Well, we want to thank everybody for coming to this panel about obtaining leadership skills and positions, and this is co-sponsored by Women in Endocrinology and the Endocrine Society. I'm Laura Dictel, and I'll be moderating today, just housekeeping things. We're going to have all the speakers go in order and not take questions in between so that we can give everyone just a couple minutes to show some slides, and then we're going to try and save the bulk of the time at the end for questions for everybody. If you have questions, you can submit them through the app. I will not read out your names so they can effectively be anonymous, or you're welcome to stand up at the microphone here. So without further delay, we'll get started. So we're going to start with building your confidence, overcoming barriers to effective leadership, and it's really a pleasure to introduce Dr. Ellen Seeley. She's the Director of Clinical Research, Endocrine, Diabetes, and Hypertension Division, the Vice Chair of Faculty Development in the Department of Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. She's a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Seeley studies pregnancy complications and their long-term sequela, and she has a long-term dedication to mentoring and career development, and she's won many awards in this area, including a Women in Endocrine Mentorship Award. So thank you, Dr. Seeley. Thank you, Laura. There are still a few seats around some tables here. For those of you in the back, there's someone with a suitcase that may have to move theirs. So maybe just raise your hand if there's a seat next to you so someone can take a seat. So welcome to this workshop. This is a taste of leadership because, obviously, there's not a lot that we can cover in 45 minutes, but we're going to cover some topics to get you started, and I think one thing I just want to say in the front is that there's a lot of things we learn as endocrinologists that are taught. No one expects us to know how to run a certain kind of gel or run a certain kind of experiment or take care of patients with acromegaly. We're taught how, but with leadership, often it's assumed that you just have it in you or you don't, or you will learn along the way, and I think there's a lot about leadership that can be taught and can be learned. So I'm going to focus on building confidence, and then you'll see the other topics that we've picked for you today. So one way to build confidence is through self-awareness, and there's a lot of research in the business world on this, much more than there is in academic medicine, but McKinsey and Company has research that suggests that leaders who are self-aware are up to four times more effective in managing change than people who are not, and importantly, self-awareness establishes a culture of trust so that the people who work with you are more engaged and people respond better to leaders who are accountable, and this is a reason why, with self-awareness, you can build your confidence and skills as a leader. So starting out of how do you become self-aware is self-evaluating your leadership skills, so these may be skills you're practicing if you're in a leadership position or that you want to gain to gain a leadership position. If you're in a leadership position, there's always skills to work on. So self-assessments can be really helpful, and there's a number of questionnaires. I just have two of these that are available, and there are just two self-assessments you can do. I think I have found these really helpful to do. I learned a lot from doing them for myself that I didn't know, and it really helped me then think about ways I relate to people that I might want to change differently based on learning characteristics about myself. So I would advise doing some of these questionnaires and learning about yourself. I think really important is investigating unconscious biases. There's a lot of talk about unconscious bias, but also taking a course on unconscious bias or doing an unconscious bias evaluation, and this is the unconscious bias training course at NIH, and I really encourage people to take that. Observing your behavior. What characteristics do you want to change, and what characteristics do you want to keep or amplify on? And then really important is asking for feedback, and this is a great time to talk to colleagues and peers. You can also talk to mentors and get feedback on your leadership skills, and 360 evaluations are now currently very commonly used for self-awareness and feedback, and there's a 360 feedback survey that's on the slide, just to give you examples of things you can try using for yourself. And then I think, and this is one way I think women in endocrinology has been so strong, it's a way to build a network, and I think networks are important for many career paths, but especially in leadership. You want a network who's going to keep you apprised of changes that you need to be aware of to change with the time, and also to give you feedback of where you're failing or where you may not be reaching your intended audience. So in terms of identifying leadership attributes and skills, I think that's pretty basic, but it's being conscious of these. Observe behavior of effective leaders. You can use this conference as a way to do that. You can look at the people who are president or past presidents and look at what are the characteristics, think about leaders back at your own institution, and sit down and actually talk to effective leadership about their leadership styles. So you can often approach people, and they're often happy to talk to you. Check leadership courses like this one, read leadership books and articles, and practice by taking on leadership roles. So self-promotion is an important leadership skill. We often think of it as a negative, and we all know