Diana Alt [00:00:03]:
Hey there, everybody. Welcome to Work Should Feel Good, the show where your career growth meets your real life. Today, my guest Grace McCarrick and I are going to talk about the thing that a lot of people didn't want to name for a long time— soft skills— and why they're actually important. Even though we went through a period where no one wanted to use the term soft skills, we only wanted to use the term power skills or some other what I consider nonsense. After I've seen the light. Grace is a workforce strategist, keynote speaker, and a founder known for translating complex generational, cultural, and behavioral challenges into clear, actionable strategies for today's organizations. She advises Fortune-level brands like Amazon, Spotify, and one of my favorites, DoorDash, on culture, communications, and the evolving expectations of modern employees. Her research-driven frameworks spanning topics from charisma to strategic adaptability to my personal favorite, discernment, reach 4 to 6 million impressions each month across social media, including TikTok, where you can learn professional things, guys.

Diana Alt [00:01:11]:
Grace also recently launched a very cool community called the Soft-Skilled School, a community to educate individuals on the same skills so they can navigate work better and make work feel good, like this podcast is all about. Welcome to the party, Grace.

Grace McCarrick [00:01:28]:
Diana, I'm so happy to be here.

Diana Alt [00:01:29]:
I'm happy to be here too. One of my favorite things about you being on the show is that we kind of defied a lot of the common wisdom around networking. Like everybody thinks that you're DMing people on LinkedIn or just getting introduced by a friend of a friend to a certain type of person, right? And I found you on TikTok talking about discernment, and I thought, oh, we've got to deal with this. So are you meeting a lot of people in the comments too lately?

Grace McCarrick [00:02:02]:
I am meeting— well, here's why you're different. You have your own platform and you're also strong in the comments. So I will say if I'm meeting people, they are in that archetype. Yeah, fellow creators for sure. I'm meeting people. Commenters sometimes. I think one person went from the comments to the DMs and I had a coffee chat, like they were an executive somewhere, but not as common.

Diana Alt [00:02:33]:
Yeah, I feel like I meet more in that like networking with other professionals in our lane on TikTok is new. The last, I don't know, I think I found you like a year ago or something. LinkedIn, I've been doing it for years and I have legit friends that I've done vacations and later business with off of the TikTok, off the LinkedIn comments. So anyway, you have an interesting thing though. So you're this, you're a culture person. Lots of people love to talk about culture. But it's also kind of gatekept in a lot of organizations. Like, you have to be— to work on culture initiatives, you have to be like 20 years of experience and in senior leadership in HR and stuff like that.

Diana Alt [00:03:18]:
And you kind of define expectation on how you started that too.

Grace McCarrick [00:03:22]:
Wait, that's such an interesting take. I don't know that I've heard that.

Diana Alt [00:03:25]:
Or that I've seen that a lot. And it could be generational because I'm 15 years older than you. And so there was a lot of time when I knew me and some of my peers were interested in like, what are the culture things going on? Can we help influence corporate culture? And we kind of got told to shut up and color. But you managed to start doing culture work in your mid-20s. Yeah, very early in your career.

Grace McCarrick [00:03:49]:
I was a number 10 hire. It was a startup and it was free. I was doing it in addition to my other job. It was so fun. I mean, the place, it was such a good moment in time, such a good place for me to be at, at that moment, because I completely defined everything. And I'm a Virgo, and I'm like, you know, can be a little control freaky. So I was like, okay, actually, this is culture here. It's not happy hours, it's organizational psychology, and here's how we're going to do it, and here's how that's going to show up everywhere.

Grace McCarrick [00:04:27]:
And so I really had a big hand in shaping the culture of that company. But that's what happens in startups when you go from 10 to 250 or whatever. That's what happens. People who are not qualified in other places do those jobs.

Diana Alt [00:04:45]:
What was your real job? The one you got paid for?

Grace McCarrick [00:04:49]:
Yeah, operations. So I've always been operations. I had come from corporate insurance, so I was operations reporting to the chief insurance officer, and I was building— we had a claims. So we were a renter's insurance company. We had claims department that was third party, which means they existed outside of our company. And so I built the structure that managed them and managed the clients coming in. And actually we had had some issues. We had this, you know, we were new, it was a bunch of non-insurance people building this insurance thing.

Grace McCarrick [00:05:22]:
There was two of us who had ever had experience in insurance and my family's in insurance. So I, you know, it was very glamorous, don't be jealous, but I had, you know, I had this background in it. The guy who was building our customer service team, so that was our client-facing team, had a food background, was like this cool guy, had these other cool startup experiences, but they were all these cool artists in Atlanta, like 20-year-old artists, amazing, loved them, spent a ton of time with them. When things started hitting the fan, as they do when you're an insurance company and people are having life crises and they call you, Our customer service was not prepared for that. They weren't prepared to discern an emergency. They weren't prepared for how people were going to talk to them. They weren't prepared for that level. So I pulled together this group I called the Mom Squad.

Grace McCarrick [00:06:12]:
And it was a group of part-time remote, this is way before COVID part-time remote primary caretaker moms who were wanting to get back into the workforce so they could work They couldn't work the normal hours, they couldn't come into an office, but they had a lot of capacity to work. Most of them had little kids in school or one had a baby. And so they just, I mean, I think we had a backlog at one time of like 4,000 pieces of, you know, whatever we were trying to get through. And these girls cleared it, these women cleared it in days.

Diana Alt [00:06:48]:
You know, they were just unreal. I have a, one of my client, One of my clients is a wealth manager, actually my financial advisor. Okay. So, and he loves to hire moms and like, I have to tell him like, be careful about your language around that. Like there are some compliance issues that you may, you may wanna pay attention to as a business owner. But it's that same thing. Like nobody is more efficient than someone that has to pick the kids up at 3 o'clock.

Grace McCarrick [00:07:16]:
And like, and who knows how to discern an emergency?

