2B Bolder Podcast : Career Growth and Insights from Women in Business, Tech & Sports

#151 QuantumBloom's Andrea Mohamed on Redesigning Work So Women Stay And Thrive

• Mary Killelea, Host • Season 7 • Episode 151

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Ever feel like you did everything “right” and still got sidelined? We sit down with Andrea Mohamed, COO and co‑founder of QuantumBloom, to unpack why so many women exit tech and what it takes to build workplaces they won’t want to leave. Andrea traces her journey from first‑gen college student to strategy executive and founder, sharing how an MBA unlocked confidence and how glass-cliff roles, nitpicky performance feedback, and unspoken power dynamics still got in the way. The message is clear and practical: stop blaming individuals and start redesigning systems, while equipping women early with the skills that make influence, advocacy, and staying power feel natural.

We dig into the critical inflection points where women quietly disengage: the first year after a STEM degree, the leap to management, and the jump to senior leadership, where relationships and influence matter more than output. Andrea explains why the school playbook fails at work, how to unlearn “merit-only” thinking, and what durable skills, communication, negotiation, and cross-functional trust look like in real roles. We talk about psychological safety, manager capability, and pro-family flexibility that benefits everyone, not just mothers, and how these choices change retention.

The conversation turns tactical for leaders and HR. Learn to quantify turnover, model retention ROI, and speak the CFO’s language so talent programs no longer get cut. Andrea outlines how HR can evolve, as modern marketing did, moving from “arts and crafts” to a revenue partner, by connecting programs to profit. We also address DEI headwinds, the tall poppy problem, and the courage it takes to be values-aligned and visible without burning out. If you care about keeping women in STEM, building fair systems, and turning excellence into advancement, this one gives you the data, the playbook, and the push.

If this resonates, follow, share with a colleague who leads teams, and leave a quick review so more people can find the show. Your feedback helps us keep these conversations bold and useful.

Resources:
Quantum Bloom is helping companies retain and advance women in STEM by fixing the systems that push them out
Andrea Mohamed on LinkedIn


Get the LinkedIn Visibility Foundation. Use coupon code: "BOLDER" to receive $50 off.

SPEAKER_00:

Hi there, my name is Mary Kill Olea. Welcome to the To Be Boulder Podcast, providing career insights for the next generation of women in business and tech. To Be Boulder was created out of my love for technology and marketing, my desire to bring together like-minded women, and my hope to be a great role model and source of inspiration for my two girls and other young women like you. Encouraging you guys to show up and to be bolder and to know that anything you guys dream of is totally possible. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation. If you've ever left a meeting, a role, or an entire company wondering what you did wrong, this conversation is going to be for you. Today's guest believes that too often women don't leave because they lack confidence or ambition. They leave because the systems around them were never designed to support them. I'm joined by Andrea Mohammed, COO and co-founder of Quantum Bloom, an organization partnering with forward-thinking companies to redesign the systems that shape women's experiences at work from career pathways and manager capability to psychological safety and support at critical inflection points. In 2024, Quantum Bloom was recognized with Women in Tech Global Award for the most impactful initiative for driving meaningful, sustainable change in how organizations retain and develop women in STEM. Andrea, I am delighted to have you here today. I love your organization. And thank you for agreeing to be here.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Mary. It's like I'm, you know, we've had a couple of conversations. I'm, you know, thrilled to be here. And uh I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

SPEAKER_00:

Wonderful. Well, I I love to, on this show, I love to give women insights to pathways and career paths that women guests have had. So start us off by kind of giving us a high-level view of your journey. Yep. And then um kind of how you ended up where you are today. And we'll go deeper into quantum bloom in a little bit.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah, that's great. So um I, you know, going kind of all the way back, because I think it's really formative. I'm a first gen college student. Um, and I think that was really formative in some of the career paths and experiences that I had. Um, most notably, I think, in that sense of feeling like you don't belong somewhere, right? I didn't have a lot of experience with college. No one was kind of give showing me the ropes. I had to find my way, muddle my way through all that. Um, and I sort of felt like that's that also kind of bled over into my career experiences too, where I was this girl from the sticks of Michigan without a lot of pedigree or sophistication. Um I was smart, I was always a great student. I was a quick study. Um, I see systems and I can kind of connect dots, you know. But I think my background, I kind of was underestimated just because of what was on paper and how I came into different opportunities. Um, I spent my early career, it was very volatile. I graduated from college um in 1999. The dot-com bubble was bursting. I had a short stint uh in a graduate program um where I had worked my entire undergraduate kind of career to become a PhD student. I got into a PhD um program at a research one institution. Six months later, it felt completely claustrophobic with perfect grades and just being one of six students that was fully funded for the entirety. It's like I walked away from that. Um, and then I found myself floundering around right after the dot-com bubble burst in startup after startup, um, not really finding my way until many years later when I started to take control of my career. Um, and I think that was like again a very formative moment is when I learned that just doing good work and being a good employee was not the path to career success. And I really needed to be intentional about what I did. And then once I became intentional, sort of the big transition point was deciding that I was gonna go get an MBA while I was still working and I wanted to go to Duke. And it's like, and it gave this leveling up this pedigree and all these types of things. And Duke was really the moment where I moved from being competent to getting my confidence, and it really started to come in the classroom because I was able to hold my own with all of these people who had the pedigree, who had the resumes that I didn't have. And I started to, you know, really start to believe more that I belonged anywhere I wanted to be. And then my career since then has been a variety of strategy marketing roles. Before I started Quantum Bloom with Anne, um, I was a VP of strategy innovation and marketing for a$1.3 billion nonprofit that served the government in research and technical spaces. And I learned a ton there and I experienced a ton there. Um, and yeah, now it's like I'm, you know, I'm kind of on my own with Anne and it's like blazing a trail. I've always been blazing trails wherever I was, but it's like it's different when it's yours. It's like the risk is yours and the reward is yours too.

SPEAKER_00:

What a what a great story. I mean, um I think there's a lot of people out there listening who can relate to, you know, the feelings of um maybe not having the pedigree, um, maybe not knowing where you're going, especially today with the disruption and um not having that clear pathway for careers. So um I I love that you're a great example of what can be achieved. Um before Quantum Balloon existed, what were you noticing in your own work that made you realize these challenges weren't about individual women, but were more about systems?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Well, it took me, I think, a longer than it should have. Um, because given that background of me feeling like the underdog, that when things didn't necessarily go my way or felt hard, I naturally assumed it was me, right? That, oh, I'll just, you know, I'm playing this game wrong, I'm doing this thing wrong, I'm not smart enough, I haven't learned the thing, you know, I'm somehow deficient. And I think when things changed and I started to realize that there was much more system level kind of things happening rather than individual, was when I started to be vulnerable and share my experiences with other women and started to hear the same story in the same pattern with people from women from all walks, not just mine from the sticks of Michigan and this blue-collar life into the you know, halls of Duke and then into a career, right? It's like it was it was way more common to for women to express sort of the barriers where it's like they had to take the job for six months before they got the title. It's like their male subordinates were given access and privilege and um consulted before well before they were or while they were subordinate. You know what I mean? All sorts of things were, you know, you kind of like, oh, they're on the escalator, you're still taking the stairs kind of stuff. And and so I I really, you know, and then you start looking at like and you get language where when you understand what a glass cliff opportunity is, for example, like it's the first, it's the thing without budget, you know, you get women who get put disproportionately into those roles because we're ambitious and eager, and those are the opportunities presented, and you start to realize, huh, women are always getting the glass cliff opportunity, right? And when you start to think about, like for me, I was so grateful to get those opportunities because I could go prove myself again and again and again, which I did over and over. But really, you start to like when you pull back, you get different language, you start sharing and swapping stories, and then you start to realize oh, it's not just an Andrea thing. This is like women, oftentimes super competent women who are also ambitious. There's patterns, right? So the system is uh it is real. Um, and I think more and more of us are naming it. And I think that's both good, but also super disruptive because it's like we're not blindly going along with go fix yourself anymore.

SPEAKER_00:

As you're saying this, I'm thinking about my time in corporate, and it was always positioned like these were good opportunities, and exactly what you said, I was eager to show up and eager to take it on. But it, you know, the promotion that was promised never was delivered. The pay that was promised was never delivered. And then it you really do psychologically get in your own head and say, what am I doing wrong? It is, and maybe this is the wrong term to associate with it, but it's like a gaslighting feeling.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, oh, it is.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's a gaslighting.

