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That metaphor of the ladder stay rung to rung, to rung and keep the course and then something happens at the top.
Everyone can see that's not necessarily the case anymore.
Building, business scheming, partnering, collaborating.
I think the lid's off.
So you do feel the optimism.
It is coming from disruption.
But disruption does bring opportunity.
That's Alison Moore, CEO of Chief, the prestigious membership community for senior women business leaders.
As an infamous New York Times headline about women in work reverberates across social media, Have women ruined the workplace?
Alison provides some critical, fact-based perspective, drawing from an exclusive nationwide survey of women leaders.
She challenges the notion, breaking down how new career approaches are being misinterpreted and pointing to critical signals of optimism and opportunity among women leaders.
Allison and I first met when she was at HBO helping to turn Game of Thrones into a cultural phenomenon.
And her pulse on the zeitgeist remains as compelling as ever.
So let's get to it.
I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.
I'm Bob Safian.
I'm here with Alison Moore, the CEO of Chief.
Alison, it's great to see you again.
Wonderful to see you again, too.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, you and I first met I was thinking about this when you were at HBO and I was at Fast Company.
And I remember it was the heyday of Game of Thrones.
And I remember we ran a photo of you seated in the Iron Throne.
Do you remember this?
It was so fun.
I absolutely remember this.
And I will say it's probably the pinnacle of my career and everything will nothing will reach to that height again.
Those are great. great, interesting days to be at HBO for sure.
And I was privileged to be in that seat.
Yeah.
Well, you've had many lives since then at NBCUniversal, at SoundCloud, Condé Nast, most recently CEO of Comic Relief addressing childhood poverty.
Taking over a chief this year, early this year, it's a different kind of challenge.
It is.
Helping amplify and support women leaders, senior women leaders.
I certainly, by age at least, have have lifted to that level of rank bringing people together, networking in the power of community.
And certainly that relates to my comic relief work.
That relates to bringing together community in terms of platforms of experience, whether it's at SoundCloud or the brands at Condé Nast or HBO or Daily Candy.
At NBCUniversal when our founders Carolyn and Lindsay were ready to kind of hand the baton off.
I saw it as a great kind of confluence of all these experiences I've had over all this time.
I was a founding chief member in 2019, so it felt resonant to me to kind of come back and bring my list of ideas to the forefront there.
And I think on a personal level, I have a 20-year-old daughter who is navigating all the things that one navigates at 20 years old and will be entering the workforce and thinking about that.
And if I can have a little bit of a space around women's leadership and what's next and how to best build bridges and opportunity for them.
That's time well spent for me.
I mean in our early chats.
I don't remember us talking much about sort of women's leadership or the barriers facing women executives.
Did I not ask you about obstacles you personally may have hit?
Did you not want to talk about it?
Every woman leader in a leadership position thinks about, Just like you know, I think, every leader.
As you start to ascend into different ranks of wherever it is, or different sorts of experiences, you have different leadership challenges.
I mean, I think that holds well for women, men generally. you know, across the board.
I had great mentors, men and women, for me, coming from way back, Turner, into HBO, of course, NBCU.
I really did.
So I felt like that wasn't a topic I was necessarily putting out there that I was having issue with.
But I recognized that there were certain things about a women's leadership journey that were unique.
That's for sure.
Personal expectations in life. are different for women often.
Kids, family support, book-ending support.
That sort of thing does affect women's journeys, whether it's like in a small way or whether it's in a large way.
So I think the routes can be different and that's okay.
But then where's that place where you have support and community and recognition of that?
And then all to just kind of better and further your ability to do the work.
For me, it's always been about the work.
The how we need support during that work is a very important conversation to have.
I mean, your predecessor as chief CEO, Carolyn Childers, she's been a guest on the show.
I've talked a bunch with her, with her co-founder, with Lindsay Kaplan, who you mentioned.
The environment that you've come into with a Trump White House is kind of heightened.
I mean, discussions about diversity are heated.
The term DEI has become kind of a negative.
Like, how do you frame what Chief is about in... in this kind of climate?
There's certainly more scrutiny on things today, perhaps, than there were in the past.
But I think, at the end of the day, there's a desire for creating better, stronger leaders, better outcomes, better decision-making, more agile thinking.
While there are different contexts being held and conversations being held around DEI and the nuances of that, the truth is, when you cut through the big headlines, the realities remain the same, which is like supporting leadership at a time of high velocity of change is always beneficial.
And we happen to build that in a way that supports women leaders.
And I think there's a lot of support for that.
Chief recently published a report in partnership with Harris surveying over a thousand senior level women.
