What traits help women climb the corporate ladder?

By Erika Jarvis via Jobpostings.ca
12th November, 2012

Carolyn Lawrence is usually surrounded by the most successful women in Canada. She runs, owns, and operates Women of Influence Inc., a growing media company focused on advancing women in business by providing access to role models staging myriad events, publishing a magazine (Women of Influence), and offers an environment for women to get a hand up (or give one, once they’re up there).

Lawrence’s career began as a marketing assistant at TD Waterhouse, moving through a couple of different roles “figuring out what I liked and what I was good at.” But when she began training for triathlons, working her way up to the elite-level Ironman event, something clicked in the corporate ladder.

“It opened up everything for me,” she says on a telephone call, squeezed in before another meeting. (Lawrence readily admits that she works a lot, but regarding work-life balance, she says it’s the order of priorities that makes her most happy at the moment.) “I realized how much energy I have for something that I’m passionate about. When you go through something like that, you realize you can do anything you put your mind to—but you do have to be really into it.”

With this newfound respect for her own power, it dawned on Lawrence that she wanted to run her own business; something she could be as passionate about as she was for the triathlon. “Once I asked myself what it was, the answer was very clear to me,” she says. “[I knew] that I wanted to influence women, to help them reach their career goals.”

Now Women of Influence is 18 years old, and has become, Lawrence says, “a place to meet like-minded peers, who are very ambitious, very intelligent, and to talk to people who are going through the same obstacles that they’re going through—it’s not an easy task for women to get to the top.”

The “glass ceiling,” or the metaphorical, invisible barrier preventing women from reaching the highest positions of power, can be an issue for the kind of women Women of Influence attracts. “Most people in major corporations, if they’re women, would say the glass ceiling still exists,” Lawrence says. “There are some new discussions lately, though, that perhaps we need to change our language, and stop calling it a ‘glass ceiling.’ Forget the term ‘issue’ when it comes to women: let’s just talk about how we’re advancing and how we’re going to do it. I really love that approach.” Read full article>>