North Star Leaders Podcast

Lindsay Pedersen

The world needs what only your business can bring, and as a leader, it's your job to deliver. But where do you focus? Where do you direct your time, your team, your budget, and your emotional energy? We're learning this together on the North Star Leaders Podcast. In this podcast, I talk to purpose-driven leaders about the choices that they make to create audacious economic value while also realizing their distinctive purpose. I'm Lindsay Pedersen, brand strategist, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand, and host of the North Star Leaders Podcast. Let's get to it.

Today I am really happy to be joined by Maria Colacurcio. Maria is CEO of Syndio, the platform dedicated to helping companies ensure pay equity and fair practices across the board. Maria has also been a leader at Starbucks and was co-founder of Smartsheet. Maria, welcome to the show.

Maria Colacurcio

Thank you for having me.

Lindsay Pedersen

I'm so glad to have you. Maria, to start us off, what is your favorite thing about what you do?

Maria Colacurcio

Oh, my goodness. I think my favorite thing about what I do is that I get to work at the intersection of where I have strengths and what I'm passionate about. I think that's a pretty rare thing, a rare opportunity that doesn't come along so often in our career. The ability to find something that you're good at, which is building. I love building. I love building companies. I love taking ideas and turning them into things. And then having that crossover with something that really matters to you and gives you purpose is a massive privilege.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, I love that. What is it called? Is it Ikigai? There's like the Venn diagram where it's the thing where you're really strong and the thing that the world needs.

Maria Colacurcio

Exactly. It's so interesting that you bring that up.

So my daughter, she's 17, she actually told me about Ikigai. She was the first one that brought it to my attention. And it's this beautiful intersection of what the world needs, what you can do and actually earn a living and where you're strong. And it's just this really interesting story about how to look for your life's purpose in a way that intersects all of those different things.

So, it is a beautiful philosophy. I love it.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that your 17-year-old daughter is the one who educated you about that framework.

Maria Colacurcio

You can learn so much from kids and teens and toddlers if you're just willing to open your mind to it.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, and what lights them up. It's so cool. I've heard you talk about how optimism is a leader's superpower, and especially true during volatile times. What is it about optimism that is so useful when you're a leader?

Maria Colacurcio

Optimism is so powerful. And it's powerful because when you're in the frame of mind where you're optimistic, you're open to outcomes that you wouldn't necessarily see if you were in a toxic or negative mindset. And I say that because when you're optimistic, you think about things as opportunities. So, a lot of times I'll tell the team, you know, I'm out kissing frogs, I'm turning over every rock, I'm looking for something that doesn't necessarily present as a massive opportunity for the business, but it could be. And I think it's that could be, it's that optimism, it's that manifestation of something good is going to come out of all of this effort that ends up coming back around to you in ways that you wouldn't expect. So, I think it's optimism, but I also think it is the way that optimism presents opportunities that you wouldn't necessarily see.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's like the opportunities will be there, but your visibility to them requires a mindset of optimism. Otherwise, they just won't be in your line of sight.

Maria Colacurcio

Exactly. So, at Syndio, we have a really strong advisory board, and these are folks that I count on for mentorship, advice, coaching, all sorts of things. We've embedded them into our business in a way that's really powerful. And one of our advisors is a gentleman in New York. He's an expert in financial services, just absolutely had this storied career, iconic career in banking and financial services. And he said to me once, he said, there's no Hebrew word for coincidence. That really stuck with me. And I think that sort of plays into this mindset and notion of there are all of these things happening. There's all these signals that you're able to get on a daily basis. And if you go into that with a positive framework and outlook, you're going to be able to catch more of them than if you're heads down in a negative space.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that, that there is no such word as coincidence in the whole Hebrew language because there is no such thing.

Maria Colacurcio

And I never, to be honest to the listeners, I've never embedded him on that. Actually, it's not true. I don't want to know. Me too. So, I've gone with it.

Lindsay Pedersen

So please, Hebrew speakers out there, do not disabuse us of this powerful truth or not, because we're getting juice from it. Yay. I love that. Well, and I also hear that there's like a generativeness that requires optimism, that coming to a place of like actually seeing the sacred third option, seeing the thing that is not obvious, that place of opening to an opportunity just can't be there without the optimism. And it also is like, I think, like when you're in a place where you don't feel safe, and maybe optimism and safety almost go hand in hand. Maybe they're sort of the same thing in some ways. You don't see it because you're protecting your animal body from predators. So you're just looking inward. You're not seeing those things that are out there, which feels really powerful to me as well. If you want to be generative, if you want to have creative solutions, you need to kind of cultivate your own optimism so that you see those solutions.