people who self-promote to an extreme, but self-promotion is an important leadership skill. Recognition doesn't always equal recognition, so practice and create an elevator pitch. Speak up in meetings. Your opinion really does count. Let your boss and peer know of your accomplishments. Enlist your mentor and peers to publicize your accomplishments, and consider use of social media. In the interest of time, I'm just going to make a couple more points, and then I'll close. So I just wanted to mention the imposter syndrome is talked about all the time, especially it's an issue with women and underrepresented in medicine. And I think it was in 1978 that it was first publicized. This is an article in the Harvard Business Review, and I think it's an overused term. Leaders should have some insecurity and be unsure. That's an important characteristic. This is a way to try to reframe it, that saying, I don't know, is actually a sign of confidence. In terms of communication style, avoid speaking quietly. Don't always make self-effacing comments. Try to avoid always using tentative phrasing, and if you disagree, you don't need to use a conciliatory tone. So amplification, I can get to when we have questions and answers. And what I want to end with is the idea of an action plan, so people's behaviors change more readily if they create and implement an action plan. This is one from the Diabetes Prevention Program that you may be familiar with because you're endocrinologists. So create an effective action plan. And what I want to leave you with on my last slide is think back of a situation. It may have been a situation during the meeting in the past two days, and think of a recent situation where you've let confidence be a barrier in your professional life. Identify how you would now change your behavior and handle it differently, and then create an action plan of the next situation you're going to be in in the future where you're going to have a different approach to displaying confidence, and then carry out the action plan. And I'll be back later. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Dr. Seeley. So without further delay, I want to introduce Gay Devey, Dr. Gay Devey. She's going to be talking about embracing equity, diversity, and inclusion, a key to effective leadership. She's a professor in the Departments of Surgery and Pathology at Duke University School of Medicine. She's the Associate Director of the Research Education and the Surgery Program Director at the Duke Inflammatory Breast Cancer Consortium. And she's at the Duke Cancer Institute. And she's a 2021 recipient of the Duke School of Medicine Mentoring Award in Basic and Translational Science and has trained more than 50 trainees in our laboratory. And she is currently the chair of our Women in Endocrinology Mentorship Committee. So thank you. Thank you, Laura, for the very kind introduction. And so the next few minutes today, we're going to talk about this concept of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace. And as you know, this concept is currently very much in the limelight. And what I hope to do today is really emphasize how it is important for us all to understand this and also incorporate that in our different capacities, whether we are clinicians, researchers, educators, in a team role, and or in a leadership role that we may have. So in this session, what I'm going to do is I'm going to attempt to look at three learning objectives. One, to define certain concepts in certain areas that are commonly either misused or ill-defined. And that is, what is health disparity? What is health equity? And what is health equality? And then identify transformational leadership strategies that could address these health disparity issues within our workplace towards a greater justice. And last but not the least, I'll take a couple of examples from my own work, which hopefully can be expanded, and then there could be other ideas where we really need to make an effort in advancing EDI in our mentoring and team efforts and including leadership. So why do we talk about this? The reason we are really looking at this health disparity is that our social determinants of health, as identified by the World Health Organization, the conditions in which people are born, grow, live in our own environment, brought a set of forces, all of these shape our existence and our conditions and affects the social determinants of health. And this could lead to, for example, the digital divide, rural-urban disparities, even employment benefits, quality of education, create food deserts, most of all health care access, which is a huge aspect in all of our lives, especially in our own areas of work, housing, financial discrimination, and above all, systemic racism. So that then brings us to this idea of how do we actually define and try to work through some of these concepts to address social justice. So I do want to bring this, because this is something that I have often struggled with, how do we separate these three terms? And I think this is a great slide that was put together by one of our nurse practitioners. Health disparity is really looking at the social, economic, and cultural differences in our environment that cause these disparities. Health inequity, on the other hand, is what are the differences in the distribution of resources amongst these groups? Do they cause inequity in health and other aspects? Last but not the least, health inequality, that is really a measure of the degree of association of differences in these aspects that we are talking about. Honestly, health equity and health disparities are intertwined. So we need to look at approaches that are specifically addressing these areas and how they come together. And what it means here is about 10 years back, it was very clear that Dr. Chen in New England of General