Female empowerment, personality development and leadership, these are all topics of our Women Power Network. The founders Anna and Antje give us an insight into the genesis and theme world in an interview.
Dear Antje, dear Anna, it’s nice that you are taking the time to talk to us! Please introduce yourselves briefly!
Antje: Of course. I’m Antje, and I have been a part of Supply for six and a half years. Until recently, I was responsible for the logistics management sector. Now, after an exciting time in logistics, I am taking on a new challenge that is a topic close to my heart: Personality development and leadership. The nice thing about Supply is that we can develop in different directions due to our size and variety of topics.
This topic was important to me even during my time as a consultant. I wanted to talk about it with others and started the consultants’ breakfast in early 2020. That was my first small contribution to our current Women Power Network. Since I’ve been working with Anna, things have really taken off.
Anna: That’s probably my cue. I’m Anna, and I have been working as a Group Legal Counsel at Supply since April 2020. My range of tasks is broad; issues vary from contracts and commercial law to compliance issues. In addition to my role as Group Counsel, there is another topic that is very close to my heart, as it is to Antje’s: Female empowerment. I would like to contribute to encouraging women to inspire one another and to increase the share of women in management positions in the future. Of course, we need room to constantly exchange ideas. That was why Antje and I created the Supply Women Power Network.
That sounds inspiring! What exactly is the Women Power Network?
Antje: At Supply we have a large number of colleagues, but we are not always in the same location, so it’s not a given that we can exchange ideas regularly. This is where the women’s network comes into play. There we have the opportunity to talk regularly about our experiences, to inspire each other, and to discuss different topics such as leadership and personal branding.
Anna: We have a lot of ideas that we would like to incorporate. From the very beginning, however, it was important for us to address everyone’s interests., for this is what creates a true exchange. In the meantime, a great catalog of topics has been created, which we can use and customize for the meetings.
Antje: The design is different every time. In addition to internal talks, we supplement our meetings with external guest lectures. For example, we had Anna Dimitrova (CFO of Vodafone) as a guest on the subject of women in management positions.
Anna: We are also a partner of Global Digital Women. With this partnership, we gain opportunities to participate in external events, and thus increase our visibility to the outside world.
For the curious among us, what can people who are interested learn here?
Antje: New perspectives, impulses, and experiences. Through our network, we offer a protected space where all our colleagues’ questions can find their place. We try to provide new impulses with our focus topics. Our internal and external presentations help us to address new ideas on topics such as our own visibility, personal branding, and leadership.
Anna: We want to inspire people. In particular, our external guest lectures motivate our colleagues to take up new perspectives in their professional or private lives. At the same time, they find the exchange of experiences, the networking, and the joint development of our focus topics very valuable.
What can each person contribute?
Antje: Everyone can actively participate in order to advance our focus topics and enlarge our network. In addition, the courage to try new things, because our colleagues’ personal development is particularly important to us.
Anna: The commitment of each individual contributes to the fact that we can also raise the topics we have developed with the management and thus contribute to the optimization of the entire Supply Group. Consciousness-raising on topics such as female leadership and work-life balance is also becoming even more important.