ASPIRATIONALLY, AMY
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
RESULTS
I came into the capstone project knowing that I wanted to build upon the project I originally created for COML 530 – Women Communication and Leadership. The project that became Tools Women Need to Lead and Succeed began as an embedded Google form that served as a leadership personality test and a leadership style "library" that highlighted coaching, democratic, and visionary leadership styles. When I designed the initial project, my goal was to create an interactive experience for women seeking to explore new leaderships styles and to curate a bank of easily accessible resources about popular leadership styles. These same goals guided me throughout this semester as I further developed the work into results that I am incredibly proud of: a polished Buzzfeed-style quiz; a library of leadership styles that has doubled in size to include authentic, pacesetting, and transformational leadership styles; and a clearer connection between the project and the 'why' women should have access to resources that support their professional growth and development as leaders. Although my work will not solve the gender wage gap or the gender gap in leadership, it centers the need to equitably cultivate engaging resources and supports for women in leadership.
APPLICATION OF THEORETICAL GROUNDING
As I wrote content for the Leadership Style Library, I chose not to explicitly reference the communication theories that thread throughout each leadership approach. My decision is rooted in my goal and commitment to create leadership resources for women that are accessible and actionable. I did not want to risk alienating my audience by delving too deeply into the concepts of communication accommodation theory, face negotiation theory, standpoint theory, muted group theory, and co-cultural theory, all of which I see as influential to the frameworks of leadership that I present. Even though I do not directly reference it, my work is also guided by feminist gender theory. It embraces core beliefs about the ways gender is socially constructed and reinforced through language and communication styles, which influences the ways they experience and engage in communication in the workplace and positions of power. My project is a response to the question of what women in leadership can do to navigate gendered stereotypes in the workplace while also negotiating their way through phenomena like the double-bind that pits their likability against their competence.
ETHICAL IMPACTS
My goal for this project was always to prioritize inclusivity and equity when it came to building out the Aspirational Assessment and Leadership Style Library. I designed the self-service tools to help women who want to level up their leadership skills but don’t necessarily have access to fee-based professional development and certification programs, advanced business degrees, or mentors. I believe that I was able to successfully interweave inclusive imagery throughout the website and quiz and visually underscore that all women, regardless of their race, age, or ability, could be a strong leader. Despite this victory, it is important to recognize that I do not explicitly address leadership approaches for women of color, members of the LGBTQ community, or disabled women. The addition of specific resources for these intersected communities of women would make the project more equitable and inclusive.
TECHNICAL LESSONS LEARNED
My skills with using Wix as a website-builder have grown immensely over the course of this program and especially this semester in service of this project. The platform is free, relatively easy to use, and really empowers an amateur website designer, like myself, to customize pages with flexible content through its drag-and-drop user interface. Although the editor functionality can be a bit buggy at times, I enjoyed working on the platform because it was really easy for me to stay within a cohesive aesthetic while building out my site structure. Determining the site structure and how all of the pages fit together was probably the most challenging aspect of the project and portfolio design. Once I figured out how to correctly nest my capstone dropdown menu, I felt very accomplished. The other technical component I got to work with was Opinion Stage. I switched from the original Google Form to Opinion Stage for the Aspirational Assessment because it allowed me to emulate a Buzzfeed quiz by embedding images and styling questions as clickable tiles. While there are a host of paid features that I was interested in trying out, the subscription fees associated with those features outweighed my desire to make a more sophisticated quiz. Ultimately, I was pleased with the final product, which was much more engaging that the simple Google Form I started with, and would recommend the tool to others who need to build a similar quiz.
LIMITATIONS
As mentioned elsewhere in this portfolio, the biggest limitation I faced was scoping the project so that I could complete it within the semester. This forced me to make tough choices about the types of resources I included, the depth to which I could address and curate resources for each leadership style, and the topics I could address within the project's overall context. For example, I deemphasized the role of men in sponsoring women in leadership, despite the positive impacts male mentorship is shown to have.
Happily, I only had to navigate a few technical limitations over the course of this project. My reticence to upgrade my tools to their paid feature sets meant that I had to get creative with the tools I had access to. While I was able to come up with workable solutions, I do think that a big question I was never able to investigate further was the accessibility of the website, and whether my designs were following best practices of accessible web design.
KEY TAKEAWAYS AND FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS
The beauty of a digital project like this one is that its format allows for its continuing evolution. During my research on the gender gap in leadership and the six different leadership styles that I featured in the Leadership Style Library, I found myself identifying many pathways that the project could go and extensions it could include had I more than a semester's worth of time to work on it. The opportunities to create accessible and interactive resources that engage women and support their leadership development are really endless. Some features that I chose not to pursue to keep the project in scope included tips and resources for engaging male allies and sponsors, and highlighting specific leadership strategies for women of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and disabled women. Along the way, I also envisioned options to highlight intercultural leadership approaches for women, and options to include interviews with six women describing which of the six styles they lead with the most and how they developed their leadership skills. Some more technical extensions that would tap further into the digital media strategies concentration could involve the production of short video summaries for each leadership style, the development of a monthly digital newsletter that features the latest in leadership resources for women, or even the creation of social media accounts to promote leadership content for women.
When I decided to pursue this project, I was occasionally daunted by the open-endedness of the topic. The more I researched digital resources for women in leadership that could appeal to a broad audience of younger professionals that also presented actionable communication and leadership strategies, the more I found that the websites out there only meet some of the expectations I had in terms of how engaging they were. While the Aspirational Assessment and Leadership Style Library I ended up creating are far from perfect, they add to the popular digital discourse about leadership for women and they underscore the importance of investing in, centering, and celebrating women in leadership. My project is not the first to address this topic, and nor will it, or should it, be the last. Until the gender wage gap and the gender gap in leadership begin to materially shrink, the creation of timely digital content for women in leadership like the Aspirational Assessment and the Leadership Style Library is crucial to sustaining a robust dialogue and eventually inciting change.
