In this keynote, Margaret Spence recounts a pivotal moment 25 years ago when her manager dismissed her leadership potential, only to later witness that same manager in the audience as she delivered a conference keynote. She frames the story as a testament to empowerment and the principle that "where you start out should never be where you end up," a lesson she attributes to her mother, an immigrant who rose from seamstress to dietary manager. Spence emphasizes lifelong learning, self‑knowledge, and the importance of defining one’s own identity and purpose. She challenges the audience—especially women—to ask themselves who they are, what they care about beyond themselves, and to create concrete plans for their careers. Spence also calls on men to support women’s advancement. She shares her own entrepreneurial journey founding C. Douglas & Associates, a large women‑owned risk‑management and HR firm, and declares a bold mission to increase African‑American women representation at the Fortune 500 level, noting that currently none exist. Throughout, she blends personal narrative, practical career advice, and a call to systemic change.
Chapters
Imagine that you've spent 5 years sitting in a particular desk in your office. You've learned all the tasks that they've asked you to learn. You've done everything that you should do as a leader. And one day you see a position posted and it's the ideal position. It's the one that you've craved your whole life for. It's the one that you saw yourself in the minute you arrived in the company that you work for. And imagine that when you saw that position posted, you thought to yourself, what I could do to have that position. Let me go ahead and have a discussion with my manager about that job. And so you schedule an appointment, you go in, and you speak to your manager. And during that conversation, you give her all the reasons why you should have that position. You basically ask for the job that you want. But instead of embracing your vision for where you want to go, Your boss says to you, "You're really good where you are. There's no reason for you to leave that position that you're in right now." Furthermore, she said, "I don't really see you having the potential to be a leader." And she added, "Not only do I not see you having the potential, I just can't see you in a leadership role within our company. That discussion occurred 25 years ago between myself and my boss. I today am sharing my story with you, a story of empowerment, a story of my life, and a story of coming full circle. 10 years later, I was keynoting our industry conference. For those of you who don't know my background, I've been in risk management and HR for the last 32 years. And so fast forward 10 years, and I'm keynoting the conference, and my boss that told me that I had no potential is sitting in the audience. She's 3 rows back, and her eyes are about to pop out of her head because I'm standing on the stage. That is how you show people who don't know who you are, who you are.
So what I want to say to all of you today is pretty simple. Where you start out should never be where you end up.
I learned this lesson from my mom. And one of the reasons why I say I come full circle is I want to share my story with you. I arrived in the United States at the age of 3. My mother had left Jamaica when I was almost 1 year old. She came to the United States to be the housekeeper and nanny for one of the most prominent families in the United States. She left me behind to be raised by my grandmother. But when I arrived in New York and got off of the Pan Am Airways, and for those of you millennials in the room, you probably have never heard of Pan Am Airways. But I got off of Pan Am Airways and my mother met me at Kennedy Airport in New York. And I remember to this day what she said to me. She said, "I want you to wake up in the morning with a book in your hand. I want you to go to sleep at night with a book in your hand." I am 55 years old now, and I have no problems telling you that. I read 30 to 40 books a year, and the reason why I read is because my mother instilled in me that knowledge can never be taken away from you.
Knowledge is something that once you have it, it can never be removed.
But what I learned from my mother very distinctly, and to understand her journey, she was a seamstress. Had limited education, but eventually she became the dietary manager at New York Hospital. So not only did she evolve over time, but she taught me how to evolve. One of the things that my mother said to me very clearly is, "Where you start out should never be where you end up." So one of the things that I knew, and knew very instinctively, when my boss said to me, "You cannot be who you should be," I knew that she did not control my destiny. I say to all of you, especially for you women in the room, sometimes when we get to high places, we forget that there's a woman struggling behind us. I empower you as women in the room to empower each other. It's important that we send a message for ourselves, for our daughters, for our sisters, for our aunts, for our nieces, that we can be empowered and we can empower each other.
So tonight, I want to ask you some key questions to move your career forward.
The first question that I want to ask you is, who are you? If you do not know who you are, other people get to define who you should become.
One of the key questions that my mother always said to me is, You have to know who you are.
When I was 10 years old, she packaged me up and sent me back to Jamaica because she wanted me to learn who I was. And so I spent another 8 years living with my grandmother and learning about who I was.
It's very clear for me who I am. I'm asking you to get very clear about who you are. But more importantly, for those of you women in the room, Who are you as a woman leader? Who do you want to become and where do you want to go? We are almost in November. We're a day away from November. We're 8 weeks towards the end of the year. I would say to each one of you and challenge each one of you to sit down when you get back to your office and create a plan for who you are and who you want to become.
Because again, where you start out is not where you should end up.
