Leisa: Hello, I’m Leisa Holland-Nelson and welcome to another edition of Women Mean Business, where we’re going to take you up close and personal with extraordinary women doing extraordinary things.  My guest today is Denise Hamilton, the Founder of WatchHerWork, a digital community, and WatchHerWork TV, and all kinds of important and exciting things. Denise, welcome to Women Mean Business.

Denise: Thank you for having me.

Leisa: Tell us about WatchHerWork.

Denise: Well, I started WatchHerWork because I wanted to solve my own problem.  Throughout my career, I’ve been the only African American, or the only woman in so many different situations that I kind of built up a little reputation of being skilled at navigating these difficult environments. So, consequently, I had numerous women that wanted to take me to lunch, grab coffee, pick my brain. Well, I had to actually work, and it also struck me that they were kind of asking the same questions over and over again. So, I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could leverage technology to just archive this information? And also, archive this information from women from all walks of life, because my advice may not be the advice; there’s a million different ways to skin a cat, so let’s leverage the best and brightest women, capture their information, and store it in a way that women can access it whenever they wanted to. So, hundreds of women later, and 5,000 videos later, we have this incredible platform where you can go and get the advice you need. How do you tell your boss you’re pregnant? How do you ask for a raise? What do you do if you cry in a meeting? There’s really not a lot of places to go and ask those questions, so we’ve created a library of sorts of the best and brightest advice for professional women.

Leisa: So, describe to me how I use it. How do I get there and how do I use it?

Denise: Well, we have two sites: watchherwork.com and watchherwork.tv. watchherwork.com is a blog, and has a certain library of free videos for you to access, but if you’re ready to get serious about your career and deep dive, you subscribe to watchherwork.tv. Thousands of videos on everything from parenting, to dealing with caring for aging parents. I’ve got two brothers; nobody expects them to care for my mother as she ages, they expect me to. So, do I go to my company’s annual meeting, or do I go to my mother with her biopsy? Those are the choices that women are making every single day, and they impact their progression and work. Am I going to have a baby? How do I tell my boss that I’m leaving? Am I going to take six weeks, or eight weeks, or twelve weeks? All of these questions, we discuss them at watchherwork.tv.

Leisa: Thank you. There you have it, another extraordinary woman doing extraordinary things.  I’m Leisa Holland-Nelson, Author and voice of Women Mean Business. You can find us at Women Mean Business on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter @lhnelson. We’ll be back again next week with another edition.