Decoy Handbags and Mentorship

It’s almost time for our annual TCB Talks: Women in Leadership event on April 15, and one of the questions that often comes up in conversations with successful women is how they juggle the demands of career and personal life. (And let’s be real: It comes up with women more than with men, even today.) Last year, Karen Wilson Thissen, general counsel and secretary for General Mills, revealed that early in her career at a big law firm, she kept a decoy handbag in her office, and she would set it on her chair, with a cup of tea steeping on her desk, before slipping out a side door to retrieve her kids from day care. Lest a partner make the late-afternoon rounds, she didn’t want them to know she’d left before 6 p.m.

When Wilson Thissen shared this story at our 2024 event, hundreds of women in the Saint Paul RiverCentre ballroom nodded knowingly. She perfectly encapsulated what it was like to be a working mom on the partner track in the 1990s. But I also noticed many of the younger professionals in the room looked confused, even incredulous, that Wilson Thissen would have gone to such lengths to hide her parental responsibilities. The pendulum of work-life balance has swung so far in the other direction that it’s not unusual today to work from home while training a puppy, let alone take a kid to a midday doctor’s appointment or log off in time for school pickup.

It’s important for young leaders to hear what it was like for someone such as Wilson Thissen or our cover subject, Thrivent CEO Terry Rasmussen, to get to the C-suite—and appreciate how much work culture has improved at many companies. But we also need to hear from the women who are climbing the hybrid corporate ladder today about their experiences and challenges, because as you’ll read in the 2024 Minnesota Census of Women in Corporate Leadership, women are still a minority in the C-suites of public companies, and progress is actually slowing.

So this year at the Women in Leadership event, before our featured conversation with former Target Corp. executive and corporate trailblazer Laysha Ward, we’re flipping the script to hear from a panel of emerging leaders in their 30s. These women have already been identified by their large organizations as high performers with huge potential, but they’re coming up in their own way. One of them, Emily Hendren, director of member engagement strategies for Thrivent, worked from a camper van while touring national parks with her husband during the pandemic. Another, Tiffani Daniels, had the opportunity to step away from her corporate job for three years to launch the Minnesota Business Coalition for Racial Equity. She’s now back at General Mills as director of consumer loyalty and rewards, thinking about what purpose-driven work means for her.

It’s sure to be a dynamic conversation, one that I’m hoping will be insightful to the bosses in the room who are trying to grow their pipelines and understand what values are most important to the next generation of leaders. Mentorship works both ways.

Similar thinking inspired a new twist for the latest season of our TCB podcast, which we’re calling By All Means: The Mentor Series. We invited accomplished business founders to the show to share their experiences with early-stage entrepreneurs. Angie and Dan Bastian of Angie’s Boom Chicka Pop offered advice to Nalini Mehta and Anita Balakrishnan, who are building a new popped snack business in Minnesota called Yoga Pops. We paired Anytime Fitness and Purpose Brands co-founder and former CEO Chuck Runyon with Melanie Richards, who is franchising her goGLOW spray tan studio business nationwide. BevSource founder Janet Johanson talked to Dena Neek, co-founder and CEO of xBlock, an AI-fueled software platform that helps businesses capture and inventory company knowledge before an exit or leadership transfer. (Neek moved to Minneapolis to take part in a TechStars incubator program and stayed because she found the business community so welcoming and supportive.)

These podcast conversations (available on most major platforms and tcbmag.com/byallmeans) feel like you’re listening in on the most productive networking meetings. Our in-demand mentors offer deep insights that could apply to most any business, but they also ask questions of this next generation of founders—it’s about stage, not age—who are utilizing AI and social media and setting up dispersed teams in new and exciting ways.

It’s a great reminder that the learning never stops and we’re at our best when we share with each other. Hope to see you at Women in Leadership (men are invited, too!) or another TCB Talks event soon.