Role Models Inspire at The White House Project’s Epic Awards

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iStock_000013251275XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Speaking last week at the White House Project’s annual Epic Awards, the organization’s president, Tiffany Dufu said, “My dad used to always tell me, ‘Tiffany Dufu, if you want to have something you’ve never had before, you’re going to have to do something you’ve never done before to get it.’ What I want to have now is for women leaders to reach [levels] we’ve never seen before.”

The White House Project works to prepare women for leadership in politics, business, and the media. The Epic Awards honor individuals who have made big strides when it comes to increasing the percentage of women in leadership roles.

“We will have achieved success when we’ve bottled, mass reproduced, and distributed that White House Project equation to an entire generation of women,” Dufu said.

The host of the event, Geena Davis, Academy Award winner and founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media, remarked, “Our goal has to be to get so many women into leadership that we can focus on their agenda, rather than on their gender.”

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Voice of Experience: Nancy Mellard, Executive Vice President & General Counsel, CBIZ Employee Services Division

NancyMellardBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

“I’m a Midwest girl, born and raised,” said Nancy Mellard, Executive Vice President and General Counsel at CBIZ Employee Services Division, and National Leader of CBIZ Women’s Advantage, the firm’s women’s program. “It’s my 20th anniversary at CBIZ, and it sounds bizarre to me that anyone could be anywhere for 20 years!”

Mellard studied English as an undergraduate and then enrolled in the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law. “I went on to law school thinking I would be a great litigator, only to realize that I truly loved using my law degree as General Counsel in a corporate setting.”

It took a few years to figure that out, she said. She worked for the state of Missouri after she graduated, but two years later, she took a General Counsel position. “I found that I’m really great at building relationships – and as a lawyer in a corporation, providing counsel, you have to understand relationships. I liked that – it got me up in the morning.”

She continued, “I knew pretty early that I wanted to be a senior officer and use my credentials to climb the corporate ladder.”

Not only has Mellard done just that, but she remains focused on building strategic value. Last year, she led CBIZ Women’s Advantage to bring in over $1.4 million in business.

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Are Men the Real Winners with the Rise of Female Breadwinners?

SuzanneDoyleMorrisContributed by Dr. Suzanne Doyle-Morris

Female breadwinning is often seen as primarily benefitting women. We think of the wins for her – negotiating power in the relationship, freedom to leave a potentially bad match and the professional fulfillment that comes from pursuing a career. However, in writing Female Breadwinners: How They Make Relationships Work and Why They are the Future of the Modern Workforce, I found these benefits hid a larger truth. The true winners of women’s increasing economic empowerment are men; the men these women love, the men they live with, the men they support.

That’s not to say it’s always plain sailing for the early 21st century man whose partner out-earns him. It can lead to resentment, guilt, stress….on both sides. However, her earnings certainly allow a greater sense of freedom and choice than generations of men have known before. Who wouldn’t want to benefit from a higher family income without all the pressure to earn it oneself? As most families now feature two earners, knowing your partner, male or female, can financially provide is a necessity. In a world where security nets are scarce, not seeking a partner who can contribute to the family through labour or earnings is strange. To limit that choice according to gender roles is madness.

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Top Women CEOs Share Advice at NAFE’s 40th Anniversary

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Cheerful employerBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Last week the National Association for Female Executives held its annual luncheon in celebration of its 40th anniversary. In addition to honoring its 50 top companies and ten to non-profit organizations for executive women, the organization hosted a fascinating discussion between Kraft CEO and Chair Irene Rosenfeld and DuPont CEO and Chair Ellen Kullman.

The two women spoke candidly about family, success, and power – and they acknowledged, the world still has a long way to go in supporting female leaders.

Rosenfeld, accepting NAFE’s award for women of the year, discussed a 1943 Transportation Magazine article on tips for employing women during the war. One piece of advice read:

“Give the female employee a definite day-long schedule of duties so that they’ll keep busy without bothering management for instructions every few minutes. …women make excellent workers when they have their jobs cut out for them, but that they lack initiative in finding work themselves.”

“Truthfully, as they say, we’ve come a long way baby,” Rosenfeld said with a laugh.

“But despite progress, there is still a persistent gender gap,” she continued, pointing out that today’s college educated women will still earn $1.2 million less than their male counterparts. “As a female CEO, these issues concern me deeply.”

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Obstacles to Women’s Sponsorship—and How to Overcome Them

iStock_000006916716XSmallBy Robin Madell (San Francisco)

“Everyone has blind spots. Our perspective is defined by our own culture and experiences so we frequently make assumptions about other people. From these assumptions we draw conclusions, which directly influence our behavior.”

-Maria Castañón Moats, Chief Diversity Officer, PwC

Most experts on women’s leadership agree that sponsorship makes good business sense—both for women and for corporations. But if it were easy to develop and maintain a relationship with a sponsor, everyone would have one.

The quote above from PwC’s Maria Castañón Moats reflects her insight about a key barrier to women’s sponsorship. Because of our own “blind spots,” we often trust what is most familiar, when a more diverse approach to relationship-building might serve us better. “We are drawn to people who are like us because it feels comfortable,” says Moats. “We have qualities in common—it could be we went to the same school, live in the same neighborhood, have a similar style—and that leads us to trust one another quickly.”

