International Women's Day - Trigger Moment

On this International Women’s Day, I want to share a story about a “trigger moment” in 2013 that made me realize how difficult it could be for women to succeed in male-dominated workplaces and industry.   

At the time, I was working in a very male-dominated industry, but that was changing.  Ironically, I was working for a female and I was very happy to have a small, but effective, team of women on our sales team that I had built the previous 3 or 4 years.  If you saw my previous post, where I consciously built our sales team utilizing a strengths-based approach, focusing on one’s talents, not on their race, sexual orientation, nationality, religion… We were very successful and the women on our team brought a much-needed level of experience and point of view that set us apart in the marketplace and in our management team. 

 In 2013, I had transitioned away from the sales role and into a newly created high-level retail development role.  Shortly after the transition, at a lunch with the person that took over my sales leadership role, the statement “I don’t know why you ever hired women for the sales roles, I would never do that” was made.  After my heart sunk, because it tore at my belief system to hear those words, the immediate fear set in that I might see the women on my previous team that I lead, lead me and became friends with (engagement 101), and who made our team successful, might be in jeopardy of losing their positions.

 With the aid of my executive coach, who happens to be a woman and one of the most influential people in my life, I reflected on this statement and the many other statements that were previously made and continued for the following 12 months, that eventually lead to me being “highly disengaged” at the company that I spent 18 years helping to build, that trigger moment made me realize the difficulty for women to succeed in a male-dominated industry and sales role. 

 As someone who is married to a very strong woman, who has successfully owned her own business for more than 20 years, a mother who is\was successful as a working mom throughout my entire life, a mother-in-law who is\was successful in her roles in the healthcare industry, an executive coach, who is highly regarded as one of the best in the world and who was influential in helping me see past a lot of my own pre-conceived biases, and the hard-working woman on my team that influenced a company and industry at a time when it was not popular, I felt proud for the women in my life who were overcoming the biases out there and I vowed to ensure that my three sons would be influenced differently, but shame that the woman running the company at the time, would be blinded by the biases she allowed to infiltrate the company culture, especially on the customer-facing side of the company.

Cheers to all of the women out there that are overcoming those biases and are making a difference for young girls and women to break through the barriers that still exist, it is not easy. 

gf

PS, don’t forget, people leave managers, not companies.