Knowledge-Transfer Webinar: Acting with Power

This week, the Women in Wind Global Leadership Program held its second Knowledge-Transfer Webinar, where our 2022 participants and mentors took part in an exclusive session on Acting with Power. The workshop had two learning aims: To explore interpersonal power dynamics at work, and to expand an individual’s ability to act with authenticity + power in leadership roles. The workshop was facilitated by Melissa Jones Briggs (pictured below), Lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. 

On faculty at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business Melissa co-teaches the popular course Acting with Power. She lectures in the flagship Stanford Executive Program among others, and is an affiliate at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. In the UK, Melissa is an Associate Fellow at the Oxford Character Project at the University of Oxford.

Off campus, Melissa works with executives and teams at top corporations and hyper-growth startups, as well as NGOs and national institutions. Trained as a performing artist in London and New York, she is a passionate advocate for equity in arts education and her international non-profit work focuses on social justice. She divides her time between San Francisco and London.

In this longer and more interactive edition of the webinar, participants were divided into small groups for rounds of breakout sessions. A prompt was broadcasted to each breakout room and participants discussed a few complex situations including how formal + informal hierarchies impact interactions at work and in our personal lives.

At the end of the webinar, Melissa provided a guideline on how to formulate a short and true mantra as a performance technique  towards building the mindset of a great leader. The session ended with a round of Q&A.

The Knowledge-Transfer Webinar received rave reviews from our participants, who were not only equipped with practical advice for acting with power, but enjoyed getting to know one another in a small-group setting.

We hope to conduct more webinars in this workshop format in the future! Stay tuned for summaries on future Knowledge-Transfer Webinars coming later this year.