We humans tell ourselves a lot of stories. Don’t let the stories confuse you about what matters to your success. Mary gives us a great perspective on why when you read about women not making it in Corporate America, you should not believe this has anything to do with your own chance for success in being entrepreneurs. Thanks for the reminder, Mary! – InPower Editors
Our beliefs shape our reality. They can help us succeed or they can limit what we achieve.
I believe that women have some limiting beliefs about what they can achieve based on old thinking about business. Every day, new ways to finance, market, and operate a company are emerging. The traditional beliefs for how a company should operate aren’t serving us well in the new knowledge-based, information economy; we need to explore new methods. And these traditional beliefs are quickly converting into myths. By adjusting how we perceive reality, just by looking at a few different facts, we can see how the world is very different than we originally thought.
Below are five myths that I will explore in the series:
Myth #1: We need to change corporate America to advance women’s leadership
Myth #2: Women have a hard time finding startup funding
Myth #3: Women need to change industry ratios
Myth #4: Women need to change to lead
Myth #5: Do you have a small business or are you real entrepreneurs?
Myth #1: We need to change corporate America to advance women’s leadership
Myth-buster: Startups and entrepreneurs are already doing this – and more.
Every corporation I have worked with has the same fierce competitor – the startup. They have disruptive products, marketing methods, and operation styles. They cause corporations massive pain.
And experts agree:
The startup model, combined with a low cost of entry, makes them a formidable threat. With inexpensive data center infrastructure, freelance communities and ecosystems to provide support and office space, startups can move fast to disrupt an established industry.
How Corporations Can Remain Competitive with the Help of Startups, The Rivalfox Competitor Intelligence Blog
Some corporations want to leverage startup operations so they can transition into the new knowledge-based economy focused on making customers happy. But not all are that way.
Startups have been doing more than creating disruptive products; they have been revolutionizing work life, mainly through necessity with limited budgets and the need to make revenue:
Lean planning: they plan ahead as far as is needed to make revenue and be competitive, and in turn are agile enough to respond to market changes
Marketing: starting with guerilla marketing. Social media and content marketing have emerged as the new tools – they are free, educate the customer, and create attention to lure marketshare away from large corporations.
Agile methodologies: prioritize what’s important for the customer right now to get a product out the door (and make money).
Financial models: from customer payment options to raising capital, there are a number of emerging methods that are proving successful.
This list could continue with work-life balance, coworking, and beyond. The irony is that all of these “best practices” from startups are appearing in corporate operations. One could say that startups are innovating the future of work and customer interactions.
And women are actively participating in these pioneer efforts:
Women are founding businesses at 1.5x the national average
Women-owned firms account for 30% of all enterprises
Why do women start businesses and become entrepreneurs?
Many women view corporations today as being fundamentally flawed and limiting in their value structures. The Guardian Life Index, an initiative to understand America’s small business owners, cites “office politics” as a driving factor for women leaving Corporate America to start businesses.
With the cost of starting a business at an all-time low, women are saying “no thank you” to spending years climbing and clawing their way up the corporate ladder, dealing with corporate politics, and working long days without feeling the overall fulfillment they crave.
We no longer work for just a paycheck or title; we care about the quality of our contributions and the audience who will receive it. This is in line with Drucker’s prediction about the knowledge-based organization.
…[corporations of the future are] far more likely to resemble organizations that neither the practicing manager nor the management scholar pays much attention to today: the hospital, the university, the symphony orchestra. For like them, the typical business will be knowledge-based, an organization composed largely of specialists who direct and discipline their own performance through organized feedback from colleagues, customers, and headquarters.
And like the symphony performers who care about performance quality and the audience’s experience, employees care about the product created and how users like it. Work is no longer about who is doing what, when, where, with who’s budget (the corporate view); it’s about what is being produced and if it makes money.
Corporations can’t catch up fast enough – and they won’t. Changing a corporation is similar to turning a cruise ship to the left – it takes planning and time.
A startup is a clean slate where any new process and approach can be tried and tested. There isn’t an existing structure to change; there aren’t teams who need to be coaxed into accepting a new vision. And if a process doesn’t work, gather your team and discuss how to change it.
If startup “best practices” inspire corporate change, wouldn’t it follow that if there are more women entrepreneurs leading startups and this becomes a “best practice,” that corporations would participate in this trend? And wouldn’t it follow that there would be more leadership opportunities for women because everyone else does it?
Women need to do more than sit at the table; they need get their own table and make their dreams happen – even if it is a table for one.
Only by leaving a corporate structure can women experiment to find new viable work structures, increase leadership opportunities and expand knowledge. Disruption is key to progress, and startups excel at this. The trend has started – women are founding businesses at 1.5x the national average; now we just need to make this mainstream.
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.
FREE PDF Guide to Women in Leadership
Executive Coach Dana Theus shares her tried and true strategies to help women excel in higher levels of leadership and achieve their executive potential.
