Lisa Rafter and Lori Frasier open up about the LeadHER Summit, the moment they knew they’d built something bigger than they imagined, and why they’re determined to keep the community alive year-round.
Only 6 of the top Monitor 100 CEOs are women. Yet in a survey of the women profiled in Monitor’s Women’s Issue, 81% said they aspire to reach senior executive or C-suite roles. That gap — between ambition and advancement — is the reason LeadHER was created.
The inaugural LeadHER Women’s Summit brought together more than 200 women in equipment finance for two days of honest, business-first conversation about leadership, sponsorship, and what it really takes to be seen and heard at the table. In this Q&A, Monitor Editor-in-Chief Rita Garwood talks with Lisa Rafter, Publisher and CEO of Monitor, Founder & CEO of STRIPES Leadership Program and Founder and Creator of LeadHER and Lori Frasier, Founder and Principal of Brightpath Workforce Solutions, and Architect and Co-Lead of LeadHER, about what inspired the summit, the “masks off” moment that became its defining symbol, and why they’re committed to building LeadHER into a lasting community rather than a single annual event — including the upcoming LeadHER Learning Series.
Watch the full interview on YouTube or listen on Spotify.
Rita Garwood: LeadHER was created to be more than just another industry conference. When you first began building it, what did you believe was missing from the conversations that women in equipment finance were having? And did the summit confirm that belief, or challenge it? Lisa, can you take that question?
Lisa Rafter: Yes, absolutely. It’s not just the conversations that women were having, it was also the conversations we weren’t having as an industry. When I look at why we initially started to think about and create LeadHER, it’s because of one industry statistic — the Monitor 100. We started to see over the years that the most recent statistic is that only 6 out of the top Monitor 100 CEOs are women. So we wanted to dive into that and really look at what’s underneath it — how can we create an inclusive environment in our industry, across the board, including women at all levels? That’s the conversation that prompted us to get women together and start talking about this.
As Lori and I began creating it, we could see there were many other conversations women wanted to have, not just that one. So we created LeadHER for Women to do just that — get together, with a business-first agenda, and begin to have really honest conversations about what women were dealing with in their roles, but also about industry topics, with it being a women-led conversation. And yes, the summit accomplished this big time. It absolutely delivered on what we intended when we created LeadHER, and so much more. One of the resounding themes we kept hearing, when we surveyed the women after the event, was: I’m not alone. They could see that other women were experiencing the same challenges and obstacles. We really began to have conversations where women could see they could build strong relationships and network, and that they had permission to lead authentically — to really be themselves. They left with a lot of tools they could put to work. It truly was transformative.
Rita Garwood: It definitely was. So, at the summit, you encouraged attendees to remove the masks they may wear in their professional lives — you actually had a mask on the table that everyone held up to their face and pulled away, and it was a really cool, symbolic moment. Lori, what did you observe when women felt safe enough to be more honest about the pressures and doubts and expectations they carry as leaders?
Lori Frasier: I think that was such a powerful theme throughout the whole conference. When people aren’t spending energy playing a role, acting as if because they think that’s what’s expected of them, they’re more creative. They’re more innovative. They’re more collaborative — because you’re not using energy on something negative, you’re able to put all your energy into making things better. We were hearing conversations about how do we add the most value to our businesses, how do we show up in a way throughout our whole lives that we can really be making an impact. It was very powerful to see people leaning into their whole power and strength, without using energy on playing a role or acting as if.
Rita Garwood: Was there a moment during LeadHER where the two of you looked at each other and realized this was becoming something bigger than you originally imagined? Lisa, do you want to take that one first, then Lori?
Lisa Rafter: For me, it was what Lori just talked about — the masks off moment. I think we did look at each other, Lori, because when the women took the masks down — well, first, when they had them up and we looked around the room — if you see some photographs on LinkedIn, it’s pretty remarkable to see 200-plus women with these masks up. And then when they took them down, I really believe that’s the moment the women thought, okay, this is for real. This is happening.
