9 Reasons Take The Lead Benefits Women Leaders + 9 Reasons to Donate
Take The Lead President and Co-founder Gloria Feldt embodies the leadership tools of the power to accomplish goals.
It’s the end of a critical year for women in leadership and the start of enormous opportunities for action. We are moving into 2017 with intention, focus and energy. We can give you nine reasons to stay here at Take The Lead and benefit from our offerings.
Thanks to the generosity of Women Connect4Good and more than 250 of you who contributed, Take The Lead successfully held our first ever crowdfunding campaign for women’s leadership parity. If you haven’t contributed yet, you still can here.
With your help, this game-changing investment in Take The Lead will help us expand our programs and increase the free resources available to women in all communities, broadening our collective impact and helping to close the gender wage and leadership gaps.
With gratitude and appreciation, here are nine valuable assets women leaders receive from Take The Lead:
Take The Lead This Week weekly newsletter is filled with original content and fresh news you need now offering original and timely blog posts, as well as what to read, video of the week, quote of the week and Gloria’s Pick delivered every Tuesday morning in your email inbox.
The Movement Blog features three to five original, robust and timely news posts created for women leaders of all levels in their careers from early career to C-Suite.
Monthly Virtual Happy Hours, that most recently included Sallie Krawcheck, CEO of Ellevest.
Leadership programs including core programs, elective programs and more.
Webinars are interactive sessions based on the core concepts of The 9 Leadership Power Tools led by training experts ready to implement a unique webinar or series tailored to you or your team.
30 Take The Lead Leadership Ambassadors are passionate trainers with industry expertise—from technology, healthcare, finance, media, arts, social justice, nonprofit, education sectors, and more—to offer programs, keynotes, workshops that are Take The Lead’s standardized or customized offerings.
Close The Gap App is a collaboration between Take The Lead and She Negotiates that turns your individual career goals into a reality.
Take The Lead Mission of Gender Parity in Leadership by 2025. Because we have set the ambitious intention of gender parity in leadership by #25not95, our scaling up strategy is collaboration. We believe that just as power is an infinite resource, when it comes to accelerating women’s leadership, the more there is, the more there is. We want you to be a part of the movement.
“Discover 9 benefits (and more) from Take The Lead every week for women leaders wanting the latest info and power tools”
As our gift to you, we offer nine additional reasons for you to be an active part and donate to Take The Lead. Each one of these reasons aligns with the 9 Leadership Power Tools created by Gloria Feldt, Take The Lead co-founder and president.
1. Know Your History. When you understand where you have been, what skills you offer and what you bring to the table, you can bloom into an effective leader. Know your own past and how you can capitalize on that, communicate that history and envision how it fits in with a new opportunity. In Sharp Heels, Linda Hardenstein writes about a woman, Susana, struggling with her next career move: “She took a career assessment that revealed her purpose, what she was designed to do. Then she looked at ways could use all of her knowledge and experience in a way that would also fulfill her dream to be close to home and her desire to do meaningful work and make a valuable contribution. In 30 days, she had a new target and a new plan of action. Her confidence was restored as she saw new opportunities and how they could fit with what she wanted. Three months later, she landed her dream job. She is currently developing small businesses in her community, just 10 minutes from her home. Now, she’s very happy. Susana learned an important lesson: being honest with herself enabled her to find a new, authentic career path. It unleashed her energy, passion, and commitment, and her potential employer couldn’t help but notice. If you find yourself in a similar situation, keep Susana’s story in mind—being true to yourself will help you find a career that you’ll love and lead to a life that you truly want.”
2. Define Your Own Terms. You choose how you will spend your career and what you will focus on. You choose the communities you belong to, the alliances you create and where you will allocate your resources. “Philanthropy isn’t about just writing a check. That’s the easiest thing. Get deeply involved with a cause. It is not a rule. It is how I think,” says Anu Aga, former Thermax chairperson in India Times. You decide how you want to contribute.
3. Use What You’ve Got. Sandra Edwards, president of Wheelz on Time, understands her strengths. “She’s a former truck driver, as well a US Army veteran and former apartment leasing consultant. And with the help of the Bunker Labs, the Comcast NBCUniversal-sponsored innovation accelerator for veteran-led businesses in Chicago, Edwards is combining her background in the automotive and leasing industries to help customers, empower women, and redefine rent-to-own business,” according to Using your resources to empower young women and mid-career women as leaders and to embrace a community of women working for gender parity is using what you have for a larger goal.
