Rayona Sharpnack
Founder and CEO

The Institute for Women's Leadership focuses on developing women leaders because we believe this vector leads to exponential increases in organizational innovation, collaboration and performance.

We believe being an extraordinary leader is about who you are and how well you harness the resources in your environment.

The IWL has presented its outstanding work in advancing women leaders and building high performance organizations to many Fortune 500 companies as well as prestigious institutions and associations such as Stanford Business School, UC Berkeley Business School, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Mills College, State of the World Forum, the Canadian Federal Government, the Australian Federal Government, Leadership America, and the Professional and Business Women of California.

Rayona Sharpnack founded the Institute for Women’s Leadership in 1991 – an organization renown for its groundbreaking work throughout the United States, Australia, and Canada.

Drawing from her successful careers in education, professional sports and business, Rayona has become an inspirational coach, teacher and mentor for executives in Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, emerging businesses and non-profit organizations.

Rayona is currently co-authoring a book on Contextual Leadership for publication in 2006 and is one of several featured authors of the ground-breaking book, “Enlightened Power: How Women Are Transforming the Practice of Leadership.”

She can be reached at:rayona@womensleadership.com

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Breaking Through by Changing Context

Rayona Sharpnack
President and CEO
Institute for Women's Leadership

Since 1991, the Institute for Women's Leadership has been the front-runner in gender-based training. The success of its award-winning program, "Women Leading Change" prompted Charles Schwab & Company to commission a co-ed version aptly named, "Partners Leading Change."

The secret to this highly successful approach to leadership education lies in the ability people have to shift their context, which enables new behaviors that produce extraordinary results.

In order for learning and training to be sustainable, it must cross the chasm from mere knowledge of ways and means to the heart of the matter — revealing and shifting context — the assumptions we make about what is and is not possible for ourselves and our companies.

First, we must recognize that our context (frame of reference, paradigm, world view) is just a web of personal conclusions.

What we consider to be reality, upon closer examination, is a only a tentative conclusion masquerading as fact. That the sun revolved around the Earth seemed real and certain in the 1600s. That your product can't break into global markets with its current pricing structure may also seem factual. But is it, really? Helping people let go of the attachment to their current perception of reality is the first step to freedom and new possibilities.

Second, we must create and sustain a new context through daily conversational practice.

Once you choose to adopt a new context, you need to stop the practices that kept the old context in place. If, for example, you used to have conversations with your colleagues about how impossible it is to sell into global markets and compete with your generic competitors … you need to stop having that conversation!

Replace it with a new conversation in which you speak the virtues of your organization's ability to lead breakthrough change in your industry. Gather evidence for this new assertion and distribute it widely among your constituents.

Third, we need to gather a community of ground-breaking thinkers who are willing to overturn the status quo.

Surround yourself with people who are willing to be courageous. These may be people outside of your organization, industry or geography. In every discipline there are leaders who were among the first to speak the unpopular or unproven, who were not afraid to challenge assumptions and change the context.

Ideas Into Action

1. Make a two-column list in which the left hand side captures all the business challenges that you assume to be real, fixed, immutable. In the right hand column put the corresponding person or entity that has gone on record as saying that each item in column one is a fact. Write a new conclusion that replaces each item in column one.
   
2. Track daily conversations — whether they happen in person or in email or any other written form — every time you or a colleague says something that reinforces an unproved assertion in column one. Set a goal to either stop or interrupt any conversation that is representing those assertions as facts.
   
3. Collect a folder of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, web pages of pioneers who are re-inventing “reality.” Begin to gather these people either physically or virtually to share their thinking and examples of creating new products, services, markets, etc. Create a display that unequivocally shows you in the middle of this circle of people breaking through the status quo and defining new realities

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