“It’s great to be bossy, but that doesn’t make you a good leader”, Mary Ricketts said with a smile, as she sipped her coffee.
What she called "bossiness" was actually an early sign of her leadership potential, and both her upbringing and her experience in business and nonprofit molded and shaped her into the woman who became the founder and CEO of Turning Point Training and Development.
She pointed to her dad as foundational in building her principles and work ethic. If she wanted ice cream, she had to work for it. She lined up her dad’s shoes and polished them for 25 cents a pair. She recalled her dad teaching her that if your job starts at 10:00 a.m., you arrive at 9:45 a.m. to get prepared. If you’re off at 5:00 p.m., you work all the way until 5:00 p.m.
Ricketts fondly remembered her mom always looking polished, even at home, and credited her mom and aunt with understanding how to present well.
“Executive presence is so much more than head to toe, but that’s a good place to start because we are visual people," she said.
Early mentors saw potential in Ricketts as a 23-year-old. She was expecting her first child and working in telecommunications with AT&T.
“It was my ability to talk and communicate with people, whether you came into our office looking like you had a million bucks, or like you just came from the grocery store,” Ricketts said.
She identified one of the biggest challenges to leadership to be a lack of communication skills. Ricketts warmly recalled her Pastor saying, “Oh my gosh girl, if you don’t learn how to season your words with grace...”
This led Ricketts to sharpen the skill of delivering criticism softly, using phrases like, “Walk me through how you made that decision”.
Asking more questions instead of just telling them what they should have done is leadership, not bossing.
Well-established in her career, professionals and companies began asking Ricketts to teach budgeting, networking, and public speaking. As she took on these engagements, she found herself coming alive in the role of coaching. She felt that she had found her professional calling, and in 2019, Turning Point Training and Development was launched.
Ricketts has worked with all kinds of leaders -- men, women, executives and mid-level managers. She is a firm believer that women need to show up as themselves professionally and as leaders, whatever that authentic self is and however it differs from their male counterparts. That diversity is what makes the whole organization greater.
She expanded, ‘When we think of diversity, we go to race, ethnicity, and gender. One of the beauties of diversity is making sure you are surrounded by people that have different experiences than you, different backgrounds than you, different lifestyles and lenses.”
One of the impacts Ricketts was most proud of was serving on various boards in the community, and seeing that by the time she left her service, the board had more diversity than when she arrived.
“Impact to me is when we can leave it better than we found it," she said "We have to leave it better than we found it. When I walk out of a room, what I’d like people to say is that I was bold, I was honest, and I helped them transform,” she said.
Read more about Mary’s services and approach at her website:
tptrainingcenter.com/
(913) 228-2250