Medicine said, leadership matters, and we have to do better for our patients. And this then brings up to this important aspect of what is health equity versus health equality? And if we follow an equality approach, it's not always correct, because it assumes that we all start from the same place, which is not always true. On the other hand, an equity approach is one that acknowledges that there are differences in our systemic, in our institutional, in our infrastructure, and looks into correcting those differences, and with the hope that we can achieve social justice, which basically means that we are able to correct, address those systemic barriers, and then find solutions together. So what can we do at an individual level? So one of the things that we can all do is really address implicit bias, intentional or unintentional, in our workplace, in our daily activities, personal, a way to look at implicit bias in our system is an absolutely important thing, so that we can address all marginalized populations, and also look at it from our own self as to what we bring to the table. And then I really like this little health equity permit that I think I want to spend a few minutes on this, where what can we do? So this is divided into four levels, which really starts by collecting raw data, either in our workplace and leadership, but also in our area of who we are serving. Is it our patients? Is it our community? Is it our trainee? It doesn't matter. These two things have to go in parallel. So we really need to look at the raw data. Then we have to come back and analyze it internally and create metrics, like a SWOT analysis, to see how is this raw data impacting in our daily work. Then we need to embed interventions into the workforce, whether it is in the leadership, we need to understand if there are effective leaders, there has to be a change if need be, there has to be terms that can be put into place, but then go back to our workforce to see if it really works. And last but not the least, it's very critical that we are transparent about this. We make this data public, whether it is in our division, in our department, in our team, in our little laboratory, or in our clinical team, it is very important that we make this transparent and public. Because once we do that, we then go into the equality approach, the equity approach rather than the equality approach. It all starts in my opinion in mentorship and what I mean by that is we all need continuous mentorship and education is key. So it's not just the early career mentoring but we also as leaders need to be involved in activities that we get constantly mentored and educated about and that can start at the departmental level. It can then go on to expand at the university level, at the health system and last but not the least we always have to elaborate what kind of partnership we are having with our external institutions. I'm just going to take one example. The study is published and we're also actually looking to publish the rest of it. We started this program called Duke Merits. This was an educational grant that I received from the institution which expanded into not only a Duke University but also in partnership with North Carolina Central University which is an HBCU in our area and what we did was we looked at faculty researchers and asked them a survey based questionnaire where we really looked at various aspects of how they are doing in their academic environment and looking at EDI aspects. What I really want to bring up here is looking at that graph which in our survey clearly showed that most of us never get trained. We have very limited training in these concepts of how to be a leader, in the concept of how do we approach equity, diversity and inclusion and this is an important thing we have to take into account, go back to our own teams to facilitate that and this can be done by trainee-led peer mentoring. We have done this where our own trainees by peer mentoring and involving in the community have been able to address these bi-directional collaborations, what we call. The idea is not just to impose on one group but really to hear back. So what can we all do and this is my last slide, really we need to learn to listen to each other which is usually as a leader very difficult sometimes and then we need to assess and identify bias. Either use coaching circles or small group mentoring and then we have to of course find ways to address these barriers which is always not that easy to do but if we can support initiatives that can be inclusive of various diversity factors whether it be race, ethnicity, culture, gender, bring that into everything that we do in our experimental designs whether we are doing a clinical trial or working in a laboratory or even when we are having a group meeting that we make sure that we have representatives from all the population. So with that it is not something that we can do alone and this slide really acknowledges my very wide group of colleagues and collaborators at Duke, different departments at NC Central and international consortiums but last not not the least I myself am a product of Endocrine Society. I started in this society as a grad student and really this society has shaped me. I have to call out Dr. Karen Clare Miller who was the reason I joined the one of the committees long back and then ended up being part of Imminent Chronology and of course today we all remember Carol Mendelsohn who was one of my mentors who really encouraged many of us to get involved as Dr. Seeley was saying. Get involved in committees, you know find leadership active committees to function and be part of and hopefully we can make a difference. Thank you. Wonderful, thank you so much. So I'm going to introduce Dr. Margaret Weirman. She's going to speak about collaborative negotiations. She's a professor