Maria Colacurcio

Yes. And you have to be open to them.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. I've heard you talk also about postmortems and how at Syndio, you're big on postmortems. Say more about postmortems. What does it look like when you do postmortems at Syndio?

Maria Colacurcio

Postmortems are really important from a broader perspective and philosophy, which is people need to feel okay with the concept of failure. If you don't give people the ability and leniency to fail, then there's going to be a lot of bad behavior going on. I think as you grow and scale a company, and we certainly have experienced this, in that we've identified moments and pockets where when you get to the root of the problem, it's wow, our people don't feel like they have room to fail. They don't feel like they have room to make mistakes, and so there's all this bad behavior happening. I think postmortems, when run well, can really hit that, and they can start to make people feel like, let's talk about why this didn't work, and let's talk about it again, bringing in some optimism, bringing in a perspective of what can we do to make this better next time, but giving people that freedom to feel like it's okay to get really innovative and try something that may not be a winner, because we're going to postmortem it, and we're going to talk about it, and we're going to figure out what pieces and parts of it we can take into the next thing that did go well, even though maybe the project overall didn't go well. And I think that's something that we've just learned over time, because we've made a lot of mistakes there in terms of making sure that people feel like they have that freedom to fail.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. It's one thing to say, failure is important. It's okay to fail, but it's such a scary thing for a person to stick their neck out that you almost have to go deeper than just telling them that failure is okay. You actually have to kind of show them with something like a postmortem that, look how much we just got because of that failure. Either we succeed or we learn. And because we do these postmortems, you can believe that it's going to be okay to fail. It seems like a really powerful demonstration of the value, like you're kind of putting your money where your mouth is. Yes, we really do value failure because of what it teaches us. And this postmortem that you're going to participate in and help us to gain fruit from shows just how useful that failure was.

Maria Colacurcio

And the key to making it work is you have to have leaders who are willing to conduct postmortems when they were the ones making the decision that ultimately did not go well.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh, say more about that.

Maria Colacurcio

If you do postmortems and it always lands on the backs of the people, whether it's the IECs or the middle management to own that failure, but they never see the executives doing that. They never see me as the CEO owning failure or owning areas where I made a decision or I pushed in a market that wasn't the right direction, or we thought we had product market fit and we weren't quite there. We had more tuning to do. There's so many decisions you're making on a daily basis. And in order for this to really sink in, executives have to own failures just as much, if not more than the people in the company. People have to be able to see that, wow, Maria just stood up in front of the whole company and said that was a mistake, this decision that she made, and here's how she's revenue in it. And here's how the direction and commitment of the business is changing because of the learning that inspires tremendous confidence on the part of people. Not only that there's a plan and a strategy and leaders that have a strong point of view, but also, again, they're able to have that understanding that owning failure is not weakness because it absolutely is not weakness. The other thing I always say is that you should be open to changing your mind because changing your mind is a sign of strength, not a sign of weakness. And I love the book ‘’But What If We're Wrong?’’ It's a great book. And if you flip it front to back, it sort of turns upside down in how the title is positioned. And it's just a great book that gives a bunch of historical anecdotes about things where we as society, we're certain of something and we're wrong. And so asking yourself that question as you're in the throes of making decisions, but what if we're wrong? What if this is actually something completely different? Gives again that mental flexibility to turn something inside out or upside down.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that. Okay. This is a book that I'm going to read, but what if we're wrong?

Maria Colacurcio

Thinking about the present as if it were the past.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's this guy. Chuck Klosterman. Okay. We'll add that to the show notes for listeners as well. Cool. It also, I mean, a word that came up for me when you were describing that as curiosity, that if you can kind of like tap into your own natural curiosity, then you also can bring forth this kind of like, we're going to learn from this. What can we learn? And there's a generative quality to that as well. And it also makes me think of how the whole idea of failure is so important for innovation. And we know that intellectually. And so most companies will espouse that as a value. But there are companies that like kind of talk out of both sides of their mouth. Like on one hand, like try to, you know, fail and fail fast and we'll learn. But on the other hand, if they're not actually modeling that from the top down, then it's hard to have credibility from employees. So, to your point about the leadership team giving air cover to everybody else by being the ones to do that postmortem to kind of like, oh, this is what we learned by it. This is kind of just tracing the decisions we made. And now we know this thing that we didn't know before. How much more powerful are we now as a result of that?

