You Have More Control Than You Think
In this episode of The Impostor Syndrome Files, we talk about how to take greater ownership of your professional experience. My guest this week is Laura Massetti, founder & CEO of Real Work Ready, who helps early-career professionals build the skills they need to navigate the workplace with confidence.
Laura shares her journey from a successful corporate career to building her own business in Italy. We explore what happens when our professional identity becomes intertwined with our sense of self and why changing our environment can create the space to reexamine who we are and what we want.
We also discuss the unwritten rules that make the workplace feel so confusing, especially as AI changes how early-career professionals learn and grow. Laura shares how feedback, mentorship and stronger workplace skills can help us feel less at the mercy of others and recognize that we have more control than we think.
About My Guest
Laura Massetti is the Founder and CEO of Real Work Ready™ — the operating system for the first five years of work. A two-time C-level executive, Laura spent 15 years hiring, managing, and writing the performance reviews early-career professionals are trying to navigate.
She had succeeded mostly by accident — by access, by being in the right rooms at the right time. Then she left New York, moved to Veneto in northern Italy, and started over. In that stillness, she found the question that changed everything: not how do I train people better, but what are managers actually evaluating? The answer was clear. It had always been clear. Nobody had ever written it down. So she did.
That document became Real Work Ready™ — and The Performance Model Framework™, the six competencies every manager scores, whether they say so or not.
Laura holds an MBA from Baruch College and has completed executive education at Harvard Business School and Imperial College London.
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Connect with Laura:
Website: realworkready.com
Free resource — The Manager Feedback Decoder (the 5 phrases managers say and what they actually mean): realworkready.com/decoder
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti
Podcast: Real Work Ready on YouTube — youtube.com/@Realworkreadyhq
Instagram: @realworkready
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Connect with Kim and The Impostor Syndrome Files:
Join the free Impostor Syndrome Challenge.
Learn more about the Leading Humans discussion group
Join the Slack channel to learn from, connect with and support other professionals.
Schedule time to speak with Kim Meninger directly about your questions/challenges.
Websites: https://kimmeninger.com
Transcript
Kim Meninger
Welcome, Laura. I'm so excited to have you here, and I'd love to start by inviting you to tell us a little bit about yourself.
Laura Massetti
Thanks, Kim. It's so good to be here. I am Laura Massetti. I am originally from New York. I lived all throughout the U.S. and my big claim to fame is now that I just moved to Italy a couple years ago, so people find that quite interesting. But you know, as part of that journey of changing countries and that big move that was associated with it, my background itself-I come from very much the corporate world. I grew up in in sales and marketing and built a really successful career around that. I had a point in my career where I completely hit a wall, gave it all up, and moved to Europe. So that being said, going through still some pretty big life changes associated with that. But yeah, so now what I'm doing here in Italy, I just started my own business, which has been really great, and I focus on supporting early professionals who are adjusting to the workplace. And and yeah, that's that's a little bit about me and what I have going on.
Kim Meninger
So can I rewind a little bit to your career in sales and marketing, and sort of your corporate life, and would you be willing to share a little bit more about the decision point that led you out of that life, and like what was happening for you at the time? I think that's something that a lot of people struggle with: is when to stay, when to go, how to assess whether it's time for a change? Like, what did that look like for you?
Laura Massetti
Yeah, it's not easy, and I I never want to talk poorly about my life in corporate because it gave me such great learning, such great experiences, and I really wouldn't be who I am today with it, but especially within the sales space, there can be a lot of associated pressure that comes from it. Whether it's from those that you work with or just that you put on to yourself, and much of that I put onto myself as far as hitting numbers and you know whatever metrics or quota was responsible at that point. But I mean, I just wasn't healthy in in any capacity. I had lost a lot of weight. I was losing my hair. My stress was just completely at a place that became a little scary, to be honest with you. And I was just feeling completely out of direction as far as what I was doing, I was so focused on what's happening the next quarter, what's happening the next year, what do I need to do that I stopped taking care of myself in all capacities, and I kind of just got to a point where I was done with it. You know what made me move out to Italy is I ended up falling in love around the same time and thought that was the perfect excuse to do something a little wild and crazy. But you know it was really kind of a build up. I don't know if there was one single moment, but I'd say it was period, probably like six months to a year.
