In this talk, the speaker reflects on her recent participation in a SHRM conference where she delivered three sessions—on Millennials, workers' compensation, and, most notably, women in leadership. She uses the platform to stress that aspiring female leaders must first engage in deep self‑work, unpacking personal values, purpose, and vision before stepping into leadership roles. She critiques the common "box‑checking" career approach women often take, noting that it neglects essential questions about why they pursue certain goals. Citing the stark under‑representation of women in CEO positions (the "1% club"), she argues that current leadership development programs fail to connect contribution, vision, and purpose, leaving women under‑empowered. To address this, she introduces her new book, Leadership Self‑Transformation: The 52 Career‑Defining Questions Every High‑Achieving Woman Must Answer, which challenges readers with introspective questions designed to uncover purpose, value, and a clear career vision. She acknowledges the book’s difficulty but posits that transforming oneself into the envisioned leader compels organizations to support that growth, ultimately fostering a new generation of empowered female leaders.
Chapters
Okay, so I've just ended an awesome, successful SHRM conference. I did 3 sessions at the SHRM conference, one on the Smart Stage on Millennials, a second presentation on workers' comp, which is my area of expertise, and the most empowering session that I did was on women in leadership. And one of the things that I wanted to impart for women, especially women who are trying to become leaders, is that you have to do all of the self-work, all of the things that is the the unpacked luggage that we have within ourselves that we need to unpack before we can embrace leadership. I've written a new book, and the new book is called Leadership Self-Transformation: The 52 Career-Defining Questions Every High-Achieving Woman Must Answer. And in that book, I try to give women the point of introspection. How do you look at yourself first before you look at the leadership position? What do you want your vision to look like? What I found over time is that when women look at their careers, they actually look at it as a box. They check the box and they check the next box and they check the next box. And they don't always ask themselves, what do I want? Why do I want it? Where do I wanna go? Why is any of this super important to me? And if you ask those questions, your organization becomes more apt to help you achieve your vision. One of the things that we know for sure is that women are in that 1% club. If you want to be a CEO in this country or in any country for that matter, women are not at the top of most of the Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 corporations. And why is that? I think it's because we haven't really empowered women to own their position within the leadership space. What we do is we put them in leadership development programs, and when they enter those leadership development programs, we don't do an effective job of connecting the contribution with the vision. We don't do enough to connect the vision with the purpose. We don't do enough to empower them to release their voice and to say what needs to be said. So the main point of this new book, um, Leadership Self-Transformation, is to get women to do the inner work, all of that inner work, to find out their purpose, their value, their contribution, and to make sure that all of that is connecting with the vision they they have for their career. This won't be an easy book for anyone to go through. It's gonna be tough. It's gonna challenge you sometimes. You're gonna get questions and you're gonna go, "Wow, I never thought about that question." Ooh, who do I wanna be? Ooh, I never thought about that. That's the purpose of Leadership Self-Transformation. If you transform yourself into the leader that you envision yourself to be, your organization has no choice but to help you get there. And so if we get clear, if we have the clarity and the courage and the vision and the purpose around our careers, we will build an effective path and have a journey that is not only successful, but a journey that fulfills our inner desire to be the next leaders of tomorrow. And that's real reason why I wrote this book, is to give women the space to be empowered to be the next generation of leaders.
