Growing And Staying Together: A Power Couple’s View On Diversity, Women Leaders, And Parenting With Bill Bold And Rochelle Bold 

 

Relationships can be tough. That is why not many people stay in them for long. These days, it is a gem to find a lasting relationship. How do they do it? What is the secret? In this unique episode, Matt Kelly invites no other than a couple who has demonstrated what it takes to stay together and get through all the different challenges and changes of being in a relationship. He sits down with Bill Bold and Rochelle Bold to talk about how they managed to stay together for 25 years and counting amidst career change, kids, and more. At the heart of it is how they both learn from each other and continue to grow together. They talk about the importance of diversity in the workplace, women in leadership positions, parenting, COVID-19, and more.

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Listen to the podcast here

Growing And Staying Together: A Power Couple’s View On Diversity, Women Leaders, And Parenting With Bill Bold And Rochelle Bold

Our lives are healthier, more gratifying and fulfilled when we’re in the comforts of sustained positive energy and support from the people we love. Receiving positive energy and support is the key element to us having the freedom to live our best lives. It’s safe to say we all face challenges. Nobody gets through life unscathed. Positive energy and support from loved ones are what allows us to overcome difficult times, dream big and excel in life.

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I want to thank you for taking some time out of your busy schedule and spending it with me here. What we’re doing here is something that I don’t think has been done previously as speaking with couples that have demonstrated what it takes to stay together and get through all the different challenges, changes and things through relationship in life as you grow together. Careers change, you have kids. How long have you been married?

We had a quarantined silver anniversary.

You’ll have time to make that up and have a great one at some point. Bill, I have to let the readers know you were one of my first people I ran this idea in my thought process through. We were up at Stein Eriksen having an after-ski get together. You are supportive. This is amazing. I have to thank you for that right out of the gate.

It was a good idea then and it’s a great idea now. I commend you for taking the time to do this. It’s an important message to be sending to an audience that doesn’t always hear it. Good on you for doing it.

Thank you. Would you two introduce yourselves? Let us know something about yourself, and if you want to promo something.

Going back to right before we decided to start having kids, I have taken an active role in the nonprofit community here in San Diego. I had been focused on my career prior to that time. Once I felt that I was in a place where I was fairly established in my career and could start spending my time, I’m giving back to the community a bit. I started to think about the kinds of issues that were important to me. I realized that what spoke to me was at-risk youth and unprivileged youth especially children. They’ve been dealt an unfair hand. Through no fault of their own, they’ve been victims of an unfair start to their lives. I wanted to focus on what I could do to help that community.

I was lucky. I was raised in a home with two loving parents who gave me every opportunity to succeed. I felt that it was important that as a community, we focus on taking care of those kids that don’t have the same opportunities. I started with an organization that was called The Child Abuse Prevention Foundation at the time, it’s now called Promises2Kids. That focuses on abused and neglected children. I spent a couple of years involved with that organization, led a capital campaign along with Bill to create the nation’s first residential high school for foster children. Once that was opened in San Diego, I went on to be involved with an organization called Voices for Children, which provides court-appointed special advocates for foster children, children who have been taken out of their homes through no fault of their own and making sure that those children have an advocate for themselves, for them in the system. A system that’s often dominated by lawyers looking out for the interests of the parents.

Diversity strengthens every organization. Share on X

It’s important that the children have advocacy as well. I spent about ten years involved with Voices for Children. I chaired that organization’s Board of Directors. I have been involved with an organization called the Monarch School, which is a K to 12 school here in San Diego that is entirely focused on children who have been impacted by homelessness and making sure that we give them the tools to succeed both academically and with life skills. I’ve taken on the chair of that board as well. Those are the things that I’ve been doing for the last years, in addition to raising two kids.

That’s a partial list. I know your show is about the dynamics that help couples balance things and support each other. One of the dynamics in our relationship is we challenge each other a bit without doing it explicitly. I am a bit more tied up in terms of work responsibilities than Rochelle, but when I watch how hard she works on stuff that is thought by a lot of people to be voluntary and your last priority, Rochelle treats it as her first priority. That’s inspiring. It challenges me to lead with my values, but also to take real care in how you do a job. That’s one of the things I’ve learned from Rochelle is how to approach a task and complete it and not move on to the next thing like a lot of men want to do.

