#38: Responsible Leadership with Dr. Marisol Capellan

Dr. Marisol Capellan is an internationally recognized and award-winning educator, TEDx speaker, executive coach, and corporate trainer. She is the Founder of The Capellan Institute, a leadership, coaching, and corporate training company specializing in workplace culture, diversity, equity & inclusion, and soft skills development. Dr. Capellan is a former lecturer at the University of Miami, Miami Herbert Business School lecturer where she taught management and organizational behavior classes and served as the associate director of their Masters in Leadership program. She holds a doctoral degree in Higher Education Leadership and a Masters of Management with Specialization in Leadership from the University of Miami.

Her dissertation focus was on the trajectory of women to leadership positions. As an Afro-Latina, mother, and immigrant, she has faced and witnessed many of the institutional and systemic barriers and biases that Black women face in their career trajectory to leadership roles, which sparked her passion for women’s empowerment and the need to increase the representation of women in positions of power. As a result, she published her book; Leadership is a Responsibility, about her career journey experience as a Black Hispanic woman in Academia, the stories of Black women in the workplace, and the need for responsible leaders to create a more equitable society where minorities can belong and thrive.

In addition, her personal story of resilience has been featured on CNN and Telemundo as an unstoppable woman, where she discussed how her mindset helped her life and career trajectory as an immigrant in the United States.

Top 3 Takeaways

1. Business is personal. Each team member is having their own experience at work. Resist the urge to think collective members of any subgroup are having an identical experience.
2. Take action. Active sympathy requires leaders not only to listen but to take action. Asking others to ignore unfair treatment or asking them to do your job is not leadership.
3. Be brave. Recognize that we have longstanding, systemic issues to overcome. Expect subtle and not-so-subtle pushback when you instill fair leadership practices.

From the Source

“I always wanted to turn my dissertation into a book where I can speak to women and tell them about what happens in the workplace, how can they prepare, what are the pitfalls, and at the same time encourage leaders to know about the experiences of women in the workplace.”

“It happens so often. Sometimes leaders are so disconnected from the organizations and they just expect the managers to do the right thing, and sometimes you don't know what they're doing.”

“There is this texturism that happens within our group, and there is also colorism where people that are lighter skin get better treatment or are seen as more valuable than people that have darker skin, and that goes all the way back to colonization.“

“Sometimes leaders, when they have a diverse teams, they usually validate the experience of the majority within that team.”

“Usually what happens is, at least the women that I interview from my book, they will say, ‘well, all of a sudden I'm treated differently because I'm the problem.’ ‘How come you cannot get along with everybody else?’ ‘How come you are the only one having that experience?’”

“Leaders need to have the openness to others, people's experiences and perspectives because everybody is different, and that will make you a better leader. If you know that somebody else is having a different experience in your team, you'll be able to rectify that, manage that behavior, see what's going on, maybe implement new team norms or team guidelines.”

Connect with Marisol

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marisolcapellan/

Website: https://marisolcapellan.com/

Leadership is a Responsibility: How to Become an Inclusive Leader in the Modern Workplace by Understanding the Lived Experiences of Black Women and Afro-Latinas at Work (book): https://amzn.to/3oW0hJM