SPEAKER_01:

I used to say sometimes, you know, and I think what we we have to recognize sometimes what we bring to it, and what I brought to those systems was a lack of confidence and wanting to feel worthy, which was my stuff, right? So I was the perfect like uh target for some of that behavior, and and and I performed and performed and performed um and later realized how much I was actually very exploited, and but I allowed it, right? So I was a you know, I wouldn't say a willing participant, but I was implicit in in what was happening. And I think when you do start to change the narrative, like I said before, it's like you it becomes a problem when you realize you're not the thing that needs to be fixed. It becomes a problem to organizations because they want you to think that this is individual deficiency rather than you know systemic things that then they have the responsibility to solve for. So yeah, I mean I wish I could say that it's like I'm seeing progress in these things, but I think the system is really, really dysfunctional for a lot of women. And I think the other part we need to think about is okay, we can't change necessarily that system, right? But what are we bringing into that in our own behaviors healthy, boundried, discerning, confident?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And we also need like what I think is helpful because there's such a weird time right now with women who are higher up in the ranks leaving because they are fed up with it, or they're getting, you know, silently shown out the door because of economics or whatever. But until one way I think we can do this is empowering women who do get hired to be aware of this to help break and lift up other women.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, and it means you're gonna have to be willing to take risk to really make it better for the women coming up behind you because it's not for the faint of heart to truly lead change. And the change agents often become the targets. And so while we desperately need women who have position, power, influence, resources, status to use that to wield that to make things better, they have to be prepared for the potential of what's to come. When you become, you know, there's this thing called the tall poppy syndrome. When women kind of are taller, when like there's a taller poppy than the field of poppies, that's the first thing to get cut down.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And what I would I want more and more of us who have the privilege of those resources and the standing and whatever to be willing to be that tall poppy and take the risk. But we have to be prepared for it. And I think to be prepared for it, it's like you have to be ready for organizations to cut you down, let you go, do whatever. And we have to start thinking that the risk of doing nothing is greater than the risk of doing something.

SPEAKER_00:

So well said. I love that. Um, so then what ultimately led you to this co-founder opportunity? And how did you know that this, you know, ultimately was the problem to target? Because I think a lot of people are passionate about you know, women succeeding in tech and business, but they they're not clear where they can actually make the difference. So, how did both of those come about?

SPEAKER_01:

So, my when I joined what is now Quantum Bloom, it had a different name, but it's like I did not set out to become a startup founder. I left my corporate job, which is a very large story. I took six months off. Um, I that six months was intentionally not about finding another job. It was about detoxing, getting back in touch with myself, kicking tires. And I thought I was either gonna hang a shingle and be like an independent consultant. I thought maybe I could work for um private equity. I'm a really good operator and work across a portfolio of companies. And I'm like, do I have one more stint in me in the corporate grind? Nowhere on there was like founder, which I feel view is different than independent sort of hang a shingle consultant. Like that's doesn't scale. This scales, quantum bloom scales. But what happened was um Ann Hungate, who's my business partner now, she had been working on this problem for the better part of 10 years. It's like she noticed as a career technology executive that what she experienced every generation behind her was still experiencing. And she was like, in order for us to change the outcomes at the top of the house, we have to start at the beginning when women are coming out of their college experiences where it's still largely a meritocracy, where you can follow the rules, i.e. the syllabus, and you will become like the straight A student, right? It's it's an environment where keep your head down, do good work, good things will come. And you're still largely autonomous, where it's like my work reflects my outcomes. Right. Then you go to the world of work and the playbook for school, if that's what you bring to work, and many of us do, we're straight A students, we're gonna drop that right back right into corporate America. And it's like it is not the path to success. And so we have to help women early unlearn sort of the things that made them successful to that point, and then give them the new playbook, kind of lift the veil on the way corporate really works. Because as much as we all talk about merit and fairness and systems and processes that keep things equitable, it's just not the way that it works. So um, a mutual friend actually had connected me with Anne. Um, she brought invited us over. We had octopus. It's like, and Ann and I actually had worked for the same company, but we knew of each other and didn't run in the same circles. And our mutual friend worked at the same company and she saw the potential for something really great between Ann and I. Ann had developed the product, she had piloted it, but she didn't bring it to market. She talks about it now where it's like she had a product, that product needed jet fuel. I was jet fuel in need of a purpose. And it's like, so it was about two and a half years ago that we made the decision that it's like this is what we're gonna do, and we're doing it for our daughters. We, you know, she's got two daughters, I have one daughter, I have a son. And it's like, and every woman that's coming up behind, because there's no reason that the next generation has to go through the school of hard knocks that Ann and I went through. There are things that you can learn. The system's still the system, but the way you navigate it, the way that you experience it and how you internalize it, those are things we need to work on, right? And I hate that we are talking about women's ability to navigate a busted system, that system does need to be fixed, but we don't have the luxury of waiting the hundred or two hundred years for there to be gender equity at work, right? And it's like, although it's not our fault that the system is busted, if we want to work and have like, you know, livelihoods that lead to wealth creation and things like that, it is our problem. Not our fault, but it is our problem, right? Um, and we but we also don't want to internalize system problems as personal things, right? It's like the system's our problem. I'm not the problem, but it's like I can find ways to, you know, make conscious choices, lead myself authentically, um, be situationally aware of these realities and make trade-offs and choices differently.

