Women Leading the Future

I recently gave a presentation to a group of Business and Professional Women on managing their careers. I left them with 15 strategies they needed to act on to achieve their goals.

On this 2012 International Women's Day I want to share them with you here.

1. Set Goals We Want to Achieve In Our Lives, Dreams We Want To Make Come True.

2. Work With Our Partners, Families Or Significant Others In Creating A "Plan" For Making This Happen.

3. Get Clear On What We Are Prepared to Negotiate On With Our Partner/Family And In Our Work And What Is Non-negotiable.

4. Get Ourselves The Support We Need to Make It All Happen.

5. Keep Our Focus And Clarity With An Accountability Or Performance Partner.

6. Become Part Of a Professional Women's Group- Where Like-Minded Women Hang Out.

7. Build And Maintain Our Relationships And Connections With The People Who Can Support Us In The Development Of Our Professional Selves And Our Careers.

8. Find The Men In Influential Positions Who Really Do Believe In the Contribution Professional Women Have To Make And Are Committed to Their Advancement.

9. Learn To Sself-Promote With Self-confidence And Integrity.

10. Learn To Be Assertive.

11. Seek Stretch Assignments And Projects.

12. Take Calculated Risks.

13. Always Present Ourselves in the Best Light. 

14. Make Our Health And Well-Being a Top Priority.

15. Don't Give Up When The Going Gets Tough!

If you want to read about these 15 strategies in more depth, go to my International Women's Day Newsletter here.

 

It's a small clothing company in America but its mission statement has become famous. I'm grateful to Craig Ballantyne at Early to Rise for telling me about this. So famous is its mission statement that it has had it printed and now sells it as a poster. Would anyone want to buy the mission statement of your organisation? They usually don't inspire their own workforce let alone a nation or a global community. That's what's happened at Hostee however.

 

No one today has everything they need within themselves to grow and become successful. The most successful people in the world – whether they be CEOs, elite sportspeople, doctors, entrepreneurs, experts of every kind or leaders in their chosen fields – will acknowledge that they didn't get there on their own. Other people helped them, inspired them, mentored or coached them.

As women moving up the ladder we tend to believe that we advance our careers and attain leadership by working hard. We make a 150% commitment. We give loyalty. We strive to excel by gaining additional qualifications. Behind the scenes we get a coach or mentor to improve our performance. Then we realise, after nothing happens, that it doesn't work that way.

Men, on the other hand, believe that their career is advanced by who they are close to, by knowing the right people. They devote significant amounts of time to developing these relationships. They get the right introductions. They belong to the right organisations. They take leadership positions on the right committees. They build their profile in their industry or professional group. They also make sure they are known and recognised as someone who wants to go somewhere, someone with leadership potential.

Most women have reservations about doing that. If they by chance meet the "right people" that is O.K., but it not O.K. to go out and consciously and deliberately look for the right people who will advance their careers and endeavour to build relationships with them for that purpose.

It's certainly not part of their nature to get someone who knows someone to set up introductions for them. They don't give conscious and deliberate thought to which organisations it is important to belong to for the growth of their careers. They don't either carefully plan how to make space in their lives so that they have the time to make a commitment to them by taking a leadership position on their committee or board. They feel very uneasy about putting themselves out there, where everyone knows they are on a journey to the top. They do, however, talk about wanting to make a difference, but they don't openly and deliberately focus on getting to the top. They often take a quieter, back road and hope they arrive.

Today millions of women in Australia will go to work and be paid 17 cents less per hour than their male colleague doing the same work in the office beside them.

They will earn $237.50 less this week than that same male colleague.

They would have to work an extra 63 days in 2011 to end up with the same pay as that colleague at the end of the year.

In 2011, it hardly seems comprehensible that this situation could continue to exist.

It is now more than 30 years since the equal pay for equal work legislation was passed in Australia. Some progress has been made, but there is still a long way to go when the conditions above still exist. 

I wrote about this last year on Equal Pay Day. Not wanting to repeat myself I went back to check what I wrote last year. To my surprise nothing has changed. I could have produced the same article.

