Is “Executive Sponsor” is the New “Mentor” for Women Leaders? The missing piece in women’s advancement strategies into leadership? Mentorship helps us be effective, but it’s not as helpful at helping us get a job as sponsorship is. Dana takes a look at what is means to have a sponsor vs. a mentor and give some practical advice for how to earn a sponsor’s support. ~ InPower Editors For years, mentoring has been how many companies and professional associations have hoped to close the leadership gender gap, in which women barely achieve 20% of the C-Suite slots and even less at the board level despite being half the entry-level workforce. Every leader points to mentors along the way as key to their success, so this focus on mentoring for women makes sense – or does it?
Research now tells us that while women are mentored more than men, they don’t get promoted as much, or see as many salary increases, because of it. It turns out that while mentors do help us learn to be more effective, it’s often “sponsors” who actually help us get hired at the next pay grade.
So what’s the difference between a mentor and a sponsor?
Mentors give us advice, counsel and strategies to learn the ropes we haven’t learned yet. Mentors can learn from us too. Mentorship is a coaching and support relationship. Sponsors, by contrast, go to bat for us, put our name in the hat for new assignments and – this is the important part – have some of their own personal brand equity and credibility riding on our success. They ask others to believe in us. Mentors can also be sponsors, but they’re not the same.
While mentorship is an explicit and usually personal relationship, not everyone knows who sponsored them behind the scenes. You don’t always have close personal relationships with sponsors like you do with mentors. Quite often, they know you through results, performance and presentations. They like the cut of your jib, believe when you’re successful you’ll be a good ally for them and – frankly – make them look good for believing in you early on.
How do you get an executive sponsor?
First of all you don’t “get” a sponsor; you “earn” a sponsor. You have to do good work and make sure people who can sponsor you know about it. I believe this is one of the primary reasons women are not sponsored as often as men, because women too often struggle to take credit for their success. But there is more to attracting the attention of a sponsor than just doing your job, you need to stand out among your peers in other ways too. Here are three key career strategies you can use to get the attention of a sponsor.
Do “hard.”
Take on the big challenges and succeed. This means going out of your comfort zone regularly and achieving things that advance the goals of the organization.
Own your success.
Talk about your wins so people know what to give you credit for. Not comfortable bragging? Then don’t. Teach others what you did to succeed, and make sure they know how you’ve successfully put your own ideas into practice.
Take a stand.
Promote a big idea that can move the business forward and learn how not to back down when you stimulate a vigorous debate. Learn to stand up for your ideas even in the face of opposition. Just as importantly, learn how not to fall on your own sword so you can negotiate with others for a big idea win-win.
All three of these strategies will get the attention of potential sponsors, but the latter one – taking a stand – will attract true allies who think like you do, and respect you even if they don’t. This is a way to leverage thought leadership – traditionally reserved for external public relations efforts – to boost your own career internal to an organization. In this age of social media, it’s never been easier to become a thought leader and capture the attention of sponsors internally and externally both.
Attracting an executive sponsor requires a sustained effort to do good work in ways that produce results and help you stand out from your peers. It’s not about being better than they are, it’s about being your best you. There are many small things you can do, in meetings, conversations and big projects to accomplish this and get noticed. Set your intention to do it!
Have you ever noticed that once you can tell a story about something, it’s in the past?
The year’s end is upon us and I observe my clients reaching for closure to make sense of another time of upheaval in the world. I encourage everyone to engage the psychology of closure, not just at year end, but in any transition. Closure is a powerful force for change, growth and evolution and our brains are naturally constructed to use it.
So this year, make yourself a commitment to bring an intentional close to the year and set your sights on new aspirations for the months ahead.
To help you prioritize making time to close out YOUR year, I’d like to explore this powerful dynamic more deeply. Why do our brains try so hard to tell the story of time in wrapped-up little packages with nice neat endings? And how can we use this to our benefit?
The term “closure” describes the ways in which our brains are built to “fill in the blanks” when they detect information gaps. Rather than seeing incomplete shapes, our physiology and psychology work together to perceive a partial circle as a whole circle instead. You can see the ways that visual designers use this principle to “trick” our brains into seeing shapes that aren’t there, a technique used liberally in logo creation.
This impulse to see a whole when only a part is perceptible is related to the ways in which uncertainty, ambiguity and confusion lead to greater stress. And this stress increases our urgency for finding certainty and clarity.
Our brains are pattern-seeking machines and this tendency our brains have to create wholeness is simple self-preservation. Every little bit of open-endedness takes energy to remain open in our short-term memory. Until we know how something ends, we have to keep checking back on it, remembering what it was about, cataloging new information and deciding when to come back and check on it again. This takes a lot of mental energy! It requires us to remember a bunch of (currently) unconnected details, and multiple–potential–patterns-of-connection.