Diana Alt [00:07:20]:
Yeah. Who can figure that out? Are you bleeding? Are you bleeding? Is the house on fire?

Grace McCarrick [00:07:26]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:07:28]:
Are you safe? Yeah.

Grace McCarrick [00:07:30]:
The catalyst was they hadn't clued us in or something had happened where they like, and because of the nature of my role, I would get those middle of the night or weekend calls or emails because I had to be the conduit between, you know, I had to understand what's going on. And there was one thing where they, they like clued us in on something that did not matter. And I was like, I don't care the color paint, whatever, whatever was going on. And then the next time there was someone's house was on fire and they didn't clue us in. And, oh my God, you know, so anyway, then the, the mom squad came in and just did a great job. And those, those, the, the other group was great. They just weren't, they weren't trained right for it.

Diana Alt [00:08:08]:
Yeah.

Grace McCarrick [00:08:08]:
Their expectations weren't managed.

Diana Alt [00:08:10]:
There's so much that that people, I think I've never worked in operations, but I've supported operations a lot. Like I spent a lot of years doing CRM system architecture and development, and I worked with sales operations. And so it was very interesting to support that group from a systems perspective because I saw all the bad stuff. I saw every bad process that people are insisting has to get automated. I saw also when people try to over-operationalize things, it's like, yes, we need a structure and you need guidance on how to talk, but most people don't need to be told every single word that they need to say. And in fact, when you do that, you actually are deleting— it's the same complaint we have about AI now. Right. If all you do is write stuff with ChatGPT or Claude, do you have any understanding of what you're doing? So interesting.

Diana Alt [00:09:07]:
So I mentioned in the intro, like soft skills had a backlash in terminology for a while. I actually like my tech background is that I always was working on the roles that were part in technology and part in people and process. And so I'm such an idiot, like I don't have my mic like close enough to my face. But like PMI renamed them power skills. And I just wanted to hurl whenever I heard that. I didn't necessarily love the term soft skills either. I work with all these hard analytical types that think it's bunk. So how do you define them for people and how do you get people on board with the idea that they matter whenever there's so much discussion about hiring for hard skills and certifications and all of that today?

Grace McCarrick [00:09:56]:
I will say in 2026, I'm not having to convince anyone that they matter. It's all over World Economic Forum, any of the Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider. Everyone's talking about soft skills. Everyone's talking about how during AI you most need soft skills. So fortunately that, that conversation's off the table. I constantly am getting, well, why, why are we calling them soft? Okay. Because I am selling something. Based on this concept, just the mechanics of sales, it's very hard to introduce a new word to someone, educate them to that word, have it show up the first time that they met.

Grace McCarrick [00:10:36]:
So for me, it never made sense to rewrite it. I get people's distaste for it and.

Diana Alt [00:10:43]:
That'S fine, but I think the distaste for a lot of the people that I've worked with over the years, because we also come at this a little bit differently. Cause you, you have some B2C or like, you know, things you sell to individuals and then you do have a lot of your selling, like only the school, but then a lot of your, most the bulk of your work is selling into corporations, into leadership teams. So when you're doing training workshops with people, which I know you work at multiple levels in your consulting. Is there, is everybody buying into soft skills at all the levels that you're seeing, or are, is it mostly your executive teams that are understanding that's the need? How has that evolved?

Grace McCarrick [00:11:29]:
It's a great question. I would say the people who hire me generally are sort of executive team. They're fully bought in, they're interested. It depends. I always, I, let me frame it this way. If I'm in a room of 50 or 60 people or more, there will be about 10% of that room who thinks of waste of space.

Diana Alt [00:11:56]:
Why are you here?

Grace McCarrick [00:11:56]:
None of this makes any sense. I'm not interested in this. This is crazy. I think there's a difference. I think some companies, and I've talked to people who are in companies like this, I think some companies just don't need the type of training that I offer. The way they operate, the way they talk to each other, the way their leadership spells things out. They don't need this extra level of like, let's be really explicit about it. But most companies now do.

Diana Alt [00:12:24]:
Yeah. I think it's rare for people to not need at least some of it because a lot of it's very rare, but real. Yeah.

Grace McCarrick [00:12:31]:
Like, you know, there are definitely some.

Diana Alt [00:12:33]:
I mean, neither of us are for everybody. I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make in business and also honestly, like, I don't know, I'm going to go with in life. We don't have to be for everybody. Like, it's fine. So if people— like, I'm definitely not for everybody. Yeah, I'm very much an acquired taste. But I think that's a really good observation, that there are people that are doing it, or they need a different approach.

Grace McCarrick [00:13:02]:
You know, even just use a really specific example. Is it, um, is it BlackRock that does the performance scorecards. Like, there are just some places that are so intense and so hypergrowth and so focused on what they're focused on that everyone who's in there is, is doing that thing. And then there's, there's like all the great companies that power all the things we use and all the stuff we do, and they have tens of thousands of people. And sometimes it helps to get a little, you know, extra Yeah, um, information in there.

Diana Alt [00:13:39]:
It's, it's interesting. I'm coming at it from like the employee perspective because I work mostly B2C. You're working mostly B2B, and the way people talk about stuff, like one of the things that I find so interesting is when I first left corporate and went full-time into coaching, I was kind of like in fuck the man's headspace. Like I was so over it after 20 years And then a few years in, I started saying, okay, this is really more of a pick your battles thing. Like, absolutely know your, your values, know the top few things that are important. And you're coming at it the other way, like, to individuals when you're talking on social media, like, stop worrying about this. Like, just, you're making yourself look silly whenever you worry about certain things.

Grace McCarrick [00:14:25]:
Well, I think people make themselves feel crazy, which is sort of the worst part of it. Like, yeah, it looks silly, but You're driving yourself crazy trying to be like, you know, for whatever. Pepsi doesn't care about the dogs in Puerto Rico. You're like, okay, Pepsi's not gonna care about the dogs in Puerto Rico.

