote teams and so now I work in person and so I’m in this weird spot where I can’t hire any of the people that I worked with in the past and I’m like so not used to that. It’s very interesting

Kevin Rice (27:29)
you

Well, yeah, 95 % retention is a pretty good metric. So you’re, you’re definitely doing a lot of things. Right. It seems like you. I, all I’ve heard you talk about is how much you care for your team, as opposed to revenue or business metrics. And it kind of comes off as it seems like the most important thing for you is the team. A lot of leaders at the end of the day, it’s shareholder value.

Becca Chambers (27:54)
Yeah.

Kevin Rice (28:14)
Is the board happy? Are we hitting our growth numbers?

Becca Chambers (28:18)
Those things, of course, all matter. None of those things are achievable in a meaningful way unless you have a functional team, right? Unless you have a, not just functional, the team has to want to be there. I have found in my career that people on my teams, at least most teams, show up for each other, right? They’re not showing up for shareholder value. My comms team, yes, they care about the business doing well.

but they care about showing up for their team. And when everybody is in that mindset, that’s like, you know, I’m going to the baseball game because it matters to my daughter that I’m there, not because I actually want to go watch baseball. That’s a very different mindset. And when you can create that with your teams, you guys are so productive, then you’re creating the shareholder value, right? Then you’re, then you’re not having churn that costs the company business.

then you’re not having to, on board new people again, that’s time wasted and whatever, nothing can succeed unless the teams are functional. And this has actually been one of like the, biggest gripes. Like I’ve run internal comms at most of the companies I’ve worked at and fighting with the C-suite to say, we have to care about what the employees feel like feelings do matter, not for touchy feely reasons for business

Value reasons and I don’t get why people don’t understand that but for me to your point the team is the first priority and It’s not just happiness, right? there’s a million metrics that you could do but it’s just the overall are we functional are we able to bring ideas and not feel scared to share them with each other and Do people actually want to be here?

Kevin Rice (30:01)
Yeah. How would you translate some of those ideas into like values? do you have a set of values that you focus on with your team? Do you talk about them explicitly? how do you bring values into the way you work with your teams?

Becca Chambers (30:15)
I do. Yeah, I do have a list of values that I have been iterating over time, but I think it’s like six things now that are kind of non-negotiables on my team. for example, a no-assholes rule feels pretty straightforward and something everybody should have. But not every team does have a no-assholes rule. Like if I had somebody on my team

who was putting other people down or making other people feel bad or challenging people in rude ways that was damaging the psychological safety of the team, that person would not remain on the team because that is just a value of the team. We have a no-assholes policy, hard stop. ⁓ Failing fast, that’s another one. really, like I said, I started my career with a chip on my shoulder of I’m never gonna fail again.

Of course I’m going to fail again, but like, I never want to fail. Failure in my head, failure is not an option, but unless you know that failure is an option, you’re never going to try new things. And as a leader, I’ve had to push a number of people in my teams to experiment more, to get over their fear of failure in order to do better work, frankly. And like,

push the envelope and be more, I don’t know, modern in the way they do things. But the fear of failure was like so, prominent in their minds that they couldn’t do it. so helping other people kind of overcome that has helped me overcome it even more. But I think the fail fast thing is like, okay, once you realize something isn’t working, let’s move on. Let’s not try to salvage the dead, right?

We don’t have to win at everything, but we have to win at the end of the day. So let’s not just keep beating the dead horse.

Kevin Rice (32:02)
Yeah, so values really, I didn’t realize, but today realize how much more important they are to how you make decisions and how you carry yourself in the company. But ultimately they don’t mean much until they’re tested. And so you mentioned like no assholes policy. I experienced a couple of clients that were kind of assholes and they were really difficult, but they were like substantial clients for our agency. And so

Becca Chambers (32:15)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Rice (32:27)
our values were tested. ⁓ And at one point we had to basically disengage with a client who was spending seven figures with us because they were just really rude to the team. And that’s when they’re tested. Have you had any examples where maybe like the no assholes concept has been tested for you?

Becca Chambers (32:49)
Yes, but let me say what you did then was put the team above the shareholder value because you recognize that if your team was going to get beaten down every day, like they were going to leave or they were going to not bring their whole selves and start to disengage. Just wanted to point that out because that’s why the team matters first more than all of the other things.

Kevin Rice (32:54)
Yes.