By contrast, once the actual connections appear, we can “forget” all the irrelevant data and unsuccessful patterns we imagined before we knew how the story ends. We can free up our brain space to noodle on other–still resolving–patterns. Once we know how the uncertainty resolves itself, we can wrap up the whole thing, from end-to-end, and shove it into long-term memory, which makes more efficient use of our brain.
The Power of Narrative
This is why our brains naturally use narrative intelligence to recognize and respond to patterns of meaning and motivation within and around us. Cindy Atlee and I use this amazing mental power to help people find Worklife Bliss in their careers and the process is as powerful as it is fun.
It feels good to wrap up uncertainty with a good story that has a happy ending. So of course we should use any excuse for transitioning from one time period to another, or one project to another, or one relationship to another… to leverage the psychology of closure. We speed our way through the transitions by telling the story of what happened before, which sets us up for success in whatever is happening next.
Best of all, it helps us grow when we find the lessons learned, the happy ending and the challenges overcome narratives in our lives as often as we can.
In short, finding closure feels good because you have a good story to tell and you get to reclaim a lot of mental energy you were expending just sitting in uncertainty.
Closure and Narrative as Tools for Evolving Your Professional Identity
In addition to reducing stress, however, I actively recommend creating closure as a way of evolving your personal brand. Each time you change jobs and have to update your LinkedIn profile, you retell the story of your career through a new lens. And in that retelling you come to see yourself in a new, more empowered and more mature, light.
If you don’t change jobs very often, or take other transitional opportunities to refresh your public identity, you may find that the story you tell yourself and others about your professional identity is very out-of-date. Your lived reality, and the story you tell about it, may grow further apart, which creates its own kind of mental stress.
So this year, leverage the psychology of closure to declutter the year behind you and set yourself up for success in the year ahead. You’ll feel refreshed with an updated story to tell about who you are and where you’re going.
By the way, if you are interested in the wonky psychology and neurology of these dynamics check out this recent podcast Your Identity is a Story You Tell Yourself by Sean Illing.
InPower Coaching Members: Here are tools for an InPower Fresh Start for the new year.
Reposted cuz it’s still relevant this time of year.
FREE EBOOK
Coaching Tips: How to Avoid the Most Common Career Mistakes
What’s wrong with women’s empowerment? Nothing and everything. – Click To Tweet
At its best, women’s empowerment programs are an organizational (or social) recognition that cultural barriers diminish women’s chances to succeed and make an attempt to counteract those forces to give women a better chance. Why? Not just because it’s the right thing to do from a social justice point of view, but because – as Warren Buffet writes in this month’s Fortune Magazine – companies who do this instigate The Women Effect and gain the productivity and performance improvements that come along with leveraging 100% of your best and brightest instead of a lot less than that.
What Most Women’s Empowerment Programs Seem To Actually Do
Those are great intentions, however, because they are too-often implemented without a deep intention for the entire culture to change, the organization ends up putting women in an “empowerment siloh” where they’re isolated and are taught how to “fit in” to the culture that doesn’t naturally empower them. Guess what their success ratio is when they fit in? Right. The same as it was when they didn’t get fit in. The default system doesn’t reward a woman for fitting in any more than it does when she doesn’t (this is an extension of the double bind research is documenting where women can’t get ahead by fitting either traditional female or male stereotypes).
Most companies do a poor job at empowering employees of any gender. But the irony of women’s empowerment makes this problem even more acute. The theory of most traditional women’s empowerment seems to be that if we acknowledge women’s disadvantage and then train them how to get ahead like the men do, they’ll be empowered. In this isolated space women talk about work-life balance and some – I swear I heard this just last week from a major global enterprise – check the box on women’s empowerment with social events where fashion designers and chefs come in to show their wares and techniques.
It’s true that I’m stereotyping some of these programs and they’re not all this bad, but I have to say that in my personal experience, and the experience of many other coaches and consultants I talk to, this kind of lipservice “women’s empowerment” program is much more common than not, at every size organization and in every industry. These programs are also chronically underfunded so that most suggestions beyond a ½ day event are greeted with “we don’t have the funds for that,” which is like saying “we’re not empowered to cause any real change.”
And thus the irony. “Women’s empowerment” has become yet another opportunity for women to feel unempowered. It’s as though they’re locked away in the tower with other women “to help them” waiting for Prince Charming to empower them.
What Does True Women’s Empowerment Look Like?