Kim Meninger
And what was it like to step away from a career that you were obviously a high achiever, right? Which is everyone listening to this conversation is a high achiever. That's how they they end up here, and so I feel like oftentimes the stories that we tell ourselves too can make stepping away really complicated because we hold ourselves to such high standards, and there's so much pressure there, as you described.
Laura Massetti
It is so hard. It is so so hard because you've really built your your brand, your identity, your everything, your comfort, your your financials. All are based around that one career, and for me, there was so much ambiguity between who was Laura and who was I as a professional, and I was really struggling with that balance because there was no balance for me. And to your point, when you are a high achiever. You just put this pressure on yourself that is so unrealistic that you need to just keep on growing, just keep on chasing. And I think it. Everyone has a different burnout point of what that looks like. Mine looked like, as mentioned, that I was bold enough and blessed enough to also have the financial capability to do that, to step away from it, but I also completely resonate with those that feel locked in, and I have to continue to do this because I have these responsibilities or whatever it is.
Kim Meninger
Do you think, in hindsight, now that you could have stayed and just? And made changes internally, like within yourself, that would have allowed you to to continue down a healthier path.
Laura Massetti
I wish I could say I could. I wish I was. I wish I was strong enough then to say that I could. But for me, I really needed to separate the environment when I had moved out to Italy, and I don't think that moving or relocating changes everything for you, but I needed to make a big change in my environment to really see differently and to kind of just like start bare bones a little bit. And I don't think I really would have been able to have that full reinvention of myself unless my professional identity was stripped away. So what I mean by that was upon leaving my last career, and I was a vice president of an organization, and you know I had all the cushy titles and everything that I had wanted for so long. When I took that away from myself, I was forced to really say, "Okay, I've been known for this for so many years. Who am I now? And what came from that was a true reinvention of how do I still build something with the same tenacity, that same grit, that same like A type that goes into you know like everyone listening on this show probably is right into doing something that I can find that balance and really that passion to contribute to.
Kim Meninger
I really appreciate that perspective because I do think it's hard if your environment doesn't change, and the the like I'm trying to think of the right way to describe it. The metrics don't change, right? That you're that you're sort of being evaluated against don't change. It's really hard to reinvent yourself, and so I want to turn now to what you're doing now because I think it's interesting to think about early career professionals and how they might be able to get ahead of some of this, right? Like it's-I don't want to make it sound doom and gloom for people who are in the situation that you described, but I do think it's easier to to be proactive than it is to be reactive, right? So, what led you to where you are working with early career professionals?
Laura Massetti
Yeah. So, my company now is called Real Work Ready, and what it was developed from was me coming into the corporate world and struggling a lot. And when I say that, I mean I really didn't know how to act, behave, contribute what was expected of me, how to handle myself in client meetings, how to work internally, how to work with my manager, how to handle feedback-all the things that go into professional growth was really a struggle for me. And as I started my own management journey, I realized that I wasn't alone in this, and I was spending a lot of time teaching early professionals some of the basics around professionalism, around expectations, and whatnot. So I thought that there was a great opportunity to be able to really provide the high-touch experience that early professionals needed and the support they needed within the first few years of their career. So, really being here, separating from what I knew, gave myself the space to do that because I've always had that on top of mind as something that I saw as a problem. So now I'm fully focused in doing that and working with the businesses that help to support those people and employ those people. So that's been really rewarding. And you know, I think that the biggest misconception that I hear when you ask the question around, well, how do these people get prepared for it? And a lot of people respond and say, "Well, you just need experience. You just need to go through it. And I do think there is a lot of truth to that, but I also think that there is just as much truth to really exposing yourself to mentors, to situations, to learnings, to hard truths of of different scenarios, in order for early professionals to make better decisions on what might be right for them. If someone had told me that in my sales career I was going to be on a plane, you know, a couple times a week, which I was, that eventually that could impact you. That could impact your relationships. That could impact your health. That could impact your quality of life. If someone had that real conversation with me, I probably would have made a different decision in going into a career like that because it did catch up with me. It. Impact me over time, so I think it's not just relying on experience for people to go through things the hard way, but finding trusted people within your network early in your career that can have real talk with you.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, I think that's such an important point because if we come back to this idea of high achievers, right? And there's often a through line. There, they're not. They don't just become high achievers. They start out as high achievers in school and become very comfortable in a predictable environment that is very transparent around what success looks like and provides feedback in very clear terms, right? Grades are pretty unambiguous, and so there there is a way in which we become conditioned to expect that we know the terms, right? We we understand the, the playing field that we're operating on, and so I think a lot of the anxiety, a lot of the self-doubt comes from entering a space that lacks that transparency, where it feels like other people have access to a playbook or information that we just haven't gotten yet. Right, so I think that a lot of that insecurity would be reduced if we had more of what you're talking about.