of medicine and integrative physiology and the director of the pituitary and adrenal program at the University of Colorado. She's also a staff physician at the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center. Thank you. As you can tell we have very diverse topics in a very short period of time and hopefully they will give you a flavor of something to take back and read more about and think more about and the topic I was given was cooperative negotiation and you sort of say well as a leader why do I need to understand cooperative negotiation? How in my life do I use negotiations? And it's every day but to step back there's actually a lot of research about different ways that people negotiate and I have to spend a second or two talking about them. So there's distributive, compromising, avoiding, accommodating, principled and then we'll talk about collaborative or integrative it's also called in the literature. So distributive negotiation is a competitive win-lose. Each party tries to maximize their own gains, the best outcome from their side, limited focus on building relationships, it's claiming value. It's sort of two siblings wanting the last cookie. You can take that back and think about that. Somebody's going to win and somebody's going to lose. Avoidance negotiation, I sort of never thought that this was a technique but it actually is used in an academic medicine. I think it's used a lot. Parties choose not to engage in the negotiation to avoid conflict or the issue is trivial. The cost of negotiation outweighs the benefits. It could be a temporary strategy or it may be a long-term strategy for some of our leaders. If I ignore you long enough the issue will go away. Have you seen that in your own institution? The next is accommodating negotiation. It's a yielding, it's sometimes called a lose-win negotiation. It's where both sides make significant concessions to meet the demands of the opposite party and it's this idea that I have to maintain this relationship or goodwill is more important than whatever we're negotiating. But the problem is that if we support a colleague, oh I'm sorry, this is the one where goodwill gesture to maintain harmony in an ongoing relationship makes it worth it. So this would be in your clinic situation, I'll support you for a request from the administration for a small project knowing that in six months time I'll need your support to go forward on the project that I'm looking at. So that's often used a lot, accommodating negotiation. This is the one we shouldn't use, compromising negotiation. This is where both parties make concessions and meet in the middle. Finding a middle ground, you've heard that, but it actually is not a very good way of negotiating because it results in a fair but not optimal outcome for both parties. So think about this, each of us will take half the funds but the funds aren't enough to do either of the two projects. So really nobody wins. So think about not using that strategy. The principle negotiation was really pioneered by a book by Fisher and Urey called Getting to Yes and it totally makes sense. It's finding solutions based on objective criteria and principles. As scientists we like that. Separates peoples from the problems and interests rather than positions and you want a fair and rational agreement that satisfies both parties. The problem is that humans are not rational and if you think about it, although it's an interesting book to read and approach, it doesn't put in the human quality that's so critical. So collaborative or integrative negotiation. It is a win-win negotiation. The parties are starting together to work to find a mutually benefit solution, beneficial solution. You have common interests, shares, goals and you're focused on a long-term relationship because you know life is full of long-term relationships and you create value through creative problem-solving and brainstorming. So this might be negotiation between two research labs or two clinics in a department for space and sharing core equipment. So let's look at some of the qualities that you see in a collaborative negotiation. Open communication. It fosters an environment of trust and understanding. Active listening. The goal is to build rapport and find common ground. We're not all great active listeners and we have to work on that. It has objective criteria. It helps to depersonalize the negotiation and make it fair and rational and importantly it places this importance on building and maintaining long-term relationships. So fostering ongoing cooperation and goodwill. Lastly it has this brainstorming and problem-solving ability to find innovative solutions that is in everybody's interest and however it has trade-offs and concessions. Acknowledge areas to yield to meet the others needs. So last point. Tools and techniques in negotiation. Objective criteria and standards. That's your data collection before you have a negotiation. BATNA you may have all heard about. It's the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. You need to think about that before you go in a negotiation. Where is your line in the sand where you're gonna have to back off. Managing your emotions and conflicts. We heard this a little bit from Ellen. We all need to better understand our own emotional intelligence. Building trust and rapport. Maintaining a problem-solving mindset. Effective communication strategies and balancing assertiveness and empathy. So try it. Practice it with your faculty, with your laboratory members, with your boss, with your partner, or your children. So life is full of negotiations and we do it all the time but I think thinking about these structures is sometimes helpful and here are two references. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. So I think we'll have actually do you want to stay up? I think I'm gonna stand over here and I'll let our three panelists sit here and just as a reminder you can send in a question through the app or you can stand up at the microphone. Just as we're coming up I think what I'm hearing a common theme of these presentations is that we're often not taught how to be leaders but there's a science, there's concrete skills, there's frameworks, and there's tools that can really help us be better leaders. And I think we heard multiple times it's kind of assumed that we're just going to, you know, either be a leader maybe or not. So it's a really interesting topic and look forward to the questions that you all might have. I have plenty of questions if no one else does. So I want to ask Dr. Seelye actually if you want some reflection one of your points was observe your own behavior. You know, do you have suggestions on how to do that because that's I think a very difficult thing to do. So there's different levels at which you can do it. So one thing that some people do is actually video or on their phone make a video of themselves interacting in a meeting. Obviously if you've involved other people you want to get their permission. But the other is just to have a dual consciousness. One being what you're accomplishing in the meeting and the other being thinking about how you're accomplishing it. And a lot of people can do that dually at this and meaning doing at the same time or when you have just finished a meeting or an interaction with someone where you needed to demonstrate leadership skills. Taking the time before you move on to the next thing on your list to do to reflect on watching retrospectively how you acted during that meeting and the different things you said and just taking the time to think did you get your ideas across and did you get them across in the best way possible. So I think by asking the questions there's a way that you can observe yourself. Great. Thank you. Yeah come on up please. Please feel free to approach the microphone. We wanted to leave more the bulk of the time for questions and discussion. Yeah just curious because you evidently are not new you're being professors and leaders for a long time and me too by the way. So can you tell us your experience how did you get to leadership position each of you and you're younger obviously I have three daughters so I'm trying to teach them how to become leaders themselves so this is very useful also for my daughters. So if you can tell us at that time when you guys were becoming leaders how did you overcome the barriers that we had 20 years ago 30 years ago we didn't have all these Instagram advice that is coming now to our feeds you know what were your strategies. Dr. Wehrman do you want to start? Okay so I would just say that when I started my career I think it is looking for mentors being intellectually curious whether it's in science it's in patient care it's in education. I had male mentors and I learned from them and I learned what not to do and and I really felt that as I was going to mentor other people I would use that experience. The other thing is I think volunteering you don't want to volunteer too much so you don't get your work done and you don't get promoted but on the other hand sometimes being more free and saying okay I'll take a chance on it if you do volunteer for committee and you're effective on that committee they will see that the group will see that and you will then be asked to be the head of the committee. The third thing I would say is not only have a mentor but have a sponsor so all of us want to be sponsors for the pipeline that's coming ahead we want successful women and diverse leadership in in our medical schools and in academic centers and having asking you know I'm thinking about looking at this position would you sponsor me whether it's a man or a woman I think you have to ask sometimes they're not always going to think about it so those would be things I think I'd say. Just one thing I wanted to add to that is I often found that I had to reach outside the hierarchy within my own division or within my hospital to find people who were sponsors. Sometimes the people you work most closely with are very invested in you continuing to do exactly what you're doing because that's how their system works. So I just wanted to add to Maggie that it's really helpful to have sponsors that are outside your institution who may be giving you advice or may suggest your name for a committee or for leadership on a review paper that consider, and a lot of that can be gained from meetings like this. You can meet people who can serve that role. Absolutely, just to add on a couple of more things here, exactly what both our speakers talked about. I think you need to have the passion for what you want to really achieve and the ask. It's very important that you have the ask because without the ask, you're not going to be able to even get that leadership position. And I think the third point that's very critical is to understand your own, what is your personality and what really fits you and what really drives you because in our approach that we are following in our institution and other places that I collaborate, one of the things we identify are there are some folks that are very good in being part of a team. And then there are folks that are much more efficient where they're able to be more at the organization level. So it's very important you really critically evaluate yourself and use some of the techniques that we were talking about today, about negotiation, about building your confidence. And last but not the least, a little bit of a thick skin. There is quite a bit of thick skin, I should say, because there are, especially as women scientists or clinicians or leaders, we are always going to be in an environment. And again, I don't wanna just say women because right now