This Former Military Officer Is Teaching Young Girls to Be Confident

Editor’s Note: This is part of our Good on the Ground series, profiling entrepreneurial women who are addressing social issues in innovative and inspiring ways.

Dianna Flett spent 21 years in military intelligence. As a lieutenant during the Cold War, she worked in Munich, Germany, in Adolf Hitler’s former headquarters. She ran counterintelligence in Belgium. She was deployed when Desert Storm began.

Today, though, she is tackling what may be her toughest assignment yet: Instilling confidence in young girls.

“How many of you want to be leaders?” she asks a roomful of girls at Rockhill Elementary in Stafford, Va., watching a show of hands. “What do you think is more important, being liked or being a leader?”

Projecting Girl Power

Listen to our podcast episode for more of our interview with Dianna Flett.

Flett, who retired from active duty as a lieutenant colonel in 2001, runs a program called Girl Smarts. It’s a series of workshops aimed at empowering 4th- and 5th-grade girls, training them in skills they can use to navigate stressful situations in middle school. She currently works with about 700 to 800 girls a year, primarily through an after-school program at 20 schools in Virginia.

“A girl’s self-confidence peaks when she’s nine years old,” Flett says, just before the tween years when her self-possession will begin to be tested. “When you can teach a girl how to say ‘no’ and stand up against something that she doesn’t want to experience, then you really have given them an opportunity to take control of who they are.”

‘Mom, You Need to Do Something’

Flett, a mother of four boys, was inspired to start the program in 2009 after her second-oldest son, Sam, expressed concern about his female schoolmates. “He was really disturbed by the crash in confidence that he saw his female friends experiencing in middle school,” she says. Then just 11, Sam relayed that girls were experimenting with alcohol and drugs, and putting themselves in risky sexual situations. “That’s when he said to me flat out, ‘Mom, you need to do something,'” Flett says.

At the time, Flett was using her years of military experience to run leadership training courses for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She felt that much of what she was teaching could be applied to young girls. “The Army takes building leaders pretty seriously … how to communicate effectively, how to delegate effectively, how to use their imagination,” she says. Those same skills, she realized, could be taught to girls at an early age.

Flett spoke with a counselor at her sons’ elementary school about presenting a series of confidence-building workshops, dubbed Girl Smarts, for girls in 4th and 5th grades. “She was all for the idea,” Flett says. “She was on the ground seeing what girls were going through.” As soon as Flett began running the workshops, which combine straight talk and fun activities, other schools in Virginia expressed interest. After the second year, “I was already in four schools, just by word of mouth,” Flett says. Volunteers enlisted their services. She began designing a curriculum.

“At that point, I had to come to the realization that I was either going to devote myself to this opportunity,” Flett says, “or I was going to have to start to pursue the financial realities of having four children that needed to go through college.” With the support of her husband, Steve, she decided to build Girl Smarts.

Figuring Out the Business Model

Flett calls herself a “reluctant entrepreneur.” She has a tough-as-nails persona, thanks to two decades in the military, during which, she says, she experienced threats to her personal safety, as well as sexual harassment. But figuring out a realistic business model for an organization like Girls Smart has been a challenge.

Flett, who has a military pension, self-financed Girl Smarts. The program itself is tuition-based, although it’s reasonably priced and parents generally pay less than $100 for a 5-part workshop series (at some schools, the Parent-Teacher Association helps pay for the program). Last year, after paying two part-time instructors and covering the cost of supplies, Girl Smarts cleared $5,000, Flett says. “Honestly the business side of this is not the driver for me personally, nor do I think it is for my facilitators,” she says, one of whom has a doctorate degree.

At the same time, “I do see incredible growth potential for Girl Smarts,” Flett says. A few years ago, she looked into a franchise model, but scrapped the idea after deciding she didn’t have enough variety of workshops for a national program. She might consider developing products, like school journals, that the organization could sell. “I haven’t figured it out yet,” Flett says.

Girl Smarts is currently a for-profit S corporation, and Flett says she isn’t interested in turning it into a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, which similar educational organizations tend to be. “I don’t love the idea of being an empowerment program that has to ask for money,” she says.

Back at Rockland Elementary, Flett finishes her workshop, teaching a group of 5th-grade girls about how to set and achieve goals, how to make values-based decisions, and how to act like a leader. “Keep that strong handshake when you go up to meet somebody,” she tells them. “Show them that you’re there, and that you mean business.” The girls give her a hug before they leave the room. “Let’s go get ’em, girls,” she says.

For now, Flett says she is content to run Girl Smarts essentially as a continuation of her service. The students “are so thirsty for the kind of information they are being given,” she says. “This is the kind of business that needs to be driven by your heart.”