![My Top 6 Takeaways from the 2018 San Diego Women’s Week Leadership Conference]()
Leadership
Last week, I attended the Women’s Week Leadership Conference in San Diego. The annual conference caps off a week of events sponsored by the North San Diego Business Chamber designed to inspire, empower and connect women of all ages and professions in honor of Women’s History Month.
Over the weekend, I reviewed my notes and selected a few quotes or concepts to share with you.
1. Kim Coles, Comedian, Author, and Actress:
Instead of looking at your life as if things are happening to you, look at it as if things are happening for you.
2. Captain Corrie Mays, Blue Angel #8 USMC:
Don’t be the first person to tell yourself “no”
3. Lesia Cartelli, Founder, Angel Faces, People’s Hero of the Week.
The next time you think, “How in the hell am I going to get through ______?”, think about the gift that will come with the loss.
4. Janice Freeman, Singer, Top 11 Contestant on NCB’s The Voice:
When your questions go unanswered by those in power, be an “askhole”.
5. Mariel Hemingway, Actress and Author:
You can’t be conscious and aware in the present if you are burdened by the past.
6. Summer Stephan, San Diego County District Attorney:
Follow the fear instinct in your gut over your socialization to be nice.
Women’s Week Leadership Conference 2018 was the largest in the event’s 8-year history. With humor, compassion, power, and grit, these women shared stories of strength and the promise of a future of women who change the world.
Question: If you attended an event honoring Women’s History Month this year, what messages resonated with you?
Sheri Nasim is President and CEO of Center for Executive Excellence, a leadership consulting firm headquartered in San Diego, CA. She is the author of Work On Purpose: How to Connect Who You Are With What You Do.
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
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People
Picture a leader. Do you see a woman? If not, you aren’t alone. A recent study published in the Academy of Management Journal confirms that getting recognized as a leader is more difficult for women than for men.
Yet, history is filled with women who defied the norms, like the four women below who persisted in claiming their leadership role – though you may have never heard of them.
1. Eliza Scidmore, First Female Writer, Photographer and Editor of National Geographic. When she began her career as a journalist, Eliza Scidmore (pronounced “Sid-more”) submitted articles using only her initials to avoid the common bias of her day against female journalists. Her passion for travel took her to the Alaskan frontier in 1883. She took the trip solo at the age of 20 and published the first Alaska travel guide. At 26, she journeyed to Japan and submitted an article for the September 1896 issue of National Geographic, introducing readers to the Japanese word tsunami.
When you think of who was responsible for the Japanese cherry trees planted in Washington, D.C. during the Taft Administration, President Taft should not be the first person who comes to mind. It should be Eliza Scidmore and her two decades of persistence.
2. Nonny de la Peña, Founder/CEO of Emblematic Group. Another norm defying woman who started her career in journalism is the enigmatic Nonny de la Peña. Like Scidmore, de la Peña has relied on her storytelling skills to launch her career and her company. Emblematic Group is a digital media company focused on immersive virtual, mixed and augmented reality. In laymen’s terms, it’s a company that produces films in which the viewer is virtually immersed. In her 2015 TED Talk, de la Peña describes how she created the first virtual reality documentary Hunger in Los Angeles that made its way to the Sundance Film Festival.
When you think of CEOs who are leading the way to use technology to connect humans to one another, Mark Zuckerberg should not be the first person who comes to mind. It should be Nonny de la Peña, the godmother of virtual reality.
3. Dolores Huerta, Civil Rights Activist and Co-Founder of the United Farm Workers. Dolores Huerta was born into the activist movement. Her father Juan Ferånández, was a union activist who ran for political office and won a seat in the New Mexico legislature in 1938. Huerta’s mother, Alicia, was an active participant in community affairs, involved in numerous civic organizations and the church in the Stockton, California community.
By the time 20-year old Huerta met César Chávez in 1955, she had founded the Agricultural Workers Association, set up voter registration drives and pressed local governments for barrio improvements. In 1962, Huerta and Chávez launched the National Farm Workers Association (now known as United Farm Workers). Her adept lobbying and negotiating skills were a vital part of the growth of the farm workers’ movement. Yet, the challenges she faced as a woman did not go unnoted. In one of her letters to Chávez she joked, “Being a now (ahem) experienced lobbyist, I am able to speak on a man-to-man basis with other lobbyists.”
When you think of the motto “Yes. We Can”, President Barak Obama should not be the first person who comes to mind. It should be Dolores Huerta, from whom Obama borrowed the phrase ― a fact that he acknowledged when he awarded Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
4. Shirley Chisholm, Educator, Author, First African-American Congresswoman, and First Major-Party Black Person to Run for President of the United States.
Shirley Chisholm was the first African American woman in Congress (1968) and the first woman and African American to seek the nomination for president of the United States from one of the two major political parties (1972). Her motto and title of her autobiography—Unbossed and Unbought—illustrated her outspoken advocacy for women and minorities during her seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Discrimination followed Chisholm’s quest for the 1972 Democratic Party presidential nomination. She was blocked from participating in televised primary debates, and after taking legal action, was permitted to make just one speech. Still, students, women, and minorities followed the “Chisholm Trail.” She entered 12 primaries and garnered 152 of the delegates’ votes—despite an under-financed campaign and contentiousness from the predominantly male Congressional Black Caucus.
When you think of African Americans who have made a political impact, President Barak Obama, again has a woman to thank for paving the way.
To close with a quote from Shirley Chisolm, “Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.”
