Ellen Snee has worked at the forefront of women’s leadership development for more than twenty-five years. Before that she was a Catholic nun, a member of the Society of the Sacred Heart, an international order of educators. She taught high school, served as a campus minister and was National Director of Recruitment and Admissions before beginning a doctorate at Harvard in women’s psychological development.

As an academic, she examined the experience of women in roles of authority in her doctoral dissertation before going on to turn theory into practice with the launch Fine Line Consulting, a boutique firm that worked with Fortune 500 companies such as Pfizer, Schwab, Marriott and Goodyear to provide both programs and one-to-one coaching for their high-potential and executive-level women.

Following 9/11 she moved to California—life is short and she wanted sun—where she worked in Silicon Valley at Apple, Cisco, KPMG, Ebay, Citrix, VMware, and others. She also taught at the Presidio School of Management in their MBA program in sustainability.
In 2009 she was hired by one of her clients, VMware to be VP of Leadership and Organizational Development where she launched their first major diversity initiative VMwomen.  In 2015, she returned to the work she loves most: accelerating the career advancement of talented women through executive coaching. Ellen lives in the San Francisco Bay area and works remotely as well as locally with clients.

During Ellen Snee’s eighteen years as a Catholic nun, she gained a number of essential—and, happily, transferable—skills: how to discern a call or deep desire, how to work collaboratively with other women, and how to be a savvy operator within male hierarchies. In Lead, she draws on that knowledge—as well as lessons learned and insights gained from her Harvard dissertation on psychological dimensions of authority for women, two decades of work with executive women as CEO of Fine Line Consulting, and five years as VP of Organizational & Leadership Development at VMware, a global technology leader—to address the exercise of authority by women.

Lead guides readers through specific challenges of leadership Snee has identified as most vital to success through her own corporate experience and consulting work: developing resilience, presenting with authority, gaining financial literacy, managing in every direction, and more. Throughout, Snee urges women to find and speak with their unique voice and claim their personal power. Full of illuminating personal and client anecdotes and surprising research insights, Lead is an accessible, instructive, and empowering road map to finding external success—by drawing on the strengths you’ve carried inside you all along.