LaVerne:

Welcome to Brilliant in 20, a new Podcast from the Scoop News Group and Emerald One where we celebrate the unique brilliance of today’s leaders and share their greatest lessons with you in just about 20 minutes. Hi, I’m LaVerne Council, CEO of Emerald One. My guest today is Carol Evans, the CEO and Executive Director of SHARE Cancer Support a national non-profit organization that supports, educates, and empowers women affected by breast, ovarian, or metastatic breast cancer, with a special focus on medically underserved communities. Prior to share Carol founded and served as President and CEO of Working Mother Media for 25 years. What a groundbreaker.

LaVerne:

Carol has launched many influential initiatives, including “The 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers” and the Multicultural Women’s National Conference. She is the author of “This is How We Do It”: The Working Mother’s Manifesto. Carol has also been a board member for multiple nonprofits, including Vice Chairman of the National Board of Trustees of the March of Dimes, where she assisted me in the launch of his major gifts campaign. And I can tell you that was really a highlight for me, really that for, with Carol, she’s been a lifelong advocate of equity and inclusion in the workplace, a spokesperson for women’s health issues and a champion for women of color. I am so proud that Carol, my friend is doing this and welcome to Brilliant in 20 Carol. I am so happy you’re here. It’s just wonderful to have this time with you.

Carol:

Thank you, LaVerne. I’m so glad to be here and to see you and just thrilled. Thank you.

LaVerne:

It’s always a pleasure. I like to say that you have more stamina and energy than anyone that I know of. You continue to do that. I don’t know what the vitamin is. I don’t know what you do in the mornings. I’m not going to ask, but my introduction covered the tip of the iceberg. You have been and will always be a phenomenal founder leader, trailblazer for working women, but women in general. And, and I’m just proud to call you friend. I’m sure you asked the question and she had been asked this question many times that I’m about to ask at least a thousand times, how do you do it? How do you even maintain, your energy? How do you maintain your zest, your passion? How do you do it? Carol?

Carol:

So, actually, LaVerne it’s really comes from my mother. My mother was a high energy, high action woman, and she was my role model for years, but I think I got that spirit from her. She went back to work when I just 12 years old and I helped her. She didn’t have the confidence that I had, but she had the ability to connect with absolutely anyone and to go, go, go morning, noon, and night so that’s where it comes from.

LaVerne:

I don’t know what that genius, but can you have your gene mapped out? I suspect

Carol:

Sure, [crosstalk 00:03:19]

LaVerne:

There’s probably some special DNA there that we can bottle a cell because I’m telling you, I’ve seen you come back from International Symposiums the night before and you’re on and you’re there and you’re present. And so kudos to you. [Crosstalk 00:03:37]

Carol:

Yeah. Thanks [inaudible 00:03:40] . That’s exactly right. Thank you.

LaVerne:

As a female leader, what qualities have you found that created that differentiator that you said that every corporation should embrace, every federal agency should embrace when thinking about their women leaders and those working mothers?

Carol:

Well, I think that for me, if their leadership qualities are kind of odd because I feel like in some ways I grew up in sales and part of being a great salesperson was being able to be a chameleon and women are so good at being able to be the person that the other person wants them to be in some way. We just know how to get along with so many people.

Carol:

On the other side, a lot of my success was from authenticity. So in a way I could match my mood or my personality with the person who I was with, who was mostly older, white male, who I was selling to. And I could just be, understand him and be there present and, and get from him what I needed in terms of information. But on the other hand, I could be extremely authentic in myself because I knew what I wanted. I knew what I was passionate about. I knew what I wanted to accomplish. So those CEOs for Working Mother Magazine, I knew how to listen to them and see the world from their perspective. But I also know how to tell them what I felt I wanted to demand on behalf of 34 million women in the country. Somehow that confidence to demand that of these very high level men was always inside me and was part of my leadership ability.

LaVerne:

It’s funny, I always say that when you’re trying to get someone to do something or convince them to do something, you have to make it a win-win and I think that’s what you’re saying. You’ve got to figure out what it is that you’re really working for, but you also got to figure out how to make it a win for them and you were better at that than anybody that I knew.

LaVerne:

It was getting that thing, that, making that thing important that working women need it. But at the same time, explain to them why this was in their best interest to do it so that it became a win-win not a win-lose situation.

Carol:

I never wanted people to feel like we were proselytizing or we were demanding, we were explaining that this was something that was in their best interest. 34 million women needed to have babies so that our country could flourish and so that everyone could be self fulfilled, but the labor market needed our talent. How else can we get ahead if we can’t be working mothers?