While it takes more work to find common ground with those who are different from us, those diverse relationships are valuable because they offer us a new perspective, Moats explains. From this diversity, successful sponsorship opportunities can flourish. Yet we might fail to seek such relationships on our own when it comes to potential sponsors. “Since those pairings don’t always happen naturally, sometimes the firm has to intervene and match people together,” says Moats.

Janine Moon, author of Career Ownership: Creating ‘Job Security’ in Any Economy, agrees that when it comes to seeking sponsorship opportunities, women do themselves a disservice by relying on a preference for the familiar. “Women are often most comfortable (as people often are) approaching and connecting with those who look like them,” says Moon. “In organizations, and depending upon the industry, there will be fewer women who fit that bill and so perceptions get in the way…it’s self-sabotage.”

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Why Connecting to Your Purpose Makes You A Better Leader

Contributed by CEO Coach Henna Inam

Steve Jobs’ said, “I want to put a ding in the Universe.” Albert Einstein said, “Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things.” Two people with a clear sense of purpose who made great impact.  I am personally convinced that purpose is what separates leaders from managers. Yet in our 24/7 work lives how many times do we stop to think about the one factor that makes all the difference in our leadership? Here are five reasons why our purpose is core to our leadership and some leadership practices to help you discover your purpose.

First, a true story. I was inspired to my purpose by a prostitute from Nepal. It was about 5 years ago and I was leading our company’s business in Mexico. I had just returned from a trip to our Switzerland headquarters where my team and I had been recognized as one of 10 in the organization (of 90,000 employees) for our business results. After the initial euphoria wore off, I found myself strangely disappointed. I expected to be happier and was not. It was then that I saw a documentary about child prostitution and trafficking between Nepal and the brothels in Bombay. The documentary went on to profile a young Nepali former prostitute who had created a half-way house on the border of Nepal and India to help others escape.

The power and sense of purpose that I sensed in this woman was something that had eluded me thus far in my 15+ year corporate career despite all the outward trappings of achievement and success. She had somehow figured out how to escape not just her pimps, but her small self, and instead found a bigger self in the work she was doing. Ironically, it was the discovery that achievement was not enough that set me off on a journey of discovery into my own purpose.

What is purpose? It’s the UNIQUE impact we are called to make for the benefit for others. Each one of us has a purpose and it is up to us to discover and bring it fully to our work and to our lives.

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Who’s Your Best Mentor?

iStock_000004699538XSmallBy Robin Madell (San Francisco)

Much of the public buzz about mentorship centers on helping women find and secure a mentor. Less discussed is the topic of how to find the right mentor for you. There are a number of possible differentiators that might make a certain mentor the perfect match for your colleague, but a poor fit for you.

Qualities such as the mentor’s age, industry level, and personality all could play a role, as could your own variables in these departments. (Gender is a larger issue, which we explored in more depth in “Does Gender Matter When it Comes to Your Mentor?”) The question is, how do you know which differentiators are most important in your particular mentor match? Below, a number of women executives in the finance, legal, and tech industries, as well as workplace experts, offer their thoughts, strategies, and guidance to help you pinpoint your ideal mentor.

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Backlash: Are Women Really Getting Even?

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iStock_000016828754XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

“How many of you are feeling this tsunami feeling… that things are changing?” asked applied futurist Faith Popcorn during her keynote talk at Catalyst’s 50th Anniversary conference last week. Popcorn gave examples like Time Magazine’s recent cover story “The Richer Sex,” which suggests that 40% of working wives now out-earn their husbands, and last summer’s much-talked about article in The Atlantic, “The End of Men.”

Articles like these point out that the majority of college graduates around the world are women or that girls tend to perform better in school than boys. They claim that it’s only a matter of time before women become the dominant gender at home and in the workplace. They imply that we are on the verge of a zero sum ascendency of women. Really?

This kind of dialogue shifts our focus away from the here and now, the present, when women still earn less money than men for doing the same job in every industry, when women are still only 3.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs, when women are still pushed out of the workforce and can’t get back in after having children, when women’s career dreams are still hampered by a societal belief that they are and should be less capable leaders than men.

The “end of men” rhetoric is aggressive and provocative. Rather than creating value, it sets us up for a fight with those who do not yet understand how inclusiveness can help companies and governments perform better, and will not agree with the urgent need address the issue. Or they simply don’t believe there is still an issue to address.

The “tsunami feeling” of change that Popcorn talked about is a great way to rally women, but without also acknowledging the headwinds we have to contend with, women will not be able to make much headway today – or, for that matter, tomorrow.

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Voice of Experience: Eliza McDougall, Partner, Bank Finance Practice, White & Case

McDougall_ElizabethBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Originally from Toronto, Eliza McDougall attended McGill University and then spent a year working in venture capital marketing. “I decided I needed to get further education and applied to both business and law school.” She enrolled in a joint JD/MBA program at the University of Toronto and, following a summer internship at Milbank,Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, she decided to go into law. McDougall spent the next five years working in their global project finance group. Subsequently, she moved into the leveraged finance group when the firm established it as a separate practice area and then moved to White & Case as counsel in 2010.

She became a partner in White & Case’s Bank Finance Practice on January 1st of this year.

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