Chief

Chief is a membership network for senior women leaders, operating across the United States and the United Kingdom. Its stated purpose is to create more possibilities for women's power, and its structure is built around peer groups rather than events.

Who joins

Chief publishes its seniority criteria in three categories, and an applicant needs to meet one.

The C-suite route covers women holding a chief officer title, or its equivalent, at organisations with 1,000 or more employees, or holding board seats at publicly held companies.

The senior leaders route covers chief executives, chief officers, vice presidents and senior vice presidents, and founders at mid-market to enterprise-scale companies, assessed on level and on the size of team managed.

The builders route is the one most relevant to this directory. It covers solopreneurs, independents, consultants, founders and fractional leaders who either have prior chief officer or vice president experience at credentialed companies, or run businesses with US$2 million or more in annual revenue or venture funding.

Chief is equally clear about who it is not for: people looking to solicit new business, people early in their careers, and people without a leadership track record. Stating the exclusions plainly is more useful than another list of aspirations.

How membership works

Application against those criteria, with a seniority review. Chief does not publish pricing.

One structural point is worth knowing. Chief offers an employer sponsorship route, so a company can fund an executive's membership as a development investment. For a woman running a family business, that means the cost may sensibly sit with the company rather than personally, which is a question worth asking before paying out of pocket.

What members get

Core groups are the substance: small peer groups that meet monthly with professional facilitation, which is the same model the effective organisations in this category all use.

Around them sit executive coaching, physical clubhouse spaces in the cities where Chief operates, and a programme of events.

For this directory, the relevance is that senior women executives and founders are a growing source of independently created wealth, and the questions they face about it are often raised more freely among peers than with advisers. Chief is not a wealth network and does not present itself as one. It is where a woman running a substantial business or a large corporate division finds a peer group, and for a family enterprise led by a woman it complements the ownership-based networks in this directory rather than replacing them.