Diana Alt [00:14:45]:
Right.

Grace McCarrick [00:14:46]:
You know?

Diana Alt [00:14:46]:
Guess what? Neither do I. I don't want harm to come to dogs in Puerto Rico, but like, I got my own stuff.

Grace McCarrick [00:14:53]:
Everyone has their own things they care about.

Diana Alt [00:14:56]:
I've got— what are, what do you feel like, what are some of the changes that you've seen when working kind of at a high level, I want to dig into a skill or two, but when you're working at a high level with your consulting clients that you've been with for a while, what are some of the changes they are telling you that they're seeing as a result of focusing on soft skill development?

Grace McCarrick [00:15:17]:
It makes the team— so, so a lot of the exercises I do are all under the umbrella of more agency, more ownership, better collaboration. It's kind of the— like, if I can, if I can get hit any of those points, it's been successful. Soft skills are a great vehicle for that, and it's a great language. But at the end of the day, what we're always looking for— more agency, more ownership, better collaboration. Um, what do people do?

Diana Alt [00:15:49]:
They.

Grace McCarrick [00:15:53]:
What are it? I think for a lot of, of people, I can at least say like leaving the workshops, it feels like, oh, I've unlocked something I didn't realize I had. Oh, there was a tool in my toolbox that I could have, I could have been using. And so it's less about what the people who hired me say and more— I have a research partner, we take data on everyone who comes through— more what the people who took the course are saying. And that's, um, like, thank God for these tools. Like, thank God I feel like I actually have something. Oh, this thing that felt so full of friction is actually way easier now.

Diana Alt [00:16:31]:
I was just going to use the word friction. Yeah, because a lot of it is internal friction, because something does not feel right. And a lot of times we think it's us, which to a certain degree, like, kinda, yeah, it is. There is a skill that you don't have yet. Or that you haven't figured out how to deploy, but it's not like an identity level, you're a terrible human kind of thing. It's a you need to learn something kind of thing. So, um, discernment is one of the first things that I found you about, and I've always been very interested in that word for a couple of reasons. Number one, I used to work at a company called Cerner, which is now part of Oracle, And, you know, the founder and CEO told us that CERN was basically a derivation of discernment.

Diana Alt [00:17:20]:
Like, that was what it was— decision support, like, stuff in healthcare IT. And then the other one is that it has a spiritual connotation, because for people that are, um, Christian, there is in the Bible talks about a spiritual gift of discernment. And so I've heard about it from these angles in my life. So what made you land on discernment as one of the top skills to teach? And what the heck is it? I would love for you to explain that to people, because I think if people listen to this, understand discernment 5% better from listening to the podcast, their work life is going to be better.

Grace McCarrick [00:17:59]:
Right. Discernment is the ability to.

Diana Alt [00:18:04]:
Um, read.

Grace McCarrick [00:18:04]:
The room in, in a manner of speaking, and pull out and focus on what is most critical. The way I talked about it, um, in the video that went viral— that's how a lot of people got to me— is this is the thing that keeps middle managers and, and people in sort of mid-company stuck and not getting into senior management. Because when they are going to their boss with problems, they don't have good discernment about what they're bringing there. So the thing that made them a superstar climbing up the ladder was I'm identifying all of these different things and I'm able to solve them. Now, the higher you get, the less able you are to solve all the things you identify and the less intelligent you seem for being able to identify them. It's just like everyone knows about those.

Diana Alt [00:18:53]:
So then when you guys find the problem, it's table stakes.

Grace McCarrick [00:18:56]:
Yeah, right. When you're sitting in the room with people who have limited time, limited capacity, and they need you to be really focused and you're coming across really unfocused because you're getting really worked up about all of these problems that they already know exist. That, that is, so I have two groups that I meet with on a monthly basis, different types of executives from two different industries. And something I had kept hearing over and over again, one I've been meeting with for two years, one for a year. So I see them a lot. One I kept hearing over and over again was the difference between how they were talking to their bosses and how their reports were talking to them. About specific problems and specific things. And so that's sort of how I crafted.

Grace McCarrick [00:19:36]:
I did not think it would blow up the way it did. I, I, you like, the resonance of the topic has been so far outside.

Diana Alt [00:19:43]:
It's been really interesting. The thing that I remember the most when I started listening to you speak on this topic online was it was not necessarily as much about the way people speak to each other, but it's about the fact that You have 10 problems. The other 10 people reporting to your same boss also have 10 problems. Why are we making your boss have 110 problems? Like, pick the one, right, that is driving all the things. And that resonated a lot because I had— I have had the people do that to me whenever I was in management. And I was like, oh yeah, this is what was aggravating. And I was getting burned out because of it, because I didn't know what to do with 110 problems. And I'm sure I probably dropped 55 of the 110 problems on my boss's desk, which it's like Amway at that point.

Diana Alt [00:20:37]:
We're just giving people all the problems. So I thought that was really good. And something I've been coaching people a lot on over time, back when I worked with people and now, is how do you speak differently? So what do you recommend to people When you're training people on how you got to read the room, you have to pull out what's most important. What do you teach people about how to speak differently to their leadership?

Grace McCarrick [00:21:07]:
So every single soft skill I talk about, I talk about as a muscle. So you have to build the muscle and then you have to flex the muscle. The building the muscle is mastering the craft of it. The flexing it is how do other people see me as this thing? And so what you're asking about is how do other people see me as this thing? And I— but I think first you have to get at being able to speak with discernment starts with listening to how other people speak. Okay, who does it well? Who's not doing it well? So that's the first thing people have to do. You cannot think your way into any of these skills, and we are in such an era where everyone thinks they can think their way. I'm going to be delusional and I'm going to manifest this and I'm going to write it down and I'm going to— like, you can't think your way. I'm going to— I'm going to think my way into this right relationship or solving this friendship problem, whatever.

