President Jim Ruble called the meeting to order promptly at 12:29, with the ring of the bell and welcomed everyone to today’s meeting.

Larry Madsen and Steven Schnell were the greeters today, and Steven introduced the members who brought guests:

Gary Pehrson had us all stand and lead us in singing “Cowboy Joe” in honor of our guest speakers today.

We had two more Paul Harris fellows awarded today, Liz Becher (PH +4), and Dusty Johnson (PH +2). Thank you and congratulations.

Tom Thorson announced that Governor Dave Foster’s Wife passed away last week.

Lisa Hubbard announced that she is retiring and moving into an on call position.

 

Liz Becher nominated PE Richard Schwahn and PE Nominee Dick Jay for participating in PETS conference last weekend and for them preparing to continue to move our club forward.

PE Richard Schwahn nominated AG Liz Becher for being at PETS for the past three years helping out and supporting that conference.

President Jim Ruble nominated AG Liz Becher for putting together the club directory again this year.

Lauren Griffith nominated Brian Helling, Brian Oliver, Jason DeWitt and John Griffith for sponsoring the basketball team that won the Casper Rec Division games.

Deb Theriault nominated Steve Loftin, Diane Treick and Guy DeWitt for volunteering to host any international Rotarians who may want to come for the August eclipse event. She also stated that there may be more opportunities available so if you are interested please contact her.

Don Harris nominated everyone who has been so helpful and loving towards him and his wife.

Eric Easton nominated Brad Cundy for hosting a dinner fundraiser for the Casper Mountain Ski Patrol.

John Griffith nominated Lisa Hubbard for her wonderful career and everything she has done for the community and congratulated her on her retirement.

Kevin Murphy nominated Daron Gruner for his daughter having a great performance skiing this past weekend.

President Jim Ruble nominated Tom Broumley for fixing the gavel that the head flew off of last week.

Our SOM this week is Deseret Laman from Roosevelt H.S. She is an outstanding student with big goals for her future.

President Jim Ruble announced that Rotary Leadership Institute will be held March 24^th-25^th at the Trails Center, the club will pay the fee for anyone who wants to attend you just need to go online to the District website and sign up. If you have questions let him know.

Dave Simonson gave us an update on the International School room project. The first of three classrooms is almost finished. They have a roof on and just need to do some painting and cosmetics. They will then soon start on the second one for the 11^th grade.

Chad Nelson announced that Leadership Wyoming will be having an informational lunch on Friday at the Chamber for those interested in learning more and signing up for this year’s class.

Chad also announced that the Blue Envelope Health Fair starts this week and runs for two weeks, Tuesday through Saturday, so come down and have your health checked.

President Jim announced that the University of Iowa Leaders Forever club will be in town doing a project with the KWHS Key Club and we are in charge of hosting a dinner for them on Saturday March 11^th. He needs volunteers to help him coordinate the dinner so if you are available please let him know.

PE Richard Schwahn introduced our speaker today, Joi Thomas, from UW who is here to talk to us about developing tomorrow’s women leaders.  She started out by giving us some of the background and research. Every year there is a study of Women in the work place and in that study we see that at the entry level men and women go into the workforce at the same rate. Then we notice is at the very first promotion there is a huge disparity between men and women being promoted, for every 100 women that are promoted a hundred and thirty men are promoted. External hires overwhelmingly favor men over women, twice as many directors from outside of the company that are hired are men and three times more men are outside hires for the VP positions. More CEO positions are promoted up from a line role rather than a support position, like HR or IT. As women progress they tend to move into support staff roles so they are not in positions that normally move up into higher positions. Women do not feel that they are heard or appreciated in the work place and receive more negative feedback when they do ask for raises. The majority of men have equal number of men and women in their networks  yet they have found that women tend to have more women than men in their networks so they are less likely to have mentors and people in their network that are in higher positions because those positions are more often held by men. The study also found that regardless of gender the people who do more work at home are less likely to want to move into executive positions. They are looking at how to address these issues effectively. She first spoke of the confidence gap; research shows that when women apply for a promotion they meet 100% of the qualifications whereas men apply when they only meet 60% of the qualifications. There is a thing called perfection paralysis which is not moving ahead until you are sure it is absolutely perfect and since nothing is ever perfect these people end up stuck where they are regardless of gender. Then there is what they call imposter syndrome, which is the belief that you lucked into the position you are in and any day now someone will figure out that you are an idiot and you should not be in the position you are in. A new study shows that regardless of gender people feel that if they work hard they will get the promotion but actually exuding confidence and looking like you know what you are doing is more important than actually having the knowledge. The difference in how generations are different is also a big issue in the workplace, each generation has a different way of looking at the workplace and how they work together. They have found that by mixing the generations in teams you tend to have a lot better teamwork as they can teach each other different things and do a better job of solving problems. By pairing different generations with reverse mentoring, both generations end up learning from each other. Also changing up the different types of incentives based on the generations goes a long way in helping the different generations work better. Do not create teams that are of the same generation, you will not get the same results as if you mixed the generations. Do not assume to know what motivates people; each person is motivated by something different. The top three companies that millennials want to work for are, Google, Apple, and then for themselves as they want to have the freedom these jobs give. They took all of this information and looked at what they are doing at UW and decided that they need do make some changes and implement some of these changes. They created a program called beyond the brand with the mission to enhance the experience of every woman in the UW athletics department and give them the opportunity to tell their story by inspiring growth, developing and supporting leadership programming and cultivating and fostering mentors and champions. A mentor is someone who knows everything about you and is offering you advice. A champion is someone who speaks for you when you are not in the room and are pushing your name forward for promotions and opportunities. They started a program for all of their full time women in the department, it is a two year program where they meet every other month for two hours for about eight months then they do action projects with career shadowing and mentoring. They hope that through this program they can help and encourage these women to get better and to help others get better to prepare for promotions and growth. They are trying to teach the millennials who are used to having everything now, that careers are not immediate they take time to develop. They encourage everyone to have either official or unofficial mentoring programs to help develop everyone in the workplace. They do a self-assessment and discover that the women always mark themselves lower than anyone else would mark them. Once they have the self-assessment done they then put together a development plan so that they can build on where they want to be. They have a checklist to help them better use the mentor program. They are having great success with the mentors as well as the mentees and feel it is ahead of their expectations. This is something that can be implemented at any age group and any school or workplace or even clubs and other organizations such as Rotary; mentoring works everywhere.

President Jim Ruble concluded the meeting at 1:21; letting us know that next week we are back at the Parkway Plaza. Our program will be Michelle Wistisen from the Casper Planetarium to talk to us about the eclipse.

“Rotary Serving Humanity”