we are, we really need to look at gender neutral and gender related aspects too. I would just say for any individual, it's very important that sometimes you are going to be, especially in leadership position, you will have implicit bias that you have to overcome. And age, how you look, and how do you speak? Are you immigrant? Are you a particular race? These things are going to really affect. So I think those things are very critical that you ask yourself what you want and learn how to ask if that is possible. Great, yeah. I think the first point too is just starting to think about yourself as a leader too. It sounds like there's just a turning point and starting to think about these principles. So yeah, please come. I would like to thank you for these wonderful presentations. It's a very interesting topic and not too many people talk about it, but it's really, really hot topic. And I would like to ask you to tell us about mentorship for a little bit more because I'm from Moscow, from Russia, and we do not have such a culture at all. It's just looks like it's just beginning. And I believe many people here do not know much about it. How to find a mentor, how to communicate, and what is it like? Thank you very much. One more time. I can go there. I think first of all, finding a way to, if you find a mentor, just stick with them. And if you find a collaborator, a colleague, because mentorship is not just based on a leader. It is even your own, someone, your friend, your colleague, your collaborator can be a great mentor too. So I think I would say start there. And even if you're in a small unit, you can create opportunities for your trainees to really mentor someone. And that I have found to be very effective, both in my own way that I was mentored, just finding ways to mentor someone, even if it's as a high schooler, when you do peer tutoring. That's a form of mentorship. And I think if you can take that through your rest of your life, I think it's a very valuable and just an amazing experience. And it teaches you a lot. Thank you. I was gonna add that in environments where people are not giving talks on how to be a good mentor and how to be a good mentee, where you really need to start more from scratch, is, as was just mentioned, is find people who have characteristics you're interested in, and you may talk with them. And then the conversation's over. Saying, can we follow up on this in another two weeks or in a month or in two months? And building continuity of meetings, because a lot of people don't wanna enter a mentorship relationship just the first time they've talked to you or before they understand what your full goals are. So I think there's a lot of work that can go into building the relationship. But as a mentee, if it's not part of the culture, you may have to do a lot of the building yourself. And part of it is having some frequency of interaction. And you may need to then bring a plan to the person you wanna serve as a mentor as to what you can do in the relationship and what you're looking for the other person to do. And let the other person have an opportunity to say yes or no, whether they can fulfill some of those or not. The other thing I wanted to also reiterate is the importance of peer mentoring, which is something that is often more easy to set up. So there's a lot you can gain from peer mentoring, where you set up a group of peers. They may be in your area of science. They may be spread out in more diverse. And you pick an interval to meet and topics that are important to your career development. And meet with your peers can be an incredibly effective source of mentoring. Thank you. Great, and Dr. Wehrman is also an awardee of many mentorship awards. Do you have any perspective on when the mentorship environment is sort of lacking how we can be more proactive? Karen Miller will remember that we, probably 15 years ago, we realized that the business community had set up unbelievable mentoring programs, that they had shown increased productivity and keeping people around. And we worked with P&G to create a mentoring program that women in endocrinology did that was connecting people outside of their institution on mentoring. It was then taken over by the Endocrine Society and I think it has died. But again, the point is, is that you can read literature about it, the Harvard Review and stuff, about mentoring. I think I love the idea of peer mentoring. But I think women in endocrinology is a place to start connecting, getting peer groups, networking, showing leadership, volunteering for one of the committees that you'll hear about tonight to get active in this organization. You can also volunteer for one of the committees for the Endocrine Society and go and introduce yourself to some of the leaders on the board of the Endocrine Society, some are here, and tell them you'd like to get involved. Sometimes putting your own nomination in, if it comes with somebody on the board or something, that will help you get a slot on a committee and then, again, you're effective on a committee and then you can lead and get that networking and develop these different ways of mentoring. I initially, when I was training, thought my mentor had to be perfect. They were gonna be a great mentor in science, in their personal life, in their balance and work life, and the reality is no one is a perfect mentor. You're gonna need a collection of mentors and at different stages of your life, we all still need mentors and so knowing that, you're not looking for the perfect, you know, whatever, and realizing you can learn either things to do or not to do from the interactions of who you see in your leadership or the people you interact with. Thank you very much. Very precious advice. Maybe time to bring back the mentoring program. Yeah, so I think we have time probably for one more