Grace McCarrick [00:21:51]:
Can't think your way into any of these. You really have to practice. Um, so discernment, you really have to be— you really have to be a listener. And then when you start, particularly if you're using it for this use case of I want to be someone who's seen as more senior so I get the promotions, there's a really specific way that, um, high-performing people with discernment, talk to their executives and talk to their stakeholders.

Diana Alt [00:22:20]:
Can you do a contrast? Like if you, can you do an example where maybe you could share like a senior manager that someday wants to be a director of VP, the way they might talk to them, talk about a problem when they're not doing it effectively versus the way the person that's gonna get promoted over them talks about it?

Grace McCarrick [00:22:39]:
Yeah. So let me, let me go, like, let me just pick something boring in general, like someone in financial services. They have a client issue that popped up because of a couple different people on their team messed up. It was like an assembly line of things that need to happen and everyone messed up along the way. So the senior manager is going to bring that mid-problem to their manager and say, these 3 things happened. This person's annoying because I fucking told them this, that last week, this happened 3 months ago. I told you they were going to do it again. They sort of do this whole thing.

Grace McCarrick [00:23:18]:
And this person, I don't know what happened, but can we please get their manager to fix it? Like they sort of spell out all the issues. I'm working on it. And there's a little bit of also like a martyrdom in it. I'm, I don't worry. I got it.

Diana Alt [00:23:31]:
I got it. These people are idiots, but I can fix it.

Grace McCarrick [00:23:34]:
Right. I'm smart. I get it. The senior person goes, uh, at the end of a meeting, by the way, this is handled. This thing happened this week. These are the factors. Nothing to do here. Just giving, just flagging it for you.

Diana Alt [00:23:51]:
Yeah, that's really good. I think one of the biggest things I love, the Olivia Pope effect. This is handled, but I'm not surprising you. So one of my very early bosses told me I can handle anything. Just don't surprise me. And that was really something I've carried forward for the rest of my career. Just don't surprise me.

Grace McCarrick [00:24:14]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:24:15]:
The idea of it's handled, the idea of I'm doing this briefly is great. One of the things I feel like people fail at a lot is at all levels is they can't define what support looks like. So I will have people that I'm coaching one-on-one that are like, oh, I'm trying to break through XYZ and I can't get support from my from my boss or from so-and-so. And then I asked the— and the reason I know this is a thing is because I had a coach ask me this years ago. Yeah, you're, you're so frustrated. What would support even look like? I'm here to do whatever you need. And I couldn't even say what support looked like because I was overwhelmed at the time. So it's a kind of a forcing question I give to people.

Diana Alt [00:25:01]:
And I'm like, don't go talk to anybody until you figure out what support looks like. Right. Because you're not going to look— that's not going to look well for you at all.

Grace McCarrick [00:25:11]:
So, and people do, like, for people who perform well, people want to resource them.

Diana Alt [00:25:16]:
Yeah. Yeah. Especially in— I, I work mostly with people that are in tech, marketing, some operations, some HR in my one-on-one coaching. They're usually making $150K plus, if not up into hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are not people that they're just going to fire on a dime. It's not the checkout person at your local store. So definitely they want to support those people. It's a— some of these people, it's a half million dollars to replace them by the time you factor in training and acquisition of a new person.

Diana Alt [00:25:56]:
It's like you can ask for what you need within reason. So there's an interesting thing that I was thinking about recently, and that is kind of the deal where people— companies say they want one thing and they don't mean it. So, um, companies will say we value XYZ in a culture, but the reward is a mismatch of that. Do you see that at all in the work that you're doing? What are some of the examples where you see that, and how do you help people break through that so they can get things aligned?

Grace McCarrick [00:26:33]:
Yeah, I think a really easy example is companies will say we value feedback or we value transparency or we value your opinion on this. And then they don't have strict mechanisms. They don't have it like, okay, when we say feedback, here's what we mean. And when we say your opinion, here's what we mean. And when we say we value whatever the other thing I said was.

Diana Alt [00:26:59]:
So.

Grace McCarrick [00:27:01]:
Without the parameters to say like, here's what your opinion means and this is the context in which we'll value it, you've opened Pandora's box. Everyone's like, well, you want my opinion. Now you're not even listening to it.

Diana Alt [00:27:14]:
It's like, I'm not going to— No one actually wants to know the opinion of the 25-year-old junior data analyst on the reorg for the entire tech department. No one, they don't care. They do care if there's friction created from it so they can figure out how to resolve it. And they definitely care if 5 people in that group are having friction and you can't get the work done, but they don't care. They're not calling you into the organizational design workshops with the consultant.

Grace McCarrick [00:27:46]:
And I think, yeah, I think even more, even Even lesser stakes than that, I think we've gotten so used to saying like, oh, we want feedback because people feel like it's a good thing. And feedback is good. Courtney Hirsch talks about this really effectively where she's a really young— she's the CEO of Jumbo Media. She's a really young employee group and she'll go, I want your feedback on this. Alternatively, we've made this decision. We don't, we're not looking for feedback. We've done it. It's happening.

Grace McCarrick [00:28:22]:
And so that's a huge thing I see is that companies say they want something, but then they don't specify it. They don't break it down. They don't reinforce it. And especially for companies with thousands of people, you're like, everyone's gonna— I mean, you can see in the comments, like as a creator, you know this, you say something, you think you're very clear about it, and then you get 5 different interpretations in the comments. Yes.

Diana Alt [00:28:46]:
Yeah. And I can, it's, it's interesting. Here's where creator discernment comes in. Where was I not clear and who was just being an ass in the comments or is willfully misunderstanding? So I think that feedback in particular drives me crazy because everyone assumes that it's negative feedback. They don't. I just, this, this comes to mind for me because I was just like working on an abstract for a feedback session that I have. That I got asked for by a local user group. But feedback, good feedback isn't just positive.

