When Women Lead, What Happens?

This podcast is brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com. When women lead companies, what happens? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, and welcome to the Way Forward podcast. My guest today is Julia Borsten. Julia is the senior media and tech correspondent for CNBC, and she's the author of a new book called When Women Lead. In today's conversation, we explore how her research and interviews with more than 120 women and a few men led to discovering that there are a range of qualities that women tend to possess that correlate with great leadership and that made these women uniquely equipped to lead, grow businesses, and navigate crises. These women were highly adaptive to change. They were deeply empathetic in their management style. They were authentic and vulnerable. They were grateful, and they were much more likely to integrate their diverse points of view into their business strategies. By utilizing those strengths and others, they invented new business models, they disrupted industries, and they made massive profits along the way. Julia and I dive deep into these qualities and how every leader, regardless of your identity, can benefit by cultivating them. So let's get started with Julia Borsten. Let's go back a few years. In your new book, When Women Lead, you start off by talking about your mom. And how back in the '60s she was marching against the Vietnam War. She was marching for civil rights. And you mentioned that she had heard Gloria Steinem talk in the '70s. So let's fast forward about 50 years to today. How has the hope that your mom had for the role that women would play in the future, how has that either come to fruition or not come to fruition?

Well, I think if you look at the fact that women hold only about 8% of the CEO roles in the Fortune 500, and female founders draw just 3% or less of all venture capital dollars, my mom's vision for me of, of working in a world where men and women equally held roles of power was just absolutely wrong. I think in her day, as she was seeing all these progress and all of these different topics, whether it was civil rights or women's rights, she saw a steady march in progress and she assumed that progress in leadership would follow. Unfortunately, we just haven't seen women equally rise to power when it comes to the very powerful and obviously important world of business. And if you look at the statistics, even the, the roles that women serve on boards now, far more women serve on boards than did just a couple of years ago, but now it's about 27% of board seats in the Russell 3000 are held by women. So that's a lot of progress. And 27% is sure a lot more than the 8% of CEO roles held by women. But we're still a long, long way from women holding anywhere near 50% or even 40% of leadership roles at the most important companies in the world.

Anne, with the benefit of hindsight here, what would you say are the barriers that have remained in place over the past 10, 20, 30 years that have not made your mom's dream fully realized yet?

Well, look, I think institutions move very slowly. And I think that things have worked very well for these companies for a very long time. And the fact that women are 50% of consumers and by many measures make 80% of all purchasing decisions has yet to really influence who is holding seats of power. Now, there are so many different studies to explain why women may start at companies, you know, out of college in equal roles or straight out of business school in equal numbers as their male counterparts. There is this theory of the broken rung where women are not getting promotions at the same rate. Some of that has to do with taking breaks for maternity leave, et cetera. But there are all these different studies that, that break down how women are not getting promoted to senior ranks in the same way. A lot of it has to do, if you look at the tech ecosystem and the fact that women, as of last year, female-founded companies drew 2% of all venture capital dollars, a lot of that has to do with pattern matching. A couple of the women I spoke to noted adamantly, and I agree with them, that it is not malicious. The fact that women are not drawing more VC dollars or being promoted into more senior management roles is not malicious. No one is to blame for this. There are all these societal and structural issues that, you know, encourage people to go with what has worked before. And if you're an investor and you know that a multiple-time founder who was an engineering major at Stanford and worked for Microsoft straight out of college and has sold two companies, if he fits your pattern of what a successful entrepreneur is gonna look like, you're We're going to invest in the guy who looks just like the other guy who worked out 2 years ago. And that's not malicious, but it may not be following the data about what's going to be the most effective investment.

Yeah, it may not be malicious, but it's still a problem.

It's still a problem. It's still a problem. And frankly, the reason I wanted to write this book as a business journalist with 16 years of experience at CNBC and another 6 years before that at Fortune magazine is this is a big missed opportunity from a business standpoint. If women were given more opportunities and investors were to bet more on female-founded companies, or frankly female CEOs, there would be a massive amount of financial opportunity unlocked, not just for those women but for investors as well.

Yeah, so let's talk about a couple aspects of that. So the first is women founders. So tell me what what your experience and research has found in terms of the advantages that women founders have vis-à-vis men in terms of founding companies. And then we'll talk about working in existing companies, not as founders, but as leaders of companies. What extra do women bring to that? So first, let's start about women founders.

