Meet Amy Williams

We recently connected with Amy Williams and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Amy, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

I grew up understanding that one did what had to be done – often without question. My resilience was born from the stories of the women in my family. My grandmothers both raised families during the great depression era while working to keep their families fed and solvent. One grandmother wanted to be a movie star, the other a milliner. They set aside their dreams to fit the social norms. My parents divorced when I was in elementary school, pushing our mother into a battle of reentering the workforce while raising small children. She persevered. We adapted. We learned from her examples.
As the eldest daughter in a family of girls raised in the 60s-70s, I embraced the idea of female career potential. It was the time of spoken possibility still girdled by traditional expectations. Excellence was the goal; achieving self-ascribed dreams was applauded, yet societal appropriateness still guided outcomes.

I dreamed of designing gowns for movies. I crafted scenarios for a make-believe cast to be adorned by my imagination. Designers illustrate their dreams and then build them materially. I got to work learning – I studied history, color theory, and textiles and designed pages and pages of glorious gowns. I kept practicing, failing, and creating, hoping to one day achieve my design dreams. All of this built an understanding that the more I practiced, the better chance I had to achieve my goals. I was accepted to the Parsons School of Design in New York. I did my best at Parsons, always doing more work than assigned. Women often demonstrate “extra” behavior to ensure they hold their place in the queue and keep the imposter syndrome murmurs muffled. “Doing more” ensured that I did enough and became my go-to behavior and the foundation of my global design practice. I spent hours creating designs manufactured all over the world. I also spent hours, days, and weeks on end in global factories, working alongside technicians and craftspeople. I was doing what I dreamed of doing!
I also dreamed of a chance at marriage and family – happily ever after. The reality of traveling the globe for weeks on end making clothing is an unsustainable practice with a growing family. I made a career and dream change.
I shifted from creating the designs to guiding design education. I fell in love with helping others imagine their clothing ideas out loud. As a design professor and fashion design program chair, I trained my pedagogy on ensuring individual students mastered the creative and critical thinking tools for successful design careers. From my years as a designer, I had seen that change was needed in industry practice, and with my faculty team, we shifted our curriculum to a sustainability practice platform. We knew our students would change the industry. They needed the tools for implementing innovations for practice and process change. These career shifts may read smoothly, but they were challenging! Navigating academic administration assessments, industry-standard practices, and governing trade associations was complicated. It was mandatory that our students were capable of tackling the practice change looming on the horizon. Many industry leaders disregarded the evidence of the industry’s persistent malefaction, calling sustainability practice a West Coast trend. As a faculty team, we kept doing the right educational work, and resilience was the key in hindsight. Pioneering takes determination, conviction, and resilience. The specialized training we delivered to our students would eventually become understood and embraced by forward-thinking industry players concerned about their growing environmental impacts. Persistence suggests effort put against a barrier or issue, hobbling efforts with a positive result. It is not a word used when there is no barrier to best. Resilience expands upon determination as it defines a person surviving or recovering readily from illness, adversity, significant life changes, etc. Being “resilient” was the action of my moving forward, regardless of what had come before. There was no other choice. I did what had to be done. I leaned on my ability to power through tough times by doing all I could throughout my life. Designing a curriculum path that pushed against the status quo pathway would be the key to training responsible future thinkers capable of challenging an irresponsible industry.
What I had seen as a designer and shared as an educator fed my quest for more knowledge. In my fifties, I was driven to begin my doctoral research journey exploring female leadership, sustainability practice, and industry barriers to both. Designing a doctoral research plan is a complicated undertaking, a challenging balance of theory, empirical knowledge, and experiential storytelling. I knew the fashion industry’s sustainability reality needed to be shared. So, I dug in and did what I knew needed to be done. I did this while battling cancer. Ultimately, my findings mirrored my journey – it is harder for women to succeed, especially when they are pioneers of thought or practice, and yet they must persist.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I guide responsible leaders – emergent or established; the future needs leaders determined to do right by the planet and its people in conjunction with their organization. My work is now to help others make their efforts to align with their personal values so they know their practice impacts and thus take the appropriate steps to do better. Choosing change over the known status quo is hard. I help leaders make the best choices for the future. Getting it “right” will take time. My years as a designer taught me to believe in testing, ideating, iterating, and redoing to get better, if not correct. During my designing years, I witnessed waste, resource abuse, and injustice, both overt and camouflaged.

