(Music)

VOICEOVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talk with the GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning & Professional Development.

(Music ends)

JACK DEVINE, HOST: Welcome to another edition of Alumni Aloud. I’m Jack Devine and I’m here with Dr. Suzanne Vickberg. Thank you so much for joining us.

SUZANNE VICKBERG, GUEST: Thanks for having me.

DEVINE: So we like to begin with a question about your experience at the Graduate Center and your research there. What questions drove your research at the CUNY Graduate Center?

VICKBERG: Well I came to the Graduate Center in, around like 1993 right out of undergrad and when I think about, you know, what I intended to study, I was in the social personality psychology program, I don’t think it was all that sophisticated at the time. I was interested in questions about gender but I don’t think I really knew exactly what about gender I wanted to study but as I got involved and started taking some of my coursework I decided to do my Master’s thesis on women’s sexual self-concept. So I was interested in all the conflicting messages that women get about their sexuality in the media and in society as a whole. And I wanted to understand how women integrate those conflicting messages into their self-concept and so I created an assessment called the women’s sexual self-concept scale. I found that in fact women do have multidimensional self-concepts when it comes to their sexuality. 

And I got, I sort of continue with that question as I moved into working at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in the cancer center there and also at Sloan Kettering. And I thought I could apply some of these questions around women’s sexuality to some of the breast cancer patients that we were working with. I was part of a group that was doing psychosocial research related to cancer. It was led by Bill Red. And he graciously allowed me to conduct my dissertation as part of our research there. And what I found, so I got real interested in women’s fears about recurrence. They’ve had breast cancer, they, you know, have gotten through the treatment and how do they think about the possibility that it might come back and what I was focused on, so you know I started with this idea about how do their ideas about their sexuality, how are those impacted by breast cancer, what I actually found and what I think often happens in research is that really wasn’t like the, it paled in comparison to the other fears that women had. And so again what I really found was that the fears are multidimensional when it comes to what might happen if somebody’s cancer comes back. I also found that the fears women have or don’t have are somewhat related to what else is happening in their life. So you don’t just sort of carve out this thing that happened to you, you got cancer, it exists within good and challenging things that are happening within your life and sometimes the really challenging things actually took focus away from the fears about a woman’s own cancer coming back and as part of that work my dissertation I created another assessment called the “Concerns About Recurrence Scale.” And that one in particular, people are still using. I get at least once a month a request from someone, you know, I developed that almost twenty-five years ago. It’s still being used quite often, being you know translated into different languages and people are very diligent about asking for my permission, if any of them are listening here I’ll say you all have permission to use it however you want if you think it’ll be helpful. 

DEVINE: So you, right after undergrad you went immediately to the Graduate Center and you started pursue these questions around sexuality and self-conception of women and this led you to Mt. Sinai where you were directly applying this but then it led you to other questions. That women were more focused on other issues in their life when dealing with cancer and so this sort of shifted your thinking and led you to pursue different research. So that’s really fascinating. When did you first make the decision to pursue a career at Deloitte? What steps did you take along your path to end up as an author, coach, and Chief Researcher? 

VICKBERG: Yeah so I’ll try not to make this answer too long because it was a circuitous path. It wasn’t really a decision that I made at any point. When I came to the Graduate Center, I think if you had bet me a million dollars that I would end up at somewhere like Deloitte I would not have taken the bet. I mean I really wouldn’t have thought that was something I was ever going to do. But as I was nearing the end of completing my PhD, after eight years, I was working at the time at Mt. Sinai and I really thought, I was all set up to have a research career in health psychology. I had a National Institute of Mental Health fellowship that paid for my dissertation research. I was part of several large scale grant proposals that the group had gotten. I had multiple publications that I had got with the group. But I realized I just that it wasn’t as applied as I wanted it to be. It felt a little like I was writing all these, you know, articles for journals that would be read mostly just by other researchers. And I had like what was a little of an existential crisis and so I decided I didn’t want to continue on that career path and, you know, people at the time who really thought it was a shame that I would change my mind after so long. But I just, I was pretty adamant that I wanted to try something else so at the time I just thought let me just, I didn’t know what else I could do. I went straight from undergrad, the only real skills I had learned were research skills. 

