Many of our American readers will gather today to express thanks. Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who are celebrating–and to our women trailblazers and their supporters, we thought you might appreciate this wonderful piece from Take the Lead, covering a few reason women leaders might be feeling thankful. Read below and click through for the full list. And enjoy the day with your loved ones, wherever you are!
taketheleadwomen.com – On Thanksgiving Day this week, many friends and family members will go around the table or the room and express what has inspired gratitude this year, and give a shout out to what and who makes them feel grateful. Or many will send emails, texts and leave voice mails of gratitude for those in different parts of the world.
It also can be time to think about what women leaders can be thankful for in their careers, and perhaps what they can build upon in the coming year.
Some women leaders have built companies on gratitude.
Kate Frucher, co-founder and CEO of Imprint, launched this “many-to-one communications platform with a mission to use social technology to spark acts of kindness and real human connection,” Laura Dunn writes in Huffington Post.
Frucher started Axiom Law, increasing company revenue from $10 million to $60 million annually, Dunn writes. “As SVP of E-Commerce at ideeli, she helped grow revenue from $23 million to $145 million in less than three years,” Dunn writes.
That is something investors are surely grateful for, thanks to Frucher. And Frucher says she wanted to launch something new with Imprint, to give back.
“Every day, people all over the country and the world are using our little tool to express more gratitude, more appreciation, more connection,” Frucher says. “That’s the problem I wanted to solve with Imprint – bringing depth back to how we communicate, to our relationships. And drawing on my past experience, I wanted to use technology to solve it. Technology isn’t inherently shallow or snarky. It’s how we’re structuring and using technology in our technological adolescence that’s the problem.”
Several factors inspire gratitude in women leaders, entrepreneurs, and those starting out in the workplace. We narrowed them down to five, gathering advice from women leaders who inspire gratitude.
1. Embracing the chance to learn. None of us prefers to be stuck in a job, company or organization where our time is filled up with rote duties and we do not have the opportunity for personal and professional development. Diana McKenzie, chief information officer of Workday, agrees that learning new skills and new approaches is invigorating. “I have found that one of the best ways to stay engaged and advance in my career is to continue trying to master new skills, and attempt things beyond my comfort zone. Sure, sometimes I’ve failed, but every step along the way was a learning experience. Learning to be less comfortable has also given me more confidence to try new things. In that get-together at the event, we all agreed that women should push ourselves to think differently, attempt new ways of doing things, and challenge ourselves to be aspirational.”