I also want to empower you as men in the room, and I am so happy to see you here. Every man that showed up in this room is empowering another woman to live her dream, and we cannot live our dream without you. So I ask you, when you go back to your office, to ask the women who work for you, who are you? And where do you wanna go? What is your vision for your role? What is your vision for your life? And find a path to help that woman step into her vision and step into her purpose. One of the key things that we have to have as women and as women leaders is clarity. Clarity is the key to empowerment and the key to moving forward. If we are not clear about who we are and where we want to go, other people get to decide what that should look like. And I say to you, I don't want someone else having control of my destiny. I want to have control of my own destiny. I want to chart a path that is my path. So 21 years ago, I left a very lucrative corporate job to form C. Douglas and Associates. We are one of the largest women-owned risk management and HR company that is not affiliated with anyone else in the United States. We manage HR for multiple corporations and HR compliance all over the world. For me, that was my vision. That was where I want to go. That was the company that I built. I've spent the last 21 years building that. But let me tell you where I am today, because again, my original mission, my original purpose is not to be where I start out. You must constantly evolve, reshape, grow, and evolve into who you want to be, and be comfortable letting go of where you are to go to where you want to become, or who you want to become. So the overarching question beyond who are you that I want to ask all of you today is what do you care about that's greater than yourself? What goal do you have that takes your breath away? Because that's the goal that drives you. If being a CEO, if being an owner of your own company, if being empowered to be a leader is your goal. That is what's taking your breath away. That is the mission that you have as a woman or as a man in this room. Each of us has a mission and a goal that's greater than ourselves, and each of us must live and step into that mission as we evolve. So let me tell you about my bold mission. I want to upend the 1% club. Let me give you the 1%. Right now, there are zero African American women CEOs of a Fortune 500 company.
There are none.
There is only one woman CEO of the Fortune 1000 that is a woman of color. We just lost Indira Nooyi at PepsiCo. Which means that on corporate boards and within the corporate structure, we do not have a woman that looks like us, that looks like me, leading a corporation. But here's an interesting dichotomy. Every time a woman exits the CEO role of a Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 company, she is replaced by a man. So let me say that again. Every time a woman exits a CEO role of a Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 corporation, she is replaced by a man. What that says to me is that when women get into the CEO role, we haven't defined the mentorship pipeline that will include other women who are ready to take over when we step aside. It's extremely important, and one of my sole missions right now is to empower women to manage their career as if you are playing chess. Every woman needs to manage their career as if you're playing chess, and let me explain that to you in the easiest and simplest way. We can make checkers moves, and checkers moves are we move sideways, we jump over, and we stay there. If we're playing chess, we're using strategy. We're deploying strategic initiatives to move our career forward. We're not accepting where we are. We're taking the strategy, we're looking out above us. We can be really good tactically, in the positions that we hold. But if we are not strategic and looking out into the horizon and lifting our heads up from the positions we're in right now and asking ourselves, where do I wanna go from here? And finding people who will help us and move the needle forward for us, we will continue to live in this 1% club. We, as women collectively, can do better than 1%. I wanna say something else to you. Women own, earn the most college degrees in the United States, yet we are often missing from every executive rank within organizations. We cannot continue to be educated and missing because education alone is not what moves us forward. Being strategic about how we align our career with the organizations that we work for is what is important to help us move forward. I have a saying that I've said pretty repeatedly that I want to say to all of you. We cannot become what we cannot see. And for you as a man in a leadership role, if a woman cannot see herself in that role, And if she walks into the organization and there's not another woman there leading the charge, then she learns pretty quickly that her voice will not matter because she cannot see where she can go. So it's really important that from a visual standpoint, from a corporate governance standpoint, that we not only create opportunities, but we understand the business case for why it is important to have a woman at the helm of leadership roles within our organizations. Organizations with women on the board, in leadership roles, in strategic positions outperform organizations that do not have women in those roles. So what do we do? Where do we go? So let me tell you what I think. Every woman in this room is high potential. As a society, we run around saying we have high potential millennials, we have high potential women, we have high potential people all over the place. But the reality, for every woman in this room, you are a high potential, high survivor. We are high potential, high survivors. Because the reality is every day we show up to work with our vision tucked in our pocket or tucked in our pocketbook. We haven't figured out how to ask for what we want, and we haven't figured out how to move the needle toward what we want versus what everybody else wants from us. So the critical questions, the 3 critical questions that I want to implore upon you to ask yourself and challenge you to ask yourself is what do you want to achieve? What do you want? Why do you want it? And why don't you have it now? These are 3 critical questions, because if we don't ask ourselves these questions, if we don't ask ourselves what do we want, how do we know that we've gotten it? If we're not asking the questions of ourselves. So the key question is, what do I want? And the better question is, why don't I have it now?