But I decided to just choose an issue I really cared about and see if I could somehow find a job and I choose Planned Parenthood. They were looking for someone to do program evaluation which is obviously not a far cry from research so I went over to Planned Parenthood, the national office. And I spent three years in the education department working with the affiliates around the country on how to evaluate their education programs and whether they were having the effect that they wanted them to have. And while I was there I just started getting really interested in the organization itself and how it worked. I had sort of joined an organizational development committee. It was like a volunteer employee committee. And just I thought it was fascinating, these questions about how does the organization work? And what is the culture? What is the experience that employees are having? And so ultimately I moved into the HR department at Planned Parenthood, spent three years there, working on how to create a better workplace and culture for the employees at Planned Parenthood. And we were working with an organization called the Great Place to Work institute which creates the list in Fortune Magazine every year of the hundred best places to work in the country. 

And, so they were helping us at Planned Parenthood to improve our own workplace and ultimately I went and worked for them as a consultant. That’s really when I started my work that was more focused on workplace culture. I also decided a little bit before that happened to go back and get an MBA because while a degree in Social Personality Psychology is certainly relevant I felt like I wanted to know more about business and organizations and how all of that works. So I went to Stern NYU in New York also and started on my MBA part time while working. So I worked for about four years at the Great Place to Work Institute helping organization sort of access the employee experience and their organizational culture. And Deloitte was one of my clients at the time and so after spending a good part of the day with some of the most senior leaders at Deloitte, who were really focused on improving Deloitte’s employee experience and workplace culture, they offered me a job to come over and help them do that.

So my first four years or so at Deloitte I was in the HR Department which we call Talent. And I was focused on really mostly I guess understanding the employee experience. I got involved in some talent analytics work, sort of, in the years before, you know, data analytics really went crazy. And after about four years I moved into a group called Deloitte Greenhouse which is the group I’m in now. And the Deloitte Greenhouse is a group and a number of spaces where we bring client teams from some of the largest organizations in the world when they have really challenging problems that they need to solve we bring them in and like help them think quite differently about how to solve their problems so that they can get to a new place or what we call a breakthrough. So I joined that group and one of the main things that group was doing at the time, it was a fairly new group at the time, was something called business chemistry which is Deloitte’s own system and tool for understanding working style differences. So it’s a type system. There are four business chemistry types. And when you complete the assessment you’re told what your type is and the way we use it is once you know what your type is, that’s interesting, but it’s even more powerful to understand what type your colleagues are. Because if you want to create really strong relationships with them you want to flex your style to what they want and need in the situation. I’m a Social Personality Psychologist. It’s not quite a personality assessment. I call it personality adjacent. It’s working styles so it can shift over time with different roles or as you gain experience people sometimes change types. And it’s also relative to who you’re working with in the moment. And so from there I really got involved and sort of jumped full force into business chemistry work and started conducting research about the different types. We wrote a book five years ago called Business Chemistry which outlined everything we knew up till that point about the business chemistry types. And from there I have just continued that work and recently have been more focused on something we call the Breakthrough Manifesto which I know we’ll get into in a moment but it’s about how we work in the Greenhouse and how we help clients solve those really tough problems. And also in the last year I have gotten certified as a professional coach so I really have the opportunity to do some of that work one on one with people who just trying to figure out how they can get more of what they want from their career and their life. And so all of that has brought me to where I am now. A path I never could have predicted. I really am doing Social Personality Psychology work at this point but it was not a straight path and not one I really ever expected to take. 

DEVINE: So you ended up where you never really expected to be. You started out with, it looked like you were all set up to work in health and research but you felt siloed off. That your work was only going to be connecting with other researchers and you wanted to have a bigger impact so you make this shift to Planned Parenthood, eventually to Human Resources within Planned Parenthood and start to deal with workplace relationships and how to create the best sort of workplace. So you end up furthering your education and eventually end up at Deloitte after having them as a client and shift into the sort of business chemistry, how to make relationships at the workplace better, how to make people understand their colleagues better, and work with them in a more efficient and productive manner. And you’ve sort already kind of begun to hit on this a little bit but were there any other career paths that you considered? 

