Thrive as an Ambitious Woman

TLDR: Introducing a powerful perspective: that being ambitious for yourself, your team, your organization and the world is not only acceptable but essential for making a meaningful impact. Ambitious? Lead to Soar is THE place for you.

This week's blog is from a conversation with my brilliant guest and co-host inside of Lead to Soar, Michelle Redfern.

I've known Michelle for a shocking 8 years. It feels like we met just yesterday. And we met because she was recommended to facilitate my women's leadership programs in Australia.  The minute I saw her resume, I was intrigued. And when I met her, I knew that she had the right stuff to become that colleague. Why? So many reasons. But the first two are that she:

1. Had a very successful career as a businesswoman in large corporations.
2. Has  an intense passion for women's equality and advancement. 

I met her at the very start of her journey as an entrepreneur. Since then she's launched Advancing Women in Business & Sport, co-founded the Lead to Soar Network, the Lead to Soar podcast, the Lead to Soar Summits and hosted the Advancing Women in Sport podcast.

As if that weren't enough, she's also the author of The Leadership Compass.  which we will talk about in an upcoming episode.  You'll find all the information you need about Michelle, her high impact endeavors, and the leadership compass in links below.  So let's dive in for part one of our conversation.

On Lead to Soar

Susan: Michelle, for so many reasons, I'm beyond excited to introduce you to listeners of the Be Business Savvy podcast.  One of those reasons is to introduce them to Lead to Soar, which is an online global network of ambitious women for which we are the co hosts along with Mel Butcher and Amal Yusuf.  So I first want to ask you, what are you hearing from members about the top three benefits of joining Lead to Soar?

Michelle: Thanks, Susan. Based on what I hear, the top three benefits are:

1. We are a safe place for ambitious women to hang out and express their ambition.  Women tell me that they feel very safe and secure in saying, I am ambitious, I'm aspirational.  And that is different to society in general. So that's number one. It's a safe place for women who are really focused on wanting to be successful.
2. The community that we have created and the cadence we have around support.  We deliver a weekly Hour of Power. I call them group coaching sessions, where facilitate them and members coach each other. It's another safe space about which one of our members, Naomi, has said, "Michelle, you hold space really well for us, for us to talk about our wins, our challenges, to have a bit of a cry,  also to get mad. , but ultimately to get actionable insights and solutions to what it is we're facing right now, and that's both challenges and opportunities." So there's a cadence of coming together for mutual benefit.
3. Women get very, very pointed, sharp and focused feedback from you, me, Amal and Mel about the importance of business savvy or BQ, business intelligence. We e remind them that it is important that they have access to this content, these experiences, and that you build and demonstrate these critical skills.

Those are the top three things in my opinion.

On Ambition and Power

Susan: I love all three of them. I'd like to dive in deeper on ambition. It has also been my experience that being an ambitious woman is a risky way to engage with the business world. The fact that you create this safe space for the members to express their ambition is highly significant. What do you think the benefits to them of that are?  

Michelle: Number one, it's a place to practice expressing ambition in a way that is comfortable for them.
They are able to practice, practice, practice expressing their ambition and their aspirations so that they feel comfortable doing it. It's holding this space for them to practice learning these new skills because  we do have to navigate this world that doesn't always reward ambitious women. So we do that together.

The other thing is, I break down ambitious and ambition for them because we so often think about words like ambition and power  as pejorative terms. "Oh, she's an ambitious woman."  "Oh, she's looking for power." And they're not pejorative.

I say, I want us to be ambitious for ourselves, our teams, our organizations, and the world. When you're ambitious for the world. And I get goosebumps every time I say this, so I'm even, you know, psyching myself up here. When you're ambitious to make the world a better place, that is a great thing.

That's a real mindset shift for many women and which I have had to make myself. For example, I was always, "Don't ask for a pay rise, because you'll be seen as too ambitious," or "Don't be this, you'll be seen as too ambitious."

Actually, I need a pay rise because I need to live a life well lived and a life well lived for me is making the world a better place and I need money and I need power and I need influence to do that.

So my ambition, my money, my power, my influence is channeled for good. I think this is a really important part of the message we give women as well.

Susan: I love that idea of making good in the world. I wrote a post this week on LinkedIn where I riffed off of an interview I watched with Nancy Pelosi, Speaker Emerita of the US House of Representatives (and the first woman to hold that position).  She talked about power as NOT something that is coming down, it's bubbling up.

I also mentioned, , Ginni Rometty's book, Good Power, in which she talks about using her power as a CEO to do good for the company, for the people in the company and for the world.

I love your reframing because oftentimes we don't think about ambition or power as forces or attributes to deploy for the benefit of the people around us, for the benefit of the organization, and for the benefit of the world.

Michelle: What I'm doing at the moment, Susan, is exploring and learning (because I do love to learn new things) the difference between a patriarchal and a matriarchal society. And when I say patriarchal, I mean a patriarchal capitalist society versus a matriarchal collective society.

This is why it's so important that we have much more diversity in leadership so that we can explore different ways for the world to be. I know this is existential and esoteric, but this is part of the importance of women starting to learn and express their power and their ambition - because it's different.

It's different from capitalist patriarchal power. I'm not an expert, but I'm trying to learn at the moment what that looks like so I can express myself a little bit more eloquently than I'm doing today about this different model.

On BQ/Business Savvy and Leadership

Susan: Yes. It's a bubbling up and and embracing model of deploying power rather than the  coming down and dictating model - or at least that's my also limited understanding.

I did want to touch  also on  what you mentioned about giving women pointed feedback about needing BQ, or what I call business savvy, because if we aren't deploying our power and ambition on behalf of the organization we are selling ourselves short in a way because  in order to have our personal ambitions realized, we have to be acting in service of the organization.

And I'm wondering does that idea resonate with you? And secondly, how does it resonate with the members inside Lead to Soar?  

Michelle: Yeah, it absolutely resonates with me. And when you first taught me about the idea of "be for the business," it brought some things in my own experiences into focus.

I thought, "Aha, I had 15 years with Telstra" (Australia's major telco here) and my children would often say, "Yeah, she's got a tattoo of Telstra somewhere on her body!" because I was so loyal to the brand (but not blindly loyal). I was definitely for the business. The language I needed at that time was,  I'm ambitious for myself, my team, and the organization. For me, that's what leadership is about. I can lead myself really effectively. I lead my team really effectively to help the organization. I lead the organization, make the organization grow.

So for us in Lead to Soar, we're always saying, as a leader, Irrespective of where you sit on the org chart or what career stage you're at, you have a responsibility to go beyond a transactional relationship with your employer. This is what you sometimes call "leaderly behavior."

Leaders go beyond that, workers get paid and do stuff. Leaders say, "I am in a relationship with my employer and it is mutually beneficial and we are both as committed as each other to helping each other grow and achieve our goals."

Susan: We're running out of time for this part of our conversation, Michelle.

I want to summarize your three points about the benefits of Lead to Soar:

1. It's a safe place for ambitious women
2. You have a cadence of events that support and create that safe place
3. We offer pointed feedback about the importance of business savvy or BQ, as you call it

And then in the course of our conversation, we've just poured out a whole bunch of other great wisdom about:

• Ambition and power
• Matriarchy versus patriarchy
• Being for the business and leadership behavior

Thank you, Michelle, for part one of our conversation.

Go Deeper Links

⭐  About Michelle Redfern

⭐  Lead to Soar online community (I encourage you to join us!)

⭐   Lead to Soar podcast

⭐   The Leadership Compass by Michelle Redfern

⭐  Connect with Michelle on Linkedin