QUESTION: What women have you known who have changed the world despite the odds?
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Leadership
In 2012, American lawyer and politician Reshma Saujani started a nonprofit called Girls Who Code. “Coding,” explains Saujani in her 2016 TED Talk, is “an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure.
Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you’re trying to build comes to life.
It requires perseverance. It requires imperfection. We immediately see in our program our girls’ fear of not getting it right, of not being perfect.
Every Girls Who Code teacher tells me the same story. During the first week, when the girls are learning how to code, a student will call her over and she’ll say, ‘I don’t know what code to write.’ The teacher will look at her screen, and she’ll see a blank text editor. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think that her student spent the past 20 minutes just staring at the screen.
But if she presses undo a few times, she’ll see that her student wrote code and then deleted it. She tried, she came close, but she didn’t get it exactly right. Instead of showing the progress that she made, she’d rather show nothing at all. Perfection or bust.”
If you are a woman born in the 20th century, you can probably relate to the phrase – perfection or bust. Three years ago, I was asked to participate in the inaugural year of SUE Talks. These TED-like talks were designed to inspire women to embrace their inner SUE by sharing stories of how they were Successful, Unstoppable, and Empowering. Since the launch in 2015, dozens of women have shared their SUE Talk on stage. Several of those talks, like two of the examples below, are examples from women who struggled for years to break the code that was written about how women leaders should behave. The third is from a woman who defied social stereotypes at an early age, and took code-breaking risks that paid off.
1. Surfing for Business, by Cheryl Goodman. In the summer of 2012, Cheryl Goodman nearly drowned. But in the moments after a set of rogue waves separated Goodman from her surfboard and threw her repeatedly to the ocean floor, her fear was not of dying – but of embarrassment.
2. There Once Was a Good Little Girl, by Michelle Bergquist. In this warm and witty recount, Bergquist shares her struggle to outgrow the childhood poem that shaped her self-image, even as her young husband recovered from a severe stroke.
3. Shooting for the Moon, by Kathy David. One month before her 16th birthday, Kathy David had a nervous breakdown. After a 3-week hospital recovery, she went home and demanded emancipation. David changed the trajectory of her life starting with a risky interview for a banking job for which she had no experience.
As we prepare the next generations of women to become our future leaders, what codes are we writing for them about what it means to be a woman, and which must they break in order to make progress?
QUESTION: What self-limiting barriers have you had to break to become the best version of yourself?
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Uncategorized
Change is coming. And patience is running out for those who don’t get it.
We’ve poured through some of the latest books written by women, about women, and for women in honor of Women’s History Month. Here are 6 fresh books that we think are well worth the turn of the page:
1. Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord
What it’s about: At Netflix, McCord served as Chief Talent Officer when a popular slide deck about its culture went viral. Now a consultant, McCord promotes the idea of radical honesty in the workplace, sharing lessons from her time at Netflix and elsewhere.
Why pick it up: It’s a guide for leaders of all levels on how to build a high-performance culture in the midst of vertigo-inducing change.
2. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All of the Facts by Annie Duke
What it’s about: Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion, was awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship to study cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She shares her work on decision strategy and distills its lessons in this book.
Why pick it up: Various sources estimate that an adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day. This number may sound absurd, but in fact, we make 226.7 decisions each day on just food alone according to researchers at Cornell University (Wansink and Sobal, 2007). As your level of responsibility increases, so do the smorgasbord of choices you are faced with.
3. Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang
What it’s about: For women in tech, Silicon Valley is a land where men hold all the cards and make all the rules. Vastly outnumbered, women face toxic workplaces rife with discrimination and sexual harassment, where investors take meetings in hot tubs and network at sex parties.
Why pick it up: In this powerful exposé, Bloomberg TV journalist Emily Chang reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures despite decades of companies claiming the moral high ground, and how women are finally starting to speak out and fight back.
4. That’s What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) About Working Together by Joanne Lipman
What it’s NOT about: Man shaming.
Why pick it up: Filled with illuminating anecdotes, data from the most recent studies, and stories from Joanne Lipman’s own journey to the top of a male-dominated industry, it shows how we can all win by reaching across the gender divide.
5. Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness by Melissa Dahl
What it’s about: New York magazine’s “Science of Us” editor explains the compelling psychology of awkwardness, and asks: what if the moments that make us feel most awkward are actually valuable?
Why pick it up: When everyone else is pretending to have it under control, you can be a little braver and grow a little bigger–while remaining true to your awkward self. And along the way, you might find that awkward moments unite us in our mutual human ridiculousness.
6. The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy
What it’s about: A hopeful meditation on womanhood and a universal quest
ion: What’s the most we should expect from ourselves and our bodies? It’s also a rumination on memory, family, commitment and the frailty of those things. You don’t have to be a woman for Levy’s writing to resonate.
Why pick it up: Levy’s story of resilience is an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed—and of what is eternal.
Question: What titles would you add in honor of Women’s History Month?
Letter from the Founder
Welcome to the thirty-first issue of CEE News!
30 years ago, if I had wanted to apply for a business loan, I would have had to ask a male relative or my husband to co-sign. That seems incomprehensible today.
What is not incomprehensible, however, is the cumulative progress women have made in the three decades since the 1988 passage of H.R. 5050. The Women’s Business Ownership Act enabled women to enter and enrich every field that we have stepped into – from engineering to entrepreneurship, from pharmaceuticals to physics.
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