SPEAKER_00:

So a lot of people are, and often I read this is women who are in STEM technical careers, um, they end up leaving sooner than expected. You know, they get frustrated, or you know, life happens, children happen, choices, demands. Um, what do you think the leaders most often misunderstand about what's really happening with um kind of that drop-off of women in tech?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think that it's the stories they tell themselves and what they choose to hear and not hear. So when they hear um, you know, so and so is leaving her engineering role because she wants to start a family. Very common, right? And it's like, and it puts the center of that, the woman is deciding to have a family, and they say, Oh, you know, wish her well, and she's gonna go have a family personal choice, rather than that company saying, What is it about our environment that a young mother does not feel like she has the choice to stay in the work environment? Right. And so the the it's too easy to say that these are one-offs, individual circumstance, it's family reasons, or it's confidence, or you know, this woman, well, she didn't raise her hand, right? Or the opportunity. Um, and it's like the reality is women are not leaning out, right, um, or leaving because they lack ambition. It's like they are starting to realize that their excellence does not pay off and that there are very entrenched barriers, policies, and things that do not enable women and the lived experience of women to thrive. We are still predominantly the caretakers for our parents, for our children. We become the sandwich, right? And when you have rigid environments and things like that that don't design themselves around these realities, um, there's a lot of system things going on to those personal choices of when women step out or step back or don't raise their hand for the next thing.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, yeah, you that's such a good point that you bring up. Um, because I I think too, I could even hear the positioning that women do instead of maybe initiating a manager meeting and saying, How can you work with me so that I can be there for my growing family? You know, I I feel like it again, it's so interesting how much we kind of do this to ourselves. And I don't want to sit put the guilt on us, but how we're conditioned. Like it's not working out, okay, I guess I gotta go find something else versus challenging the system. Challenging the system and asking for what you need.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Right? It's like you get nothing that you don't ask for, right? You know, and this is not just a young woman's issue. It's like I have a good friend of mine, um, very senior, SVP type level, and she right now is exploring an opportunity that would require her to go into off into the office when she has been work from home. And let me tell you, the juggle that she is thinking through, and her kids are high school age, the but she is very consciously thinking about moving from home office into and the realities of the commute and what that means and and whatever, um, because we still are not systematically addressing some of those things. I think the other thing too is it's not just those policy barriers or you have to work from home, or we don't have a lactation room, or all those types of things, which are bare minimum. You need to have environments and policies that are pro-family. And I would say men should be able to take advantage of those flexible policies, not just if we fit if we work to support mothers, we will work to support all in right, and everybody benefits. But I think beyond some of that structural stuff, then it's like the bias, right? The it's like the gendered bias. There was this just heartbreaking research that was done where they evaluated and looked at high, high performing um men and women in organizations and their performance reviews. And what they found was that seven now, this is the top echelon, high, you know, objectively the highest performers in organizations. And what they found is that 76% of high performing women, even though they were high performing, still got negative feedback on their performance reviews. Compared to 2% of men, not a typo, 2% of men getting negative. So when you're a rock star in a man, you are a rock star in a man. When you are a rock star and a woman, there is still some stuff that we need to do to tweak about you. And that feedback was overwhelmingly. Lovingly about their personalities.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. So when you are both have, you know, the realities of being primary caretaker and the realities of even when I kill it at work, I am going to still be nitpicked about fundamentally who I am, not what I do. Right. Even if I'm the best.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I remember being told I was too too direct.