So the reason I— a large part of my book is talking about female founders, or looking through the lens of female founders to tell this broader story of leadership, is I wanted to find the place in the business world where women face the largest the steepest odds. And if you look at industries like Wall Street, which went through a reckoning in the '80s and '90s and have a lot more female leadership now, I mean, look at the CEO of Citi is, is a woman. There are female executives across Wall Street. You've seen these other industries become far more diverse. And the one sector of the business economy, and I would argue perhaps the most powerful part of our economy right now is the tech sector. Do you look at tech startups, whether it's Uber or Airbnb or Facebook, Facebook, now Meta, these companies, Google, they all have changed the way people live their lives. They have transformed entire industries by forcing the incumbents to change. These are companies that are backed by venture capital dollars. And this is the part of the economy where women face the steepest odds. The fact that 75% of all companies that get VC funding do not have a single woman on the co-founding team is remarkable to me. So I thought, this is an in— a place of the business world where women face the steepest odds. And therefore, if we can learn from the women who have managed to succeed, then those women have lessons that would be valuable for anyone because they have defied the odds. They are by definition exceptional. And so they have leadership characteristics that are certainly valuable and have proven valuable for me, but also would be valuable for anyone in any position. So in terms of the VC space, 18.6% went to co-ed teams. And in the first half of 2023, 27% to female teams, but 65% of all VC funds, like investing funds, at, uh, as of recent count, didn't have a single female decision maker. So they might have a female marketing partner, but a lot of VC funds don't even have women making decisions about what companies to invest in. And that leads to this perpetuation of men investing in men who look like them or remind them of themselves. This is a huge missed opportunity because a lot of data shows that female founders are more likely to do more with less. They have a track record of yielding higher returns based on lower upfront investment and of yielding returns to their investors earlier. Now, in the high-flying days of, of the last tech bubble, which I think is quickly coming to an end, that maybe didn't matter so much. We heard of tech companies chasing growth at any cost, and now the funding bubble has deflated and people care more about return on investment. If you're chasing growth at any cost, male founders may be better off at that. But when you're looking at getting returns, return on investment, female founders are more likely to be able to do that more quickly and more efficiently. And part of that is that they just haven't had the same access to capital. But while the male founders may be swinging for the fences and going for the crazy moonshot in this day and age, especially the economic uncertainty we're reckoning with right now, the female founders being more practical not needing to raise as much money has ultimately given them an advantage.

What does the data show in terms of the percentage of men that want to start a business versus the percentage of women? Is it an equal number? Is it just there's just more men, period, that like to start a business and less women do? Or is it that more women would if they felt like they had an equal opportunity?

So this is a really good question, and I dug deep into this because I was trying to figure out What is the success rate of women? A lot of people say, hey, maybe just women aren't trying to found VC-backed tech companies. Maybe they're more interested in launching bakeries or hair salons or whatever. There is no comprehensive data on this because you can't go around and poll people and say, hey, do you want to start a business or do you think you have a shot at getting VC funding? I really dug deep into this one and I was really hoping I would find some numbers, but there are some data indicating that women are founding companies at a higher rate than they are raising VC dollars. So Silicon Valley Bank, which serves a ton of startups in the tech space, they found that I think it was about 28% of their companies had a female founder. So based on their numbers, they were seeing that more companies with female founders existed than were raising money at the same rate as men. That might indicate that male-founded companies are raising money more frequently. So female-founded companies may be raising every other year, whereas male-founded companies are raising every year. So I would say, despite the fact that I don't have comprehensive data, all the numbers indicate that more women are founding companies and growing their companies than they are able to access financing at the same rate as men.

Okay. So let's say that we had a level playing field in terms of raising the capital, and I know we're not there yet, but let's just assume that we were there. What have you seen in your research in terms of the difference in how women go about building that business versus men?