question and hopefully we can talk afterwards and at the WEA meeting tonight. Hi, thank you for the great talk. Cillian Pelley in Madison, Wisconsin. So gender stereotypes shape our professional lives in many subtle and not so subtle ways and there are professional and social penalties when women sort of violate those gender stereotypes and so leaders have kind of choices as to whether to go with some of those approaches that do violate those or trying to navigate other leadership styles that are more commutal and maybe more aligned with expected stereotypes. I'm interested in your experiences and comments as your journey to leaders navigating those choices. I can make, I mean, I don't think any of us have the answer to that, it's a very big question. I think there's a duty to particularly women who have reached leadership roles, not necessarily for the people starting out, to really work on breaking down the stereotypes. I remember in one of the women's group that I was in at my hospital where a woman said, who was an accomplished leader said, we know how to become leaders, just act like men and I felt like that wasn't really doing a service to women in later generations that were starting out. So I think that there's, now that more women are in leadership roles, I think that people need to consider themselves as role models and present a restructured image of leadership. There's a lot being written about this now and not enough time to go into it, but I think that by women in leadership roles doing that, it can help change the image and what happens, we actually have a course, we give a workshop on how men can support women advancing in their career and that we need to involve people of all genders in supporting all genders being able to reach the opportunities they want, not a strict image that we used to have of what looked like a leader. One thing I just wanted to mention is that there's been a lot of work done on unconscious bias about the kind of pictures that we see in the media and in news or in publications or the pictures that are hung on walls in the rooms where we meet. And there are really concrete things that we can do that can change the atmosphere by making sure there's diversity displayed wherever we go in terms of at a meeting, in terms of the speakers at a meeting. So there are concrete actions that we can do to help change the culture. Dr. Weirman, it looks like you were agreeing. Did you have anything to comment after that? No, I would just say that, again, bias is part of life, right? I mean, everyone has unconscious bias. And all the studies on unconscious bias that we train ourselves, it doesn't change our bias, but it makes us more aware when we're being biased. And so I think that's important. I also agree with you that the sort of, quote, picture of a woman leader being aggressive versus assertive in a male, all of those happened over the last generations, and it's really changing. But there still are qualities that make a leader in different areas that have more diversity, but having more diversity in the group, men, women, genders, age, all of that, allows leadership to develop with not just the standard white male, old concept, you wanna say? Yeah, no, I think absolutely. I think you both put it in terms that are just very clear. One thing I have to say, just personally, I feel like what happens is when you go after a leadership position and you end up getting that, you sort of create a situation where you almost seem you're alone there. And then you're responsible for many things that you thought you were planning to do. And it's the feeling of being alone. I think if we can break that down and create leadership to be not a siloed position, but to create a community of leaders, reach out to form your colleagues, or anybody, just have a leadership community that you can get together. We usually do that. We get some drink or some food, and we talk about what worked and what did not work. Sometimes just sharing is itself a very important step. At least I find that to be very helpful. And like Maggie said, in terms of implicit bias, it really is something that starts from us. What are we looking to bring to our team? And then try to see if we can be, actually have been incorporating surveys a lot and coaching circles where I think use of these survey instruments have been very effective. In fact, what I'm gonna do, I did have a set of activities survey that I was gonna bring in, and I'll share that with anybody who's part of this panel, or they can write to me. This is something that you can incorporate in each of our environment to really understand, to listen what is missing, and dynamically change. Because as the world changes, we also have to dynamically change. Great, there's no real right answer. I just wanna say the time has flown. We are at the end of the session. I just have some housekeeping things. First of all, I just wanna say thank you. It's really an honor to be up here on the stage with these three very accomplished women. So can we just give them a hand for coming and speaking to us? I think it's clear that we should have a whole leadership day here. That would be helpful for all of us. There is a survey for the session, so we try and change the session each year that we sponsor, and so it has the wrong title, but please still fill it out, and we will take that feedback. And then, I think we're gonna try and share some of the resources. For example, Ellen, you had some links on your slides. We will make sure that we can do that on the Women in Endocrinology website. So we will do that, and you can contact any of us. You can contact me in the meantime if you'd like access to something. So thank you so much. Thank you.

leadership skills

gender

diversity

self-awareness

networking

collaborative approaches

mentors

gender stereotypes