Lori Frasier: For me, I opened after the masks off ceremony — my keynote was opening the conference, so I was still a little nervous during the masks off, because I had that coming. But once I was done and we were into the first workshop session, there was another moment where folks were sitting at their mentor circle tables, starting to talk about limiting cognitive frames and the things we do to ourselves to limit bringing our whole selves to whatever the situation is, whether that’s work or life. One of the women in the audience stood up, someone brought her the microphone, and she said, I’m realizing that even the way I dressed today, and the way I dress at work, is kind of a mask, because I don’t think it’ll be accepted. She said, but right now, for all of you, I am taking off this sweater — and she had these beautiful sleeves of tattoos on her arms that are personal, that say who she is, that’s who she really is. And the fact that she felt safe enough at a professional conference to take that off and say, this is the real me, this is how I show up, and I’m still just as professional, still just as smart, still just as powerful when you can see my sleeves — Lisa and I looked at each other, and I thought, wow. The whole audience erupted in spontaneous applause and hooting and hollering. It was a moment of chills. I thought, we did something pretty cool here.
Rita Garwood: That was such a powerful moment, I remember it well. Lisa, what did the conversations at LeadHER reveal about where women are thriving in the equipment finance industry, and where significant barriers or unspoken challenges still remain for them?
Lisa Rafter: It’s a really good question, Rita. What surprised me was the split. Women in equipment finance are thriving at the table, but where they’re still struggling is to be seen at it. We kept hearing that women are landing the roles, building expertise, earning technical credibility. But it’s harder for women to get the visibility around advancement, to get their voices actually heard around shaping decisions — while carrying an invisible load at home. That came up again and again. So there’s an important gap between being present and being heard, because showing up isn’t the same as influence.
Two things came up specifically: advancement pathways — because of what women have going on in their lives, there’s sometimes an assumption of unlimited availability, which collides with responsibilities at home, and women aren’t even asked about the next level. And visibility for sponsorship — not just mentorship, but someone advocating for you in the room when you’re not there. The obstacle isn’t just capability anymore, it’s also access and advocacy.
Women aspire to advancement and, in some cases, C-level roles. You did a survey last year, Rita — from all the women profiled in the Monitor Women’s Issue, 81% said they aspire to reach senior executive or C-suite roles. That’s a pretty big number. But when you look at the Monitor 100 list and see that only 6% have the CEO role, there’s a gap between aspiration and actual seats at the top. What we discovered is the pipeline isn’t the problem — it’s the promotion opportunity and sponsorship problem. That’s what we’re looking to address.
Rita Garwood: So important. Several conversations at LeadHER challenged familiar assumptions about confidence, authenticity, and success. Lori, what conventional piece of leadership advice do you believe needs to be retired, and what should replace it?
Lori Frasier: One of the myths of senior leadership we grew up with — I was in the corporate environment from the 80s — was this idea of command and control at the top, that the people at the top have to know all the answers, and that saying you don’t know, or asking for input outside the C-suite, is some sign of weakness. I think, especially in this age of AI and constantly changing environments, and a whole new kind of workforce, we don’t want a know-it-all leader. We want learn-it-all leaders — leaders who are listening, who are constantly focused outside of themselves, outside the usual suspects they go to for advice, and learning on a constant basis. Being able to bring together and synthesize input from many sources is the new superpower. It’s no longer the know-it-all hero CEO a lot of us grew up expecting. That’s dead.
Rita Garwood: I want to talk about mentor circles for a minute — they were one of the most personal elements of LeadHER. Lori, what happens when women at different stages of their careers move beyond networking and begin sharing the realities of leadership with one another?
Lori Frasier: Mentor Circles was one of the real secret sauce aspects of LeadHER. We purposefully curated cohorts of women to sit together the entire day, each day. The first day was by profession — if you were an operations person, you’d be at that table with other operations people from all levels. There might be a C-suite woman there, an individual contributor there, all from the operations standpoint. We did that across different professions. Throughout the day, there were meaningful, deep conversations where people talked not just about success stories, but importantly, what they learned through the hard knocks and challenges. Vulnerability-based trust is so powerful — we know the best teams perform when they’re based in it, the best individual relationships grow when you have it. We purposefully made that happen, and we had women willing to go there, which was such a gift. What we saw was people were then able to bring their best creativity, their best ideas to the table — thinking about where they could show up differently at work to add more value, and how to make choices that really matter for them and their lives. It was powerful. That really was part of the secret sauce.
