I believe that transitions can provide powerful, sensitizing insights into the human condition. My own career has been shaped by twists, turns and unexpected bends in the road as opportunities have opened, closed and shifted — giving me rich and textured experiences and a career of diverse chapters with some large transitions. Read on to learn more about my transitions.
My first professional chapter began in Nigeria, where I helped inoculate 20,000 children against measles — a killer disease in that part of the world, and in Kenya, where in my early 20s I helped run a hospital and learned about native healing practices. These experiences sparked my interest in anthropology and led to a career informed by an understanding of the ways culture and structures influence behavior. As an anthropologist, I taught about diversity and inclusion in a medical school in Iran, consulted with royalty in Thailand about gender issues, studied the structure, culture and leadership of a global oil company, led multi-country research teams at the UN and became an expert on migration and its impacts.
In my higher education chapter, I served as a dean of arts and sciences and academic vice president, which gave me a lens into some of the challenges I work on today … of how to develop diverse and inclusive leaders, how to help experts become empathetic and strategic leaders, and how to address the challenges, but also the positive dividends, of advancing women and people of color in the sciences and in academia more broadly.
My experience as President and CEO of the National Council for Research on Women further stoked my interest in leadership in the corporate arena. Through the Corporate Circle we built of several fortune 500 and 100 companies, we helped company leaderships develop practices, programs and policies to create diverse and inclusive environments and leaderships. There, as in my work in higher education, I saw the difference self-aware, committed and inclusive leaders can make to broader organizational cultures.
My career has required me to stretch myself in many ways and often do the counterintuitive; stretching also bleeds into my personal life. I’m viscerally afraid of heights, yet I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, ski challenging slopes and hike across mountains. Though I’m busy with my consulting career — my new chapter — I make time to serve on the nonprofit boards of causes I believe in and also to pursue my personal passion — painting.
These experiences, and the insights I’ve gained about myself and the world, have helped me understand big pictures and how they influence little pictures and the kinds of complex changes, rapid growth and uncertainties individuals, teams and organizations confront today. They inform how I help my clients and my students navigate the complexities of their situations and expand their mindsets; it is work filled with gratification and fulfillment.
As much as I love my work, I also value my personal time, which takes place in New York City and North Carolina with my husband, 3 children and their partners, our shared puppy Skylar Pacho, our extended family and close friends. We have a big tent!
