Q&A with Jessica Gendron on helping women achieve success

Jessica Gendron was just two weeks out from adopting an infant when—exhausted and already overwhelmed—she jumped on a plane for a 36-hour business trip to Los Angeles.

The CEO of a fast-moving family of education, technology and marketing companies, Gendron had left her husband at home with their new baby and a 2-year-old. When she returned, the couple knew they couldn’t live that lifestyle anymore.

“I had to make the decision between my career and being the mom that I wanted [to be],” she said. “It was time to leave.”

That was 2018. Fast forward six years, and Gendron is now owner and CEO of The Center for Leadership Excellence & Career Consultants, an Indianapolis-based company that provides leadership and executive training as well as outplacement services to companies that are laying off workers. The firm’s revenue, she said, topped $1 million in her first year as owner and is now approaching $2 million. “I would like to break that mark in 2025,” she said.

Gendron has also recorded a video series called “Ladies Leading” and written a book—“What It Takes to Shatter Glass”—focused on helping women push through adversity to achieve their goals. And she launched the Emerging Leaders Academy for young women on a leadership track in their organization.

“Women have so much more to think about,” Gendron said. “We have to think about families, and we have to think about caregiving, and we have to think about how we navigate office politics a little bit differently than men and think about what we are willing to put up with versus what we’re not. There’s a lot for women to consider on that journey.”

IBJ talked with Gendron about her path and how her company helps others navigate their journeys.

What attracted you to The Center for Leadership Excellence?

In about 2012-2013, [the center] started doing some work with women. And that was really what appealed to me. And when I came on board, I really wanted to take what they were doing on the women’s side and grow that part of the business.

What made you decide to buy the business?

I came on board in 2018, and then in the middle of the pandemic, the owner said: “Either you buy it, or I’m out.” And I said, “Well, we’re having too much fun here to sell it or to get rid of it, so let’s do this.”

Was it a tough decision?

No, really, it wasn’t. I just felt like the stuff we were doing was so important, and there were so many really cool possibilities.

What does it mean to do outplacements?

When a company does a reduction in force or position elimination or there’s a merger and acquisition and there’s some duplication of jobs, they’ll do some elimination. And those companies pay us to coach those severed individuals and help them find new jobs.

From the moment that they’re severed, they get matched with one of our coaches, and they get help managing the emotions. They get help preparing a resume, identifying jobs that they’re qualified for, where to look for jobs, how to interview, how to negotiate.

What’s different about us that I really love is that our coaches actually stay with people until they land a new job. With other providers that are sort of the bigger names, you get a term, like a six-week program or a 12-week program, but our people are with you until you find a new job, no matter how long it takes.

About what percentage of the business is doing outplacements?

It’s a big chunk, because we have some pretty big clients that are constantly eliminating positions or restructuring departments or things like that. So it’s probably 50% of our business.

What is the thing you find that people in that situation need help with?

A big piece of it is the emotional support—feeling like they have an ally in their job search. Because if you weren’t ready to look for a new job and then all of a sudden you’re unemployed, whether you have a severance package or not, that’s a really scary feeling. … I think they’re just really grateful to have somebody to hold their hand through it.

On the leadership coaching side, what percentage of the people you work with are women?

It’s mostly women.

What do you find are the common themes when you start working with women?

It depends on where they are in their career journey. With early-career women, I see a lot of not really trusting that they have the ability to speak up for themselves. … So they’re really hesitant to ask for the things that they want.

We also see a lot of not really understanding how to navigate the relationship politics of a workplace and how to build relationships in a way that will benefit them but also not feel manipulative. Because I think women are really attuned to that very fine line between manipulation and authenticity, and I think that they struggle with that more than men do.

With executive women … they come to us because they recognize that they need some help or they just need someone to shoot them straight. They feel like they’re surrounded by people who won’t tell them the truth, and they don’t feel like there’s anybody that they can talk to and get real honest feedback from. And so we act more like a sounding board.

You hosted a video series about women leaders called Ladies Leading. What motivated that?

I was very mad because I felt like all the stories that we were seeing about female leaders were of women who were wildly, insanely successful in a way that felt unattainable or inaccessible to most women. … I wanted to be able to show women that there were lots of stories of female success that were a lot more accessible and also laden with failures and lessons and mistakes.

What did you learn from those conversations?

One-hundred-thousand things. Including the lessons about failure and about adversity. Every single woman I talked to—all of them—could point to things that they failed on. … Failures are what shape female leaders and give us greater power, because we can be reflective and learn from those mistakes and use those things to propel us forward.

