Women Rethinking Career Advancement in 2026
01/13/2026
Women rethinking career advancement in 2026 is reshaping leadership pipelines. Burnout, uneven support, and changing definitions of success are altering
The Mousai Group’s reputation as a powerhouse peak performance and executive advisory firm grew from small seeds of creativity planted during a humble childhood in Brooklyn, New York. Navigating her early years with few resources, Dr. Gloria A. Chance, Ph.D., Founder, and CEO of the Mousai Group, used her imagination to overcome obstacles and excel. She didn’t realize it, but those early connections to her creative mind were pivotal.
Today Dr. Chance is a Peak Performance Humanist Psychologist and Creativity Architect based in Los Angeles, California. She believes imagination is the most valued skill for our future economy and the key to mental wellness and peak performance. She started The Mousai Group, a global, Black Woman-Owned consultancy firm to help leaders navigate the complexity and velocity of global changes. With innovative learning experiences, she grounds leaders and teams in a modern skillset of shifting thinking by helping clients activate their imaginations to lead with unleashed creativity, empathy, and innovation to solve complex problems.
The cornerstone of Dr. Chance’s work brings the latest emerging trends from business, science, technology, and the arts to organizations and teams desperate for new approaches to peak performance. She leads organizational transformation at the intersection of business, digital transformation, and human systems, creating tangible value for clients across all lines of business. Dr. Chance also challenges organizations to consider how expanded creative thinking can accelerate diversity, equity and inclusion solutions, serving as a tool to build and nurture psychologically safe spaces, cultural integration, social innovation and social justice.
“Talent development is often ‘the same old stuff’. You brought a fresh perspective with unique offerings we haven’t seen before. The leadership outcomes we’ve realized are new tools and resources and we’ve gained new levels of respect for each other. We are functioning more cohesively as a business.”
– HR Business Partner, Tech Industry
Disrupt Thinking to Transform Organizations
Dr. Chance’s experiences as a C-Suite executive in banking, healthcare, tech, entrepreneurship, and engineering fueled curiosity about using creativity to unlock potential. Focused on the idea of rewiring unproductive patterns of behavior to spark transformative thinking in her teams, she tested her theories on the connection between creativity and improved performance. In 2007 US Banker recognized the impact of her unique approach, honoring her as one of the Most Powerful Women in Banking. Eventually, she earned a doctorate in psychology, focusing on leadership, creativity, organizational systems, and leading transformation.
The Mousai Group’s powerful and unique participant experiences and exercises use techniques built on a psychological foundation to leverage the psyche, resulting in the personal and professional transformative alignment and clarity needed in today’s organizations. With a network of psychologists, strategists, activists, designers, and marketers, Dr. Chance’s team uses social-emotional psychographics to help clients understand stakeholder attitudes, aspirations, barriers, biases, and other characteristics at play in organizations.
This insight informs The Mousai Group’s portfolio of services—strategy assessment and development, advising and leadership development—empowering clients to cultivate and amplify their creative capacities. Disrupting thinking opens possibilities for exceptional leadership to envision and stimulate new products, processes, organizations and future alternatives and solutions for elevation and growth.
“Dr. Chance and her team are extremely valued and loved by our team. Her approach to strategy, creativity and leadership development provided the big transformation our organization needed to take us to the next level of performance, thinking and execution. As a 30-year-old organization with a history of creatively serving our community, the work with Dr. Chance positioned us to successfully pivot towards an exciting future.”
-Bea Stotzer, CEO, NEW Capital
The Humanist Leader
During her research on the leader’s creative mind and imagination for peak performance, Dr. Chance uncovered a new type of leader: The Humanist Leader. This leader is armed with imagination (internal world) techniques, is an instigator of change, and a joiner and connector of things and people. Dr. Chance discovered that this leader is adept at connecting meaning and imagination that supports a foundation for increased productivity at work and introduces holistic, creative, collaborative, and meaningful interactions, building new energy and possibilities for individuals, teams and organizations.
To amplify and elevate the benefits of The Humanist Leader, The Mousai Group prepares today’s inclusive leaders for the more nuanced decisions, situations and discussions they encounter.
A Champion for Women
Dr. Chance is committed to elevating all leaders to their highest, most joyful potential. However, she recognizes that women and underserved communities face different challenges in their aspirations toward personal goals and professional success; therefore, she offers her expertise to uplift the broader community and is recognized for championing women. In 2019 she was honored by The International Association of Women as A Most Influential Woman Leader. She also received talk show host awards for championing women’s health. Additionally, Dr. Chance works with the Small Business Association’s (SBA) Los Angeles Women’s Business Center to conduct psychology, creativity, and expanded thinking workshops for small and startup businesses. She is an avid supporter and speaker for the Los Angeles International Association of Women. As Chief Research Strategist for the non-profit New Economics for Women, Dr. Chance collaborated with the team to create the Impact on Economic Mobility Status of Financially Vulnerable Populations in Los Angeles County, the Covid-19 Global Pandemic Report of findings, the case for support, and policy recommendations.
“Soft Skills” are the New “Hard Skills”
Dr. Chance sees first-hand that the skills women often see as barriers are gifts needed now and for the future. She endeavors to expand their understanding, igniting a connection to the value they have as true leaders. Research debunks perceptions that stereotyped “soft skills” are less relevant to leading and influencing. In “Office Politics”, a Women in the Workplace study, not only were women judged to be superior in areas where women are traditionally thought to excel, such as developing others and building relationships, but their ratings were significantly higher, statistically speaking, on 12 of the 16 attributes identified, in more than 30 years of research, as most important to overall leadership effectiveness.
Unlocking Peak Performance
The Mousai Group’s promise to clients is to deliver exceptional leadership experiences and strategic solutions for grand possibilities while nurturing individual expression. Organizations are simply groups of individuals who gather around common goals and structure. Leaders who ignore the power of the individual to spark innovation and performance will be on the sidelines of progress. But for aspirational leaders desiring a better way to align teams and individuals, expanding the creative mind is the secret to unlocking peak performance with lasting impact.
Dr. Gloria A. Chance is a Peak Performance Psychologist, Creativity Architect, Award-Winning Talk Show Host and Founder/CEO of the Mousai Group.
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