VICKBERG: Yeah I think that when I first when into psychology, I was a psychology major as an undergrad, psychology and women’s studies, there was probably a short period of time where I thought I would be a clinical psychologist. I very quickly got interested in research and the kinds of questions I could answer with research so I didn’t stick with that, but coming back to the coaching at this point is different to clinical psychology but it’s related so that sort of path I closed off a long time ago but I’m opening that up in a different way 

I did think I would be a professor at one point. Like a lot of graduate students I started teaching college courses very early in my graduate career. I enjoyed it but frankly felt quite out of my depth. I probably wasn’t, you know, nobody really taught me how to teach and I was probably not mature enough at the time. You know in most cases I was only like a year or two ahead of my students. I found that very stressful. So I decided not do that. That I wouldn’t pursue the path of professor. I did a number of years ago decide I wanted to try teaching again. So while working at Deloitte I went back to teach for a while at Rutgers Business School. I was teaching management skills to business school freshmen and there was a lot of social and personality psychology involved in that. It was a curriculum that was already developed. I taught that course for two semesters. Eventually I stopped just because I couldn’t manage the load between teaching and working full time for Deloitte and I have two kids. It was just more than I could do but it did sort of reignite me at a time when I needed that. 

And ultimately what happened was I started the Business Chemistry blog which is now in its eighth year as a result of my teaching. As I was starting to, you know, read and discuss all of this with students and seeing new connections again and talking with colleagues about the connections I was seeing. I kept writing everybody all these long emails. I finally decided maybe I should stop writing everybody all these long emails and put what I’m thinking out there into the world and so now, you know, thousands and thousands of people read the Business Chemistry blog. So, you know, in a way that feeling I was having, while I didn’t expect to end up at Deloitte and I don’t think I knew what the topics would be that I was interested in I now have an opportunity to reach so many people because of the blog and the book we write and so that makes me happy. And I don’t think, I think those were the only career paths that I ever really ever thought about. I always thought, well you know, maybe I’ll want to write a book one day but I didn’t know what it was going to be about, but here I am and now that’s what I get to do. 

DEVINE: So you considered briefly being a clinical psychologist and you had teaching experience that you were considering being a professor but you felt maybe overwhelmed at first, that you didn’t get the preparation that you needed to. You were young at that moment so it was difficult to teach students that barely a little older than. But later on in your career you returned to teaching. It was brief. Again it was overwhelming because you were juggling so many different things in your life but that inspired you to write and share the knowledge that you have in a different way through your blog and eventually to writing your book which we’ll discuss in a moment. But a lot this kind of started out at the Grad Center, all of these options that you were considering. So what role did the Graduate Center have in your intellectual development? And how did your experiences at the GC transform you into the researcher that you are today? 

VICKBERG: Yeah I think one of the things that the Graduate Center did for me, first of all it just broadened my horizons immensely. I mean I grew up in Minnesota in a homogenous community. Went to college in Wisconsin. Not such a far cry from where I started and then from Wisconsin moved to New York to the CUNY Graduate Center which is really such a special place and you know our class size was so small, my class started out as six of us and by the end of the first year there were only four of us. So we had this opportunity to just get really deep in discussing issues and all kinds of issues. People in our program were interested in all kinds of things. When, you know, you’re in those size of classes and everybody is going real deep on the topics that they’re most interested in you learn about your own topics and you learn about everyone else’s topics too. I think it also just really fed my curiosity and just you know there are so many things to know about, you know, that I wanna learn about. 

I think, you know, one of the most significant things I learned was how to read a research paper, how to read a journal article. And the reason that’s so important is, you know especially today, you read or hear all of this quote on quote knowledge out in the world and you have no idea normally where it comes from. Especially now with social media, you know, there’s all this stuff that influences say and sometimes it may be backed up by valid research or science and sometimes it’s not and often times people don’t give any source at all. But if I can track it back and identify the original source of something I’m interested in I will always do that. Always, okay, always is maybe not fair. I will often do that. Whether it’s a medical paper or a psychology research or really any kind of research, with the exception of maybe like real hard sciences that maybe I don’t understand all of it, like probably can’t read a chemistry paper, but I understand in way that I never would if I hadn’t learned those skills at the Graduate Center. I also learned to write research papers which is a style of writing I don’t really use so much now but I actually in preparation for our conversation went back and read some of the papers I had published after I finished my Master’s Thesis and my dissertation and I was shocked at how technical my own work was but that’s, you know, how you need to write it for a journal article. And so that wrap around for all of that is just rigor. I mean I learned rigor. I learned why it’s important and what it means to be rigorous when you conduct research. I’m just really grateful for all of that. 