Background, I’ve done a bit in the nonprofit sector. My career started in Washington, that’s where Rochelle and I met. I worked in politics and then spent the bulk of my career at Qualcomm Incorporated, the largest headquartered private employer in San Diego where I did their external affairs work. I was there two decades. In my golden age, I have two jobs. I’m a professor at the Graduate School of Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, where I teach one class a quarter. My real job is I’m the Executive Vice President for Strategy for a small but fast-growing specialty insurance company here in La Jolla called Palomar Specialty. Right away you can tell, Matt, that we’re a family and a couple with lots of irons in the fire. Doing all of that, plus being active parents and friends can be a real challenge.

Back to Rochelle and the work that you do as I saw a common theme of working with children that don’t have the support that would be necessary for the majority of them to succeed and not let those kids fall through the cracks. That is admirable. It’s such an incredible focus. I’ll tell you right down deep in the heart of balancing us is one of my main goals in interviewing couples that support each other and figure out how to keep their household together, that helps the children. That allows the children to not have the disruption of the divorce process and the two homes way on their minds at a tender young age as they’re developing. With the work that you do is incredible in my mind.

If we don’t raise our kids with the thought process that they can accomplish anything in this life and they’ve got positive support and people around them that are going to help them get to where they want to go, as long as they have their own motivation. You can’t kick a horse. As long as they have their own and they have something built inside of them that they do want to succeed. Giving every one of those children the chance to do it is incredible, Rochelle. That’s amazing. That touches me. Getting back on the subject with the women, the support and what I like to see as far as both sides being equal in the home and in the workplace. Bill, you and I had a conversation before. You had mentioned to me at Qualcomm that you had female bosses for the majority of your career.

It wasn’t at Qualcomm. I’ve had female bosses outside. I’ve had a number of female bosses starting in politics. When I worked on Capitol Hill, everybody I worked for was female. Both the staff director to whom I reported, and in one case, the member of Congress was a woman. I’ve had a lot of experience. I’m grateful I’ve had that experience early in my career to have working for women. One of the things I took from that when I got to a managerial position was I noted that even in those situations where you might not get along with your boss or you’re bristling at the management. Overtime, I understood that the women with whom I worked fundamentally looked at politics in that case, which was the subject of our work, in a different way.

They approached workflow in a different way. When I got to a management position, nobody needed to tell me to build a diverse workforce. I always had a majority female workforce reporting to me, not a huge majority, but as well as a lot of ethnic, religious, cultural, and political diversity because I realized that I’m good at thinking with the brain that I have but that brain is limited. It looks at things in a Bill Bold way. I’m creative. I’m not Rochelle. I’m not good at execution and follow through. By surrounding myself with folks like that, many of whom were women, not only was it the right thing to do but it made me way more effective. It made my group more effective. It made our company more profitable. It’s a bottom-line issue. Diversity strengthens every organization. I firmly believe that.

Rochelle, on the panels that you chair and work on, is it diverse or is it mostly women? I do seem to think that women go more towards entrepreneurship. Bill’s experiences is a bit rare from what I’ve come across. It’s harder to get recognized and get promoted in a corporate environment as a woman. That’s something that we’re trying to understand why because when I talked to someone like Bill and hear what he has to say, and you see the women that are in influential positions, in business, in politics. Why are they? Is there this gender bias? We’re talking to people and trying to figure it out. What do you see on that philanthropy side? Is it mostly women that work with you?

 

It’s not. Our board at Monarch, at the top of my head, it’s 50/5. On our executive committee, it is 4 men, 3 women, but we’re about 50/50. Things are changing. I’ve been out of the workforce for several years.

You have a Law degree.

I do. It’s interesting because by the time I got to law school, about 50% of the class were women. There were a lot of women going into law school, which was different than when my mother went to law school, and there were four women in her class. In that twenty-year period, things changed a lot that way, but you still see at least at the time that I graduated law, there was still a big difference when it came to the partners in law firms and the hierarchy and the leadership versus the rank-and-file attorneys. That was my experience in the corporate world as well. At one point, I had a job where I worked for a large defense contractor and we had this retreat every year with the top 1% of the company, which was 100 people because the company was 10,000 people. The top 1% went to this big retreat every year and out of 100 people that went, two of us were women.

