How Women Lead

Julie Castro Abrams is the Founder and CEO of How Women Lead. She is an expert in board governance and building diverse boards that are a strategic advantage. She is an experienced nonprofit CEO and entrepreneur. Through her consulting practice, she supports leaders to build high-performance boards, breakthrough performance for the leaders and high performing multicultural teams. She’s the Chair and CEO, as I mentioned of How Women Lead, which is a network of over 10,000 women dedicated to promoting diverse women’s voices and propelling women’s leadership forward as well as the Managing Partner of BoardLeaders, where she places leaders on corporate boards and supports them to build inclusive and high-performance boards. She’s an active investor and advisor to startups and sits on the advisory boards of FinTech startups like LENDonate and The New Search Collaborative. She’s the recipient of many awards, including the More Jobs Genius Award, the Morgan Stanley Innovation Award and has been featured in four books including Scrappy Women in Business. Julie, welcome to the show.

You have such a diverse impact on the world in many ways that you inform and start things. If you don’t mind, let’s go back to your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood and school. Where did you decide that you wanted to have an impact in the world and saw some injustice happening that you wanted to be part of solving?

When I was growing up, Title IX was just passing, that was the law that said you have to spend as much money on girls sports as boys sports. I was an athlete in which the data is pretty clear that the majority of CEOs and leaders in this country, women leaders in particular have been serious athletes at some point in their lives. That was formative for me, but it was paired with some interesting things that were happening. My mom had some family money, her dad died and left her some money. She had to get my dad’s permission to spend her own money. I was around at this moment of big change. I remember when I was going to college, it was this moment when all of these guys left their wives for the 24-year-old secretary and these women were destitute. This was before there was the requirement that there would be a 50/50 split. It’s this moment in time right before an important justice was happening. I thought economic stability, women having economic power is essential to them being able to have a voice in their own families and their own communities. Those were the big influences for me that kicked me off.

I went to Northwestern University. I get into racial and gender justice in a much deeper way. I was challenged for my white privilege and all kinds of other things that were super formative for me. I spent my life designing and defining frames around how I want change to work. Early in my career, I defined this frame of a strength-based approach to poverty alleviation. When you have somebody, a woman in particular, I spent most of my life working with women, but I also worked at a music conservatory for low-income kids for seven years. It’s one of my first big job as the deputy director there. What we knew is if kids were coming from public housing, for example, in this environment, they were the violinist. They weren’t the kid from public housing. They reshaped their self-definition and it changes everything.

I ran a microenterprise and microfinance program for low-income women. I helped over 6,000 women start their own companies. If somebody is a domestic violence survivor, it’s wonderful and essential that we have emergency services that we have places for them to be in therapy, etc. If you came to my organization, you were the CEO of your own company. You were no longer defined in that space, in that moment as the domestic violence survivor. To me, that’s an essential way of thinking about how do you shift our world’s frame. As we’re dealing with all of these racial upset in this country, we need to shift the frame of who’s a philanthropist, who’s an investor and what does leadership looks like. That’s what I’m up to. We launched a venture fund. As we looked at who our investors were, the majorities were women of color. It’s first in the country. We’re all about doing campaign is like, “This is what an investor looks like. She’s brown. She’s black.” These are women who are highly educated, extremely successful and have made some wealth. They want to play a role in defining the future of our companies and what leadership looks like.

Let’s start with the impact that sports give people as a learning tool. If you’re in a sport, you learn team building. As an investor in startups, everyone who I’ve ever interviewed has always said, “We invest in the jockey, not the horse and the jockey is the team.” If you don’t have any framework of being a team player and cheering for the team even if you’re not on the field or whatever it is, you don’t have a concept of that. Let’s talk a little bit about what lessons you think people can take from sports into being a good team player whether they’re the CEO or not in a startup.

One of the other important things is you’re not going to win every time. How do you pick yourself up and try again and keep having incremental goals? That is essential as we think about, how are we incentivizing and supporting people to innovate, to take risks and move things forward.

Click here to read the rest of the interview.

If you want help on how to craft a better story My Better Selling Through Storytelling Method online course is for you.

Are you tired of coming in 2nd place when you pitch?

Are you struggling to be persuasive without being pushy?

Are you looking for a way to become irresistible to your ideal clients? 

Then the Better Selling Through Storytelling Method is for you.

If you want a private 15-minute strategy call to discuss how my course can help you be a revenue rockstar, click here to book in a time.