Many companies are born from the experiences that changed the lives of the founders, and MixR is no different. The mission and purpose of our company are intimately tied to our CEO’s personal story. As a woman quite happily making her way in the workplace in France, Cecile had no realization that her gender could even be a problem… that is until she reached positions of significant power and started finding a seat at the table in the corporate boardroom.

That’s when she first started to feel … small, like maybe she wasn’t enough.

They say a woman’s intuition never lies, and luckily, Cecile’s intuition was still intact. She began to observe that many employees – from lower level associates to middle and even upper management – would seemingly use a company’s organizational structure as a form of power play to preserve and protect their turf rather than collaborate for the common good.

Why was this? Was it a fear of becoming obsolete? Of someone younger and spunkier swooping in and stealing their job? Of simple mistrust in anyone else?

As she began to internalize these thoughts, she started reading, working, and researching how organizational structures shape company culture. In her journey, she discovered that, contrary to her own experiences, many successful organizations operated in open, self-organized, organic, and collaborative environments, sometimes called “flat.”

At first she couldn’t put her finger on it but the more she thought about it, it suddenly hit Cecile that these adjectives were descriptive of what we commonly think of as feminine traits. She couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps the key to solving the mystery was in creating a balance where female traits – even our DNA – reached a level playing field with the rest of the world.

It was several years before Cecile brought a defined structure to the thoughts that had been consuming her mind for several years by this point but it soon became inevitable that these thoughts, visions, images of the future needed to have a home somewhere specific, purposeful, and widely accessible. Why, the Internet, of course!

MixR was launched in December 2016 as an answer to Cecile’s feelings of imbalance in her professional life. It offers private social circles as well as small and large female-forward organizations the opportunity to experience the power both of creating communities and of sharing the task of activating them. Together we hope that they will become the “butterfly that changes the world.”

The core issue we are addressing at MixR is the need for a new type of leadership in our world. Millennials and GenZ consumers are craving environments that are more transparent and collaborative, and communities and companies that not only enable but encourage trust and co-creation. Concurrently, they are feeling more and more trapped by digital platforms, and so the hunger for human connection that old social structures used to provide is similarly increasing.

MixR was created to reflect those values in today’s world and to address the need to create intimate connections among like-minded members online to drive in-person interactions in the real world.

MixR is directing its initial efforts toward female-forward organizations because we feel that they have the biggest need to break free of old paradigms. Building upon the unique skills that make up female leadership and redefining the definition of leadership itself is crucial because leadership no longer exists only in the workplace: it exists at home and within our families, at play, in communities, at churches, in schools.

MixR is reflecting a world where it is becoming ever more powerful, relevant, and important to Lead Like a Woman.

We invite you to be part of our movement, to #leadlikewoman and help shape our future.