The keys to owning your own journey and leadership success with longtime CEO and C-suite advisor Sabrina Horn

Sabrina Horn believes that we’re all the director and lead actor in our own movie—and therefore we control our destiny. “You have one life to live and it's yours,” she says. “You have to push every day. You have to fight, and when you get shot down, you have to get up the next day and try it again.”

In this episode, the longtime CEO, C-suite advisor, professor and bestselling author sits down with Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein to discuss this philosophy and her own career journey. Sabrina founded a PR company in the tech industry in 1991 when she was just 29—and she ran it for 24 years before selling it. At that point, she made a decision: “I decided that rather than doing public relations for companies and putting companies on the map, I wanted to switch to really helping individuals like CEOs and founders, entrepreneurs, students as well, people who run teams in corporations, individuals who want to become leaders and help give them the tools to get over certain challenges that they have,” she tells Sam.

Starting out as a 29-year-old female CEO in 1991 was a bold move, and Sabrina says one of the reasons for her success was the fearlessness that people have in their 20s. “I would say 98 percent of the executives I worked with were almost twice my age, and they were all male,” she recalls. “I felt like as long as I've done my homework and I'm really intelligent about the advice I'm giving them, there's no reason to be worried about my gender, and if they don't want to work with me because I'm a woman, then there's plenty of other fish in the sea to work with.”

PR as strategy

Sabrina says a common misperception about public relations work is that it’s all about the message and the hype. “It was never just about putting out press releases,” she clarifies. “It was about helping them think through what those strategies might be, what move are you making today in anticipation of this move you're going to make tomorrow and the day after tomorrow so that it's strategic, it's a plan. It can't just be tactical.”

In terms of helping companies grow strategically, Sabrina says being authentic and not being intimidated or backing down is important for leadership: “This is where standing true to what you believe, if you really have done your homework and you really have done your research and you know in your heart that the direction that they're going in is not going to help them, I would always say, Look, you can do that. You can do whatever you want. But I'm here. You ask me to come here to give you my advice. So if you go down this path, here's what can happen and if you go down this other path, here's what can happen here.”

Why “Fake it ‘til you make it” is the worst business advice

On the surface, she says, there’s nothing wrong with this common adage. “If you are doing cognitive behavioral therapy to practice certain behaviors that you wish you could exude, like more confidence, and you practice that and you visualize what that might look like or you wear a certain color to a meeting because it makes you feel more confident or as Amy Cuddy did over a decade now ago in a TED talk about power posing where you stretch your arms out, that was how fake it till you make it got started and it's okay because you're just helping yourself,” she says. “It’s self-help.”

The problem with the phrase, she says, is that it’s mutated over the years to become an excuse to lie and exaggerate the truth at the expense of others for personal good. “It was like an excuse for bad leadership,” she tells Sam. “But the problem is that the truth always comes out. The investor will do her due diligence, the customer will use the product and it won't work as prescribed. Then you expose yourself, you set yourself back, you embarrass yourself and your team. You ruin your credibility.”

Rather than go down that dangerous route, Sabrina encourages people to be authentic at every turn. “It’s about looking at yourself in the mirror every day and saying, this is what I stand for,” she says. “These are my values. This is what my company stands for. This is what we don't stand for, and committing every day to that. And surrounding yourself with people who will call you on that when you don't stay true to that.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of July13th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

 

Full transcript here