For the past few weeks I’ve been interviewing about one-half of the participants who recently completed the Women in Leadership (WIL) program at Columbia Business School. The full roster of participants included women from eighteen different industries but my focus was, of course, on women who work in wine and spirits, in this case for wholesalers.
I was particularly interested to interview this group who have been identified for their promise and potential at some of the largest and most influential WSWA member companies where women have traditionally been underrepresented in leadership roles. Those companies who supported employee participation included Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits (SGWS, the program’s co-organizer), Breakthru Beverage Group, Allied Beverage Group, Republic National Distributing Company, United Distributors, Badger Liquor and Central Distributing.
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What could the participants’ experience in WIL tell us about the progress and advancement of women in our industry, today and moving forward? Could we discern a few more factors in the formula not only for change, but for greater success in this area? How can this style of training facilitate and expedite the rate of change for women in leadership roles, even within companies where the traditional “old boys club” infrastructure has dominated for decades?
Throughout the interviews with participants, several themes emerged that are hallmarks of programs designed to outfit women with tools and strategies for expanding influence and leading change: networking, for example, executing on a growth mindset, and the cycle of giving and receiving feedback.
It’s the more nuanced variables where I’d like to focus my coverage of this opportunity for a deeper dive into the perspectives of a discrete group of people. Yes, the women I interviewed work primarily at large companies and yes, they are fully aware that they represent a minority of employees at those companies and within the wholesaler ecosystem. As I listened to them reflect on their experience in the WIL program, however, I heard more personal resonance than the sweep of generalizations, and more one-to-one applications of takeaways than blanket statements.
In itself, grounding the ideals of women’s professional success into individual experience isn’t revolutionary. What seemed to matter more, I gathered through conversations with participants in the WIL program, is the frequency and number of occurrences when a woman experiences that the intention of a general ideal has come to fruition. Corporate statements of good intentions are an important and necessary piece of the puzzle, but it’s the pace of execution of the intention, to more and more women in visible and supported roles, that will move the needle in this industry.
More women experiencing more success, more frequently. That’s a brief synthesis of my interviews these past weeks, and I’ll spend more time in the week ahead unpacking that summary with specific examples and hands-on applications. Those examples are instructive — for the participants in the WIL program, the companies they work for, and for the rest of us who didn’t experience the program first-hand.
Before moving on, however, I’d like to articulate what I saw as an important variable that went largely unspoken, and it has to do with the chain reaction of value, confidence and proactive behavior. The participants’ employers and organizations invested in them and their potential as leaders; they felt valued as individuals and as contributors to their work community. I could hear it in their voices and see it in their body language. Feeling valued leads to confidence in the workplace, which can lead to any number of outcomes, like expressing fresh or proactive ideas and assuming the initiative to own those ideas in order to bring them to fruition. That’s when the impact of a program like WIL is multiplied.
If there’s a formula for the greater success of women in wine and spirits, that seems to me like a good place to start the conversation.
I’ll close with a few statements that resonated strongly with me from the interviews, in order to foreshadow more specific coverage later this week.
- “A key takeaway from [the program] for me was that this is not education for education’s sake; it’s education to inspire a specific action, and that action is actively bringing more diverse voices to our table. If we can’t find ways to do that as leaders within our companies, we fail.” — Maggie F. Maxwell, Vice President of Wine Sales at Allied Beverage Group
- “We learned about a concept called Not Yet. Instead of giving grades, instructors gave students a Not Yet. It’s not that you failed, it’s that we’re all always practicing and working on certain things. Things are not going to be perfect right off the bat.” — Susan Forrester Rana, Commercial Strategy Manager (West Region), SGWS
- Shell Cameron, General Manager of Central Distributors, reflecting on an exercise about mining the past in order to develop a plan for the future: “We don’t revisit the past in order to stay in the past. We revisit it in order to do better in the future. Whenever you go back, you see that you can fall into a pattern whether you want it or not. That’s why change becomes so hard. I learned a different vocabulary, and specifics for how to deal with things differently.”
August 31, 2020 at 10:09PM
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Women’s Success In The Business Of Wine And Spirits: A Case Study In Leadership - Forbes
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