Laura DePasquale on Female Leadership and Mentorship

5 Minute Wine Singers
00:00:00

Welcome. Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast with Forrest Kelly.

Forrest Kelly
00:00:06

We continue our conversation with Laura DePasquale of Southern Glazer.

Laura DePasquale
00:00:11

Women of a certain age were told, well, you're being too.

5 Minute Wine Singers
00:00:15

The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast

Forrest Kelly
00:00:17

We'll let Laura finish that statement in just a moment. But first, the mentorship programs at Southern Glazer. Now, these have traditionally been male dominated sectors like supply chain or logistics.

But how do you ensure that women entering the wine business receive the tailored guidance that they need to thrive? Specifically, can you tell me about that?

Laura DePasquale
00:00:37

So, specifically, we have multiple mentor and mentee ship programs within southern glaser. We have leadership development programs. Everything starting from new leaders to advanced leaders to senior leaders to executive leaders.

And these are really highly developed, extraordinary programs.

You either nominate your employees to go into one of these programs, with the exception of the exceptional Leaders program, which is by application, and it's a very competitive program. And this is really like the bench for our next generation of senior leaders and executive leaders.

We also have something called next gen leaders, where we are by application, bringing in recent college graduates. They spend two years with us working in different departments.

I think what employees and people who are looking to get into the wine or spirits distribution side don't understand stand is all the extraordinary opportunities. So while you might start as a sales consultant and work your way up through the commercial channel, right.

Area manager, district manager, sales director, maybe a sales vp, there's also other applications. Right. Business intelligence, financial, pricing, marketing, logistics. Supply chain is huge, huge, our b two B development.

So there's extraordinary opportunity.

And in this next gen program, these recent college graduates get to spend three months in very different departments or divisions so they can say, oh, wow, I thought I wanted to be on the marketing path or in the portfolio management path. But what I really love is supply chain and logistics after spending, you know, my time with them.

So I'm going to go down a supply chain logistics path. So there's a lot of opportunities and a lot of different paths you can go down.

Forrest Kelly
00:02:35

It has to be a bit gratifying. But I imagine that over the course of your career, you've seen opportunities open up for women in leadership roles, correct?

Laura DePasquale
00:02:45

100%. You know, I'm no longer the only woman in the room. There's usually several, which is that, which is fantastic.

My boss is a woman, Cindy Leonard, and she's the executive vice president of wine. And so that's extraordinary. It's really changed.

In fact, I now have times where we're a group of women leaders together, not because we're the women's group, but because we're the leaders and we happen to be women.

And so it's super gratifying as a woman who's been in the business for over 20 years and a woman that used to be the only woman in the room to sit in a room with all women, putting together a strategy, a business plan, a brand launch, whatever it is that we're working on. It's a moment where I quietly, personally to myself, sit back and go, yeah, it's good now.

Forrest Kelly
00:03:39

And this is kind of a sensitive topic.

I want to put this delicately, but I always felt like there's a double standard between, for women in passion, differentiating between passion and emotion.

So can you coach or can you teach somehow to embrace the, their passion without it being misinterpreted as emotional in professional settings, especially when you're advocating for an important decision, how do you, how do you deal with that? Is that teachable?

Laura DePasquale
00:04:07

Yeah, I think that's. I think that that is, is one thing that is very important.

I think women of a certain age were, were told, well, you're being too emotional in a business setting. And it always used to bother me when people said that, and it was like, oh, I've got, okay, I've got to, like, check that.

And then, you know, I came to a place with that where it's like, am I being emotional or am I being passionate? And those are two different things. If I passionately believe in a winery, right?

Or I passionately believe in a hire, for example, somebody is, there's a job opening, and I'm putting forward my case for why that person should be hired over this person or why we should put our resources on this brand launch versus that brand launch, or why we should target these markets. And I personally believe it, and I have facts to back it up. It's not just, you know, well, I think so.

You know, I think that finding that balance is really key.

And what I sometimes see missing today, and when I'm mentoring a woman in particular whose career is on the rise, I will tell them, listen, don't be afraid of that word emotional. I mean, it's one thing to break down in tears. It's another thing to be passionate and firmly believe in what you want to get done.

5 Minute Wine Singers
00:05:21

The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast

Forrest Kelly
00:05:24

Don't forget my favorite part.

5 Minute Wine Singers
00:05:26

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