I think the number one thing—and I'll start with Lululemon and practices that I've conveyed over to Luvo—is we taught leadership as part of our curriculum from day one. To anybody who came to work at Lululemon, we taught three levels of leadership.
The first was self; managing yourself and your relationship with others, managing your performance. Those were all considered of self.
Then we taught leadership of others, and that wasn't just people who reported to you. That was actually your relationships with peers and how to be a leader in an organization across multiple functions and divisions, and to work on projects so that we gave exposure to women.
One of the things that we did was in our leadership course, we would take 20 high-potential women leaders, and we would put men in there as well. The point was to keep them working together. Then we would give them strategic projects or initiatives from our plan and have them work cross-functionally. That gave them visibility, which is important to women leaders. It gave them confidence. Also in those courses, they all had a mentor from the management staff and an outside leadership course when you participated in that program. We ran it for eight months of the year; somebody would be in it for the eight-month program, and then a new class would be selected.
Our final leadership level was leading organizations, where we taught strategy and function and how to lead into the future vision and capability of an organization.
Leadership development was a core competency at Lululemon, and very much those are the philosophies that I'm bringing over to Luvo as well.
I have to start at a slightly different base here. I have to teach English as a second language, for instance, reducing barriers for training in my manufacturing facility, where we have hired a lot of immigrants.
I think it's recognizing what's in your workforce, the base that you're starting with, and developing leadership programs. For instance, in the manufacturing facility, we take the most competent women we've seen working and we put them in charge of a line, and we teach them already very basic principles from the lean manufacturing philosophy. We are already having them coach and learn leadership. As soon as they demonstrate any skills at all, we put them into a training program. Then they're getting self-development, and then that gives them promotional opportunities.