Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be blogging about some of the many women at Frito-Lay who are blazing new trails in business, including the unique challenges they face and how they're overcoming them, starting today with Charlotte Wheat, Frito-Lay's Director of Financial Planning and President of our Women’s Initiative Network (WIN) employee group.
About 12 years ago, I began to see a major shift in the recruitment and promotion of women into leadership roles at Frito-Lay -- all levels and in all functions. We began by acknowledging the obvious -- women in business face unique challenges, such as resistance to women’s leadership, differences in leadership style and demands of family life. Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli do an excellent job of objectively discussing such challenges and offering corporations advice in an article in the Harvard Business Review titled, "Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership."
To start to address these challenges, we set aggressive goals for hiring, retaining and promoting women, established training programs and developed WIN to foster support and mentoring among our female employees. I attended part of the national kick-off of WIN 12 years ago and recall the tremendous outpouring of support for the new organization -- from both women and men.
We’ve come a long way in 12 years. Today, PepsiCo (Frito-Lay’s parent company) is led by a woman, Indra Nooyi, and WIN is stronger than ever, with approximately 400 members across the company. Recently I caught up with Charlotte Wheat, WIN's current president (pictured below with her husband, Bob, and two sons).
"This year, we surveyed women at Frito-Lay about how WIN could best meet their needs," Charlotte told me. "They told us our mission should be to help Frito-Lay women grow confidence and build the skills they need to become the leaders of tomorrow.
"To fulfill that mission, WIN runs ongoing leadership programs, supports the business by providing insights and perspectives that help Frito-Lay develop and market snacks especially for women, and is actively involved in Susan G. Komen and the Girl Scouts, two organizations with long-standing commitments to women."
Charlotte is an excellent role model to be leading WIN, because she herself is a trailblazer. She started her career at Frito-Lay 13 years ago in a male-dominated field of contract manufacturing, where she had the fun assignment to help with the acquisition of Cracker Jack. Her career has steadily progressed and today is in a lynchpin leadership role in the Company. She and her team work with all departments to explain financial results and forecast upcoming sales and expenses for the entire company.
"One of the biggest improvements in the last decade is that there are now women role models in senior level positions at Frito-Lay who have successful careers and family lives. They provide young women with practical advise on leadership skills needed to progress and tips on how they've succeeded. Most importantly, they provide the aspiration that I can achieve the same thing.
"In addition, functions like Manufacturing -- that are very male dominated -- have taken womens' feedback from organizational health surveys and developed very specific programs to retain and help women advance their careers."
Charlotte also works at balancing her professional and family life -- raising two active sons ages five and seven. "I don't try to be supermon, but make sure that I'm very involved with my children and don't miss important events" Charlotte told me. "And my husband Bob is very active with the kids. He has an art degree and volunteers once a month at their school to teach art."
So Charlotte has successfully transitioned from wanting role models to being one herself. Over the next few weeks I'll introduce you to other trailblazers, starting next week with Sabrina Kephart, who is trailblazing in the field of nutrition. Who have been the women trailblazers that you most admire?
I think the following are Trailblasers at Frito-Lay:
Leah Box Plano
Donna Diermeir Plano
Carolyn Kelly Plano
Vanessa Terry (Wright) Plano.
These Leaders have worked at different roles
threw out their careers.
Posted by: David Crider (retired FLNA) | July 07, 2009 at 05:06 PM