Dr. Rumeet believes that “Why?” is the most critical question to ask anyone about their life goals. Whether she’s speaking to a 7th-grade focus group or a high-powered CEO leadership workshop, Rumeet’s genuine interest in each individual she interacts with is palpable.
But what is Dr. Rumeet’s own personal “Why?” When she was only 25 years old, Dr. Rumeet Billan was named one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women by the Women’s Executive Network. She was awarded that honor again just three years later.
Her 2013 TEDx talk in Nova Scotia was adapted into a student workshop in Ontario, Canada. She authored “Who Do I Want To Become?”, a book and a set of free learning resources for children and adults wondering what they want to do with their lives.
Partnering with Thomson Reuters and Women of Influence, Dr. Rumeet created, designed, and led a groundbreaking research study titled “The Tallest Poppy,” examining the causes, costs, and solutions of the silent systemic syndrome impacting high-achieving women in the workplace.
That’s just the beginning. In 2016, Dr. Rumeet founded Viewpoint Leadership, where she now serves as president, CEO, and Chief Learning Architect. In this role, Dr. Rumeet creates transformational experiences for corporations and prestigious universities through leadership workshops, certification training programs, and keynotes.
In 2016, she also became a Program Developer and Instructor for the award-winning Strategic Leaders Program at McMaster University. She also serves as the National Ambassador for Not Myself Today®, a Canadian Mental Health Association initiative that aims to transform workplace cultures.
While all this has been going on, she’s been President and CEO of Jobs in Education, an education job board she founded in 2004. Herein lies Dr. Rumeet’s own personal “Why”: to raise potential by designing experiences that build resilience.
Jobs in Education is not just any job board. It’s a job board with heart. Through it, Dr. Rumeet has opened three primary schools in Africa and South America, supported uniforms and textbook programs for orphans, and even built a teacher’s college in Kenya.
Her organization has also contributed to a year-long breakfast program in Canada, created a Social Action eBook for young leaders who want to make a difference, supported Canada’s Breakfast for Learning program and over 60 full-year scholarships, and supplied backpacks and school supplies to students in Greater Toronto and Nicaragua.
With that kind of proof, it’s hard to argue with Dr. Rumeet’s convictions about the “Why?” question. Read on and see if you can discover yours.
Monica: Talk a little bit about what life was like growing up and what led you down the path you’re on right now.
Dr. Billan: Growing up, I had a powerful role model at home. My mom and dad were both incredible role models, but in very different ways. My mom was very hardworking, so I got to see a powerful female role model at home, which shaped what I believed I could achieve. Having that environment was very critical to my success. I saw a strong woman who could work, take care of the family, and do all of these things effortlessly.
That made me believe that I could. Of course, I could go to work. Of course, I could reach for the stars. That role-modeling piece was critical to my success.
Monica: What do you think made her so successful in everything she did?
Dr. Billan: It’s interesting how we define success. My mom worked on an assembly line her entire life, but I would say she’s one of the most successful people I know because she knew her priorities. She elegantly prioritized her responsibilities.
Being successful doesn’t mean you have to be the CEO or run your own business, as I do. It is about how you define success and what’s important to you.
So, for example, she made sure to be home during her work hours when we were back from school. That was something important to her. She could have chosen different shifts that would have made her life more comfortable, but she had her priorities, and she always stuck by them. More importantly, she had her values. That’s what I think made her successful: she knew who she was and whom she wanted to be.
Monica: You are an award-winning, internationally recognized entrepreneur, learning architect, speaker, author, and humanitarian. You’re a leading learning architect who developed ways to raise human potential and help people build emotional resilience. When you design experiences that help people build resilience, what does that look like?
Dr. Billan: It depends on my audience. For example, I just finished working with grade seven and eight students.
What we did to develop resilience was to give them all this pressure to decide what they want to be when they grow up in grades seven and eight. So, we go back to leadership basics. We talk about understanding the self. We talk about understanding others. We talk about what makes a great leader. What we get to is who they want to be when they grow up. So, for grades seven and eight, it’s very different, yet somewhat similar to the senior executives I work with.
I think the senior executives are trying to figure out what they want to be and who they want to be when they grow up. We change that language to, “What legacy do you want to leave?”
We develop resilience by focusing on psychological capital and designing experiences that help us build that. We look at strategies to develop their self-confidence and their “possibility thinking,” and we talk about how we can persevere through the obstacles and challenges we face.
All this leads to building our resilience overall.
Monica: At that age, when they’re seventh and eighth graders, do they have a good understanding, for example, of what leadership means?