Mentorship is an important part of any leadership development program. But should you formalize something that is often most powerful in its informal state? Having participated in and supported many different styles of mentorship program over the course of my career I believe the answer is often ‘yes,’ but beware that as often as mentorship programs are helpful, creating stronger leaders, stronger corporate culture and greater employee engagement, they can just as easily be a waste of an organization’s time and resources.
Mentorship programs, such as corporate mentoring programs and formal mentoring programs within professional associations, are structured relationships within organizations that facilitate knowledge transfer and guidance between experienced and less experienced individuals. These programs offer invaluable opportunities for:
Personal and professional development
Fostering high retention and engagement rates
Strengthening corporate cultures
Enabling knowledge sharing between organizational leaders and less experienced employees
Passing on industry experience and perspective
When designed and implemented effectively, both mentors and mentees often report that they are more productive thanks to their mentoring experience.
The Role of Mentors
Mentors play a crucial role in providing advice, support, and guidance to mentees (i.e., protégé), helping them reach their goals and maximize their potential. Pairing mentees with the right mentors is absolutely vital for a successful mentoring process. Mentors leverage their inspiring background, impressive skills, and invaluable expertise to improve the mentee’s experience in the workplace and industry. They share their knowledge and experiences, providing valuable guidance and advice to their mentees, who in turn can learn and grow from their mentor’s expertise.
When Mentors take their role seriously, they also act as positive role models, helping mentees navigate the challenges of the workplace, building strong careers and providing valuable insights into the organization’s or industry’s culture and professional networks. By fostering a strong mentoring relationship, mentors can empower their mentees to achieve their career goals and contribute positively to the organization’s success.
An often overlooked aspect of mentoring is the opportunity to help mentors become better leaders. Mentoring gives them opportunities to
Practice their listening and coaching skills
Learn more about parts of the organization they rarely spend time in
Gain new perspectives on employee and customer insights
Gain more experience leading with an inclusive focus
The Role of Mentees
Mentees are equally important in mentoring relationships, actively seeking guidance, feedback, and support from their mentors. They open themselves up to learning and growth opportunities, taking ownership of their own development. Mentees can reap the rewards of mentorship by acquiring knowledge and skills, expanding their professional network, and boosting their confidence.
To maximize their mentorship experience, mentees should embrace learning and growth opportunities, take ownership of their development, and actively participate in the mentorship relationship. This proactive approach is important to making the mentorship relationship success, but it is also an opportunity to practice leadership skills such as assertiveness and executive communication.
Mentoring gives mentees the opportunity to:
Gain important insight into how to navigate corporate and industry culture
Access experienced perspectives on their career potential and development
Explore ideas and approaches to advancement they can’t receive from their supervisor
Learn about leadership through personal role models
Types of Mentorship Programs
There are various types of mentorship programs, each with its unique structure and objectives. In this blog post, we will explore three main types: Traditional 1-on-1 Mentoring, Group Mentoring, and Reverse Mentoring.
Each of these program formats offers unique opportunities for growth and development, catering to different organizational needs and goals.
Traditional 1-on-1 Mentoring
Traditional 1-on-1 mentoring is an incredibly powerful tool for individual growth and development, fostering strong one-on-one relationships between a mentor and mentee. This type of mentorship program often pairs a more experienced or senior employee with a junior employee, providing them with personalized guidance and support to help them achieve their career goals and develop new skills.
One-to-one mentoring programs can:
Empower junior employees by providing them with informal job training and a sense of ownership
Help develop leadership skills
Foster a strong sense of belonging within the organization or industry
Lead to higher employee engagement and satisfaction
Gain exposure to senior leadership
Group Mentoring
Group mentoring offers the opportunity to:
Learn and grow together
Collaboratively solve any issues that arise
Foster a supportive environment and corporate culture
Build strong internal networks
Share experiences and learn from each other
In this type of mentoring program, one or more mentors guide a group of mentors. Mentors can be the same throughout the program, or can change so that over time the mentees gain exposure to a large number of senior leaders. Group mentoring can be particularly advantageous for organizations looking to launch a mentoring program without investing too much time and energy in managing a large number of individual relationships.
Group mentoring can provide mentees with an opportunity to:
Engage in meaningful conversations and activities with a mentor
Center discussions around a specific topic that is beneficial to them
Create a sense of belonging and camaraderie among the group members
Foster a more engaged and productive workforce.
Reverse Mentoring
Reverse mentoring is an effective way to facilitate knowledge transfer between generations. In this type of mentoring, a less experienced individual mentors a more experienced individual, often to gain fresh perspectives or learn about new technologies. This innovative approach to mentoring can provide unique insights and perspectives, helping the more experienced individual stay current with emerging trends and technologies, while empowering the less experienced mentor to contribute their ideas and expertise to the organization.