Laura Massetti
Oh my gosh! Yeah, I mean, I feel like a lot of stuff that we all learned along the way is. I probably didn't need to learn it that way, right? Like I probably didn't need to go inside a client meeting and you know speak out of turn, say something really silly that at the time I didn't know that it was silly. If I would have just known how to operate inside of that before, right? And someone just said like, "Hey, Laura, that's the CEO of this major company. Like, don't say something embarrassing, and I probably wouldn't have. But yeah, I think it's just like I feel like people glorify business so much, and like as you enter the workplace, there is such this distinction between early professional and high-ranking executive. And I think that businesses and you know those that like to mentor out there need to try to bridge that together because at the end of the day, we're all people trying to trying to like make it in this world.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, you're right, and I think that there is a lot of gray area along the way. To even people who are executives, and I've met many of them, still struggle with some of this themselves because there's still a lot of uncertainty around how to handle changing environments that are happening today. We've got unprecedented change and volatility in today's workplaces, and humans are humans, as you said. We don't do well with uncertainty, and all all it takes is have a new leader, and the rules change, and we have to catch up. And so, I think what you're talking about makes a lot of sense to start at an earlier time in your career and kind of build a solid foundation. But I think it's relevant to people at every stage.
Laura Massetti
I would agree with that. I think that each progression in your career season of life, whatever it will be, it takes you know some adaptability and someone before you that has done it that could provide guidance for you. You know, I had spoken with someone earlier today that talked about you know I think that every I don't hire a coach unless that coach has a coach, and I just thought that was such an amazing idea. That like you always want to be with people that are looking degrees ahead of you, that have been through something, but they're also positioning themselves for what that next season of change might look like. And it doesn't always need to be career wise, but like I think adaptability is one of the biggest qualities that's needed within business and leadership, and people should have the opportunities to learn that and be exposed to how to get those skills.
Kim Meninger
Absolutely, I I completely agree with you, and I think you're right that there there's the hard way, right? And then there, there's the easier way of going about it. Like, what do you see as some of the highest priority, or maybe some of the most common challenges that you help people with? Like, what do you think is really hard for people today.
Laura Massetti
Yeah. The hardest things that I think that early professionals are. Are struggling with or need to navigate through is the things that they're actually being judged on. So we've all been through performance reviews and, and things like that, getting some sort of grading opinions from our management teams. And for me, what I really work with the early professionals on doing is like, what are actually the things that make the difference in you showing up and you performing well? So a big thing that early professionals struggle with that I work with them on is things like prioritization, right? You're when you come into the workplace, you're going to get a whole bunch of stuff. How do we think about prioritizing those things? Communication. How do we communicate internally? Understand the organizational dynamics of things. How do we communicate in a way that people will understand us and come across as professional, incredible person? As well as that's the client-facing activities as well. How to follow through on things without being chased, especially. So, how is it that as a manager they don't need to follow up with you constantly to get those reports? How much is communication too much? How is it not enough? So, kind of all of the professional nuances that we learn over time. I've created a program that really captures all of those professional nuances that, at the end of the day, people make real decisions on. They want to be able to know that can I trust that you're going to do your work and you're going to do it really well? Point blank, that's how you make promotional decisions. Can I trust Kim to be able to represent in this capacity independently? Yes or no? Those decisions are made through myriads of actions that you're doing on a daily basis to prove your trust. So that includes follow through, execution, prioritization, those sort of things. So I work with early professionals on all of those capabilities that really matter to be their fully operational professional selves.
Kim Meninger
That's amazing. I mean, that to me sounds like a really robust way of orienting people towards the workplace. You know, and I think orientations maybe have gone away in many many ways today. It's like here's your laptop, here's your you know, sign up for your benefits, and on your, on you go. And not all managers have the bandwidth or the skill set or the motivation to provide this type of support.