Many women, when they find out that their employers are paying them less than their male colleagues, just feel so betrayed and cheated that they don't want to work for that organisation anymore and begin looking for another job.

Others, will try to correct the situation by going through all the appropriate channels - talking with their manager and HR. If that fails they also will look for work elsewhere.

If there was an easy or obvious answer to the question of why women are not more strongly represented in management and leadership positions, the situation would have rapidly been reversed long ago. In recent years there has been a growing realisation by companies that they are losing enormous expertise, knowledge, experience, skills and insight as women decline management and leadership positions, opt out once they arrive or don’t return to their leadership position after maternity leave. More disconcerting for some of these companies is the fact that, in spite of their concerted efforts, making changes in their organisations that they believe will retain their women managers and leaders, they are not successful.

 

Is this the glass ceiling? Some women will want to debate whether there is a glass ceiling that prevents women from attaining positions of senior leadership. These are the women who have made it. They are also the women who we want to openly and honestly share their experience of how they did it because many women are not making it. The question is, however, whether it is a glass ceiling presenting an impermeable boundary to women as they climb the leadership ladder that stops them going further, or whether as women get to the top of the ladder – or even near it – they do not like what they see and experience and choose not to stay, or even go there.

What are some of the challenges women experience as they aspire to leadership and management positions in companies and organisations.

• Some corporate cultures are foreign territory for women. They operate in ways that conflict with their value systems and challenge their sense of who they are and want to be. It becomes difficult therefore for women to find places to grow and develop in these cultures.

Many women don’t like the way some men “do” leadership. They don’t like the way these men put themselves so out there. They see them as very ego-driven.  Their leadership style is very much about them. They go after what they want very directly and specifically. This doesn’t sit well with women’s socialization and upbringing. Nor does it sit well with the way they want to create their relationships and connections.

Whenever I begin talking with managers about using a coaching process to motivate and inspire higher levels of performance in their people, there's always a hesitancy.

They know they need to give feedback and do performance appraisals whether they like it or not but they see coaching as optional and discretionary. More importantly they don't feel they could do it.

This feeling of inadequacy is more about them misunderstanding what coaching is, than it is about any real inadequacy on their part.

In 2008, Blessing White did a very interesting global study on coaching - The Coaching Conundrum. One of the important results in this study is very relevant to what we are talking about here.

They asked survey respondents to think of their "best coach" and then think of the one coaching action by that manager which they most valued. These were the answers:

20% - Stretched me beyond what I thought I could do.

18% - Asked questions to help me think through and solve work challenges on my own.

13% - Guided me by sharing personal insights, learnings and experiences.

10% - Treated me as an individual, understanding my unique needs.

10% - Recognized my talents and accomplishments.

9% - Provided useful feedback to help me achieve my career goals.

8% - Was candid; told me what others would not.

8% - Helped me understand where I could make a difference in the organisation.

4% - Established clear performance goals for me.

None of the respondents expected their coaches to have all the answers. What they wanted was something quite different.

Managers can take each of these points above and use as a guide to best ways to work with their people because a sizeable group of people have found these to be helpful.

 

 

One of the major obstacles for women who want to break through the glass ceiling is the lack of opportunity to gain wisdom and understanding from those who have already done it. They are out there, though not in the numbers at the top that we would  like to see.

That road for women is not travelled easily. In fact women have to be twice as good as men to get there. Many more obstacles are put in their way.

So when they finally arrive and can sit on the same "stage" with their male colleague CEOs, are they going to want to talk about the struggle they had to get there. Of course not! They would be treated with derision.

It's only when these women leaders are given the opportunity to talk on a platform that is created by other women that they dare to share part of their story of struggle.

I heard Janet Dore, CEO of the Traffic Accident Commission in Victoria, and a woman who has broken through many glass ceilings in her professional life, say recently that she had to meticulously watch everything she did in her work and be excellent at it. This was from the way she acted and responded to the way she dressed because she was scrutinised in a way that her male colleagues weren't.

If you’ve ever been working out with a personal trainer, you’ll know what it is like to be stretched to the limit? They always want us to go that bit further than we think we are capable of. They stand beside us and coach us to keep going. “But I can’t”, we say. “Yes, you can. Don’t stop. Stay with it. You can do it. I know you can.”

