I'm looking forward to our conversation, and I'll go ahead and share these slides.Today, we're gonna talk about amplifying women's leadership and the role women can play in changing the game for everyone. Now question I like to ask is do we think that progress towards equality is inevitable? Do we think that the next generation grew up with more women leaders and they'll be the ones to lead the way? Or what we think for ourselves, once I get into the boardroom, then my voice will really matter. Here's what we know from research that even when women have the credentials and the position there can still be dynamics that prevent our voices from being heard.

And thus what I'm going to suggest is that even though progress is indeed moving, it's up to us to keep it moving forward. Now why might it be that there are dynamics that prevent us from having an equal voice in the boardroom, an equal voice in executive positions? Well, it's because in many ways the pull towards the status quo happens and continues to happen in ways that are mostly unnoticed. So think for a minute. Have you, yes, even us, have you ever walked into an executive room and mistakenly thought that the man was in charge when in fact the woman was the senior sponsor? Or have you ever criticized a woman leader saying that she just doesn't listen? And then someone said, well, a lot of people in that room weren't listening. Why is it that you're focused on her? It's because unbeknownst to us, these dynamics in the status quo are preventing us from seeing that perhaps change is necessary.

Now what are those dynamics of the status quo? In many ways, our stereotypes are the historical ways we think is that when we think leader, we think male, which makes it harder for us to recognize talent when it comes in the form of this remarkable leader. If you don't recognize her, it's Ursula Burns who was the black woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company and CEO of Xerox. So when we have stereotypes that have us think leader, think male, it prevents us from really listening to acknowledging and seeing the talent fully of women all the way through the pipeline. From the beginning of what Lean and and Mackenzie call the broken rung all the way up to the boardroom. As Shelly said, I worked with many directors to come up with a board culture playbook.

And in our conversations, we learned that even at that level, women have to be strategic to ensure that their voices and ideas are heard in many settings. Now what I'm gonna share with you today is an idea that as you rise through the ranks in an organization, people really turn to you to solve problems, turn to you to have frameworks, turn to you to have what I'm going to call a playbook, a playbook for how you're going to lead the organization to solve the problems through the change that's needed.

And as I discussed, there might be dynamics, the pull towards the status quo that prevent your voice from being heard. So as a woman leader, you may discover that your greatest impact is to not only create a playbook for how you will succeed, but to create a playbook to advance the entire movement towards greater gender equality, to having more women succeed and rise through our organizations.

Now at one point, I had the advantage, the great opportunity to hear from Gloria Steinem when she celebrated the anniversary of her Ms. Magazine. And in that speech, she said, you know if we want to advance the movement, we can't do it by having leadership defined and enacted in exactly the same ways that led us to where we are today. We need to change the game. And what she said was, let's define leadership in different ways. And the word she used to describe leadership was kindness. And for myself, I thought of my own way I want to design my playbook for leadership, and the word I think of is generosity. So for yourself, how do you wanna create a playbook for success that advances not only you, but other women, and in a way that you're changing the game and defining leadership in a way that can move us all forward? Now what I wanted to share with you are five areas we can work together to create change in the very way that we get work done.

When I think of leadership scholar, Haminiya Abara, at the London Business School. She says you don't get to the c suite and then start thinking like a leader. It's the actions you take to get you into the suite c suite that shifts your thinking. Her book, act like a leader, think like a leader, lays out her playbook for advancing leadership in organizations. Taking new actions will lead to new ways of thinking that could lead to your playbook. So let's look at those five key areas. The one is what I'll call be a Jedi in meetings. If you're like me, I'm a fan of the Star Wars series. And in this series, there were these mythical creatures called Jedi who were able to use their minds to change the way people behaved.

Well, it turns out that meetings are a place where behaviors do need to be changed. Even at senior levels, we find that meetings tend to be dominated by just a few people. Here's a fact from research. In a group of eight, three people speak 67% of the time. So if you wanted to redesign the meeting dynamics of the rooms you're in, one of the key tools you have is creating and agreeing upon norms. Norms are the rules of engagement. It's how people wanna work together as a team and how work will get done. If you don't deliberately define what the norms are, the norms will pull to favor the status quo. So what are some of the things that you can do?

One, it turns out you get more ideas on the table if the most senior person speaks last. In fact, when we were interviewing directors, they said the best chairs of their board of directors spoke last. They created space for everyone to share their diverse and unique perspectives. Then they summarize those perspectives laid out where they were going and used their influence to get the group to move in a productive idea. Another Jedi trick you could use is to consistently ensure that you take turns in conversations. It can be called a round robin. Now you know, don't need to do this for every conversation, but notice that if you don't ever do it and you really only hear from three people out of a group of eight.

Now I had a chance to listen to Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor. She used to run a 100 person team at Google. And she said what the way she ensured everyone participated in the conversation was she left open a Google Doc after the meeting and asked people to continue to input their ideas. And then they discussed it once people had a chance to weigh in. So there are many creative ways you can ensure people have a chance to weigh in. Have that be part of your playbook. And lastly, as you might have seen in the the description of my my talk, even at the most senior levels, women tend to get interrupted more than men. So what can you do about it? Well, if you're in a room and the woman keeps getting interrupted, instead of pointing out the interrupt interruption, hey. Stop interrupting Laurie.