Maria Colacurcio

You're bringing up two things that pop into my mind. So, we really strongly believe in the concept of having mission and values and the values as a company that map into the behavior. So it's not just something you put on the wall and you don't ever surface again, but they actually every single all hands that we have, we have them every other week. We start by putting our values up at the beginning of every meeting just to remind people and ground people in what are the values that we think about as we push ourselves to think about communication and how we behave. And one of the things we talked about in the early days was curiosity and this idea that you're referencing. And what we noticed is that we needed to reframe the value a little bit. And so, the way we talk about it now is really around digging deeper. So how do you ask questions that unlock information that isn't readily apparent? So, inquiry and discovery are really the keys to that. And they're the keys to solving problems creatively. And when you couch that in the word curiosity, that can mean a million different things to people. And so, when you add that additional context of when we say curiosity, we mean dig deeper. We mean ask questions to unlock information. Go that one step further. And I think it's important to have that context and that clarity when you're thinking about what are the behaviors that you want to really become the things that define your company. And I think that the second piece that popped into my head as you were talking is the thing about failure. That's really how you earn trust. So, you earn trust because you've got each other's backs and you admit when you make mistakes and that from those mistakes, you're going to learn and you're going to try again. So that's really the way that you get to trust as well is, you know, there's a lot of studies around vulnerability and trust and candor and trust and all these things. But I think a clear way that you're able to earn trust is to own things, to own when you make a mistake or when you screw up.

Lindsay Pedersen

That is so profound. And I can think of that in kind of almost every context of a relationship, whether it's among employees, between leaders and managers, between parents and children, between friends, that the trust really results from willingness to be vulnerable and to be real and to go there, to claim, you know, to actually own what is the thing that I did or that I'm feeling and not distance from it, but to actually like, use that as a stake in the ground. And so, you accrue trust with employees, but also, I imagine with customers, with investors, with partners, that principle is so powerful for any relationship. It really resonated for me once you said that at Syndio, we don't overemphasize research. We've hired super strong thought leaders. So instead of doing research for every decision, let's trust our internal judgment. I'm really intrigued by that. Talk more about what it's meant for Syndio to trust the judgment of the team and sort of a shoe over analysis of decisions.

Maria Colacurcio

It's another value. And this, again, this comes from us, I think, as a company, getting to a place in the early days where we made things way more complicated than they needed to be. And again, you know, we started as a pay equity company and our methodology is the cornerstone to why we're successful, because it is a methodology that can stand up in the court of law. When you think about pay equity analysis, you need to make sure all of that math is absolutely correct, that you've got quality and assurances built into the product, that your methodology is sound and can stand up in a court of law. And so, all of that is so important. But I think what ends up happening as you expand to different types of products, that deep complexity can oftentimes lead you down a path where you overcomplicate things. And so, for us, something that we're sort of hammering on right now and trying to embed into our culture is that we take pride in turning those really difficult things into something simple and elegant. And we're passionate about that continuous improvement. And so, when I speak about research, I think we do a tremendous amount of research with our own customers. And because we, through our products, are analyzing 8.5 million employees across the Fortune 2000 as our customers, it gives us an incredible opportunity and sounding board amongst those customers to do very, very targeted research as to what the problems are that they're trying to solve. So, when I say we don't do research, it's more the generic type of research that you often see companies spinning their wheels on. We're much more specific because we've got this perfect group of stakeholders in our customers that are very devoted to us and they'll talk to us. We call them, they'll pick up the phone. We have an incredibly high retention rate and an incredibly high NPS. So, when we talk about things like research, it's let's prioritize talking to the people, both internally, our thought leaders and experts, but also our customers, because our customers are the ones that are going to lead us in the right direction. And oftentimes where companies can go a little bit astray is when a customer asks for something, again, going back to that concept of digging deeper, we really need this feature. Okay. We hear you. You really need this feature. If you don't dig deeper and you don't ask, what problem are you trying to solve? As an enterprise business to business software company, you couldn't spend your entire lifetime just building features for the enterprise because they're so customized and specific. But if you do that thing, which is dig deeper and ask a few questions to understand what they're trying to solve, that's what gives you the opportunity to now unlock, kick open the door and get to the place where you can simplify something that may be very complex.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that. I think this idea of understanding kind of the problem behind the stated problem is so big, not only for delighting the customer, but also for the business model soundness. When you ask a customer or when a customer requests a feature, it might be that they don't know what it is that they need to solve the problem. And they're kind of thinking of a feature as like the easiest thing to reference. But it might be a totally different feature that's needed to solve the problem. Or it might be that a different feature needs to be removed. It might actually make the product simpler. It might actually save you money. Not that that's the goal. But by having kind of the humility to hear what's the thing behind the stated thing and really get like empathetic and deepen that inquiry, it leads to something that superficial research never would be able to.

