Melinda French Gates on Owning Your Power and Leading with Purpose

Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel

Careers, Business

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melinda French Gates has spent her life navigating pivotal career moments and using her influence to empower others. In today’s episode of Hello Monday, Jessi Hempel sits down with Melinda to dive into how we can summon and own our power, both professionally and personally. From her early days as high school valedictorian to her role as one of the world’s most impactful philanthropists, Melinda shares what she’s learned about leadership, career pivots, and using your power to make a difference. Melinda and Jessi discuss: The role of trusted advisors to guide you throughout your career The difference between a mentor and a sponsor, and why having a sponsor is crucial to your success How to ask questions and admit when you don’t have all the answers Strategies for tackling gender inequity in the workplace Re-entering the workforce after parental leave Making intentional career pivots and surviving despite fear of a career transition Continue the conversation with us at Hello Monday Office Hours! Join us here, on the LinkedIn News page, this Wednesday at 3 PM EST.

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn News
0:02.0	Melinda, it feels like the cost of failure is smaller for men.
0:09.0	So I put you up for a role and you blow it.
0:11.0	I think that women often experience the ramifications of getting that wrong much more severely.
0:18.0	And by the way, you can totally disagree with me on this.
0:21.1	I do. Oh, you disagree? I disagree. I think it's more that they doubt themselves,
0:27.9	so they're not sure they're going to sponsor this, that, or the other woman. I think
0:31.6	businesses move forward very quickly, but I think we doubt ourselves in terms of doing that for other people.
0:40.6	From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jesse Hempel. And this is Hello Monday. It's our show
0:45.7	about work on our own terms. If you've found yourself here today, you are probably a person who has at some point in your
0:56.4	life, maybe even right now, had to make a big change. Maybe it's a career change or pivot,
1:02.4	or maybe it's something that you are trying to change about yourself, to show up differently.
1:07.5	To show up as powerful as you actually have the potential to be. Well, today we have a guest who's going to give us some advice on how to do that. We have Melinda French Gates, and that's probably a name you know. Melinda has been one of the most powerful women of our time. But did you know about Melinda
1:27.9	that she was actually valedictorian of her high school class?
1:31.6	Like she started out a powerhouse.
1:33.7	Did you know she had an incredibly technical education?
1:36.7	And that for her first job,
1:38.2	she chose between IBM and Microsoft,
1:40.8	two of the most important tech companies of the moment.
1:45.7	That was the late 80s.
1:49.7	Did you know that she spent a lot of her early career building teams inside Microsoft?
1:55.2	Did you know that she actually opted out of her career for a brief period to help raise her kids full time? But even when she did that, she knew she was coming back and she prepared
	...

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