Part 1-How an Unconventional Leader Fosters High-Level Virtual Relationships — with Coco Brown

Pam Harper (00:00): Our guest today is an unconventional CEO who leads to foster high-level virtual relationships. What does it take to do this? Join us for episode 214 of Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper.

Pam Harper (00:16): This is part one of our wide ranging interview with Coco Brown CEO of the Athena Alliance. It was such a wonderful conversation that we just couldn't cut it short. So we're releasing it as two episodes to respect your time. Part two is also immediately available as episode 215 at growthignitersradio.com or wherever you get your podcasts. So you can listen to our entire conversation at your convenience.

Chris Curran (00:55): This episode is brought to you by business advancement, incorporated, enabling successful leaders and companies to accelerate to their next level of success on the web@businessadvance.com. And now here's Pam and Scott.

Pam Harper (01:11): Thanks Chris. And welcome everyone. I'm Pam Harper, founding partner and CEO of business advancement incorporated and sitting right across from me as always is my business partner and husband Scott Harper.

Scott Harper (01:26): Hey everybody, it's great to be with you again, and as always, our purpose here is to spark new insights and inspiration and immediately useful ideas to help visionary leaders accelerate themselves. And of course their companies to their next level game, changing innovation, transformation and growth,

Pam Harper (01:45): And because so many visionary CEOs tell us that one of their biggest challenges is leading their organization to move even faster. As the world keeps changing. Here's a gift, our quick assessment, five questions to ask when you need to move even faster, when you're already leading at warp speed to bring bold visions to life, it's easy to feel like everything's important because it is. One CEO actually told me that thinking about this was keeping him up at night. Well, this quick assessment can help you discover where your energy and resources can have the most powerful impact under your current circumstances while it doesn't replace conversations with employees and other stakeholders, it's a starting point that can help you come up with some immediately useful next steps. It can also help you sleep better at night. So go today to the show notes page for growth Igniters radio episode 214 and click on the five questions link in resources.

Scott Harper (02:48): You know, Pam at the core of our five questions is the value of ensuring that your company's culture is in sync with your company's strategy. And to that point, working off of that, that we've been seeing more and more articles in the news that promote the importance of bringing people back into the office after all this virtual stuff, through the pandemic, but at the same time, given how far we've come with technology combined with people's preferences and needs that have risen over the past few years, we've seen that virtual relationships can play an equally important role in company growth,

Pam Harper (03:24): But it takes unconventional leadership to bring virtual relationship building to its full potential, especially at the highest levels.

Scott Harper (03:32): That's true.

Pam Harper (03:33): That's why we're speaking today with Coco Brown, the founder, CEO and board member of the Athena Alliance. Athena is revolutionizing leadership success while leveling the playing field for women. We're going to have her share more about it in just a moment, and you can also read much more about Coco's background by going to growth Igniters radio.com, episode 214, and scroll down to her bio. Coco, welcome to Growth Igniters Radio!

Coco Brown (04:04): Thank you for having me.

Pam Harper (04:06): This is such an interesting episode because ,as Scott said, we are seeing all these different kinds of articles that say "you have to be in the office. It's so important. You can't have a culture, you can't create those relationships outside the office."

Scott Harper (04:21): People are gonna drift away ...

Pam Harper (04:23): And you are going in the opposite direction and doing it very well. So we had to have you on growth nitrous radio. So, before you tell us a little bit more about Athena, I'm curious about you. I'm guessing that you didn't always imagine yourself as the CEO of software as a service organization, helping women executives reach their higher potential.

Coco Brown (04:50): I did always see myself in charge, but, you know, from a very, very, very  young age, I always saw myself in charge. But yes, I think the rest of that statement is true.

Pam Harper (05:02): Okay. What was the major influence that led you to your business focus? And we'll talk more about what Athena Alliance actually is in a bit.

Coco Brown (05:10): Well, just very quickly -- in the first decade of my career, I graduated from university about 30 years ago now, and immediately moved from the east coast to the west coast, not even knowing what Silicon valley was. I was not a technical person. I was a psychology major, very much still today, driven by people and relationships, and people structure, and organization structure. And I found myself in Silicon valley in the heart of tech. And my entire career has been in tech kind of, accidentally. As you say, I sort of didn't imagine this. At the age of 27, I found myself in the position of being elevated to running about two thirds of a company that is in the deep IT infrastructure space, that is like the plumbing of the business -- the servers, the networks, the data center, the databases, et cetera.