Dr. Billan: They absolutely do. I ask them the question, “What makes a great leader? The answers they come up with are the same as those of my senior executives or other adults I work with. When we think about leadership, I think we all have a common understanding that it’s those who are good listeners, kind, patient, communicative, honest, and transparent. Whether you are an adult or in the seventh grade, there is that consistency. Far too often, we think it’s your position title that is leadership, but it’s not. That’s authority.
There’s a difference. Authority doesn’t always equal leadership. I tell my seventh and eighth-graders,
“You know, all these qualities you’ve listed, I don’t need to leave the room to find those. Everybody in this room can be honest, caring, trustworthy, and a good communicator. We have those characteristics within us.”
Monica: In a world where there is so much negativity being brought to the forefront, whether it’s television, news, a newspaper, or social media – and it happens daily – what can people do, not only to stay motivated, but to distance themselves from the negativity that surrounds us all? You can be in the midst of something, but you don’t have to partake of it. What are some societal factors that keep us from being resilient?
Dr. Billan: Social media is a big one. I find this, especially among youth. Social media has a huge impact. Often, we’re comparing our lowlights to someone else’s filtered highlights.
That can impact us. The people we decide to surround ourselves with have a significant impact on what we believe about ourselves and our resilience. For example, I can give you 100 pieces of feedback, and 98 percent is positive and 2 percent is not so positive. Monica, you tell me. Which feedback will you spend your time on?
Monica: You have done a tremendous amount of research on the Tall Poppy Syndrome. Can you briefly explain what that is for people who don’t know, and how it impacts women in the workplace?
Dr. Billan: Tall Poppy Syndrome, a metaphor of the tall poppy, is a term from Australia. What it means is that poppies are supposed to grow together. So when one becomes too tall, it gets cut down to size.
So, how does that translate in the workplace? The study looked at the experiences of Canadian women. Over 1,500 Canadian women responded. What we wanted to see was, when they were successful or had achieved something, were they cut down? 87.3 percent of those who responded said yes, they experienced Tall Poppy Syndrome. They were attacked, resented, or ostracized for their achievements and success.
We had 268 pages of data and hundreds of stories. We saw that respondents said it directly affected their productivity. Seventy percent said it affected their productivity. Fifty percent said they left their jobs. For organizations, that’s important because these are your high achievers. It’s your high achievers who are leaving their jobs. They’re the ones who are harder to replace.
If they’re the ones who are leaving, guess who stays? The ones who are creating these issues.
Do you want your organization to support that? We found that Tall Poppy Syndrome was impacting the organization and affecting the individual on a personal level. Things like a lack of self-confidence, negative self-talk, and impostor syndrome frequently came up. There’s a lot to this, and it’s happening across all our organizations. We set out to find where it was happening and who it was happening to. Unfortunately, what we found was that it’s happening to everyone everywhere.
Monica: In every corporation, there is a culture, whether it’s good or bad. How can culture be cultivated or changed to reduce the negative impact it has on lower-level employees who come to work every day? People want to feel productive, but for some reason, the culture they’re surrounded by makes them feel unappreciated.
Dr. Billan: That’s exactly it. It creates a culture of distrust, and that’s what our data shows. It creates a culture of unhealthy competition. Competition isn’t all unhealthy, but it’s that unhealthy competition that’s making them feel this way. Think about it: we spend more of our waking hours at work. Don’t we want to enjoy where we work?
Monica: How does it impact, let’s say, a Fortune 500 corporation versus a ten-person business? Does the same thing apply when it comes to developing a culture that is accepting of all people instead of specific people or certain groups of people within that business or company?
Dr. Billan: You know what we’ve found? It can even be a one-person solo business, and we’ve found that vendors and the competition were doing it. People were getting it from all different angles. So, it could be a Fortune 500 company. It could be a small business.
Monica: Are men impacted differently in most cases than women?
Dr. Billan: I do believe men experience Tall Poppy Syndrome. Our study focused on women. A lot of that had to do with our databases and with the majority of women who responded. We don’t have enough data to make any conclusions about men and Tall Poppy Syndrome. My hunch is that men absolutely experience it. They experience it differently.
Monica: You are the CEO of Viewpoint Leadership and an expert on psychological capital. What is psychological capital?
Dr. Billan: Psychological capital is essentially knowing who you are. We all have economic capital: our finances or assets. We all have human capital: our education or experience. Also, we have social capital: our community or networks. However, how many of us have true psychological capital, knowing who we are and who we want to become? Psychological capital helps us get through obstacles, challenges, and setbacks. It’s the resilience, the self-confidence, the perseverance, the objective reasoning, the “possibility thinking.”