I have personally seen few examples of where successful women’s empowerment in a corporate setting, though I’ve read about them. McKinsey’s groundbreaking research on this has produced a concise description of the four qualities of organizations that are achieving gender balance in their leadership tiers. (InPower Women will publish the full summary tomorrow.). The key quality of the effective efforts is that they are the exact opposite of the disempowering siloh’s labeled “women’s empowerment.” The efforts are integrated into the organizations talent development efforts from the board on down.
I’ve seen another model of empowerment work, however, which I think holds interesting promise, and I suspect it is also at work in those organizations McKinsey studied.
At the District Alliance for Safe Housing (where I am a former board member), the underfunded and highly committed staff helps victims of domestic violence transform into survivors of domestic violence. This distinction is intentional and meaningful to them. The process is not quick or easy, and they do this with an empowerment philosophy that I believe is more INpowerment than traditional Empowerment. (It doesn’t matter what you call it, of course.)
Many social service “empowerment” programs are organized much like the corporate ones. They bring women together in a safe space and allow them to share stories about how unempowered they are. They’re put into programs that dictate how they will heal so they can go back out and fit in to society. They’re treated like victims that need to be protected and sheltered. In the end – despite all the good intentions – this approach doesn’t help them, but reinforces their feelings of disempowerment. DASH, however, tells them that they get to make the decisions about how they put their lives back together. Their individual choices about how to heal their families are honored and supported within the limits of what transitional housing and social services can provide. They are treated with respect and over the course of time they learn to respect themselves.
The result is that they return to their abusers at a lower rate than in more traditional programs and go off the rolls of social service at a higher rate. Why? Because the women have tapped into their own internal power. They don’t view themselves as victims anymore, and so others don’t treat them that way either. The system supports them in solving their own personal puzzle of empowerment and they become committed to find a way out. With support, they do. (For a fabulous TED Talk on this philosophy and results, watch Peg Hacskaylo’s short talk.).
What Women’s Empowerment Programs Can Do To Help Women Find InPowerment
A siloh’d women’s empowerment program can become simply another iteration of the Prince Charming myth, where women wait around to be granted the tiara and life made easy.
This isn’t working – for the companies for the women.
Companies are watching many of their best and brightest walk out the door just below upper management. The women who stay inside either continue to feel like Prince Charming is playing a cruel game of wait and wait, or they leave and join the swelling ranks of female entrepreneurs (which may not be all bad for them or the economy, by the way.)
But what if our corporate women’s empowerment programs looked more like DASH? What if the women’s empowerment workshops challenged women to respect themselves and develop their own authentic feminine leadership styles* – respecting their own internal power – and then actually supported them by redefining leadership in the organization to make room for InPowered leaders no matter what their gender or ethnicity?
I believe that this approach would achieve astounding results because Prince Charming would be defined out of the mix and the talent Warren Buffet hopes will become engaged in our corporate economy will be activated instead of siloh’d.
So What Can You Do?
If you’re a woman in a women’s empowerment program and are tired of waiting for Prince Charming, get into a leadership position and buck the trend to redefine what the program should be. Yes, it’s swimming upstream, but keep asking yourself, “What if Prince Charming isn’t coming?” Contact me for ideas and resources.
If you’re in company leadership (woman or man), get educated and learn how the best companies do it. (contact me for ideas and resources.)
If you’re in HR, educate, educate, educate upper management and use Mckinsey’s research to arm champions in the C-Suite. Contact me for further resources and ideas.
If you’re a man who wants to help women in your company, read this post for some ideas. Join MARC to share stories and ideas with other men who are working towards the same goal. Contact me for ideas and resources.
In short, no matter who you are, if you care about this issue and want to see real results instead of simply checking a box to ensure nothing changes, become inpowered your self and challenge the status quo. There is no Prince Charming, for any of us.
*Authentic Feminine Leadership exists! And it’s the kind of leadership the world says it wants in it’s women and men! Read The Athena Doctrine, John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio.
Almost everyone deals with bias, and there are many strategies to deal with it, but we love Dana and Kate’s takes on InPowered strategies for confronting bias with empathy and humility. Enjoy a not-so-obvious-but-very-effective strategy to deal with awkward and unfair situations you find yourself in. – InPower Editors
One of the key things to understand about InPower is that accessing it often seems counter-intuitive. For example, the InPowered response to things that make you angry is to not be angry in your response. And by that I mean, truly not angry. An InPowered response to something unfair is to release your anger and any other negative emotions and respond from a place of peace, gratitude, and joy . . . or, if that isn’t going to happen, a place of mission, focus and patience. If you’re just trying to hide it, it won’t work. If you feel it, others will too.
If you feel it, others will too.
This is a pretty abstract concept though (counter-intuitive things usually are), so I’m always on the lookout for good examples. Recently I read a fantastic post by Kate Nasser that not only talked about the power of Empathy and Humility (great traits!) to help deal with bias and unfair situations, but gave some great examples from Kate’s own experience. Please enjoy her post!
