Butler Center to host new Lead by Example speaker series session

The Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence is inviting faculty, staff and students to the next session of its Lead by Example series, featuring Lynn Wooten, president of Simmons University. Wooten’s talk will focus on "Academic Leadership from Anywhere on the Stage: Balancing the ‘Me’ and ‘We.’"

Jay Akridge, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and diversity, will provide opening remarks and introduce Wooten.

Started in fall 2021, the Lead by Example series features speakers who model and provide insights about “how to be” in order for women to gain acceptance to move into and succeed in leadership positions.

Time and again, women leaders — particularly women of color — are not well-regarded, or they lose credibility because they are perceived as crazy, too demanding, too serious, too opportunistic, and so on. The issue of trying to gain credibility as a leader is complicated, but such credibility is necessary to be a leader. In order to gain credibility, women are compelled to behave in specific and constrained ways. In fact, the reality that there are widely shared beliefs about how women, specifically women of color, must present themselves to gain acceptance as leaders can limit what women can do and how they can lead. Suggesting how to lead may feed into stereotypes of what women of color are expected to conform to.

The series will feature women leaders who will consider key questions such as, what communication strategies, qualities or features or ways of interacting make women, particularly women of color, persuasive, credible, successful and well-regarded?

This virtual session is scheduled for noon-1:30 p.m. ET March 4. Registration for this session is available online. For more information, contact butlercenter@purdue.edu.