Women in Leadership
Virtual Event:
Achieve your next steps

Harnessing your power and influence; articulate your leadership brand and manage your future career

Join Professor Vinnicombe and Dr Anderson in their exploration of the myths of female leadership, the challenges women face today, and the practical options available to women to better position themselves for executive success. By the end of the keynote, attendees will gain insight into:

• Articulating your own leadership brand and verbalising your ambition,
• Leveraging the power of political will as well as political skills
• Navigating hybrid working to manage your future career.

You are smart, you are successful, and you are great at negotiating for others. If only you were so successful at asking for what you want. In this session, we will help you ask for exactly what you want - be it a job, a promotion, a pay rise, support, or more resources. Learn how to approach the negotiation table with confidence, and leave with what you want.

What we'll cover:

• How to approach any negotiation
• What you need to prepare in advance
• Addressing challenges – negotiation tips, moves, turns, and rebuttals
• Closing the negotiation

Your professional network profoundly impacts your job effectiveness and well-being: it is at the very heart of how you get your job done and how you advance your career. But what makes a strong network and how do you build it?

Based on the latest research into networks, this session is designed to help leaders and aspiring leaders to develop the techniques you need to build rich and diverse support and advice networks and to discover new networking practices to leverage them more effectively, both for your personal career goals and those related to your leadership role.

Through various reflection activities you will:

• gain practical insight into how networks can best help you with career challenges
• learn how you can become a more effective leader by promoting a culture of helpfulness in your organisation

Susan Hodgkinson is an award-winning executive coach and author of The Dignity Mindset: A Leader's Guide to Building Gender Equity at Work (2019), winner of the Nonfiction Authors Association Gold Award. She is a trailblazer in personal branding, having founded The Personal Brand Company in 1994.

A centerpiece of Hodgkinson's leadership development work is that it has always incorporated the needs and issues of women and people of color into its teachings, ensuring everyone learns the challenges of succeeding on a playing field that is not level and favors straight white men. She is the author of The Leader's Edge: Using Personal Branding to Drive Performance and Profit. The book received the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award.

She is a keynote speaker, workshop leader, and co-Leads "The Race & Gender Project" with Carol Fulp, consulting to the C-Suite on how to advance Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Fulp is author of Success Through Diversity: Why the Most Inclusive Companies Will Win.

Hodgkinson is a member of The Harvard Business Review Advisory Council. Her work has most recently been featured in Working Mother Media, NasDaq TradeTalks, HR Future Magazine, Training Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Indian Express, Essence Magazine, The Boston Globe, and other major electronic media and syndicated business columns. She holds her MBA from Simmons School of Management.

Susan is a global leader and advocate for change at Cranfield University, specialising in the lack of women in leadership (especially on corporate boards), women's leadership behaviours and the issues involved in women developing their executive careers.

Susan was Founder Director of the Cranfield International Centre for Women Leaders from 1999 to 2016 and the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Endowed Chair in Women's Leadership at Simmons College, Boston, USA from 2013-2016. She and her co-authors produce the annual Female FTSE Board Report, which she launched in 1999 and is regarded as the premier research resource on women directors in the UK and is renowned globally.

Susan receives regular recognition worldwide and was honoured in 2016 by the International Women's Forum as a woman who has "Made a Difference" in the world. Susan was also named in the HR Magazine Most Influential Thinkers, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021 - and has been inducted into the Thinkers50 Management Hall of Fame in 2021 (founded in 2009, the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame honours the legacy of an elite group of thinkers whose work has had a profound and lasting influence on the world of management).

Susan was awarded an OBE for her Services to Diversity in the Queen's New Year's Honours List in 2005 and subsequently awarded a CBE for her Services to Gender Equality in the Queen's Birthday Honours, 2014.

Dr Deirdre Anderson is Director of Cranfield University's Gender, Leadership and Inclusion Centre (GLIC). The GLIC is the hub for Cranfield's long-standing international reputation for research, executive development and collaboration with industry and government to ensure an evidence-based approach to attaining every woman's full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels in professional life.

