Leadership, DEI, And Life As An Entrepreneur, With Dorothy Enriquez

Before an employee can take on a leadership position full-time, they must be equipped with the right knowledge and skills first. If they do not receive the proper leadership development, they might not be as effective as they should be. Dorothy Enriquez of The Ellevate Collective sits down with J.R. Lowry to discuss how they guide corporate and nonprofit leaders in optimizing their talents and unlocking their greatest potential. She discusses the difference between a manager and a leader, as well as the best approach to building a business that could operate even without your full supervision. Dorothy also shares her advocacy to bring more gender equity in C-suite leadership and the importance of increasing the number of women leaders.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/dorothy-enriquez/

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Leadership, DEI, And Life As An Entrepreneur, With Dorothy Enriquez

Founder And Principal Consultant, The Ellevate Collective

My guest is Dorothy Enriquez. Dorothy is the CEO and Principal Consultant with The Ellevate Collective, which is a learning and leadership development firm that helps close the skills gap at every level of an organization. Before going full-time with Ellevate, Dorothy spent a number of years at Molson Coors in Learning and Development.

She also had training roles at Applied Medical, Veterinary Pet Insurance, and HireRight. Dorothy was an instructor at Cal State Fullerton, a Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of DOT Magazine, and a member of the Forbes Coaches Council. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Communication and a Master’s degree in Human Communication. She lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Dorothy, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

I’m excited to get to know you a bit since this was an arranged interview, which is always fun and a bit different than my interviewing the people that I’ve known over the years. Tell our audience about The Ellevate Collective.

The Ellevate Collective is a premier learning and leadership development firm. Primarily, we work with corporations and nonprofits. We also spend some time working with small businesses to help them optimize their leaders and help the leaders that are there answer the call on remarkable leaders, which is to produce another leader who can produce another leader. We do that through cohort style experiences and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion engagement experiences to help that organization create this culture experience, which leads to engagement and why people stay and find meaning in the work that they do.

What are some of the specific areas that you work with them on?

On the leadership development side, what I find with most organizations is that they want to primarily focus on leaders in place. What that means is they don’t necessarily want to put in as much time and effort in emerging leaders but the leaders who are already there, especially leaders who sit in the middle because the leaders in the middle are the ones who ignite the strategies that get propelled down from the top. You’re not working with new leaders. You’re working with experienced leaders. You’re curating advanced leader experiences because they’re not starting from scratch. They’re starting from experience.

You’re figuring out what the initiatives are. Where is the culture? What’s that vision? What does that five-year plan or that long-range plan look like so that we know how to help these leaders who have been leading for a while to cultivate a more meaningful leadership practice and give them those soft skills because it’s that introspective look increasing self-awareness and self-efficacy? How do we do that through this interactive experiential activation that says, “These are the skills that I have. What am I going to do next? What do the courageous possibilities look like?” That’s where we often end up spending quite a bit of our time.

What does an experiential program look like then?

Number one, it’s custom. Every organization over the next 6 to 9 months going through this cohort-style experience is going to have these classes. It doesn’t work like that because it depends on where is that organization, where are the leaders, and where are they trying to go. The customization depends on that. It could be that we’re doing a lot of coursework around understanding your internal dialogue because that impacts how you’re showing up.

We’re doing content and courses around your confidence and self-efficacy because that’s what’s slowing you down. If you don’t feel like you’re adding value and you don’t feel like you’re valuable, that is going to impact how you lead. For us to say, “We need to work on Innovation,” but don’t like your valuable, and you don’t feel like you’re adding value, we need to train up quite a bit. It could vary.

Sometimes it is understanding the difference between being a leader and a manager. Sometimes it is navigating the fact that a lot of times, people are trying to cope with the leadership transition. I went from being your peer, and now I’m your boss. All of us applied for this position, and I’m the one who got it. It’s hard for me to do these other things over here if I’m still navigating the fact that I’ve transitioned into this higher-level role that I’m trying to ensure that I have the competence and the skillset to execute even though there’s going to be a transition.

With each organization, depending on where the leaders are, then that’s going to determine what exactly is this going to look like but what we’re wanting is a transformation that goes beyond the experience. Most cohort-style experiences are anywhere from 6 to 9 months but to make that impactful, not only do you need to do stuff in the program during the session but you also need transition activities that you are doing outside of the session in the real world on the job, igniting it, pressure testing it, and finding out what’s working and what’s not. You also need coaching so that anchoring and sustainability can last beyond the program.

