“One of the early influencers in my life was a coach. I was going through a rough spot entering my junior year. He taught me to do stats for football, basketball, track and field. That really helped me get integrated into a new school.” -Dianne Ogle
[00:01:07] Dianne Ogle: I had my first child in Texas and I was working for a corporation running their marketing department. And I had to put my oldest son in with a lady who had a small group of children in her home.
And every day I’d go get him. I would see him in a swing. And I told my husband, I cannot do this. I feel like I couldn’t run this marketing department yet. I want to have more of an impact on my own son. And so, my boss said, great.
She said go start your own business, figure out what that looks like. And I’ll be your first client. And I thought, oh my goodness, how am I going to do this?
[00:01:47] Tommy Thomas: Our guest today is Dianne Ogle. Dianne began her career in sales and marketing before making a name for herself as a leader who could grow organizations and identify trouble spots and bottlenecks that tended to enter an organization’s growth and effectiveness. As a prominent figure in the Executive Women of Influence Network, Diana has dedicated her career to empowering women in leadership roles across various industry sectors.
Her leadership experience spans leadership development, team dynamics, and organizational strategy, thus making her a sought-after advisor and coach. Her impact is widely recognized, and she continues to inspire and support women in their professional journeys, helping them to navigate the complexities of leadership and achieve sustained success.
[00:02:38] Tommy Thomas: Dianne, welcome to NextGen Nonprofit Leadership.
[00:02:41] Dianne Ogle: Thank you for having me, Tommy. I’m excited to be here with you.
[00:02:45] Tommy Thomas: I’ve been looking forward to this. You come with good recommendations from one of my previous guests and one of my future guests. I’m looking forward to this. Take me back to your childhood. What was that like? What are some of your fondest memories?
[00:02:59] Dianne Ogle: I grew up in the Midwest. I was born in Colorado but grew up in Indiana with a high work ethic, middle class. Early on, my parents took us to a church that didn’t really preach the gospel as far as what the Bible taught.
And one summer when I was 11, my mom took us to a local Baptist church that had VBS. That was the first time both my mom and I heard the gospel. And she became a Christian with the mother’s group that they had. And then I did shortly thereafter and so it was a beautiful place to grow up and go to college.
And we lived on the baseball field because I had a brother who played baseball up until minor leagues. And so, there were three of us. I was the oldest of three. So, it was just a great way to grow up in the Midwest.
[00:03:57] Tommy Thomas: So, what was high school like?
[00:03:57] Dianne Ogle: I had to change high schools in my junior year. I went to one school in Indianapolis from kindergarten until my sophomore year. And then my parents went north of Indianapolis. And at the time it was a really rural area in Fishers, Indiana, which now it’s like the largest high school. But back when I transferred, it was farm kids and I was the city girl moving out into the farm kids and I went kicking and screaming.
That was not a good transition for me, but the Lord’s hand was in it even then. I had to take the driver’s ed course and I had the athletic director who was a tough football coach, and my dad was a barker, so he didn’t intimidate me, but he quickly got me involved and got me to be a stat girl because my brothers were athletes.
[00:04:58] Dianne Ogle: And he taught me to do the statistics for football, basketball, and track. And so, it was a great entry into a smaller school that was very established with kids who had been growing up together. And then I got a chance to be in musicals and got to play in Annie Get Your Gun. So, it was just a fun, great group.
[00:05:22] Tommy Thomas: What kind of career aspirations did a young 16-year-old Dianne have?
[00:05:29] Dianne Ogle: I had a lot of parents thinking I should go to California to go into acting. I had a lot of common sense of knowing the value of a dollar. Because I was raised that if you wanted extra money, you had to work.
So, I started working as a babysitter at age 11, got my first job at 15. I bought furniture, I bought my car. And so, I had a really deep, intrinsic work value at a very young age. And I didn’t have a lot of role models of women. Unless you wanted to be a teacher or a nurse, there was not a lot of women, at least in my little world view at that time in the Midwest.
[00:06:06] Dianne Ogle: Mom stayed at home with us. Now I knew she had worked at the Air Force Academy back when she was single in finance but other than that, I didn’t have a lot of visual people ahead of me that I could see. Now my dad was in business. And so that’s started me out in that track of well, maybe that’s what I’ll tip my toe into.
[00:06:29] Tommy Thomas: What’s something that people are always surprised to find out about you?
[00:06:35] Dianne Ogle: They are probably surprised that I come from all brothers, that I was raised on a baseball field, that I love sports, and I can talk with the best of them about many sports.
