Who is your Corporate Heroine?
To be clear, I'm not speaking of a mentor. A mentor is someone you know who can work with you personally to help you shape your career and reach your professional or personal goals. Kudos and gratitude to those who mentor (I had some great ones and I strive to be one), but I'm asking about the one woman in business who you'd do anything to have coffee with. Your Corporate Heroine.
I define a Corporate Heroine as a woman who has risen to the top of her industry, blazing trails that women AND men can follow. Whose path are you trying to follow? Unfortunately, I don't think we have enough of these women in the spotlight and I'm interested in reading about your choices for Corporate Heroine and why her outlook, leadership, accomplishments, and story resonate with you. What would you ask her if you could?
As for me, my Corporate Heroine is Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX. (I'm in Operations.) Gwynne joined the team when there were less than a dozen employees and was selling rocket launches before there was a rocket to launch. Since then, she has been Elon's secret weapon, creating a culture of efficiency and excellence that I am always hungry to know more about. Recent articles show that she is working to improve diversity and inclusion at the company, engaging employees on their experiences and setting clear expectations for behaviors and values. Speaking with an employee, I've been told that she's an amazing and consistent leader. If you watch their launch broadcasts, female engineers are front and center in key roles. I've been inside their doors to see women building the rockets and directing work. I love that their work has been invested with so much meaning and importance, inspiring children. Most recently, Gwynne and the SpaceX team were the first to return astronauts to space from American soil after the close of the shuttle program. Just yesterday they relaunched the same booster from that historic launch, turning it around in record time, and caught both fairing halves using two big net ships while landing the booster on a drone ship! The bold visions may be Elon Musk's, and certainly Gwynne doesn't do this alone, but she is the captain of that ship with the day-to-day work. My hat is off to her and having the opportunity to learn anything from her would be a professional highlight.
Alright, your turn to comment!
Finally, if you don't already have a Corporate Heroine, perhaps take a look at some of the comments here and find yours.
Best wishes on your professional journey!
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Hi all - ok this is a first.
The new boss, promoted from within, and I are a bad fit, to put it mildly. I put in my two weeks’ notice, and she replied that I could leave tomorrow.
Here’s the twist: I WANT to stay for two weeks, to put files in order, to coordinate with co-workers the processes for future events, and to finish setting up a Dropbox account for my department. Most of all, I work in a retirement community, and want to ease these beloved residents into the knowledge that their trusted friend is leaving them in good hands. They just lost the last ED without notice and took it badly.
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Still, I have a good plan for leaving, and as you can tell from the above description of her, any discussion is going to go badly.
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