What about the Diversity program that you do?

On the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion side, we create activations in 90-day increments. Part of that is because sometimes I find that in this landscape, organizations want to do this work but then they start doing the work. They realize it can be hard and challenging. Sometimes, they need to take a break, they need to take a second to get the teams together, or they realize they need to recalibrate. Maybe they said to everyone, “This is what you’re doing,” but they didn’t necessarily think about the impact it would have on the culture to draw that line in the sand and say, “This is what we’re doing.”

Sometimes those efforts require constant recalibration of the humans that are there because often they’re being asked to do something that they have never had to do before. They’re being asked to step out of their comfort zone and get comfortable with being uncomfortable. That’s a big pickup because if you look at the evolution of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion depending on how old you are and how long you’ve been working, you remember when there was just a D. You might remember when there was nothing. The D got implemented because somebody did something wrong. A man said something wrong to a woman. Somebody touched a Black girl’s hair. Somebody made an advance to somebody else, or there wasn’t a ramp to get in. What if somebody has a wheelchair?

We got to do diversity training, sensitivity training, and workplace civility because something bad happened. Depending on how long you’ve been working, you remember when there was a shift of, “Everyone needs to go through diversity training once a year so that we could check the box.” There has been this evolution but post-George Floyd and post-2020, there have been a lot of changes in this space. Even leading up to that, there were a lot of changes organizationally that started infusing inclusion. We started to see this in commercials. Even when you would fly on airlines, you started seeing inclusion in who is sharing the messages about how to be safe on a plane. It used to never be like that.

We have seen these subtle changes over the years but it has been a big wrecking ball in a sense post-2020 depending. You might remember terms like policemen and firemen. We haven’t heard those terms in years. That’s because there have been all these changes over the years. There has been this shift but now, in this landscape, people are being called to the carpet more. They’re being held far more accountable than they ever have been. It’s challenging work. It can be done but that requires a strong leader that’s willing to draw a line in the sand. Some organizations pick it up and put it down.

What I have seen through the work that we do here at Ellevate is that the organizations that are committed to doing this deep work are constantly renewing for the next experience and saying, “This is going to become part of the culture. This is going to become part of the fabric of who we are, how we think, and how we do things.” Ostensibly, you have an option. You can get on the bus and sit in the right seat or you can get off and find someplace that’s going to be a little bit more flexible than we’re willing to be because we believe that this work is important.

You started doing this back in 2016. What led you to found The Ellevate Collective?

I went to a leadership retreat. I thought it was just a retreat and then realized it was a nine-month program. I went through the African American Leadership Program in Milwaukee. During the retreat, I was given permission to be awesome, do scary things, and have confidence in myself even if I was going to walk down a path that hadn’t been walked down before.

Sometimes we want so badly, especially women or people of color, to walk down a path that is paid so that we know, “I’m going in the right direction. I see that there are roads, signs, and lights. This is great,” but that retreat gave me permission to go down the path that hasn’t been walked down before. I walked out of that retreat and the following Monday, because it was Friday to Sunday, I walked into my boss’ office, “I’m going to quit this job.” She’s like, “Do your work. You’re going to quit but get your work done.” I thought to myself, “I could probably do this.”

What was happening is that I would be at work gifting my leadership and igniting my gifts, and people would always be telling me, “You could do this for yourself.” I’m like, “I can’t do this for myself. Who would pay me to do this?” I was not even considering the fact that I’m already doing it, and someone is already paying me but forget about that. Let’s not use logic in this particular situation.

That retreat is what made me start thinking, “Maybe I could do this for myself. What would that look like? What would that sound like?” Initially, it did not sound like The Ellevate Collective. We rebranded to The Ellevate Collective but originally, we were known as The Communication Strategist. It was a team of one, a one-woman show, or a boutique firm. In 2021, we rebranded to The Ellevate Collective.

It’s a much cooler name. It’s interesting to me. You worked in learning and development and went to this retreat. You’re used to seeing people go through these a-ha moments and experience the light going on but it took you going to one of these programs for that light to go on for you, which is interesting.