Laura Massetti
Oh my gosh, they don't have the bandwidth, and like you know, obviously, I mean, there's only so many hours in a day that you can do this, and I truly believe that if we took a step back, that everyone wants to spend time to mentor and help. I do. I think you wouldn't be in management unless you like that in some capacity. So that's one piece is the time. The second piece is now in this new era of AI, where you and I would spend, my goodness, a week or so to go work on a spreadsheet and you know do some analysis on something and come back with some recommendations. That grunt work, those smaller projects that you would learn the business, you'd be able to practice presenting, working with your peers. Now AI is supplementing a lot of that. So how are these early professionals supposed to get up to speed with what it means to contribute to the workplace in a real way? And to me, that's that's terrifying because we're thinking about what are the next phase of leaders, and we're not creating any ramp, any any background or toolset to be able to get them to the place that they could be on an even playing field as the rest of their peers.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, I think about that a lot too. Is that if AI is going to do the entry level work that would ordinarily be done by early career professionals, how do you possibly build a pipeline when once people who are in manager positions today move out of the organization? How are you preparing early career professionals? There's a huge gap in experience.
Laura Massetti
Yeah, and what's really interesting is I started my company before this AI fatigue started, really on the premise of like I already knew that there was such a big problem and a delay in having all the opportunities to get fully acclimated to the workplace and being able to operate. Then once AI happened, I was like, oh shit! Like now it's just fully impossible to have any capability to do that. So my program itself it focuses on creating a program around all those things that give you that first five years of experience in a really consumable way in order to practice. It has the full human element of it. I'm. A believer in AI where it matters, but I do believe that what separates people and professionals is going to be how are you operating as a human? How do you show up every day as a person makes all the difference. So you know, I think companies are trying to address it now, but we're just in a different world, and I think that we need to completely reinvent our onboarding path that we have at at the companies.
Kim MeningerI'm wondering too. There are some companies who have formal mentorship programs, and I wonder how much of this we should be thinking about as part of formal mentoring programs too, because I think one of the downsides of formal mentoring programs, aside from the fact that the chemistry isn't always there when you're matching people artificially, is that some and I've heard this on both sides from the mentors and the mentees. Like I don't know what to talk about, or this person doesn't bring me, you know, something substantive, or this person's not available. It sort of feels like that could be woven into mentorship programs as well as to give you something beefy to actually work on together.
Laura Massetti
Yeah, yeah, I definitely think that that's approach to to do it. I think that mentoring that space is, you know, a good way that these real scenarios can be complemented with those. But to your point, I think that formal mentoring and, and arranged marriage mentoring is really hard. I've been in so many of these programs that it's just not a match. And then you're awkwardly stuck in these arranged marriages, and you're like, "Get me out of here, because it's not working for them either, right? And they're like, "I don't really like you. You know, it's like whatever it may be, but it's true. It happens more often than not. So, listen, I I think that eventually companies are going to need to integrate exactly what I'm doing and what I you know kind of like the I do like real uh real scenarios with them. So we'll do like you play manager, I'm employee. Let's go through something, right? So it's a lot of like coaching and real time feedback. So I think that if formal mentorship programs are able to have some sort of real time feedback, that's that's super valuable. And just one more point that I'll make on that, especially with this generation coming in, this Gen Z population, we have to think about that they've entered an era, era. Sorry, an era where feedback is always something they've gotten at their fingertips. Whether it's a a like, a, a comment, whatever it is, they need that feedback. Where generations before we knew I will talk to my manager on my weekly one-on-one. I will talk to them on my quarterly. I will talk to my end-of-year review. They expect that feedback in real time. So I think it's also being really cognizant around what does this generation need that might have looked a lot different from generations that have came into the workplace before.
Kim Meninger
That's such an important point. I do think that there is a way in which the each new generation has its own reputation for being difficult and needy, and I think you see it. We've talked about it with the millennials. I've seen, I've seen, you know, posts or articles from way before about Gen Xers, and so this is nothing new. But I think the environment is very different, as you're suggesting. And I wonder if you have advice for people who do want more feedback, whether they're Gen Z or of any generation that aren't getting it today. Like, is there a way to take ownership of that process a little bit more proactively.
Laura Massetti
Yeah, that's a really good point because it falls in both people's hands. So as a manager, you're not always inclined to give feedback whether you don't have time for it, you're not comfortable, you're not good at it. It's not something that they could act on. And then the other side of it is that the employees in themselves don't know how to act for it and don't know how to ask for it or what they even should be asking, right? But what I do like to do is I usually schedule what it depends on how big my team is, but either weekly or monthly one-on-ones, depending on what the business looks like, I always ask my team to come prepared with things that they want my feedback on. So it could be something like come prepared with you know what you're looking for reaction on, whether it was a presentation, whether it was a pitch you gave, whatever it is. So we could talk about that. So I think. From the leader's perspective, it's about making space in the agenda that your employees feel they can get that feedback safely, and then on the other side of it, it's being persistent and having a dedicated space to receive that feedback. Because I always say that you can't get lucky with good bosses. Like you get who you get, right? But you also need to take responsibility of training the behavior of your boss to say, "Hey, I need this during our one-on-one. So that's that's my approach.