Coco Brown (06:09): And that company was about a hundred million in revenue at that time and flying high. But we nearly crashed in the.com bust. Literally in a matter of a blink of an eye,  in 18 months, we went from a hundred million in revenue to 10 million in revenue. And around that time, I was asked to take over as COO, and then president and COO, and the entire business reported to me. My first order of business was to turn the company around, which I did. And fast forward, all of that early 12 - 13 years of my career, I hadn't really thought about barriers. I was just operating under the sense of like, "I can do this, I can do this, I can do this." And then by 2005, when we were clearly turned around, doing well, growing, diversifying the business, and moving up the food chain, working directly with chief information officers as our customers, I started to have this sense of internal and external limitations.

Coco Brown (07:19): I started to think about what people, sensed as limits. I'd meet a woman CIO, she'd say, oh, and I'm the only one in the valley. And I'd say, no, no, there's another one. There's, you know, Gina and Jerry and son has a day and, you know, Marty Minna and so on. I started getting us together for dinner groups, largely because it started making me also think about, well, wait a minute, I'm a woman. And I look like I'm very young and I'm not technical by sort of the, I've never touched a line of code in my life. And I started thinking about my own limitations and perceived external and internal how people saw me externally, as well as the worries I had when I walked into a powerful room and I was surrounded by men. So that led to this dinner group that I started, that wasn't about, you know, "gosh, it's really hard being a woman and growing in career," because we were already at the top, we were women who had achieved the goals we were looking for.

Coco Brown (08:16):  We were talking about data center strategy and business continuity planning and disaster recovery, and the things that CIOs talk about. Fast forward, from 2005 to 2015. Now 10 years later, I'm hosting this dinner group once a quarter over and over. And it grew from about eight women at the start to 80 some women by 2015. And then I stepped down from running Taos in 2012. I stayed on the board two years and then I sold my interest to the other two guys. And I was looking for the next thing I was gonna do. And at that point, all the way back to your initial point, I knew I was gonna build something. I knew I was gonna be a CEO and an entrepreneur. And I knew it was gonna have something to do with this community of women.

Coco Brown (08:59): And the reason that I knew it had to do with this community of women is because that's the one thing I held onto at that point. I had been with Taos for 17 years. So that was kind of the genesis point. Senator Mark Warner was out from Virginia on a hearts and minds run of Silicon valley. This was 2015. He got a group of senior executive women from the valley together, and about 25 of us sat around a table. And he said, "what's on your minds?" Someone said, "Why aren't we in the boardroom?" And I got a flurry of emails the next day saying, "That's it Coco, you know, solve this problem." And I said, okay, let me start there. And that was the starting point. I'll start there, just like that.

Scott Harper (09:42): Wow. Now let's talk a little bit about your company's growth story. You've come to the point of starting it and you decided to make it a virtual organization. This was before the pandemic and all that. That was pretty bold. What was behind that decision?

Coco Brown (10:02): There were two big things behind that decision. One was my own need. You know, having run a company as president COO for 10 years, everything reported to me, but I was the one report to the CEO. And the one thing I didn't have during that time was the ability to fundamentally create the structure that I felt was gonna be the most effective structure for the organization. And again, I'm a people person, so organization is made up of people. So one thing that I realized is in this sort of modern world, we've gone from, you know, having a separation between business and home life back in the day before cell phones and internet, and always connected. We have this factory model of business structure that says you clock in, you clock out, you have eight hours here and you know, and then you go home and now you have your home life...

Scott Harper (10:57): The old days. Yeah.

Coco Brown (10:59): Back in the old days. Yeah, yeah. That doesn't exist any longer. And so what happened was companies crept into our home lives. But our home lives weren't given the same permission to creep into our company life. And the things I did while I was at Taos was I never missed a field trip. I picked the kids up or dropped them off at least three times a week. I volunteered in the classroom, but I could do that because I was at the top of the organization. I could dictate that structure, but it still was like chipping away at things I needed in order to be okay as a parent and also doing big things as a leader. And so when I decided I was gonna start Athena virtually a big part of that was my conviction that we can create businesses that do not require offices. Now, of course, there's limitations. If you have a manufacturing floor or, you know, it's a hospital, you have to be there.

Scott Harper (11:57): Right.

Coco Brown (11:59): But in our case, I didn't need anybody in an office. And if I permitted them not to be in an office, then I gave them the beauty of having interruptions occasionally from a kid who would walk up and say, "Hey mom, are you on a call right now?" And you'd say, "no, I'm not on a call. What's up honey?" And it would turn into this great, like five minute connection, you know, and that's so meaningful and so important. And then you go back to work energized and excited and, and not carrying so much of the weight that you do as a parent of like, okay, I've gotta be in the grind for eight hours. And then I've gotta try to do everything at home while also being interrupted constantly by the business. It just, it gives you more flexibility to design a work relationship that works for you.