What happens? We do stay with it. Yes, we can do it, but we didn’t think we could. We wouldn’t have done it either unless we had someone beside us who believed in us more than we believed in ourselves and coached us.

We are all like sticks of dynamite. The power is on inside us

.....but nothing happens until the fuse gets lit.

That really inspired me when I first read it. It is just so true. I really believe that every single person has something special and unique inside them. The reason why some are able to develop that and show it to the world is because they light the fuse. That's what it means to empower ourselves. No one else can empower us. We have to do it ourselves. Others can encourage, support, motivate and inspire us, but only we can take that final step and light the fuse. When we do that, we take off. All those talents and all that potential we have inside us is activated and released. Some people think the word "empowerment" is an old word belonging to the 1970s when it first emerged in popular jargon. I certainly don't think that, especially when my main business is called "People Empowered". More than ever today, in the midst of a complex, uncertain, ambiguous and paradoxical world, we need to be able to believe in the "power within" which is what empowerment is about. We can very easily be overcome with fear, doubt, frustration, disillusionment and depression and never even explore the breadth of our inner resources.We never experience what it means to stretch ourselves to the edges of our potential.

So, if you want to light your fuse, if you want to be more than you already are, if you want to explore all the possibilities that are in your life, then there are some things you need to do first.

• Discover what your dream is, either personally or professionally. Set yourself some goals and give them a deadline. A goal is a dream with a deadline. If there is no deadline it usually remains a dream. If there is no dream, the goal remains a dead-line!

A colleague over a 15-20 year period has therefore  been around my workplace quite a bit over the years in a number of capacities. The other day she asked me a question that I actually hadn't thought about for many years.

Why don't you ever have photos of your family around your offices?

She went on to say that in all the years she's known me and been in and out of my office many times, she's never seen a sign of photos of my family.

As a consultant also, she reminded me that she is in and out of many offices with her work and like me, sees many family photos prominently displayed around men's offices.

It was a very deliberate action on my part, many years ago when I set up my own business, not to have family photos around my work. I'm not sure that much has changed 20 years later, but certainly back in 1989 there was the attitude that women with children were a questionable item in some ways. It was not voiced publicly. That would have been politically incorrect even back then. 

It was assumed that we would put our family first before our work. That would then demonstrate that we were not committed, did not have the drive and commitment to succeed. That would then demonstrate that we probably couldn't make the hard decisions that needed to be made in business. In fact, there were a whole range of assumptions that followed on from all of that.

Assumptions have a unique ability to become beliefs and beliefs to become facts. These "facts" then shaped women's potential to advance their careers.

Today is the 100 year anniversary of International Women’s Day (IWD), a public holiday in many countries -even if not in Australia yet!

It was 1908 that the “first” International Women’s Day saw 15,000 women march through the streets of New York, protesting working conditions and better pay, as well as the right to vote. It was 1910 at an International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen that IWD was enshrined as an annual event.

It has always been understood that women have much more highly developed Soft Skills than men. This is a sterotyped position, but it is probably true that up until recent times, society has been much more accepting of women leaders openly demonstrating their Soft Skills than it has been about male leaders doing the same thing. In other words, it’s been a strength for women, but a weakness in men. It can, however, work against women and if we are not very conscious of the “games” that are played in the workplace, those skills we value and espouse as women leaders can actually work against us.

Every now and then someone says something very simple that we actually know but it hasn't really registered for us. Have you ever had that experience? I have many times.

Yesterday was one of those occasions when I read an article in The Sunday Age Magazine by personal trainer, Michelle Bridges. She constantly gets asked questions about exercise, health and well-being. One that makes her "want to tear my hair out", she says is: "So tell me Michelle, how do you stay motivated?"

She says that achieving what you want for your life is not about motivation. It is about consistency. 

She reminds us that motivation is about feeling - whether we feel like doing something or not. Motivating ourselves is about keeping the positive feelings about that in top gear so that  we maintain the momentum and don't go back to where we were. Feelings don't last, she reminds us and they are fickle and unpredictable. There one day and not there the next.