Well, what's really interesting is a lot of these companies founded by women are tackling problems and products that women need. This is not rocket science to think that more women might be founding what they call femtech companies addressing things like fertility or menopause. There are massive parts of the healthcare space that have not gotten attention or investment because they're serving 50% of the population. That doesn't happen. To be writing checks most of the time. But right now we are seeing a surge in, say, femtech companies. These are the health tech companies targeting women. So that's a big part of the economy. And then we're also seeing a lot of these companies that are simply saying, what are the products that I need or want? And whether that's the healthcare product or a fashion product. And we've seen some remarkable retail founders who are women who have really redefined the way people shop and get dressed every day, whether it's Rent the Runway CEO Jen Hyman or Katrina Lake, who brought the the technology of a stylist to the masses, or The RealReal, founded by Julie Wainwright, which created this idea of a circular economy of buying used, you know, designer resale clothes and then selling them back in again. So I think we're seeing women really understand the female market and come up with products for that market, but also oftentimes taking the fact that sometimes they are outsiders to a male-dominated world and using that outsider perspective to innovate. Some examples would be Sally Krawcheck, who founded Ellevest after being, you know, running Citi and being most powerful woman on Wall Street for many years, or Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Hurd. She was at Tinder. She saw what she thought was broken about Tinder, and she used her outsider perspective to say, let's flip this script and create a product that really is for women. So it's interesting to see how women use their different perspective and the fact that maybe they've been excluded for years as a real advantage in business. And as to how they build teams, there's a lot of data showing that female executives and female CEOs care more about diversity, not just about gender diversity, but also about racial diversity. And there's some great studies on this that I cite in my book.

So let's take a hypothetical here. So you were on the executive committee here to hire a new CEO of a billion-dollar fast-growing company. You've got a male candidate and you've got a female candidate. It's down to these two people. How will you think about those two candidates, both from a gender standpoint and maybe a non-gender standpoint, in terms of who's going to be the right leader for this company?

Well, look, hypothetical hiring. I'm not a headhunter, so I can't speak to that. But one thing that's really interesting is this idea that historically, if you look at the power of the resume in hiring, people who've been hired in all roles, not just CEO roles, but in all roles, based on their experience. And a lot of that experience is the gift of their birth. You know, I went to an Ivy League school and interned at the White House. And I think that is my circumstance that enabled me to even know to apply to those things rather than my potential. Increasingly, people are seeing the power in giving people opportunities at work based on their potential, not on the experiences they've had. The resume is just a list of your experiences. So now there are all of these companies including some I write about in the last chapter of the book, that are able to test what someone's soft skills are, saying, hey, we could train anyone for this job, but do they have the potential to grow into this position? And I talk about it as being a growth mindset for hiring. We all should have a growth mindset in the way we live our lives, push us to get better, know that we have potential to grow and change. But can you hire people knowing that they're gonna grow into the role? A CEO role is different. And in fact, many studies have found that public companies, their stock drops if they hire a woman into the CEO role and there's a lot of attention paid to the fact that she's a woman. The data would indicate that that's because a female CEO does not fit the stereotype of what a CEO should look like. Over time, the data shows that the stock equalizes or even goes up since that woman was hired as a CEO. So there is a sense of that companies can get effectively punished by the stock market if there's too much attention on the fact that their new CEO is female. But over the long run, a female CEO may outperform. So look, every person is different. Men and women, we, we— there's so much variability for everyone. But I do think just being aware of that data can really influence the way we think about even hiring. You know, should someone only be hired into a CEO role of a public company if they've had previous CEO experience? That selection bias has perpetuated the fact that most CEOs are men. You just CEO from one company to another company. But if you start hiring people based on saying, well, hey, this woman is not a CEO, but she's run teams and showed her executive capabilities in these other ways, let's just change the way we're having a conversation about what experience is necessary to have someone hold that top spot.

I wanna try and dig into the differences in how men and women lead. So there's nature versus nurture. So does your data and research indicate if there is any innate difference in personality traits or anything else in terms of how women lead versus men? And you just mentioned the example here of how when women become CEOs of companies, the stock price tends to go down.

Only on the first day.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. But I think your research also showed that when women get put into the leadership role of a company that's in a crisis, that it actually tends to go up because women tend to be better leaders in a crisis situation. So with that as a lead-in, what are your thoughts?