Rita Garwood: I want to talk about the two of you. You each brought a different set of experiences and perspectives to the creation of LeadHER. Where did you challenge one another during the planning process, and how did those moments ultimately make the summit stronger? Lisa, let’s start with you.
Lisa Rafter: Speaking of secret sauce, I think part of it was our partnership, and what we were able to create together — that started from the word go. The alignment Lori and I had from the very beginning was pretty magical, and it continued, and still does. Mostly we were aligned — one of us would have an idea or an approach, the other would build on it, back and forth. Where we ended up challenging each other was making sure we tied back what we were doing to our overall commitment and the outcome we wanted for LeadHER. We created a tagline early on — LeadHER Women’s Summit, Redefine the Possible: Unlearning Limits, Unlocking Leadership. We kept making sure every speaker, every keynote, all the facilitators, even the timing of each session, tied back to that. That’s where we’d challenge each other, but at the end of the day, there was mostly alignment.
Lori Frasier: When you look at our backgrounds, it was a great match in terms of bringing different things to the conversation. Lisa brings this entrepreneurial spirit — she’s been so deep in the industry, at the very senior levels, kind of knows everybody. She’s not afraid to pick up the phone and ask people why they’re not doing something, like bringing more people to LeadHER. My deep corporate background, having been in the C-suite, working in organizations, and having challenges where I wasn’t able to have the influence I wanted — those real experiences came together in powerful ways.
One thing worth double-clicking on: about three-quarters of the way there — we were working on this hard from January through the end of May — we went back to the focus group and survey information at one point, and one of Lisa’s great team members ran it through AI and said, look at our agenda and this feedback, are there any gaps? That was part of our commitment to be led by the voice of our client. Even if Lisa or I had a great idea and started to run with it, the other would sometimes ask, are we getting too far from what we’re really trying to do here? We both have creative minds that get really excited about things, but we were able to check each other and make sure we stayed true to our purpose. That was really the magic.
Rita Garwood: Many events create inspiration in the moment, and LeadHER definitely did that. But sometimes the feeling fades after everybody returns to work. What responsibility did you feel to help attendees turn the LeadHER experience into lasting action? Lisa?
Lisa Rafter: Responsibility, yes, but it was also a commitment Lori and I had from the very beginning — we wanted this conversation to continue throughout the year, and we wanted to come up with ways to do that. We wanted to keep the conversation alive, the energy alive, the community alive. You can leave an event like the LeadHER Summit feeling so energized and inspired, and then life comes right back in and takes over. The glow of the event can start to fade. We didn’t want that to happen, so we reinforced it, kept it alive, and even expanded on it.
We created a few things for the next 12 months. One is an all-attendee check-in — we had one last week, where everybody comes back together with an agenda to share and build and expand. We also have what we’re calling learning series, which I’d love Lori to talk about. We really wanted to create opportunities for participants and others in the industry to keep building together — that was our responsibility.
Lori Frasier: We also built in, structurally, some follow-up with the mentor circle experience. We had this incredible group of 20 executive-level, busy women who committed to being Catalyst Mentors. Not only were they Catalyst Mentors during the summit — facilitating conversations, sharing their own vulnerable moments, for two full days — they also agreed to have a follow-up session with their table. That’s in progress right now. Some women have told me they did that not just with their Day 2 group, which was the commitment, but also with Day 1. So there was structural follow-up — people left knowing they’d be invited to a call with the people they’d been sharing with, which gave them a bit of a higher sense of accountability to keep it top of mind.