Tell me about it. I’m always watching people ignite and have these a-ha moments and epiphanies. Going through that program and being immersed for days was such a huge catalyst to be in that space. I had never been in a space with a bunch of Black leaders in one spot who are all doing amazing things, and then sitting back in my chair, “What am I doing here?” coming out of it, and realizing, “I’m supposed to be here. I belong in every room that I’m sitting in,” but it didn’t start that way. That was a journey.

What does the business look like? You use, “We,” but you also said it started as a one-woman show. Where are you now?

I have an Internal team of seven people, and then we have our experts who are client-facing. It is myself. I’m the Founder and Principal Consultant. We’ve got Dr. Laci C. Robbins. She is our neuroscientist leadership expert extraordinaire. She also has a background in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion building multiple certifications and a terminal degree. We have Dr. Essence Johnson. She is an optometrist by trade but also a certified Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion practitioner.

We have Celeste Cuffie who is a leadership expert extraordinaire. She’s also certified in DEI. She’s also wielding multiple additional certifications like DiSC on not just individuals but being able to use all the aspects and attributes of DiSC as well as the five elements of building a cohesive team. We’re being able to infuse those different things in any type of work that we need to be able to do.

Our secret weapon is our in-house data scientist, Timeka Smith. What she’s able to do is ignite 180s and 360s predictive analytics where we would be able to go into an organization and say, “Based on looking at all your data, 10% of your female leaders are going to quit at X level. Your people of color aren’t as engaged as everyone else.” We’re being able to go in, see that information, and use that as a tool to say, “How do we want to ignite the programming?” or be able to create leadership dashboards or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion dashboards.

Anytime there’s a project that requires more than Dorothy, I call in the experts. Dr. Laci’s example was that we are like a Transformer. I could be Bumblebee all by myself and do a great job, and that is what happens the majority of the time but when we need to call in the big dogs, we become Optimus Prime. Together like Captain Planet, our powers unite when it’s a big enough project.

We’re going all over the superpower universe.

We are the superheroes of leadership development and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. We’re able to come together, do different programs for different clients, and make sure that they’re getting what they need and finding who’s going to be the best add. There are things that each of them can do that I cannot, and vice versa. Who’s going to be the best addition to the program?

What are your goals for the company over the next few years?

I want us to be able to scale. From a business standpoint, business is up and down. It’s a little bit rollercoaster-like. One thing that I’ve learned in meeting some experts that help businesses scale and catapult to that next level is that most business owners over-index on one side or the other. They either over-index on sales and marketing and under-index on operations and fulfillment, or they over-index on operations and fulfillment and then under-index on sales and marketing.

My favorite is operations and fulfillment. When you find yourself in this space where you want to scale, and you’re running into hiccups and hangups, that’s one of the first places that you should look, “Where am I having a preference?” You can start to tip the scale in that other direction. That’s what we’re doing. I prefer the operations and fulfillment side. Every time I have the desire to do something more on that end, I do the exact opposite of what I want to do. I’m like, “I want a project manager.” You don’t. That is not what you need. Stop. Get yourself a fractional CMO. That’s what I did.

Dorothy Enriquez: When you are business scaling and running into hiccups, learn where you are having a preference so you can start to tip the scale in another direction.

For me, part of it is about leveling it out so that the scale is not so uneven. Officially, I got the idea in December 2016 and launched it in January 2017. I didn’t even have that language. I didn’t know that I was over-indexing on one side versus the other. We spent a lot of time operationalizing the firm, which we will continue to do but for 2024, the journey is going to be focused on swinging the pendulum in my least favorite direction out of necessity.

As you continue to grow a business, create more awareness, garner more accolades, and attract more clientele, you want it to be more even so that you’re not taking a bicycle to a motorcycle race and then feeling like you need bigger wheels when you need to change how you operate. Changing how we operate, creating more of that balance, continuing on this awareness phase, and creating this opportunity for Ellevate to become more of a household name are some of the things that we’re focusing on. My personal focus too is around culture.

Internally, there are seven of us but I do believe it’s important to start thinking about culture before you add in the humans, and then always pressure testing and checking in. I’m the CEO. I built the culture. I don’t know what it’s like to live in it. As a leadership development firm, if we’re going to be helping other cultures build their culture, ignite their culture, and create meaningful and purposeful cultures, we have to be doing that same work in-house. We cannot be The Cobbler where everybody else’s shoes are great, and their kids’ shoes never get fixed. I want us to be able to live out loud internally the same things that we do externally. That’s what we’re focusing on for the next couple of years.