Oh, there's so many questions baked in there. Okay, so I'm gonna, to, to answer your last one first. What you're referring to is what they call a glass cliff situation. You know, we talk all about the glass ceiling, but there is this theory called a glass cliff, which is that women are more likely to be put into a leadership role when the company is on the precipice of something terrible. When a company is in a a terrible situation, oftentimes the board will say, hey, let's give this woman a shot. There are a lot of theories about why. Maybe they think the stakes are lower. It can only go up from here. Things are so bad. Why not let the woman who we never would have gotten a shot before try out in this role? So there are a lot of interesting theories about why that is. But statistically, women are more likely to put leadership situations when a company is in a precarious situation. The good news is that women outperform in those situations.. And it's just fascinating data. And once, once these academics figured out this concept of a glass cliff, there have been many studies over the years. I'm looking at this. This concept was established before the financial crisis of 2008, 2009. Some researchers went back and looked at what happened at banks, particularly small banks in the US after the financial crisis. Women who were running those banks did better. That was in large part because they were a little bit more conservative going into the financial crisis. They were being more careful, more proactively sort of protecting what they had before the financial crisis. They weren't embracing risk as much as their male counterparts were. So I think it's really interesting then to look at what happened with the pandemic and how female leaders, both of companies but also of countries and of states, outperformed comparable states, comparable countries. And when it came to important issues such as reducing the death count in that first year of the pandemic. So that's what I'll say about the glass cliff. In terms of nature versus nurture, things that are learned and sort of societally imposed as opposed to innate biological traits. There is one data point that I referenced in the book that is about biology, and that is how in risky situations, just generally risky situations or sort of high crisis situations, men are more likely to take bigger risks and women are more likely to be cautious. That can be tied back to testosterone and other things like that. I referenced that But you could also say that that might be a societally implicated thing where men are supposed to be again swinging for the fences, where women are expected to be more cautious. It's interesting how these expectations are so broad, including the idea that women are expected not to ask favors of each other in a professional context. There have been a lot of studies about how women say they feel uncomfortable asking their friends for professional help, whereas men are socialized to think that's just what you do. You ask for a favor, you give a favor. So there are a number of organizations right now that are trying to change that stereotype, saying it's okay to ask your friends for help, it's okay to have a business network that's— its sole purpose is to offer and give professional help to each other, and to try to just like break down some of these stereotypes and realize which ones are useless and we need to move away from.

One of the studies that you mentioned in your book was about empathy. And you had quoted a study where it showed that women scored 10 points higher on an 80-point empathy quotient test. And I think the researchers were trying to figure out, is there an empathy gene in women that naturally makes them more empathetic? And I think the result was no, there really isn't. So we do, I think, have this stereotype about women being more empathetic than men. Is that really true? And why do you think that is? And how do women or can women use that as an advantage in leadership?

Empathy is an, an advantage for everyone to use in leadership. Leaders, male or female, executives, male or female, the more you tap into your empathy, the more that will help you succeed. It helps you connect with your employees and really understand what their challenges are. It helps you connect better with your customers, whatever kind of customer you might have, and understand what it is they need, why they're frustrated, what their problems are. Empathy is a superpower. It is not something we talk about as being a power, but it is really a superpower. And it's so interesting looking at the data around empathy and women. There was one interesting study talking about how because women are socialized to talk a lot with their friends, even little girls, you see it on the playground, they're talking with their friends to try to understand their feelings, that women are effectively trained to pay more attention to other people's feelings. It doesn't mean that we all can't try harder to be good at understanding other people's feelings. And the test you're referencing is a really fun one, and you could do it online. The test that initially came up with this idea of the empathy quotient or understanding how women outperform men in terms of empathy is called the Reading of the Mind in the Eyes test. And it's a black and white photograph. You can do this test online. I have a link on my website, juliaBorsten.com, a black and white photograph of people's eyes, and it shows people with different emotions. But you have to guess what the emotion is based just on that black and white photograph only of their eyes. I tested really high on this, much better than my husband performed on the test because I made him take it. But I think it's really interesting to understand how you can be clued into different kinds of cues that people are giving. And female leaders are statistically more likely to lead with empathy. And I found it in a lot of examples of the women I interviewed for my book. I interviewed over 100 people for the book, but also in the data that if you're really clued into what is the source of your customer's problem, you're gonna be really better at finding a solution. And this idea of it's not about the value of a top-down approach and having someone alone in an office come up with a solution to a problem or decide the problem that needs to be solved, but really going down and talking to the people on the ground who are either the customers you're trying to serve or your team that's out there interfacing with the customers who have a problem that you could solve or, or, or our product to sell to them. So I think that the empathy actually really ties well to this idea of communal leadership and not just having a top-down approach, but a divergent approach of trying to bring people together to understand how to best serve them. And it's not about philanthropy, it's about figuring out the best business solutions by talking to the people who you're gonna be serving.

And we did a podcast here recently on The Barron's Show on empathy with Maria Ross. And one of the comments that she made was she said the very qualities that make us uniquely human women will become our competitive advantage. Robots won't render us obsolete. Instead, they will make our human skills more relevant than ever. So I like your point about how empathy isn't just reserved for women leaders. It's something that men need to cultivate even further because it's going to make a greater work environment and help make organizations more successful and the people who work in them more successful and more engaged in the work that they do as well.

