Lina Acosta, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer for GLT Logistics
Women have capabilities that can help trucking companies achieve great success, but they are still overlooked for leadership roles across the industry, says Lina Acosta, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer for GLT Logistics, a Miami-based third-party logistics company found in 2002. One way for women to step up and show their worth is to boost their self-confidence and stand out from the crowd.
Out of the 350 people that make up the GLT Logistics team, Acosta says 61% are women. In leadership roles at the company, women make up more than 62%. It’s a reminder that though it may seem daunting to create such a situation in a male-populated field, having a majority women-led organization in the trucking industry is possible.
Acosta says being taken out of her comfort zone was a key part of her own personal development. When she found herself in a negative situation, she didn’t want a lack of self-confidence to get the best of her. She focused on the positives, faced her fears, and learned how to do things differently.
“Let’s play a role in which we are the creators of our reality, and the creators of our future,” Acosta says. “We need to be accountable for everything that happens to us.” Acosta says the first rule is if you see something not working out you must find a way to make a change.
The transportation industry has made progress in promoting women to leadership roles. In fact, the 2023 WIT Index (the industry barometer to benchmark and measure each year the percentage of women who make up critical roles in transportation) shows that 31.6% of C-suite executives are women and 36.9% of company leaders are female. While Acosta says the number is growing slowly, we’re “not there yet” and it should be around 50%.
She says her generation grew up watching men take on most of the leadership roles in public and at home. These circumstances that women find themselves in during childhood and beyond set a precedent and also create unconscious bias by women about women.
“We have to fight against those beliefs that we have because it’s something that when we wake up we need to dedicate some time to say ‘I am capable,’” Acosta says. “Women rate themselves as less confident than men until their mid-40s. We, women, are very hard on ourselves.”
This article was originally featured in Edition 3 of 2023 in our official magazine, Redefining The Road. Download the latest edition here.
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