That’s a pretty rich agenda. How do you like being an entrepreneur overall?

Overall, I like it. I do feel like you probably have to have a light dusting of crazy to do it because I do think it’s unpredictable but I do think the world of work is unpredictable too. This space works better for me. It’s stressful at times but for whatever reason, it feels like a stress that I can manage. I was more stressed out when I had a corporate job. I feel like I worked way more hours than I work now.

It seems like there is more of a rhythm. The ups are up, and the downs are down but even when I’m in a down space, I always ask myself, “Do you want to get a job?” The answer is always, “We’re not doing that. We’re going to ride this way.” Nothing lasts forever. If it went down, it’s going to go back up but I do think you have to have some level of capacity to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty.

If you have to know what’s going on at all times, this landscape would make that individual miserable because it would present a huge headache. You’re learning on the fly. You’re building the plane as you’re flying it. There are things that happen out of nowhere. Are you capable of rolling with the punches? Are you willing to invest in yourself to increase your business acumen?

A lot of times, when we start businesses, it’s because we’re good at the thing. We’re good at building homes, doing makeup, making clothes, or delivering a service. That doesn’t mean we know how to run a business. That is a different skillset that we would need to bolster over time as we’re continuing to master our craft. You’re going to fail a lot. The transformation comes from how you talk about your failure. How are you talking about these failures and near-misses? That is where you will see your transformation and your area, soar, and rise. You’re your biggest competition.

Dorothy Enriquez: Know how you talk about your failures. That is where you will see your transformation.

Relative to a corporate job, when you’re an entrepreneur, you have to make a lot of decisions. You walk into work and take for granted, having a computer, having a desk, having the lights go on, getting your paycheck, and all of those things. You have to make all those things happen. This for me is a very part-time thing. There are a million little things you think, “I’ve had to go down the rabbit hole of Search Engine Optimization. I had no idea how deep that rabbit hole was.” That’s one example but there are so many things like that, which you end up by necessity. You may not be an expert but you at least have to become conversant.

That’s why I always have the same nail color because I don’t want to make another decision. I’m done deciding. On some level when I do have a second, I’m like, “What do I miss about having a job sometimes?” I wish somebody would tell me what to do, especially if I don’t know what to do. In the case where I know what to do, I don’t want anybody in my ear about that but when I feel stuck, who is going to tell me what to do? There’s some level of confidence that it’s going to work because when I had a job, I would be told what to do. 80% to 90%, of the time, whatever I was told to do would work out.

I don’t feel like I spent my career being told to do things, and everything fell through the cracks and flopped. It didn’t seem that way. When it’s hard, and I can’t figure it out, I wish someone would tell me what to do. I also miss a company covering your healthcare or a good portion of it. You’re always going to get paid. When you’re running a business, until you get it to the point where it can run without you, you have created another job for yourself. However, if you have a regular job, and you get sick or you go on vacation, you’re still getting paid.

When you start working for yourself, if you’re sick, and you don’t have an automated something, you’re not getting paid. If you are on vacation, it’s the same thing. If you haven’t figured out a way to create a sleep coin system, then that’s the next iteration. How are you going to set up this business where for X amount of time throughout every year, it can run without you? That’s the journey. If it can never run without you, you have a job.

You also haven’t scaled it. When you feel stuck, who do you go to for advice?

I almost always have a coach. I have an operations coach because I realized that was part of the issue, and it was already an issue. I didn’t know what the issue was. This is the thing about people telling you what to do. Somebody could have told me years ago, “This is an operations issue.” I didn’t know that. I had to figure that out on my own. I spent a lot of time operationalizing the firm slowly because I was noticing that we would be constantly recreating the wheel. There would be a lot of waiting. There are different operational things that can get in your way. Waiting is an operational hazard. A lot of the waiting is because of me. I end up being the roadblock, “We can’t move forward until Dorothy approves this. We can’t do this until Dorothy looks at it.”

In making operations a priority, we have cut down time significantly, which saves us money because we’re not having to redo work and wait. You’re sitting there waiting, and the clock is ticking. I took an operations class as well. I have an operations coach. If you’re trying to double your business and expand, you have to have processes. When you don’t, and things fall apart, your first thought is, “I’m going to fire everybody. This team doesn’t know how to be a team and do their work.”