Maria Colacurcio

Exactly. And that's where we've been in terms of starting a company around solving pay inequity. So, making sure people weren't paid differently because of something like gender, race, or ethnicity. And then giving our customers a roadmap on how to solve those issues, both from an economic standpoint, so remediation paying people to get them to parity, but also from a non-economic standpoint. So, looking at the root cause, what are the policies and behaviors that are driving those issues? And can you change that at the root? Our customers really led us down this path of we need a recommendation engine because in a lot of cases, we just want some guidance on what to pay. What do we pay people? And there's so much discretion in those decisions of starting pay. What do we pay people? We have ranges that are now public. So, companies are dealing with candidates coming in and having a ton more information. How do we articulate at the recruiter, hiring manager, people manager level, here's why you are where you are in range. And here are the things that in our company drive pay. Here are the reasons we pay what we pay. And with this era of transparency that's upon us in terms of the EU directive on pay transparency passed after 10 years of debate, which impacts any company that's operating globally, you see about a third of employees across the United States that are impacted by pay range transparency. So, you have to post the range if you're advertising for a job. So, this is now becoming very commonplace that companies are asked, why do you pay what you pay? Or if I'm low in range, why? And our customers really led us there to the degree that they wanted a, in the moment when that decision was being made, give us some guardrails, give us some articulation of our policies, tell us what to pay, what to offer. And that's really a result from listening and being really specific about understanding the problems people were having and not necessarily what that feature function was that they were asking for.

Lindsay Pedersen

It inspires so much loyalty from customers to feel like they're deeply heard, that there is a true understanding and resonance that you have with them, that you're not kind of just taking orders from them, but you actually deeply want to solve the root cause of what's causing the problem. So, in the world of DEI, DEI was so topical, and now people are hating on it. And I'm sure there will be another pendulum swing so that DEI is hot again. How do you as a CEO navigate ups and downs of trendiness when you're out to do something that's bigger than this trend, that transcends kind of the buzzword of DEI? How do you kind of have kind of a calm in that storm?

Maria Colacurcio

It's an interesting question because as the CEO of a company, you have to be on top of trends. The EU directive is a great example. That is a trend that's happening right now with tremendous urgency. Companies need solutions to help them report on their unadjusted pay gap and other things that are embedded into that directive. I think with DEI, we were never a DEI company, but what we were was an analytics company that was offering enterprises a way to, from an agnostic perspective, so software is agnostic, to look at how are people moving in an organization? So, there's pay equity, equal pay for equal work. But then there's also the unadjusted pay gap, which is a reflection of movement. So, are all your women up at the top and all your men are down in lower ranking roles? That would be a large unadjusted gap in favor of women. Most companies, it's the reverse. And so we always took a perspective that without favoring or disfavoring any particular group, which is why DEI has come under such tremendous attack, we are offering a picture of your organization in terms of how people are moving, how we would expect and predict them to be moving based on the things that you value and why you pay and promote for the things that matter in your organization. And are they moving as expected?

So, if you have a group, for example, of white men that is not moving as predicted and there's a statistically significant gap, we would flag that group because we're not favoring or disfavoring any one particular group over another. And I think that's where analytics and the power of analytics and software is really tremendous because now, if you're a customer of Syndio and you're leveraging our suite for workplace equity, you can use those analytics to talk to the Robbie Starbucks of the world to say, hey, I hear you're coming at us with an activist proposal that we're establishing a quota to have more women in leadership. So, what that means is you're hiring people because they're women would be his stance. And we're going to show you the analytics that actually prove that we're not. We're hiring and promoting women at the exact rate that we ought to be. And so, I think that's where software and analytics can really play a powerful role because they can show that you're not favoring or disfavoring any particular group or you do have gaps that are because of something like gender. And those are things that you should be able to address. So, I personally think as long as you stay the course and you're creating solutions that companies need and you're solving problems that companies want to solve, that's where you're going to see success over time.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, I can see how the analytics, the software kind of defangs the idea that there might be some ulterior something that people don't like that a certain word or phrase might evoke. And also, yeah, at the end of the day, a trend is by definition not something that's going to be enduring. So, what is the thing that's enduring that companies do have an interest in nurturing? People feeling included, people feeling that they're being taken care of in the way that they should be, all of those things. It's sort of like aside from the buzzword, those things are kind of evergreen and needed. And so, if you're addressing those things that it sort of just makes that go away, it just doesn't really matter anymore because these are authentic needs to be solved. And you're in a position, you have a product that uniquely is situated to solve them.