I brought my lived experience into my classroom lessons to ground students’ understanding of the impacts of their behaviors and choices. My teaching was infused with sustainability language long “sustainability” was acknowledged in industry circles. Through the years, I developed coursework and curriculum to help sustainability advocates successfully bring change into their practices. My years in the field were foundational for my writing and teaching of the “Leading Organizational Transformation for Sustainability” course for the University of Southern California’s Masters of Sustainability Management program. Educating tomorrow’s sustainability leaders is a crucial pillar of my work.

My research investigated the top fashion and textile sustainability organizations and found women steering the change efforts. I uncovered that these powerful women had each faced underlying gendered barriers that led to them shifting their dreams and career trajectories, ultimately leading to their leadership success. Their resiliency in the shifting moments resonates with me. As women, we do what we must do. I believe women are innate leaders. I also believe they need championing. I am here to help. Humans are responsible for protecting our planet, all its resources, and humanity. Leaders must be exposed to the results of their actions to learn why and how to make better decisions. MAPxGuild came together as a consulting group built on subject matter expertise to amplify responsible leadership. At MAPxGuild, our belief in humanity fuels our view of tomorrow. We have created a four-pillar implementable methodology in our workshops to help leaders create sustainable and positive change. At MAPxGuild, we encourage emergent and current leaders at all career levels, those with authentic interest, agency, and inherent ability to step forward for humanity and the planet. Our training and tools are human-centric and are proven to deliver impactful change in organizations and institutions, large and small. I am writing a values-based leadership book and a resource workbook to accompany our MAPxGuild workshop lessons.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Persistence in action and consistency in interaction are top qualities that enabled me to hone my creative and critical thinking skills to develop frameworks and systems for values/purpose-based change. I seek and protect kindness and fairness. When people welcomed me in workplace settings, classrooms, and boardrooms, their kindness helped me grow my voice. I have found that listening carefully is a skill that needs much practice yet is often undervalued and underused by leaders. Mindful and honest responses come from true understanding, which comes from listening. We have trained our society to answer fast and answer first, loudly. We have applauded the noisy extrovert, who is not necessarily the most knowledgeable or effective leader, just the loudest. Action reigns supreme over thoughtful reflection and considered response: under-considered action wastes time and resources, people’s creativity, interests, and funds. I advise emergent leaders to listen hard, consider what they have heard, reflect on their values, breathe deeply, and move forward. Doing work you care about will have longevity. Often, we worry that we will “miss” our opportunity if we do not act immediately. If the pressure is uncomfortable, let your gut weigh in – listen, breathe, choose purposefully, and do what you need to do.

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?

I believe very strongly in collaboration. It is a key tenet of sustainability engagement. Collaboration across industries will help women rise as responsible stewards for the future.
Partnering with other leadership and change consultants will amplify everyone’s good work impacts. Collaboration leads to diverse thinking, which expands the opportunities for bold innovation. I base my work on human needs and thus focus on grounding values, purpose, and individual goals to (re)position efforts and expectations in work and life. I look forward to working with clients and partners wishing to learn how to imbed inclusive sustainability processes into their workflow and are committed to resilient teambuilding pillars would be wonderful folks to work with.

Please connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyameliawilliams/ and email me at amy@mapxguild.com.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mapxguild.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ameliabwilliams/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amy.w.williams.56/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyameliawilliams/
• Twitter: n/a
• Youtube: @amywilliams6423

Image Credits

Paige Billings, Brandt Williams