Mission Forward with Carrie Fox

This week’s episode is brought to you by SHRM. Read on to learn more.
 

Jennifer McCollum has driven a long and winding road to her position in the C-suite. Today, she leads Linkage, a SHRM company, where she oversees the strategic direction and global operations of this leadership development firm.
 

This week, Carrie Fox sits down with Jennifer to talk about, well, a lot. In addition to her work as CEO, Jennifer has become an inspiring voice in the realm of women's leadership. Her book, "In Her Own Voice: A Woman's Rise to CEO: Overcoming Hurdles to Change the Face of Leadership," is a definitive take not only on what it takes for women to advance their careers but for any organization eager to improve gender equity at every level for this generation, and the next.
 

As McCollum explains, while women represent half the workforce, a stark drop-off occurs in the executive ranks. "When we look at the C-suite specifically, about 70% is still the leadership majority of white men," she says. McCollum's mission is to change that status quo.
 

The data is out and shows clearly the positive impact of women in leadership roles. What are organizations doing to help women face the unique challenges, societal expectations, and work-life pressures they face, while enabling these same women to do the best work? "To drive change, we must encourage women to bring their full, authentic selves to work," she says.
 

Through Linkage, McCollum has empowered thousands of women. Now, with her book, she hopes to reach women at all career levels with research-backed insights on overcoming hurdles and help them to truly thrive.
 

Our great thanks to Jennifer McCollum for joining us this week.
 

Sponsor: SHRM

SHRM provides solutions for 95% of Fortune 500 companies to transform talent management, accelerate executive development, elevate workplace culture, and build inclusive workplaces. SHRM promotes diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging while advancing women leaders to construct better workplaces. Mission Partners routinely consults SHRM first when facing HR and best practice challenges and we're thrilled to be able to work with SHRM as the sponsor of this week's episode. Learn more at SHRM.org.

AI is an important tool and an indelible part of our future. But we don't need to lose our humanity in the process of using it.

This week’s essay comes from the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights directly to your inbox. If you like what you read, we hope you’ll subscribe to ensure you receive this each week.

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• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

Community, says our guest this week, is not a place. It's a practice.

It is a practice of authenticity, vulnerability, mutual support, and accountability in creating meaningful connections between each and every one of us. And he should know. He's dedicated his life and career to helping others challenge assumptions and daring to dream of a new future together.

We welcome Rev. Ronnie Galvin to the show this week to share his journey through social change and community building. He's an incredible advocate and change agent, and, in spite of the challenges and strife he sees around us today, he's also an optimist: "I fundamentally believe that our capacity to solve the biggest problems in front of us is directly related to the experience and the practice of community that we engage in with each other in a world where it feels like everything is falling apart."

His current enterprise, Communivation, is an embodiment of his passion for aiding people, organizations, and movements to convene and generate transformative ideas for community experience and practice. Despite the despair and angst felt in these challenging times, Galvin expresses his firm belief in the power of community to solve the biggest problems faced by society and "to interrogate our current reality fiercely and lovingly, but also dream about and reimagine and practice the future that we want together." The conversation is a powerful reminder of the role of community in fostering justice, equity, and sustainability.

Thank you, Reverend Galvin, for joining us on Mission Forward.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

The memory we carry in our pockets directly affects the memory in our heads—and that impacts how we communicate. So, what are you doing to protect that precious time you have ... to think

This week’s essay comes from the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights directly to your inbox. If you like what you read, we hope you’ll subscribe to ensure you receive this each week.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

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Now Available! More Than Words: Communications Practices of Courageous Leaders by Carrie Fox, founder and CEO of Mission Partners, is available. You're invited to join an emerging community of practice and become a positive and powerful agent of change.

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina has taken her modest public health email for friends and family and fashioned it into a public health powerhouse of a newsletter and significant force of influence for millions. Yes, that little newsletter, "Your Local Epidemiologist," grew from a personal email list to over 330 million followers seeking clear guidance amid uncertainty during the pandemic.

Dr. Jetelina sits down with Carrie to reflect on how we had to learn to navigate the firehose of pandemic information. She turned that effort toward teaching, translating complex science for diverse audiences through an empathetic and apolitical lens. No, she's not trained in communications. Dr. Jetelina is a professor, and embracing that role free of judgment set the stage for her personal rise to prominence.

As culture continues to evolve, Jetelina argues public health must improve its communications capacity and community engagement. She's doing her part to move the discussion forward; she now tackles more ideologically charged topics like gun violence, though still approaches these issues through her solutions-focused, nonpartisan lens.