Some inspiring examples of reverse mentoring include an older employee being paired with a younger hire to gain insight into social media marketing or a senior executive being paired with an entry-level employee to gain a better understanding of the company’s day-to-day operations. Reverse mentoring offers a unique opportunity for both mentors and mentees to learn from each other and grow within the organization.
Implementing a Mentorship Program
Creating a successful mentorship program involves setting clear goals, selecting the right participants, and establishing a matching process. To many program leaders’ surprise it also involves a fair amount of followup with participants throughout the duration of the program.
Setting Program Goals
Clearly defining the purpose of a mentorship program is essential to ensure its success and maximize its impact. Setting achievable and measurable goals for the program helps guide its direction and provides a clear benchmark for evaluating its effectiveness over time. These goals should be documented and shared with all program participants, ensuring that everyone is in the program for the right reasons. For example, many mentees hope a mentor will help them get a new job, but most mentors and mentorship program leaders do not include job hunting in their program goals. It’s important everyone understands what the program hopes to achieve, and what it doesn’t.
To measure the success of the program, it’s important to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with the program’s objectives. These KPIs can help track progress and ensure that the program remains relevant and beneficial for all participants. Regular checkpoints can be set up to monitor achievements and successes, while also providing support and resources to mentors and mentees throughout the mentorship journey.
Selecting Mentors and Mentees
Selecting the right mentors and mentors is crucial for creating productive and beneficial relationships within the mentorship program. When selecting participants, it’s essential to consider specific criteria that align with the objectives of the mentorship program, such as:
Demonstrated enthusiasm
Specific technical skills
Leadership or communication skills
Shared professional outlook
Commitment to offer their time
In addition to selecting the right participants, it’s also important to create an atmosphere of enthusiasm and excitement around the mentorship program. Some strategies to consider include:
Hosting launch, networking and closing events to introduce the program and engage ongoing interest
Providing informational materials that highlight the benefits of mentorship and how to participate in the program and how to contact program leaders and other participants
Encouraging potential mentors and mentees to participate through targeted outreach and communication
By implementing these strategies, you can help ensure a successful and engaging mentorship program.
Matching Process
Establishing a matching process is an essential step in implementing a successful mentorship program. A well-designed matching process ensures that mentors and mentees are paired effectively, leading to successful mentorship relationships that align with the program’s goals and objectives. There are two main types of matching available in a mentorship program: self-matching and admin-matching.
To ensure successful mentor matching, it’s important to consider how you want to match people or if you want them to match themselves. Creating comprehensive profiles for all participants, including their skills, interests, and goals, can help facilitate the matching process.
Here are the primary pros and cons of each mentor/mentee matching approach:
Self-matching:
PROS: greater participant satisfaction, somewhat less admin burden
CONS: greater opportunity for participant bias to inform choices
Admin-matching:
PROS: more consistency in program participation
CONS: greater admin burden
Regardless of the approach you use it’s important to have all participants include their goals for the program, and highlighted career achievements, in their applications to facilitate matching.
Followup and Check Ins
Many program leaders are surprised to learn how many participants, both mentors and mentees, can become distracted from their participation in the program, leading people to stop meeting and communicating. In addition, many participants will come across problems engaging their partners and need a program leader to intervene.
In addition to schedule regular events throughout the duration of the program, it’s important for program leaders to engage in proactive outreach to both mentors and mentees. This is a good opportunity to encourage their ongoing participation in the program and also to do informal pulse checks on how well program communication and support is performing.
Measuring the Success of Mentorship Programs
Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and gathering feedback are essential for evaluating the success of a mentorship program. In this section, we will discuss the importance of measuring the success of mentorship programs and the tools and methods that can be used to do so.
Measuring the success of a mentorship program is important to ensure that the program is achieving its goals.
Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs can be a great tool to assess the effectiveness of a mentorship program and ensure it is meeting organizational objectives. However, tracking progress consistently can be challenging, as employees may be motivated to protect their goals and privacy. Some specific KPIs for mentorship programs may include:
Match rate
Participant growth
Program health and sentiment
Engagement metrics
Progress metrics
Participant engagement
Participant satisfaction
Employee/Member Retention rates
Employee/Member Promotion rates
Employee/Member Performance ratings
Supervisor input and observations
By monitoring KPIs like these, organizations can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of their mentorship program and make data-driven decisions to improve and optimize the program. Regularly reviewing KPIs and adjusting the program as needed can help ensure its continued success and alignment with organizational goals.
Gathering Feedback
Regular feedback, fathered formally and informally, from mentors and mentees is essential for identifying areas for improvement and optimizing the mentorship program. Feedback can help pinpoint areas for improvement, gauge the effectiveness of the program, and offer guidance on how to maximize the program’s success.