Diana Alt [00:29:22]:
It is specific and it's actionable and it's related and, and we know what we're going to do with it. And we have receipts for it, which is different from positive feedback, which is, oh, I love your thing. Thanks. Your soft skills school is great. Your consulting was great. Your coaching was great. So That's a really good example, though, because it does show up so easily. And we're, we're now training— well, actually, we're doing a bad job training.

Diana Alt [00:29:51]:
We're telling every manager they need to be a coach, never training them on what that means. I think that's another example, wouldn't you say?

Grace McCarrick [00:29:59]:
100%.

Diana Alt [00:30:03]:
Do you ever run across a situation where people are having something that's not a soft skills problem misdiagnosed as one?

Grace McCarrick [00:30:22]:
Here's what I'll say. I see a little bit more just because of the nature of my work and what I talk about. People think they are utilizing soft skills really well, and they are not. So it's sort of the opposite. Like, someone will be like, um, I'm in this team, whatever, I'm 20, I'm in this team. Oh, actually, wait, I have a better— this one came straight from my DMs. Um, I'm 2 years into work, I'm at this company, I really want to seem eager. I, you know, I have these soft skills, like everyone always tells me that I have these skills.

Grace McCarrick [00:30:58]:
Great. Okay. Um, She goes, I've been replying to all the large-scale distribution lists just so people know I'm active and engaged. What do you think about that? I'm like, I think that's a terrible idea.

Diana Alt [00:31:12]:
That's like hitting reply all.

Grace McCarrick [00:31:14]:
No, she's literally hitting reply all.

Diana Alt [00:31:17]:
Well, I meant like I was thinking about in a forum, but I'm going back to my early— she's hitting everything. Dude, I don't ever want to reply all. Maybe if the building is on fire, send it to everyone, like, get the hell out of the building. But oh no, that's not it. Wow.

Grace McCarrick [00:31:38]:
Yeah. And there's a lot of that where people will be like, I'm really skilled at this and this person's bad. And for me, it's always if your immediate problem is someone else, you don't have the soft skills you think you do. Soft skills is so much about— well, I don't know if I defined soft skills in the beginning. Soft skills is, to me, my point of view on this is the way you read and interpret the world around you, filter it through your own systems, and then figure out how you can add the most value. That's it.

Diana Alt [00:32:12]:
Say that again for the people in the back.

Grace McCarrick [00:32:14]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:32:15]:
So good.

Grace McCarrick [00:32:16]:
Yes. The way you read and interpret the world around you, Filter it through your own systems and then figure out how you can add the most value. And that comes in so many flavors, shapes, sizes, so many skills. Some people will be innately better at them. Some will be innately better at others. But it's not— this isn't like, oh, I'm really good at math. It contextually will change. You might have been amazingly self-aware 5 years ago in that company.

Grace McCarrick [00:32:43]:
And now you've told yourself a story for a long time And now you're in this place where you're not self-aware. And so what you think you're doing is backfiring.

Diana Alt [00:32:50]:
Oh, that's a really good point. It also evolves. Like one thing when we're trying to grow our careers is that the expectations and what's considered good when you're in whatever, senior project manager, it is not considered good whenever you're in a director role.

Grace McCarrick [00:33:07]:
I know.

Diana Alt [00:33:08]:
It's just not. And that's not to say like you're bad. It's just to say that it's table stakes. It kind of, to me, feels like I work largely, like 75% of my people are in tech in some way, whether it's like cybersecurity, engineering, leadership in those, or whether it's like product and program management, they're doing work in tech. And anytime I ask people, what are, what are you about? Like, what lights you up? Every single person says solving problems. And I say, well, no one hires for anybody unless they have a problem to solve. So stop saying that because you look silly.

Grace McCarrick [00:33:47]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:33:49]:
If you want to talk about what problem you solve and how it moves the needle, like, that's cool. If you want to talk about the unique way you solve problems and how that is a value add, then absolutely. But just saying I solve problems, like, I solved problems in first grade arithmetic. So.

Grace McCarrick [00:34:08]:
I hear that a lot also. It's funny, I did a personal brand course on Maven with my friends Mallory and Joe, and when people start to orient around their, like, what is it they want people to understand about them, everyone starts out the same way. I'm really good because I, I go into companies and I roll my sleeves up.

Diana Alt [00:34:28]:
Like, okay, so the last thing I.

Grace McCarrick [00:34:30]:
Want to do So does everyone though, like anyone, whatever their position, whatever they were doing, I go in and I roll my sleeves up. Okay.

Diana Alt [00:34:40]:
Well, it's the people that I really take notice of are the ones that say, actually don't roll my sleeves up. I'm an architect. Or I'm like the orchestra conductor. I'm gonna help all the other people figure out where exactly they need to be.

Grace McCarrick [00:34:55]:
Well, that's your profession. You know, that's your, that's your craft.

Diana Alt [00:34:58]:
That's my profession. Yeah. That's a different ball of wax than what you're dealing with. So, which is why I, I think it's so interesting to talk to people that are doing so much more of the company side like you are. When we think about this whole feedback thing, so we talked a little bit about here's the mismatch. People are saying things like, you know, I value feedback and then they're not giving structure. Like, how, how is misapplying soft skills in that way actually hurting people with their leadership advancement? Like what is happening to that leader that keeps telling everybody in their 50-person organization, I value your feedback, and then it's just handling it all wrong. What's that doing to their prospects and to their team?

Grace McCarrick [00:35:46]:
It can be an interesting journey because at first people just start to distrust. I don't know if they're actually listening. And then what happens is they start to not respect that person, and then there becomes sort of the, the, um, grim reaper of all relationships— disdain, contempt.