Maria Colacurcio

And I think what people need is they need to understand the largest line item on their P&L, which is headcount. And are they paying too much or too little for the skills, experience, and characteristics that they value as a company? And it's looking for that signal through the noise because for every company, it's a little bit different. That's why skills ontologies are becoming so popular and so prevalent and everyone's trying to crack that nut because companies want to understand, in particular, CFOs and CHROs want to understand what are the things we value? What are the objectives we have as a business? And how do we pay people in a way that gets more of that? And you see this right now in a really big way with companies that need more AI and ML talent. And they're compensating that talent in a way that reflects that as a business priority. And so, we need to be able to offer solutions to companies to do this across all of the things that matter to them. So how do they make sure they're optimizing that line item to the degree that drives business outcomes?

Lindsay Pedersen

High stakes.

It's the biggest line item, yeah. I know that Maria, outside of work, you have seven children, you have a very rich life that exists outside of the work that you do as a CEO for Syndio. What are the things that you do, the disciplines, the practices that support you and support your capacity, given that you have like eight jobs?

You have a lot on your plate. How do you do it?

Maria Colacurcio

Oh, my goodness. For starters, I have a super supportive partner. So my husband does a ton at home with the kids and he drives them around to practices and to cheer and to cross country and all things. So that's number one. Number two, during COVID, we built a gym in our garage and that's a complete hack because fitness training is really important to me and it's how I get my energy and it's where I do a lot of my thinking and I'm super competitive. We can compete in these fitness competitions, which is also sort of our husband and wife hobby that we love doing.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh, I love that.

Maria Colacurcio

And if I had to commute to a gym, there's just no way. So this idea, and luckily for the listeners, they don't have to see me right now, but the idea that I can get up at five, do an early workout in the garage, hit the ground running, coming into work after getting the kids out the door, it's all so compact. And that's not to say that I don't deeply believe in also spending time in the office, I do. But being able to have a bunch of those elements, really compact and convenient, is a huge hack and something that helps a ton.

Lindsay Pedersen

As hacks go, that's like the mother of all hacks because you're combining time savings with something that's energy unlocking for the day and that feeds your spirit, feeds your relationship with your partner, gives you movement and therefore endorphins. Like that's a super hack.

Maria Colacurcio

And I've applied that to larger meetings where I think normally it's a little bit scary to do so. So, for example, when we have a board meeting, we like to plan a workout before the board meeting with the board. So, this last board meeting, we were in San Francisco and we all did a dish walk. And so, you're combining movement and you're combining things that are going to help you feel better over the long-term with work. And I think that's really important and it's really critical to live that way. You've got to integrate these components. And I think it's super cliche, this whole work-life balance, work-life integration. People are trying to come up with terms for it. And it's just like, throw the terms out the window because it's going to be so different for everybody. But you have to look at your own life and what matters. And what matters to me, number one, is my family. And so, I'm going to do whatever it takes to make sure I get the right amount of time with my family and what the right amount of time for me might differ from the right amount of time for someone else. So, for me, for example, last week I was in the UK for work. It's a really big market for us right now. And my son had a cross-country meet, but my husband was there and his parents were there. So, it's making sure that somebody's at these things. I know that I'm not going to be able to be at every single one of them, but the next one that comes around, if I'm in town, I am at it. It's figuring out what is your capacity and willingness and having conversations with your kids too. I sit down and I talk to my 16-year-old, I have identical twins, and they do competitive cheer. They have six competitions a year. And they're like, mom, it's really important to us that you're at every single one because we look for you in the audience. We have to make eye contact with you. That's what calms us down and gets us in the right headspace. So, I'll be damned if I'm not at every single one, I'm there no matter what. My son's like, I have 60 soccer games a year. If you could make it to half, that would be great. So, I make it to half. So, it's also a conversation with your kids, respecting their point of view, and if they feel strongly that they need you at something, you drop everything and you're at that thing. But I think what parents sometimes miss is kids are different. And so, what matters to my 16-year-old twins might not be as important for my 14-year-old son who's doing cross-country for the first time. And so, he'd rather, you know, we go for a run on Sunday, he values that time more than if I make every single meet.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. Oh, I love that. And also, it strikes me how dynamic that is, too, because what's important when they're 16 will likely be different from when they're 19. And I mean, when my daughter was in second grade, it was so important that I came to the Valentine's party in the middle of the day on a Wednesday. But my God, right now at age 15, she doesn't want me anywhere near her school in the middle of the day on Wednesday. It really does require that constant conversation because the priorities are not fixed. They're going to evolve as they evolve.

