Dymphna Cordova typically spends her Thursday mornings in conference mode, figuring out work priorities with her team and managing her company’s complex employee issues.
But on this particular Thursday morning, Cordova, 57, is sweating it out at L.A.’s Trinity Boxing Club. The chief human resources officer at business management platform Squire had never even tried on boxing gloves before, but he’s now on his second day learning how to put punches together to form basic combinations.
In another part of the gym, about a dozen other women are shadow boxing, and some face off with punching bags. The women, who range in age from their 30s to their 50s, make up the second batch of Fight Co.Lab’s retreat series, a program aimed at blending boxing training with leadership strategies for executive-level women across the United States.
The retreat comes at a complicated time for even the highest-level female professionals.
Women remain underrepresented at all levels of the leadership line. According to Lean In and McKinsey & Company’s latest Women in the Workplace Report, for every 100 men, only 93 women are promoted to management positions, and only 29% of executive roles are held by women. According to McKinsey, 6 in 10 senior-level women report feeling burnt out frequently.
Sheryl Sandberg, founder of Lean In and former chief operating officer of Meta, told CNBC in December that today’s corporate environment is “one of the worst” she’s ever seen, as companies backtrack on efforts to equalize careers for women. This trend is widening the ambition gap between men and women.
For some senior-level women, programs that help them reinvent and combat the challenges they are experiencing in corporate America are especially appealing.
Boxing to fight burnout
Fight Co.Lab is the brainchild of Erin Lenzas, 41, a technology executive turned consultant and amateur boxer who splits her time between Los Angeles and Amsterdam, and Shea O’Neal, 49, a Boston-based physical psychotherapist and executive coach.
In 2021, Lenzas says he is reaching a breaking point. She rose to what she calls “the highest echelons” in her corporate career, including serving as head of marketing during Square’s IPO and as an operating partner at one of the world’s largest technology investment firms. But she says she felt burnt out and unfulfilled.
She felt she had spent her career “optimizing myself and perfecting myself,” but it didn’t work out, she says. This is what she thought. “If I’m not happy with the success of this version, maybe I’m doing it wrong.”
So Lenzas said he focused on his health and eventually moved to a gym in Amsterdam for work, which had a boxing ring in the back. When she got tired of running, she started boxing.
It changed her life, she says. She realized that for as long as she could remember, she had been fighting without being taught how to fight properly or sustainably, especially during her career.
In March, 14 female executives gathered at Trinity Boxing Club in Los Angeles for Fight Co.Lab’s second retreat, which combines boxing training and leadership strategy.
Provided by: Fight Co., Ltd.
In the ring, Lenzas said, “I had my back against the ropes a lot and couldn’t find a way to get out. So I hit shots that never landed, and after that I was just exhausted.”
One of her boxing coaches, Marvin Nimmermehr, taught her strategies for getting out of corners. Instead of freezing and “fighting back hard,” she learned to keep her guard tight, time sharp countershots, put her weight on her opponent to stop her opponent’s rhythm, and pivot out to redirect her opponent.
Lenzas will apply that to her experience with executive coach O’Neal during her career.
“I’ve seen many times in my career where people were forced into corner situations and tried to protect themselves from intense pressure,” she says. “In boxing, I learned to stay alert and look for cleaner shots that make an impact without taking damage.”
“Combat strategy is not about violence,” she added. “It’s about making a choice.”
Lenzas and O’Neal realized that boxing and executive coaching had more in common than people expected, so they spent a year with a group of boxing coaches developing the framework for Fight Co.Lab, which will officially launch in 2025.
Being “alone” in the ring
In March, 14 women joined Fight Company Lab in Los Angeles, the company’s second retreat following its first retreat in New York City in November. The full cost of the three-day program was $4,200, including discounted rates for nonprofit leaders. Some women sponsored their attendance using their employer’s learning and development budget.
Participants boxed for several hours each morning of the retreat under the guidance of four coaches who flew in with Lenzas from Amsterdam, and spent the afternoon in facilitated leadership sessions.
One day, the women focused on form, precision, and flow while boxing and discussed connecting those principles to leadership under pressure. On another day, they trained under stress in the ring to hone their rhythm, resilience and focus, then drew the line on how to maintain energy and make decisions at work.