All these things contribute to having a psychological capital mindset.
It’s about getting through challenges and obstacles, being true to who you are, and knowing who you are and who you want to become.
Monica: You wrote a book titled “Who Do I Want to Become?” Of course, that’s a question anyone at any age can ask themselves. I think we should always be asking ourselves, “How can we live our best lives? Why do you think people sometimes struggle with figuring out what they should be doing with their lives, or even how to prepare for future opportunities?
Dr. Billan: Because we’re so focused on “what.” We’re so focused on the position title.
Things change so quickly. I wrote this book because we need to change the conversation from what we want to be to who we want to be. We want to expose ourselves to different experiences, but we’re also fixated on the “what.”
That’s quite misleading, because ten years from now, we don’t know what kind of jobs are going to exist. When I was younger, I couldn’t say, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a web designer.” There was no web.
When we focus on the “who,” that’s where we can open up possibilities.
Monica: How can parents help prepare their kids to discover who they can become and how they can achieve it?
Dr. Billan: I think a lot of it is opening them to different experiences and asking the right questions. There’s nothing wrong with asking, “What do you want to be?” However, follow that up with, “Why?” “Why do you want to be a doctor? Why do you want to be a lawyer? Why do you want to be a mechanic? Why do you want to be a chef?” Answering the question ‘why’ is how we find purpose and meaning.
Monica: You have a passion for education, for improving people’s access to quality education, and for enhancing humanity’s overall welfare. In what ways overall are you using your expertise, your knowledge, and skills to improve access to education around the world?
Dr. Billan: For well over a decade, we’ve supported many initiatives to create opportunities around the world. We’ve built three schools around the world and a teacher’s college. We just opened up a library in rural Nicaragua last year.
We supported soccer tournaments and scholarships. Every year, we do something different. So, I need to ensure that opportunities to get an education are enabled, not just at home, which is very important, but also abroad, because we’re all a part of a community.
Monica: How can people help support you in what you do?
Dr. Billan: That is a great question. It’s by living their purpose. I think if we all lived our purpose, we would do this naturally.
Monica: What drives you every day to do what you do? What gets you up in the morning?
Dr. Billan: I absolutely love what I do. I do training and development. I get to work with students and adults.
Every day is very different, and that’s what keeps things exciting and fun. It’s seeing that transformation happen. When I work with people, and they say to me, “Ah, I’ve got strategies that I’m going to use today,” that, to me, is powerful.
Monica: I would imagine that you’ve had interactions with many of the people, including students, whose lives you’ve helped change. So, how have they had an impact on your perspective and on how you see the world? What have you learned from them?
Dr. Billan: Oh, my gosh, so much! My higher-ed students teach me about flexibility all the time. When I was traveling around the world, I would ask the children, “What do you want to be?” And they would tell me who it is they wanted to be, the type of person they wanted to be. I get so much from the people I surround myself with and from the youth that I’m around, and they have so much to teach all of us.
Monica: I would imagine there is an underlying message you want people to hear and take action on. What is that message?
Dr. Billan: Just based on my research and what I’ve seen, if there’s one thing, it’s that we each can develop our self-confidence.
I find that self-confidence is the key to many things. Many people want to develop their self-esteem. The most significant relationship someone will ever have is the one with themselves. Developing self-confidence can help with things like resilience, psychological capital, Tall Poppy Syndrome, mental health, anxiety, well-being, and leadership.
Monica: You’re the national ambassador for Not Myself Today, an initiative of the Canadian Mental Health Association that aims to transform workplace cultures. Can you talk a little bit about how the organization is working to do that?
Dr. Billan: Not Myself Today is a campaign run by the Canadian Mental Health Association. It’s about raising awareness that we all have emotions. We all have moods. Sometimes, we don’t feel like ourselves, and that’s okay. It’s this idea that mental health is health.
If we’re not feeling like ourselves, that’s okay. It’s okay not to be okay. This initiative is really powerful because it gives organizations the tools they need to talk about mental health in the workplace and help employees identify how they might be feeling. The goal is to transform workplace culture.
Monica: Part of what you do is centered around leadership and working with leadership. What do you consider to be the top three or five qualities of a good leader?
Dr. Billan: That’s a great question: a great communicator, an active listener, empathetic, transparent, and authentic.
Monica: Excellent. Out of all the different projects you are working on, and how you are impacting young people as well as people in corporate America or small businesses, what is it that you enjoy most about all those things? Is there one particular thing that stands out that you enjoy most?
Dr. Billan: Just being able to interact with people from different walks of life. I think I enjoy that the most.
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/rumeetbillan