Elevate her expertise. Wait. This is a really great point. I'd like to hear the end of what Laurie has to say before we move on. Had another woman share her tip. She says, I really wanna address that question. Let's hold on to it because I wanna finish this Does that work for you? Again, these are tricks to realign the meetings to be more inclusive, and they can become a norm and part of your leadership playbook. The next idea is to remove errors from decision making. And to quote professor Shelley j Correll at Stanford and my lab faculty director, she says that bias is an error in decision making. You want to choose the best person for a job, but bias will cause you to pick somebody who might be less qualified, not due to their qualifications, but due to the way we process information.

And bias might mean, like that earlier slide, think male, think leader, or think leader, think male, we might inadvertently see the man as more leader like even though he has the same qualifications. So what can you do about this? What can you add to your playbook? One idea is to be very clear about the standards and criteria you're using to make your decision. If you're making a lot of free flow decisions, you might wanna try using a scorecard, a way to track how you're grading people or evaluating people against the stated criteria. You might want to practice asking this question. What criteria are we using to make this decision? Agreeing to the criteria before you make a decision has been proven to remove a lot of the bias.

And lastly lastly, ask the evaluators why they made a certain assessment. That's transparency. It turns out if we know we have to justify our decision, we're less likely to be prone to biases. The next idea is to be strategic in activating your networks. Now you might have a lot of ideas of what I mean by network. Here's the definition by leadership scholar, Herminia Ibarra. Networks help you offer more and have more impact. In fact, the higher you rise in an organization, the more your networks matter. So when you enter an organization, oftentimes, just learning how to do the work is what your job is.

But as you become more senior, people want you to bring in resources, ideas to the conversation, to your work. And oftentimes, the people around you have exactly the same access to ideas as you do. But your networks over time become critical in bringing in new ideas to your work. One way to flip the script, instead of saying, how can I get access to that to improve my work? You can't think about what you can offer. Many of us are nervous network more actively because we think it's too self serving. Well, one way to, again, use maybe a way a framework to move beyond that is to think about what you can offer.

Do you know that you have a very robust network yourself already? In fact, women tend to have deeper networks throughout an organization. And what you can offer leaders may be access to information that your network's providing. I'm not sure if you know what's happening on the ground. Here's what I'm hearing in my networks. If you're worried about being bold on behalf of yourself, here's another tip. Be bold on behalf of your team. Think about what will empower your team and that might encourage you to have more conversations on behalf of them. And lastly, I always say be kind to yourself. I'm an introvert, so when I go to a networking event, I don't wanna meet a 100 people. I give myself permission to meet one or two people and have a deep conversation that will impact my work and hopefully help them.

So I'm kind to myself and say that's good enough. Now think about the way that you can start to shape perceptions using language. Let's do a quick thought exercise. If I said to you, you can only draw from one of these columns of words to describe somebody who deserves a promotion. Would you use column a or column b? And I've done this exercise with thousands of leaders from around the world. And in general, people pick column b. Now you might have noticed that there are two very different kinds of language. Column a is what we might call communal language or the language of we, of relations. Column b is what we might call agentic language, the language of agency or individuals or I, we or I. Now you might realize that both are required for good leadership.

But thinking again about stereotypes, the historical archetype of leadership aligns with agentic words, and the historical archetype for woman, our stereotype, aligns with communal words. So in many ways, we describe women and men differently for the exact same performance. Now Russell Reynolds even looked at the way language was used in media to describe CEOs. And indeed, they found different communication words used to describe men and women CEOs. So what can we do to proactively shape perceptions using language? Since we know we tend to overvalue agentic language and undervalue communal, one thing we can do is focus on impact. We can focus on balancing agentic and communal terms in job descriptions, performance evaluations, promotion statements. We can remove doubt.

Our research on performance reviews showed that these doubt raising statements showed up more when we describe women. She eventually delivered good results, not she delivered good results. Remove doubt from your descriptions. And lastly, think about being specific. In an article written by Shelley Corral and Carolyn Simard, it looked the fact that we tend to describe women using vague terms. So be specific and focus on impact. And the last strategy that you could think about using to build your own leadership playbook is to amplify women leaders. Joan Williams at UC Hastings did research, and she discovered that women are more likely to have to prove it again. What does that mean? Well, they were given a seat at the table, but they had to prove they earned the seat at the table.

And once they did, they might have to do it over and over and over again. This is a form of bias. So what's something we can all do for each other? We can amplify her expertise If you're in a meeting and there's a woman leader speaking and people aren't paying attention to her, just the way you're paying attention could cause others to pay more attention. In the Obama administration, women were appointed to cabinet lever level posts that had never really had a lot of women before, and people weren't paying attention to them. So they started to underscore each other's expertise. That's a really important point. Thank you for making it. Cause them to listen. You can introduce her powerfully. Notice if you always introduce women with those communal warm words. I really love working with her.

If that's the case, don't give up on them, but balance it with agentic words. She's a world renowned leader and expert in supply chain. She's gonna drive results using this framework, and you'll love working with her. Introducing women powerfully can set conditions for their success. So as you build your board or your individual playbook, your leadership playbook, and you're thinking not only of your success but of the success of all women leaders advancing women's leadership more broadly. You might think about it as part of the women's movement. Here I am in the last women's march in DC. Can you sustain the movement? The question is, isn't too much at stake for us not to do this work, not only on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of other women? I want to leave you with this quote from Nadine Gordimer. Nadine Gordimer is a Nobel Laureate. She wrote many books.

She's a South African who wrote these books in the time of apartheid in her country. She wrote, the gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails followed by the mind's eye only fade out in sand. So take intentional actions, amplify women's leadership, and know that together, we can indeed change the game. Thank you so much.