And it pointed to a sort of changing definition of maybe, ambition and success, a shift away from playing it safe toward like bolder, career moves, which was in some ways more optimistic and more empowering than I'd expected.
There had been a slew of articles that had come out focusing on changes in the workforce and finding the negative nugget in there, to kind of put that on blast.
And I'm not denying that there aren't.
Those factors at hand.
But, you know, the she session is coming.
Women are being dumped out of the workforce.
The return to office doesn't work for all women.
And the polarity that we're in today of like big headlines being the only definition of women.
You know, we lose all nuance.
And so for us here, I come in in February and I'm looking at this incredibly energetic chief membership.
And thinking, you know, this is what I'm seeing.
I'm seeing people reacting and responding to change in ways that are innovative and curious and thought provoking.
This level of optimism that's sitting in chief, that they're communicating together.
This is not just chief telling people. women to be optimistic.
This is the energy that you're feeling from conversation.
And so the genesis of this poll was, how do we validate that?
And so in the women that we surveyed, they're citing that they're more ambitious now than ever.
And in fact They're energized by the professional growth ahead because they feel like they can have more optionality and more of a hand on the wheel of their own career design than what they used to have.
This is where that metaphor of the ladder and the, you know, stay rung to rung to rung and keep the course and stay the path and then something happens at the top.
Everyone can see that's not necessarily the case anymore.
How much of the boldness... do you think might be like economy driven?
I mean, I noticed that like over 80% of the executives cited market disruption as a motivator.
It's almost like disruption is, I don't know, forcing action?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think so.
Economy is certainly always going to be a factor, but it's also like look at industry consolidation.
You can look at what's happening in the media business.
You can look at what's happening across retail.
You can look at what's happening in every vector and enters AI, which has a through line all the way across all of these industries and a common thread of like this duality of opportunity and threat of change.
Is that wrong?
As a metaphor again for just career direction, not necessarily the corporate ladder, as much as it is just the up a ladder.
Is that the right path for me?
Do I want other options?
Do I want different kinds of flexibility?
Do I have the sort of tools at my disposal fingertips to actually do that, and that is what happens at Chief and that's what's been very interesting for me to see, and come back actually, from a founding membership in 2019 to where we are today, women are building Scheming, meaning like business scheming partnering, collaborating.
Differently now.
I think the lid's off on a lot of that stuff for women.
And so you do feel the optimism coming out in this survey.
Even though I think there's a pragmatism in recognizing it is coming from disruption.
But disruption does bring opportunity.
So much of Chief is built around in-person connection and community.
But in-person is so hard to scale.
You know and I know, when I was talking to your predecessor Carolyn, she talked about sort of the potential to have like a LinkedIn like product, and a masterclass like product, and a dating app like product.
Like how do you think about today sort of digital tools for community versus the?
You know the IRL experiences.
Like, where do you balance those things?
What I think about, Jeef, today.
And I think that was a very accurate description that Carolyn gave when that started.
I think we've morphed into this space where there are a couple of different components.
There are Intimate experiences.
By that I mean small space experiences where you talk and see and share about leadership challenges.
That can be, in a virtual experience, very rewarding.
But in certain places and markets, we can make that happen in real life.
It doesn't have to be either or, right?
Coaching, one-to-one coaching.
So that happens on a virtual piece sometimes.
That can be very rewarding.
But if I'm going to have a cocktail party around, you know Other senior marketers like that should be at the clubhouse in real life.
I'm about to go to L.A. this week for my eighth and then San Francisco in two weeks for the ninth.
Nine chief exes this year.
And this is where.
Nine locations across the country.
We've had members come and it's in real life and they're like rallies.
And I get so much energy out of these things.
It's unbelievable.
We have some speakers, some programming, but it's really about this kind of connecting energy between chiefs with other chiefs.
Big corporate people talking to founders of small things, folks who are in transition, all senior leaders in various parts of their journey.
And these large rallies are definitely IRL.
And then peppered between that are the right size virtual rallies.
My next sort of tranche of focus is really on the digital experience of the chief app, the chief digital experience in terms of like how do we make that as best of a member companion?
The networking piece, the connections piece.
You know whether it was the LinkedIn analogy that Carolyn met.
I mean, that's where that really comes to life, but it comes to life in service of a lot of in real life experiences across multiple use types.
You've talked about creating ROI for members.
And, as I'm listening to, sort of the range of things that you're and ways that you're trying to bring people together and the range that people are at in their careers.
Like, are there specific metrics that are, you know, an ROI for every member?
Or is that... different depending on who you are and where you are.
I definitely think it's different depending on who you are and where you are.