Absolutely. I mean, it's so interesting to think about how essential this idea of empathy is. Empathy is all about understanding someone else, their perspective, putting yourself in their shoes. If we could all just get out of our own space for a minute and think about where everyone else is coming from, think about how much more effective collaboration could be, or coming to a new solution to a problem.

What are some other ways that you found that women tend to lead differently than men?

There are two things I'd point to here. One is communal leadership, and the other is adaptability. Communal leadership is this idea of saying, okay, things are changing. Let's turn down my confidence level and the plan I had a year ago. Let me gather as much data as possible from people on the ground. The closer to the point of contact that the information is coming from, the more valuable it'll be. And I saw so many women in the book throw out their plans and try to figure out how to get everyone in their organization to participate and share their best ideas. And this idea that a great solution, a great idea could come from anywhere. I think communal leadership is essential right now. And the other idea, the adaptability quotient. As we saw in the early days of the pandemic, everyone had to throw out their plans and figure out a new solution. There is a lot of research about how a nimbleness in companies and a nimbleness in leadership, which in a lot of ways ties back to the communal leadership, listening to the people on the bottom of the totem pole because they might have good ideas. High adaptability enables companies and leaders to take advantage of all sorts of different opportunities as they arise. A perfect example I cite in my book is Karen Seidman Becker. She's the CEO of a biometrics company called Clear. Now, before the pandemic, Clear was entirely reliant on airplane travel. In late February of 2020, she started realizing that the airplane travel business was going to fall off a cliff. So Weeks before a pandemic was formally declared and airplane travel really shut down, she immediately adapted. She slashed her advertising spending on all platforms. She started dramatically investing in health. She said, how can we use this technology and apply it towards health? It's biometric identity. We need this if we're going into a health crisis. And she invested in turning Clear into an entirely different business as well, which is a health pass. So in the early days of the pandemic, they offered their health pass to, to bubbles such as the NFL and the NHL, and they, they used their technology in all sorts of different ways. But she didn't have any ego tied up into, uh, maintaining the business as it was. She said, we just need to pivot as quickly and as efficiently as possible. And companies that have a high adaptability quotient also tend to be okay with failure because they understand that if you're going to adapt and try something new, there may be a quick failure, but then you can use that information and data to pivot to a greater success down the road. So I think all of this stuff comes back to humility and a willingness to follow the data and to listen to diverse perspectives.

I think we can segue to YPO, Young Presidents Organization, because you talk about this in your book, and I thought this was really interesting. I'm fairly familiar with YPO. And in recent years, YPO has tried to do a better job of getting more women to be part of the group. And YPO is— it's a membership organization of successful founders and CEOs who run multi-million dollar businesses. Now, you made an interesting observation in there about networking and women's desire to join or not join YPO.

Tell me a little bit about that, if you What's really interesting about networking is something I mentioned earlier, which is this idea that women have been socialized to think that it's tacky or it's not something you're supposed to do in terms of asking friends for help. And there's so much data about how men network more than women. At the beginning, they might network at the same pace after college or business school, but when it comes to the long-term career networking trajectories of men and women, men network more. And it doesn't have to do with parenthood because even women who don't have kids, their networking amount falls off when women are in their 30s. It's so crazy looking at a chart of how women's networking frequency and intensity declines, whereas men seem to consistently understand the value of networking. We all understand the value of networking. Women just do it less. A lot of that is socialized and a lot of that is because these networking communities are not necessarily for them. YPO, Young Presidents Organization, has recognized the importance of having more women engage in the group, but they are representing the percentage of, you know, leaders who are women. And so one issue they've had is it's not, it's not a bias they have, it's a selection bias. If you're going to be only allowing presidents into your organization, you're by definition not going to be having 50/50 men and women because women are not 50% of companies with revenue of over $20 million, which is one of their criteria. So YPO has been making efforts to bring more women in. There were a number of the CEOs in my book who are members of YPO and like the fact that it's a male and female group of executives helping each other out. Other of them told me, I couldn't pull off YPO. I'm trying to scale a business. I have kids. I can't commit to doing 10 or 12 meetings a month, and I can't commit to the kind of social commitment of going doing activities with my cohort. So it's been interesting to see how some of these women have gravitated to sort of female-only groups to find community. And there have been a number of organizations that have popped up trying to serve that demographic. So for instance, Chief, which I write about in my book, is targeting the kind of women who might be a step below the YPO qualifications and also women who would qualify for YPO. And they're trying to give them a community of women who are a network to give each other valuable advice. There were some interesting studies about the massive value of networking. But the types of networks that most benefit women and people in general are diverse networks. You don't want to just get business advice from your buddies because they, A, they're not going to be honest with you because they're your friend. They might not want to hurt your feelings. And B, they might be too close to you to really understand, have perspective and understand the best advice to give. So the best kind of networks for business advice are ones that are diverse and people from not necessarily your business or your industry. That's what these organizations like Chief and also YPO are trying to do. But as we see some women not feeling like they can make the time commitment to YPO, we're seeing them move over to some of these other organizations. And we're also seeing YPO trying to adapt because they want that talent because it might be great for the men in a group to have some more female perspectives.

