An Update from NLL Founder & CEO, Brigid Moynahan

With NLL in the capable hands of “next gen leader” Lucia Brizzi, I guess you could say my role as CEO is really- Chief “Celebration” Officer. 

What am I celebrating? The generosity of women helping the next generation of leaders thrive by sponsoring Success Circles in their organizations. Our business has been built from the loyalty of program alumnae. To highlight a few of our most recent examples….

Mojgan Hossein-Nia,( Rutgers ELP 2006) was not only responsible for large-scale expansion of Success Circles at Novartis from 2008-2011, but then launched our first fully virtual Success Circles Leadership Program for Women at Takeda in March 2020. Remember March 2020? It was the height of the pandemic with no vaccines in sight! We thought about pausing but Mojgan told us: ”Women want this training now.” She was right. By the end of the program, 30% of participants were promoted and all but one remained at Takeda. This during what has been described as a “mass exodus” of women from the workplace!”  Mojgan and her team continued expanding the program to talent charged with overseeing the life cycle of drug development in R&D. Today participants and graduates are continuing to spread positive contagion at Takeda, coaching as they lead across and beyond their organizations. We are also grateful to Lynda Libby and Christian Lease, for their continued support of Success Circles Leadership Training for project managers and project leaders at Takeda. 

Back to our graduates! It’s been a joy working with Dafni Bika (Rutgers ELP 2008) to bring the Success Circle Leadership Program for Women to AstraZeneca. Recently, I got to moderate a panel for the group that featured Dafni as well as another program alumni Gina Wilkerson who graduated from the first Success Circles program we ran at AstraZeneca when she was a Director there. She’s now a Senior Executive at Glaxo Smith Klein so it was a homecoming of sorts when she joined Dafni and two other inspiring AZ women a few weeks ago to share wisdom with the current class. Particularly gratifying for me was hearing Dafni and Gina describe key decisions they made as program participants years ago that positively transformed their lives and careers. Feedback we’ve received since that session is that the mentoring participants received was transformational as well!

It's been great to watch our graduates continue “lifting as they climb” by supporting our Success Circle Leadership Development programs.  If you’ve got leadership insights of your own to share or if you’d like to collaborate with us in sponsoring the next generation of leaders, I hope you’ll be in touch because I’d love to connect!

Here’s to celebrating where we’ve been and what’s to come,

Brigid