My team is 95% women, and I'm better for it.
Celebrating International Women’s Day 2020.
I work in an organization that is filled with women. I am the only man on the team. Wasn’t by design. And every year, I consciously set out to celebrate this fact whenever I can. It's an important piece of the organisation's story that is easy to lose sight of and dismiss.
While I still lead this organization, a talented team of women leaders make the bulk of every organizational and leadership decision every single day. My time is now spent elsewhere, while the women lead.
Today, there are now more women leaders, more champions that have risen to leadership roles. The women in this office are key to this, and they are leading and mentoring more women leaders across the organisation. You can see them rise together if you pay close enough attention.
I think it’s important to celebrate this - even if this is a small company. Even if we do not have a global footprint or hundreds of employees or billions of dollars in revenue.
If this can be a place where women found the inspiration and tenacity to believe that they can achieve the impossible, the impact on them can and will reverberate across every encounter we have as a team, across the entire industry.
Young women who are starting their careers believing they could achieve career growth while holding on to who they are as a woman instead of having to act like a man. Or women who are mentored to realize that being tough isn’t about not crying or hiding emotions but rather to work through them to energise themselves. Women who demonstrate to others that you don’t always have to be somebody to make a difference.
No, we don’t hire exclusively women in this organisation. But the women set the standards. The women decide that we will all rise together, and to do it better than any other. And that raises the standards and the expectations for everyone. It will raise the standards even for the men that do join us from time to time. I know this because that happened to me. I'm better for it.
So, I do not want to lose sight of this. This organisation that I'm part of, consist of 95% women, including its leadership. And we are better for it. I am better for it. That’s worth celebrating.