We recently started the "Women's Innovation Network" (WIN) at Zurich. It's a grassroots effort to bring people together to help develop women professionally through networking and development. I was flattered when I was asked to be on the Steering Committee for this group. Informally, in the past, we've commonly discussed that it would be great to pull something like this together, and suspected many women felt the same way. We did some focus groups in 2009, and our thoughts were confirmed. We held our first pilot event late in 2009. We invited a speaker to talk about leadership and our event was completely over capacity. We actually had hundreds of employees attend and had to get an extra room for the attendees. Clearly, there was a strong interest and far more than expected. We've hit on a need. Mostly what we've heard is that people want to feel like part of a community. They want others to go to for help, networking, support and mentoring outside of their immediate team.
The events to date have centered on leadership development and networking in two of our core office locations - New York and Chicago. So far, we've held three formal events and are working on a fourth. We're also working to expand the concept in other Zurich offices. We suspect many customers and brokers would likely have the same interest - so we'll be teeing up something to hold jointly with our other businesses later this year.
Outside of the formal events, I think we all should take some responsibility to think about what we can do to give someone deserving an opportunity. How can I give someone more exposure, visibility, encouragement and support in their careers? How do I help someone to network? I think if we all take some time to help someone else, we can create our own version of WIN in each of our own local offices every day.
