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Clever Girls Collective's Cat Lincoln thrives on transparency
- 1. 12/16/2015 Cat Lincoln is CEO and founder of the Clever Girls Collective - Silicon Valley Business Journal http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/print-edition/2015/12/11/clever-girls-collectives-cat-lincoln-thrives-on.html?s=print 1/3 VICKI THOMPSON Cat Lincoln heads Clever Girls Collective, a network of mostly female marketing professionals. She lives in San Francisco and is a member of the de Young museum, where she loves to take visitors when they come to town. | Cat Lincoln | Age: 46 | Residence: San Francisco | Hometown: Milton, Massachusetts | Family: Married; just celebrated 14th wedding anniversary | Education: B.A., psychology, Bates College in Lewiston, Maine | Languages: “English and a little bit of French, and tourist Italian that sometimes turns into French.” | Career path: Worked with disabled adults after college, then worked in the financial services industry. Did administrative and compliance work before being hired as vice president of marketing at Wells Fargo. Exited “corporate world” to become a marketing consultant and From the Silicon Valley Business Journal: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/print-edition/2015/12/11/clever-girls- collectives-cat-lincoln-thrives-on.html Social Capital Clever Girls Collective's Cat Lincoln thrives on transparency Cat Lincoln won't let stereotypes dictate her work environment SUBSCRIBER CONTENT: Dec 11, 2015, 3:00am PST Cat Lincoln, co-founder and CEO of Clever Girls Collective, started her marketing agency in the middle of the recession. Despite the economic downturn, the small network of marketing consultants was able to grow and thrive. Lincoln led the collective during its 2013 partnership with the Make-A-Wish Foundation to create the memorable #BatKid phenomenon. Yet the self-professed bookworm says her leadership strength comes from her close partnership with fellow executives and co-founders Kristy Sammis and Stefania Pomponi. I want to ask about your mentor in your first financial services job. Could you tell me more about her? Her name is Alice Schulman. She’s still a dear, dear friend of mine. She saw that I was a hard worker, and
- 2. 12/16/2015 Cat Lincoln is CEO and founder of the Clever Girls Collective - Silicon Valley Business Journal http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/print-edition/2015/12/11/clever-girls-collectives-cat-lincoln-thrives-on.html?s=print 2/3 founded Clever Girls Collective soon after.that I was interested and smart. ... She also looked out for me. Knowing what I know now, as a manager and having hired people, I know she went to bat for me, over and over again, to get me the right compensation, to get me raises, to get me recognition. I always felt like she was on my side. That’s the difference for a lot of people, but particularly for women, to have someone looking out for you and saying, “Try this, try this.” Get A.M. business scoops. Subscribe to SVBJ's free morning email newsletter. Social Capital is a weekly Silicon Valley Business Journal feature that introduces readers to the person behind their business persona. Did you ever see yourself leading a female-centered network or company? I feel like it’s been such a journey for me to learn to be a leader and to learn to say, “Here’s what we’re doing and you can trust me and believe me.” I think it’s a constant journey for anyone as a leader, male or female. It makes sense — also, I will give a shout out to Wells Fargo. They gave me so much wonderful leadership training. We’ve just pulled out all of the one-minute manager books and training to start to use at Clever Girls. I would also say that we have a fairly unique leadership structure — I call it roundtable leadership — where I’m the CEO and at the same time I have my two partners Kristy (Sammis) and Stefania (Pomponi) who know everything that I’m doing. We make our decisions together. How do you balance the female-centered network with some of the men that are involved in the business? There’s a lot of popular culture around how to mitigate being a woman in the work environment. Like “don’t be too emotional, don’t cry, don’t talk too much.” We don’t consider it gossiping. We consider it being transparent and sharing knowledge. I don’t think it’s being too personal. It’s important to me to know if one of my colleague’s friend’s kid is having trouble at school. And knowing that allows me to be more flexible with them and say, “Hey, if you need this morning off, of course, just go do it. I understand
- 3. 12/16/2015 Cat Lincoln is CEO and founder of the Clever Girls Collective - Silicon Valley Business Journal http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/print-edition/2015/12/11/clever-girls-collectives-cat-lincoln-thrives-on.html?s=print 3/3 that this is important to you.” And I have learned in my career that people will come back and work much harder and be much more loyal to you if you show them that humanity and trust. While those are usually considered female values or female ways of working and things that have to be fixed, we just consider them good humanity and smart business. So the way that the men fit in is that men are humans, too, and men have kids, too. On your website it says that you have an addiction to reality TV. What are your favorite shows? I think my one true love is, of course, “The Bachelor” — I don’t even know if you’d call it a series — the dynasty, all of them. We were so proud when we got a couple of former Bachelors and the Bachelorettes in our Instagram Elite Network. Oh my God, the entire company freaked out, because we’re all huge Bachelor and Bachelorette fans.