“I wouldn’t be telling the full story about my career if I didn’t start with a nod to my father, who from the time I was tiny always said to me, ‘You can do anything your pretty little head desires.’

My father probably wouldn’t have seen himself being a feminist, because of the time and place I grew up in in Texas.  I would however understand that message when I was older, that ultimately those words not only had an impact on me, they turned out to be true!

One of the people who taught me most about how to do ‘anything my pretty little head desired,’ was a man named Watts Wacker.

Meeting Watts

‘Yes, Watts Wacker is my real name,’ he would say, and it was the perfect name for a man who was full of impact and contrasts.  He was a staunchly pro-woman man, a brilliant futurist wrapped up in a bundle of contradictions and authentic quirks. And somehow, that exact quirkiness he possessed was probably most valuable to me.

I met Watts in 1997, not long after I had taken the helm of Planned Parenthood Federation of America during a challenging time in its history.  External challenges were daunting, but biggest challenges were internal to the organization. The organization had become emotionally depleted. Outdated structures made it impossible to get anything done.  It was a very inward-looking organization, rather than outward-looking, and I knew it needed something different.

What the organization needed was a bold vision. Something to shake us into new thinking in order to get back on the path toward growth and serving the public properly.

The Cold Call

I had read a book that Watts wrote, 500 Year Delta. Someone on my staff suggested I call him.  This was before email was a regular thing: You actually had to pick up the phone and call people back then!  So I summoned up my courage, got his number and literally cold called him. 

Watts immediately came to the phone and said, ‘Thank you for calling!  Whatever you want me to do, I will do.’ He volunteered on the spot to help me. 

Creating a Vision

Watts sat down with me and helped me understand how to turn a great ship of an organization around, by creating a bold shared vision.  What was most compelling was his advice to make the vision long enough into the future that people could let go of what’s bothering them today.

That was an incredibly pivotal insight for me!  If you start from where you are today when creating a new plan or vision, you’ll be mired in just that — what you are doing today, making it harder to get the old ideas out of your head so that new ideas can come in.

But, when you brainstorm 25 years out, you can let go of what is keeping you  stuck in the present time.  In the process of doing that, we developed an 18-month plan to take every single person across the organization, across the whole country, on our journey. Watts and I probably met once a week, in-person or over the phone, he met with the Board and key team members, and he became a really trusted mentor during that time. 

Lessons from Watts

There are many lessons from my time with Watts that I still use, quote, and even teach to this day:

• You have to get people thinking on a time horizon long enough that they can let go of their current fears.  That’s how you can get employees to think about possibilities and solutions they’d never have thought of if.  This principle, as I mentioned, was a pivotal insight for me as a leader. And it’s now a bedrock principle of my current program Three Powers of Executive Intention.

• A good storyteller tells a good story, the great storyteller lets you see yourself in the story.  It’s become Power Tool #9 in my leadership program 50 Women Can Change the World, which reaches powerful, promising women across many different sectors such as finance, journalism, and healthcare.

• The fastest route to self-esteem is to stand up for what you believe in.  This has become one of my 9 leadership power tools too. I tell a story about Wearing the Shirt: How important it is to put your convictions out there, to know what your values are, that you believe so deeply with conviction, that you would put visibly on your shirt.

• Leaders deal with predicaments that have no one solution.  It’s the spark for another signature program, Leadership at the Crossroads.  When faced with choices, leaders may firstly not have enough information, and secondly there’s risk in any decision that you make.  The more and higher you are in leadership, the more you have that kind of dilemma.

Watts’ Impact

Before Watts passed away last year, I spoke to him a lot about the impact he made. When I wanted to rebrand myself and decide what I was going to be in the last 1/3 of my life, he offered to sit again with me and plot out my future: He would come in to New York, we’d sit together and develop the speaking topics that I deliver to women’s groups and companies to this day.

I think that women are in the midst of an unfinished revolution.  There are still a lot of gray areas, and a lot of places where we can see that it’s important for men and women to work together for gender equality.  And yet, we don’t always have the language or the processes to do that effectively.

That’s one of the reasons it was so important to me to have a male mentor when I did, because there were few females I could turn to for leadership mentoring at the time.  The fact that men still hold 80% of the top leadership positions, means that if women are ever going to achieve equality, it’s essential that they have male as well as female mentors.  

I think of it like this:  If men at the top still hold the power, they are also the people who’ve had the most experience.  We stand to greatly learn from those experiences, so that we can pay these lessons forward to shape the next generation of women leaders.”

– Gloria Feldt, Co-Founder and President, Take The Lead, New York, NY (www.taketheleadwomen.com)

Gloria Feldt is a New York Times best-selling author, speaker, commentator and feminist leader who has gained national recognition as a social and political advocate of women’s rights.  In 2013, she co-founded Take the Lead, a nonprofit initiative with a goal to propel women to leadership parity by 2025.  Gloria is a former CEO and president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, directing the organization from 1996 to 2005.  Today she continues to pay forward her groundbreaking leadership lessons as an author, speaker and activist.