It’s always a bittersweet wrap up to Women’s History Month in March and all of the celebration and intentional work that is initiated around International Women’s Day.
We had a great month, working with past clients like Givaudan and the KaoNow women’s network as well as new clients NRG and Gerdau who selected our special IWD program, Practicing Equity.
In addition to working with VMware’s Women Connecting Women over the years, this summer we were also invited to deliver short programs on Navigating Burnout to VMware’s CodeHouse participants.
CodeHouse is a three-day technical experience for students. The Atlanta session was targeted at undergraduate Black and Latina women in Computer Science and the Palo Alto session had an audience of graduate-level women in Computer Science.
As Women’s History Month and the celebration of International Women’s Day comes to a close, we want to take a moment to acknowledge and celebrate the organizations we had the privilege of working with during such a pivotal month for so many companies to drive gender equity action forward.
With this year’s International Women’s Day theme of #BreakTheBias, individuals were called to take action for collective progress. At Gild Collective, we worked with our clients to approach this theme in different ways—providing tools for interrupting bias in big ways within workplaces and small ways within our own interactions.
We love working with our repeat clients to develop tailored content to best meet their audience’s needs. Over the years, we’ve gotten to know the leaders of Givaudan’s We Lead women’s initiative with programs focused on communication and burnout. As 2021 is coming to a close and organizations are continuing to adjust and re-adjust their return-to-office plans, it seemed like the perfect time to address this upcoming transition. While we have a standard topic on Equity in Hybrid Work, Givaudan’s workforce has varied working structures—some hybrid, some all in-person, some all-remote—which has been true throughout the pandemic. Through our planning we chose to deliver a workshop focused on Intentional Transition regardless of each person’s particular working situation.
DriveWealth has been in a period of hypergrowth in the past year, adding over one hundred new employees to the organization. In March of 2021, a new group was started to support women in the organization through networking and development opportunities. Women at DriveWealth meets monthly with varying topics and activities during the virtual sessions. Since the group has begun, there has been a desire to provide structured professional development opportunities to the group participants. Based on participant feedback, the planning team chose to offer Gild Collective’s Communicating Confidently and Assertively workshop.
The theme of the 2021 Next Gen conference for the Ohio Banker’s League was “Building for the Future”, with a focus on preparing emerging leaders for an industry that is moving forward. The conference was an opportunity for industry rising stars to come together, albeit virtually, to learn, grow, and inspire. Attendees came from all functions of the bank, most relatively early in their careers. All were hoping to come away from the conference sessions with tactical skills that they can use daily to grow in their leadership capabilities.
This Summer, we returned to a past client—Women in Bio—an amazing organization of professionals committed to promoting careers, leadership, and entrepreneurship of all women in the life sciences. Together with collaborative partners, we delivered a 3-part Navigating Burnout + Building Support Series.
Women Adding Value Everywhere (WAVE) was started 5 years ago as the Cintas women’s Professional Business Resource Group (PBRG). As the Cintas team was planning the WAVE event for 2021, they decided to take a virtual approach to still provide valuable programming during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our focus for the session was on giving employees a thorough understanding of their personal and professional strengths as an integral first step to creating equitable pathways for communication in the workplace.
Infosec helps IT and security professionals advance their careers with skills development and certifications. The organization recently initiated a Women at InfoSec employee resource group and one of the group’s first recommendations was a company-wide bias training. We worked with the team to develop a 3-part series to provide a foundational bias understanding and tailored tools for interrupting bias for both individual contributors and managers.
Like most organizations, Guggenheim Partners came to us as they were adapting adapting to the unexpected shift from in-person to remote work. Existing communication challenges had been highlighted, and new ones had been created. In partnership with their women’s network we planned a program focused on building effective communication skills specific to remote work and advocating for oneself and demonstrating value in negotiating.
We partnered with Circor for International Women’s Day – March 8, 2021, the theme for which was #ChooseToChallenge. The theme reminded us that a challenged world is a changed world, and without individuals willing to challenge the status quo (which had led to gender inequity for so many, for so long), things would never truly change. For that reason, our focus in this workshop was on communicating effectively to encourage assertiveness in individuals raising these challenges.
The economy, like every other aspect of life, what rocked in unprecedented ways when COVID-19 hit in early 2020. The Xavier University Office of Alumni Engagement (a longtime partner of ours) decided to provide the graduating seniors and alumni community with resources for the daunting task of job searching during an economic downturn. We created this session, Confident Communications During Job Searching, to help them on their job search journeys.
The team that leads the We Lead women’s initiative at Givaudan recognized that members were experiencing burnout—as so many women are during the pandemic. There was a desire to provide women the tools to set boundaries to reduce their burnout without adding one more thing to their plate.
We are taking a bit of a different approach with today’s case study than our previous summaries of client work. Instead, we want to celebrate our Women’s Initiative Roundtable, which we have been producing for over three years locally in Cincinnati. I’m writing about the Roundtable because the main purpose it serves - community - is the thing that so many of us are missing so much right now. While we can’t currently gather in-person with our Roundtable community it still brings great value, and we are excited to see how it evolves in the years to come.
We joined Ribbon to present a Communicating Confidently and Assertively session for the entire organization. It was well attended with an extremely engaged group of attendees, especially their CEO. All of the employees came to the session with a central goal of improving the culture of assertive communication within Ribbon, and with one another.
WE Lead Class 15 started during the pandemic. So rather than a two-day overnight, the team at the Cincinnati Chamber made adjustments to keep Gild Collective facilitators and participants safe while still finding a way to gather together in an outdoor space for the important work that kicks off the program. The class was able to make connections and begin benchmarking where they were currently in their career and develop objectives for where they want to go throughout the program.
We know COVID-19 has thrown the best laid plans into a state of unknown, but we’re grateful that our ongoing partnership with WE Lead could continue through the pandemic and we know that learning from this unique format will only make future programs even stronger.
In March 2020 we began working with the Federal Home Loan Bank of Cincinnati (FHLB Cincinnati) for two workshop sessions: Mapping Career Strategy and Building + Communicating Confidence. As we all know, March 2020 was when the country began to undergo massive shutdowns due to COVID-19, forcing many businesses to begin remote work. As our workshop approached, FHLB was managing a remote workforce for the first time, and could have decided to halt the programming but didn’t.
As part of an ongoing relationship with one of our clients in the technology industry, we delivered a women’s leadership program to women’s ERG participants within the organization. The two-day session leading up to International Women’s Day offered participants the rare opportunity to set daily responsibilities aside and focus on their personal and professional development. By taking a step back and looking at their careers–past, present, and future–participants had space to clearly articulate their values, vision, and goals for success. Participants left the session with an expanded network, both through the cohort they bonded with over the two day program and through the intentional planning they completed to create purposeful networking, mentorship, and sponsorship goals.