Organizations can gather formal feedback through various methods, such as:
Surveys
Interviews
Focus groups
By analyzing the feedback and making necessary adjustments, organizations can continuously improve their mentorship program, ensuring its ongoing success and maximizing the benefits for all participants.
The Benefits of Mentorship Programs
Mentorship programs offer numerous benefits, including personal and professional growth, improved employee retention and engagement, and promoting diversity and inclusion within organizations through employee resource groups.
Personal and Professional Growth
Personal and professional growth are essential for developing new skills, increasing knowledge, and enhancing overall performance in your personal and professional lives. Mentorship programs create a great opportunity for mentors and mentees to share their expertise, knowledge, and skills, leading to meaningful personal and professional growth for both parties.
By participating in a mentorship program, individuals can acquire new skills, expand their professional network, and boost their confidence. This growth can lead to accelerated and more sustainable growth, improved work and relationship outcomes, and a more fulfilling, joyous, and higher quality of life.
Employee Retention and Engagement
Mentorship programs can improve employee retention and engagement by fostering a supportive and collaborative work environment. Research has shown that employees who participate in mentorship programs are more likely to feel satisfied with their jobs, with 9 out of 10 workers with a mentor reporting feeling satisfied and more than half rating themselves as “very satisfied”.
By providing opportunities for personal and professional growth, mentorship programs can help employees feel more engaged and committed to their organization’s success. This increased engagement can result in higher job satisfaction, lower turnover rates, and a more productive and dedicated workforce.
Promoting Diversity and Inclusion
Mentorship programs can help promote diversity and inclusion within organizations by:
Connecting individuals from different backgrounds and experiences
Fostering a welcoming environment that enables employees to express themselves fully
Contributing to a more diverse and inclusive workplace culture
In addition to promoting diversity and inclusion, mentorship programs can also help underrepresented employees access resources and opportunities for career advancement. By providing support and guidance to employees from diverse backgrounds, mentorship programs can help break down barriers and create a more inclusive and equitable workplace for all.
To ensure a mentorship program achieves its goal of promoting diversity and inclusion it’s important for mentors to be prepared to work with mentees who have different life experiences than they do. Giving senior leaders essential awareness of their own unconscious bias can be an important way mentorship programs contribute to building a strong corporate culture in addition to growing the next generation of leaders.
Check out this complete listing of all InPower Coaching mentoring articles.
NOTE: This post was written with the help of an artificial intelligence research assistant. Comments? Please share.
We hear a lot about how, in addition to mentors and mentorship, women need assistance to get into leadership. They need sponsors to help make it into the executive ranks. But how do you learn what a sponsor wants? Dana turns it around and invites you to start sponsoring others now, no matter what level you are at. This, she says, helps you develop a leadership mindset that helps you attract sponsors yourself. Learn other tips for attracting career sponsors on this month’s InPower Coffee Break coaching call May 30th. – InPower Editors
Research into why some people make it into executive leadership, and some people don’t, has illuminated an interesting phenomenon. It turns that that while mentors talk to you – helping you work more effectively in the corporate culture – sponsors talk about you in positive ways– tossing your name in the hat for a plum job behind closed doors or pointing out some great work you did to someone who can help you advance in your career.
Sponsors, it turns out, are a key to talent development in that sponsors help promising leaders get the right experiential opportunity at the right time in their careers. The higher you go the more sponsors are critical to your success – including at the CXO and board levels.
Yet when I talk to CEOs, board members and other senior executives I rarely hear much about their sponsorship activities. I hear more about how much they enjoy mentorship. And who doesn’t? Nurturing talent is one of the best parts of running a business and so we tend to spend more energy on it. Sponsoring others is also usually best done privately to protect against unhelpful gossip, but this doesn’t shine much light on how this important talent development activity really works. As a result it’s challenging for those lower in the ranks to understand how to be a good sponsor, and attract sponsors themselves.
So I’d like to ask mentors to help their mentees become good sponsors and become proactive in attracting sponsors, too. Yes, I want to encourage everyone – even middle and lower level managers – to sponsor others more consciously. Why train mid-level employees to be good sponsors? Because when you sponsor others, you’re:
looking out for the business and helping strategically develop talent; rewarding others’ good work directly; and becoming more conscious of what makes a good leader in your organization so you can continue to develop as a leader yourself.
This last point is pretty important for lower and mid-level employees. When you start sponsoring others, you become better able to see how you can proactively position yourself to those above you.
Becoming an active sponsor puts you in a leadership mindset, regardless of what your actual authority or responsibility is. And that leadership mindset pays off by helping you lead more consciously, develop talent where you see it and take on an “ownership” orientation to the company – no matter what level you’re at now. And all this pays off by making your leadership abilities more apparent to all those who might sponsor you!
Taking on a sponsor mindset is one strategy for becoming attractive to executive career sponsors who can help you achieve your professional goals, but there are more.
Join the InPower Coaching Community to download an eBook on how to attract an executive Sponsor.