What I always say is, “If you feel like firing everybody, don’t. Before you get mad at the people, look at the process.” I realized we didn’t have any processes. That’s part of the problem. A lot of our problems stem from us having to shoot from the hip and fly by the seat of our pants, and then it does not work. It flops horribly. Who’s salty, singed, and crispy? Me. We had to start putting processes in place because the thought is, “What if you have ten six-figure clients at once? What are you going to do?”

Dorothy Enriquez: If you feel like firing everybody, don’t. Before you get mad at people, look at the process first.

It’s a good problem to have.

If you’re ready for it. We’re thinking, “What do we need to have in place so that this runs more like a well-oiled machine?” Ultimately, it’s a good problem to have if you’re ready for it. If you’re not ready, something like that seems like a good surprise. There are no good surprises in business. People would be like, “What if you’re on Oprah? That’s a great surprise.” It’s not unless you’re ready for what’s going to happen when you go on Oprah. Are you ready for the influx of service delivery products? If you’re not, and you can’t handle it, this could tank you.

Are you waiting for that call?

I can’t wait to hang out with Oprah but I also want to make sure I’m ready when it’s time to hang out with Oprah. That’s why I’m getting it together now. If you stay ready, then you don’t have to get ready because you’re prepared. You’re anticipating greatness around the bend and doing the things that you know how to do so that you’re as prepared as you can be because an opportunity presents itself when you are doing what you need to do. You’re preparing. That means you’re anticipating an amazing opportunity around the corner.

There’s a certain amount of preparation for the positive surprise. Being ready for a positive surprise is an investment. It’s a leap of faith of your time or your money. Sometimes you have to do it. What did you envision yourself doing when you were a kid growing up? I’m sure it wasn’t learning and development necessarily but what did you think you would be doing?

I thought I would do all kinds of things. However, when I asked my parents, “What did you think I was going to be?” they were like, “We thought you were going to be a teacher.” I was always forcing my sister to play school. They’re right. I’m a teacher. I didn’t necessarily think that I was going to grow up and be a teacher. As a little kid, I was like, “I want to grow up. I hope I’m pretty. I want to carry a briefcase. I want to look important and dress nicely. I want to be able to talk a lot.”

I always got in trouble for talking in school. Whatever job it is, if I could talk a lot and be paid to talk, that would be great. That was the extent of it. It worked. That is what I do. I talk a lot. I get paid to talk and think. That sounds on par with what my ten-year-old self was envisioning but I don’t think I ever thought that I would be working for myself. I don’t think that was the thought because my parents were like, “Go to school, get your degree, and get a great job.” That’s what I did.

I don’t think that running a business was the thought. It’s not like I was raised where they were like, “One day, you’re going to run or own the place.” Funny enough, I would have been playing pretend and imagining I always worked for someone. I have a five-year-old daughter who’s never worked for anybody. Even when she plays pretend, she owns everything. She works for no one. She’s never had a job a day in her life. She owns a restaurant that has a drive-through and accepts carry-out and pickup borders. She owns a boutique hotel. Who told her about boutique hotels? I don’t know. She also owns a grocery store that is vertically integrated with her restaurant. She’s five.

It sounds like she’s off to a good start.

Tell me about it. Mind you, I’ve never asked her, “What do you want to be when you grow up? Do you want to get a job?” I’ve never said anything. When she’s playing pretend, that is how she plays. I’m going to be extremely curious to see what she ends up doing as an adult.

Most of us have no idea what we want to do, and we find our way gradually as the years go. Let’s go back and talk a little bit about some of the things that you work with your clients on. You talked earlier about managers versus leaders. I’m curious to hear your definition of what that transition means going from being a manager to a leader.

Off the top of my head, if you’re a manager, and you solely see yourself as a manager, you’re primarily responsible for performance as it aligns and attaches to the strategic initiatives for the year or the quarter. Your goal is to ensure that whatever that goal is, it gets done and that you leverage the skills of your people to do it. The end. There are some additional elements of being a manager.

Dorothy Enriquez: If you are a manager, you are primarily responsible for the team’s performance as it aligns and attaches to the strategic initiatives for the year or quarter.

