How do women advance in fields still dominated by men? Part of the answer lies in supporting one another.
That’s exactly what a true braud (aka broad) would do, and in taking a page from the original networking brauds who don’t view the term as a pejorative put down — quite the opposite, in fact — Rebecca Prochaska, head of marketing and business development with the Madison architectural firm Potter Lawson, has formed Brauds 2.0.
Prochaska’s interest in “braudening” her horizons was influenced by her mother Beth, who is Potter Lawson’s executive vice president and a member of the original Brauds group along with real estate executive Joanna Burish and Carole Schaeffer, formerly of Smart Growth Greater Madison and now vice president of business development for Miron Construction.
|
Rebecca Prochaska Advertisement
|
However, her interest was organically sparked by a budding friendship with Jeannie Cullen Schultz, health care construction director for JP Cullen, a family-owned construction firm. As the two women started meeting three years ago, simply as a function of their jobs, they realized how much they had in common. As they discussed a formal group, there was an important takeaway from their exposure to Brauds 1.0.
“The consensus was that the key to the group is that it’s a smaller group,” Prochaska explains. “We watched what they had built and we wanted to start our own group.”
In Brauds 2.0, Prochaska and Cullen Schultz are joined by a group of professional women who work in commercial development. They include Elizabeth Breitlow, development associate, Hammes Company Sports Development Inc.; Kris Cotharn, project executive, KJWW Engineering; Melissa Fellows, vice president of commercial deposits and treasury management, Associated Bank; Gretchen Lins, an associate with the retail and office brokerage group of CBRE; Anne Neujahr Morrison, who works in commercial leasing and development at Urban Land Interests; Deana Porter, an associate with Broadwing Advisors; and Summer Strand of Payne & Dolan.
Prochaska did not know everyone in the group before cold-calling them and inviting them to join. She made a list of people she’d heard good things about with the idea of forming a group of women who are at similar stages of their lives and careers. None of the Brauds 2.0 group is as established as the members of the original Brauds, but most of them have been at it for roughly a decade, so they have built the foundation for their careers.
“These were blind calls,” Prochaska says. “I said I’ve heard about you and I think you’re amazing, so let’s meet. That was a little intimidating, like a first date when you ask someone out, but I wanted the group to be made of up of women I admired.”
Now it’s time to help one another climb higher. Their get-togethers cover both personal and professional topics. They might start out with discussions of family and children and segue into professional experiences such as deal making, but they offer group members the comfort of knowing they are not alone.
“I would say we’re strong, driven, eager women in the development and design industry,” Prochaska states. “We’re looking to empower our network.”
(Continued)
Feminine intrigue
Cullen Schultz was ready to be empowered by taking part in a group of professional women. “In my career, I’m around men the majority of the day, so that was intriguing to me,” she states. “We just got to talking and we reached out to Joanna Burish, and she invited us. I think we first sat down with her and then we attended a Brauds meeting to see what it entailed. From there it was obvious that we needed to do something for another subset of women.”
For Cullen Schultz, it’s always good to have a different set of voices to listen to and it’s nice to have a different set of ears to hear your story. She has walked away from initial Brauds 2.0 meetings with a sense of appreciation of what various group members had to say, and she also appreciated the opportunity to hear from the first Brauds group about what has worked and what hasn’t.
What has worked best is a special brand of “spill-it” networking and the resulting nonjudgmental feedback. “That meeting was really important,” says Cullen Schultz. “Joanna [Burish] doesn’t want it to grow into a huge organization. She likes the fact that it’s a small, intimate group of women that get together and grow together, just as you might have with your class at business school.
“Sometimes we don’t think how many women there are in our profession and in the industry, maybe not in construction but in real estate, banking, finance, and architecture who are making big strides, and to be able to build relationships with those women is really important.”
Founding wisdom
Burish, now the owner and president of MTI-Red LLC, would not mind the formation of a Brauds 3.0 and several more, but she has no intention to build a large, single group where the discussion takes place in the open. She wants any future Brauds groups to be private, confidential, and tight-knit because that scale offers better opportunities for expression.
“There is a certain kind of Brauds culture,” Burish says, “that I want to maintain.”
Click here to sign up for the free IB ezine – your twice-weekly resource for local business news, analysis, voices, and the names you need to know. If you are not already a subscriber to In Business magazine, be sure to sign up for our monthly print edition here.