I think we could

have made the decision sooner. We definitely let it play out longer than it should have. And it was creating real big problems and we were going to lose employees. And ultimately we made the right decision. Kind of took a little bit longer than I think it probably should have.

Becca Chambers (33:20)
Well, right.

But you kind of had

to see the consequences playing out in order to like know that was the thing. think the best example I have is kind of a similar thing, which is in every company I’ve worked at, the comms team gets abused in ways that they shouldn’t.

just a lot of dismissive BS or treating people like their assistants and things like that. And what I learned is that I could create some amount of shield for my team.

that meant that I would be the one who would take the shit from other people so that they wouldn’t have to be the ones to experience it. And it became kind of a explicit thing at certain companies. But if this scenario happens, you say to the person, let’s bring Becca into this so that we can have a conversation. And it’s not a passing the buck. It’s a, she’s the manager. like whatever.

beef you’re having, you can have it with her and not with me, the junior, whatever, whatever person. And I think over time, that became something that it clearly really mattered in the longevity of the teams and the psychological safety of the teams, because there was a lot of shit that if that had continued to rain down on people who certainly shouldn’t have been in that position, they would have left or they would have,

not wanted to be there anymore and would have started to check out. and in fact, one of, would say

one of my biggest failures was finally leaving a job because the emotional labor of insulating the team became too much for me to bear. Like I couldn’t do it anymore. I was like psychologically roasted.

And it was just because we worked at pretty abusive company where people were,

feeling horrible all the time and I was doing my best to keep it all out of their, out of their way, but it was, it became too much.

Kevin Rice (35:35)
I’m hearing a lot of EQ from you, there’s a lot of leaders that don’t have that depth of understanding of the emotional relationship between leaders and their teams. Is that something you feel you were just born with? Did you learn it at an early age? where does that come from for you?

Becca Chambers (35:54)
I grew up in the Bay Area. Like I mentioned, I went to this very progressive elementary school it’s called the WAVA. If you’re in the Bay Area, I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Now it’s very prestigious, whatever. At the time when I went there in the eighties and nineties, was like all the neurodivergent and gifted kids. It was just a collection of weirdos and it was awesome.

And they invented the whole concept of EQ, emotional intelligence. And so from kindergarten on, I was doing what’s called self-science class, where at a very young age, would be, we all sit in a circle and they put a bunch of rocks in the circle and they say, pick a rock that feels like you today. And then you go and you pick your rock and everyone goes around and shares, my rock is hard and spiky because I fought with my mom this morning and I’m feeling kind of spiky, whatever.

you start to talk about your feelings and understand and whatever in a way that just feels like play from a very young age. And so by the time I was in high school, I wrote my college essay about being able to understand and read people, which now I realize is also partially an ADHD thing and like all the masking and, trying to understand other people. But part of it is just this like deep emotional intelligence that I think kind of trumps all the other intelligence I have in life.

And it’s is a massively important quality, not just in a leader, but in a successful employee. Like if you want to have a successful career,

having high emotional intelligence will get you so much farther than just being smart.

Kevin Rice (37:25)
Yeah, your example about picking out a rock is kind of like a light bulb moment for me. I don’t think I could do that. I don’t think I could pick out a rock and describe the way it’s making me feel today. I love the exercise. I’m going to try it with my kids and it’ll probably help me more than them. Yeah.

Becca Chambers (37:32)
Hmm!

You should. Yeah, have them go first, obviously.

Yeah. It’s so funny you say that, because I would have no problem doing that. It could be something else like, what color are you today? Why? You know?

There were other things though about the school. So here’s another thing. I wonder if this is still the case. I don’t know. If you had a birthday party and you invited more than half of the girls in the class, you had to invite all the girls in the class because they were not going to create a place where you were intentionally creating people being left out of situations. So if you didn’t want to invite all the girls in the class and you could have a small intimate party with your three best friends or whatever,

But the idea was if you were gonna have a party, you were gonna invite everyone. There’s not 200 people in the class, it’s not very big, so it wasn’t a stretch. Same thing, if you invited more than half of the class, you had to invite everybody. Great, and it just became ingrained. And now when my kids have parties, that is a hard and fast rule for me. If we get to a certain threshold, I’m like, you gotta invite everybody. You can’t just invite these kids and not those kids. And that is just emotional intelligence because you’re thinking about

How does this make other people feel? Maybe you will never interact with that other person again in your life. Maybe you will. Maybe somebody’s observing how you’re treating that person. You never know, but just showing up with the presence of mind to think about how your actions impact other people is just so much more important than just being intelligent.

