Women in Ops day

By Denise

Originally from Australia, Denise joined our Stamford office in the fall of 2014 as an experienced hire, and transferred to the Seattle office in the fall of 2016. She's served a wide range of clients in her consulting career and is now focused on food companies in the consumer, retail, and logistics industries. Denise holds degrees in commerce and economics from the University of Queensland. She has lots of personal interests, including cooking, restaurant-exploring, anything outdoors, playing the saxophone, keeping up with the latest on entrepreneurship and gender issues, and exploring her new home country with family and friends.

Women Connectivity

October 4, 2018Hi everyone,
Hope you had a great summer! It’s the best time of year in Seattle – infinite amounts of sun, lots of mountain time, and outdoor fun with friends!

Last month, we hosted our annual “Women in Operations” day in New York City, and I was stoked to be the emcee for the day! It was a super exciting opportunity to be asked to emcee. While every Women in Ops day that I’ve attended has been great, this one took it to the next level. The event started out with a fun and unexpected connectivity experience, in which many of us experienced travel issues due to some pretty crazy thunderstorms in the New York area. Everyone started sharing their photos from various places they were stranded, which turned into a funny giant group email chain.

The planning team that organized the event did a stellar job. Throughout the day, we had celebrations for promotions, breakout sessions on various topics (flex programs, dual career couples, dating while working at McK), culminating into a massive problem-solving session to brainstorm 100+ new break through ideas to make progress on some of the biggest challenges faced as a Women in Ops group.

Our breakout sessions were open discussions with senior leaders who had experience in the various life areas, and it was really inspiring to hear how these leaders have led full lives outside of work while having busy careers. For the problem problem-solving session, we broke into groups focused on four different topics: conscious inclusion, sponsorship, lifestyle and flexibility, and desire to be a senior leader. We had gallery walks set up with a lot of data and analyses from surveys, and everyone was asked to submit ideas solving some of the gaps that we found in these areas. It was such a productive whiteboarding session, which resulted in over 100 new ideas to explore.

The Women in Ops team has since taken this big list and prioritized them to select the first tranche of initiatives we want to implement. It was an amazing session that really helped us shape our future direction, and I can’t wait to keep moving forward!

Take care,

Denise