Mindy Segal

There was a gentleman that I worked with at New York University, and we were doing a very large-scale, pretty disruptive transformation on the campus. I was trying, as I think female leaders often do, to do everything all at once and make certain that I was not letting any of those strings or threads drop. And he said to me, 'Mindy, there are glass balls, and there are rubber balls.' The rubber balls are the ones that you can let drop when you're juggling things, and they can roll under the couch, and they can collect dust, and one day you'll say, I haven't seen that in a while, and you can go look for it and grab it, and nothing bad is going to happen if the rubber ball hits the ground. But the glass balls are the ones that you have to keep up in the air, and those are the ones that you really need to focus on. I always remind people, whether it's with a colleague or someone that I'm doing management development with or a client, that we can't be everything all the time, and so it's really important to decide what your glass balls are at any time, and they can change, but decide what the glass balls are, and those are the ones that you really need to focus on.

I think as a woman who's been doing some form of this work for almost 3 decades, young women will come to me and ask how I keep it all together. I have 3 sons, and being a mom was absolutely my number one job through all of my career growth, but it was not easy trying to manage being a mom and being a leader to a very large decentralized team. Young women would come to me and say, 'You look like you're doing it so well,' and I would say, 'I'm not.' You need to let some things drop, and that needs to be okay, and you need to focus on what's most important to you at any given time. Trust in yourself that you're doing the right thing, and that the right moves will happen as you do those things. I think that we put extra pressure on ourselves because people keep different expectations of female leaders than they do male leaders. In doing that, we sometimes end up doing less instead of focusing on things one bite at a time. I use the analogy a lot that if you threw a big steak on a table in front of someone but gave them no utensils, they would have a very difficult time trying to manage the steak. But if you give them the tools to do the job properly, which in that case are a knife and a fork, they can cut the steak into bite-sized pieces, and then they can digest it. It's really important to look at your life and all of the things that you're trying to do as a leader in our field, which was traditionally a male-dominated field, and look at it as something that you can digest in smaller bites, which makes it much more manageable. Gaining confidence in yourself by knowing that you're getting those things done in a confident way is going to make you more confident as you move through the industry.

A lot of my current career focuses on management consulting in higher education, specifically around hospitality and dining as part of the culture of higher education. Students on campus obviously cannot think if they're not fed. As the world is shifting right now away from college as the only answer, colleges and universities are having to strategize and come up with some very unique ways to continue to grow the amenities and grow the experience of the student on a college campus. Some of the challenges really lie in keeping that affordable for students, helping to make certain that students aren't having to choose between feeding themselves and their academics. Food security is another huge issue right now with people in general, but with young people on college campuses especially. We need to make certain that the clients on college campuses, which are often the people who are running student affairs or the people that are running the finances and the leadership on a campus, are confident that they can move forward with that type of strategy and do it in a way that's not going to be on the backs of students. There are a lot of unique challenges in higher education right now, and being able to be an ear and to empower people who, you know, this is not their first industry or their first knowledge base, being able to empower them to understand what they're doing is really a great challenge.