Charting Ourselves: Leadership Development with Black Professional Women

Abstract

and groups in a healthy and catalytic fashion has everything to do with how they themselves are first willing to create and gain access to support vehicles that seed self-revelation and promote their own knowledge of self in relation to others. An ongoing commitment to developing the self is paramount to the establishment of an identity that is centered and grounded. The use of same raced, gendered, dyadic relationships, sister circles, therapeutic interventions, and mentoring relationships is a first step. This process is the precursor to obtaining analogs to optimize self-definition and relational positioning. Attending to such personal housekeeping allows for the dissolution of toxic interactions derived from stereotypes, negative interjections, destructive projections, character assaults, delimitations of opportunity, an absence of reciprocity, silencing, or relegation to a dominant-culture-defined placement. In short, it is the processing of raced-gendered and class-related interactions that serves as the nexus to both personal liberation and the capacity to teach others the process of uplift. Over the last fifteen years we have hosted fifteen bonding retreats for African American professional women. Our collaborative blend is rooted in being African American women. Toni C. King is an African American associate professor of Black Women's Studies at Denison University who holds a joint appointment in Black Studies and Women's Studies. S. Alease Ferguson is an African American therapist and consultant who has extensive experience in organizational and community development. Each of us has attained licensure for clinical practice. In addition, we both hold Ph.D.s in organizational behavior and we began collaborating as professionals more than a decade ago while attending the same doctoral program. The field of organizational behavior is an interdisciplinary one, drawing from psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and management science. While our counseling backgrounds have provided us with paradigms to understand individual development across the life span,