International Womens Day 2024 - Reaching Your Potential
Image Description: A powerpoint slide with the title 'International Women's Day 2024: Reaching your potential'. The slide has a headshot of each of the speakers and their names, job titles, organisation and pronouns.
Today the JEDI MATTERS Collective in a session led by Pip Murray, Founder of Pip & Nut hosted a panel with four inspiring female leaders Anuradha Chugh, Charlotte Di Cello, Lou Pollitt & Melissa Hedley Lewis around the topic of reaching your potential in your career.
We asked them about what moments in their careers were particularly formative, who's helped them along the way, how can employers support women and what advice they would give women who are earlier in their career journeys.
Here’s a few of the key takeaways from the session:
🗣 “Give the gift of feedback to each other” - Feedback shaped all these women’s careers, helped them learn and grow at different stages of their journeys. For those on the receiving end being open to learn and unlearn from this feedback is key or, as Anuradha Chugh, said “learn to learn”.
🦇 “Take the Batman suit off” - don’t try to be everything to everyone and expect to juggle it all without dropping a single ball. Progress not perfection is the goal from Charlotte Di Cello.
🌟 Small actions can have a big impact - day to day behaviours like sharing a word of encouragement when someone makes a great contribution to a discussion, having an honest conversation about someones career development or nudging someone forwards for a stretching project can be all that you need to do to boost confidence and set someone in the right direction. Lou Pollitt had first hand experience of the benefits of this in her career.
👐 Be bold, be brave and be vulnerable - adding vulnerability into these leadership traits was key to Melissa Hedley Lewis leadership journey. By being vulnerable you will be more authentic and by being more authentic we free ourselves from the pressure of being someone we’re not.
🚺 Don’t get caught up in stereotypes. It’s important not to create pathways for women which assumes we are all the same and where there are more female traits - we need to make sure we are more alert to them, as men and women.
📑 Employers must be intentional in their behavior to support women at work and help fix some of the structural issues that are preventing gender equality. Policies that support women with childcare responsibilities, recruitment frameworks that ensure a balance of genders are seen at all stages of the process and encouraging men to take shared parental leave by having policies that support them to do so are just some of the ways employers can help.
As one of the panelists said, lets take what we celebrate on IWD into our every day.
#iwd2024