In this keynote, Margaret Spence challenges women to recognize their own high potential and stop the endless cycle of checking boxes that keeps them from advancing. She highlights how women often meet far more criteria than men before being considered for promotion, leaving them stuck in supervisory roles while men move up. Spence urges organizational leaders to deliberately reposition women into succession pipelines and to create structural pathways for advancement. She differentiates three critical support roles—mentors, sponsors, and champions—explaining that mentors advise, sponsors advocate, and champions aggressively fight to secure leadership opportunities for women. The talk concludes with a call to action for both women to claim their ambitions and for leaders to strategically place and champion women into senior positions.
Chapters
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. 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 key question is, what do I want? And the better question is, why don't I have it now? But then we think about it, we mull it over, and then we begin to be sheepish and we say, you know what, I don't really— ah, maybe I really don't want that. Maybe what I want is something else. Maybe I'm not ready. Maybe I haven't checked all the boxes. Maybe I need to check another box. Women check 99 boxes and a man only checks 2 or 3. So while we're checking the boxes, men are advancing their career. So I say to you, stop checking the boxes. We are already qualified for the role. Find someone in this room, someone on this side of the room empowering someone on that side of the room. Pick up the phone and call somebody else and say, "I think I want to do this." Talk me into it. 90% of women are in managerial and supervisory roles. We are not in line of succession. We're not positioned so that when a position opens up above us, we are ready to take on that role. If you are running a company and you're looking at where women are placed in the organization, if you find that women are stuck in supervisory and management roles, it's imperative that you go with— to your HR department and you say, how do we realign this so that we are strategically placing women so that they can advance into key leadership roles? Because if we don't place women appropriately, they will never move up into the ranks. That is the marching order for every man in this room. That's what I would like to ask you to do for all of us. If you are in a key leadership role, go back to your company, evaluate the positioning, 'cause what we often say is, "We need a woman in leadership." The reality is we have no woman positioned to be a leader. And if they're not positioned, they cannot lead. We cannot lead. In order for women to move forward, we must have mentors, we must have sponsors, sponsors. We must have champions. Let me quickly condense what each one of these roles are. Mentors will say to you, these are the things you should be doing. This is how you need to position yourself. This is what positioning should look like. Sponsors, on the other hand, are willing to go to bat for you. They're willing to go to someone else and say, I see potential in this person. I think that she or he could be great in this position, and I know you may not see it, but I see their potential. But the best people to have in your circle are champions, because here's a champion. A champion will kick down the door, stomp themselves in the room. They will put on combat boots for you. They will Fight to the end to make sure that you get the position you deserve.
