Dana Theus

InPower Coaching, USA

Title: Healing Our Broken Relationship with Power

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Biography

Dana has worked for Fortune 50 companies, entrepreneurial tech startups, government and military agencies, and nonprofits; and she understands organizational dynamics from the front lines. With her personal support and extensive library of leadership development videos, workbooks, and training materials clients take the guesswork out of personal and organizational change and gain the tools to transform their business practices for career success, competitive advantage, employee engagement and enhanced brand power. She is a thought leader in authentic women’s leadership, recognized by Forbes, published in The Atlantic, The Mission and Smartbrief and recommended by clients in Microsoft, Nestle and The World Bank, among others. Through InPowerWomen.com I volunteer and speak to help women and minority leaders find their voice and sidestep the double-bind paradoxes they face in achieving their leadership potential.

Dana has spent her 25+-year career helping individuals and organizations succeed as they venture into new territory. Her functional experience spans coaching, executive facilitation, management consulting, leadership development, change management, strategic planning, marketing, branding, communications, product development, product management and international government affairs.

Abstract

Women all over our world have experienced historic, systemic and pervasive alienation from positions and behaviors that allow us to experience, understand and use our power. While we all know this, experiencing it every day, what we often don’t realize is that this reality has led too many of us to believe that we don’t want or deserve power. At deep psychological levels we are afraid of our power, so that we either do not pursue it, or find the journey to power confusing and frightening in ways that can hobble our impact and career potential.

Despite this, many brave women and men are succeeding in bringing more women into positions of power. In the process we are discovering that women bring many gifts to organizations and communities when we exercise our unique authentic feminine leadership styles. Women in leadership, especially when acting in gender balanced leadership teams, help produce better business, health and other outcomes.

Women’s driving desire to make the world a better place does, in fact, make the world a better place when we wield the instruments of power.

In the process, we are discovering that the path to power for women, although difficult, can become a healing journey. Learning to want power, to do the work necessary to attain and use it wisely, can repair not only our relationships to power, but our relationships to ourselves.

In this session we will explore all the themes above, looking at the hard realities1 of today’s broken relationship with power for women, what women are accomplishing despite it and what works to heal ourselves and our world.

Takeaways for participants will include:

·         An empowering, realistic understanding of key barriers—interpersonal, organizational and systemic--to women’s attainment of power

·         What women do to overcome these barriers and examples of what they accomplish when they do

·         Three key mindset shifts that audience members can deploy to help heal their own relationships with power

1 Example data for this section of the presentation is included in the “Women in Leadership; What Works” below