And now I have three boys, and I’ve got a grandson. And so, Boys-R-Us is what we call ourselves. And I now have two granddaughters. Yay, I’ve been redeemed. But it’s interesting because now the Lord has had me working with mostly all women. So, it’s interesting. I was raised with mostly all men and then God’s used it to now have me work with women. So it’s been a sweet time.
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[00:07:10] Tommy Thomas: You graduated from college, and you got out in the workforce. Take me back to the first time you ever had a staff. And what do you remember about that element of basic leadership?
[00:07:23] Dianne Ogle: I started my career in Indianapolis at a computer software company. And then about a year and a half in, I was working in Pittsburgh running a sales territory and their president’s club, only women. So, I learned really young about being the only woman in a whole salesforce and I didn’t see any women ahead of me. And then I was tapped in Pittsburgh to come to central Florida and open an office for a temporary help company, which is in your industry. I didn’t have any experience in it, but I thought I would just go down there. And that really was my first hand at leadership because before that, as you can imagine, I’m in charge of a sales territory and my clients and peers, but I wasn’t having anybody that I was personally in charge of leading until I moved to Florida, had to launch this office.
[00:08:19] Dianne Ogle: This was back in the early eighties and I had it doing over a million dollars in annual revenue within three years and they eventually had me take over Tampa and then do trap troubleshooting up here in Atlanta where I’m at. But yeah, that was the first time I got inherited by a staff, but then I had to build staff.
I had to train them both inside sales and outside sales and didn’t get a lot of training. It was just let’s go do it.
I really did it based on my own values on what I saw worked. I have a high work ethic and integrity is huge for me. And so being able to just navigate that was really important for me.
[00:09:05] Tommy Thomas: If I could have shadowed you earlier at that time, as you were building that team, what would the typical weekday or month look like?
Dianne Ogle: I started out with team meetings, daily team meetings, especially for my internal staff, of course that was back before computers.
And so, everything was on these huge Rolodex clocks and these files that were flipping around and we had clients, we had built it to Martin Marietta and law firms and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. We were considered a little bit higher level administrative, so we didn’t do lower and then we did some permanent placement.
We would start off our day on just trying to get our grounding. Who was going to do what and what was coming up. Because every morning you had either calls coming in from clients or you had employees that either could or could not make their commitment, which was always a challenge.
And then my sales staff, who are you going to visit? What appointments do you have? What do you need? How can I come alongside you? Do you want me to go with you? And so just that constant motivation and help to make sure that they were adhering to what we needed the office to do.
[00:10:24] Tommy Thomas: If I could have been in one of your staff meetings and you took a break and left the room and I asked them, what’s the toughest thing about working for Dianne? What do you think they would have said?
[00:10:35] Dianne Ogle: Probably just adhering to their commitment to their numbers and even if the climate is tough, and it is hard with rejections, especially my sales team.
But having to get back on the phone or having to try to get back in front of people, which is, like I said, we didn’t have computers. So, all of it was either you had to just do cold calling. Knock on those old doors, which I got kicked out of some buildings early in my career, but you just had to have that tenacity and not every day is that easy.
And so that’s probably what they would say is that, boy, she’s going to keep making us get up and go back out and try to call that person again and try to see them. Because we found that the more we could see people in person and have that face to face, the stronger that trust bridge and relationship could happen.
[00:11:28] Dianne Ogle: And then we can not only help navigate any kind of problems or issues, but we have a chance to grow together. And so, we all knew, and that’s what I kept telling all our team, both internal and external. We’ve got to be able to find ways to get in front of them to build those relationships.
[00:11:46] Tommy Thomas: If I flip that, what would they say was the most rewarding part of being on your team?
[00:11:51] Dianne Ogle: Probably their autonomy. I’m not a micromanager. And so, if they wanted to do their schedule a certain way, I wasn’t going to micromanage how they did it. I always want to just come alongside to encourage and spur them on and help to motivate them for their highest and best. And quite frankly, it’s tough every day, whether you’re going through something personal, cause we’re all whole people, right?
[00:12:15] Dianne Ogle: And how we show up each day can change based on other areas of our life that could be impacting us. And so just helping to navigate that I care deeply about not only today working with my C level clients, but also back then. We are real people. We have real issues. And so how can we be there to support each other?
[00:12:38] Tommy Thomas: You started out not having many mentors. When did mentors show up in your life?
[00:12:45] Dianne Ogle: Once I asked.
[00:12:47] Tommy Thomas: Okay.
[00:12:48] Dianne Ogle: I had my first child in Texas, and I was working for a corporation running the head of their marketing department. And I had to put my oldest son in with a lady who had a small group of children in her home.
And every day I’d go get him, and I would see him in a swing. And I told my husband, I cannot do this. I cannot feel like I could run this marketing department yet. I want to have more of an impact on my own son. And so, my boss said, great. So that’s when I made the transition from corporate into on my own.
Cause she said just do your own job, go start your own business, figure out what that looks like. And I’ll be your first client. And I thought, oh my goodness, how am I going to do this? And so, I ended up listening to a lady who was a speaker. She came from a similar but different background than me, but I could see, we saw things similar, and I thought, that’s it.
[00:13:48] Dianne Ogle: I’m going to go up afterwards and ask her to mentor me. And what I didn’t know, she was highly sought after. She was an author and a public speaker. And she heard my why and my desperation. And she goes, of course, but you’ll have to do homework. I’m like, fine, put me to work. And her name’s Betty Price out of Dallas.
And she was a gem. She shared; she opened her heart. She showed me how to write contracts. She showed me how to set up a business and really grow it. So that was absolutely amazing.
[00:14:20] Tommy Thomas: Before we get a little broader, what are some times in your life that have really tested your metal and what did you learn?
[00:14:36] Dianne Ogle: I got married at 30 and then we moved from Florida to Texas for my husband to go to seminary to get a master’s in religious education and marriage and family counseling.
And so, I was the breadwinner, which didn’t bother me at all because I’d been independent and been earning my own income, but it bothered him more because he came from a hospitality background. And so that was an interesting season for us because I didn’t fit the mold of most seminary wives or any that I ever saw.
And we couldn’t live on campus because my job location would bend too far for me to commute in that big metroplex. That was a hard season. Being a newlywed, having a heart for the Lord, but not finding community for anybody who could really. In fact, I got a lot of judgment and condemnation because of what I did.
And I wasn’t fitting that traditional role of a seminary wife. That was painful back then.
[00:15:41] Tommy Thomas: Frederick Wilcox says progress always involves risk. You can’t steal second base with your foot on first. What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken and how did it turn out?
[00:15:53] Dianne Ogle: Starting my own business. That was out of desperation. I had no vision. So that was also something I really wrestled with. Cause I’m like, I don’t sell Tupperware or Avon. I don’t know, what do you do? But it helped me. At least my old boss said do what you do now for me. And you’ll figure it out.
And sure enough, I started having small businesses tap me to help them. At least I initially started helping them on how they could grow their business through effective sales and marketing and with the teams that they had and how to develop those teams so that they could be a producing, performing, high performance, achieving team together. But that was a huge risk because we were still meeting my income. And so, you go from the luxury of having great benefits and a great package to, oh my goodness, I got to build this thing fast.
[00:16:49] Tommy Thomas: It’s been said, most of us learn most things from our failures. If that’s the case, why are most of us so afraid to fail?
[00:16:57] Dianne Ogle: Because sometimes the stakes are high. Like in my case, we needed my income, and we needed it, it wasn’t a luxury. We didn’t have a lot put aside or family that would just say, oh, let me write you a check or any kind of investments back in that day. And so, there was a lot on the line for us to succeed or for me to succeed for sure. And yet still support my husband and our joint goals moving forward.
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[00:17:27] Tommy Thomas: Let’s move a little bit into your current organization. I’m fascinated and I’m going to probably mispronounce the title. So why don’t you save me that embarrassment? And you tell us about your women’s collaborative.
[00:17:39] Dianne Ogle: It’s called Areté Executive Women of Influence. Areté is a Greek word. It is unique. But when, and I can tell you the backstory, the name is a Greek word that means excellence and the Greek men and women attained it, especially in the face of adversity. And when I saw that definition, I’m like, that’s it.
That’s the name. Because we all could either opt out or we press into the pain and stay in the game that God’s called us to through that whole sphere of excellence, right? It’s not perfectionism, but it’s excellence.
[00:18:19] Tommy Thomas: Where did the idea come from? Did you think about it on the tennis court one day or did somebody approach you?
[00:18:26] Dianne Ogle: We serve a master weaver. He weaves our story, weaves our expertise. So, one of the clients that I had when I first started my business, someone in New York City found me and said, hey, we want to start a chapter for women business owners that are at a higher level. We want to start a chapter there in Dallas and we want you to launch it, grow it, run it.
And of course I had no background in that. I had other background, but I knew what it would take. I could see what it would take. Initially I said, no, because by then I think I had two little boys at home. I had other clients on my books, but they kept coming back around. And I thought, you know what? If I can rally women, because I too know the plight of the high-level woman and I can encourage her.
Then I need to be open to it. And so, it was very quickly the Lord let me know that I should take that endeavor on. And so, I grew a very large chapter in Dallas, ended up taking over their Houston chapter. And then there were some ethical issues. I just couldn’t protect my Dallas women anymore.
[00:19:39] Dianne Ogle: I finally let them know I need to step aside because I cannot continue to be this placeholder for some integrity issues that I just can’t be a part of anymore. So, they said Dianne, start your own. I’m like, okay. That’s not my vision but they were desperate. So, I started my own with that particular group.
They all came with me, not that I was trying to do it out of ill means. It was their choice. And so, I launched it, figured out how to do a 501C(3) and did that until we moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. And I had my third boy at age 40, and I did that for just a small bit. And I finally handed the baton over to them and said, you take the organization.
[00:20:22] Dianne Ogle: I’m going to get this back to you because I needed to be more present for my boys in that new season. So then fast forward, we moved to Orlando and oh, back up, one other caveat. They called me their little Christian leader. And so, I always felt handcuffed in my leadership with them. They knew I was a Christian.
I’m not a Bible leader, but I’m authentically going to be who God created me to be. But they put me on notice that you better keep that in a box. And I thought, I told my husband, I said, that is too hard. That doesn’t fit who I am. I’ll never do that again. Love when you tell the Lord, never going to do that again.
[00:21:06] Dianne Ogle: That was hard. So fast forward in 20, the crash happened in 08. My husband had been with Wyndham Worldwide at that point for a decade and his job got released, finally catching up to him about 2010. So, I started introducing him to some men that I didn’t know. They didn’t know my backstory.
They didn’t know me, but I would get us in front of some men. Cause I wanted to teach my husband, just have to tell your story and see what God’s doing and see if there’s any fits. Tommy, four men in a short amount of time would look across the table at me and I’m trying not to keep the conversation on me at all and said, Dianne, you need to start something for the high-level woman.
By the fourth one, who was the president of the Central Florida Chamber, he just knew he couldn’t meet the needs of his high-level women and that he would come in contact with another one. It was his partner. Another one. It was his wife who was an engineer. It was, they were all coming from different places and spaces, but they heard the plight of the high-level woman.
[00:22:10] Dianne Ogle: So, I went back to my prayer closet, and I thought, Lord, I always say, here I am, use me, send me. I thought, woe to me if I start putting guardrails up going, been there, done that, this is too hard, I know what it would take. And he quickly showed me four columns, like those Grecian columns. Before he gave me the name of Areté, which is interesting how God works, but I’m a visual girl.
And he showed me that they would come from profit, non-profit, academia, and public service sectors. Because I always knew we were missing a lot of women. Not every woman owns her own business. I didn’t come from that space. I ended up there by default, but I came from corporate, and I thought we’re missing women everywhere, especially women of faith and those who love Jesus.
[00:22:55] Dianne Ogle: And I thought, what Lord, what would it look like if we could link arms with this higher level of women and create a container of confidentiality of trust of authenticity and vulnerability. What would that look like, Lord? And what could we do where we are better together? As one of our members says.
And so that’s when Areté was born. I called my CPA at the time and said, this has been a year since I’ve done this. I don’t know Florida laws. And she said, Dianne, get it going. I’ll be your first member. I was like, whoa, I hadn’t even quite made the decision that I was going to do this.
Then I’m like jumping in the fire ring again. So that’s how that got launched.
[00:23:39] Tommy Thomas: So, it’s primarily a word-of-mouth growth pattern.
[00:23:42] Dianne Ogle: Yes, Tommy, I would say absolutely. And our men still do this day. I had a pastor in Tennessee call me this week. He used to be my pastor at Knoxville.
And he said, hey, I’ve met somebody that, there’s not many of y’all out here, but she needs to talk to you. And because I also do executive coaching. So, she wasn’t sure if she needed executive coaching or if she needed an Areté type of group. Because we have a chapter in central Florida, one in Atlanta, and then I have remote members now I’ve opened that up for the past two years.
In Texas and Pennsylvania. And yeah, it’s been quite an adventure for sure. Over the last 13 years now.
[00:24:22] Tommy Thomas: Next week, we will continue this conversation with Dianne Ogle. In that episode, Dianne shares her insights on the importance of authenticity, community, and resilience in leadership. She delves into the importance of building a supportive community among women leaders and the role of prayer in strengthening leadership.
She’ll also share her observations on key areas that can derail leadership or enhance a leader’s career. This episode offers profound insights for anyone looking to deepen their leadership impact.
“Around our house, if you wanted extra money, you had to work. I was babysitting at age 11. I got my first job when I was 15. I developed a deep, intrinsic work ethic at an early age.” -Dianne Ogle
Links and Resources
Next Gen Nonprofit Leadership with Tommy Thomas
The Perfect Search – What every board needs to know about hiring their next CEO
Areté – Executive Women of Influence
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