
During the week-long program, NACS Women’s Leadership Program attendees get to experience Yale’s campus in addition to classroom learning.
Unapologetic. Powerful. Respected. Authentic. Women aren’t simply equipped to succeed because they are human — they have unique strengths. Often they can harness an innate emotional intelligence that allows a deeper breadth of understanding and clarity. This empowering course is designed for women who want to individually, and collectively bolster their leadership abilities, reinvigorate their companies and expand their networks.
The NACS Women’s Leadership Program offers convenience leaders the opportunity to:
- Develop critical top team leadership skills
- Refine strategic perspective and decision making
- Understand and hone leadership style through feedback assessments
- Improve executive presence and leverage diversity to accelerate innovation
- Practice emotionally intelligent leadership
Participants from retailer and supplier companies are invited to exchange ideas with a peer group of experienced and emerging women leaders who face similar challenges in their professional lives. The program is administered by thought-leading faculty at Yale and successful female convenience industry practitioners.
For any questions or to request more information, please contact:
Brandi Mauro
Education Program Manager
bmauro@convenience.org
(703) 518-4223

“I thoroughly enjoyed the content and atmosphere of the program. I’m going to share my experience with several women back at the office who would get a lot out of it too. Thanks for recognizing the need, and developing such an amazing curriculum.”
-Amanda Flowers, Fuel Accounting Manager, Wallis Co.
Not sure which program to attend?
Please contact NACS Education to schedule an advising session.
Schedule Consultation >
(703) 518-4223



The NACS Master of Convenience designation acknowledges the hard work and investment NACS members have made in their personal leadership development. It is awarded to convenience retailers who have attended 3 or more of the 5 NACS Executive Education programs. For questions, contact Brandi Mauro, NACS Education Program Manager: bmauro@convenience.org or (703) 518-4223.
“Candidly, it was by a significant margin, the best program I have ever attended! It combines some of the best parts of other leadership courses, and melds them into one cohesive journey – making the goal of being one’s best self entirely feasible. The NACS Women’s Leadership Program at Yale has changed how I look at a number of things in my daily life.”
– Michelle Walsh, Director-Retail Implementation, Wawa, Inc.
Women executives, district and regional managers, and women identified by their management as high-potential leaders from retailer or supplier companies.
Participant Roles

Participating Companies Include
- Applegreen PLC
- Maverik, Inc.
- McLane Company, Inc.
- Reitan Convenience AS
- Wawa, Inc.
To get a better understanding of what the program offers, take a look at a sample curriculum and course schedule (PDF). The 2023 schedule will be posted as soon as it’s available. Attendees should plan to arrive no later than 3 PM on Sunday, November 12 and depart after 12:30 PM on Friday, November 17.
The NACS Women’s Leadership Program is administered by faculty in the Yale School of Management. Meet the professors lined up to present at this year’s program.
Show Bio...
Professor Baron’s research interests include human resources; organizational design and behavior; social stratification and inequality; work, labor markets, and careers; economic sociology; and entrepreneurial companies. Before coming to SOM in 2006, he taught at Stanford's Graduate School of Business from 1982-2006. At Stanford, he taught the MBA core course, Human Resource Management. He was co-director of the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies (SPEC), a large-scale longitudinal study of the organizational design, human resource management practices, and financial and non-financial performance measures of entrepreneurial firms in Silicon Valley. Papers based on the project appeared in leading disciplinary journals, and an overview of the project in California Management Review won the 2003 Accenture Award for making “the most important contribution to improving the practice of management.”
He is the author, with Stanford economist David M. Kreps, of a textbook, Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.). Baron is also a regular contributor to leading sociology and organization journals, such as the American Sociological Review and Administrative Science Quarterly. His research has also been published in influential journals in economics and social psychology.
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Heidi Brooks, Senior Lecturer in Organizational Behavior, teaches and advises on the subject of everyday leadership: the everyday micro-moments of impact that shape our lived experiences. Creating more courageous communities—especially within organizations—is a particular passion of hers. Dr. Brooks specializes in large-scale culture change projects focused on individual and collective leadership effectiveness in organizations. Interpersonal Dynamics, the MBA elective she has taught for 15 years, is one of the courses most in demand at Yale School of Management. Recently, Dr. Brooks pioneered the Everyday Leadership course at SOM, where she first taught the Principles of Everyday Leadership. She has also taught Emotional Intelligence, Power & Politics, Managing Teams and Groups, and Coaching Skills for Managers. Dr. Brooks received her doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. A life-long experiential learner, you can find her as a student in classrooms as far-ranging as improvisational theater and immersion language lessons.
