Leading With Transparency & Empathy

The C-suite is beginning to take on a new look. Historically women as CEOs were unheard of. While still not the majority, it is no longer an anomaly. According to a March 2023 Challenger, Gray & Christmas report, 32 percent of new CEOs were women in the first three months of 2023, an all-time high. Companies increasingly understand that having more diversity at the top is suitable for businesses.

When Inspire Clean Energy’s former CEO decided to step down a year ago, he and Inspire’s Board Chairman hand-selected Stephanie F. Donner, who was serving as Inspire’s Chief Legal Counsel and People Officer, to step up into the role. Since then, Stephanie has driven transformative change to Inspire’s revenue and culture. During her CEO tenure, the company has experienced a 48 percent revenue increase and 38 percent customer growth over this last year. FY23 reflects Inspire’s best fiscal performance in its nine-year history.

It’s no coincidence that the company’s all-time best performance mirrors Stephanie’s time in office. She credits this unprecedented performance to empowering and engaging her executive cabinet; setting clear, focused priorities and goals; and galvanizing accountability across Inspire’s collective staff to unify everyone under a single strategy and shared purpose.

One of Stephanie's first actions in her new role was investing in a robust, committed team. Once set, she quickly assessed where she needed to continue to lean in and where she could step back and let her SMEs do their best: leading and overseeing decision-making for their teams. Stephanie believes that while it’s vital to have talented individual players, those players also need to be dedicated to functioning and ultimately winning as a team.

Tightening the strategy and communicating consistently has enabled her cabinet leaders to filter every decision through that lens. This has helped her leaders, and their teams, prioritize, avoid distractions that don’t support Inspire’s strategic goals, and move the needle against the company’s larger north star to drive meaningful progress.

Stephanie embarked on an internal campaign to help staff understand accountability and how every single job matters when it comes to advancing the strategy for the business. She has also made it a point to establish report scorecards that hold employees and the company accountable for what they set out to achieve.

Success, she says, comes from talking transparently and candidly with employees, encouraging open discussion, reinforcing it, and inspiring them to adapt it to what it means to them.

Despite the solid financial performance, Stephanie is proud of the bolstered culture and how well people treat each other at Inspire. She observes that there is a general interest and desire from Inspire employees to want to feel good about the work they are doing and who they are doing it with. Stephanie’s talent for driving business is matched by her ability to motivate and inspire those around her. She has shared that two principals have guided her time as CEO at Inspire – lead with transparency and empathy- qualities she encourages in other leaders.

In her experience, transparency wins because it removes many employees' apprehension. Being open and candid with employees enables trust and brings people along for the journey. She says that leaders need to hold a high bar for teams and foster a psychologically safe environment for employees to get there.

Stephanie’s collective career has grounded her belief to lead by example. Letting her actions speak doesn’t simply push employees toward excellence and outcomes but explicitly demonstrates that excellence. Leading by example also means living out her values. Stephanie has spent her career developing women and girls and encouraging other women leaders. She shares that coming up through the ranks in a world where there were not a lot of females sitting in positions of power and influence has motivated her to be a spark for change.

Stephanie is a recipient of the Girl Scouts of the USA Women of Distinction Award; named one of the “Top 25 Most Powerful Women” by the Colorado Women's Chamber of Commerce; honored by the Denver Bar Foundation and Davis Graham & Stubbs LLP with The Davis Award, an award that recognizes outstanding service to the legal community, along with civic and charitable leadership; and presented with a recognition that applauded her accomplishments in women’s innovation by the Colorado Women's Bar Association Foundation; among many other awards, honors, and distinctions that recognize her leadership in women’s equity. Stephanie says she is a blessed beneficiary of such recognition and is proud to know that her contributions make a difference in causes she is passionate about.