Earlier this month, we hosted our annual Watermark Entrepreneur Conference: For Women, By Women. Watermark hosts this event every year to provide both inspiration and practical, hands-on strategies to our core audience of women entrepreneurs. However, this year was special: in celebrating our 20^th Anniversary, we gathered together a lineup of experts whose collective star power infused the room with an unprecedented level of energy, expertise, and straight up know-how.

The schedule was packed with panels, workshops, and fireside chats – all highly informative and relevant, but there were a few major highlights to this year’s program:

The introductory fireside chat with Shellye Archambeau, CEO of MetricStream with veteran broadcast journalist Sydnie Kohara inspired the audience to grab the bull by the horns, and go out there and launch your own company or lead within a company with energy and determination. Listeners were given a firsthand account of personal experiences, challenges overcome, and how to become an influencer.

A panel with Bill Campbell, Chairman of Intuit, Shona Brown, SVP of Business Operations of Google, and Donna Dubinsky, Co-founder of Numenta provided practical and tactical advice from operational experts who have seen and done it all. Most refreshing was their humorous banter as they shared their practical and authentic takeaways.The first breakout featured a focused session for our Emerging Leaders audience, facilitating conversation on women’s presence in the workplace, how to manage your presence effectively, and how to promote your own professional growth. We look forward to continuing to develop this important audience in our community.
The second breakout was another opportunity to meet another subset from the community and hear from experts on drilldown topics.

The day ended with a “Firecracker Chat” between Carol Bartz, former CEO of Yahoo! and Gordy Davidson, Chairman at Fenwick & West. It was delightful to see the relationship between them, appreciating Gordy’s support for women, and being witness to Carol’s tremendous career.  It was an inspirational and informational conversation, giving yet another glimpse of a wildly successful woman and the roads she traveled.

If you missed the conference, take a look at our conference photo gallery to see pictures from the event. Don’t miss next year’s conference!

Recently, an article was published in HBR, “The Rise of Executive Feminism,” where the authors laud the launch of a powerful new feminist dialogue and analyze the backlash against it. Their most effective example is the way in which the media – and by extension, the public – reacted to the conversation by inventing a vicious catfight between Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg, the two most vocal and visible figureheads in the debate.

I believe this is an example of reinforcing old stereotypes about women as not supportive of one another (remember the queen bee syndrome?). This is simply not reality. There is room for more than one woman at the table, more than one woman spokesperson, more than one woman’s voice in the conversation.

Women can disagree with one another without tearing each other down. How do we know? Because it happens all the time! If we look at male leadership authors and speakers, we see different and some overlapping perspectives, but we don’t automatically identify them as cat fights to feed the gossip mill.

This exaggeration of differences is often created by the established power structure and comes from unconscious bias about how women should be and about how women are. When there is only one woman’s voice, suddenly she is under pressure to represent her entire gender. In reality, no one can fill that role because women are all individuals and we all have our own perspectives.

When there are multiple voices, they need to be viewed as just that: multiple voices all supporting the goal of more women achieving their career goals.

As the head of IP and broadband development for Ericsson in Silicon Valley, Maya Strelar-Migotti wrestles with a problem that you hear many leaders of huge, global companies worry about all the time: Now that we’re gigantic and hidebound, how do we keep that start-up-like passion for innovation?

Strelar-Migotti told a cavernous room of entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs at TiEcon 2013 this weekend that she came up with a six-part recipe to get the innovation mojo going at the Sweden-based telecom company.

1. Legitimize Innovation
2. Emphasize Learning
3. Appeal to Internal Motivation
4. Have a Method for Innovation
5. Encourage Collaboration
6. Anticipate Customer Needs

Before you say, “duh,” I should say I can elaborate in a minute. But first it’s interesting to note that Strelar-Migotti’s initiatives were born of something of a culture shock. When she came to the United States four years ago, it was the fifth country she would work in for Ericsson. And let’s just say Silicon Valley was unlike anyplace she had been before, lending support to the notion that the valley indeed has a unique innovation culture.