There were 98 men and two women in the top 1% of the company. It was a while but not that long. It’s been slower in the corporate world than it has in other sectors, but things are changing now. Leadership structures are changing and people are making more of an effort. On some places, it’s mandated. In California it’s mandated, at least with public companies, which is a good thing that women be a board member. It’s been nice in the nonprofit sector, at least in this community, I can’t speak to others. There is a recognition that men and women equally bring different skillsets, ideas and thought processes. If you want to have an effective board, you need to have both. That’s something that I’ve always kept in mind whenever I’ve been involved in these organizations or others. When I’ve been involved in the governance process, you actively want to maintain your eye on diversity as you’re recruiting new board members and making sure that you not only have gender diversity but diversity across a number of other sectors as well. Thankfully, men in this community in San Diego do want to step up and give back and are willing to take time out of their professional careers to give back and help the community. We’re lucky that way.

When you’ve got men and women working at the same number of people in an office or in a philanthropy like you’re doing, when there are meetings and working together, those individuals have that balance of men bring a different something and women bring a different something. When you have that throughout your working day, as you have both sides of that from each side of the gender, when you go home to your wife or your husband and your family, there’s more of an understanding of how each one of you thinks. Your conversations can be more on an equal level and can have more of a harmonious environment at home versus when one is off with men all day and one is off with women all day, and then you come back together and you try to put this together. It’s like an experiment at home, whereas it doesn’t flow as evenly from the day to the evening.

It’s one of the reasons Rochelle and I both have always tried to practice diversity in the workplace. When we were talking about the difference between men and women, it got me thinking about a metaphor that’s been kicking around my head for a while. A lot of the discussion about men and women in the workplace and society focuses appropriately on equality as a legal matter. We’re not there yet. Women get paid less than men and there are steps that we can take to address that. For lots of folks, whether they think of that equality and they reject it because they’re like, “Men aren’t like women. Women aren’t like men.” I wonder if the better metaphor would be two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

This pertains to relationships where each piece is the exact same surface area but they’re shaped differently. They’re different. You’d never say they’re similar but they’re as important. If you fit them together, you’ve got something much bigger still. Every relationship has ups and downs, you grow and learn from each other. The one thing I would say about Rochelle and my marriage and our partnership is that we are those jigsaw pieces. I know what she’s good at, everything, but there are a couple of things I’m better than her at. There are approaches that we make with our children, for example, where we’ll deputize the other not because we don’t want to deal with it but because we know the other is going to be more effective. That intimate knowledge is what diversity in the workplace yields. Even with your coworkers, you’re constantly learning and eventually you can put all the pieces together and soon you’ve got a whole completed puzzle.

What popped into my mind is when you say how you two communicate on whatever the kids have going on and you put your best foot forward, “Honey, you do this. Let’s do it because I know that this is right down your alley,” that takes jealousy and control out of it. As a couple, if jealousy, control or ego creeps into that relationship, that makes it difficult to make decisions like you two make, which is for the betterment of both of you. The one that’s more qualified to take on that task with that child is going to be doing it and better for the child because they’re getting the parent that feels more comfortable in that role and is going to be able to give that bit of extra without even an extra effort, but because it’s something that they’re more familiar with.

Leaders know how to deliver the truth in an empathetic but forceful way. Share on X

As crucial and not be an ownership thing, if we divided tasks as efficiently as we do but we never spoke to each other, it wouldn’t be a good outcome. If I’ve got to talk to one of our children about something, I try and I hope I do check in with Rochelle to say, “What do you think? How should I approach this?” Each of us have the benefit of the other’s thinking. We’re saying like this goes smoothly, but like you, we have two teenagers so you know it doesn’t go smoothly.

That’s the thing. It’s good for you to bring that up because that’s what we need to hammer in with a lot of people that could make it through and should keep their marriage together and their relationship. Little things like this get in the way and they escalate, before you know it, you’ve got a separation going on and it’s like, “Those two could have made it.” Bill, we had spoken previously. You had mentioned to me that you had your twenty-year career at Qualcomm and you’re busy corporate-wise. When you retired from that and you were spending more time in the home, you adapted to picking up more chores at home and doing more balancing a bit of that plate. When you went back to work, you’ve kept those chores because it’s ingrained in you.

We’re not laughing at the word chores. I do help but it’s de minimis. The bigger issue was being present with the children, being able to take them to sports and tournaments more than I had, and then connect with the family in a bit more full and meaningful way was a treasure. We’ve been through this difficult year where everybody’s been homebound, but I’m glad that the rhythm of my career went the way it did because I feel we’ve gotten closer through quarantine and all the attendant disruptions in our lives. We’re not sick of each other, which was what every family was worried about when this news first broke. I feel fortunate and grateful to Rochelle because it was a difficult adjustment to go from Fortune 500 executive to house staff doing a little bit of teaching. She led me through that process. By both advice and example taught me the most important thing is to take advantage of this and dive into the family and develop even deeper bonds than I have with my wife and children. I’m happy to report that’s what happened.