LaVerne:

When I think about the things you’ve done, especially around publishing and non-profit work, the starting and founding Working Mother Media is a big deal. And you’ve always acted like I did that my spare time, but experience getting more from less before COVID has challenged people. And we talked about this offline, how it’s challenged some non-profits that we worked with. And how have you been able to get around that? And what’s been your biggest win as you moved into this other role was SHARE to keep people focused, even in times when they don’t think they have the dollars, so they don’t have the time or they don’t have the energy.

Carol:

Yeah. It’s a hard thing in COVID. But we have found that translating our work to first of all, remote work has been very, very smooth. And partly, I think it’s because the teamwork that we have, I believe in teams, I believe that I am there to help them be the best that they can be. I’ve learned over a long career that it’s not about me, it’s about them.

Carol:

And I feel like getting the best value is really about what’s valuable to them. How can they contribute? How can they improve our organization? And that goes from our board to our person who helps the helpline to our volunteers who do this without being paid. Having everybody move in the same direction for the same purpose, because it’s been clearly explained what’s trying to be done and where our future lies. That’s really the secret ingredient of leadership. You, people on my team know where I want to get to. We’ve decided it together and we’re going to solve all the obstacles in our way together.

LaVerne:

Let’s go down that path a little bit, because I like where it’s going. The fact is teaming to you requires as the leader that you define and architect a direction, but you said with them, which I love. Talk to me about how you create it. And then maybe you want to use a story, an example, that’d be great, but when you’ve created direction and we’re able to get that team mobilized.

Carol:

Yes. Well, I could give you an example that we’re working on right now at SHARE. You know, we have at SHARE our outreach to the public is half of what we do. So half of what we is outreach to the public and underserved communities and the other half is patient support for women with breast, ovarian, metastatic breast, and now also uterine cancer. So we really divide our work into two different buckets of work. And now we can’t go out physically and find people to talk to in the general public about signs and symptoms of our cancers. We can’t go out and warn them about making sure they get diagnostics. We’re trying to fight the terrible disparity in outcomes by talking to the communities of color, to the underserved communities, medically underserved, especially and giving them information that they can take to heart. Well, now we can’t go anywhere in person.

Carol:

So we have to rethink, we reach the general public and how we accomplish this mission, which is half of our missions. So we have our team at SHARE is working at all levels. The people who are the ambassadors that go into the community are working on this. The managers are working on this across different functions. We have a meeting every week called Create, Don’t fix. And we go into that meeting to think, how can we solve this problem where we can’t be face to face, everything is now remote. What are we going to do? And so I honestly don’t know the answer. These people are doing it. They know the answer. And so little by little we’ve been we’re in our sixth week of this little by little, we have pulled together exactly how we’re going to solve these problems. And now we’re putting a plan, a specific plan and budgets and everything together.

Carol:

And we will be executing on this in from now on. But if I try to do that in my little office by myself, which is not my home, my home office by myself, I wouldn’t have come up with nine tenths of the ideas that the people who are doing this every day have come up with. So what I do is I listen and I grab the ideas that I think are executable, knowing, because I know more about the budget and the capabilities and the capacity of the organization, I grab the ideas that can work and we commit together and we move forward in whatever way we need.

LaVerne:

And I love the idea you say, Create, Don’t fix.

Carol:

Yes. I [crosstalk 00:11:07] learned a long time ago. Create, Don’t fix up my Executive coach, Mary Lynne Heldmann taught me that.

LaVerne:

I like it. I think I’m still in that Carol. I think so.

Carol:

Be my guest.

LaVerne:

You’ll see your shirt, I’ll wear it. So you put this Create, Don’t fix mentality with this high focus stamina that you got from Agnes with this high power team that is willing to work together and then figure out the direction. So you put all that together. And to me, you’re a unicorn, right? Because most people this, so a lot, right? You’re a business leader focused on what’s in your heart and you’ve always led that way. And even as you about solving these issues, you’re talking about them from, I don’t understand. I don’t know, but what I do know is this, this and this, and I take that what they’re saying, and I create something I think could happen. So you made a career out of doing things that really matter to you.

LaVerne:

Some of us don’t get that blessing to really do stuff that matters. How many times have you had a job that you do? This really does not what I want to do, but maybe if I do this a little longer, I can do what I want to do. But you have done things like Working Mother Media, that really matter to you like Mark in the March Dimes, like doing the work with SHARE, how do you drive yourself to reach for the things that really, really matter to you? You were in sales, but you leverage your capability of sales to do what you really want to do. Tell the audience, how do you do that? How do you maintain your true self?

Carol:

Well, I think it’s about your decisions that you make. So all throughout my career, I had just little teeny decisions. Like the first career decision was I could work for Cosmopolitan magazine with Helen Gurley Brown or Ms. Magazine with Pat Carbine and Gloria Steinem.

LaVerne:

Wow. The big names.

Carol:

Yeah. I could’ve made a lot more money at Cosmopolitan, but I chose Ms. Magazine. And then I could, then my next career choice was to work on Working Mother. And it was being launched by a big publishing company. And I said, I know how to do this because my mother was a working mother. And so I pushed myself right into that spot where I could lead that new, new, new magazine. Nobody else wanted the job. Nobody else understood it. I grabbed it. And then at every point in my career, I made decisions that weren’t about title. They weren’t about money.

Carol:

They weren’t about power. They were about my true North and what I wanted to do and what I wanted to spend my time on. And so I had a wonderful career because of that. And also I was very brave. You know, you have to be brave. I went out to, by Working Mother from the previous three male owners in 2001, and I had 36 nos. Everybody said, no, we don’t want to invest in you. But the 37th organization that I went to invested with me and we bought Working Mother and I followed my heart because I had started, I had launched it in 1978 and I turned around and bought it in 2001. So I just, every little decision leads to something that’s either right for you or not right for you.

LaVerne:

Yeah. And just stay with it and buy a life…

Carol:

[inaudible 00:14:24].

LaVerne:

but being brave, right?

Carol:

Being brave, corporate, bravery career bravery, I mean, we’re seeing so much bravery around us in the nation right now with people going out to protest and to express themselves that bravery extends to every area of your life. You have to be a brave mother to be a good mother. You are one of the bravest mothers. I know LaVerne.

LaVerne:

Thank you. Thank you. I think I’m just the lucky to have a kid that taught me a lot. That’s for sure.

Carol:

Yeah, me too, [inaudible 00:14:56] taught me a lot.

LaVerne:

[inaudible 00:14:58] Right. You know, it’s interesting that following your dream and it’s, and you say you launched a 78 and bought in 2001 and you know, and I got a suspicion that from 78 to 2001, you were like, why don’t I own this?

Carol:

Exactly right. Yes.

LaVerne:

So, something clicked. What clicked?

Carol:

Well, I left Working Mother after 10 years. I was working for that big publishing company. And I deliberately went to a smaller company where I could be a more senior person. I became the President of Stagebill Magazine for the performing arts, which I adore the performing arts,

LaVerne:

Stagebill which we all know

Carol:

Everybody knows. And I loved it because I could immerse myself in that world. But, but it wasn’t my first love. And so when I was able to but I learned what I needed to learn to be an entrepreneur. I learned at the feet of entrepreneurs. And then I was able to by Working Mother. So in a way, the little decisions that I made set my, set me up for being able to do what I eventually was able to do. But a lot of it also was just, really going for it and saying, this is what I want.

Carol:

No, no way was anybody going to help me by Working Mother? You know, I mean, I was not the profile. Only men got investment money in those days, only men. And, and it was a terrible situation for women, but I got it because I just didn’t give up.

LaVerne:

Thank you. Amen for that. Right. Not giving up is half the battle.

Carol:

It is.

LaVerne:

That is, it is. If you give up, you lost, it’s that’s simple.

Carol:

Correct. Exactly. Yeah.

LaVerne:

It’s that simple. So, your determination and in deciding what to do, when I saw that you were working with SHARE, I was like, nobody better. Right? This is when people are at the wit’s end and need the most help. So what made you change and move into this and fill this gap? Cause I know you saw something.

Carol:

Yeah. Well, what I saw was, what I saw at SHARE was that program that they have for women of color LatinaSHARE is a 25 year old program reaching out to MANNA Linguistics, Spanish-speaking women. And that to me is really part of what I’m all about is helping diverse women to get ahead. So it’s not just white women at the top and then they also have African-American SHARE, Japanese SHARE. They do languages. They serve women who were diagnosed at every stage of, of these cancers from any walk of life. And that was what touched me the most. Also, the other thing that touched me was that the women who work at SHARE are breast cancer survivors, or they’re living with metastatic breast cancer or uterine cancer survivors, what better work team could have than people who have lived through this terrifying diagnosis, the treatment process and survivorship who lived through that to help others. I just fell in love with the whole idea of how SHARE operated and its value system.

LaVerne:

I think it’s wonderful for people to hear one your passion. Cause you know, I’m now like how do I volunteer? Right? But also your deliberateness. And I want our listeners to pay attention to you’re very deliberate. You understood this organization, you understood where a gap was, you understood it to be a gap that you had a passion for, and that allows you to bring Agnes to the table, right. Because if you didn’t have all that, you can bring her with you because you couldn’t have that kind of passion. So I think it’s really, really important that to realize what I’m gaining from all this, and it does so good for my spirit is you got to do the things that drive you to your best you to bring that team together, to be their best for those women that really need.

Carol:

Yes. That’s exactly right.

LaVerne:

Yeah. Yeah. I think a great lesson for all of us focusing on your career and what’s in your heart can be fulfilling, you know that, but I imagine that there are setbacks, a lot of things can be difficult. Some people just don’t get it.

Carol:

Yeah.

LaVerne:

What’s some of those lessons that you’ve learned over the time of being hard lead,

Carol:

There’s a lot of really big difficulties that I’ve had in my career. I mean, one thing was that I bought Working Mother three weeks before 911 and it was just a terrible, terrible experience because I, I inherited a hundred employees and I didn’t even know their names. And I felt like I had to save their lives, because we were right there in Manhattan. And we lost a third of our business that in the third week of owning the company. So, we had to just completely regroup. We lost all of his business overnight and so much was at stake. The entire existence of his magazine that I loved was that stake. And what I learned from that was that, it was really, I mean, resilience, perseverance, what do you want to call it? Is that, you can, you can fall away to the bottom, right.

Carol:

To the bottom and see that there’s just a terrible gap between where you are and where you need to be. And you couldn’t just get yourself out by doing what you do best. So being authentic, being deliberate, getting the team together, trying to figure it out, listening. I mean, I didn’t even know that much about, what was going on at that time cause I was brand new back to the company.

LaVerne:

Yeah.

Carol:

So, and I think also in terms of people not getting it, Oh my gosh, I could give you stories upon stories. People thought that we were, leading a political movement in 1978 when we launched people didn’t understand at all, why mothers should be out working. And, and to me, I just kind of like get my own head aligned about why, why this is important so I might write a presentation or write a paper, write an email that says this is what is important. So it’s shared, for example.

Carol:

Why is it important that these women who are just receiving a new diagnosis, have someone to call, who’s been through that exact journey? Why is that important? Well, because she’s not going to get it in the medical community, she’s not going to get it from her family in many, many cases, she has no one to turn to, she’s scared, she might not even want to tell anybody about this. So you look at that and you say that is what we’re solving for.

LaVerne:

Yeah.

Carol:

That’s what we have to get clear about.

LaVerne:

I love it, Carol. You are everything that I’ve ever thought and more. I don’t have a word for it. I think you have [foreign language 00:21:43] I’m going to create the new word.

Carol:

Oh. I like it.

LaVerne:

Special innate power that allows you to bring out the best in others and never ever feel like you cannot accomplish your goal. I have known you for a lot of years and I’ve never known you not, not to do what you said you would do, and to do it against all odds. And so when people talk about the little stuff that I have to put up with and the piddly stuff, I think of people like you, who you come in and you get it and you get it done. And if it’s not what you want to do, you change until it is.

Carol:

That’s the secret. You create it,

LaVerne:

Create it and you make it work. So I really appreciate you for giving me this time today. I, I love you. I respect you. I adore you. I admire you. You’re my friend. And before we go, I have one question. I’ve asked people this question, I’ve asked them what’s on their desk. So I’m going to ask you. It’s always interesting. What’s on your desk right now?

Carol:

Right? Well, my desk right now is my dining room table.

LaVerne:

Okay.

Carol:

It has so much stuff on it. I’m a yellow pad note taker.

LaVerne:

Okay.

Carol:

And, and I, and I also take notes on my iPhone. So my, my desk is filled with yellow pad notes that I then staple together and I file them for the next meeting. And so that I can remember all the details of what was said, because to me, that relationship of what I said to you, and you said to me, I want to document it in my own little handwriting so that I know so that I could pick up the thread because it’s personal. It’s if it’s business, it’s still personal. If it’s personal, that is really family, and so I want to always be able to pick up the thread of what we said last. So my desk is filled with all these yellow pads. I usually have like 17 going at one time. It’s low tech, but it gets me through. And it makes me feel like I, I will never forget our conversation because I wrote it down.

LaVerne:

Wow. Carol, I’m speechless. There’s nothing more to say cause that’s special. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your insights. I want yellow pads everywhere. Now. I want my own to process. I think I’m the Digital Diva. Forget Digital. I want my own pass now. I think.

Carol:

[inaudible 00:24:08] Thank you so much.

LaVerne:

Thanks for being with us. I appreciate you, adore you. You’ve been brilliant. And as always, I could spend more than 20 for our listeners today. I know they’ve been blessed. Thanks so much love.

Carol:

Thank you Laverne. I’m so joyful that you called me and that we’re doing this. Thank you.

LaVerne:

And thank you for joining Brilliant in 20 a joint production of Scoop News Group and Emerald One. We look forward to sharing our next episode with you. So stay Brilliant.