Kevin Rice (39:11)
Yeah, How does this emotional vocabulary show up for you at home? is this something that you work on with your kids?

Becca Chambers (39:18)
Yeah, totally. Well, and they go to a school that was founded by the same people who founded the school that I went to. So they are being inundated with emotional intelligence, learning and whatever all day long. My son is dyslexic and has ADHD and has been in occupational therapy since he was four. He’s just kind of graduated recently. He’s about to be 12. So it’s been a long time. But what that is is…

like a combination of mind-body connection exercises. So he starts to learn how things make him feel and then how to identify like, what am I feeling right now? And I don’t think a lot of adults can do that. can just stop and reflect and this feeling I have in my stomach. Am I hungry or am I mad? Am I anxious? my son, totally.

Kevin Rice (40:02)
It’s taken me years of therapy to be able to tell you how I’m feeling

right now.

Becca Chambers (40:06)
My son who is, he’s about to finish sixth grade, which I would say these years are the freaking hardest years ever, sixth, seventh, eighth grade. And he is the most Zen balanced kid you will ever meet. And that’s after being the hardest kid in the world when he was younger. And it’s just because he has had so much help and time and given the resources to

connect with himself and understand how he’s feeling. And when he had an anxiety attack during a test at school and he asked for help, he said to a teacher, this is the thing that’s happening. This is the help that I need. he was just able to articulate it. And again, adults can’t do that. And I’ve watch him doing things that I’m just like, unbelievable. And it’s because he has had people who recognize that he needed these tools.

and we gave them to him without judgment and without like, you should be able to do things this way. It’s just hey man, here are the tools. And now compare him to all of his very neurotypical sixth grade friends. They are all falling apart because middle school is hard and they don’t know how to deal with these emotions that they’ve never had before. And my son’s like, this is cool, we’re good, what’s up? You know, it’s awesome.

Kevin Rice (41:19)
That, I mean, that gives me a lot of inspiration and hope because my middle son, he’s been in occupational therapy for at least a year now, and he has always struggled with emotional regulation, um, which kind of bleeds into like what some might call like defiance, low frustration tolerance. And so it’s something we’ve been working on for years. And, I love to hear that, you know, your son has kind of made it through that, period and I’m.

doing everything I can to help support my son. So he’s about to turn seven. He’s six and a half. So he’s, yeah.

Becca Chambers (41:46)
How old is, how old is he?

You’re in that age. Yeah.

There is no regulation when you’re that age. All you can learn is the, how am I feeling? and it gets hard again at like third grade. I think that’s the other like big hump because then that’s when kids start to compare themselves to other kids. And that is a really hard thing for kids who feel different. Right. And it’s like,

Kevin Rice (41:57)
No.

Yeah, like

nine to 10 age, that’s a big change, yeah.

Becca Chambers (42:14)
Yep.

And honestly, I think the thing that changed for us the most was recognizing that a lot of what my son’s issues were, were was anxiety caused by all these other things, right? Like he’s dyslexic. So being put in situations where he would have to read or be around other kids and seeing how fast they were reading and he was comparing himself, he would just get anxious and the anxiety would overwhelm him. So once we were able to

remove him from the situations that would make him anxious or allow him to go do something in a room by himself all of that went away. And it’s like, again, if that kid if he didn’t have people looking out for him, trying to understand what was going on and providing him the resources, trial and error, all of the things to see what work, he would just be a struggling sixth grader. he would hate school. And he used to be like that. And

seeing the change is just, again, it’s work. You have to put in the work. And I always tell parents this, your kid isn’t gonna turn out who you want them to be. Your kid is who they are. And you can either embrace that and help them become the best version of that, or you can make them feel bad about that forever and try to make them become who you want them to become and just give them an identity crisis. like, choose wisely.

Kevin Rice (43:28)
Yeah, right. my, kids are very rambunctious and they’re constantly pillow fighting, wrestling, just jumping around the house. And it used to drive me crazy. Cause I wanted this peaceful home environment and that’s just not who they are. And it wasn’t until I realized, well, I just need to change the environment. I need to give them a place where they can be who they want to be. And so that means getting outdoors, getting to the beach, going on a hike.

and they can just be themselves. And all of sudden, I can relax because I’m not fighting against their nature.

