FreezePoints eMagazine

On Tuesday, May 12th, we had a special treat at our May Dinner Meeting: a live podcast recording. Trina Schaetz, Director of Marketing and UX at Project Insight and host of the Wear Your Cape to Work podcast, brought her show to PMI-OC for a featured presentation that doubled as a recorded episode.

Joining her were Marjan Khan, MPA, HR Project Manager at Mazda North America Operations, and Tamas Vejsz, PMP, MSME, Senior Project and Program Leader at CTC Global and Director of PMO for PMI Orange County.

The conversation centered on a simple but powerful idea: strong leaders don't have to be good at everything — they need to know their strengths and lead from there. Marjan and Tamas come from very different backgrounds (Marjan's path into PM was nonlinear, while Tamas moved from engineering into project leadership) but both arrived at the same conclusion from different directions.

A few highlights from the discussion:

• Know what people come to you for. Marjan identified her strength as bringing structure and clarity, which was a skill shaped early in life, while Tamas leans on relationship-building and consensus to lead technical teams.
• Your strengths can shift. Both agreed that the strengths you rely on may change depending on the role, the team, or the season of your career.
• Asking for help isn't weakness. They talked candidly about mentors who saw their capability before they did, and why trust matters when someone gives you hard feedback.
• Networking starts close to home. Marjan shared how she built a project management network inside Mazda by starting with people already close to her and being brave enough to reach out from there.

It was a genuinely INSIGHTful conversation (pun very much intended), and a fun way to experience a podcast recording live and in person.

The full episode is available now to everyone here.