Throughout the tumult, Jetelina has stayed anchored by her commitment to equip trusted messengers and meet people where they are. Her trailblazing work shows scientific facts alone don't shape opinions; we must appeal to shared values. She calls us all to reimagine public health as a collective mission vital to our shared future. Our great thanks to Dr. Jetelina for joining Mission Forward this week.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

The most compelling stories for social change break stereotypes and build new ways for us to understand issues and each other. Start by looking for stereotypes in your communications, and then practice some reframing. As we learn this week, the story will be even better as a result.

This week’s essay comes from the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights directly to your inbox. If you like what you read, we hope you’ll subscribe to ensure you receive this each week.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

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Now Available! More Than Words: Communications Practices of Courageous Leaders by Carrie Fox, founder and CEO of Mission Partners, is available. You're invited to join an emerging community of practice and become a positive and powerful agent of change.

What does it mean to orient your life around your mission? We talk about mission all the time around these parts, but when was the last time you stopped, took a deep breath, and embarked on the discernment journey around not just what you do in the world but what you want to leave behind when you're gone from it?

This week, kicking off the eighth season of the Mission Forward podcast, Carrie sits down with Dr. John Izzo, author, and advisor who has dedicated his mission to helping companies and individuals find theirs. This conversation is a masterclass in vulnerability; Dr. Izzo shares how experiences from his childhood, growing up without his father, shaped his desire to help people live more purposeful lives. This led him to become a minister, get a Ph.D. in organizational psychology, and eventually advise companies on creating positive cultures for themselves.

He's also a leading trend-spotter and shares with Carrie major trends he sees in business and society: rethinking our relationship to work and seeking more meaning, the growing divide between the wealthy and others, and more. We're at an inflection point, he says, where we could create a more regenerative society or head down a darker path. The choice is made by the cultures we create.

The bottom line, according to Dr. Izzo, is this: "Ultimately, the only thing that's going to matter to you is what you wound up giving the world, not what you wound up taking from it.” 

We're deeply grateful to Dr. Izzo for sharing his time and attention with our Mission Forward community. 

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

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Now Available! More Than Words: Communications Practices of Courageous Leaders by Carrie Fox, founder and CEO of Mission Partners, is available. You're invited to join an emerging community of practice and become a positive and powerful agent of change.

In a world where communication breakdowns seem increasingly commonplace, even the most talented communicators can question their ability to connect. Leaders at every level wrestle with how to communicate change or address critical issues, often assuming their messages are being heard when, in truth, much gets lost along the way. 

This season, we’re staring those communication challenges in the eye, and in so doing, we’ll introduce you to key practices that some of the world’s most effective leaders use to communicate. The skills they practice can all be learned, and our incredible lineup of guests will show you how. 

Through courageous storytelling and a commitment to equitable, inclusive practices, we aim to model the communication skills you need to better serve your communities and workplaces, proving that authenticity and integrity, not eloquence alone, hold the power to drive change.

In the fast-paced nature of time, where it’s all too easy to get caught up in what’s coming next (vs. what’s happening now), where we want to be (vs. where we are), and how we get there (vs. what we’ve accomplished to date), it’s good to pause and remember that life is fast, and it’s short. Wherever you are, may you find something wonderful worth holding onto in this present moment.

This week’s essay comes from the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights direct to your inbox. If you like what you read, we hope you’ll subscribe to ensure you receive this each week.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

So much of the success of any of our DEI work is rooted in our ability to communicate vision through metaphor. It is, after all, a metaphor that connects to emotion, to our human ability to find empathy and build affinity between us. Vision, often, starts with a metaphor built with the heart in mind.

In this rebroadcast episode, we are talking about the role of storytelling in social change. And today’s guest has a natural gift for uplifting powerful and personal stories of impact from some of the nation’s most effective charities to build a more trusted charitable sector.

Art Taylor is president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance. As head of the Alliance, he oversees the organization’s work, which includes setting standards, evaluating charities in relation to those standards, publishing the Wise Giving Guide, and promoting charity accountability, plus a whole lot more. Art led the Wise Giving Alliance to introduce the accredited charity seal, a symbol of trustworthiness used by national and local charities that adhere to the Better Business Bureau standards for charity accountability, and it’s estimated that more than a billion impressions of that charity seal exist in the public domain. This is the bellwether that indicates to donors whether an organization is trustworthy.

At the foundation of all this success, however, is Art’s vision of success. This is the story — the metaphor — that touches us, too. “America is a very competitive place. And there are always ten chairs and 15 people. But I believe that we can take those ten chairs, and if 15 people get together, we can rework those chairs and make a bench, a place for us all to be able to sit down. And that’s how we have to view the world. We keep viewing the world as a zero-sum game. It’s not. There’s always more that we can produce if we work together.”

This is a conversation not about building bridges between communities but building a bench and offering those with opposing views the opportunity to sit together on it in the greater spirit of charity, impact, and trust. We thank Art Taylor for joining us on this show this week.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward