A place where leaders can finally be human.
Felisa Preciado Higgins has spent a career doing hard things, and carrying the weight of them quietly. She found a room where she did not have to carry it alone.
The warrior is a child.
Ask Felisa about the hardest part of her job, the part nobody talks about, and she does not name a task. She names taking care of herself. She points to a song called The Warrior is a Child.
You get where she is by solving hard problems and doing difficult things. But some things feel too difficult, and the path through them is not always clear. In those moments a leader can feel completely alone, unable to be vulnerable with anyone, afraid that a crack might be read as weakness or a sign she is not cut out for it.
Looking for people who would get it.
Felisa joined WIBE in January of 2021, within the first month of the WIBE associate dean community, while the world was still climbing out of COVID. Looking back, she knows what she was really searching for. A place to connect with people who could relate to that loneliness.
WIBE felt like an invitation into a community, and she never looked back. She found support, and she found a rare kind of room.
I never found another network where I felt so free to be me.
FELISA DEL CARMEN PRECIADO HIGGINSA cone of confidence and trust.
The workshops are what first hooked her. The topics were timely, and they were immediately actionable, not pie in the sky ideas that fade in a month. But the real difference was how the room worked. People did not gather only to receive information. They gathered to think through things together.
That is rare in her world. Business schools are fiercely competitive, always chasing rankings, and even friendly gatherings can turn into a quiet contest of who is doing better. WIBE was different.
WIBE is the place where academic leaders can actually be human.
FELISA DEL CARMEN PRECIADO HIGGINS, DEANStrong and vulnerable at the same time.
Felisa has been in WIBE for five years now. The job has not gotten easier. What has changed is that she no longer carries it in silence. She sits with the deans now. She came in as an associate dean during the hardest stretch of the pandemic, and she moved up to the deans group a year ago, this time as one of the people others turn to.
She still returns to what she found there. A room where the struggle was part of the process, and she did not have to go through it alone.
Your next chapter starts in the room.
Every member story began with one decision to stop doing it alone. Yours can too.
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