Are the people affected? Are they efficient? If they have obstacles, are you moving them out of the way? Are you the obstacle? Do they have what they need to do their work? Do they have the skills? Can they GWC? Do they get it? They want it. They can do it. Do they understand based on whatever particular role they hold, how that ties into the initiative, your goals, and the overarching goal of the company, which is the bottom line, which is to make money? That’s a manager.

You can be a manager and a leader at the same time but a leader is someone who understands, “First, I must lead myself. If I cannot do that, I can’t lead anybody else.” Leadership is influence. If I’m a leader, there are a couple of things that I will be doing that don’t necessarily match exactly what a manager is doing. If I’m a leader, I have a vision, and because I have a vision of what’s possible in the near future or the distant future, I am able to ignite that vision and paint such a vivid picture that you, the person who is following me, can see yourself in the vision. You can see it, hear it, taste it, and feel it because of how I’m presenting and igniting what’s possible if you and I collaborate in a meaningful, effective, and impactful way.

As a leader, I’m the one who creates this area of opportunity for courageous possibility and inspiration. That also means that I can inspire you through how I show up, how I coach, how I guide, how I mentor, and how you get to watch me do what I do. I can inspire you to learn more, do more, and be more. If I’m a leader, my role is to also help you see that you’re a leader. Everybody is a leader.

Even if you don’t have direct reports, you are a leader because leadership is influence. You’re required to lead from every seat you sit in. Even if I’m the leader, I have enough competence, capacity, and understanding. I’m coherent and congruent enough. There may be times when I understand I need to follow you. I’m also here to serve you. I’m also here to cultivate my leadership practice and help you do the same. These are not overlapping things as they would be with a manager. This is different for sure.

Maybe it’s an overly simplified view of it but management is ultimately more about the task, and leadership is about the people. I’m curious to get your view on the people who are managers versus the people who are leaders. With the managers, I’m responsible for other people but I look up in the organization, and they’re still a bit of us and them whereas with a leader, us is them. It’s now we. There are things like that. That’s not the only one but there are those mindset shifts that are part of that transition. Some people get it right away, and other people struggle with it.

Wherever you are, let’s pretend you’re not at the top. You could be close to it in the middle, at the bottom, or whatever the case may be. It is so easy from that vantage point to say, “If only they would. If they do, then I could. If they, then I would.” Something that I try to lift for the consideration of the clients that I work with is you are they, and you’re the one that you’ve been waiting for. You are them.

This is not, “If they would.” This is you. You are they. You’re the one they’re waiting for. No one is coming to save you. If you peer through it from that perspective and that lens, what can you do to shift the culture? What can you do to find meaning, the highest level of happiness, in the work that you do day-to-day? What can you do to shift how you experience the world of work?

You are a leader, which means that you also will be shifting how other people experience the world of work. What can you do? Sometimes people are like, “I can’t do anything because of them.” If you want to remain stuck, you can but each of us is one decision away from changing everything. Do I want to live as if my life is happening to me or do I want to live and show up as if I’m happening to my life? This is a choice that we have to make on a regular and consistent basis.

It’s very true. You have a goal of increasing the number of women in the C-Suite. You put a particular percentage on it in your show, 2%. I’m curious how you’re going to measure that and what you’re doing to help increase the number of women who are moving up the ladder into the C-Suite.

That’s one of the differentiators of how we curate programs at Ellevate. We are always taking into account how women ascend into powerful positions. We’re always looking at how women wheeled, maintain, and share power because we do it differently. One of the things on how we create courses accounts for that. We’re working with clients, especially on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion side, looking at job descriptions, and being able to say, “Based on this, women aren’t going to apply. The way that you have this framed, women aren’t going to apply.”

When women see a job description and there are 10 things, if we don’t have all 10, most of us are not applying. How do you curate job descriptions that take that into account? Even when we are developing courseware, understanding how women show up and how women ascend into leadership roles is particularly important. When courses are being created, they’re being created leveraging Adult Learning Theory. How do adults learn? What do adults need? What makes this sticky for grownups?

However, we want to add that extra layer of what happens when women are thrust into the forefront as far as what women need. We can all be here but what do women need as they are ascending into leadership roles and giving themselves permission to be great and impactful? What does that look like? What does that sound like? What does that feel like? How can we take that into consideration in everything that we do?