Rita Garwood: Lori, why was it important that LeadHER not end when the summit concluded, and what does all this continuing investment — the attendee calls, podcasts, mentoring conversations — say about the kind of community you’re trying to build?
Lori Frasier: Lisa mentioned this earlier — it was really interesting when we did the post-summit feedback survey, which we got a great response to. That level of engagement itself said something. One of the key themes was, what I really took away is I’m not alone. What we know is that when people feel isolated, they’re not as effective — when they think they’re carrying a load all by themselves. So keeping that community alive was a real commitment, and there are a few different opportunities for folks to stay engaged. We’re going to be doing articles in Monitor to keep the topic alive. Last week, on the all-attendee call, we heard stories that were heartwarming and inspiring — people who’ve gone back to their workplaces and started their own communities similar to mentor circles within their companies, people who’ve asked for and gotten promotions.
One woman had a big organizational change in her company, with new leaders who didn’t know anything about what she’d already contributed over her years there — her job title wasn’t reflecting what she actually did. She put together a 10-page PowerPoint and sat down with her leader to lay out the big picture — not that it was all about her, but to help that person understand who was really contributing. She told me she wouldn’t have had the confidence to do that before LeadHER. Those are the kinds of stories this is all about.
Rita Garwood: I wanted to go back to what you said about trying to navigate career growth alone. What do professionals risk when they try to navigate leadership and career growth on their own, without a community? And how can having a community like LeadHER change that experience? Lisa, do you want to speak to that?
Lisa Rafter: This kept coming through again and again throughout the three days, and it still does. I think when women are alone in leadership, they face a few compounding risks. They miss out on sponsorship — not just mentorship, but people spending their own credibility to advocate for them, sometimes behind closed doors. They don’t get access to the unwritten rules of how promotions and power actually work in their organization. And the ambiguous moments — being talked over, being passed over — are hard to read alone, so women either internalize them as personal failure, or they waste energy second-guessing themselves.
An ongoing community like LeadHER changes that because it’s a recurring opportunity to be together and talk about these things. When women hear the same story from, say, five other people, it stops looking like a personal flaw and starts looking like a pattern you can actually solve. Lori talked about that a lot — women and their agency. At a summit like LeadHER, these relationships build over time. People start sponsoring each other, not just cheering each other on once a year — they can be there for each other as a community, which is really what we’re intending to develop, and have already begun to.
Rita Garwood: You started hinting at the LeadHER Learning Series, but we haven’t dived into it yet. That represents the next evolution of the community. How will it build on the conversations that began at the summit while creating an entry point for professionals who weren’t in the room? Lisa, can you answer that one?
Lisa Rafter: I’ll speak to that, and then Lori has some things to say too. The whole summit gave us this spark — this amazing community of 200-plus women, real conversations about leadership for women. But a single day can’t sustain that. So the learning series is designed to keep it going, to take the themes we heard at LeadHER and build on them. We’re going to start with the series Lori will talk about, and create a rhythm people can keep showing up to. Just as important, we’re opening it up to women and people, men too — people who weren’t in the room can attend, because a lot of the themes are universal. You don’t need to have attended LeadHER to be part of the learning series. Monitor will be promoting these, so the industry can see what we’re creating — it really is for anyone, to keep making these powerful conversations accessible to everyone.
Rita Garwood: Lori, the first LeadHER Learning Series session challenges the traditional idea of work-life balance. Why do you believe the pursuit of balance can sometimes create more guilt and frustration than clarity or fulfillment?
Lori Frasier: Because I lived it. I think Lisa lived it, and probably you’ve lived it too, Rita. There’s a load we carry in our culture, as women, that goes so far beyond our career — the many things we’re responsible for outside of work. I don’t want to limit it just to mothers, either. We also have a growing demographic in our workplaces of younger people who look at the game we played and say, that’s not the game I want to play — I want a life where I’m working to live, not living to work. Some of the things we took for granted, in terms of having it all, being it all — it was a myth then, and it’s a myth now.