That’s the ebb and flow of life.

Left to my own devices, I might’ve never got there. Rochelle led me. She didn’t push me, she led me.

She is a leader. There’s no doubt about it.

She is a leader. Leaders know how to deliver the truth in an empathetic but forceful way. Throughout our marriage, Rochelle has done that and reset me. I know when she comes to me with something, I know the seriousness, I have great respect for her instincts, which do not overlap mine. They’re different. She sees things I do not. That’s what a successful marriage is built on. That communication and willingness to cede control to your partner.

You traveled quite a bit before with Qualcomm. Would you ever go back to that?

 

I love to travel. I’d rather not ever travel like that for business. We’ve been blessed to take some trips with our family, seeing the world. I’ve been to a handful of continents with them. I love to do that again. They’re about to leave the roost. We’re going to have to strike while the iron is hot there. Hopefully the world will be opened up so we can do so.

Rochelle, if I could back up, as you were talking about with your law school. You had about 50/50 men and women in school but then there were 2 women out of the top 100 in the firm to go to the vacation trip award deal that you went on. Men and women start school together at the same age. We go through kindergarten. We go through everything. There are men and women teachers, all the way through college. We go through grad school or law school. Where do the wheels come off for this issue? When I heard you say that, I was like, “There you go again.” Where there’s 50% of the kids in law school are men and 50% are women. Everybody’s got the same intelligence, the same drive there, the same goals, and then they graduate from law school. How does it drop to 2/100? Is it the women not get overlooked on the hiring process possibly at that point? I know they can do the job. I know they can be as good as anybody. Where did those kids go? What did they end up doing that had a law school degree but didn’t end up in the firms?

I wasn’t working in a law firm at that time. I was working at a company in the private sector. After law school and after taking the bar, I never went the route of working in a law firm. I worked in politics and then went straight into the private sector. I can’t speak to what happens in law firms. In the private sector, it’s a number of things. There’s the historical way that companies have developed in the historical way that women have moved up or not moved up the hierarchy. Companies want to have women in their leadership ranks. They have to make an affirmative effort to do so because there has to be more flexibility with women sometimes and that’s important.

COVID, in some ways is going to change a lot of things for women in a good way because everybody’s working from home. When I was first working at a law school, we didn’t even have the internet back then. We didn’t have computers. We didn’t work from home. You need to work in the office or you didn’t work. If you had child-rearing responsibilities, it made it hard and forced women to make what was often a difficult choice. The two women that I happen to work for in my career as bosses, neither of them had children because both of them made that difficult decision to focus on their careers and not have children.

With technology, that’s a huge driver in being able to change the landscape for women and what that looks like and being able to have more flexibility because now everybody has a laptop, a cell phone and can be connected 24/7. People can work from home. At that point it became a mindset of the organization and the corporation about where someone is physically doing the work. With COVID, that’s going to change a lot. There are going to be a lot more opportunities for women in leadership. You see many tech companies announcing that their employees can work from home forever. That mindset did not exist several years ago, even with the technology available. It was a mindset. The mindset change is important because women are able to juggle a lot but if they want to have careers and they want to have kids, you do have to juggle a lot and companies need to be flexible. That’s the nature of how it is for women.

You saw even before COVID lots of big companies who are in a sellers’ market for talent. I’m thinking of big tech companies where there’s a lot of competition and a mobile workforce. All these companies were building daycare facilities on their campuses if the company was big enough. That became a big perk. I remember at Qualcomm being part of our diversity and inclusion team and having a woman engineer come to me and say, “I have a modest request for something the company can do. We need to change the rule that prohibits refrigerators in people’s offices.” For health and safety reasons, there had been a policy banning refrigerators. They didn’t want people to put beers in there, whatever the case might be. I was puzzled being a dumb male. She said, “I’ve got two kids. I’m nursing both of them. I need time to pump in my office and I need somewhere to store it.” The scales fell from my eyes. I’m like, “Why didn’t I think of that?” To Rochelle’s point, there are lots of things companies can do to make those affirmative steps. Make sure that somebody who’s having a kid has not only sufficient maternity leave but that the benefits extend to the spouse.

