Mavericks at Work

I just saw a great presentation by Polly LaBerre about "Mavericks at Work" hosted by LifeScience Alley and sponsored by Larsen. I'm looking forward to reading the book. Polly LaBerre was a phenomenal speaker and great story teller. Her talk reminded me of specifically why I started this business - because business discussions often fail to acknowledge that collaboration, innovation, and right bright brain thinking is practiced by women leaders who often go un noticed or unrecognized because there numbers are few, they are not in your face with their "maverick-ocity" or, if they are, they make us uncomfortable and challenge our notion of what a leader is (A middle aged or older, slightly graying man who is over 6 feet tall.) As with Daniel Pink's book " A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future," it distresses me that the mind sets described are stereotypically female and yet women are still not being called out as models for the behaviors, recognized for their contribution, calling out each other for their valuable contributions or supporting each other in an environment that requires them to take on at least two jobs - being a woman and a man. It's the elephant in the room.
What we aim to do at Polish Your Star is to call out that elephant and recognize the great contributions of women like Polly LaBerre (CNN), Liz Rammer (LifeScience Alley) and Catherine Gillis (Larsen). Because I don't know Polly, I can only guess that she is able to more easily recognize the Mavericks because she is as one herself. Like many women, she has to make her own way in a field highly dominated by men. Men who often want to ignore the differences in the way men and women are perceived in the workplace and pretend it's all "gender neutral" when all the evidence in front of us tells us it is not. We wonder why more women aren't leaders of organizations. We ignore that we raise them and expect them to be different than stereotypical leaders and yet punish them when they behave like women and when they behave like men. If you don't think that is still the case, check out Catalysts Foundations' recent study at www.catalyst.org - "The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership: Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don’t." It's my dream that calling out this elephant in the room will help other women recognize it, challenge it themselves, be their best self at work, and support other women being their best selves, whether it makes others comfortable or not.