Read the beginning of Kate’s post…
When others’ bias threatens to block you, you can tell them off, walk away, or use empathy and humility to overcome their narrow mindedness. Empathy and humility is the place to start. You can always walk away later if you find people’s minds are sealed shut.
Empathy and humility can …
Reduce the fears that create the bias
Open the mind to a new view of the issue
Chip away at the comfort of the status quo and spur learning
Give you possibilities that outbursts or walking away can’t or won’t
When you’re emotionally triggered, your reactions to stressful situations (and people) feel out of control. All the stress reduction in the world can’t help you if your emotional triggers are in charge. These 3 lessons will get you back in the driver’s seat.
How are you doing in your career? Are you where you want to be? Is everything hunky dory? Do you end every day at work glad to be alive? If every answer isn’t an enthusiastic YES! Then it’s time to do a career audit and see just how much “bliss” you’ve got in your work and life. It may even be time for a Worklife Reset to get yourself on track.
Yeah. I didn’t used to be able to say YES! very often either. And, to be honest, that’s a tall order for every day even now that I’m there, but it’s not a tall order for most days when you’ve gotten your career on the Worklife Bliss track.
What’s Worklife Bliss? Worklife Bliss is the genuine feeling that–even when things are not great–you’re making steady progress towards a career and a life that feels meaningful, with enough joy to make you glad to get up and keep going at it, pretty much every day. Or as my colleague and co-author on Worklife Reset puts it:
Worklife Bliss is a state of being where who you are and what you do are in a kind of joyous lock step. In the state of Worklife Bliss, what you produce and how you produce it flow together. . .
while opportunities and challenges both feel exciting.
Cindy Atlee
And the path to Worklife Bliss isn’t as hard as you might think it is. The hardest part is actually deciding what you actually want, and what you’re willing to let go of, so you can have it.
Where Does Worklife Bliss Begin?
The journey to anything begins with realistic expectations. Most of us ask ourselves if “bliss” is even possible. It depends a bit on your definition, then, doesn’t it? Most of us have an unrealistic idea of what bliss means. We think of it as a no-problem state. But Cindy and I prefer the definition Joseph Campbell came up with when he wrote “follow your bliss.” Despite what you think he said, here is what he actually said:
Follow your bliss. If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.
Joseph Campbell
Campbell never promised no problems. No hardships. No challenges. No fear. He encouraged us to find meaning and purpose in our lives. And when we follow this track, the hardships and challenges we can’t avoid are more manageable, and sometimes even enjoyable.
Career Audit Step #1: Know Your Story Type
So where do you begin looking for bliss in your work and in your life? It starts with centering on your purpose, the motivation that gives all your work and your effort meaning. While “what’s my purpose?” sounds like a daunting question to answer, it’s much easier than you think.
It turns out that the work on psychological archetypes pioneered by Carl Jung gives you the cheatcode for your purpose in life. I know it sounds too easy, but I swear it works. Just ask all our clients we’ve taken through this process. Once you know your core worklife archetype, you’ve got the kernel of your life’s purpose. It takes a little work to zero in on your own version of it, but you’re not not starting from scratch.
So that place to start your career audit is zeroing in on your worklife archetype. You can take a free assessment to learn your most likely archetype (story type) here. Learning more about the constellation of values, motivations, skills and strengths that are most aligned with who you are is a great place to start a career audit because you’re just comparing reality to the things most likely to bring you joy.
Once you know how far from your ideal your 2023 reality is by learning your story type and comparing it to your reality, it’s time to consider becoming the driver in your own career.
It turns out that most of us don’t end up finding or following our bliss because–well–we let other people define it for us. And, note to self, other people do a crap job of defining what makes us feel most alive and purposeful. It’s not their fault. Even parents, friends, and partners who know us well. They’re just not US.
And the first step to finding purpose in your life is to claim the right to decide for yourself what matters. This means looking critically at your life and career and asking yourself:
Am I a cog in someone else’s wheel? A company? A family? An old story?
Or am I the wheel?
This is a deep inquiry to get honest with yourself about whether you make decisions in your life for yourself or others. There’s nothing wrong with factoring in others’ points of views, opinions and needs. But if you’re not owning most of your choices (i.e., I have to do this), then you are not much of a wheel. Take a look at the last year of your career and decide if you’re ready to be more a wheel.
Want some help figuring out how much cog and how much wheel you are? Do the worksheet on page 28 of our Worklife Reset book excerpt.
Worklife Reset for an Energized, Authentic Personal Brand
Workbook & Toolkit
Feeling like you need to hit the reset button on your job, career or business?