Have a mentee who would benefit? Please share the link!
Happy Valentines Day! This year we wanted to give you a new way to love yourself, by sharing a career development perspective designed to help you take the pressure off yourself, take more credit for what you’ve achieved and strategize more productively about where you go next. Welcome to your “fluid career.” – InPower Editors
“Are you happy in your job? Are you fulfilled and feeling purposeful? Does your job give you what you need right now?”
These are questions I ask in coaching sessions. Lately, I’m wondering if they are the wrong questions to diagnose whether a person’s job is a good fit, much less whether it means now is the time for a job change. Seems odd for a coach to say that, right? I mean, aren’t fulfillment and meeting needs the things a job should be about?
Here’s my “aha” moment on this subject. In this modern era, I believe we put too much emphasis on “the job” and not enough emphasis on “the career.” We give employers too much power in our employment relationship, and too often leave on the table proactive opportunities to shape a career that supports our life.
Shifting the Focus From Job To Career
There was a time (many years ago) when you’d be in a job, on average, 10+ years. This was the era my father grew up in. In that length of time, you’d be likely to go through a life stage (or two!) In 10 years, you could get a couple of grad degrees, have several significant relationships, or get married, have two kids and get divorced. So “a job” would be the most unlikely thing to change in your life during those years. As a result, your job needed to be stable and the backbone for your life.
Now, it’s not been the case that you’d be likely to stay in your job for 10 years for a long time, but it’s also not unusual to hear advice like, “recruiters look askance at you if you’ve been in a job less than 8-10 years” (i.e., Even if you hate your job you should stay so you don’t look disloyal to your next employer.) These two facts seem a bit at odds with each other, don’t they?
What I’ve come to believe is that our stories about how to manage your career haven’t caught up to our reality.
In 2017, thanks to changes in technology and the survived-several-downturns economy, the average job tenure in the private sector is 3.7 years. Average. Now the truth is that this isn’t a terribly new phenomenon. These stats have been similar for the last 25 years, but the stories we tell ourselves about how long we “should” be in a job, what kind of loyalty employers expect and how “lucky” we are to be employed hark from earlier eras.
Once we wake up to this fact, that most of us are likely to have a fluid string of 10-12 significant jobs through our working lifetime, instead of 3-4, we realize that our jobs aren’t likely to be those stable factors in our lives anymore. Our jobs are at least as likely to change right along with our life events and relationships. Add to this the lowered cost of going into business for yourself online, and other opportunities to string together a series of “gigs,” and our careers become much more important than any singular job.
When you think about it, this is very freeing. Over the course of 10-12 jobs, you have more flexibility and freedom to select jobs for reasons other than short-term fulfillment. Or conversely, you can choose short-term fulfillment knowing you’ll have a chance to invest in long-term skills development in your next gig. You can more easily find a good attitude in a dreary work environment because you know it’s a short-term gig. You can shift your perspective on how empowered you are in your employer relationship.
Thinking about your career as opposed to your job also opens up a discussion about whether your career is “healthy” or not. In my own case, for example, I went from great job to great job, and yet still found myself over-specialized for something I wasn’t feeling passionate about anymore in my mid-40’s, and had to do a career switch-back (or, as I told myself at the time, an “evolution.”). I think if I’d paid more attention to my career along the way, instead of my individual jobs, I might have started the evolution a bit earlier and had a less bumpy road.
Empowering Yourself in The Employer-Employee Relationship
I think that waking up to your career development reality as a fluid succession of jobs is most helpful because it empowers you as an individual to view your career as a series of employer relationships that will blend differently with your life over time. When you realize that you’re not choosing just a few employers in the course of your career, but many, you can break out of a scarcity mindset. You can realize that there are many fish in the sea and that you can swim with a bunch of them. You can choose the one(s) that support the work-life balance you need right now, and move on to others that support you differently in the future when what you need changes.
A fluid and abundant career development mindset allows you to take more risks, and be more selective at the same time. It can help you break out of the “if I’m not moving up, I’m not succeeding” mindset. It allows you to have intentions for each job that are related to the quality of life you want and the requirements of your life at this moment of time.
What does this short-term, fluid career freedom look like when viewed through the lens of the long-term? Freewheeling with nothing tying you down? Go for the workaholic job that gives you great experience so when you must respond to family obligations, you have experience with which you can negotiate more flexibility. Have those obligations now? Choose the employers who will respect your needs and help you position yourself for success when you have more time to give—or just choose the employers who will respect your need for flexibility now and worry about what comes next when you get there, knowing your availability for a demanding job will change in the future.
Even though you don’t always feel empowered in negotiating your employment relationship with your employer, trust me, you are, especially as the job market tightens. Employees who ask for things – more salary, more experience, more flexibility – are more likely to get it. The thing is, it’s not up to your employer to tell you this, or have your back in the negotiations. It’s up to you.