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Zoë Chance loves helping kind, smart people become more influential. She researches and teaches interpersonal influence here at Yale, publishes in academic journals and trade pubs like Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today, and speaks on influence around the world and on TV. Google uses Zoë’s behavioral economics framework as the basis for their global food policy, and Zoë has been named one of the top 50 management thinkers to watch. Prior to Yale, Zoë managed a 200-million-dollar segment of the Barbie brand at Mattel, and earned a doctorate from Harvard. Currently, she’s finishing up a book on influence to be published by Random House as one of their lead titles for next year.
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Professor Kovács studies how socially structured information such as categories, awards, online reviews, and social networks shape audiences’ perceptions and evaluations in creative domains such as music, literature, dining, or technology. Focusing on audiences is important because in creative domains quality and relevance are often elusive, making social evaluations particularly important. Quality here is constructed in part through categorization and the interaction of heterogenous audience segments and networks. His research takes a sociological approach, in which actors, objects, organizations, and markets are located in a relational space, and heterogeneity, positioning, and networks are studied by exploring the locations and movements in this relational space.
Professor Kovács typically uses large-scale, “big data” approaches to study these questions, analyzing online reviews and social networks. His research appears in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Organization Science, Management Science, Nature Biotechnology, Psychological Science, Research Policy, Social Networks, and Strategic Management Journal.
Professor Kovács received his PhD from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Prior to joining the Yale School of Management, he was an assistant professor at the University of Lugano, Switzerland.
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Professor Taly Reich's research interests fall at the intersection of behavioral decision theory and social psychology. Within these general domains, a great deal of her work explores issues related to the value of unintentionality in consumer choice and the unorthodox choices that people make in the face of threats to their personal identity. In exploring these issues, she strives to answer both theoretical and practical questions, with a fundamental goal of advancing basic insight in consumer psychology and shedding light on strategic actions that can subsequently be generated. Taly Reich has published articles in leading journals such as Nature, Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Consumer Research. Taly Reich holds a PhD in Marketing from Stanford Graduate School of Business and an M.Sc. in Industrial Psychology from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.
Show Bio...
Emma Seppälä, Ph.D, is Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and author of The Happiness Track (HarperOne, 2016). She is Co-Director of the Yale College Emotional Intelligence Project at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and Faculty Director of the Yale School of Management’s Women’s Leadership Program.
She regularly consults with and speaks at companies around the world on positive organizations, happiness at work and social connection. She has addressed companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Bain & Co, and Ernst & Young. She was an invited speaker at a United States Congressional Hearing and has also spoken at TedX Sacramento and TEDx Hayward.
She writes for Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, TIME, QUARTZ, Business Insider, Stanford Medicine, Psychology Today, Fast Company, Forbes, Huffington Post, MindBodyGreen, Greater Good Science Center, Scientific American Mind and Spirituality & Health.
Her work and research have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, VOGUE, ELLE, CBSNews, Oprah Magazine, Fast Company, U.S. World and News Report, Forbes, Cosmopolitan, Inc, Huffington Post, ABC News, Business Insider, SELF, GLAMOUR, and the World Economic Forum.
She is a repeat guest on Good Morning America and has also been featured in ABC News, Fox News, Huffington Post Live and TIME/MONEY and is featured in the documentary film The Altruism Revolution and What You Do Matters.
Her research focuses on well-being, compassion, social connection, complementary and alternative practices, and trauma resilience. Her research on yoga-based breathing for military veterans returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan was highlighted in the documentary Free the Mind.
She is the recipient of a number of research grants and service awards including the James W. Lyons Award from Stanford University for founding Stanford’s first academic class on the psychology of happiness and teaching well-being programs for Stanford students.
She graduated from Yale (BA), Columbia (MA), and Stanford (PhD). Originally from Paris, France, she is a native speaker of French, English, and German and conversant in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.
Show Bio...
David C. Tate is a licensed clinical psychologist and an Assistant Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at Yale University. His areas of practice in organizational consulting include coaching and leadership development, conflict resolution, team-building, succession planning and promoting healthy organizational development. In his clinical practice, he sees individuals, families and groups around issues concerning health, relationships, and dealing effectively with life transitions.
Dr. Tate is a co-author of Sink or Swim: How Lessons from the Titanic Can Save Your Family Business. He earned a certificate in family business advising from the Family Firm Institute, and serves as the facilitator for the National Association of Corporate Directors Connecticut Chapter’s Family Business Roundtable. He also is the co-founder of the Connecticut Consulting Psychology Group.