You wear a number of different hats. So sometimes you're interviewing the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world. Other times you're doing research for a book like you've just come out with. Other times you're doing deep background on an industry. So in your book, you mentioned something I thought was rather interesting. You said that if you're doing deep background research on an industry, you tend to talk to women because they have a little different perspective. Tell me how you think about that and what is it that women bring to that area when you're just trying to get the deep background information?

Well, so I'll say I talk to everybody, and especially in these male-dominated industries, there are more men. I'm gonna be talking to a lot of men as well. But one thing is different when I talk to the women to try to get perspective on an industry is because women are often outsiders to different spaces, whether it's Web3 or NFTs or crypto, new spaces that are emerging. Because women are in the minority, they may have an outsider perspective and may not be swept up into the bubble. There is a concept I talk about in the book called cultural numbness, and this idea that if you are part of a society, part of a culture, part of the culture of a company, you may lose sight of the things that are great about it and the things that are maybe inappropriate or maybe wrong about it. But if you're an outsider, you're not numb to the culture and you could have really fresh perspective on what's going on inside one of those little ecosystems, whether it's a company or something like the NFT community. So I think having an outsider perspective is hugely valuable.

So what can men do to get more women in positions of leadership, more diverse teams, more people of color? Just some practical things that will speed up this progress and make your mom's dream come to fruition.

Well, look, I am very optimistic. I'm very optimistic. And I think there is a clear path for men and people in power to take because the data is so clear. I think the more that men can follow data when they're making decisions, whether it's about hiring or promotion, the more they will find themselves with a diverse assortment of executives. There are some great, uh, companies that I referenced earlier that are trying to help companies hire based on potential rather than experience. And I think this idea of separating people's opportunity from the things that are listed on their resume is a really massive opportunity for companies when they're looking to hire. At CNBC, I've profiled some companies that have done great work to eliminate promotion and pay gaps. Companies such as Salesforce and PayPal realized that their challenges weren't in pay equity, but in making sure they weren't promoting men faster than women simply because maybe men were more of a squeaky wheel. It's not rocket science to make progress towards pay and promotion equity, and there are great tools out there to do just that. In terms of following the data, I think a lot of times companies need to just measure what's going on at their company. The best way to have progress is to create a benchmarking system of saying, okay, here's where we are in terms of gender equity. Are we noticing that men are moving faster? Are we noticing that there are no female leaders or people of color leaders in this one office? We should understand what's going on there. Having like raw data can sometimes be incredibly revelatory. So I think that's one thing. And then I think on a personal level, we all have so much stereotype and bias just trained into us And it's interesting talking to some of the CEOs in my book. They didn't imagine that they would be CEOs. This woman who is the CEO of a company called Lancetech, she said, I never thought of myself as a CEO. It wasn't a stereotype that she could imagine even fulfilling because she didn't look or sound like a CEO. She's an introverted Colombian immigrant who was running a chemical division that was focused on transforming different feedstocks into fuel. And now she is the CEO of a company that does just that, but she didn't see herself as a CEO. And I think the more we can all check ourselves and check our biases that could even be holding ourselves back, the more we could change the conversation. It's so easy to get stuck in these stereotypes of what a CEO is supposed to look and sound like that we could be missing massive opportunities in having an introvert as a CEO or having someone who doesn't check all the boxes promoted into a certain role.

Yeah, definitely. So I mentioned here a minute ago that you've interviewed some of the most successful leaders of the biggest companies in the world. So you're interviewing them, but now the tables are turned. So you're the recipient of the interviewer's questions. So are you sitting there and you're thinking, oh, I sure wish Steve would ask me this question? So what's the question that you would wish that I would be asking you?