Still don’t feel empowered? You’re not alone. Most of us don’t. So surround yourself with friends, advisors and resources that will help you. Take responsibility for crafting a career that supports your life, brings you satisfaction and stretches over decades. Don’t ask yourself if you like your job, ask yourself if your career is supporting the life you want to live right now, and whether your current employer is giving you what you need right now. Then take action to move all these parts of your life-work blend into alignment.
** Wonder what the employer’s view of this whole new reality is? Check out Jennifer’s fluid workforce post to get a peek.
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Coaching Tips: How to Avoid the Most Common Career Mistakes
NEW TIME!! LIVE: February 7, 2017:Noon pm ET / 9 am PT
Doesn’t it seem like yesterday when colleagues would work at a company for 25 years and get that silver anniversary pin? Today it happens so rarely, it seems like something out of a history book. And it is. The average tenure of a job for professionals is 3.5 years. About 20 years ago, if a professional changed jobs and companies every 2-3 years he was considered a “job jumper” with little loyalty to any company. It was a severe red strike on a resume. Little did we know, these professionals were onto something.
There are some of us today who are always looking for that new job, a new place to land, that next career move. We keep our network alive and working for us, notifying us of opportunities that we may have never considered. We have embraced the constant change and don’t see it as a mark against us if we only stay in a company for 1.5 years.
But then there are some of us who feel the need to stay at a company for 10+ years, even if that means that we are clinging onto a dead-end job and really should find something new.
Who is right? What’s this trend of job-jumping all about?
We’ll be talking about a new career model called the “fluid career.” It is both freeing, in that it gives people more control to design more work-life balance in their career over time, and anxiety-producing as it can feel less stable to them if they define success as “a job that lasts at least 10 years.” This fluid employment trend takes into account the growth in both entrepreneurship and the Gig Economy, reductions in employee tenure, increases in employee dissatisfaction and increases in employee turnover.
Dana Theus will be sharing her thoughts about why this “fluid career” model is relevant – and popular – today, how you can embrace it, and what it means for you.
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Coaching Tips: How to Avoid the Most Common Career Mistakes
Ouch. For 50 years of the venerable organization’s existence, which began at that pregnant moment when second wave feminism would about nine months later birth Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, Catalyst and its sister organizations—now numbering in the thousands devoted to research on and advocacy for women–have shaped the public conversation about women by using the most dismal data to highlight seemingly intractable problems.
Information has its own power. Quantifying discrimination can motivate companies to change hiring policies or politicians to change laws. Just as important, documenting the absence of females in powerful positions performed a crucial consciousness raising function women needed in those Madmen days. For just as fish can’t see the water they swim in, many women—perhaps most at the time—accepted the way things were as the way they had to be.
I counted myself among them. I wasn’t one of the first feminists, though I was an early adopter, despite living in wild and wooly West Texas where men were men and women were screwed if they wanted to be anything other than housewives and mothers of large broods.
But this is 2013, people. The old narrative no longer works. It’s time to change that negative focus on today’s problems to a vibrant positive story about solutions for tomorrow.
We have to face the fact that women have been stuck at under 20 percent of top leadership positions across all sectors for almost two decades, according to the White House Project Benchmark study, but not let ourselves be defined by it. Shifting the narrative would foster a new wave of breakthroughs that I believe can catapult women to leadership parity by 2025.
After all, women have the purchasing clout of 85 percent of consumer goods sold, constitute half the workplace and 54 percent of the voters, and earn 57 percent of college degrees. So why does the narrative remain numbingly the same, creating so little progress that at the rate women are ascending to Congress it will take 70 years to reach parity and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg predicts that it could take 500 years for women to reach parity at the top of the corporate ladders?
Why? Because power unused is power useless. The problems have been researched and documented ad infinitum. We can continue to rail against them and get the same results. Or we can create a new, positive and solution-focused story about how women can achieve parity, and barrel right on through to make breakthrough progress in the 21st century just as the second wavers did in the 20th.
Power and energy come from going into new spaces, not from standing still or remaining mired in half-century-old tropes. It’s difficult to make the shift for three reasons we must understand if we are to change them.
First, like those proverbial fish, it’s hard to see beyond the constructs and constrictions of one’s own culture. And let’s face it, it’s in the best interest of the existing power structure to diminish the women’s movement, declare it dead, and dismiss its gains. In reality, feminism has become the predominant social value for both younger women and men today whether they claim the name or not. Women in their 20s, 30s and even 40s don’t just see a world different from their mothers’ experience, they live in a different world. Still, it’s a world where they are repeatedly told what’s wrong with them, that the workplace is rigged against them, and the double burden of managing family and work will fall to them, so they should curb their ambitions. That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Second, when you fight an adversary for a long time, you can become its mirror, locked into a Kabuki drama. US women have had a very good year politically, thanks in no small part to well-timed misogynist revelations by the likes of Todd Aiken and Foster Freiss who seem to have failed sex education. We reelected a pro-choice president and defeated the guy who saw us only in binders for heaven’s sake. We elected a record twenty women in the Senate (still at that 20 percent level, but up from 18). Yet, I am bombarded with pleas for money from women’s organizations asking me to fight back against the latest attack, rather than fight forward for an agenda of their choice, pun intended.
