An evening with Lean In Leaders

This month, we at Lean In Bangalore (LIB) were delighted to host the wonderful team from Lean In: Rachel Schall Thomas, Co-Founder and CEO of LeanIn.Org; Emma Macan Roberts, Head of Lean In Circles and Company Engagement; Hema Gokal, APAC Lean In Company Engagement Lead; and Ali Bohrer, Chief of Staff at Lean In; for a session with the Lean In Bangalore community.

It was great to hear Rachel talk about her journey of starting LeanIn.Org with Sheryl Sandberg 7 years ago, to how today we are a strong community spread across 44,000 circles in over 170 countries! In her Fireside Chat with Sphoorti Kumar, she spoke about how we could move closer to gender equality by emphasizing a need for systemic change — women need to be paid equally and get paid family leave. Organizations need to tighten up their hiring and promotion process, so there is less bias, and it is more inclusive. However, she said there are small practical things we can do for each other starting today -

1. When you introduce people, do it in a way that elevates their status — Don’t just introduce them by their title but highlight what impact they have had and how integral they are to your team. Research shows that women are less likely to be naturally seen as leaders and our performance tends to be under-estimated, so be a cheerleader for each other.

2. A lot of bias plays out in meeting dynamics — women are often spoken over and interrupted. She spoke about the concept of the ‘stolen idea’: when a woman puts an idea out, there isn’t much traction; but later when someone else brings it up again, all of a sudden there is a lot of momentum around it. You can say, “Hey, you interrupted her, I wanted to hear what she was saying”, or, “That is an amazing idea when she said it, it really resonated with me.” Remind people where the idea originated from. When you advocate for another person, your status as a leader goes up. You are seen as a more effective leader when you stand up and speak up for others.

3. Mentorship and Sponsorship — You don’t have to be a senior to be a mentor. You could be a good mentor at any point in your career! If you are a senior, reach down and help other women. It’s important to be allies to one another.

4. Celebrate each other’s accomplishments — Women pay a social penalty if they promote themselves too much. Celebrate each other’s accomplishments loudly and proudly without any penalty! She gave an example of McKinsey, their partner in the Women in Workplace study — whenever a woman did something great, they would circulate an email thread applauding her achievements. At the year-end review, the male partners exclaimed how much more work they had done this year, to which the women said that they had done the exact same work, but the only difference was that they were promoting each other this time around.

Speaking about Lean In’s upcoming roadmap, Rachel shared their plan of having a new Lean In curriculum that will be more global and inclusive based on new research and a deeper understanding of women’s experiences; and Lean In Girls, a program that helps develop young girls to become future leaders. She pointed out that to drive lasting cultural change, we need to start a lot younger. She spoke about reaching more women with more tools, and putting more research out to drive the right conversations and the right awareness.

We followed up the fireside chat with a panel discussion with our LIB circle leaders moderated by Hena Mehta to discuss the motivation behind starting the circles and the impact they have had.

Archana Venkat, who leads the ‘Women Leaders of Sarjapur Road’ spoke about how her circle is for aspiring women leaders. Sweta Pachlangiya runs the LIB Moms circle for working mothers that discusses the challenges of a mother returning to work. Dipika Jaikishan, who runs the Financial Independent Women’s Circle, highlighted the importance of talking about money and making money decisions. Manasi Soman, a Lean In Bangalore team member spoke about how workshops like ’50 ways to Fight Bias’ taught her not only how to effectively communicate, but also gave her a vocabulary to point out unconscious bias. Srividya Balasubramanian started the ‘Women in Data Science and Data Visualization Circle’ to motivate women to learn new technologies and find mentorship when taking these new career paths.

This was followed by Rachel, Emma and Hema on the panel having a great interaction with the LIB community! We spoke about being ‘Onlies’ — The only women in the room or at the higher rungs. Rachel added, “This is why Lean In Circles are important, as they serve as a great antidote to being an ‘only’ and building resilience”. One of the community members also expressed how she was able to share Lean In Resources like ‘Men as Allies’ with her manager to help him see his biases. To this Emma added her experience of Ally-ship circles that go through the ’50 Ways to Fight Bias’ curriculum, and how Lean In designs actual tools that people can use and make a difference by distilling research into bite-sized information. Rachel shared the importance of empathy while discussing bias — “We all fall into the pitfall of bias, it is good to remind men that we empathize with them, that gender stereotypes hold women back but they hold men back too. We are all on the journey together”. Community members also shared how these circles have been a safe space where they have received learnings and help with jobs too!

Hema was enthusiastic about working on the Company and Community Engagement in the APAC Region. We look forward to working with her on Lean In Bangalore and Lean In Workplace Inclusion Network, an inclusive network launched to map corporate circles of all genders.

The evening with the Lean In the team was indeed a memorable one! We loved hearing how the Lean In Team and our community members enjoyed it as well. We look forward to having many more Workshops, Power Chats and meet-ups with you. You could sign up here to know all about our upcoming events!

If you were a part of this meet-up, do let us know in the comments one take-away that you had from this Fireside and Panel Discussion. We would love to hear!

Feel free to join one or more of our Lean In Circles using the Whatsapp group links below:

• Motherhood: for all current and future moms!
• Women in Tech: for all of you navigating a career in technology
• She Restarts: for all LIB members returning to work after a career break
• Wellness: for all things wellness (mental and physical)
• LIB Safe Space: to discuss any sensitive topics in a closed, confidential space
• LIB Data Visualization Circle: for all the current and aspiring data scientists!