SPEAKER_01:

We all have. We all have. I was told you'd be more effective if you spoke 30% less. Oh my God. By a woman. A woman executive told me that. And here's the thing about feedback, right? I don't ever want us to say we shouldn't be listening to feedback. We have all have blind spots. And the reality is I'm verbose. I say a lot of words. I could be far more concise. People on this podcast listening will say she could have said that with like 30% less. But that's not who I am. And part of my magic happens in the brainstorm of it all. Or, you know what I mean? Where I the way that I just very stream of consciousness sometimes talk about. That's where I sit in genius. I am not the sit and contemplate and get the perfect response and then come back to everybody. I'm an in the moment.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Like, and I like to play off of other people's stuff, right? So when she said you'd be more effective if you spoke 30% less, it was from her lens of being the very precise communicator. My effectiveness actually comes from being an external processor. So in her world, it's ineffective to speak this much. In my world, this is where lightning strikes.

SPEAKER_00:

Right? Yeah. And I love this point too, because it's about bringing your authentic self. And I know that's an overused word, but you know, that we don't need to all be cookie cutter the same way. And that your brilliance does come through being your unique self. Really does. Um, you talk about critical inflection points where women quietly disengage or exit. And we've kind of been talking about that a little bit, but what are the points where you see this happening over and over again?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I wish it was just one point that we could pinpoint and then like just focus our attention there. But I think there are multiple points across the employee journey, right? Life cycle, where we have to think strategically about these things. We have an early career challenge, particularly in STEM. 20% of women with STEM degrees leave STEM professions in the first 12 months. They've spent four years or more getting degrees in STEM. And within the first 12 months, 20% of them are saying nope. Right. And that is when we have a tech talent crisis and we don't, we're trying to compete on a global stage. That should scare every executive, is that they have talent coming out and immediately making a judgment and pivoting their careers into non-technical careers. The next point is so by the age of 30, 68% of women have left STEM. So what's happening at 30? Right? You're now you're having families. It's like you're starting to see the handwriting on the wall that you're in cultures that don't really support that. They, you know what I mean? Right. So you have that, you know, sort of early mid-career kind of family kind of time. Then you start looking at those higher level promotions to be director or the senior director. And sometimes what you see is a lot of women, especially now, not raising their hands for those opportunities. Because what you'll hear is they'll hear, I don't want to play politics. I don't want to do politics because they have still been working from this playbook of merit. Do your work. You're evaluated on your outputs, right? Like I did the thing and we did whatever. And then you get up into these um rungs of the ladder in leadership where you have to build relationships and sell, sell internally. And women view that often as politics, right? And sometimes there is politics that are nasty in the true sense of like it's the who and the what, but politics sometimes gets looped into influence. Like we're right, where it's like I am a senior director, say of a function. You've got to recognize that you need to be influencing your peers, you need to be understanding their work, you need to be figuring out they have different priorities and what your priorities are, and now you need to negotiate some of those things. And if you label that politics and ick, it's like you don't want to raise your hand because you're no longer just head down doing the work. So when you get to those levels where it's less what you do and how you're doing and who you're influencing, we see women are opting out. Part of what we do at Quantum Bloom is like, how do we help you start building the skills of relationships and influence and communication early? So by the time that those are the job requirements, you view your practiced and you view that very differently. Then this is just politics and I don't want to play that game. Right. So I think that those, and then you go, and we talked a little bit about that very senior level where you have women who it's an inflection point where you're you've done the thing, you're no longer trying to prove yourself. Then you start thinking, where do I want to be? Where do I want to put this last chapter of my skills to use? And then you kind of start to realize that maybe the grass is greener on the outside of this system, you know, and you're seeing, you know, or if you're at the super echelon at the top, it's like you might be tired and exhausted. And it's like, are you gonna be the tall poppy? Are you gonna be the one driving change? Or are you gonna say, you know, I did my job and I'm gonna sit in this place now and I'm going to collect my big paychecks and big bonuses, and I'm gonna enrich my family because I am just exhausted and I have nothing left in the tank because I've been through 20, 25 years of the grind. So I think women at all of these different stages, there's different things and pressures for us to be thinking about and system level stuff. But here's what I think if we can start early, which is where quantum bloom is, if we can start early, where you see the world of work the way it really is, where you develop skills and relationships and confidence and like, you know, agency in the sense of like, I'm making intentional choices. I see it, I know myself, I know what I want, and I'm gonna go here, not there. Or I want that job, but I know the profile of that leader and I know how important that lead your leadership is, and I'm not gonna take the job even though it's a perfect job, because that manager is not gonna like when you start to know, right? And if that's the way we navigate, where you're not getting so exhausted by the time you get to the top because you've been wearing a mask and flexing to everybody's expectations of who you're supposed to be. I used to call it gumby, like I was expected to be gumby and to be able to be so flexible to everybody else's whims and what they wanted from Andrea, right? And it was never natural because I'm very outspoken and I have a strong sense of like self, but I was still trying to walk this tightrope of driving change while being myself. And like, and it was up, it was hard, and I didn't realize how hard it was till I left those environments.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, no, I mean, what you're what you're saying resonates so strongly with me. Um, not only for my time in corporate, but also the women that I've interviewed on this show. A lot of the upper um tiered women say it's lonely at the top. And then, you know, younger women that I come across in in the work that I do also say college just doesn't prepare you for the real world whatsoever. I mean, and I feel for that because I too have two daughters, and I don't know why colleges and universities, and and I appreciate what you guys are doing at the younger career entry point because it's so vital. What do you think universities should be doing? Or do you think that it begins more in the corporation education?