I had generous paternity leave when I was at Qualcomm, thanks to a good benefits program. I got to be home a bit more than the average father. You’re going to see that as a real trend line in addition to what Rochelle mentioned about work from home. Steps have to be taken. In other countries, it’s a policy choice. If you are a couple with two kids in France, you pay for this with taxes but the state provides universal childcare. It’s explicitly saying, “We think this is worth paying for as a society so that we can have better equality in the workplace.” I’m not advocating that. I’m suggesting that we’re not the only folks worrying about this and there are lessons we can learn from other societies.

What a successful marriage is built on is that communication and willingness to cede control to your partner. Share on X

It’s interesting you brought up universal health childcare. Rochelle, you brought up about the commitment that women have with young children once they’ve had a child and that is where the workplace has to be flexible. It’s a huge time commitment to find the right person that you trust to be in your home and to be taking care of your young children or child so that you can go work. If there was a system in place where people are already vetted and completely licensed on an enormous level across the country where the couples that both of them have a career, continue their career, and not have to make that difficult choice to not have children so they could have their career, what a choice to have to make. That’s horrible to have to make a choice like that.

The career and the children are two pillars of somebody’s world if they are a career-oriented woman and they want to be a mother. How can you not allow both of those to happen for them in their lifetime? I have thought about what would it be like to have an organization like that? It would be a government-funded organization that the couple has the opportunity to use. They can hire somebody they want or have their aunt, uncle, grandma, neighbor. There is an organization there run within each city that has people that you can trust, that are going to take care of your child, are going to respect your home, are going to be on time, are going to communicate with you as you need while you’re in the office.

That seems something that would be a huge benefit to allow couples. You could hire somebody that’s fantastic to take care of your children. You get 2 or 3 months down the road and then that person moves. You’re working and you’ve got your career. Your husband is working and got his career. You’ve got these young kids and you’re back to, “I’ve got to be home more until we find somebody.” You’re trying to figure out the interview process. You’re pulling all your friends and trying to network. How disruptive is that? That is a category of something that could be done on a national level and then broken down within the different cities that would allow couples that both want to work to have an enormous comfort in having children taken care of properly.

If government communicated it, advertised it, gave it a lot of priority, buying public service announcements, that wouldn’t cost that much money but it would get the right information out to prospective parents. My statue is Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist and women’s rights activist, one of the great black women in American history. She gave a great speech around the civil war called Ain’t I a Woman, which is one of the greatest speeches in American history. She’s an amazing woman. She’s well-known on the Eastern part of the United States but I would love Western Americans to learn her story.

Bill, thank you.

Matt, thank you. I love you.

It’s been a pleasure. I love you too.

 Important Links:

• Bill Bold – LinkedIn
• Promises2Kids
• Voices for Children
• Monarch School
• Rochelle Bold – LinkedIn
• Palomar Specialty

About Bill Bold

High-performing executive with global expertise building and leading government and public affairs functions that enhance shareholder value through the intersection of technology, government and opinion leaders.

 

 

About Rachelle Bold

Rochelle Bold, Board Chair of The Monarch School, is a community volunteer who has spent the past twenty years devoted to our community’s most vulnerable youth. From 2000-2002 she served as a Board Member of the Child Abuse Prevention Foundation and co-chaired the Capital Campaign for the San Pasqual Academy, a residential school for foster youth. She then spent ten years as a Board Member of Voices for Children which transforms the lives of abused, abandoned, or neglected children by providing them with Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASAs). Her tenure on the board included two years as Treasurer and two years as Board Chair. Rochelle has also served as a Trustee of The Gillispie School and the La Jolla Community Foundation and has chaired several large community events including the San Diego Library Foundation’s “Under the Dome,” celebration. In her early years of community engagement, she was a founding Member of the Economic Development Corporation/Business Roundtable for Education Committee to Create High Tech High. A native San Diegan, Rochelle has a BA from UCLA and a JD from the University of San Diego. Her career began as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill and she spent several years as a Vice President at the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation. Immediately prior to becoming a full time parent and community volunteer, she spent a number of years as a senior executive in the San Diego technology community with responsibilities that included mergers and acquisitions, marketing, corporate development, corporate communications, investor relations and strategic planning. Rochelle’s husband Bill is the Chief Strategy Officer at Palomar Holdings and a lecturer at UCSD’s Graduate School of Policy and Strategy. Her daughter Sydney is a high school sophomore and son Jake is a high school junior.