Has that helped you in your own career?

Yeah. When I left the job that I had before I joined The Center for Leadership Excellence, it was a really hard transition for me. I had left an industry where I was sort of the big man in the room, where I’d walk in the room and everybody knew who I was and everybody listened to my opinion. … And I came into a world where I wasn’t really known. It was a really humbling experience for me, but also I felt like I was such a failure.

[The video series] allowed me to reflect on that experience and … recognize and acknowledge: Oh, it’s not just the failure; it’s what you do after the failure. It’s how you continue to persevere and push yourself forward.

What do you think helped you overcome those feelings when you made the change?

Some of it was obstinance, you know—just sort of that, “I’ll show you” type of attitude that I’ve always had about my life.

I feel like it was such a weird time, too, because COVID happened, I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the same time, and so it was like a perfect storm of stuff that sort of all piled on top of one another. And for me, it was like, “Well, there’s nowhere from here but up.”

There was a point in all of that where I said to myself: “Adversity will come. Trials, tribulations, failure will always be there. That is inherent to the human experience. … And the only thing you do by avoiding it is make it stronger, make it more powerful, make it bigger.” I started to tell myself the only way to get over this adversity or trial is to go through it and to keep going. The only other way through it is out the other end of it.

How important have your own experiences been to your work with other women?

I think it is such a critical part of the story we tell. I say to young women, particularly early-career women all the time: “You will be faced with decisions that feel absolutely impossible, when neither decision feels like the perfect one, and no matter what, you’re going to end up giving up something that you don’t want to give up. You have to decide which things are most important.”

That’s a key thing you write about in the book: setting priorities.

As women, we are created to be collaborative and helpful, and that is what society expects of us. And so women get really good at saying yes to way more than we should. … And so I find a lot of women are overwhelmed, burned out and stressed to the max—worrying about other people’s priorities and not our own. All the stuff that matters most to us gets pushed to the back.

So I think that an important lesson for women is to understand and be clear about the things that are most important and how to make sure [to] protect that stuff before saying yes to other people’s priorities.

And I relate to that. For the longest time, my career had been my number one priority, and so I said yes to all that stuff all the time. … But when my career was no longer No. 1, and my family was, it would have been really easy for me to keep saying yes to that stuff and to the owners of that company and to the responsibilities for that job and then get more burned out and more frustrated and more stressed. But I made a decision that my priorities had to take precedence.

You also write about self-advocacy. Why was that such an important theme in the book?

When I think back to all the conversations I ever had with women, all the interviews I ever did, there was an underlying theme about speaking up for yourself.

I think there’s a lot of waiting that women do for people to notice how hard they’re working, for people to notice that we’re frustrated, for people to notice that we’re mad about something, for people to notice that something has upset us. We wait for people to notice that we’ve been doing everybody else’s work, or we wait for people to notice that we are literally better at our job than our bosses. And none of that helps us advance or ascend or anything.

We have to be better at telling people: “I’m not fine. I’m actually mad at you because you said this thing to me 20 minutes ago, and here’s why it makes me mad, and here’s why I’m upset.” Or, “I’m mad because I’ve been doing my boss’s job for the last six months and nobody’s even recognized it.” … Until we learn that skill, we just keep getting left behind.

Tell us about the academy for young women in leadership.

It’s a 12-month course, and we focus on topics that are relevant to young, emerging females who are embarking upon a leadership journey in their careers. So either they’ve just been promoted or they’re in a succession plan, and honestly, we have a lot of women that are sort of stuck in an entry or middle-level management role and need to move but haven’t been able to.

We focus on things that are going to help them. We talk about the value of relationships and understanding how to be intentional about the relationships that we’re building at work and having a plan to network effectively and network to the relationships they need. We talk about communication differences—understanding how men and women communicate differently, understanding impact versus intent and being able to communicate in a way that people hear it the way we want them to hear it. … We talk about advocating for themselves and priorities and boundaries.

We also talk about the gender dynamics that play into our ability to [lead] and how to navigate gender dynamics. A lot of management and leadership programs don’t take into account the gender dynamics that go along with management.

At the end of the day, it would be really easy to just be yourself and do whatever feels authentic to you as a woman, but we have to embrace the reality that the business world was made by men, and it works for men, and it favors the way that they do things. And so unless we learn how to navigate that, we’re never going to advance at the same pace.•