SPEAKER_01:

I think preparation is always helpful, but I don't think the universities, you think about what happens in a college career and all the existing things that those kids are doing, right? And how do you put another thing in there? Right. And at the same time, I do think that these kinds of topics of what might be considered soft skills, I like to call them durable skills, you know, life skills, right? I think it should and can be integrated into college curricula more than it is today. That said, we need employers to recognize that there is they're demanding the skills coming out of university students, like I need this, we need programs for that. It's like whatever it might be, heavy, heavy emphasis on the technical, technical, technical, technical. But I think we really need like when you start looking at these soft skills and the leadership skills, the ability to apply it in a real work setting is really important because while you do have some of these influence, relational, all these types of things have starting in college careers, it's not really apples to apples. Yeah. Right. And so I think you need the context of work to be the backdrop for some of this development, right? That you it's it moves from theoretical, like you will be faced with challenges around people understanding, you know, the impact of your work. What will you do? Versus on the job, work-based sort of opportunities to grow and develop, where that's a real thing, versus the theoretical prepare yourself in a in some role play in a college class. Right. Um, and I think we also need these, we need young people to be able to navigate the difficulties of multi-generational relationships and conversations and influence that are there's going to be friction. We need to be able to handle friction better than we do.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

All of us, right? That it's like, and you know, there's this coach at the women's basketball coach at Duke. It's like she has this um video that went viral that was like, we need to learn how to handle hard better. It's like life is not going to get easier, but we need to learn how to handle hard better. And when I think about work, you need the players, you need those different real players to start developing those skills. Um, and so yeah, I think it's really more employer side, early career leadership development, which is a huge open area. Because when we start providing actually employer-led solutions in this space, you are director level or above. The very rarely will you ever get a coach when you're 25. You're in a succession plan by the time you get a coach. And so we just provide this training too late. Companies know they need to do it, but they provide it too late. And if we were to shift left, go sooner, and build more of a better foundation of leadership and leadership pipeline, you don't then have to take, you know, a senior director and put them into coaching because they've developed bad habits.

SPEAKER_00:

I remember being at what we would call grade eight, and I felt so ready and hungry for the leadership training. But it, if I didn't get to the level nine, I didn't qualify. Even though I was hungry for it, I was ready for it. I mean, it was it's so interesting that you're hitting on that because that is a big gap.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. We start too soon. We start, we know leadership skills, which we may want to call, you know, soft skills or whatever. We know they're important, but we usually are too narrow on it's like it's when you're leading big teams. It's like, no, it's like leadership is not a position, right? It's not the position you hold. It's like you lead from any place that you sit. You lead up, you lead down, you lead sideways, you're on teams, you know, and all leadership starts from within, right? So knowing yourself, like intentionality. There's so much that you could start doing early with young people to get that sense of self, to learn about their strengths and weaknesses, to learn about their ambitions so that they pursue the things that are values aligned to them. Like there's so much that we could shift sooner and set the whole kind of career pathway up for better outcomes and impact and like success, you know, versus midway through your career, let's teach you some skills that maybe you could have benefited from 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_00:

I think that's such a good point. And I hope people who run businesses are listening to this and hear that leadership is not just a title, it is you can lead from any any spot because that is invaluable information for most companies. What have you seen from the the backlash of cutting back on DEI and kind of has it created new headwinds in your yeah? And yeah, how are how are you helping businesses still see the value that once we were making such great progress on, and then it felt like we took eight steps back, if not more?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So what I've seen, especially in the last year, is sort of organizations are falling into one of three camps. It's like one is there are the Costcos of the world, where they are just plowing forward, don't care what's happening outside in the, you know, political world, and they are doing what they set out to do. You have on the other spectrum organizations that were all doing it performatively anyways, and saw it as their big out, where they're like, peace out, I'm no longer doing this. And then there's people in the middle, the organizations in the middle that are trying to assess their risk appetite, um, trying to figure out how to thread the needle. It's a bigger burden, right? They, because they, and many of those that are sitting in that middle, they know it's critical that they be able to attract and develop like diverse talent for their business. Now, what I would say is that that last point, like to drive the business outcomes, organizations have got to start tying investments in talent to bottom line results. And unfortunately, HR leaders are still not speaking the language of business. We are seeing really some funky stuff happening in the world of HR where at one pharmaceutical company, HR is reporting to um the technology organization now because so much of it is around IT and what, and or so much around AI. There's more and more where CFOs are trying to understand the economics of talent supply and all sorts of stuff, and people are starting to sell solutions into CFOs. HR is at a point where marketing was 15 years ago. I led, I was a marketing leader for a long time. And when we had digital channels become the predominant channels in marketing, we moved from sort of being the arts and crafts shops, I'm making pretty pictures and telling good stories, to being able to connect every dollar spent to a dollar earned, right? Because the digital breadcrumb allowed us to start talking about customer acquisition costs and like return on investment in brand new different ways. And the CMOs that got on board, right? Those CMOs that got on board really were able to elevate their seat at the table because they became a revenue engine. Right. Right. So, but the CMOs that were still brand in comms and design and art, and they wanted to stay in that land of impressions and things like uh share a voice, right? Right, when those were their metrics versus revenue, they slowly lost position and influence because pretty soon you started seeing the rise of chief revenue officers and all sorts of other things, right? Chief growth officers and new titles and names, where they wanted to take the best of these things and repackage them. I think CHROs and chief people officers, whether they know it or not, are at that moment where they either need to evolve and up-level their functions to be able to connect programs to profits, right? Rather than talking about culture and engagement. Right. And so, and we're not there yet. And HR is still not a very powerful, it didn't start as a powerful seat at the table. And with all this technology and all of these sort of market levers on talent supply, all this kind of stuff, all the AI, HR leaders need to up level, or someone else is gonna start connecting investment to business outcomes and it won't sit in your function anymore. And you're gonna be doing payroll and policies.

SPEAKER_00:

I love this because I worked at a stint in uh recruitment marketing, and we definitely, you know, when we were attracting individual clients, we were that tracking the cost of acquisition for that employee. And we were also able to pull different levers for the types of, you know, whether it was DEI or specific uh business unit type classifications, engineers, etc. So HR, I agree with you, has such potential to tie revenue into their system to make it a better noticeable. Like, here's the value we bring, here's the money. I mean, retention, progression, the the loss of an employee and the cost of that.

SPEAKER_01:

Every executive peer of a CHRO should know that number.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. They should know, they should be so tuned into the cost of turnover, the cost of a vacant seat. It's like there's so many things that is not in sort of the ether of most organizations on connecting people things to financial outcomes. And it's like it's almost like mixed, it's hard to even comprehend that we're not there yet because there's so much data flowing through a lot of the HR systems, right? There's a lot of data, it's just not being presented in economic models that make the CFO take notice. And so then when you go and ask for programs to invest, say, in early career, high risk for attrition talent, like women in engineering or women in IT, when you go and say, we need to address this problem, and let me show you the math on why we need to make this dollar investment in someone that literally has been with us six months or just got hired, because the current sort of culture is you gotta you might get invested in once you're proven. And what we know statistically for these high-risk groups is they will be gone before they even have a chance to be invested in. So that's HR's job to be able to elevate their power and position in the organization and get more money coming into them to serve the ultimate business goals, right? And to compete on talent. Here's the other thing that you see too often they're benchmarking across to really crappy benchmarks, right? I was talking to somebody in the semiconductor industry, and they're like, well, our numbers on par with everybody else, so nothing to see here because we're just as bad as everybody else.

