During the Woman-to-Woman Community call, 40 female DLN Members gathered and discussed the most important issues they face as female business owners. Here are a few insights into many of the challenges that female leaders are facing in our current climate.
- Many points of the discussion revolved around the issue of balancing your work life vs. family life. Particularly how to best manage your time, how to be flexible and adaptable while avoiding compromise and how to mitigate the assumptions male colleagues make about the level of productivity while running a business alongside caring for your family.
- The group also discussed that it is important to not only recognize those with kids at home but also recognized the differences between the staff who are living at home alone. There are new complications for everyone.
- One strong female business owner stated, “we as women can embrace the challenge that this crisis is very real and use it as part of our messaging and how we think about the home.”
- Another asked, “how do we lead differently?” And followed up the question by saying, “At the end of the day, we service clients needs and they come to us because we do it better than everyone else. How do you take this period of forgiveness from our clients to use it to our advantage? Women can be the drivers because we aren’t ashamed of saying we multitask and work hard at this balance everyday.”
- Many felt that women are consensus builders and nurturers by nature. Female owned firms tend to cater more carefully to clients’ needs, and address their insecurities. In this climate, where the home and work environment needs to be a haven, clients will gravitate toward firms that make them feel safe and secure.
- Another overarching theme related to how important it is to be visible. Many explained that our industry is primarily made up of female led firms but we are not the majority in terms of being visible. The DLN is a platform to to raise your voice and share ideas, resources and inspiration.
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It all comes down to resources and needing different resources for different things. How does a collective group share their man power to better assist our industry? Times are changing – women need to carve out their spot and the DLN is working on new resources to share and further connect the female leaders of our community.