Kim Meninger
I love that. I often try to remind people: people can't read your minds, right? Everybody's busy. Everybody's, you know, doing lots of different things. And sometimes people, if you're the manager, if you're the manager and you don't need that kind of feedback, you may not realize that you're not meeting the needs of people on your team.
Laura Massetti
Exactly. And you make a good point. Like everyone's doing so much during the day. Like they're not always thinking about you in the way that they should, and I've been guilty of this. Like I don't give my employees feedback all the time when I probably shit on things. So I think it's like we both need to meet in the middle of what the employee will do to step up and the manager themselves.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, yeah, I think that also gives people more confidence because it gives them something that they can control, and I think when you feel like you're at the mercy of forces around you, you do feel more anxious and insecure.
Laura Massetti
Yeah, exactly, and that's why I love the name of your podcast as well because I do think that a big piece of that is you gaining control around really like your perception of the environment. Like, how do you gain control of how you feel that you're perceived to other people? And I think a big piece of that is taking control of what’s possible and you have more control than you than think over those situations. Like, just because you get stuck with a bad boss that doesn't provide you feedback, you should be thinking, "What can I do to try to get that out of them? Like, what can I do to take control of this situation?" All of the other A-type control freaks on the call listening right now.
Kim Meninger
Yes, it's so much more empowering to think about it that way. [Yeah.] And I wonder too because we talked about the arranged marriage mentors, which I think is a hilarious way to describe it. Do you have advice on how to find an actual mentor? Like, what I think sometimes people just feel like that is such a daunting task to try to identify and recruit a mentor. So, in the absence of, or maybe even in in place of a more formal matching system, how do you advise people to look for and find mentors these days?
Laura Massetti
I would say that for me, one of the insecurities that I had at the beginning for asking for mentors in my life has always been like this is a favor that I'm asking for them to do for me, but at the end of the day, more often than not, those mentors love the idea of being able to help and contribute. So I think your mindset needs to be that everyone out there is looking to give and gain from each other, right? That's how we develop relationships, partnerships. People like talking about themselves; they do, and like take advantage of that because people are very generous with your their time if you ask. And I've done a couple different things. So, as mentioned, I've done a lot of the formal mentorship programs on both sides of the table. I don't love that. I, I haven't found a good one. I, I don't love that, but I have found that when I do enter a new role, I always try to identify who can be a manager within my sphere of work, right? Or a central part to that-that is a level or two above me. And then on top of that, someone that's a level or two above me in another area of the business that I'm not familiar with. And ironically, I actually find that those in a different area of the business that I, you know, meet to arrange with, say, can we go get coffee and, you know, get, get to know them more and share experience? I learn a lot more from them than I do those working directly within my chain. So I don't know. I just feel like you open your mind, where you don't feel like I want to follow this one path to get to this one way, where instead it's like, no, you could teach me something because your world looks so different than mine.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, I think that's a great way to think about it too. Is to have first of all the idea that you don't need just one mentor, right? And to look outside of your current sphere because you don't know what you don't know, and most people don't go down one linear career path and retire at the end of it. There's a lot of twists and turns, and by making those connections with people outside of your area of the business, you might be opening doors you don't even realize are out there.
Laura Massetti
Exactly, exactly.
Kim Meninger
Yeah. Oh my gosh, Laura, this has been so fantastic. I'm so grateful to you. For people listening who want to learn more about you and your work, where can they find you?
Laura Massetti
Yeah. So on LinkedIn is usually best. Laura Massetti. You can follow me there. I put out a lot of content related to all things and really professionals, how to be a good manager around that, whatnot. And then also I have a website, real work ready dot com. Have some upcoming master classes if you're interested in this subject more. But LinkedIn's usually best.
Kim Meninger
Excellent. Well, we will make sure the links are in the show notes. And thank you so much for being here.
Laura Massetti
Thank you so much, Kim. It was so lovely. Thank you.
