Chief finally has a clubhouse in San Francisco, but don’t call it a coworking space. The 8,600 square feet include conference rooms, one-person Zoom rooms, and open-plan seating, but it also has a bar, lounge seating, and, like Chief’s other clubhouses in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, a piano.
“To me, what the piano represents is ‘this is not a coworking space,’” co-founder-in-chief Lindsay Kaplan told me on a tour of the clubhouse before its official opening Thursday. “This is a place where you can sit and take meetings in a very relaxed way.”
Unlike Wing, the women-focused club and coworking space that closed this summer after six years, Kaplan and co-founder and CEO Carolyn Childers are still much more interested in building and supporting Chief’s network. than in increasing his physical comforts.
That’s why Chief’s core offering, curated 10-member “Core” peer groups that meet monthly with an executive coach, will still be held virtually.
“What we optimize for the most is to find the right, perfect 10 people to be with,” Childers said. “Even in San Francisco, it could be someone out of town.”
Before Chief expanded outside of New York, groups still met in person, but applicants who said they wanted to join the space rarely made it off the waiting list. The network is about the peer group, and the space is more like “the container that can happen in real life,” Kaplan said.
The network is modeled after the Young Presidents Organization, the 72-year-old network of CEOs under the age of 45 who help each other overcome professional and personal challenges. YPO is all about its network and doesn’t have spaces of its own, Childers said.
Kaplan and Childers were also inspired by Carole Robin, a longtime facilitator of the popular “touchy feely” course at Stanford, in thinking about “how do you create the right level of, frankly, vulnerability that you need to get to in order to really work?” . through things,” Childers said. “The nucleus [group] It really gets to a place where you can talk about what’s really going on with you, both personally and professionally, because those two things fit together so much.”
That said, the clubhouse is also a place where members can entertain, hold their board meetings, and yes, take Zoom calls. Ten percent of Chief’s 20,000 members live in the Bay Area, but when Chief was planning his next clubhouse, San Francisco was also the city most sought after by non-Bay Area members. . In other words, Chief members in cities like Boston and DC wanted a clubhouse in San Francisco where they could visit while in town.
Despite that, Childers and Kaplan try to more closely emulate a Harvard alumni club, which has clubhouses with “great amenities,” Kaplan said, but most of the real benefits come from being part of a vast network. and powerful. But with a mission to change the face of executive leadership, the female-centric atmosphere could also feel more approachable: Kaplan recalled a similar feeling of camaraderie with other women trying on clothes in the communal dressing room of the old New York department store. York. Loehmann’s.
“It reminds me a little bit of this intimate space,” Kaplan said. “If you tried something on and stood in front of the mirror, all the women around you were like, ‘Honey, that looks good.'”
Source: news.google.com