Creating the Lab in your life.
Continue with COLabing
Skills acquired in the Lab are elevated with ongoing reinforcement in a safe collaborative setting in order to become second nature.
Building a community of female leaders in your company—collaborating toward common goals—reinforces their commitment to the organization and seeds an environment of trust and cooperation where women can thrive.
The Harvard Business Review agrees:
Creating a safe setting—a coaching relationship, a women’s leadership program, a support group of peers—in which women can interpret these messages is critical to their leadership identity development.
Companies should encourage them to build communities in which similarly positioned women can discuss their feedback, compare notes, and emotionally support one another’s learning.
– HBR, Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers, September 2013
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Identifying common experiences increases women’s willingness to talk openly, take risks, and be vulnerable without fearing that others will misunderstand or judge them. These connections are especially important when women are discussing sensitive topics such as gender bias or reflecting on their personal leadership challenges, which can easily threaten identity and prompt them to resist any critical feedback they may receive.
When they are grounded in candid assessments of the cultural, organizational, and individual factors shaping them, women can construct coherent narratives about who they are and who they want to become.