In the event that we have an opportunity to have access to the data, then we can also say, “Based on how your organization is set up, you don’t have a ton of women. Based on what these predictive analytics could be showing, you’re going to experience a notable drop-off in female representation. What are you going to do about it?” Doing these different things over time will create a shift. It’s an ambitious vision but it’s something that I always want to be working toward. Women are over half the population but that’s not the case in the C-Suite at all. It’s not balanced.

What are some of the things that you would advise your corporate clients to do to address that?

Part of it is being willing to have the conversation. Some organizations don’t want to talk about it but other organizations are open. There are lots of organizations that have some programming around catapulting women into the right roles. What I have noticed and what we have talked about with some companies is second-generation bias, the likeability bias, and the impact between confidence and competence.

What the research shows is that while women are perceived as more competent than men in various roles, they’re not perceived as confident as the men who hold similar roles. Part of that stems from the likability bias. If you’re not likable, if you’re too masculine, or if you’re too feminine, there are all of these things that you have to navigate and combat as women in leadership but being able to have courseware allows you to have those conversations, address that, and get the skills to figure it out, “How am I going to show up? What am I going to do?” Understand what you’re experiencing.

Sometimes we could be experiencing something the same way how I needed to fix operations in my business but I didn’t know what the problem was. Women could be experiencing something at work, notice it, not have words for it, and not necessarily know what to do about it because we might not even recognize what’s going on. What organizations have done over the last few years is instead of having a token woman, they now have tokens so that they can say, “We did it. There’s not just one woman. There are two.”

Be able to do that deep work and see, “Is this something that an organization wants to do?” Making it a more equal representation would require them to ignite the E in DEI and to make it equitable but a lot of times, part of what makes that work challenging is the idea of privilege. Privilege says, “If I have a privilege, and you don’t, that means I have to give up something for you to have it too.”

We live in a society that is based on a variety of different kinds of privilege. Privilege says, “If I’ve got a privilege, and you don’t, I’ll lose something if we’re the same.” That’s very challenging to navigate in an organizational setting, especially when it’s organizations that have been around for eons. Having to make that shift feels very risky. How do we at least start having the conversations and start exploring the impact, even if it’s on a smaller scale?

What can people do individually to help bring more gender equity to the C-Suite?

They can be talking about it. When you think about conversations that are happening in corporate now, we were not having some of these conversations years ago. Part of it is having conversations. Part of it is being able to create a break space where the conversations can be had. Some of it is acknowledging the shortfall. As organizations look at their data, they might say, “It’s 50/50. Fifty percent of women are in management. Fifty percent of men are in management,” but then take a deeper look at the data and ask themselves, “Where are the women in management?”

Depending on the size of the organization, is the structure hierarchical? Is it flat? Is it regional? Is it geographical? Is it a network? That will determine how many layers there are but if there are 4 layers in manager, 2 layers in directors, and 2 layers in VP, and all of the women, for the most part, sit in layers 1 and 2 in the manager, you have women in management roles but they are in the lowest-level roles. Where are we seeing a drop-off? Why? Are we willing to invest?

It’s not a cost. It’s an investment. Are we willing to invest in a gap that we’re noticing? If there is a majority drop-off at level 3 in manager, how do we create a leadership pipeline, succession planning, and the skills necessary in the people we already have in-house to make sure that they’re set up for success so that they can get to level 4 and be adequately prepared for levels 1 and 2 with the director role?

How do we get them the coaching and development that they need to succeed in this culture and elevate to that VP level? What does that look and sound like? That’s an investment but all the research shows that when women are in these powerful positions, maintaining, wielding, and sharing power impacts the bottom line. It makes companies way more money when women are in leadership roles.

There’s an economic incentive to do it. There’s a psychological incentive not to do it for a lot of people. It comes back to your point about the people who are in the privileged position. They have to give something up to make room for somebody else. Some people are good about that, and some people struggle with it.

We have cultivated intentionally a scarcity mindset. If there’s a pie, and there are ten of us, we can’t all possibly be able to get a piece. Only five of us can have a piece. The rest of you can find a new pie somewhere else. If we have this scarcity consciousness versus a liberatory consciousness that there’s more than enough, and if we did run out, another pie would come, and we would still have more than enough. There’s more than enough but that’s not what we subscribe to culturally.