Diana Alt [00:36:09]:
Hmm. So they think they're doing— they think they're checking box leadership boxes by saying, I value your feedback, I value your feedback. They're getting all of this feedback A bunch of it is not even in the scope of what the person giving feedback should be doing. And so they're either not taking any of it and then the team's pissed at them, or they're trying to be everything to all people. And then that's people-pleasing behavior. And that also doesn't look good. So, oh, what a great— thank you for extending that. Because that's the really hard thing for me about soft skills like that, that line that you drew.

Diana Alt [00:36:45]:
What did you say? They stopped trusting you. They stopped rejecting. Respecting you, respecting you, and then it go into disdain and contempt. Yeah, that's a really important progression because the job that people are happy in now and then 18 months later they're not happy in, that's a lot of what's happening.

Grace McCarrick [00:37:05]:
And you must see that all the time.

Diana Alt [00:37:08]:
I'm not asking a question, right? I'm saying that that is exactly what is happening, right? Um, And I have a, I have a guy that I've known for years and years, and he talks about having a 6-month rule for this reason, so he can see if things are going to get better. Because sometimes, like, it just sucks for a season. You're working too much or whatnot. He puts a marker on his calendar for 6 months from the first day that he's like, God, should I still be here?

Grace McCarrick [00:37:35]:
Right?

Diana Alt [00:37:36]:
And then he gives it that 6 months to get better. Cause it never stays the same. It either gets better or it gets worse. And so it, that, that progression you just talked about definitely can unfold over a matter of months for sure. Um, that's a really cool way to look at it. Um, we need to talk about another of the internet's favorite topics.

Grace McCarrick [00:38:02]:
Great.

Diana Alt [00:38:03]:
Can't wait. Wet hair. Yeah.

Grace McCarrick [00:38:05]:
Yep. We have to go there.

Diana Alt [00:38:08]:
I knew it was wet hair. And I, I think that a lot— I don't know exactly what you call this skill, but the whole showing up with polish thing. So talk to us about the wet hair viral moment for people that haven't heard you, because that, um, you're apparently like a corporate shill and you're sexist and misogynist and like all of this stuff because of this piece of content, this take.

Grace McCarrick [00:38:32]:
This was— this one was really interesting because it came out of— I, I was getting so many questions one season about appearance. I had a law firm kind of be like, we have these 35-year-old lawyers that post-COVID just are dressing so sloppy with our clients. And then someone else came in and said, can you talk to us about how to dress? And then a hedge fund came in and whatever. It was a really interesting moment in time where I just got a lot of appearance questions. And so I ended up working with this woman I met on TikTok. Her name is Anjuli, and she's now a teacher, but she had gone to law school in Oxford, grew up in California, was doing a bunch of interesting things, just like a really interesting old soul, young but old soul, deep, full of context person who was doing some styling stuff at the same time. So I forget how I happened upon her and I was like, oh, I kind of need a partner in this appearance thing. I think it'd be really interesting to have someone with a— she had such a philosophical intellectual approach to appearance at work.

Diana Alt [00:39:35]:
Oh, she sounds like my kind of person.

Grace McCarrick [00:39:36]:
Yeah, you would really like her. Also, you were like— she, um, she had said something along the lines of anything that's not professional, because I— and, and she's Gen Z, so there was a lot of me like flexing my biases against her when we first started working together. And I was like, here's what I think, break it, you know. And so she had said something like, the way she defines unprofessional is anything that takes you out of the current moment you're in.

Diana Alt [00:40:04]:
Oh, okay. I love that definition.

Grace McCarrick [00:40:09]:
Yes.

Diana Alt [00:40:09]:
Because I've been seeking— like, I've actually been seeking a good definition of this for a long time. I grew up in— like, so much of what I did was— I worked in a digital marketing agency and worked in tech, and I've seen everything from, like, you better be in a suit and a white shirt and tie or heels and a, you know, skirt suit if you're a woman, which is early in my career as a consultant, all the way through hoodies, but they're professional. So everything— It takes you out of what you're trying to do.

Grace McCarrick [00:40:41]:
Yeah. So it takes whoever's in the room out of the moment. Right? So if you think of unprofessional, someone takes a phone call, someone's clipping their nails, someone's— And what she was saying was what hair does is mentally for a second, if you have dripping wet hair, Everyone thinks of you just getting out of the shower, not in a sexual way, not in a perverted way, but it just brings to every— they're like, oh, that person just got out of the shower. And so you're now out of the conference room where you're trying to make something happen and you're in your bathroom, you're in your shower. So, so that's what I talked about. I thought that I was like, that is so clean. That is so good. I love it.

Grace McCarrick [00:41:17]:
I'm going to take it and I'm going to, and I can't remember if I tagged her in this. I had done it on both TikTok and Instagram. On Instagram, it was one of my first videos, it just started going haywire wild. And meanwhile here I'm thinking like, let me make sure to tag on Julie because this is so brilliant, people are going to love it. It starts to just blow up. And listen, there's an argument where people are like, this stuff doesn't matter, this stuff, if you're so focused on this and actually it's really unfair for people who have this, this, and this thing. And yeah, Everyone's going to have their own approach to this. Everyone's going to have their own truth around it.

Grace McCarrick [00:41:58]:
The shower, to me, I thought the shower thing then made me think, okay, what are all the other things that would take someone out of that moment? That, that helped me orient around looking at professional behavior.

Diana Alt [00:42:09]:
That's really, no, it's really good. I mean, it's also the lint all over your suit, you know, it's the animal hair. Huh?

Grace McCarrick [00:42:17]:
Oh, animal hair.

Diana Alt [00:42:18]:
I don't think I don't, I don't have any pets, so I don't tend to think of animal hair, but yeah. It's anything that smells weird. Mm-hmm. Um, and it's being out of sync with the dress code. So if you work in a hoodies and t-shirts place and you show up in a suit for an interview, which I do not advocate, I actively tell people to ask about dress code and then go like 2 clicks higher, not all the way, like not all the way wearing a tux and tails., to an interview, but if you're too far gone, it takes you out. And I have seen people get rejected as not being the right cultural fit because they did not learn enough to know that we are a cargo shorts and t-shirts and Converse kind of place. And we can argue about whether that's fair or not, but I'm done pretending the world is fair. And I'm.