Cordova, a San Francisco-based human resources executive, said that by coming into leadership sessions physically exhausted, women were able to connect faster on a deeper level. “I don’t straighten up because I’m too tired,” she says. It means addressing the real problems you face in your work and life. “We wear workout clothes. We’re not fake. You’re just who you are,” she says.
Most of the women who attend Fight Co.Lab’s retreats range in age from their 30s to their 50s and say they have never boxed before.
Provided by: Fight Co., Ltd.
Many of the women, like Lenzas, were in a period of transition when they first started boxing.
“Some people are taking a break. Some people are looking for the next thing,” says O’Neill, who facilitates leadership sessions. Some women are thinking about how to manage personal milestones like marriage and children alongside their demanding careers.
O’Neill said sports metaphors are often used when talking about leadership, but McKinsey research shows that boxing has a unique poignancy for women at the senior level, who often lack mentorship, sponsorship and overall support from companies to help them grow.
She says she often feels “alone in the ring” at work. “And the higher up you get in your career, the lonelier you become.”
But in boxing, Lenzas says, it’s a good idea to think about who’s in your corner, including your coach and training partners. Even your opponents will help you compete at your best.
She thinks of it this way: Boxing isn’t about “beating the person in front of you,” just like managing conflicts in the workplace isn’t about winning the argument. Rather, sparring with colleagues can be an opportunity to get better, and an opportunity for all of us to get better in order to make business better.
Redefining success for women executives
With fewer women at the top of companies, finding women who are at a similar stage in their lives and careers can make a difference.
Bay Area resident Semonti Stevens, 44, was drawn to the community aspect of the retreat. “There’s an element of women coming together in a really honest way,” she says. With people who get it, “you knew you were probably going to get deep into the conversation.”
Perhaps this ring wasn’t originally created with female executives in mind. Corporate boardrooms weren’t built with female executives in mind, either.
Erin Lenzas
Co-founder of Fight Co.Lab
Stevens spent her career climbing the ranks in technology and government, but in November she began taking a break from her career to care for her family, including her son with special needs. She looked into other wellness retreats, but couldn’t find anything that stood out.
Lenzas says Fight Co.Lab isn’t your typical wellness environment without confrontations or distractions, and that’s by design. “One of the things we intentionally designed as part of this program is that we want people to feel the turmoil in their lives when they’re in the middle of a battle or dealing with busy schedules and work conflicts.” “How do you find rest and clarity when 90,000 things are hitting you at the same time?”
As a parent, Stevens said learning how to find stillness in movement resonated with her.
“One of my coaches told me, sometimes you need backup to put things in perspective, but sometimes you need to conserve your energy to make a big impact,” Stevens says. In her own life, this lesson helped her understand that stepping back from work would give her more energy to raise their two sons with her husband and make an impact as a school board member to support other families.
Managing both career and caregiving responsibilities is often cited as the number one reason why women quit their jobs completely.
Fight Co.Lab’s retreats feature boxing training with four coaches in the morning and leadership facilitation from co-founder Shea O’Neil in the afternoon.
Provided by: Fight Co., Ltd.
Meanwhile, Christina Lang attended Fight Company’s November retreat in New York and says it was a pivotal time in her life. Lang, 40, of Seattle, was wondering whether to stay with her former employer or move on.
Through the training, I learned to choose the “suitable partner.”
In boxing, that might mean competing by weight class. At work, that could mean identifying which priorities need the most attention. “We’re always asked to fight. We’re always asked to defend our mindset and the strategy we’re building, (and) to fight for our team and ourselves,” Lang said. “The reality is she was going into every fight not knowing which ones were worth her effort.”
This realization ultimately led her to leave her employer. “It wasn’t the right challenge anymore,” says Lang, a former marketing executive who has worked at companies like Mozilla, Twitch, and Meta.
As women, “we just spread ourselves so thin, and the idea that I could target what I was putting my energy into was really powerful for me,” she says. She then joined Fight Co.Lab as an advisor and is exploring what she wants to do next in her career.
For Lenzas (who hopes to expand to Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans in addition to retreats planned in New York City and Los Angeles), the goal of Fight Company Lab is to give senior-level women the opportunity to redefine what success looks like, rather than clinging to an image of corporate leadership that was shaped for men decades ago.
In that sense, she says, the connection between a corporate career and a boxing ring makes even more sense. “Maybe this ring wasn’t originally created with female executives in mind,” she says. “Corporate boardrooms weren’t built with women executives in mind either.”
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