Leading by Leaving
This is the story of a group that I helped to create in 2018. That year, I’d been out of corporate America for about 12 months when one of my former colleagues invited me to catch up over coffee. We were discussing the significant number of women who’d left our former employer—some by choice, some not—and how many of them were feeling unmoored. I saw an opportunity to get beyond casual conversations and organize us in a way to better support each other as we moved on to whatever would be next in our careers and lives.
I pulled together a group of ten of us for a lunch to lay out our plans, our hopes and dreams. It was a lively discussion—as you can imagine happens when you get ten highly intelligent, accomplished and engaged women together. For me, that was the appeal of the idea of creating our own network. I knew my colleagues to be women who inspired me, challenged me and held me up when I needed it. It was the feeling of teamwork that I was missing having decided to become a solo-preneur and I knew we could create that feeling for each other.
As often happens in my life, I found myself gravitating towards a leadership position. One of my superpowers is the ability to synthesize information in a way that helps to galvanize groups and move toward decisions. Before I knew it, we were setting up a private group on LinkedIn, soliciting a sponsor and hosting an in person gathering. We decided to call our group The Wing Women, a recognition that we had each other’s back and were there to lift each other up.
It was in that room that we could see that what had started as 10 of us just months before had grown 10 times over. As we spoke to colleagues we hadn’t seen since our days behind “the berm” (as we called our old workplace), it was clear that there was an appetite for further gatherings. That led me to create a strategy outlining our leadership structure and focus areas.
Months went by, we were meeting quarterly and our membership continued to increase. I could see it was time for a more formal leadership structure, one that would outlast the informal decision making that could happen more naturally when it was just the 10 founders. I created a leadership committee and when asked to lead it, I insisted on a co-chair model. That worked for a while, but as we continued to grow, there were new voices pushing to be heard.
I could see that it was time to create a structure with a board of directors. We needed to meet more regularly and when the pandemic hit, forcing us (and everyone else) to pivot to virtual gatherings, having the board structure was critical in allowing us to make decisions quickly. It was an honor to serve as the first chair.
I began to notice that as we grew, every so often, someone would refer to our organization as “Pamela’s Group” as kind of a short hand. That never sat well with me because the goal was always inclusivity. In fact, we took great pains to explain that all former full-time employees who identified as a woman were welcome regardless of what their title had been. This was about our lives now…not who had reported to whom or held a certain rank or led a particular team. We had moved on from our former employer and were all equal including, in my mind, our leadership team.
It was then that I began to consider limiting myself to one term as chair. Not because I didn’t believe in our mission, but precisely because of that. I was interested in creating an organization for the long term, an organization that outlived any one of us, so that it could be for all of us. And that’s why, I believed, in order to be the leader this group needed, I had to step away. And I did just that.
While I remained available to the chair and the board as a resource, I deliberately pulled back to make room for new voices. Our total membership had grown five-fold by the time I stepped away and we continue to attract more and more of our former colleagues.
Most importantly, the board remains dynamic and is inhabited by both new members and those who have participated longer. And that has always been my goal as a leader: to leave a legacy by building a culture that supports innovation, growth and change. Sometimes that means knowing when leaving is the best example of leadership there can be.