DEVINE: So being from Minnesota and going to college in Wisconsin you got to New York and got to expose yourself to a diversity of people and ideas. And then in the classroom you got to dive deeper into subjects and other people’s research and kind of exposing you to new ways of thinking and beyond that you learned research, how to break things down, how to understand where something is coming from, how to be a critical thinker on a higher level. And this also led you to do writing and getting more technical and now you’ve become an author. And the writing is different than you did when you were in graduate school. But you have a book publishing on November 7th called the Breakthrough Manifesto. Can you tell us about the book and how it came to be?

VICKBERG: Sure, so the Breakthrough Manifesto is a series of ten principles that we use in the Deloitte Greenhouse when we bring in those client leaders and teams to help them solve problems or when we work with each other in the Greenhouse. It’s a way to think about any problem or issue like with fresh thinking about shifting your mindset. I won’t go through all ten principles but I’ll just give you a couple of examples. 

Silence your cynic is one of the principles. It’s about, you know, our tendency to dismiss ideas quickly because we can easily see the flaws in ideas or why it won’t work. But silence your cynic is about holding off on doing that so that an idea has time to grow and morph and something that seems very outlandish in the beginning, you give sometime to work it and ask more questions and build on it can become a really great and creative idea. But if you close it off right away, you’re never gonna get there.

Another one of the principles is called make a mess. And that is about just sort of instead of talking and talking and talking about how you might solve a problem. It’s about jumping in and just trying something, experimenting, getting a sense, building a prototype, building a sense of how does that work. And then, you know, adjusting and moving on from there. You can figure things out a lot faster if you do that. 

You know, I’ll just give one more. Dial up the drama. Often we think of drama as something we don’t want in the workplace. But dial up the drama means that we don’t just use facts and numbers and graphs when we’re thinking about how to solve problems, we also want to bring in people’s emotions and their senses and their real human experiences into understanding and solving a problem. 

So in the book we have a chapter about each of those principles and then for each one we have five methods which are very practical ways that you can take that principle and you can apply it, either on your own or in your team. We wrote the book because, you know, at Deloitte we have this opportunity to work with, as I said, some of the biggest, most of the biggest companies in the world and they get to come into the Greenhouse and bring their teams and work with us. But there’s a lot of people who don’t have that opportunity. And we just really wanted to help folks of all kinds in all types of work situations and even in their personal lives have access to these same principles and these same techniques so they can apply them in whatever kinds of problems they’re trying to solve. And they can do it without, you know, without coming to work directly with us at Deloitte to do that. 

DEVINE: So the Breakthrough Manifesto is organized around these ten principles including being more open minded and connecting with your emotions. And you want to take these principles and methods that you apply them in the workplace and reach a bigger audience than just the clients that you have. And so what is the connection between the topic of the book, creative problem solving, and psychology? 

VICKBERG: Yeah I mean the book has a lot of psychology in it because, you know, when you think about how you even think about a problem or get to a solution, there’s for one thing a lot cognitive biases that can happen in terms of, for example, Ernsts Dogmatism effect. When we experts in something we actually become more closed minded. Well that’s not really what you want when you’re trying to solve a problem in a new way. So what you really want is beginners mindset instead. Pretend you don’t know anything about a problem. Or there a lot of ways in which the confirmation bias can affect us in problem solving. So confirmation bias, you know, means oh when I see information that confirms what I already believe I’m going to notice that, I’m gonna remember it, I’m gonna put more importance to it. When information comes my way that goes against what I believe I’m going to ignore it, not notice it, not remember it, think it means something different. Like this is just what our brains do because our brains want to be efficient and in order to be efficient we use a lot of shortcuts. So we talk a lot about those kind of issues in the book. Also when you’re problem solving in a team, as we often are, the way in which you work together is going to be influenced by who’s on the team. You know, what are the personality styles and self image of everybody on the team and what environment the team is in. All of that is going to affect how we work together. You know, there’s lots of psychology involved in how we solve problems. 

DEVINE: That makes a lot of sense. Dealing with issues confirmation bias and how to organize together as a team to solve problems collectively is not just something you have to deal with facts and figures, there’s emotion involved. There’s people the way that their mind is operating, how to connect people together, and work together to solve problems and issue are gonna arise so you have to think of it more than just these concrete facts but how people interpret things and how people react to things. So what’s the biggest takeaway that you want readers to leave with? 

