Richie’s Slam Dunk

Richie’s Slam Dunk

Laurel Richie, 53, is the first African American president of a U.S. professional sports league. Perhaps as fitting, the WNBA is the nation’s longest-running women’s professional sports league.

The Dartmouth graduate used her business acumen to transform the 16-year-old league into a successful franchise. Her mission? To broaden what women can achieve through sports, and as athletes.

(Click here to read her exclusive profile!)

A champion of young women, previously she was the CMO of the Girl Scouts of the USA. The advertising veteran also spent more than two decades at Ogilvy & Mather, where some of her key accounts included American Express, Kotex and Pepperidge Farm.

Here, she tells Little PINK Book about how difficult conversations solve problems, how leading a team of misfits brought her success, and why women truly belong in the business world.

Little PINK Book: What’s your advice for women in male-dominated industries?
Laurel Richie: The important thing is to never, ever deny who you are. Gender, ethnicity, and background; all of that is part of you. As you go into environments where you may be the only one, you should not feel like you have to deny that part of your personality, or hide it or modify it. That keeps you from being true to yourself. That [helped] me eventually transcend the fact that I might have been the exception. People started to view me more as Laurel, rather than as a woman or as an African American.

LPB: What’s the biggest career obstacle that you’ve faced?
LR: Shortly after I was made a VP at Ogilvy, I went on vacation to celebrate. I came back a week later and my entire team had gone to HR saying, ‘We know this is a high profile account and our clients are happy but we don’t like working with Laurel.’ It was literally a mutiny while I was gone! It came to me as a total shock because I was evaluating my success on tangible measures – we were winning awards, our client reviews were very positive. What I learned from that experience was: Yes, it’s important to be successful but people have to feel that they are contributing to that success. It transformed my view on what it means to be a leader. My job as a leader is not just to make sure we’re successful. It’s to create an environment where everyone feels they can be successful.

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By Ruchika Tulshyan

“I like to build teams where people feel that they can bring their full personality.”
Laurel Richie