Diana Alt [00:43:14]:
For teaching people what's real. So now, yeah, if somebody's trying to like discriminate, like, don't break the law, please, when you're hiring. But I don't, I don't live in a world where I pretend everything is fair.

Grace McCarrick [00:43:29]:
Yeah. And people have an argument where they're like, it used to be that curly hair was considered unprofessional. And so women of color and Jewish women who have really coily curly hair, like, then they were put at a disadvantage. And that's, I can't argue with that. That was the case and that was unfair. But I do think we are getting a little bit closer to things that.

Diana Alt [00:43:51]:
Everyone can control, right? The message— I'm a big— I became kind of a stoicism nerd a few years ago and it literally might have saved my life. I was incredibly depressed and I was just kind of looking outside my normal day today for something to kind of grab hold of to help me. And all everything that flows through stoicism around understanding what you can and can't control, which fun fact, you can't control much, but you can control some stuff. Yeah. Has been really important. So thinking about, I used to, I know I've showed up to work with wet hair, but one of the big things is my hair is somewhere between Hermione Granger and Hagrid. From Harry Potter. And I just decided my pandemic project, while everybody else was figuring out how to like make sourdough and have a pandemic baby and get a puppy, I decided to figure out my hair.

Diana Alt [00:44:49]:
And I feel like it's, it's made a big difference in my confidence. So what did you do for everything else?

Grace McCarrick [00:44:54]:
Huh?

Diana Alt [00:44:54]:
What did you do? Literally, um, I bought I don't know how many hair tools.

Grace McCarrick [00:45:01]:
I decided I like this. Okay, you, you experimented.

Diana Alt [00:45:04]:
Yeah, I experimented, um, but I ended up with a Conair curling iron that was $25 off of Amazon, and then like one of those blowout brushes that was like $130, which felt like a lot because all my consulting work went away during COVID But I'm like, I'm using that thing 6 years later and I think my hair looks decent.

Grace McCarrick [00:45:25]:
So it looks great.

Diana Alt [00:45:26]:
Here we are. Yeah. What are some other things that people don't understand are taking people out of the moment besides the wet hair?

Grace McCarrick [00:45:40]:
Smells. Um, I did one of my also sort of, um, very antagonized viral videos— antagonistic, I guess you could say— um, is, uh, I said the, um, smell of dirty hair and the smell of musty clothes. That were in the dryer too long. Both of those make you seem unprofessional. Um, people always talk about bad breath. Yes. I also do think, like, we've all been in these types of workplaces. You are working on something all day, you have no time to stop, and then you go to— like, you've had coffees, you have whatever, what— then you go somewhere and just, just, you know, whatever.

Grace McCarrick [00:46:17]:
That sometimes that just happens. So that to me is not always a marker. Like, yeah, people should pay. I pay— like, I carry Listerine strips with me everywhere, but Um, that to me is like, that happens to everyone at some point, even if they try really hard for it to not happen. And, um, the other stuff is a.

Diana Alt [00:46:34]:
Little bit more controllable. Um, I feel like the dirty hair one is super interesting because we live in the age where women flex how little they've washed their hair. I know.

Grace McCarrick [00:46:46]:
And although it's, it's— I will say the, the worst I've ever smelled this I was working, it was that same startup. I, it was like a winter day, so the heat was on in the office we were in. I walked in from outside and it was all men. It was like, at that point, I think there's only 3 women and maybe 20 men. It was all guys. And I just got hit with like dirty hair. And I'm like, did any of you motherfuckers shower this morning? They were mostly engineers and, you know, par for the course. Um, But yeah, the dirty hair one's tough.

Grace McCarrick [00:47:22]:
I think that most, most of the women who flex it in real life— I don't know about the internet— are really conscious about the dry shampoo and the gels and the mist and the night.

Diana Alt [00:47:34]:
Yeah, that's what I try to do. So, um, because I used to have to wash it every day, and then I hit a point where I didn't have to. Thank God. If I still had to wash it every day, probably wouldn't look this good, but yeah, because it's a little— it's some work.

Grace McCarrick [00:47:49]:
So, right.

Diana Alt [00:47:50]:
It's a lot of work. What do you think though? There was so many random— so much random discourse. What do you think that that post and the reaction to it revealed about how people are thinking about work right now?

Grace McCarrick [00:48:05]:
People feel like work is something— on the internet, people feel like work is something that is put upon them. That's a burden that they have to bear with as much grace as they possibly can, which is none. Um, and they think, they.

Diana Alt [00:48:23]:
Think, um.

Grace McCarrick [00:48:23]:
The amount of times that I see the word slavery in my comments, I'm like, you people need a dictionary. Signing a white-collar corporate employment contract is not slavery.

Diana Alt [00:48:37]:
You're making $173,000, Chad.

Grace McCarrick [00:48:40]:
Even if you're making $93,000, if you're making $76,000, I just talked to someone who is working in PR and just went from $32,000 to $40,000, which is a salary I had not, did not think I would hear in the last, I, you know, that was my starting salary. Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:49:00]:
I made more than that in 1999. So.

Grace McCarrick [00:49:08]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:49:08]:
It appears, it appears, but that's— yeah, it's a real thing. Yeah. How, um, do you teach on appearance and when you do consulting, or was that kind of like a one-shot thing? I'm curious the difference between, you know, we have the internet people and then we have the real life people that you work with. When you talk to people in real life about some of these things, um, how is that going? How are people in the real world perceiving it?