This uplifting 8-step process will help you find meaning, motivation and momentum in your career and work
Once you’ve assessed how close you are to living in alignment with what gives you meaning, and making decisions from this place, it’s time to ask yourself the final question of the career audit: are you being your best self?
The hardest part of this question is really to get used to looking at how you are being. In our culture we’re so focused on doing that we forget we were born a human being. But when you look at who you are at your best, you can find those qualities of being that not only bring you joy and meaning, but help make the world a better place at the same time.
To do your career audit, focus on who you are at your best and ask yourself, how often in my worklife these days am I being my best?
Want some help distinguishing your BEING from your DOING? Do the worksheet on page 37 of our Worklife Reset book excerpt.
Using Your Career Audit Results
Don’t be surprised if your results are a little disappointing. Whether you do the detail work to answer the questions above, or just check your gut in reading this post. Most of us, most of the time, come away feeling we’re not always our best self, or driving our life from our purpose, in our job.
And most of us blame….someone else. The job. The boss. The coworkers. Our family.
And some of this blame is merited, but if you’re being the wheel, you learn to claim back more of this opportunity yourself. Because, no one can know your purpose, no one else can choose to live in alignment with it, not one else can BE YOUR BEST SELF…except you.
This can be a hard truth to uncover, but I can tell you that the moment you commit to moving closer to a blissful worklife path, the more joy you begin bringing into your life every single day.
Want to get started taking action right now? Do a Worklife Reset. Not only will you clearly see the gap between where you are and where you want to be, you’ll have practical steps to take to make it a reality.
Start with the career audit, but don’t stop there. Keep going until you get there. If you’re like me it will take you the rest of your life, but every day becomes easier and filled with more joy.
InPower Women’s Mastermind
We don’t Mastermind your business. We Mastermind YOU!
How can you tell the difference between being wiped out, and burnout? Paula blows our minds with this simple distinction and then helps us break down exactly WHY we’re burned out so we can do something about it. Awesome post! – InPower Editors
Earlier this week I spoke to a group of women accountants and financial professionals about preventing burnout and better managing stress. Accountants, like many busy professionals, are susceptible to burnout, but many people don’t know quite how to define burnout or what it entails. The word burnout is an overused and frequently misused word that was first coined in 1974 by Herbert Freudenberger, and typically refers to a state of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion.
Burnout is not feeling bummed out, having a bad day, or depression, although being burned out can lead to mental and physical health issues, which can include depression. I define burnout as the chronic state of being out of sync with one or more aspects of your life, and the result is a loss of energy, enthusiasm, and confidence. Eventually, and as I experienced toward the end of my law career, your physical health and mental well-being will likely deteriorate.
While burnout can occur in many life domains (parents, spouses, and caregivers all can experience burnout), much of the burnout research focuses on work. Research by Drs. Michael P. Leiter and Christina Maslach points to six specific sources of burnout at work:
Lack of Control
Your sense of control over what you do is undermined or limited and you don’t have a lot of say in what’s going on. One study measuring job demands and lack of control found that the one combination that was most detrimental to health and morale was high job demands in combination with low control. Individuals in this category experienced much higher rates of coronary disease and depression than those in other categories (Karasek, R., et. al, 1981).
Values Conflict
There is a disconnect between your own core values and the core values of the organization. Many companies flash their mission statements and values on websites and marketing materials, but few actually walk the talk. If you want to learn more about values and categorize your own, please visit my website to find a free values worksheet.
Insufficient Reward
You feel taken for granted, not recognized, and/or undercompensated. Many companies survived the Great Recession by demanding employees do more with less, and that often meant having one person do the work of two (or more). While this may have been a strategy necessitated by the severity of the economic crisis, it’s unreasonable to expect this to work as a long-term strategy. At my husband’s company, the CEO and other managers often send company-wide emails recognizing the efforts of employees. It takes a few minutes to type an email, but the goodwill created will last far longer.
Work Overload
Your workload is too much, too complex, or too urgent. When I was practicing law, I had a client who categorized the priority of his work for me as “nuclear,” “super-nuclear” and “catastrophic.” I still don’t know what the difference is in the three designations, and I suspect he was so busy that even he didn’t really know—he just wanted me to take care of matters urgently. The stress created by work overload is not something to be ignored. According to the most recent Gallup survey on employee engagement, 50% of workers report being “not engaged” while another 20% report being “actively disengaged” (Sorenson & Garman, 2013).
Unfairness
You or others are treated unfairly, there is a culture of favoritism, and assignments and promotions are made in an arbitrary fashion and discussed behind closed doors. One of the things that makes a company great, according to a recent Harvard Business Review article, is that employees are told what’s really going on. Nothing shuts down morale more than whispering behind closed doors.
