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January 25, 2019

Trio tackles executive gender gap with Moxie

Photo | Contributed L-r: Ellen Keithline Byrne, Karen Kirchner and Denise D'Agostino of the Moxie Project.
By MICHAEL C. BINGHAM

A trio of executive coaches has launched a new initiative to help narrow the gender gap in the highest ranks of organizational leadership.

Last summer Denise D’Agostino, Ellen Keithline Byrne and Karen Kirchner, under the umbrella of their consulting firm Moxie-Leaders, started the Moxie Project, a six-month program that combines business coaching, awareness-building, feedback and peer-focused accountability to help participants better navigate the upper reaches of the executive suite.

The first Moxie Project class, which took place last autumn, had eight participants from Fairfield County and metro New York, including aspiring executives from Boehringer Ingelheim and World Wrestling Entertainment.

Now the group, whose three members are based in Fairfield County, is seeking to expand its reach into New Haven County and beyond with a new session kicking off Jan. 29 at the LaKota Oaks Hotel in Norwalk.

What are the forces that continue to hold female leaders back from reaching the highest ranks of organizational leadership — especially now, in an era when gender equity is the law of the land?

“There are two levels of issues that hold women back,” explains Karen Kirchner of Fairfield, an executive and team coach with a 20-year consulting track record primarily in the banking industry, including with Citigroup. “One is the systemic level — organizational structure, male-dominated organizational cultures and unconscious bias -- things that continue to exist in many organizations, particularly large organizations.”

“Then there the individual level of things that hold women back, and those are the things that we’re addressing through the Moxie Project,” Kirchner says. These are things like ‘disease to please’ and lack of confidence; not thinking strategically enough about the business or our own careers. Those are the kinds of things we work on in the Moxie Project.”

The irony is that in 2019 many organizations, including corporations, are expending considerable energy and resources to help female and minority candidates ascend to the top ranks of executive leadership. But that hasn’t obviated the need to help women executives reach the desired destination.

Lonely at the top

“We looked at a lot of the research out there that shows that women are represented in the workforce at even numbers with men up until about the director and VP level,” Kirchner says. “There you see a real fall-off — and you see it even more the higher you go in the organization.”

Kirchner adds that among publicly held U.S. companies, still only about 5 percent have female CEOs.

The Moxie Project’s immersive six-month program includes monthly in-person or virtual training workshops, one-on-one executive coaching and peer-group work that helps participants with “accountability, problem-solving and inspiration as they’re working toward their goal,” Kirchner says.

The feedback from the inaugural session was “amazingly positive,” Kirchner explains. “Women gave us feedback about showing up more powerfully in meetings, being invited into more conversations at a more strategic level, getting promoted and just [advancing] their careers as they started showing up more powerfully.”

The cost of the next Moxie Project session beginning Jan. 29 is $8,100, which is typically paid by the employer. So far, Kirchner says, participants from Morgan Stanley, Pepperidge Farm and Boehringer Ingelheim are registered for the new session.

Find additional information about the program or the Moxie Project at Moxie-Leaders.com

Contact Michael C. Bingham at mbingham@newhavenbiz.com

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