Mentorship and sponsorship are different. Mentors are people who listen and advise, while sponsors open doors and lift you up. Mentors may tell you where the door is, but sponsors open the door. Sponsors have skin in the game and use their personal and professional capital to foster and provide opportunities.
Last night my husband and I were sitting in a sports bar in Cabo San Lucas while I was ruminating on how to write this blog post – romantic, I know…. Quite unexpectedly we struck up a conversation with the man next to us. He was a tall, lean man in his early 50s, and his name...
Verona Dorch, Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer for Peabody Energy, was recently interviewed by Kristin Calve of Corporate Counsel Business Journal. Dorch shared several strong messages that resonated with me personally, so much so that I wanted to highlight how they’ve been important in my practice and work with clients.
Influence Leadership
Like Dorch, I’m a strong believer in teams. She says, “I’m a strong believer in building a team of leaders. I like to give people the ability to lead, and I sometimes do it before they are ready.”
This describes how I sometimes...
We talk a lot about diversity, and how important it is for companies. In addition to mirroring their customer base, companies want to make sure they have diversity of thought at the leadership level. Companies like Uber (and indirectly perhaps the entire car-share industry) have suffered because they were trapped in a singular “bro leadership” mindset that led to some disastrous results. If everyone thinks the same way and no one pushes back, the CEO echo chamber becomes a very dangerous place.
There was a study published in the Harvard Business Review that examined the performance of companies...
