744: Where Being Selfish is Better, with Jenny Wood

Coaching for Leaders

Dave Stachowiak

Education, Business, Management, Self-improvement, Careers

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jenny Wood: Wild Courage
Over an 18 year career at Google, Jenny Wood grew from entry-level to executive, most recently leading a large operations team that helped drive billions of revenue per year. In 2021, she started a passion project within Google called Own Your Career, which grew to one of the largest career development programs in Google’s history. Her work has since been featured in Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, and Forbes and she’s now the author of Wild Courage: Go After What You Want and Get It*.

Leadership is about serving others – and it’s also ensuring that we take care of ourselves along the way. Sometimes leaders over-index on helping their organizations and teams, to their own detriment. In this conversation, Jenny and I explore where being a little more selfish might actually be better for everyone.
Key Points

Selfish redefined means having the courage to stand up for what you want.
People want to join a winning team, even if they don’t say that out loud.
Guilt is natural, but always caving to it is self-defeating.
Don’t do work that’s not actually promotable. There’s no prize for an empty inbox.
A belief like “I owe it to them,” may signal an over-commitment to the organization. They will not love you back.
Appreciate truth when you get it, but don’t sign up for a burned-out boss.
It’s inefficient to always be in the lead. Draft in another leader’s wake.

Resources Mentioned

Wild Courage: Go After What You Want and Get It* by Jenny Wood

Interview Notes
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Transcript

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0:00.0	Leadership is first and foremost about serving others, and it's also ensuring that we take care of ourselves along the way.
0:08.8	Sometimes leaders overindex on helping their organizations and teams to their own detriment.
0:15.3	In this episode, where being a little more selfish might actually be better for everyone.
0:21.7	This is Coaching for Leaders, Episode 744.
0:26.4	Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.
0:34.7	Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host,
0:40.9	Dave Stahofiak. Leaders are born. They're made. And this weekly show helps you discover
0:47.1	leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. The word selfishness, we think about it and most of us bristle a bit. We think about it
0:57.4	as a word that isn't really the kind of way we want to show up as a leader. And yet, oftentimes,
1:04.2	we don't think about the power of that word, the importance of it, and how we can redefine it to make it work better for us,
1:13.4	but also for the people around us. And today I'm so pleased to have a guest with us that's
1:18.3	going to help us to redefine this word a bit, help it to make it work for us and for our
1:24.2	organizations, and give us a little bit of a kick on maybe how we could do just a bit
1:29.2	better in driving our own careers. I'm so pleased to welcome Jenny Wood. She had an 18-year
1:35.6	career at Google from entry level to executive, most recently leading a large operations team
1:41.2	that helped drive billions of revenue per year. In 2021, she started a passion
1:45.9	project within Google called Own Your Career, which grew to one of the largest career development
1:51.7	programs in Google's history. Her work has since been featured in Harvard Business Review,
1:56.5	entrepreneur, and Forbes. And she's now the author of Wild Courage. Go after what you want and get it.
2:03.6	Jenny, perfect title. I'm so excited for this conversation. Welcome to the show.
2:08.5	Thanks so much for having me, Dave. It's so much fun to be here.
2:11.9	This word selfish. We hear it. We think about it. As leaders, I think we bristle about it. And you highlight the
	...

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