Tiffany Atkinson

First day vibes!

Yesterday was my first in-office day for my new role as the Learning & Development Manager, Member Experience at Trupanion.

After spending several weeks working remotely in Indy, it was a nice change of pace to finally be in the office to meet my team.

One of the highlights of my first day was the welcome sign the L&D team made for me. Reading all of the personalized messages they left, sharing their excitement for my arrival to my new city, made my day.

Plus, the welcome party donuts and desk swag were an added treat!

I’m thrilled to officially kick off this next chapter with such an amazing team and I’m looking forward to helping make a meaningful impact here at Trupanion!

When I began developing our programming philosophy for my company’s rebrand into L&D Consulting, I knew I wanted to address some of the shortfalls in Women’s Leadership and Professional Development programs.

I started with the most glaring one: biased archetypes and stereotypes used to define and determine women’s leadership potential.

Attend any major Women’s Professional Development conference or prestigious Women’s Leadership program, and you will see these biases on full display.

From exclusionary examples of successful female leaders to limiting steps for exhibiting Executive Presence and unrealistic goals for climbing the corporate ladder, women are often told they must change themselves to prove their leadership potential.

Now I’m all for exploiting the problems in a broken system to ultimately use that exploitation to change the system.

But what I’m describing isn’t what’s happening in Women’s Leadership today.

Maybe that was the initial intent, but at some point, we started conforming to the system as if it wasn’t broken.

So when my team and I designed our programming philosophy, we had one goal to uphold: to make our programs truly inclusive.

To do this, as our first tenet we adopted a revolutionary idea: Every woman has what it takes to lead.

Instead of telling women they need to change, we focus on the systems they’re up against that need changing and discuss the roles women and their workplaces play in dismantling those systems.

Because we recognize that women showcase their natural leadership skills every day, often without recognition, through the several leadership positions they occupy throughout their lifetimes while balancing their personal lives with building careers.

So as much as women may be capable of conforming to a broken system, we’d much rather help them take it down.

Now I know some of you read our “revolutionary” statement and thought, “Tiffany, that‘s not very revolutionary at all.”

And I agree.

But in today’s Women’s Leadership and Professional Development landscape, the idea of building programs that cultivate the inherent leadership capabilities of women without making them conform to a broken system still seems too revolutionary for some.

Even if it should be the standard we all follow.

Take Care,
Tiffany

Today’s home office while recovering from an ankle injury.

I promise it’s not as bad as it looks.

Anyone else have to get creative with their workspace today?