Tips for leaders: start small, expect twists and turns.

Women's paths to leadership are rarely a straight line or a ladder. Sometimes the path feels more like a maze, a puzzle fraught with false turns and no clear way out.

That's how rural South Dakota felt to Dr. Melody Schopp when she started teaching there years ago, after growing up a city girl near Greeley CO. Speaking in October at the Women in Educational Leadership Conference in Lincoln NE, she described how marriage to a rancher (the only eligible bachelor within miles) committed her to a rural, conservative corner of a state with more land than people. She taught there for 23 years.

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"I didn't talk to folks about my real life," she said. She felt a lack of acceptance for women like herself who took risks and deviated from the norm.

To her surprise, the isolated setting gave her great exposure and unexpected chances for leadership. She now directs the state's Office of Accreditation and Teacher Quality, with a 170-mile commute. "Because we're so small, I am given opportunities again and again to represent the state," she told WIHE.

Her PhD dissertation study of three prominent South Dakota women leaders confirmed her experience. Their leadership paths were neither straight lines nor mazes but labyrinths, as described in Through the Labyrinth: The Truth about How Women Become Leaders by Alice Eagly and Linda Carli (2007).

Reflective movement through a labyrinth is very different from the puzzle-solving of a maze. The only choice in a labyrinth is whether to enter it. A meandering spiral path leads by twists and turns into the center and out again, emerging where you went in. It's a meditative practice and a metaphor for women leaders.