An experienced occupational psychologist, Deirdre spent over 20 years working with organisations in the field of Learning and Development, before obtaining her PhD and taking up academic research and teaching at Cranfield University. Deirdre's research focuses on flexible and hybrid working, gendered careers, and work and family issues in varying cultures. In all of her work, she seeks to increase awareness of inclusion and diversity, challenging the often-unconscious processes which can limit individual actions and perpetuate systemic barriers in terms of organizational practices. Deirdre frequently presents her research at practitioner and academic conferences within the UK and internationally. Her current research explores the barriers facing Black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals in progressing to senior leadership positions in FTSE 350 companies.

Dr. Omobola Johnson is Senior Partner of TLcom Capital, a venture capital firm with focus on deal flow generation, investment, and value generation in technology companies in sub-saharan Africa.

Before joining TLcom, Omobola was Minister of Communication Technology, Nigeria from 2011 to 2015, focusing on the launch and execution of the National Broadband Plan, and the support of the Nigerian technology industry, including the pioneering involvement of the government in a local VC fund and a network of start-up incubators. Prior to serving in the Nigerian government, she gained over 25 years of consulting experience with Accenture including five years as Country Managing Director, working with companies in a variety of industries, transforming them into more competitive and dynamic organisations.

Omobola serves on the Board of a number of leading Nigerian and multi-national corporations including MTN Nigeria, Liquid Telecoms Holdings and is Board Chair Guinness Nigeria plc. Omobola has a Bachelor's in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Manchester; a Master's in Digital Electronics from King's College, London; and a Doctorate in Business Administration from Cranfield School of Management. She is the recipient of the Distinguished Alumna award from Cranfield and the Lagos Business School.

Krishnanjani is a recent Cranfield MBA alumni from 2018/19, with 12 years’ experience in the Software Technology industry and a self-declared “techie”. Krishnanjani is the Principal Engineeering Technical Manager at ZF Group, an automobile parts manufacturer, where she builds and manages digital products. At Cranfield she was secretary of the Women in Leadership club, and was a finalist in the Unilever Innovation Challenge for branding, marketing and supply chain.

As Director of Coaching/Lead Coach at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam (RSM), her specialisation is developing programmes to advance dynamic team success and to assist individuals to share challenges and best practices in service of each other's developmental goals.

Her teaching portfolio includes leadership development programmes and conferences focussing on leadership from a coaching perspective and she incorporates neuroscience in her coaching and teaching portfolio. Furthermore, as Lead Coach for the Erasmus Centre for Women and Organisations (ECWO), she specialises in coaching women, supporting gender balanced leadership and women empowerment and also devotes time to encouraging and empowering other coaches in their development. She is described as authentic, energetic and (com)passionate in all her engagements.

Gianluca Carnabuci is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at ESMT Berlin, the Director of Research, and holder of the Ingrid and Manfred Gentz Chair in Business and Society. With a PhD in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the University of Amsterdam. Gianluca studies how informal networks shape the flow of information within organizations and how that, in turn, affects the productivity of leaders, teams and organizations.

Dorothy Grandia is a specialist in leadership and influence communication in progression from management to leadership. As Associate Director of Programming at the ECWO Rotterdam School of Management, she has contributed to the development and delivery of gender-balanced leadership programming since its inception in 2014. She is also an executive coach in leadership communication at INSEAD since 2016 and for several years coached expat managers in cross-cultural communication at both Unilever and Heineken.

Since 2005, she has helped clients working primarily in STEM industry contexts to recognize and exploit the difference between objective and subjective decision-making in their communication strategy. Her interest in communication as a tool of influence on business and policy decision-making evolved out of early career experience in the United States as a legislative aide in the political system of the State of Texas. After leaving politics, she graduated with an MM in Vocal Performance from the New School University/Mannes College of Music and performed as a professional operatic soprano for many years in both the EU and the US. She also holds a BA in Asian Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Lisa Umenyiora is Executive Director of Careers and Student Life at Imperial College Business School, supporting 2,500 students across the School's portfolio of 15 post-graduate MSc and 4 MBA programmes. Lisa oversees all aspects of the student experience outside of academic delivery, with a particular emphasis on career and professional development, community building, global experience, and partnerships. She is also leading the student EDI strategy at the School. Lisa is a senior leader with over 15 years' experience driving strategy within higher education and career services.