WeKC Assembly Report: Women Leading Through Waves of Business Change

The long, slow progression of women in business leadership continues its march toward equity. To hear some of this region’s leading executives from high-performing companies discuss the challenges they’re addresssing in the workplace, one can only wonder: What’s taken so long? Honorees from this year’s Women Executives-Kansas City, joined by several others in the WeKC sisterhood from 2023, gathered June 12 at the Plaza-area offices of the law firm Dentons, where managing partner Lisa Krigsten served as host. In addition to accepting their recognition placques, 16 honorees convened for a discussion on topics that are top of mind not just to women in leadership, but for any executive. They pondered the challenges of talent acquisition, generational differences in the workplace, career development, the impact of rapidly advancing technology, shifting worker preferences on workplace locations, the need for flexible workplace design to accommodate those employees, and much more. For a relatively brief dialogue, it was packed with many nuggets of wisdom that demonstrated precisely why these women are now part of Ingram’s influential sorority.

The discussion started with a question about near-term business conditions—which of the participants was most excited about growth potential at their organizations? Karen Crnkovich, owner of DMC Service, was quick to respond.

“As a fixer, not a builder, construction trends don’t affect us,” she said. “We’re the ones who stay consistent. Things are always breaking and need to be repaired, need to be maintained and sometimes replaced.” Beyond that, she said, her Olathe-based commercial HVAC and plumbing services company anticipates additional growth through building automation, regulations on refrigerants and other efficiencies. The lone concern? “Finding qualified employees. That’s what hampers our growth, but we’re still having the best year we’ve ever had.”

Also in that realm, Sheri Johnson of McCownGordon Construction said economic data is highly positive looking out to 2026. “Our projects in the queue don’t even break ground until next year,” said the company’s chief marketing executive. “And we started a manufacturing unit that is going crazy with all the reshoring.” While private developers have held back on commercial projects amid the increase in interest rates, the infusion of public money has helped keep the work pipeline full.

As for residential real estate, a sector slammed by rising prices and high rates, Lindsey Schulze of the ReeceNichols Koehler Bortnick team said things in her world were “shockingly” good. Why? “Because we’ve been in it so long, and people are always having babies, moving, getting divorced or dying. So we’ve always been consistent, but it’s an interesting time to be in real estate, for sure.”

Over the course of her 20 years in that field, she’s seen the number of regional agents soar from 6,000 to 16,000. With the recent lawsuit over agent commissions threatening a rewrite of compensation practices, that number may change. “So far, we’re kind of stuck in neutral,” Schulze says. “We hear a lot more chaos than anything actually happening, but it will be interesting when they make the changes about how we do things.”

At Commerce Bank, treasury executive Samantha Werner says clients are still doing projects and making investments. “From a treasury standpoint,” she says, the biggest challenge “is finding qualified employees.”

Automation also has Sarah Tiedt, wealth adviser for FCS Family Office, anticipating tech-driven growth. “I am excited because of automation for the tasks that don’t require a lot of people so it allows us more time to sit with clients, kind of like doctors, and spend time asking what’s going on in their lives. I’m hoping that those tasks that can be done automatically, will be.” Among them might be more mundane things like note-taking in meetings, but also the possibility of sending push notifications to clients instead of making calls to each or using AI to review tax returns and estate-planning documents. 

“AI,” said Crux KC  founder and CEO Melea McRae, “is a huge development in our business.” She sees it as a way to help manage a diverse set of corporate clients with the firm’s fractional marketing services. “We work with so many different industries; I think our business is like a microcosm of the economy as a whole. But we have to figure out how that tech piece, especially AI, is going to be used.”

Not every business represented at the table, however, sees sunshine and roses ahead. Audrey Masoner, COO for UnitedHealth Group’s Kansas Community Plan, volunteered that, “I’ll be the dark cloud because of the space I work in—I serve Medicaid,” she said. “While we see a lot of opportunities in some segments … Kansas is struggling with health care, won’t expand Medicaid, and we’re seeing the impact of that political divide, along with degrading overall population health.”

People now, Masoner said, “are sicker, even the younger ones, and the sicknesses are more severe. And we have an aging population, so we’re kind of at a critical juncture. There’s a lot we need to address with population health.”

An insurance-sector colleague, Rachel Arnett of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, agreed. From her perspective as vice president of sales for the region’s largest private-sector insurer, Arnett said, “I think a lot of us around the table don’t realize how folks who don’t have access to care are impacting our costs, as well.” Employers are looking to their insurance partners to help control costs, she said, but solutions are harder to come by. Just recently, Blue KC announced that it was exiting the Medicare Advantage space because of ongoing losses. “That’s a small impact nationally, but it impacts 33,000 members in Kansas City,” she said. “We are a local not-for-profit insurer, and we want to have money to put into the community and pay providers, but we can’t lose $350 million over four years—that’s just not sustainable. So we made the decision in the interest of serving more than 1 million other members.”

