A Community for Women Leaders With Laura Bennett & Kellie Jenkins

Coaching can take on many forms, it's a bond, a connection and it does not end with one-on-one training, as we imagine it to be. Depending on the project, company, team, or individual, any of these coaching approaches can be beneficial and the most effective leaders will use all of these ways to confidently take on leadership roles. Our guests, Laura Bennett and Kellie Jenkins, founders of "Her Brilliance," are both accomplished leaders. These two bring out the best in women by providing a safe space for them to connect, form deeper bonds, and gain the confidence to transform their leadership. Her Brilliance sought to apply the same coaching competencies to a group environment, so they could gather a powerhouse of women and motivate them to step into their full leadership potential. --- Listen to the podcast here: A Community for Women Leaders With Laura Bennett & Kellie Jenkins Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Something we've talked about quite a bit on this program is coaching. When a lot of people think of coaching, they probably think of a one-on-one, an individual relationship where a coach listens to what you have to say, assigns you a bunch of exercises, and gives you advice on what to do next, or gives you questions, and hopefully, you'll come up with the answers. However, there are multiple approaches to coaching and I want to give every approach its fair due. --- Today, our guests are Laura Bennett and Kellie Jenkins, who are the co-founders of Her Brilliance Community, a community of women leaders. Kellie, Laura, welcome to the program. Thanks, Stephen, for having us. Definitely. First, I always like to orient the audience. Tell us a little bit about Her Brilliance community, what your system is all about. Sure. Kellie and I founded Her Brilliance a couple of years ago now. We are an organization-focus that uses a women-centered group coaching approach to accelerate the development of women leaders. We're all about helping women really access and tap into their authentic natural strength as a way to amplify their leadership impact and influence. Yeah. I think I'll just add to that. The idea of community comes from this group coaching approach where it gives women an opportunity to learn in that peer-oriented community environment. This group coaching approach, you describe it as a community. How does that manifest? I know a lot of people in America and probably a lot of other countries too are missing this idea of community after social media first ripped it apart and then the pandemic ripped it apart even further. What does this community look like? Yeah. It can look very different ways. Obviously, over the last couple of years, it's been mostly virtual, and has been just as effective as an in-person environment. You're really looking at a small intimate group of peers who have come together around some common theme or experience. It could be, they all belong to the same organization. It could be across industries. They're all at the same level and experiencing the same sorts of challenges. What we're doing is bringing that group together. Instead of learning through this one-on-one executive coaching, we're applying those coaching competencies into the group environment. It's not training where we've come in as experts and share our leadership knowledge. It is really us bringing together a group of women to share their experiences and us facilitating exercises and dialogue to help them reflect on their own leadership and come up with their own answers. What did the group sizes look like? You found a way to make it work virtually. Is there a certain size of the group or make-up of the group -- as you mentioned, shared experiences? Are they all from the same industry, or all in the same level of leadership, or something like that? Yeah. It can look in a number of different ways. As Kellie mentioned, we tend to go with a more intimate size. One of the core tenants of our approach is around creating a really safe place without judgments, creating that psychological safety. It can feel a little intimidating if you're coming into a group of 50, expecting to show up and be open, so a smaller size is what we generally see. Also, because of the nature of the level of discussion and reflection, there needs to be enough space and time so that each person can really have the airtime to share their perspective. Possible to do something in a larger group also, then with a subset perhaps of smaller groups, really to create that psychological safety and the intimacy where people feel like they're comfortable to be able to show up and really be open. Is there any magical parameter around that group size? You seem to say 50 is too many. Obviously, you're not one-on-one. There's some number in between. I know people who read the Bible a lot will cite the number 12 as the optimal number that comes out of that book. What are your feelings on that? Is there a lot of variance? Do you gauge it a little bit based on the personalities of the people in the community, how some people may be a little bit shier and some people may be a little bit more outspoken? I think the research would show you that group coaching sessions generally fall between four and 12 people. Once you get beyond 15, the International Coaching Federation doesn't consider that to be group coaching anymore, that tipped into the realm of training. Six to eight is the sweet spot. That is small enough that we can all fit on the one Zoom screen and really connect as though we're sitting in a physical circle. It gives that time and space that Laura was talking about for each person to have their air time for us to break off smaller groups in different constellations. That's really where we like to play -- in that six to eight group size. Yeah. I know that feeling of being alone. It's actually interesting, I spent 10 years believing that I was some kind of an outlier or alone in the fact that my preferred work style was what I would refer to as the 90-minute power session. I would really focus on something for 90 minutes. I'd want to practically lay down in the office and socialize. All of a sudden, around four or five years ago, all kinds of research started coming out saying that that's actually the normal human state. It was just like, "Oh my gosh." People just don't even realize it. I feel like it gives some validity to people's experiences when they say, "Okay. I'm going through this," especially with things like imposter syndrome, which I know is pretty common. It really validates and normalizes those feelings. I think what it also does too though is that when you share that, that is your experience, and somebody else can identify with that, you can then exchange your experiences with, "Well, here's what I tried and this is what worked for me," and somebody can take inspiration from that and then think about applying in their own work or in life, or perhaps thinking about this situation differently. It's like a permission. You finally give yourself and each other permission and normalize those feelings. A part of what you were saying about creating this is creating a safe space, a place where people feel comfortable sharing what they need to share. I don't want to say you're not going to be judged, because I do honestly believe people are judging at all times in one way. You're not going to be reprimanded, mocked, any of these other things. People are going to validate your experience no matter what it is. Is there a key formula in these groups whether they'd be as small as four or as big as 15, and your magic spot of six to eight, that helps make sure that no one feels uncomfortable sharing whatever it is they need to share? We put a lot of effort into creating that safe space and there's a number of different aspects to that safe space. The first thing that we do when we come into a group coaching session is help everybody to arrive. We go through some sort of grounding exercise so that they can leave behind the stresses of the day and really be present to what is going on and the collective energy in the group. We use a check-in process to help people feel comfortable sharing. We ease people into it. Here's some sharing at a fairly non-threatening level. We may then do the next exercise in smaller breakout groups, in pairs or triads, before we move into the bigger group space. We also put a lot of effort initially into designing the alliance. Let's agree on how we want to show up for one another in this space -- how do we want to be? It's amazing to us and continues to surprise us each time we host one of these sessions, just how quickly particularly women can go deep with each other. It really doesn't require all that much setup at all. People can be complete strangers coming in. At the end of an hour, they've shared some of their most vulnerable thoughts. I think there is something too about sharing in that kind of environment where these people, they're not invested in your life in the way that your colleagues or your family are. If there is a level of judgment, which we do try to store, it's at a different level. People feel free to share more vulnerable in those spaces, which sounds counterintuitive, but it's certainly been an experience. Yeah. I actually do know that experience. I think I experienced it first when I was 18 years old and I took an Amtrak train from Chicago to the Wisconsin Dells, and I told my life story to a complete stranger. That's when this light bulb went off. It's like, "Wait. I'm not comfortable telling my parents this stuff. Why is that? Oh, yeah, this girl on the train has no vested interest in how my life turns out. I'm just on a train." Exactly....