And I think that's one of the things in this latest kind of relaunch of our service is that we're paying recognition to
What you need to get out of something like Chief may differ not only at the point in time in which you enter, but as you traverse through that experience, you know.
That's complicated though, right?
Because you have to have different things for different people at different times.
Like sometimes it's...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I understand.
But these are all women leaders and there are a common set of components.
Right that folks are thinking about.
So you talk about tariffs and –
Or you talk about RTO or you talk about Gen Zs or you talk about AI.
I mean, there are big chunky things that everybody I don't care where they're sitting they're thinking about.
So there's a commonality to that.
It's not everything.
We're not a one-to-one. personalization service.
And I think the thesis is, and it's proven true that there are a bucket of things that senior women leaders think through.
What do I need as a corporate executive?
I may be coming and joining chief looking for like where can I learn about best practices from an industry sector that's different than mine?
And that might be a goal for me to just expand my mind so I can bring that back in a leadership position.
What is your business doing around RTO and with young people and, you know, resistance, etc.?
?
I can learn from that.
What are you doing for best practices for AI?
How are you leading your teams for all those things?
How do I find investors?
Where's the right place to get a seed round?
But identifying at the top end, are you in a corporate seat?
Are you in a founder seat?
Are you looking to kind of go in between one of them is a good sort of clarifying.
And those are really only three or four vectors that we have to flag somebody's special interest.
Many of the things that a woman leader is interested in are things that any leader is interested in, right.
It doesn't have to connect to the fact that it's a woman.
And then there's a tranche of things that may be more applicable to women than to men, although you could argue they're applicable to everyone.
I always struggled with this, you know...
When we mentioned you know, you being in Fast Company, it was for a package we did on the most creative people in business.
And there were men and women on it.
And we didn't do a most powerful women in business like Fortune did.
But there is something different when women get together without men there that maybe as a man I don't quite appreciate, or I want to, but I don't really know.
Listen, I think you know for women in leadership roles there is a place and a time for you know, being together and learning from each other, that's just different.
It's additive.
The conversations are because a woman's kind of career journey is tied to that 360 view of who they are in life.
It just makes those conversations different, but not necessarily better.
I mean, I've been in multiple co-working experiences, environments where it's male female, that's all great too.
I'm a big believer in the both and.
I really am.
Alison doesn't negate the value of broader communities, even as she champions what a women-focused network like Chief can offer.
So what lessons is she learning from the Chief community?
And how is she applying lessons of Game of Thrones to Chief?
We'll talk about that and more after the break.
Stay with us.
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Before the break, we heard chief CEO Alison Moore talk about the unique value of women-centered spaces.
Now she talks about the rise of the multi-hyphenate leader, keys to managing AI-driven volatility and how chief is like HBO.
Let's jump back in.
You referred in a recent Fast Company piece to the multi-hyphenate career which I guess comes out of that study also.
I'd love you to explain that, that senior women hold multiple professional identities.
What does that mean?
Multi-hyphenate women terminology which is clunky and maybe, like a better branding person would have said, don't even use that.
But that is how I have described myself for years.
I have experienced, you know TV, music publishing platforms, small digital startup companies, big corporate companies, now social impact.
In the survey, which was really interesting, they hold two to three professional identities.
This was me when I was sitting in a corporate seat You're in a corporate role.
You might be in an investor.
You might be sitting on a board.
I mean that's I just.
I think it sort of like blows up the idea that women kind of track in and then that's it.
When we put out that language both in the survey and we put it out in social and kind of with our members.
There are so many people who are like, I feel seen with that word, as clunky as it is.
Because they've had to explain like well, why did you move from this industry to that industry, to this?
And it's been additive to their career journey, but it always has to be explained.
When you're talking to the members at all these, you know nine different chief exes around the country.
What are the leadership themes and topics that you're hearing back from them?
You know and is it different than what you're?
You know whatever reading about in the news about.
You know AI and tariffs and return to office.
Or are those really the places where people are focused?
I think there's some pragmatism in, you know, AI tariffs return to office that all women leaders have as a piece of topic.
And by the way, there's a dynamism to all three of those topics that, you know, how are you doing?
What are you doing?
Just kind of checking in on that from the fundamentals.
So I
I feel like the conversations that women at CHIEF are thinking about is like okay, Where are the pragmatics that we can learn and just sort of fortify my business, whatever that happens to be across the things that we know are common, things that we're all facing?
And AI is definitely of a huge interest for our chief leaders, for sure.
But then I think there's also kind of a personal response to that. all the volatility, right?
Like, what do I need in my toolbox to kind of best fortify my ability to handle whatever's coming?