Becca Chambers (44:00)
talk to you.

Work with your brain, not against it. That’s what I always tell people because to your point, they are who they are. Put them in a safe environment to let them be who they are and then you won’t be upset when they trash your house.

Kevin Rice (44:12)
Yeah.

Yeah. Well, earlier you mentioned a lot of leaders couldn’t describe how they’re feeling right now, or there, seems like there’s this EQ gap, right? And, there’s people out there who are just technically brilliant, but really struggle to understand and connect with their team. where should somebody like that start? How do they start developing their EQ skills?

Becca Chambers (44:36)
Dude, I have no idea. That’s a great question, because I’ve never had to do that.

Kevin Rice (44:37)
Right? We need,

we need the school that you went to for adults.

Becca Chambers (44:43)
I know. EQ became all the rage some number of years ago. There are totally videos, classes, whatever. But I really now I’m kind of interested in like, what does that look like for adults? I like to, you know, this is going to be oversharing when I do it anyway, like

When I go to therapy, which I haven’t in many years, therapists are kind of like annoyed because I already know what they’re going to tell me. Right. I’m already very in touch with myself. so when they’re having me talk through things, I’m like, yeah, I already have

Ruminated on this for six weeks. I already know what you’re telling me. So like a lot of therapy is helping you Become in touch with yourself and that is emotional intelligence. It’s then how do you also apply that to? how you show up in the world and how you treat other people that it like really becomes the then you are emotionally intelligent, but it starts with you

Knowing yourself right and I highly recommend therapy for people who don’t feel in touch with themselves

Kevin Rice (45:43)
I have the same conversation with my therapist earlier this week. She was talking me through something. was like, okay, I already know this, but what do I do next? Like, where do I go next? What’s the next thing? And she goes, well, you’re also fairly impatient. So maybe we should work on that.

Becca Chambers (45:59)
There you go. That’s funny. people used to joke that self-science was group therapy. And that is kind of what it is. And I sometimes run my team meetings like group therapy, which is just like, you guys want to go around and just gripe for a minute like anyone want to vent? Because

That is actually helpful. Not when it’s directed at people in a mean way. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about here’s the thing I’m frustrated about. And then other people can be like, my God, yes, me too. Or, ⁓ man, I’m sorry, that sucks. know, like that is all helpful in the world of families and it’s helpful in the world of work.

Kevin Rice (46:33)
Yeah, right. I want to talk a little bit about kind of where you’re at today. And maybe I would imagine some tension that you’re feeling because your kids are getting older, you’re in a CMO role. You’re also Becca from LinkedIn. Like you are building a personal brand. and, that’s a lot to manage. how are you prioritizing everything right now? And, when something has to give what gives first.

Becca Chambers (46:56)
Yeah, the answer is I am prioritizing poorly and I am like in one of those grind sessions where I am very conscious and aware of how unhealthy my routine has become and yet I am still grinding away at it because sometimes that’s just the phase of life that we’re in. Exactly. So I am in that right now, which in a lot of ways it sucks. In a lot of ways it’s

Kevin Rice (47:15)
the season you’re in. Yeah.

Becca Chambers (47:23)
Productive right it feels like it’s moving towards something so it’s not just kind of treading water or whatever But the answer to your question is I feel very much like I’m playing whack-a-mole so I will miss a softball game My daughter is awesome

Her team is awesome, undefeated. I only caught a couple games this season because I have work stuff that I have. I’ve been traveling a lot and whatever. My husband goes to all of the games, so she is not without parent, don’t worry. But she is like so super understanding because she also thinks it’s badass that she has a mom who’s like doing all of this stuff, she sees that as a net positive. So it’s like, it’s okay.

On the flip side, I’d spent a lot of effort creating one-on-one time with my kids. Like my daughter and I went on like a little three-day cruise to Mexico. It was awesome. A couple years ago, I took my son to Vegas. Just the two of us. Like I try to create one-on-one time or like me and the kids time or just the four of us. we’re going to gold country for the long weekend this weekend because

I know that like those are the things that are gonna create these core memories and I can carve out meaningful amounts of time. And that’s my way of kind of saying I know that I’m not showing up as my best mom over here, but I’m gonna show up as best mom times a thousand over here. And does it all make up for it? I don’t know. But at the end of the day, they’re gonna still remember me as an awesome mom who did cool shit with them.

and probably not like the mom who didn’t show up for their softball games, hopefully.