“You come here where companies are giving employees one day a week to innovate,” she told the crowd at TiEcon, an annual tech and networking fest that draws thousands. Her outfit wasn’t in a position to do that, she said, so she asked herself: “How can you enable this innovation?”

She started with the legitimize innovation idea and with setting aside 1 percent of her budget (“which is very big”) to create an innovation culture.

“We said, ‘Let’s make it the venture capital model,” Strelar-Migotti explained while speaking on the TiEcon Women’s Forum stage. “We give people that qualify for the ideas one week of experimentation. We give them $500 to buy books and some software and so on.”

Then they go to work on their ideas, continuing on with more time and more support as long as the idea continues to hold promise.

Next on Strelar-Migotti’s list is emphasize learning, particularly figuring out “how do you dare to innovate.” Believe it or not, failure still has something of a stigma, more so in some cultures, Strelar-Migotti says, than in others.

“We need to demystify failure,” she says. Ericsson leaders need to spread the word that failure is OK, that it can be useful and educational.

“People should not actually give up when they fail.”

On to appealing to internal motivation. Strelar-Migotti says she is trying to tap into internal motivation by giving employees awards. “We don’t give money,” she says.  I’d argue that money is a really, really great reward, but Ericsson has other ideas.

What they give, Strelar-Migotti explained, is recognition for the best manager, in terms of fostering innovation, the best ideas, the best facilitator, even the best failure.

“We recognize there are many different roles if you want to have this,” she says of an innovation culture.

Companies have a method for sales and design and testing, why not have a method for innovation? Strelar-Migotti asked. Ericsson in Silicon Valley is working with the creativity gurus at IDEO to figure out how to best “unleash the power of the people going forward.”

Create spaces that encourage collaboration, Strelar-Migotti suggested, and though she wasn’t specific, I’m thinking kitchens, lounge areas and foosball tables. (OK, not every idea is an original idea.) She wants to get managers together with people who can make ideas happen and she wants idea people to mingle with managers and facilitators.

Finally, Strelar-Migotti says it’s important to anticipate customer needs. One way to stay ahead of the market is to know what your customers need maybe before they’ve figured it out themselves.

“We have to innovate to resolve something,” she says. “If you look at the iPhone or iPad, all these things came from anticipating what we as a user would need in our lives to make it better.”

Then, of course, you just need to go out and make what ever it is that will do just that.

Roberta LaPorte
Founder & Principal, RAL & Associates

Roberta (Bobbie) LaPorte, is Founder and Principal of RAL & Associates, a consulting firm providing career and leadership development services to technology, financial services and healthcare organizations. RAL & Associates produces the “When She Speaks” – Women in Leadership Series in San Francisco, sponsored by blue chip Bay Area companies including Charles Schwab, PG&E, McKesson and Salesforce.com, and is also the Co-Founder of the Leadership Balance™ Program.

Before founding RAL & Associates, Ms. LaPorte served in GM, COO and CMO roles in several Fortune 50 companies, including IBM, GE and United Healthcare, as well as two healthcare technology start-ups. A certified career coach, she has a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Harvard.

She is a nationally-recognized expert on the powerful relationship between physical fitness and career success, and an accomplished triathlete and multi-sport coach. Bobbie is currently training for her fifth Ironman triathlon. When she is not coaching executives or Ironman triathletes she proudly serves on a number of Bay Area non-profit boards and happily rescues senior Golden Retriever dogs.

Why is it so important for women to support other women?
I believe it is important to support other people in general – but women in particular – to help them achieve career success and satisfaction. I love supporting other women because they often don’t see their own potential and the possibilities that could be for them. Most women are not comfortable acknowledging their accomplishments, promoting themselves and claiming their success. So if I can help them see their achievements and potential in a different way and then move to capitalize on that for themselves – I will have done my job!

What are some of the ways you champion other women?
I love producing the “Careers in Motion” program for Watermark, because it gives senior women a forum to share their career challenges and gain positive peer feedback to move forward. It is great to see the relationships and ongoing support that emerge from those forums. I do quite a lot of work with corporate women’s groups to help them launch, gain executive support and increase the value of their groups internally. And I always enjoy helping senior women “rediscover” the power of physical fitness to help them get to the top of their game.

