Sitting at the Babson Executive Education Center, listening to a group of very talented women managers discuss their work, careers, and challenges, marveling at their willingness to open up about their own situations and to offer each other advice and support. It’s our semi-annual, week-long Women’s Leadership executive program and the ideas are flowing and tight bonds are forming.

Many compelling questions about leadership are explicit and implicit in our discussions this week. For example:

• What does it take for a manager with substantial operational responsibility to create the space herself to be strategic?
• How can managers with substantial operational responsibility manage the tensions between delivering short-term results and taking strategic action? 
• How can women leaders create broader awareness of who they are and of the value they are creating for the company – without being self-promotional and stealing time from actually doing your job?
• How does a person learn to look at herself and identify what is really driving her or holding her back? 

Many powerful ideas have been stimulated and shared, like:

• Too often women’s skill in managing and enhancing operations dooms us to being perceived as lacking strategic capability. Yet so many women are capable of moving very successfully at and between the operational and strategic levels. We need to show the value of shaping strategic decisions according to operational potential and constraints. 
• Risks typically provide value, though not sure value. We need to take more risks. We need to develop resilience (everyone fails, failing is learning) and a thick skin.
•  When people accuse women of having a fear of success, they probably have it wrong. Fear of success is really a doubt about whether I want what that “success” will bring me. Especially if it means I have to be a different kind of leader than I want to be. I need to shape the role so that it fits and satisfies me.
• Corporate entrepreneurs create value for companies. I do that; maybe I am a corporate entrepreneur. Maybe I need to change how I operate to create more value.   
•  I am in charge of my own career. I have to take initiative to shape it to meet my personal and professional goals. If I need to be strategic, I need to develop and delegate more, create and enforce my boundaries, and just do it. 

And there are moments of enormous camaraderie, connection, and support, like:

•  All of us adopting one participant’s mantra of “game on!”
• Hearing someone say, “you have done a very thorough job of mentoring your people; give yourself more credit for that,” or “why are you shouldering that burden by yourself”
•  Three voices chiming in on a response to a peer: “Who says?!” 

Submitted by Anne Donnellon
Associate Professor and Faculty Director for Babson’s Fast Track MBA Program