VICKBERG: I think it’s first of all that we can get more creative in how solve problems. I think, you know, often in our lives and in our careers we just kind of like go along and do things the way that we think somebody expects us to do them or the way we did them before or the way we saw someone else do them, but if you really want to arrive somewhere new, to be, you know, innovative in the way to solve a problem you can do it by thinking differently about the problem and about the solutions and, you know, I personally am also really interested in how we can use these same type of techniques in our personal lives. And I also have another book that I published this year that’s more of a personal book. It’s called Divorce by Design. And it’s about how you could use some of these same kinds of principles and problem solving techniques on a very large sort of personal issue. How you could get more creative about divorce and how you could challenge convention and reimagine what that could look like. So I’ve written a book about that and it tells partly the story about my own personal divorce which is creative in that thirteen years later we’re still a family, we still live in the same house with our kids. And I want people just to know that, you know, these kind of techniques are not just for a corporate setting. You can use them in your own individual life. You can apply to asking questions about your career path and where you wanna end up and are you really after eight years in a PhD program going to continue on a path of an academic research, you know, career, or might you just say, hey, maybe I’ll do something totally different. So that’s what I hope people takeaway. 

DEVINE: With those experiences in mind, with those obstacles that you’ve overcome, what would you recommend to current graduate students interested in pursuing a career working in private sector research and beyond and all the sort of things that you do? 

VICKBERG: Well, I mean one of the things that’s not really a recommendation but I guess just to point out that while it was tough to make that transition, I mean there are some incredible benefits to me to having made that switch. And one of them being that the audience that I now have and that I get to share my work with and just you know to have an organization like Deloitte behind me to be able write books as part of my day job and blogs and just sort of have this audience that is interested because of who Deloitte is and you know our internal audience at Deloitte is really interested in our work also. So that is like an incredible luxury I feel like, but the other luxury that I have now is so different from graduate school is when I did my Master’s Thesis I was literally standing on the street corner collecting data, asking people to please fill out my paper survey. I was at all the CUNY campuses, going around saying please could you just fill out my survey. You know and I would need to get like two hundred and fifty people. And there was a lot of leg work involved. And now we collect pretty simple data but we do it very easily. And because we have this online assessment for Business Chemistry that people are responding to and we are able to attach additional questions that are whatever research questions we have in the moment. And I just put them online and let it sit there and within a couple of weeks I’ll have thousands and thousands of people who have responded. You know most of my data sets are anywhere from ten to forty thousand people with doing very minimal leg work. And so that’s a huge huge benefit to me as a research, you know I just get to answer all these interesting questions. 

But I think that in terms of recommendations or advice, you have to find something that you’re interested in that the organization needs, you know. It’s not, sometimes I’m kind of interested in stuff but it’s not really, you know, something that maybe my audience would care about or that would be something that Deloitte is gonna be really attracted to, you know, sharing. I’ve had a lot of flexibility in what I get to do, but I’ve had to know that, you know, I need to do research that people who employ me are going to value. And so it’s finding that thing and also sometimes also sometimes I think it’s also finding the people within the organization who get what you bring, who get the value of, in my case, you know, deep research skills. Even though I’m not doing the same kind of research here, I’ve had people along the way who understood the value of that because I have been in both the situation where I’m trying to push stuff on people. I’m trying to say “hey I did this analysis. I answered this question. Aren’t you interested?” It does not work nearly as well as you get someone pulling and saying “hey, I really wanna know about this. Can you help me do that?” That is really going to help your case in terms of being successful. 

DEVINE: So I just want to thank you so much for joining us on Alumni Aloud. Any final word for our listeners? 

VICKBERG: No, I just, more to say this was so fun for me. I mean it’s so long ago I feel like that I was at CUNY Graduate Center and I got so much out of it and, you know, the professors that I worked most closely with. Tracey Revinson, Kay Doe, Gary Winkel who was my Stats professors who I’ve used that a lot also. I just learned so much from them and all of my classmates, I still have great friends that I met there and I just really value the choice that I made. You know we often we choose where we go to Graduate School right, there are multiple options and I’m so grateful that I chose CUNY. 

DEVINE: I’m glad that you had such a great experience at the Graduate Center and have enjoyed being on this show. So once again I want to thank you for coming on Alumni Aloud. 

(Music)