“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
We can all remember moments when our interactions with a co-worker, a boss, a client or a partner taught us a thing or two about work ethic, communication, leadership or management style. Some of those chance networking or learning moments became the seeds that grew into our own core values that we lean on throughout our careers.
When I think about the people I’ve met and learned from during my career in sports, I feel lucky to have been positively affected by a number of game-changing women … women who relentlessly push through the glass ceiling, who change the minds of naysayers and work tirelessly to put their values into practice. From watching the first WNBA President Val Ackerman lead an ambitious startup, to my countless conversations about persistence with Sue Rodin, founder of Women in Sports and Events, to solving challenges alongside my own agency’s female partners (including one of SportsBusiness Journal’s Game Changers, Donna Providenti), I’ve seen time and time again that female leaders know how to get things done.
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Mannix with members of the LeadDog Marketing staff, which is 71 percent women.
Photo by: LEADDOG MARKETING GROUP
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But often women in the sports industry aren’t given the chance to make a truly meaningful impact. Many up-and-comers need guidance, inspiration and opportunities for mentorship to get to the next level. This is where gatherings like the SportsBusiness Journal Game Changer Conference come in. Events such as these serve as an important meeting spot for women to hear from industry leaders, learn about important trends and make valuable contacts that could help take their careers to new levels. Conferences such as this one can be a game changer for women Game Changers themselves.
The Game Changers Conference is a great start. But simply bringing people together in a ballroom for discussion and talking about making more opportunities available for women in sports isn’t enough. We need more action. We need to take tangible steps to create real opportunities for women to help them gain entry to the corridors of power in sports.
With this in mind, LeadDog is proud to announce the creation of the “Mentoring Challenge” at this year’s Game Changers Conference. We will provide 10 deserving young women, or “Rising Stars,” the opportunity to attend the conference as our guests and be paired with a Game Changer honoree as their mentor going forward. And because true and meaningful mentorship doesn’t happen during a single conference, we’re working with SportsBusiness Journal to create a quarterly content and speaker series to provide ongoing learnings that we hope will encourage more women to thrive in the sports industry and have more opportunities made available to them.
In closing, I’ll share that as we have built our agency over the past 15-plus years, there are many things for which we are very proud. But at the very top of that list is the fact that our LeadDog staff is 71 percent women. And that is no accident. My management team and I are ALL IN toward helping women break through that ceiling that has kept women in lower-level positions across our industry for so many years. And we’ll have to keep at it. That ceiling is real. It is thick. So we’re going to invest as many of our resources as possible in the years ahead, including time, money and in developing catalyzing mentorship relationships that help grow up-and-comers into mentors — and commissioners, and sports network presidents, and team presidents — themselves someday.
Dan Mannix (dan@leaddogmarketing.com) is president and CEO of LeadDog Marketing Group.