Even newer, edgier women’s groups such as Hollaback and Ultraviolet (both of which I admire greatly) operate primarily from a position of reacting to gender based discrimination. Slutwalks, heralded as the new women’s movement are anything but — protesting but not creating systemic change.
And third, at some level, we’ve been co-opted into the culture of oppression, become drunk on the nectar of fundraising and support building made easy by sounding the alarm rather than leading to aspirations. I once had a fundraising director who became distraught when we won a political battle. “How will I raise money,” she fussed, “when I have no devil to fight?”
Instead let us ask, “Why do we need the devil to fight when we could be calling upon everyone’s higher angels to accomplish the next big steps for women?”
Almost all Americans now think women should have equal rights. The world is ready for equal rights—are we?
According to negotiation expert Victoria Pynchon, women work 20% longer and 10% faster to get the same reward as men. Women must stop focusing on those studies that decry the 23 percent wage gap and attend to the solutions: ask, expect, demand, intend, insist upon equal pay. And in every sector’s parity gap, the same scenario exists. Nobody will step aside for us once the doors are open. Women have to walk ourselves through. And the story we tell ourselves about ourselves will either propel or limit us.
It’s up to women to change the conversation. We must shift to a new vision of what is possible for the continuing advancement of women to full equality, and how it can be done. To start from a position of believing we deserve it, and create a new narrative based on the possibilities for solutions with which we can shape a future where all women and men can thrive. To embrace wholeheartedly this truth: we’re powerful as hell and we’re going to take our rightful place in politics, work, and personal relationships now and forevermore.
Gloria Feldt is a nationally renowned inspirational keynote speaker, activist, and author on women, power, and leadership. Her latest book is, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power. Gloria is the co-founder of Take The Lead, an initiative to bring women to leadership parity by 2025. She is also the former president of Planned Parenthood. Tweet @GloriaFeldt and connect on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.
This post originally appeared on VitaminW.
FREE PDF Guide to Women in Leadership
Executive Coach Dana Theus shares her tried and true strategies to help women excel in higher levels of leadership and achieve their executive potential.
Efforts to increase diversity in our workplaces has been dismally slow over the last few decades, despite business initiatives, research and even expansions of the very definition of diversity. Like many, I find this frustrating. I find it especially frustrating that in light of #metoo, the public shaming of powerful men, and new courage among investigative journalists, I and many other women I know don’t expect to see much change in the dominant workplace culture. I find it frustrating that after decades of civil rights legislation and public awareness, it’s still more common to see a woman in the CEO chair (about 4% of the time), than a black man. I find it mind-boggling that after hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate diversity program funding over decades, diversity-unfriendly work environments still contribute to higher employee turnover among black and hispanic workers.
And I don’t believe it’s for lack of good intent on the part of men or white people that these frustrations persist.
Most men, I know, want equality. They want harassment to stop. They want the women in their lives and offices to feel safe. Most white people, I know too, also want discrimination and unconscious bias to stop. So why is it so hard to make this happen?
I had a conversation with a nice, grey-haired gentleman recently that shed light for me on this topic. As we left an interesting talk about ethics in the workplace our conversation gave me insight into the interpersonal dynamics that keep such deep cultural changes at bay. He brought up #metoo and how much he wanted things to change so that #metoo wasn’t necessary, how proud he was of his executive wife and how he mentored young men in the workplace to “keep locker room talk in the basement while watching the game with a beer.” I said to him that I appreciated his attitude and guidance to young men like my sons, but I thought better mentorship to his protégés would be to ask them to take a hard look at their locker room talk and what it said about their attitudes towards women more generally, whether they were watching the game or sitting in a meeting.
This comment gave him food for thought, and we extended our discussion on a cold, windy street to explore the idea of bystanderism a bit more deeply. It seemed to be a new concept to him and he thanked me for it. He gave me a lot to think about, too, which I’m going to do my best to explain in this post.
It turns out that the interpersonal dynamics of harassment and discrimination that hold women back are the same things that hold back everyone else. @DanaTheus –Click To Tweet
Is hurt still hurt, even if that wasn’t the intent?
