The Sydcast is all about intimate and informative conversations with fascinating people you may not know. Until now. Because everyone has a story.
Listen in as Syd talks to entrepreneurs, community leaders, professional athletes, politicians, academics, authors, musicians, and many more about who they are and how they got there.
Sydney Finkelstein is an award winning professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and a best-selling author of Superbosses and 25 other books. He’s written for the Harvard Business Review, the BBC, Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and more academic journals than you’d care to know about. He spends his time asking questions, and sometimes, even answering them.
Episode Summary
Most people look at the life of the entrepreneur and think, they’ve got it made. You’re your own boss, you call the shots, you’re making money, what a great life. But, the reality is very different. Incredible stress, ultra-long hours, doubts about everything that can never be shared with anyone else, and sometimes much worse. Even with a long lineage of entrepreneurs behind her, start-up founder Cherry Rose Tan found herself underestimating how tough and personal the start-up journey would be. Drawing on her own personal and professional experience, Cherry Rose is creating a mental health movement in entrepreneurship and her podcast #realtalk is helping others create solid emotional foundations for success. She talks about the stuff no one is saying out loud, and she’s making a difference. Syd and Cherry Rose dig deep into the emotional world of the entrepreneur, in this episode of The Sydcast.
Syd Finkelstein
Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Masters degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.
Cherry Rose Tan
With twelve years of expertise in psychology, Cherry Rose has guided thousands through the trenches of mental health. A fifth-generation entrepreneur, her superpower is helping leaders talk about the really hard things, so they can lead powerfully at home and at work. A mentor for the Inc. Founders Project, she coaches CEOs on emotional resilience and psychological safety. As the CEO of #realtalk, the mental health movement for the tech industry, she is shedding a light on tech’s darkest secrets. With 70+ champions across North America, tech CEOs share their mental health stories on her Top 14 Business podcast on iTunes. A mental health authority, she has been featured in Forbes, Inc., and more. She teaches at the Schulich School of Business.
Insights from this episode:
- Reasons why entrepreneurs suffer from higher rates of depression and other instances of mental illness.
- The secret skill key to being a good and effective leader and how you can train yourself in that skill.
- Benefits of emotional management on mental health.
- Strategies for dealing with the leadership and power systems currently in place around us to increase our emotional capacity and create a space for healing.
- How to share difficult or painful experiences with others to help normalize conversations about mental health.
Quotes from the show:
- “When I got into entrepreneurship it was really a lot tougher than I thought.” – Cherry Rose Tan
- “It’s so important for a leader to be a great listener. It’s an old story, everybody talks about it, very few are all that great at it in my experience.” – Syd Finkelstein
- “You can not outsource the ability to listen effectively, you’ve got to do it as a leader.” – Syd Finkelstein
- “When people are going through those [painful] things it’s so important for us to be in a space where we can actually be with the pain.” – Cherry Rose Tan
- “I know we talk about the pandemic in terms of COVID, but there’s also a second pandemic in the sense of what’s happening with mental health and I mean it very seriously.” – Cherry Rose Tan
- “Emotional management is one of the most important skills that we could possibly have because the way that we relate to our emotions completely affects how we show up as a leader.” – Cherry Rose Tan
- On sharing emotional, personal stories: “I think we’d be healthier if somehow we could share some of those stories with others. We put on a mask, don’t we.” – Syd Finkelstein
- “One of the best risk mitigation tools is actually listening because when you listen and you can observe you can actually see the warning signs early.” – Cherry Rose Tan
- “I’m the kind of person that gets really excited about creating solutions, especially at the systems level and creating solutions to problems that I know are ready-coming.” – Cherry Rose Tan
- On the process of starting a business: “My fascination is why haven’t we thought about tracking the mental health conditions that occur across the stages.” – Cherry Rose Tan
Stay Connected:
Syd Finkelstein
Website: http://thesydcast.com
LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein
Twitter: @sydfinkelstein
Facebook: The Sydcast
Instagram: The Sydcast
Cherry Rose Tan
Podcast: #realtalk with Cherry Rose Tan
Podcast: #realtalk movement [for the tech industry]
Book: Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg
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This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry (www.podcastlaundry.com)