Breakdown of Community
You have to work with patronizing colleagues, there is no mechanism for conflict resolution, and feedback is non-existent. One study found that the number of people saying they have no one with whom to discuss important issues has nearly tripled between 1985 and 2004 (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Brashears, 2006). We spend so much time at work – building better relationships should be a main goal for all employees and managers.
Our culture of burnout isn’t going to improve until these six sources of burnout at work are addressed. What’s troubling is that you don’t need to have a serious mismatch in all six of these areas to be at risk – a mismatch in even one area puts you on the path toward burning out. The time to start is now.
Most leaders do not want strife and disharmony in their organizations. The emotion of disharmony drains the team’s energy and attention from successful behaviors. Leaders want insightful, competent collaborators who can get the job done and win the day.
So when they think “Whom should I hire or promote into leadership positions”, what trait do they seek in leaders? Answer: The magic of balance. They want someone who seems strong enough to put their fears of failure to rest yet agile enough to instill and model collaboration, action, and accountability in the organization.
What does this mean for women in leadership? Those who can show strength without strife and build innovative, collaborative, action-oriented, accountable teams who deliver results will rise to the top.
To that end, women represent diversity not strife and disharmony. Diversity of thought is vital to an organization; disharmony, fatal.
Diversity of thought is rooted in respect for ideas and for each other. Disharmony grows from fear and disrespect for others, their ideas, and their ways of working.
Diversity excites; it doesn’t enrage. It expands possibilities; it doesn’t limit. It feeds organizational success. Disharmony — with all its disrespect and power struggles — strangles success with resentment, cliques, and self-protection.
The return on diversity of thought is growth, innovation, and stronger bonds through learning. The return of disharmony is less collaboration, lower morale, rampant mistrust and organizational paralysis.
Women with the magic of balance have replaced their focus on gender differences with a focus on social styles/personality types. Gender is not the main cause of disharmony yet social styles and work styles are high on the list!
Being able to spot and adapt to social style is the great equalizer. Adapting in this case doesn’t mean weakness or surrender. It means using the knowledge of someone’s social style to communicate and influence effectively. Sales professionals have used it for years and modern day leaders are working it well.
This skill is also tremendously helpful in resolving conflicts. It is a key skill of highly successful leaders as they keep the organization moving toward success.
How much magic of balance do you currently have?
Do you know your social style (expressive, analytic, amiable, driver)? Do you know how to spot and adapt to each type?
Are you comfortable with your type or do you believe you have to be another type to lead? You may be apologizing for who you are without knowing it and your indecisiveness is scaring decision makers.
Can you spot the difference between discord that is fueling divisive paralysis and spirited discourse that elicits valuable views? Desiring constant peace may blind you to the difference. Believing that harmony equals inaction and failure can also neutralize your magic balance.
How well do you instill commitment and accountability in others? Do you shrink from building that culture—even a little bit—because of the desire to be liked? Leaders looking to promote you to high levels want to see a focus on financial success and your ability to inspire everyone to do the same.
Can you make the tough financial decisions even if it affects many employees’ livelihoods? The proof is not in saying you can; the proof is in showing your magic of balance at tough moments along the way.
Don’t seek approval; show them who you are and deliver results. Whether you get a promotion now or later, all your actions and interactions are your emerging portrait of what you can do as a leader.
While many leaders still shy away from promoting women and other under-represented people into the highest slots because of a bias for the status quo, they are doing it at the glass cliff moment as with Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer. I guess there is nothing like a point of no return to melt away fear driven bias.
Nonetheless, when they come looking, what will they see in you? Someone who is focusing on proving a woman can do the job or someone who has been producing profitable results through the magic of balance with inspired accountable teams?
As you build your financial acumen, your P & L experience and your operational insight, hone your people-skills of diversity to influence those who will impact your future.
Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™, is founder and president of CAS, Inc. For 25+ years, she has coached thousands of leaders and teams in the corporate world on profitable people-skills.
Her workshops in leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and the ultimate customer experience transform results from the ordinary to the exceptional. Her keynotes move everyone from inspiration to action with lasting effect.
Kate’s diverse background and magic of balance make her incredibly valuable to leaders and teams in many different industries. She is a techie turned people-skills guru with a BS Mathematics and Masters in Organizational Psychology. She succeeded through balancing diversity her whole life with parents of two different generations, equally strong technical and people-skills bents, and career shifts from public school teaching to IT at American Home and Johnson & Johnson and finally to entrepreneurship.