I would say in terms of the one thing that really surprised me in reporting this book One thing that I assumed going into it, because I've interviewed so many CEOs, is I thought some of these leadership traits were going to be born, male or female. I thought, you know, we have this myth of the Mark Zuckerberg emerging from Harvard as a natural founder of a game-changing company, or the co-founders of Google emerging from a garage in Palo Alto ready to change the world of the internet. And the reality is, is that every CEO I've interviewed has has had to grow and develop these traits. And this is actually, I think, that's been most reassuring for me as a journalist in the world is this idea that no one is born a leader. Everyone has to evolve and change, and everyone can have a sense of change and progress. I have a lot in the book about having a growth mindset, both for yourself but also for your organization. I talk about growth mindset and hiring. And I think that each one of these leaders has been able to be successful because they knew they were not great out of the gate. They knew that they had certain maybe innate traits that were advantages, but that they could progress and create their own benchmarks and drive their own progress. So I was really impressed to see not how impressive these leaders were, but how much they evolved themselves and see their leadership as a constantly evolving process.

Well, it's interesting that you mentioned that because just yesterday I was listening to a podcast and Lou Gerstner was being interviewed interview, and he's the former CEO of IBM and had a tremendous run there. A legend. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And he was asked, are leaders born or are they made? And he said that probably 80, maybe 90% of leadership is actually management. And he said management, you know, you can learn management, certainly. But he said that final 10% or so, it's difficult. And that's something that you have to continue to learn. Some of that might be born with personality traits or whatever. And it's also interesting, another show that I was listening to, this guy was a rower. And so he's in a boat with other people that are rowing. So he said there was one person that won every time, but this person wasn't the biggest, wasn't the strongest. It's like, so he finally asked me, what is it about you that whatever boat you're in, you win. And what he realized was it's because when you're a great leader, when you're in the boat, the boat goes faster. And what he meant by that was the people around you want to work harder for you in a positive way. Now, there's certainly leaders who rule by cracking the whip, and out of fear you might work harder, but that's just going to be temporary. That's going to fail at some point. But this particular person generated the loyalty, would have everyone's back, and everyone in his boat knew this guy has my back. And so I thought that was really interesting to think about leadership. Now, maybe that's something that you're born with. Maybe that's something that you can develop, is cultivating that loyalty of the team around you so that they want to work hard, so that when you're in the boat, that boat's going to go faster.

Well, I would say that's 100% true. I heard that from every woman in the book. But this idea, though, that all of that can be cultivated. You might start out with an instinct to be an inspiring speaker, but you can study and learn how to get better at anything. And I think that this idea of drawing the best out of your team, that's what, you know, it goes back to empathy, understanding, and listening to your team. It goes back to humility, understanding that good ideas may not come just from you, but from the people who work from you. And also, you know, communal leadership as well. But I think this idea of thinking about how to motivate your team— one interesting statistic about female-led companies is female-led companies are more likely than male-led companies to be purpose-driven, meaning to have some additional purpose that's not financial, so such as environmental or social purpose. When it comes to purpose-driven companies, a number of the CEOs told me that it was so much easier to push through the hardest of times and to get their employees rallied to face the hardest of times because they knew that it wasn't just about making money and giving returns to the VCs. It wasn't just about the stock price. It was about serving these other constituencies as well. It was about helping the environment or helping the people who needed healthcare. And that additional purpose helped them not just survive but thrive because because being an entrepreneur is tough. Any part of business is tough, but if you have that additional purpose, it could be key motivation in the toughest of times.

Yeah, and I'm so glad that you're reinforcing these ideas, 'cause we talk about empathy, we talk about communal leadership. We haven't really talked about being vulnerable. I know that's something in your book. We talk about being purpose-driven. A lot of people hear that and they think, ah, that's just the soft stuff. I got profits I gotta make. But it's like, that's the stuff that makes companies successful and makes leaders successful. So I continue to hear that reiterated. And I'm glad you brought that up here as well.

Vulnerability is authenticity. Some people might call it vulnerability. Other people might call it authenticity. People can tell when you're being inauthentic. Your employees, your customers can tell if you're being inauthentic. If you're being vulnerable, you're saying, this is a situation. Things are good, they're bad, they are mixed. Nothing is perfect all the time. But if you're authentic, people will trust you more, and that yields massive benefits, massive dividends, whether you're the person trying to drive the boat faster, saying, look, we're behind now. Don't lie to them about how far you're behind, be honest, and people will trust you more and be more likely to want to follow you into whatever that battle or race is.