One of the things we talk about a lot, this sort of Artificial intelligence and human intelligence and the sort of duality between the two.
There's a lot of that desire for chief leaders to make sure they're having conversations with human beings as we.
We think about what's next.
It's amazing how much more value is being put into the real roots of community to do business and further business, but also to touch base and find balance in a sea of business chaos.
Brand and membership, you had to be accepted to be part of Chief.
There's a certain amount of exclusivity in the membership, which I guess is part of the appeal that you're getting, sort of a vetted membership group.
But how do you balance that with sort of scale and access?
We are not exclusive as much as we're intentional.
You know the conversations that senior women leaders hold.
There's a baseline to kind of entry to make sure that the membership is is connected across navigating the complexities of modern leadership.
There's a benchmark of leadership experience.
And then now we've actually opened our model to have a range of broader range of experiences.
You know, I think, not just only the corporate seat, but the corporate seat and the founder, the builder, the solopreneur seat.
And as long as the person's of a leadership level.
Those who have found themselves recently in transition to be able to kind of rebuild or rejoin another corporate piece.
You know,
Yeah, no, but it's more like HBO, though, than it is like a network TV, right?
I never thought about that like that.
Yeah.
Curated.
Yeah.
Curated.
I would say that.
Yeah.
So I guess in the HBO analogy, it's sort of like original content, sports, documentaries.
Yeah. comedy, whatever variations of original content, but it always had to be original content.
It's been now, you know, nine months that you've been there at Chief.
In that time do you, Do you find yourself thinking back to any specific lessons or episodes, whether it's from HBO or Comic Relief or anything in between?
Yeah.
I do, actually, and it's really funny.
We've been thinking about some changes to the service structure and what that looked like and the communication of it and adding more value back to sort of your investment in chief.
That was right straight out of cable packaging mindset.
Or HBO, which we you know.
Certainly, in the point that I was there and on you know the digital side, thinking about the idea of consumer experience like that, we centered on consumer experience.
You think about what folks want to see and those diehard people that love the HBO experience and you do everything you can to deliver it.
That's a service worth paying for.
You know, a membership should be something worth paying for that every every couple ways along the way oh, I got some value out of that.
Or I look ahead like this is a classic HBO example, right where Game of Thrones is launching in September.
We start talking about it in February because, instead of churning out in March or April because your Game of Thrones isn't on, you'll stick around.
That's sort of building things anticipatory for people, to remind them of their value in their today experience, their past experience, and then what's on the path for the future.
I think of all these experiences as like a tapestry of things that I can pull from periodically.
So what's at stake for senior level women in work right now?
I think having a space and place of calm, planning, connectedness.
Recognition of the journey, I think reminding women of resilience, resilience in the face of change.
If you sit around and listen to headlines all the time, you certainly would feel like there are not those stories of resilience and innovation and change.
And you know, every day I hear that at Chief about women who are like.
Well, I left a corporate job.
I tried to find something.
I looked for two years.
And then, through you know, an experience and a couple of collaborations at Chief, I decided to start something on my own.
And now I've got a known business.
I have my first investor.
I mean those kind of stories of resilience, renewal and change, you know, rethinking and reframing and not losing your juice in the process.
I think it's good for women to be in spaces where that is celebrated and heard, because it just is like a shot in the arm and then you're out to continue your work.
I do think that networks are the new power source and in the future of work, whatever that is going to look like, networks are going to become even more and more important in helping define that.
And I, you know, there is some There are some stats that we had from that survey.
93 of women believe they have the collective power to build new tables and center of influence and opportunity.
And then 94 of the women say being around other ambitious women fuels their own ambition and their work.
I love that too.
So Chief's experience as being a nexus for network, I think, is a really it's a very exciting direction for us.
Well, Alison, this has been great.
Thank you so much for doing it.
Thank you so much.
I enjoyed it.
Thank you is exactly Alison's point and the point of Chief, as a space for undiluted insight and support.
I keep coming back to Alison's both and philosophy that creating a community tailored to one group of people doesn't mean it's the only community those people belong to or should belong to.
There's an openness in her perspective that really stands apart from today's cultural correctness.
The reality is, we're all both in so many ways not tied to a single litmus test or demographic group or any set in stone career definition, as Allison's emphasis on multi hyphenate careers illustrates.
As any Game of Thrones fan would know, the real winner isn't who sits on the throne, but the broad network that supports them.
After all, we can't all tame dragons, and we all need to stay open to the possibilities around us.
What connects us may not always be visible to the naked eye, but that doesn't make it any less powerful.
I'm Bob Safian.
Thanks for listening.
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