The US is a very individualistic culture. It’s every person for themselves. It is hard to imagine that there’s enough for everybody, “How? There can’t possibly be.” We take that everywhere that we go. It’s no surprise that it has navigated into the world of work. For many of us, that’s where we spend the majority of our time. The idea that we should shift consciousness across the board is a big pickup. It has to be a choice.

Some companies are making that choice. Those are the companies we love working with. It’s those organizations that aren’t trying to check the box because a woman got upset, and she didn’t get a promotion, “We got to bring in a consultant.” I would rather be a strategic partner with those organizations that say, “This is an amazing opportunity. We want to do this work. We have been trying to do it on our own but when we think about what it is that we do, this is not our area of expertise. Let’s bring in somebody who has the time, the expertise, and the bandwidth. This is what they eat, breathe, and sleep all day. We can continue to do what we do, whatever that is. We can do this important deep work over here at the same time.”

Dorothy Enriquez: Shifting consciousness across the board is a big pick-up. It has to be a choice. Some companies are currently making that choice, and those are the ones people love working with.

Last question. If you had to give 1 or 2 quick pieces of advice to our audience about how to make the most of their careers, what would they be?

If you want to make the most of your career, I would encourage you to become a high performer, not just a high achiever. I spent forever as a high achiever, and it’s not the same. If you want to be a high performer, you want to find meaning in the work that you do. As you go through your day, ask yourself, “How can I be courageous? How can I operate from a place of necessity? Who needs me to understand why this is important? How can I operate from a place of productivity?”

Sometimes we pretend to be busy at work. We could be getting after it, and we’re not. How can I operate from this place of productivity? How can I operate from this place of taking care of the talent? You are the talent. You’re gifting your leadership to this company. Being a high performer means that you can achieve high results consistently over the long haul whereas being a high achiever is you want to do well. You’re going to put your best foot forward. You’re inconsistent but your heart posture is, “I want to do well. I want to do good work.” As a high performer, you’re delivering consistently over the long haul but you’re asking yourself those important questions regularly.

The other thing that I would say is that 70% of Americans hate their job. They’re not engaged. If you fall into that category, I would encourage you to ask yourself the question, “What if I went and pursued what I would love to be doing even if that meant a pay cut for a little bit or switching industries and sectors?” What would that courageous possibility be if you trusted yourself in the process? Life is too short for you to hate work. We got to work because we have to make money. What would you do if you could trust yourself in the process? What would that look like so that you can find meaning and flourish? You shouldn’t just be surviving at work. That is no fun. You should thrive.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. That Gallup statistic gets trucked out all the time. Only 30% of people are engaged at work. That’s better than every other country on the planet. You think, “What a tragedy.”

We spend so much time at work. We have to find a way to take the risk. It’s a hard thing. You can do hard things. It’s hard but what would it look like if you trusted yourself to do the thing that you love?

That’s a good way to end. This has been fun.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks for doing it. It’s good to hear what you’re doing. You’re focusing on important topics, turning people into leaders, and helping bring more to the topic of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Those are both great areas of focus. It’s important stuff that you’re doing. Thank you for that.

Thank you so much for having me.

I want to thank Dorothy for doing the show with me to discuss The Ellevate Collective, her work with clients, a little bit about her career journey, and a number of other things that we covered. If you’re ready to take control of your career, be courageous as she said at the very end of it. Visit PathWise.io. If you would like more regular career insights, you can become a PathWise member. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the PathWise newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Thanks. Have a great day.

Important Links

• The Ellevate Collective
• African American Leadership Program
• LinkedIn – PathWise
• Twitter – PathWise
• Facebook – PathWise
• YouTube – PathWise

About Dorothy Enriquez

Dorothy Enriquez is the CEO and Principal Consultant with The Ellevate Collective, which is a learning and leadership development firm that helps close the skills gap at every level in an organization.

Before going full-time with Ellevate, Dorothy spent a number of years at Molson Coors in learning and development. She also had training roles at Applied Medical, Veterinary Pet Insurance, and HireRight.

Dorothy was an instructor at Cal State-Fullerton, was Publisher and Editor in Chief of DOT Magazine, and was a member of the Forbes Coaches’ Council. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication and a Master’s Degree in Human Communication. She lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.