How has being a Watermark member helped you make your mark?
Being a Watermark member has helped me connect with some amazing women – who continue to inspire me and push me to realize my own potential – including training for my fifth Ironman race later this year. And serving on the Strategic Advisory Board has also helped me have broader input an impact on where this amazing sharing community of women is headed.

A Leader’s Test: Balancing Drive and Compassion

This interview with Wendy Lea, chief executive of Get Satisfaction, a customer experience platform, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Wendy Lea is the chief executive of Get Satisfaction, a customer experience platform.

This weekend is Mother’s day, and we wish mothers everywhere the gratitude and love that they so deserve. While it is wonderful to have this reminder to recognize the important role mothers play in our lives, it’s also a poignant reminder that, as a country, the U.S. is way behind in supporting working mothers.

It is remarkable that we consider ourselves a model for other countries – yet we are behind in legislation regarding diversity on public boards, on equal wage enforcement, flexible work practices and on maternity leave requirements. In many other countries, a minimum leave allocation is required. In Sweden, the mother and father get a total of a year and a half off to care for a new child, and they can divide that time any way they want between the two parents.  This promotes sharing childcare but more importantly, allows women to remain in the workforce and still take time off as they have children.

One of the reasons women have difficulty advancing to top level positions is that many leave their careers in their mid-thirties to raise children, and when they want to return to the work world, they have difficulty obtaining a job. Typically it is at a lower position than the one they had prior to leaving. This off-ramp/on-ramp phenomenon and its implications for women’s careers is well documented by Sylvia Ann Hewitt and the Center for Talent and Innovation.

We know that women are the next global economy and can help drive up GDP if they are on a level playing field. It therefore makes sense for the U.S. to implement legislation that mandates a more progressive maternity/paternity leave including provision for adoptive parents, to fully leverage women who work.

In the interim, the corporate sector can take a leadership position and implement stronger benefits for parents that will help with recruiting, retaining and engaging women and they will reap the benefits of greater diversity, innovation and ultimately a stronger return on investment.

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We found this great infographic, making The Case for Parental Leave, on www.whattoexpect.com. Click here to view the original post. 

You have to know yourself before you can effectively lead others. Many leadership experts call this “finding your voice”, and it is the best starting point when you decide to make improving your leadership skills a priority.

Over the past two decades, my work in executive coaching and leadership development programs always begins with assessing and focusing on an individual’s strengths and weaknesses.

I have met many leaders who have learned how to do everything smarter – they are focused, passionate and committed to their life and work, understanding the importance of self-reflection.

I offer up the following questions which were developed based on my experience coaching these successful leaders and are meant to help you create more opportunities in your life.

Ask yourself these questions:
Value of Self: Do I clearly see my dream?
If your core values and vision are not clear, no strategy will work and it will be impossible to prioritize correctly. It is vital for today’s leader to bring others along on the journey, but you first have to know where you are going.

Clarity of values will give you the confidence to make tough decisions, to act with determination, and to take charge of your life.

How do I spend my time?
After setting your priorities evaluate how you spend your time.
“Nothing separates successful people from unsuccessful people more than how they use their time.” ~John Maxwell

Are you clear on what you bring to the table?
You need to truly understand your strengths and weaknesses, be comfortable with them, and help everyone around you understand their assets. Using a tool like the DiSC assessment can help you and your team better understand one another.

The leader has to take the lead on this self-evaluation. Focus on exploring and enhancing what you do well and reap the benefits of simplicity, standardization, and deep experience.

People Are Your Most Valuable Asset: Do you have the right people on the bus, the right people off the bus and the right people in the right seats?
Determine the knowledge, skills and abilities each job requires to support the business strategy and culture, and design an interview process to find the “right” people.
“The toughest decisions in organizations are people decisions hiring, firing, promotions, etc. These are the decisions that receive the least attention and are the hardest to unmake”~Peter Drucker, management expert

Do I invest in training and employee development?
Your employees must have the tools to do their best work and this investment also strengthens their commitment to the company. According to John Maxwell, developing people means:

• I value them
• I commit time to them
• I mentor them
• I equip them
• I empower them

Are you willing to listen?
This is the most powerful tool you have to get your organization to accomplish more. Do you know what it takes to be a good listener?

