Message to women seeking the executive suite: Don't sell yourself short; Cable executive Colleen Abdoulah says women should play up their strengths and support each other.

• Position: Interview

The following is an edited transcript of an interview with Colleen Abdoulah, CEO of WOW! Internet-Cable-Phone by ColoradoBiz Editor Mike Cote. Visit the video archives at co-bizmag.com to watch the interview, which was posted Dec. 18.

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Englewood-based WOW! serves Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio and employs 1,200 people. Abdoulah will be the keynote speaker at the Women in Corporate Growth Breakfast on Wednesday, March 12.

COLORADOBIZ: What do women bring to the executive suite, and why is that good?

ABDOULAH: Their intuitive sense helps them a tremendous amount as leaders, and they are tremendous multitaskers. We can handle a lot of different things at once. And I think the balance between the feminine and the masculine helps a great deal at an executive level in any corporation.

COLORADOBIZ: WOW! consistently gets high marks for employee satisfaction and customer service. How do you accomplish that?

ABDOULAH: It's truly because we focus on the employees, on each other. We have what we call service structure, where we define who everybody's internal customers are. We take away the focus on titles, control and power and bureaucracy. And we are simply there to serve each other and help each other do the best we can do so we can then serve the end customer.

COLORADOBIZ: Give me an example of how that manifests itself.

ABODOULAH: Once a year when we do our internal survey of how people are doing, we have frontline employees evaluating people all the way up to my level. Anyone who is in management who doesn't touch the end customer, who isn't on the front line, once a month has to go in a truck with an installer or has to go to our call center and listen to phone calls and write a report on it.... When we see that something doesn't work, we can change it. Leadership can lose touch with the people who do the actual work or with the customer paying their salary.

COLORADOBIZ: What can women business leaders learn from each other?

ABDOULAH: First and foremost is to support one another. Men are terrific with bonding with one another, supporting each other. Women can be incredibly critical. And I think it starts internally. We tend to be far more critical of ourselves than...