Grace McCarrick [00:49:33]:
Let me think. Am I doing it that often? I had one client, such a badass CEO in the Philippines, and I've worked with them for a couple of years, so a couple different levels. And I did a multi-day program with them and it was all about, it was like this specific group needed to uplevel. The CEO just needed them to come across more sophisticated. And so we just went at that in a bunch of different ways. And yeah, I brought Anjali in actually to to talk to them. And yeah, it was really— I think there's always going to be people who are like, I have this down pat. And then there will be people who go, oh, I didn't realize I could think about it like this.

Grace McCarrick [00:50:18]:
Gotcha. Like, for the most part, I'm not in these skills. I'm not trying to go, okay, I know you have this mental burden you carry from all of the things we have to think about and all the problems and all the stimulus. And now I— now I want you to add 20 more things to think about. I'm usually trying to go Okay, this thing that you think about this way, don't do it. Think about it this way instead.

Diana Alt [00:50:40]:
Yeah. I feel like the perspective check is, you know, 98% of my job I feel like is changing perspective. Oh, that's for sure. Right. Especially people's perspectives on themselves in the work that I do with most people. So I'm going to ask you like one more soft skill thing and then I have a couple of kind of lightning-ish rounds before we close.

Grace McCarrick [00:51:02]:
So. Hit it.

Diana Alt [00:51:03]:
The first one is, what soft skill do you think is going to matter a lot more in 5 years than it does.

Grace McCarrick [00:51:13]:
Today? I think, you know, I'm going to say, because we had a long talk about it last week, digital literacy. Being able to understand what's going on in the digital world and then translate that back out to people offline in a way that relates to the work you're doing.

Diana Alt [00:51:28]:
Yeah, I think that's good. And I think, I think that was a— I'm in, I'm actually in Grace's soft-skilled school, which we're gonna have the link. We'll put the link to that in the comments. So if somebody wants to try to join the next time it's open, you can. But digital literacy, my favorite thing that we did whenever you assigned that to us was talk about how do these things, how are the conversations different? In person versus LinkedIn versus TikTok, etc. That's really important, especially when you're working with a multi-generational workforce.

Grace McCarrick [00:52:04]:
So yeah, and you, you need to be able— there's so much noise. You need to be someone who's parsing through the noise and not adding to it.

Diana Alt [00:52:15]:
Yeah, definitely. And that's— it's something that a lot of people think can't be learned either. We're just used to thinking of some of our colleagues or friends or whoever are the ones that can put their finger on it. But there's no reason, no reason at all. If people are trying to practice this, like, go copy, go find a video, copy like 25 comments, dump it into ChatGPT, let it tell you, see if you notice the same trend. Like, it has never been easier to learn how to distill the themes down than it is right now.

Grace McCarrick [00:52:48]:
100%. And still It's such a highly valued skill.

Diana Alt [00:52:51]:
Yeah, it's a really good one. Well, my lightning round questions. First one is, what is the worst piece of career advice you've ever received?

Grace McCarrick [00:53:05]:
Hmm. The work will speak for itself.

Diana Alt [00:53:08]:
That is probably my top one. The work will speak for itself. What about something you've changed your— I stole this one from Adam Grant, who I love. What's something you've changed your mind about recently?

Grace McCarrick [00:53:26]:
Oh, I probably change— I have a strong life philosophy of spending a lot of time with people who challenge me in my thinking. Not necessarily that we have like hugely different value sets, but who have different experience and different perspectives and challenge me. So I would say I'm often changing changing my mind on things. Oh, good.

Diana Alt [00:53:51]:
That's called.

Grace McCarrick [00:53:54]:
Maturity and intellectual curiosity, honestly. I'm not going to— okay. What is something I recently changed my mind on? I mean, I'm talking about work so much now.

Diana Alt [00:54:09]:
I think it doesn't have to be work. Yeah.

Grace McCarrick [00:54:13]:
Well, I'm just saying, it's like one of the the sort of top conversations in my head. Oh, you know.

Diana Alt [00:54:22]:
What?

Grace McCarrick [00:54:22]:
Um, I've listened to a podcast that talks a lot about the Baldoni-Lively trial, and I felt very in one camp last year, and now I'm kind of.

Diana Alt [00:54:38]:
Like, I don't know. I think there's no way to know. I think all the people that are like, of course it's this— did you really read all that discovery? No, you didn't. Right there. No, you weren't. Right. Like, I can have a gut feeling, but yeah. And I, I try not to follow that too much, but it's hard to avoid if you're on the.

Grace McCarrick [00:55:01]:
Internet. Right, where the internet discourse is a completely different beast than what the actual trial's about.

Diana Alt [00:55:07]:
Yes. Yeah, for sure. Um, and people like— I find, I, I find that I've taught a lot of people about retaliation being illegal as a result of that, um, trial, because most people have never heard about that. Um, and so I'm like, okay, well, I'm teaching you some workplace stuff because of this crazy mess over here. I will do it all day.

Grace McCarrick [00:55:30]:
Yeah.

Diana Alt [00:55:30]:
Um, what else are you working on and how would you like people to connect with you?

Grace McCarrick [00:55:35]:
Ooh, so we're continuing to run the soft skills school. I'm not opening new enrollments until the end of March. But when I do, we'll sort of reset that. Anything else? I have a podcast episode for— on the Call HR podcast coming out tomorrow.

Diana Alt [00:55:56]:
Nice.

Grace McCarrick [00:55:56]:
You'll like that one. Michelle Vollberg, the CEO of Twill, is really cool. And then people can find me on TikTok, Grace for Personality Hires, Instagram, Grace_McCarick, LinkedIn, Grace McCarick, and my website, GraceMcCarick.com.

Diana Alt [00:56:12]:
Cool. I'll put all those things down in the show notes. Grace, thank you so much for coming and kind of educating people about the soft skills things. Thank you so much for just a great conversation. A great excuse to have a conversation. That's why I have podcasts now.

Grace McCarrick [00:56:26]:
Great. Love it.

Diana Alt [00:56:27]:
Love it.