Listening is the act of receiving, attending to, interpreting, and responding to verbal and non-verbal messages in ways appropriate to a situation.

Real listening takes time and patience, and the payoff is definitely worth the effort. The flow of communication within an organization can improve greatly just by making people aware of how important it is to listen.

Business Practices and Process Improvements: Do you set and clearly articulate your goals?
Unless you write your goals down they are often lost in the shuffle and excitement of new problems, challenges, and decisions.

The function of goals is to get you into action – they will give you a way to measure your effectiveness.Setting and then reconnecting with your goals on a regular basis is a powerful success discipline.

Do you cultivate good managers?
It is widely known in the HR consulting world that the biggest reason for an employee’s departure is a poor manager. Managers are the grassroots implementers of the company culture.

Successful leaders provide training and coaching to help their managers. Many leaders have abandoned management development for fear that the investment will be lost if they leave.

My question to those leaders is: “What if you don’t invest in your management and they stay?”

Do you encourage productive conflict?
If harmony comes only as a result of people holding back their opinions and honest concerns, then it’s a bad thing. Many believe that it is better for people to agree and get along than disagree and conflict with one another.

I’d trade that false kind of harmony any day for a team’s willingness to argue effectively about an issue and then walk away with an action plan and no collateral damage.

There needs to be constructive conflict and a leader must be willing to start a difficult dialogue and show vulnerability to encourage others to join the discussion.

Are you willing to make the hard decisions?
The willingness to go against the majority, to do what’s right and make the tough calls is an important leadership trait that takes discipline and courage. This is not a character trait, it is a learned practice that can be developed and help separate you from the pack.

To become a great leader, one must first become a great person. You cannot lead others until you have learned to lead yourself.

“Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems; wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom.” ~ Jim Rohm

What can you do to become a better leader? Who can you effectively listen to today? Are you truly really ready to make those hard decisions?

About the Author

Kristi Royse, CEO of KLR Consulting, inspires success in individuals and teams with proven best practices that enable organizations to capitalize on their strengths. She partners with companies to improve communication, implement change, align their organizational values and goals and move to higher levels of performance. KLR Consulting’s programs are direct, specific, and drive bottom line results. Kristi is a nationally recognized speaker, facilitator, management consultant, executive coach, and trainer. Since 1987, Kristi has been coaching executives to be stronger leaders and helping organizations optimize their most vital resource – its people.

This blog was originally posted on KLR Consulting.com. Click here to read the original post. 

SUNNYVALE — Seven months after giving birth and two months after she shook up the tech world by ordering employees to stop working from home, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is now offering female employees 16 weeks of paid maternity leave while new dads get eight weeks of paid leave.

For a couple working at Yahoo, the change in policy means new Yahoo moms and dads could have a combined six months of paid time off to bond with their new babies. They’ll even get four months off combined for babies they adopt or foster.

Yahoo’s new company perks include free Yahoo gifts for both babies and pets and reimbursements for employee laundry and housekeeping costs. But the maternity and paternity policies especially pleased Mayer watchers on Tuesday who shook their heads after she banned telecommuting and ordered employees back into the office.

“I was quite concerned when the initial policy around working at the office came out that they were going to take a step backward in support of women,” said Marilyn Nagel, CEO of Watermark, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit group that supports women in their careers and in their communities.

“This current new list of programs and benefits is a step in the right direction because we know that women tend to leave their jobs if there is not flexibility or other benefits to support them. The fact that Marissa is looking at other options suggests that she has done some research and is really looking to move Yahoo forward, in contrast to that other position that took Yahoo backward a bit.”

Yahoo’s new policies for parents are hardly the best in Silicon Valley, which constantly seeks to attract and retain the brightest tech workers.

For instance Google, where Mayer worked before joining Yahoo, offers up to 22 weeks of paid leave for its new mothers, among several other perks for expectant Googler moms that include premium parking while they’re pregnant.