I had many years where I felt like I was trying to do it all, and therefore wasn’t doing any of it great. At any given time, one of these things is your second job — and you can’t have two jobs and give them both 100%. We really want to dispel that and make it more about the agency we have to make informed choices about where we’re spending our time — to not feel like we have to take everything coming at us and figure out how to handle it, but to be a lot more intentional, and to lose the guilt, because we have these ideas in our head of what it’s supposed to look like, and the truth is, it might look like that on Instagram, but it doesn’t look like that in real life.
What’ll be great about the learning series is it’s not going to be me as a talking head on your screen — it’s going to be a very interactive opportunity to talk with other women about the challenges and the ways they’re finding success, coming up with what beyond balance really means for them. We’ll have some great executive women from the industry — Jen Martin is joining me from LTi, and Gina Rigsby is joining too. It’s going to be a really powerful set of conversations. This isn’t limited to the LeadHER community that came to the summit — this is where we’re really starting to expand and say, this is for everyone who wants to be successful and who works. We’ve heard from women asking, can I offer this to my non-leasing counterparts? Yes — this is for everybody, because we all have a lot to learn from one another about how to make our lives work, not how to do it all somehow, because that’s just a myth.
Rita Garwood: For someone considering attending the Beyond Balance learning series — how will the session go beyond a traditional webinar? What kinds of practical tools, new understandings, or permission to make change do you hope participants carry back into their lives and workplaces after attending?
Lori Frasier: It’s going to be very interactive, talking with one another about how things work. I’ll be sharing a set of tools that help people make those choices in a way that’s more intentional and proactive, instead of just reacting as life happens to us — being a little more purposeful about the way we think about our days, our weeks, sometimes our hours, and how we’re spending our time.
Rita Garwood: Last question for both of you. As you think about the future of LeadHER, what are you carrying forward from the inaugural summit, and what are you ready to challenge or evolve? And what would you say to someone wondering whether this is a community they need to be part of? Lisa, can we start with you?
Lisa Rafter: What I’m carrying forward is the energy of that room — 200 women being honest about things we often don’t say out loud, and definitely don’t say out loud at work. That’s non-negotiable — it’s the whole point of LeadHER, bringing that honesty and the masks-off conversation forward. What I’m ready to continue evolving is the ongoing format. As Lori and I have said, a once-a-year summit can inspire you, but it can’t necessarily sustain you. We’re pushing toward something ongoing — a rhythm of connection, not just a moment, through the learning series, the mentorship circles, the all-attendee calls, all the pieces we’re putting in place.
As for someone wondering if this is for them — I’d ask myself this question: are you currently navigating your career alone? If the honest answer is yes, then this community is for you. You don’t have to have all the answers for yourself, by yourself, and you shouldn’t have to.
Lori Frasier: Absolutely. One of the things we heard on the all-attendee call last week is that there’s a whole group of summit attendees, growing every day, who have their own chat group — they’re on their phones, inspiring each other, there for each other, touching base day to day. That’s something we, as women, don’t do as well as a lot of our male counterparts — keeping the network going between events, because we’re so deferential to the calendar, and because of the load we’ve already talked about, it’s easy to stay heads down and lose those connections between events.
That question you asked was beautiful, Lisa — are you navigating things alone? If you are, it’s not the best way. We need one another. I think the LeadHER community — you started with the question of when did we know this was more than an event — this thing is turning into, dare I say it, some kind of movement. It’s a movement toward giving people community. Not a movement to change the world, a movement to change my experience day-to-day, to help me feel less alone, to help me have the tools to navigate. Life is hard. Life with work is hard, and I think that’s what this is all about. You don’t have to do it alone, and frankly, you won’t be as effective for your business or your family if you’re doing it all alone. So here’s somewhere you can come. Welcome.
Rita Garwood: It’s so true. Well, thank you both for being on the podcast today and sharing about LeadHER. I’m excited to see how it all unfolds. I’m already excited to have been a part of it, and I’m excited to see where it’s going. Thank you both for creating this for the industry.
Lisa Rafter: Thank you, Rita.
Lori Frasier: Our pleasure. Truly a labor of love.