Coco Brown (12:50): And I believe strongly that you will get more out of people, not less, so the big argument is everything we're seeing in the media, et cetera, is that people aren't gonna be as productive. There's not gonna be as much intimacy and, you know, sort of trust building. And are they really working? You know, there's all that sort of like stuff going on. But on the one hand, I don't believe any of that's true. But secondly, it's sort of also contradictory to the fact that companies we have offices all over the world and we have offices all over the country. And so our, our workforce is distributed. So you're sort of doing it, but not really, like it's sort of works, but doesn't really. Like how can you say that it works to have a headquarters and satellite offices and then say it doesn't work to have people working remotely, right? Like that doesn't make any sense.

Scott Harper (13:39): Well, as long as you're very clear about what success looks like, and people are held accountable for that, how they get there, who cares?

Coco Brown (13:50): Yeah.

Pam Harper (13:51): I want to also step in because we haven't really described exactly what Athena Alliance is. Maybe you can fill in the blanks. We know it's virtual. We know it's about relationships. We know it was inspired by an incredible story. Tell us about what Athena Alliance actually is.

Coco Brown (14:16): So what Athena is, is part of what drove me to the second reason we needed to be virtual. So what Athena is, is it's an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem of senior executive women that largely 99% exists in the digital environment. Occasionally we'll do in person meetups. And we facilitate that for people who, you know, different regions wanna get together with people. But what we do as an ecosystem is we are about accelerating the advancement of women leaders into the C-suite, into the boardroom, into CEO roles, as entrepreneurs, as investors. So think about how you have this career ladder that you grow through and you focus on a particular career, and then you get to a senior point and you realize that your impact can broaden, and you could have a portfolio of impact. You know, you could be an operator and on a board and invest in some startup companies. And maybe even start your own.

Coco Brown (15:11):  And like you can do a lot of things, right? So our goal is to accelerate women into advancement and women, you know, are very underrepresented. We're at best, in the less than 25% of senior roles. And if you're a woman of color, you're 4%. I mean, it's, it's really abysmal the big part of that advancement though. And you said it at the very beginning and your gift here is that the world is moving so fast. That keeping up with all the things you need to know as a leader and as a business leader, the technical skills of business, as well as the leadership skills of business, keeping up with all of that is like nearly impossible because it's constantly evolving. Yeah, absolutely. It's not like the old days where you, you know, my, my dad who has his MBA from the sixties, he'll still refer to Porter. You know, it's like, Porter's theory, da, da, da. It's not just one person's theory. Like it's so vast,

Pam Harper (16:07): So much is changing...

Coco Brown (16:09): And in, in order to keep up, you have to do it in the digital world. It's, you know, like, think about kids who are like, oh, I'll just Google that you need an equivalent to that for senior executives. MBAs have to be evergreen. They have to be digital. But the second thing is that we are taking six degrees of separation and making them one. And if you are an underrepresented group in your ecosystem, so women are less than 25% of leadership roles. So we're underrepresented, right? Then in four walls, one geography, one role, one industry we're small. You put us in digital and we're huge. There's over 600,000 women in the VP ranks and above of companies over 500 employees in the us alone. Hmm. So that's why digital and remote is essential for our business model, because you can create power there.

Pam Harper (17:02): Yeah.  You're moving he geographical barriers. And to that point, Athena Alliance is global. How many countries are you in?

Coco Brown (17:17): Oh well, I don't know the exact count, but we are in various countries in Europe and Asia, Australia, United States and Canada.

Pam Harper (17:26): And these women who are members have close relationships. Is that right? I mean, they're able to develop this at a virtual level. They've never met each other in person in many cases.

Coco Brown (17:38): That's right. Absolutely.

Pam Harper (17:41): See, that is remarkable. Yeah. That is remarkable. I mean, I do it, I have incredible relationships with women around the world too, but, but usually I trend is in Italy. But usually I've met them in person at some point. This is yet different. Yeah. Did you think when you started it that it could be that way and at the same time you're leading, how many people do you basically have as part of your business organization?