Have you ever lost your job? Cute quotes about making lemonade out of lemonade don’t quite cut it when you get the news, do they? Dealing with change is tough, even for those of us who’ve practiced a lot. We really like Andria’s simple rules for handling the inevitable life changes coming our way. – InPower Editors
Change is a way of life. It is something lots of us have been dealing with lately and are probably always going to be dealing with. As much as we like “the way things are,” eventually and inevitably life changes – seasons change, we grow, children grow up, and time moves on. Change often seems disruptive; yet, we can learn to thrive through change by following a few simple steps. I’ve been through a lot of changes in my life. They started when I was growing up and my family would have to frequently relocate to follow my dad’s corporate career. These changes continued into my adult life – job assignment changes, career changes, divorces – all these things created radical movement and shift in my life and I discovered a few key things that supported me in staying grounded throughout these seemingly large disruptions to my life.
First: Don’t resist the change.
When change is thrust upon us (as when I was a child and would receive the dreaded news from my parents: “We’re moving,”) it’s easy to push back and resist the change. However, if you allow yourself to accept it, turn towards the momentum of the change, you are more able to ride that momentum. As a kid I knew I had no choice – we were moving. The more I cried and yelled that I loved where we lived and didn’t want to move, the worse the change appeared. Once I was able to take a deep breath and accept that there was no way around it, my momentum shifted. Instead of paddling upstream against the current, my acceptance allowed me to turn downstream and flow with the change. It made it much easier to deal with.
One of my clients received devastating news that she was losing her job.
I saw the same dynamic recently when when one of my clients received devastating news that she was losing her job. Initially she resisted that news with her entire being. This created a lot of consternation in her life. As soon as she accepted the fact that she was losing her job, she was able to ride the wave of the change and discover opportunities that were waiting for her on the other side of the change.
Second: Look for opportunity
That’s the next way to thrive during change: look for opportunity. There is always opportunity lurking behind every life change – you just have to seek it out. It is when we resist change that we are unable to see the opportunity change creates. This holds true for changes that are unexpectedly forced upon us or those we create on our own. Several years ago when I began getting internal nudges to leave my corporate job and start my own business, I resisted those internal nudges for a while. Why? Because I was not ready for the huge life changes that acknowledging the nudges would mean – it felt scary. Yet, just like when I had to move as a kid, once I accepted that the change was necessary, I saw the huge opportunities behind taking the leap and leaving my corporate job to start my own business. And, just like with my client who was resisting the fact that she was losing her job – once she accepted it, she began to see the endless opportunities ahead of her – opportunities that would not have otherwise been presented to her if she had not lost her job.
I saw the huge opportunities behind taking the leap and leaving my corporate job to start my own business.
If you’re finding it difficult to see opportunities, try to imagine what the other side of the change will look like for you after you have successfully transitioned through it. Visualize what your life looks like after the change and how relieved and proud you feel to be through it. Often opportunities will present themselves to you as you are focused on your success at the other end of the change.
Third: Control what you can
The third way of thriving during change is to determine what you can control and take action on that. There will be countless things about a life change that will be out of your control. My client could not control the decision took her job away. She wanted to – in fact, she toyed with the idea of making a plea for her company to keep her. She found that trying to control things you can’t is actually a way of resisting life changes, and it prevents you from moving forward. Once she realized that the only thing she could control was her reaction to the decision – and the steps she took in response – she built an action plan to transition through the change – one that was focused on things within her realm of control.
Change can be scary but it doesn’t have to be. These things may seem simplistic but they truly can change the way you handle change: Don’t resist. Seek Opportunities. Take actions on what YOU can control and let the rest go.
What life changes have you survived and thrived through? What tips can you contribute to others facing scary change?
Take charge of your career development to get the job that supports your work and your life. Check out the tools and resources in the InPower Coaching Career Center.
Working in low-income communities, I’ve learned that leadership and management are not only skills that increase productivity, they can and should be empowerment skills as well. Dialogue, in particular, has become my go-to strategy for empowering the people who work for me. When I use it, I leverage my interpersonal relationships in favor of a greater good. The best way to do it, in my experience, is through performance reviews.
Performance reviews are heavy things. They cause the employer and the employee to put their professional faces on and exchange in tense conversation about the latter’s accomplishments and short comings. The important thing, in my experience, is that it take the form of a real conversation. Dialogue is important, but we might not understand why.
Traditionally, we ‘create a dialogue’ between managers and their staff to ensure the staff members are heard. Nobody wants to sit through a lecture from his or her boss again. I argue, however, that dialogue is so much more than that – more even than a chance to empower an employee, it’s a chance to open doors for people who grew up with less fortune than we did or who have less work experience than we do.
I am speaking specifically from my experience working in community development.
A unique opportunity was presented to me when I arrived in Honduras. My non-profit charged me with a small micro-lending project. I presided over a tiny staff and a tiny budget. Our work, though, was a lynch-pin service in the broader structure of the organization. It was up to me and my team to put a sustainable and effective working face on the organization. There was only one problem: I could only stay two years in-country.