SPEAKER_00:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

Now the savvy HR person sees that low benchmark and they say, huh, if everybody's sucking at this and everyone's just saying, shrugging the shoulders, saying, is what it is, industry norm. The savvy HR leader will say, hmm, I want to break that norm. And if I do something different, how do I gain competitive advantage? Because I address this problem that everybody else is just sitting around saying is a fixed problem that can't be changed. You could come out looking like the hero.

SPEAKER_00:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

If you start talking about your work in things that the CFO cares about.

SPEAKER_00:

Dollars. Yes, absolutely. Revenue. Um, I and I know I I that's sorry, I took you off a little bit on a tangent there, but Okay. I absolutely see truth in everything that you're saying about how the systems need to be changed. And HR, to your point, is such a great place within the organizations that can evolve to help recognize the value in bringing in some of these programs like yours.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. We are not a cost. We are like a return engine. When you look at if we were to model what it costs for someone to come through Quantum Bloom's sort of most comprehensive program, and if you at year five conservatively retain 50% of your women engineers, and you could make this investment on year one, and at year five, you have 80% of those women staying, you're printing money.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Because you start to understand the economics of turnover. And the economics of turnover, you can model that. We built a model. We partner with an organization called Marstella, which models the entire employee life cycle. And the leader of that organization, this was an idea that came out of what she did in corporate at Geico, and she was able to economically show a savings of$94 million, which changed the boardroom conversation and got her resources to continue to reinvest into the programs, right? She changed the language. Very few people are taking it this far and getting sort of the elevating the conversation. And we know here's the thing HR leaders know. They know they should or could be investing, but it's like it's the first place that gets when your learning and development budget is the first thing to get cut, and you are a pay people-dependent business, and most of us are. So it's like really being like thoughtful on not just uh taking up, you know, space, people's attention, but for what purpose? And it's like, and that of course, then is should be values aligned and things that matter to you, right? That you and it's like, and when you are values aligned in your public persona or whatever it might be, it's easy. It's really easy to raise your profile and whatever, because you're staying, your values drive you, not necessarily the expectations of or the corporate machines rules. And there's an you know, it's interesting when you work in an organization and you are at a certain level and visibility, you know, you have to many people have to kind of figure out how to walk the line between representing the company, right? Because they are an officer or agent of an organization and then themselves. Hopefully, the best case scenario is you are in a values-aligned role. You are in a values-aligned company. And then you're not having to walk any tight robes because the way you show up is very much tied to the way it's difficult when there's a mismatch in that. You don't get to raise visibility without risk. It's like it is necessary to be a leader, a thought leader, like to have some sense of a risk tolerance. Because if you put yourself out there, you will not, it will, it's a matter of time before someone doesn't like the thing you said and they're challenging you and whatever. So you have to kind of have the stamina and the risk tolerance to have visibility and to be willing to take on the criticism or the darts and to have ways of dealing with it, right? Because it's like if you're gonna become a thought leader and you're gonna piss off some people, those things happen. It's like when things come into you, do you have the tools that those other people's opinions don't crush you, don't necessarily send you in a different direction that's not true, don't overly influence you, but that maybe are worth kind of listening to. Do you have the discernment to even take negative feedback? Right. And all that again is like stuff you can control, right? On how do you show up? But it's like, I think it's necessary for leaders to be risk takers. If you are not taking risks, I don't know if you can call yourself a leader of much because leaders are necessarily blazing trails, and it's risky to go where no one's walked.

SPEAKER_00:

Very well said. Um, I know I have had you for a while, so I am gonna wrap it up with my final question for you. What does to be bolder mean to you?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, bold, right? It's like for me, it's like I love the name of your podcast. I'm living a bold life. I am refusing to play small. It's like to me, it's about removing limits, removing barriers. It's like, and it's like, and I'm bold in the things that matter to me. I'm not necessarily bold in all things, but I have figured out what matters to me. And I am relentlessly pursuing progress in those areas. And I don't think there could be anything bolder than living your truest self through work.

SPEAKER_00:

It has been a pleasure learning about you and your business and your journey. Thank you so much for coming on and the work that you're doing for women at all levels and for changing systems, because that's really uh the hard work. So thank you.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, thank you, Mary. I really enjoyed this, and I hope your listeners do too.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for listening to the episode today. It was really fun chatting with my guest. If you liked our show, please like it and share it with your friends. If you want to learn what we're up to, please go check out our website at twobeeboulder.com. That's the number two, little beeboulder.com.