Coco Brown (18:09): Well, there's the direct team. There's all of our coaches. And then there's, you know, the ecosystem of all of our community leaders. So there's about a hundred people. Yeah. In some form that are connected to the central thesis and structure and delivery of our model. And we're connected to them. A lot of them I've never met in person, including my closest team. I just met three of my teammates that have been with us for two and three years for the first time, just a month ago. Wow. They all live in Nicaragua, three of them

Pam Harper (18:45): I love this. I mean, I think that it is, so it is so unconventional and so interesting and even more important, it is successful and helping women to advance. As you say, in a world that still has a ways to go. So what's been most surprising to you as you've grown your company.

Coco Brown (19:07): You know, one of the things that's surprising to me is the resistance to the idea of a virtual peer organization. Before COVID, everyone would say, "what do you mean you don't have a chapter model and you're not in person based. What do you mean? You don't have sort of small cohorts that get together and develop intimacy and trust." And it still surprises me that people hold onto that strongly, particularly there there's this great research done by a Stanford professor, Mark Grater on the strength of weak ties. The thing that surprises me is like  when there's so much resistance to your idea, you sort of get surprised that it actually works too. Cause you know, people put that in your head. But one thing that I have been so pleased by is that the ways in which we're creating intimacy are really working.

Coco Brown (20:02): So for example, one of the things we do is when we do our live learning events, salons, everyone's in the same room, quote unquote, right? So there's no like speakers over here and the audience can't engage with the speaker and speaker, can't see the audience. There's none of that in our world. We're all in the same room. There's a moderator who watches the chat, et cetera. But we tell everyone join 10 minutes early because the moderator, the speaker and our tech people are going to be on 10 minutes early doing a tech check. But once that's done, we're just bantering. We're just talking about each other's day and gosh, the heat wave. And you know, who's got the hottest weather and you know, all sorts of things, child rearing and some crazy thing that just happened. That's how you build intimacy and trust. And so our members have learned to show up, they show up, they're like, Hey, and we meet each other and it's great fun. So we do little things like that, that mimic things that work in the real world. So the five minutes between classes on college campus, the five minutes before class starts where the teacher's up on the whiteboard, wiping it down and you can ask them a question. You can mimic that in the digital world. So we've just thought about how to do that, to create intimacy.

Pam Harper (21:16): I hear a lot, for instance, about the Apple business model, where, you know, you're running around in the hall and you accidentally bump into someone and that's how they foster some of their culture. What you're coming up with is here's a way to accidentally bump into someone

Scott Harper (21:33): And you don't have to go to the bathroom to do it.

Coco Brown (21:37): Exactly. Exactly right.

Pam Harper (21:39): This is great. So we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll dig deeper with Coco Brown, founder and CEO of the Athena Alliance about leading to foster high level virtual relationships stay with us...

Scott Harper (21:56): This is Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper. We're brought to you by business advancement incorporated. And we're on the web at businessadvanced.com. As always, BAI focuses on enabling visionary CEOs and C-suite leaders to accelerate momentum for game changing innovation, transformation and growth.

Pam Harper (22:15): We're excited that Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper has recently been selected as a top podcast in the business marketing and tech category of the 2022 PopCon podcast awards.

Scott Harper (22:28): Say that 10 ten times fast...

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Scott Harper (22:47): In addition to being an occasion to celebrate these milestones have stimulated us to innovate in response to the feedback that listeners have given us that they'd like to hear more from us more from Pam and Scott. So in addition to our twice monthly half hour podcast, like this one, we are going to be sending out short growth Igniters episodes on alternate weeks that we call growth Igniters quick takes

Pam Harper (23:12): These episodes will be about 10 minutes or less. They'll feature our take on professional and personal leadership in the rapidly changing world sometimes will be inspiring sometimes quirky, but always with a point and an immediately useful idea or question for you to use.

Scott Harper (23:28): And go to growthignitesradio.com to get all of our episodes.

Pam Harper (23:34): This is the end of part one of our conversation with Coco Brown, founder and CEO of the Athena Alliance. Be sure to listen to part two of our conversation, you'll learn more about Coco's unconventional leadership style and her creative approach to leading a virtual organization and ecosystem. We also discuss three immediately useful ideas you can use for fostering high level virtual relationships in your company. Part two is now available as episode 215 at growthignitersradio.com, or wherever you get your podcasts

Chris Curran (24:21): Growth Igniters and Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper are registered service marks of business advancement incorporated. All growth Igniters radio episodes are copyrighted productions of business advancement incorporated intended for the private use of our audience, except as otherwise provided by copyright law. All other uses, including copying, editing, redistribution and publication without prior written consent of business advancement incorporated are prohibited all rights reserved.