But Yahoo’s maternity and paternity policies are far more generous when compared with the rights of thousands of California workers who are only guaranteed partial salaries for maternity and paternity leave. Employees at small companies who take even unpaid time off to care for newborns also face the possibility of losing their jobs, said Netsy Firestein, executive director of the Berkeley-based Labor Project for Working Families.

“Huge amounts of data show that it’s really good for kids and for their brain development to have time to bond with their parents,” Firestein said. “In terms of the tech industry, 16 weeks (of maternity leave) for mothers and eight weeks for fathers seems to be the standard and that’s great. And it’s a great model for other employers to follow. But we lag grossly behind the rest of the world. Other countries offer six months to three years and Canada has almost a year. When there is paid parental leave, people come back to work in much higher numbers.”

Back home in India, Ajay Bhutoria and his wife, Vinita, would have been surrounded by family when Vinita gave birth to their youngest son, Yesh, in 2011.

But in California, Vinita could get only four weeks of paid maternity leave and took another 12 weeks of unpaid time off from her Silicon Valley tech job to care for Yesh, who developed medical problems.

“Most immigrants who live here don’t have the family support of home, where we have grandmothers and brothers and sisters all living together,” said Ajay Bhutoria, who runs Fremont-based Global Business Consulting Services. “For Yahoo this change in policy will get them new and brighter talent.”

This post was originally published by Dan Nakaso on InsideBayArea.com, the online publication of The Oakland Tribune. Click here to see the original post.

High-five to all the Watermark Members recently welcomed to the 2013 class of the Silicon Valley Business Journal’s Women of Influence. Read More >
Renu Bhatia
Julie Brooks
Catherine Courage
Lise Edwards
Ruth Gaube
Laurie Lumenti Garty
Susan Hailey
Karineh Kachatourian
Maya Strelar-Migotti

Congratulations to Karen Rodhe for her new position as Chief Human Resources Officer of Amyris Inc. Read More >

Longtime Watermark Board Member Shellye Archambeau was recently listed as the second most influential african americans in technology. Way to go! Read More >

We’re so proud of Kat Gordon, Founder of the 3% Conference, for winning a 2013 “Marketers That Matter” Award for Customer Engagement. What’s more, she was nominated by a fellow Watermark member, Dr. Barbara Mark, for the Award. Yet another great example of how Watermark women support other women! Read More >

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Want to be featured in the You Go, Girl! section of The Watermark Factor? Don’ be shy! Email usyour latest and greatest successes, and we’ll include it in next month’s version. 

*Watermark Factor successes include: Major career milestones, like a key promotion, new job, or new board seat, OR publication/news feature in a high-profile publication with national readership. The Watermark editorial team will curate which successes show up in this space.

A study of 624 directors of corporate boards indicates that the presence of women on a board of directors may shift its decision-making style towards best or “right” and away from tradition.

According to Drs. Chris Bart and Gregory McQueen in “Why Women Make Better Directors?”*, female directors scored significantly higher than their male counterparts when selecting the best or “right” path for the organization. This decision-making style, called complex moral reasoning (CMR) involves taking circumstances and competing interests into consideration.  It differs from the styles that focus on tradition and rules (normative) or self-gain (personal interest).

This author weighted the study findings to see how board decision-making styles might look if they were 100% women, 100% men, or 50-50 men and women.  The end result shows that the presence of women increases the overall presence of CMR in comparison to an all-male board.

However, the fascinating counterpoint is that the personal interest decision-making style, the “what’s in it for me?” group has the opportunity to break the tie between “best” and “traditional” in any scenario.

Think back on your own group decision-making.  Does the self-interested minority have the opportunity to tip the scale?  Does the presence of a female in the fix add more weight to the consideration of new ideas?

So, while we are all leaning in nowadays, the Bart/McQueen study adds yet another data point regarding why it is in investors’ best interest to include female decision-makers at the very pinnacle of influence: in the corporate board room.

About the Author:
Dana Kunz is the Executive Director of Watermark Institute’s Board Access™ Program. Click here to learn more.

*Int. J. Business Governance and Ethics, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 93–99. Click here to read the study.