Well, Julia, I've got 3 more random questions that I want to ask you, but before I get to those, tell me about the book. What's the best place for people to connect with you if they want to learn more about what you're doing in the book?

The book is out from Avid Reader Press. It is called When Women Lead, and you can buy it at any of your local booksellers. It's on amazon.com, it's on Bookshop. You can find it if just type in my name, Julia Borsten, or When Women Lead. And I have a website, juliaborsten.com, and you could find a lot more about the book, some more resources, including that test I referenced where you could test your empathy quotient, which is a really fun one, and, um, links to buy the book there. But there are great stories in the book of over 65 entrepreneurs woven together with academic research explaining their characteristics and traits that have enabled those women to succeed despite the And the lessons from this book have changed the way I've lived my life in the past couple years that I've been reporting it, and I know are incredibly valuable for anyone looking to succeed in this business world. Excellent.

Okay, so 3 random questions. The first one is, you get to put up a billboard, and we're going to go to Los Angeles, Dallas, Miami, and New York City. So we're, we're covering a good part of the country. What's that billboard going to say?

Oh, this is a tough one. I would say Follow the data, invest in diversity. I think there's this myth that diversity is a philanthropic thing and we should give women a chance in business because that would be a nice thing to do. That's not the case at all. It is better for business and the data says so. And we need to change the conversation around diversity to understand this isn't about philanthropy. This is about dollars and cents.

Okay. Second question. So you graduated from Princeton, I think class of 2000. You've now been invited back. They want you to give the commencement address to the Princeton class of 2023. What is the title of your address?

The title of my address is "Take the Chance." I think that we all have expectations of things we should do and the path we're expected to take. And I'm certainly risk-averse, but I have reported on a lot of people people who are not. And that's why I love talking to entrepreneurs and writing about their journeys. I think the key thing is understanding that sometimes the best opportunity is not what you think it's going to be. It's the best opportunity in general. So for instance, when I graduated college, I thought I wanted to work in politics or international relations. And I happened to— of the 20 jobs I applied to, the best opportunity was a job writing for Fortune magazine. I didn't care about business at the time. I didn't think I was going to want to be a business journalist. List, but on an absolute basis, it was the opportunity that was going to give me the most potential to grow and stretch myself. So I think sometimes we have to get out of what we think we're going to be interested in and separate ourselves from the idea of what we think we're supposed to do and just say, hey, I'm going to try something new. You never know what you're going to love or what you're going to fall in love with until you try it. And I think now more than ever, people just need to take the chance, try something new, and give yourself an opportunity to have an entirely new path and an entirely new passion. I love business news. I never would have believed it if you would have told me when I was in college that I would have found this amazing career in business news.

So what's the next chance that you're contemplating taking?

I want to write another book. I think this book has been so fascinating. I am so intrigued by disruptive leadership in particular. So right now, I'm excited to go around the country and talk about the learnings of my book and how people can apply the research and stories from my book to make their companies and their workplaces more effective and more efficient and more inspired. And then down the line, I look forward to trying to write another book. Great.

Well, I will look forward to reading that one as well. Okay, final question. And this comes from a previous guest who had no idea who my guest was going to be that I was going to ask this question to. But it turns out that it's actually very appropriate because this person, his question was, If you could interview somebody who passed away, anyone in history, who would it be? And what would you ask them?

Hmm, that is a tough one. There's so many people who are alive now who I want to interview. Anyone in history, I actually think right now I would be really interested to interview Steve Jobs. He hasn't been gone for that long. But I think to understand the way he transformed— first of all, I never got to interview him, so I've always, you know, wish I had gotten to interview him. But to understand his vision for the future of technology— and right now there's so much attention to AI and robotics— and to understand how he sees people and technology interacting in the future, that might be more of my regret, that I didn't get to interview him when he was alive. But I think he was a genius, and I would be so curious to learn from him.

Excellent. All right, well, Julia, we will wrap it there. Thank you for spending some time today. Congratulations on the new book.

Thank you.

My key takeaway from my conversation with Julia is how the range of qualities that women tend to possess that correlate with great leadership are qualities that all of us need to cultivate. And by supporting, encouraging, and elevating more women and people of color to the highest levels of leadership, we can get to Julia's mom's dream of women having every opportunity to excel without having systemic roadblocks in their way. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe. This podcast was brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com.