Given that, is there a role for the broader business community to influence public policy on issues such as the expansion of Medicaid? That’s been a hot issue in both the Missouri and Kansas legislatures for years, without either state budging until voters in Missouri authorized it in 2021.

On the Kansas side, says United We’s Wendy Doyle, “it is a challenging political climate. If you spend time in the state capitol, when you try to have informed conversations, it becomes political and personal. That’s No. 1, what we’re doing with the political climate.”

Lisa Krigsten, managing partner for the host Dentons law firm, pointed out that one of United We’s goals “is to find women to seek political appointments, get involved in the process of making political decisions.”

Said Doyle: “We have a responsibility, and a major election coming up. We have power with the vote, and spending time to know who we are electing to these positions is critical. We try to build a pipeline to really educate women, but until we can change the composition of who is making the decisions, it is going to be a challenge.”

Women in Leadership

That opened a discussion about the pace of change within their own sectors’ efforts to diversify the executive ranks.

Mechelle  Chavey, president of Hollis+Miller Architects, volunteered that when she started at the firm, “it was certainly still somewhat unusual to have a female architect” on staff, let alone one in the leadership ranks. But in the years since, the gender split has nearly flipped. “Now our leadership at the top is one man, and all the rest women,” Chavey said. “It’s fascinating that in the next 10 years, our company will completely turn over from a leadership perspective.”

And yet, while that is happening, the next cohort of potential women in leadership seems to have lost some of the ambition, she said—and she was not alone in making that observation.

“You hear some concerns from that age group that ‘I don’t know if that’s possible for me,’ and they tell me they don’t think it’s attainable,” Chavey said. “I found that funny; I literally did it. I asked why, and they said, ‘Because you’ve done a lot of things that the average person wouldn’t have the endurance to do.’ ”

Others at the table noted that with the playing field for advancement more level than any time in their careers, many young women were ceding potential promotions to male colleagues who were willing to put in the hours and do what’s necessary to get ahead.

That, said JE Dunn’s Margaret Bowker, is where women in leadership need to lead. “Our responsibility as leaders is to mentor the next generation of women who want to be leaders,” she said. “If you’re going to aspire to be up here, you’ve got to work harder than your peers, whether men or women. As a mother, you have to build support systems to be able to attend meetings or go on that trip. If you don’t do that and the male counterpart does, they’re going to get that position.”

Lisa Krigsten, who’s legal career started in the nation’s capital, recalls how she wanted to rise through ranks and “took every opportunity” to do that. “Now, I’m confronted with people who are eligible for partnership, but say ‘I don’t know if I want to do that.’ They’ve put a lot of work in to get to this point and are pausing, and I don’t see the men pausing.”

Like others at the table, Dentons strives to let employees know that they can have a life and don’t need to sacrifice everything to succeed. That doesn’t mean advancement comes without any sacrifices at all. “They want family, they want flexibility, and with law firms today, yes, you can go on that vacation and do these things, but when you are on the clock, you are on the clock,” Krigsten said. “It’s a high-performance culture. Interesting to watch the differences between men and women in the exact same position, with the exact same opportunities to make partner, but more women are thinking, ‘Do I really want it?’

Generational Change

Also of note are trends within the youngest members of the workforce—not all, certainly, but enough to warrant concern.

With many young employees today, said Sarah Tiedt, “I do think there’s a lack in the way they value experience. Young people now are like, ‘I can do that, why can’t I have that job?’ The other person may have been meeting with clients for 15 years, but they’ll say, ‘Well, I met with a client last week.’ Building out a plan is great, but a year in, they’re saying, ‘OK, let’s go.’”

No longer taboo is the discussion between employee and supervisor about the disconnect between compensation and expenses. Several at the table cited experiences like hearing, ‘I need to move into a better apartment, so I need a raise.’

Coming up in business, said Melea McRae, “It was never how I needed to move up to make more because expenses were too high. There is more of an expectation among young employees that they will get promoted sooner. In my day, it was three to five years before you got that first promotion. Now, they think a year is enough.”

“That,” said Karen Crnkovich, “is the society we’ve created. We’ve raised kids with instant gratification, who expect that if they text you, you’ll drop everything and respond right away.” It is, she says, a generation that has never heard ‘no,’ who don’t know what hard work is.”

Still, she’s optimistic that things will come full circle as that segment of the workforce comes to accept the realities of job and career, but it won’t be pain-free. “They will eventually learn,” Crnkovich said, “and it will be a harder learning lesson for them when they find what it’s really like.”