Maria Colacurcio

It shows to listen to them and value them and value their perspective as human beings. And it's interesting when you sit down and you take the time to do that because the answers are a bit surprising. The number of times my kids have said, oh my gosh, I'm so glad you don't hover or you don't, you know, there's like little important traditions. Like we all sit down for dinner together every night. And sometimes that dinner is 12 minutes long. And most of the time it's a vat of pasta and there's like no sandwiches. But what matters is that like tradition of that ordinary thing that over time becomes extraordinary because you do it so often and it's very mundane. And those are the things that they start to value. And when you ask them, where do I need to be so that you feel seen and valued? The answers are very surprising. So, I definitely plus one that conversation for folks to have with their kids, because it might take a lot of pressure off that you don't even realize it's there.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that so much. This has been such a neat conversation. I have five rapid fire questions for you as we end. Are you ready for some like one word answer? Okay. Ready. What was your first job?

Maria Colacurcio

I worked at a kids talent agency. I mean, other than babysitting, my sister and I babysat forever. So that would probably be the first job. But my first office job, I worked at a kids talent agency and my job was to call all the parents whose kids hadn't been cast. And so, I got screamed at, yelled at, you know, it was just this long list. And I would have to call the parents who hadn't heard from the agency in a long time and tell them why their kid wasn't getting.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh my God. That's like worthy of a whole podcast right there. So well, on another conversation, I want to ask you more about that. Okay. What, if any, nicknames do you have?

Maria Colacurcio

Well, my team will really love this one because I'm constantly trying to give myself nicknames. I wanted them to all call me Cola. That was my nickname at Smartsheet. It just didn't catch on. I changed my Slack name to Cola and just got mocked mercilessly because they said you can't nickname yourself. So...Okay. Well, we're going to go. My quest to have a nickname.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. If you did not live in the United States, what country would you live in?

Maria Colacurcio

Italy, hands down.

Lindsay Pedersen

What is your favorite way to work out?

Maria Colacurcio

Oh, my goodness. So, I trained for these fitness races called Hyrox with my husband and it's strength, conditioning, heavy weights. I love iron. I love lifting. I love barbells. But it requires a lot of running too. So, we also run a lot.

Lindsay Pedersen

But are you running to enhance the strength training or are you strength training to enhance the running or both?

Maria Colacurcio

The race is running plus eight stations that require you to be pretty strong, like pushing a slide, doing lunges. So, it's a great mix. It's a great training mix in order to be good at the sport. If you call it a sport, I don't know, these fitness races, you have to be strong and you have to be somewhat quick.

Lindsay Pedersen

Say the name of the race again.

Maria Colacurcio

What is it called again? It's called Hyrox, H-Y-R-O-X. My colleague started doing them too. And his daughter said, if you have to spell it, it's not a sport.

Lindsay Pedersen

Sounds pretty bad-ass to me. Okay. And lastly, what is your favorite food?

Maria Colacurcio

Pasta and meatballs. We do Sunday dinner meatballs. Gnocchi maybe? I'm a sucker for it.

Lindsay Pedersen

Wonderful. Well, this has been so great, Maria.

Where can folks find you online if they want to learn about you or Syndio?

Maria Colacurcio

I would say LinkedIn is probably the best.

Lindsay Pedersen

LinkedIn. Okay. Okay, good. And we'll add your link to the show notes. Perfect.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

Maria Colacurcio

Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

Lindsay Pedersen

Thanks for listening to this episode of North Star Leaders. Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app. If you know of a North Star Leader whose insights would be valuable for this community, please message me on ironcladbrandstrategy.com. Also on that website are show notes, transcripts, and a way to sign up for our monthly newsletter. I hope you join us again for another episode of North Star Leaders.