Dr. Tate received his B.S. at Cornell University and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Virginia. He completed pre- and post-doctoral fellowships at Yale University before joining the faculty.
Registration for the 2023 NACS Women’s Leadership Program is closed. Sign up below to be added to the waitlist and to be notified once registration is open for the 2024 program. If a seat becomes available in the 2023 program, then you will be contacted directly.
Registration Pricing:
NACS Retail Member - $4,295
NACS Distributor & Supplier Member - $4,995
A tuition endowment from Altria, BP, and Frito Lay makes this program most affordable for NACS member companies. The program registration fee includes instruction, lodging, course materials, and assessments.
Classroom
Yale School of Management
Evans Hall
165 Whitney Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
All sessions will take place in Edward P Evans Hall on Yale’s campus. A shuttle will be available to transport participants between the hotel and Evans Hall.
Lodging
The Study at Yale Hotel
1157 Chapel St.
New Haven, CT 06511
Lodging at The Study at Yale Hotel and scheduled meals are included in the total cost of the program. NACS will handle the booking of your room and will communicate updates as applicable. All participant’s lodging will be booked with an arrival date of Sunday, November 12 and departure date of Friday, November 17. If an extra night is needed either before or after the program due to travel, then please contact Brandi Mauro at bmauro@convenience.org.
Helpful travel instructions:
Airports
- John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK): General information, 718-244-4444; 72 miles/1.5 to 2 hours from New Haven, Connecticut.
- LaGuardia Airport (LGA): General information 212-435-7000; 72 miles/1.5 to 2 hours from New Haven, Connecticut.
- Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR): General information, 973-961-6000; 105 miles/2 to 2.5 hours from New Haven, Connecticut. Amtrak also provides train service from Newark Airport to Union Station, New Haven, Connecticut. A reservation with Amtrak is recommended if you prefer this method of travel. The train ride is 2.5 hours and is approximately $71. You will need to take a TRAM from the airport terminal to the Amtrak platform, this could take approximately 20 to 30 minutes.
- Tweed-New Haven Regional Airport (HVN): General information, 800-428-4322; a taxi is recommended to travel to the local hotels.
- Bradley International Airport (BDL): General information, 860-292-2000; 48 miles/1 hour from New Haven, Connecticut. Shuttle service is approximately $42.
Trains
Amtrak , 800-872-7245, and Metro-North , 800-638-7646, provide service to Union Station, New Haven, Connecticut. (NHV), 1 mile from The Study Hotel. You may choose to take a shuttle or subway from John F. Kennedy or LaGuardia International airports to New York City, then take the train from Grand Central Terminal or Penn Station to Union Station, New Haven, Connecticut. (NHV).
Transfer of registration to another person within your company may be possible and will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Cancellations received on or before October 1 will be charged a $250 administrative fee. After October 1, the full amount of the registration fee will be forfeited. Registration cancellations or transfer requests must be emailed to bmauro@convenience.org by October 1, 2023.
All registered participants will be notified of updates or changes via direct email as soon as they are made. In addition, the program’s webpage will also be kept up to date.
Please reference the Yale School of Management’s COVID response page for all of the COVID requirements and guidelines. See below for some highlights from the FAQ page:
Before the program
- All participants must be up to date with a vaccine and booster series with full approval or emergency use authorization by the U.S. FDA or the WHO to the extent they are eligible. The Yale team will collect this information prior to the program start.
- All executive education participants will be required to submit proof of a COVID-19 PCR test showing a negative result, with a test date no more than two days before the campus arrival date for their program. The Yale team will collect this information.
- Fully vaccinated participants are not required to quarantine upon arrival unless they are experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. Individuals experiencing symptoms, whether or not fully vaccinated, must obtain a COVID-19 PCR test and isolate until the test result is received. If the test is positive, the individual should continue to isolate and speak to their health care provider.
- All participants are required to either have health insurance or travelers’ health insurance in order to attend one of our programs.
During the program
- Currently, masks must be worn in all shared indoor spaces within the city of New Haven, including all Yale buildings. Please plan to wear surgical, N95/KN95, or similar masks rather than a cloth mask alone. In addition to testing requirements that apply prior to arrival, additional rapid testing may be required during the program; Yale will provide test kits to support any rapid testing requirement it implements.
Resources: For the latest industry information and updates, please visit our COVID-19 Resources page, which is updated regularly in consultation with government and public health officials as well as venue partners as new guidance becomes available.