4. Embrace Controversy. It is a critical time for women entrepreneurs and women leaders. Knowing how to operate in choppier waters can also allow you to rise to the top. Controversy can also mean embracing the competition and the problems it may cause. “Amy Kim, woman-owned small business program manager at the Small Business Administration’s Office of Government Contracting, said that your competitors are not your enemy, especially when considering the Rule of Two [when a contracting officer expects that two or more women-owned small businesses will make an offer, that officer can set aside a requirement for women-owned small businesses,): writes Meredith Somers in Federal News. “It’s very, very important to establish a friendly relationship with your competitors,” Kim said. “It’s also possible that relationship could turn into something more in the future and become a joint venture.”
5. Carpe The Chaos: It’s a confusing yet opportune time for women in leadership to take action and lay claim to the future we intend to create as women together. Aligning with Take The Lead to empower other women leaders is a way to embrace the moment. Julia Pimsleur, creator of Little Pim, founder of Million Dollar Women and author of Million Dollar Women: The Essential Guide for Female Entrepreneurs Who Want to Go Big, told Elana Lyn Gross in Forbes: “Never react before you have all the data. When you are an entrepreneur so many things go wrong all the time – from the sales dropping, to staff quitting, to harder to anticipate things like natural disasters interfering with your business or calamities like your office flooding. I learned not to react when seemingly awful things happened because you usually don’t have all the information yet. It’s easy to get yourself all worked up — and distracted from what you should be doing — with running through the worse case scenarios. Over time, I realized nothing is unfixable and often you find the solution in a matter of hours or days, so why waste your energy on overreacting? If you can keep a cool head you can usually find the solution faster. Now when anything goes wrong for me – personally or professionally – I stop and ask “Do I have all the data?” if not, if there is anything more I can learn about the situation, I focus on gathering that information instead of having some big emotional reaction.”
“We’ve got 9 reasons to give back to Take The Lead in the New Year.”
6. Wear The Shirt. That can be literal or figurative, but it means to be transparent about your support for a cause, an organization, a company, a movement, an idea, an issue or even an individual. And then shout your support, wear the company colors and be loyal. Take The Lead would love to have you on the team. As Chelsea Handler writes in Thrive Global, “It’s time to get focused on what really matters. Find women that are different than you and figure out the things you have in common. We have a whole generation of girls who are looking at us to see how we treat each other. Let’s show them what the power of being a woman really looks like. Let’s open our arms to each other, and to them.
7. Take Action, Create A Movement. “Put down a step-by-step plan for each of your goals. Ensure that each plan has a solid foundation and is detailed in its ideas; the more meticulous your plan the higher your probability of achieving your target within the set limit. For instance, you could jot down three pragmatic steps for each of your goals that you can take right now. Focus on what you do well and delegate the rest to those who know better,” rites Anushree Singh in Business Insider.
8. Employ Every Medium. One method of empowerment for women and for yourself is giving back, selecting wisely on your philanthropy and choosing to financially support organizations that lift up other women, including Take The Lead. “Your values are the principles that guide you in your everyday decision-making, in your relationships, and in your work. Take a moment to identify what is most important to you, then find an organization that aligns with those values — even if it is just about the structure or the transparency of that organization. When you give time or money to that organization, you are voting for your values,” writes Mega Desai in Daily Worth.
9. Tell Your Story. Telling your story is about more than chatting with the person next to you at a conference or across from you at a dinner party. Telling your story and your truth about your path as a woman leader illuminates the room for the rest of us looking to calculate the landscape. The recent demise of the Amazon video series, Good Girls Revolt, based on the true story of author Lynn Povich and her colleagues at Newsweek is a morality tale of the need to tell our stories as women in the workplace. Marianne Cooper writes in The Atlantic, “All of this matters—for the stories that get told, the characters that get put on screen, the decisions that get made, and the profits that are earned or lost. It just may be the case that when a white male studio executive decides he doesn’t like a show, say one about a pivotal moment in women’s history, his sentiments might not be shared by women or people from other underrepresented groups. One has to wonder if Amazon video’s decision about Good Girls Revolt may have been different if even one woman was in the room.
Happy New Year. At Take The Lead we are please to offer nine reasons you benefit from take The Lead. Please consider nine more reasons to give back to Take The Lead. We need you.
About the Author
Michele Weldon is editorial director of Take The Lead, an award-winning author, journalist, emerita faculty in journalism at Northwestern University and a senior leader with The OpEd Project. @micheleweldon www.micheleweldon.com