My most reliable team member, with the most permanent position, was a young kid from the community itself. He was only nineteen at the time I arrived, but he’d been a tried and true Loan Officer for our programs for over a year. Coming from a tough neighborhood, he had removed himself from a difficult situation and tried to get ahead despite everything poverty had stacked against him.
By the time we met – management to staff – he had been well prepared for his current position, but he had never received a formal high school education and struggled to take on responsibility. The board and I agreed, however, that his potential was bigger than even he knew and cultivating his talents would pay off in the long run. We wanted to develop him professionally to help or organization become sustainable even after I left.
I started giving him performance reviews and here’s what I learned:
Reviews are more than just a dialogue
They are key moments in working relationships for leaders to empower their staff.
Like most common practices, our performance review covered four primary topics:
Relations and Services
Dependability and Accountability
Adaptability and Flexibility
Decision Making and Problem Solving
I scheduled these meetings on a biennial cycle. I took it slow and didn’t move on until I felt that topic was totally exhausted. The first review ran the gambit of his activities and character traits, and the discussions started tense and formal. We were discussing solutions to the same problems and the same topics, but it felt more like trading pleasantries than actual progress.
It wasn’t until the dialogue changed into a “choose-your-own-story” that the ball started rolling. Empowerment is when someone internalizes the power and the authority to choose, but more importantly, choose without fear of retribution or subjugation. For a boy from an extremely impoverished community, this was game changing.
Management Tip: Dialog them into better performance. – Click To Tweet
Here’s what “choose-your-own-story” dialogues look like
I would pose open-ended questions. I would ask him how I could do my job better; how the entire organization could be run better; find out what he would do if he were suddenly to assume my position. This created a dialogue where he was in control and not me.
My review sheet included a short introduction to the topic, and then a series of questions and blank spaces. I transcribed our conversations in a journalist’s hand, capturing quotations and exact wordings. At the end of each six month period the reports were less what I thought of him and more what he thought of himself. In the first review, the criticisms I had were received with head nods, explanations, and acceptances. Any fan of the Socratic method will tell you that’s not a dialogue, but as soon as the second review, I saw changes in his manner.
Each performance review spanned three days. We met for one hour a day, swimming through different problems and different scenarios. The more we talked the more comfortable he became. What should we do about his posture when visiting a client at home? How might he promote safety in the palm farms where the motorcycle thieves reigned? What could he do as an employee to make our communications run more smoothly with teams in the U.S.?
With each scenario, each time he explored his own shortcomings, the more dynamic his responses became. I gave him a grade, he gave himself a grade, and then we negotiated the final number. Suddenly he began meeting my criticism with rebuttal. He challenged my assumptions of his work, and not just the bad, but the good too! Even a light bit of praise was met with the word ‘why?’ Why do you think that about me? He honestly wanted to know what I saw in him. Suddenly, he was choosing to take the investigative role in his own development. The will to pursue his growth was transferred from me to him.
That is a dialogue – or at least what dialogue in the format of a performance review should be. Too often we forget that reviews are meant primarily for the development of the employee, not the development of a company asset. To accomplish this we need to turn to the human element and break down the barriers that hold us all back. Since no one confronts exponential barriers like the marginalized peoples of the world, I conclude that the performance review is an important tool for empowering low-income individuals.
By the end of my tenure in Honduras, both he and I anticipated his biennial reviews with excitement. We sat down smiling and joking about his progress rather than handling it like a fragile glass egg between us. Looking back now almost three years later, I choke up thinking about how far he’s come.
When I left Honduras he immediately stepped up and took my place. The training he had received from my predecessor and the personal, professional development we worked on together, helped him grow into the employee we needed and the man of whom we were most proud.
About the Author
Jeff works on the ethical considerations of economic development and financial empowerment programs around the world. He spent two years running a microfinance operation in Honduras, and currently works as a financial empowerment coordinator in Boston. He holds two degrees in Philosophy and International Affairs.
FREE Executive Coach Consultation With Dana Theus
What got you here won’t get you ahead. Stop working twice as hard for too little recognition.
Sure, sometimes you’re the lucky recipient of spontaneous innovation, but according to business gurus, consistently good innovators actually have strategies for leveraging luck (the good and the bad) when it trips across their paths.
In “Great by Choice” Jim Collins and Morten Hansen have unearthed a fabulous idea they’re calling Return on Luck, and we all have something to learn from this concept. (more…)
Jeff works on the ethical considerations of economic development and financial empowerment programs around the world. He spent two years running a microfinance operation in Honduras, and currently works as a financial empowerment coordinator in Boston. He holds two degrees in Philosophy and International Affairs.
