23: Women in Leadership: Harnessing Their Strengths for Successful Career Growth

Links mentioned during this episode:Get it Made article: https://get-it-made.co.uk/insights/manufacturing-industries-that-employ-the-most-womenTHE MANUFACTURING EXPERIENCE: Closing the Gender Gap: Recruiting and Retaining Women in Manufacturing: https://www.themanufacturinginstitute.org/research/the-manufacturing-experience-closing-the-gender-gap/Women Make America Initiative: https://www.themanufacturinginstitute.org/women/wma/Lori: Welcome back, fellow listeners. We are in the new year, which is super awesome, and we're excited about lots of great new things that we're going to be doing on a broadcast for manufacturers. I know you like and very much enjoy our normal banter. But guess what? This entire episode is going to be banter with myself, Erin, and Kris, it's going to be awesome. We found a very inspiring, enlightening article on the website. Get it made. We'll add that link in the show notes. I'm just going to have a little side note that this is well-done marketing content for a manufacturing company. So the article is titled manufacturing industries that employ the most women. And the data is collected from the bureau of labor statistics to rank the manufacturing industries that employ the most women in the US. Today. I found it quite fascinating that only three out of every ten employees in manufacturing are women. And then when it gets to the higher levels, that number gets lower, unfortunately. And the article does a really interesting job of ranking all the different types of jobs and fields in manufacturing. And where you see the most women, which is roughly 50%, is in the textiles, apparel, and leather manufacturing space. Erin: Let's say that you're talking to a woman who's at some maybe mid-level leadership right now, and she's got her eye on the prize too. She wants to get there. What kind of advice would you give?Kris: Yeah, absolutely. I will say that the first thing that I did is I volunteer for areas within my strengths. And a lot of people will focus on their weaknesses and they will think that they need to go work very hard on their weaknesses and they spend a lot of time overcoming them. To a certain degree, of course, we have to be aware of our weaknesses. And if we have a job that requires us to execute certain functions and we have a weakness, then we have to correct that in order to perform our job. But whenever in my career I had an opportunity to volunteer for things that were challenging, I rose my hand when I knew it was to my strength. Which gave me new opportunities to be successful. And as leaders saw me be successful in these areas, I was given more opportunities that aligned with my strengths. This is advice that I share with so many people that I get a chance to mentor all along. And I, of course, am always looking for the team member strengths that exist across our organization. We want to give work to those strengths. So that, I think, is something that has really been a part of my success. Now, I have had tremendous leaders above me who I learned from. I always like to say, you take the best and leave the rest. So that's really critical. But now if we want to just get in the space of how do we ensure we have women who can climb and get to those executive levels of an organization? Where we saw the lack in this article is we have to give women opportunities. We have to be thinking about the women in the room as well. I think...