Page 47 - BusinessWest December 8, 2021

Wondolowski
Continued from page 45
said of LPV and its mission. “And that’s the thing I really appreciate about this organization; it allows me to be entrepreneurial and to try new things. Some things work and some things don’t, so we take small risks. Overall, the need for leadership keeps expanding.”
This need to be entrepreneurial and take small risks was exacerbated by — and in all ways impacted by — guiding LPV through COVID.
Wondolowski said the past 22 months have been a learning experience on all kinds of levels, but espe- cially when it comes to decision making and con- fronting change on a massive scale.
“It’s been a real a roller coaster,” she said. “In the beginning, it was, ‘OK, we just have to do this,’ and we pulled our board together to make some tough decisions. In the early months, we were meeting very regularly, and in some ways it was hard ... but it was in different ways than it is now because there was a sense of purpose, and knowing we were all coming together helped a lot.
“As it dragged on, and it waxes and wanes, there are some days when it can just be really overwhelm-
Harassment
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are lower for those in these positions, for one fast- food worker forced out of her job, lifetime costs still totaled more than $125,600.
• The lifetime costs of workplace sexual harass- ment and retaliation were particularly high for those pushed out of well-paid, male-dominated occupa- tions, reaching $1.3 million for an apprentice in the construction trades. The cost of a single year out of
ing and hard,” she went on. “You get decision fatigue.”
These are the same challenges confronted by
all business and nonprofit leaders over the past 22 months, she said, adding that COVID and its many side effects have brought changes to how and where work is done, and thus profound changes to the dynamic of the workplace.
And many of these changes are long-term, if not permanent.
“We’re not going to go back to fully in-person workplaces for a long time,” Wondolowski said, add- ing that many workers have been very productive
at home, and many see little, if any, reason to return to the office. And a number of companies large
and small see the logic in allowing remote work to continue.
But with this seismic shift comes changes in how people communicate — and how they must lead.
“There are all these questions about work culture and how you create a culture when people aren’t not all in the same place,” she said, adding that this rep- resents just one of new frontiers, if you will, when it comes to managing in these compelling times.
“For our last class, we actually had a session on executive presence and focused a lot on how you
work for another apprentice in a construction occu- pation translates into a lifetime loss of $230,864 due to lost wage progression and foregone benefits.
• Forced career change may necessitate paying for new degrees or credentials. These costs came
to almost $70,000 for one woman, reflecting direct tuition costs for a two-year community-college degree plus lost earnings over two years as she pur- sued her new degree.
communicate effectively virtually, and all the things about body language and how you frame yourself on the camera,” she told BusinessWest. “These are things you would never have thought about, and now you do.”
Bottom Line
That’s just one example of how leadership is, as Wondolowski said earlier, ever-changing. And that’s one of many factors that has not only kept her in this job longer than she ever thought she would be in it, but kept her engaged and energized.
As she plans that 10th-anniversary commence- ment for next spring, she is also thinking about the many springs to follow and the future classes of LPV and what they will need to be impactful leaders in the community and in business.
Filling in those blanks, especially in the era of COVID and the profound changes it has brought
to the landscape, is not easy. But if anything, Won- dolowski has demonstrated that she not only grooms leaders — she has become one herself. u
George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]
The report suggests that culture change, company change, and governmental change are all needed for prevention and accountability.
“It’s clear from our interviews that a lack of enforcement is a part of what’s missing,” said report co-author Ariane Hegewisch of IWPR. “Sexual-harass- ment policies alone will not work unless there are consequences when they are broken.” u
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