Kevin Rice (49:02)
Yeah.

I mean, it sounds like, yeah, you have a lot going on, but what I hear is prioritization, intentionality, presence in the times that you are physically with them. I mean, those are, those are all the things that we aspire to do as parents. So despite having a lot on your plate and, having a lot of responsibility, that sounds like the right way to be doing it.

Becca Chambers (49:15)
Yep.

Yeah, mean, it’s like, show up the best you can in all of the realms and don’t like harp on where you’re failing because like we’re always going to be failing at something or at least not doing the best job that we could be doing at something. So just do the best you can. And this is other thing that goes back to how I am with my kids. I’m very honest with them about stuff. So if I’m disappointed that I can’t go to their game, like I will tell them that or if

I’m feeling bad. Like if I had a bad day at work, I’ll pick them up and be like, man, I had a bad day. Let me tell you about it because I want them to share their stuff with me too. And again, I think it creates this and it creates this awareness that I’m not just not doing stuff because I’m off shopping, Like they get to kind of peek into my life and know what I’m doing in the same way that I know what they’re doing. And it, I guess, creates some mutual respect and

Kevin Rice (49:59)
Right. You’re modeling.

Becca Chambers (50:17)
All of that.

Kevin Rice (50:18)
Yeah, that’s great. So my kids are at the age where if I ask them a question, everything is like a one word answer. Like how was school today? Good. how was baseball? It was good. It’s almost always good. And so, oh, okay. Well, here’s how my day went. And I’ll tell them about, oh, I was really struggling because this thing happened and here’s what I did, but I was feeling this way. And eventually this is how I got through it. And

Becca Chambers (50:24)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kevin Rice (50:42)
I’m trying to teach them and then all of sudden they’ll come back and be like, oh, well, yeah, this thing happened at baseball. Like I struck out and I was really frustrated. And, so it just opens the door to reciprocal communication when otherwise the door is just so shut.

Becca Chambers (50:55)
Totally.

You know what else I love? Like I’ll be telling stories about work and they’ll be like, well, that was rude. Why did somebody say that? And I’ll be like, I love that. you recognize that, interaction in our world would not be cool. So like, why is that cool in a corporate environment? Good on the nine year old for picking up on that, you know? So again, it’s all part of the grand scheme of emotional intelligence and learning to be a good person and just

operating in a world where you know that other people exist too, I guess.

Kevin Rice (51:27)
Yeah.

Awesome. as you look forward and your kids get older and they’re going off to college and having their own families, what do you hope that they remember about?

the way you showed up for them and the mother that you were for them.

Becca Chambers (51:39)
⁓ I just hope that they feel the way that they feel now, which is like, my mom is my ally and she will always have my back if I’m making decisions that are the right decisions, right? Like they know that if they advocate for themselves and it pisses off a teacher, but what they’re advocating for is valid, they know that I will have their back

right? And I think that that will be true in school and life and all of that. And I think that that really matters to them to like be able to be an individual. And like if one of my kids was struggling with identity stuff or a secret or bullies or whatever, I feel like they would be able to come and share that with me and not be worried about consequences, which I think I hope that they will hold that when they’re adults and

as a

I mean, I was raised Jewish. I’m not religious anymore, but as a Jewish mother, I hope that my children don’t move too far away. And I still live near my mother for the same reason. And my son always promises that he’s not gonna go too far away for college.

Kevin Rice (52:50)
My son wants to go to Cal Poly because we live in Pismo Beach. He’s like, dad, you went to Cal Poly. I want to go to Cal Poly. That way I could be here. I’m like, that sounds amazing. You do that.

Becca Chambers (52:58)
My daughter

says she’s going to Stanford. I’m like, girl, please go to Stanford right down the street. But you know what? Dream big. You’re going to have to do a lot to get into Stanford. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Rice (53:03)
Yeah.

Yeah. You have to work hard. Yeah. Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for joining today. I love the conversation.

Kevin Rice (53:14)
Your candor and honesty around authenticity is really powerful. Personally, I’m also grateful for the kind of tips and advice you shared around your son’s journey of just connecting to himself. I have no doubt that a lot of other executives and parents are going to take much from this conversation. So thank you.

Becca Chambers (53:32)
Thank you, it’s been great to be here.