Ingrid Hu Dahl’s journey to becoming a great leader started when she noticed how different she was from her peers.
In her book, Sun Shining on Morning Snow: A Memoir of Identity, Loss, and Living Boldly, the leadership coach and speaker shares how grappling with her identity impacted her career, and why she hopes other leaders and HR pros will approach leadership with empathy.
“This is a leadership book. It’s a book about how I came to become a leader, from the lens of identity, and choice, and choosing to learn every step of the way and to choose to connect with people despite all of the series of projections,” Dahl told HR Brew.
We chatted with Dahl about more insights from her book.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you write this book?
I absolutely wrote this book to lay bare my authentic journey and invite people to step into my shoes as I experienced xenophobia, and how I slowed down as a child being inquisitive about being asked the question, “What are you?” every day by typically white adults. And this search for identity and trying to fit in, but not belonging anywhere. I didn’t belong with the white kids or along with the Asian kids, and it continued throughout my life, and so I got really comfortable being an outsider. But I was very bold, and there’s been also a lot of rejection and loss in my life, which a lot of people can relate to. And, so, I’ve just been seeing a lot of people say, like, “Wow, I really saw myself in her story,” and this is a cis-white Jewish man down the street who’s in his 70s.
I ultimately wanted this to be a couple of different things. One was, how do we help, through my story and my lens, bring us closer to humanity?...There’s also such a huge reconciliation story between a mother/daughter anchored in sexuality. I absolutely struggled with my mother, who did not want me to be gay, and I’m absolutely a lesbian, and she struggled with that…It’s also this painful connective point around coming out, coming of age, losing my mom, because I’ve chosen myself, not what she wants, but what I who I am, and before she ultimately passes from cancer, which is a really beautiful, dramatic part of the book. She has, and we have, this beautiful, transformational experience together of forgiveness and healing, and intergenerational healing.
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How did those experiences impact the work you do?
Being somebody who’s been in learning and development for about 20 years, and leadership development for the more recent five years being an executive coach, I have connected with a lot of people and have experimented with a lot of different learning solutions around behavior, and around what does good leadership, or empathetic/high emotional intelligence, high self-awareness, look like in the workplace. How do leaders actually create conditions for people to thrive?
People were like, “Why didn’t you write a leadership book, or a book around inclusive leadership, or something that reflected your expertise?”...All of the vignettes that make us who we are continue to shape how we lead, and how we choose to belong, and how we model to our teams, how to interact with one another.
What are some HR takeaways from the book?
When I work in these corporate settings and run teams, I tend to be known for my empathetic leadership and people want to follow and be in my teams…We choose to believe in one another, and I recognize and value that that is a choice every day that you’re making, and sometimes you’re going to have a day where you’re like, “I feel like shit. I don’t like the company, or I just am cranky.” And, that’s okay. But to be seen and to be able to show up full of your fallibility, or mistakes you might make, not knowing how to do something and need to ask for help—those things are important to feel safe.
For people who are curious about this particular way of leading from somebody’s perspective who grew up as, “the outsider, the other,” is a very telling example of transformational leadership from this point of view, and to lay there and understand all of these things that made me who I am, that shaped my lens. I hope it will be inspiring to people who are leading differently, and have come up, from growing up, multiracial, multicultural, bilingual…I felt like sharing that story from the beginning to present was more important than writing a straight up leadership book.