Recently I had a personal realization about how I, just like my gentleman friend mentioned above, had been unintentionally perpetuating the very problems I had sworn to help overcome. It turns out that as I’ve explored the interpersonal dynamics of harassment and discrimination more broadly, I’m learning that the things that hold women back are the same things that hold back everyone else, including some white men. While there are places that still tolerate blatant sexism, racism and bigotry, this is not the norm in most work environments the way it was in the 60’s and earlier. But even though such blatant discrimination is uncommon these days, there are other behaviors and attitudes that dampen everyone’s ability to succeed and which keep most of our workplace cultures from evolving to the point where men and women in every category can envision more diverse faces in the C-Suite.
What holds people back in the workplace are microaggressions and bystanderism, and almost everyone’s blindness to what these things actually look like and why they matter. It turns out that being conscious of the problem and having an intention to change it is step one of two critical actions we must take if we want our corporate cultures to truly welcome everyone.
When it comes to discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, white men are not the problem. @DanaTheus –Click To Tweet
Learning to see microaggressions
Recently I updated an older post about speaking responsibly and posted it at The Mission. In so doing I accidently stumbled into a deep conversation about the subtle, small and usually unintentional phrases, dubbed microaggressions. This post, Microaggression: Everything You Say Matters created a fascinating discussion in comments. The discussion boiled down to explorations of whether the term “microaggression” had been too politicized to be useful anymore, whether good intent was enough and whether people should just buck up and stop allowing themselves to be victimized. I’m not going to go into all these threads here (if you’re interested, I will blog more on these topics on Medium so you can follow me there.) However, the comment debate did make me delve more deeply into the value of talking about microaggressions and helping people see them more clearly to better combat a culture that tolerates harassment, discrimination and other forms of inequality.
I’ve come to the conclusion that while “microaggression” in its original form has been unfortunately politicized, there really isn’t a better vocabulary snippet to describe those small and often unintentionally hurtful comments and actions, which will wear a person down and make them feel threatened at worst, and unwelcome at least. These feelings of threat and unwelcomeness are not just an inconvenience if you’re trying to build a truly welcoming corporate culture and combat employee turnover. Feeling unwelcome forces people to either leave (making employee retention metrics worse) or stay and cover* themselves in order to fit in. Covering makes us feel inauthentic and there’s a limit to how much inauthenticity people will accept before they jump out into the pool of employee turnover statistics.
There’s a lot more to employee turnover than microaggression, but our inability to see and accept these small slights is definitely part of the problem, and we can’t take action to reduce them until we can see them.
So what does microaggression look like? Well, here’s why it’s such a sticky wicket: microaggressions look different to just about everyone, and this gives fuel to those who say it’s not useful to talk about it. How can you stop something that isn’t a single thing? How can you not offend someone who (it seems to you) is going to be offended no matter what you do? I’m actually going to try to address these very legitimate issues in future posts here and on Medium, however right now I’m just going to note that while each instance of microaggression is subject to personal interpretation, there is a pattern and it’s a pattern worth trying to understand. In the interests of trying to illuminate the pattern, here are a few examples.
A male boss fails to mention a promotion opportunity to a female employee, “Because I know she wants to start a family and that job would have too much travel and be too stressful.” Giving the man the benefit of the doubt, he was trying to be kind, but the woman is hurt because (a) he judges that she can’t negotiate the travel with her partner and/or support network, (b) he tries to protect her instead of giving her the opportunity to learn how to handle stress on her own, (c) she was robbed of the choice!
A group of white men waiting for a meeting to start responds to their black male host’s question about whether they need anything while they wait by saying “how about a rope?” and then laughing uproariously at their not-funny-at-all joke. Looking at the black man’s face to see how he handles it, they feel absolved when the black man smiles too, chilled inside and hoping not to become the target of a not-joking version of this threat. (Yes, this really happened to a friend of mine, and it wasn’t in a southern state.)
An HR manager promises to call the company insurance provider and help secure a transgender employee a doctor who will treat her after her PPO-assigned physician refused. Feeling uncomfortable and morally conflicted, the HR manager fails to make the call. The employee, who is struggling with a urinary tract infection, ends up in the ER a week later to be diagnosed with a severe kidney infection, forcing her out of work for two more weeks. (Yes, this also happened to a friend of mine.)
There are other kinds of microaggressions, such as the way many African- and Asian-Americans feel unwelcome in their own country when they are asked “where are you from,” and are then asked again “no, really, where are you from?” after they answer the original question truthfully by responding, “I’m from Ohio.” For more of these “teeny tiny” and not so small agressions, check out other lists here and here, which you should explore on your own because I’m sure that you, like me, will find things on these lists that you’ve said or thought before.
There’s more to #employeeturnover than #microaggression and #bystanderism, but they are bigger contributors than we like to admit. – @DanaTheus Click To Tweet
The problem in discussing any of these things as “aggressive” is that the microaggressor, which is you and me sometimes without us even realizing it, usually has an idea in their head that there is good intent behind their words–to protect others, to invoke laughter, to resist something they feel genuinely conflicted about or to get to know someone more deeply–but which harms others when they express it. I am still working on a solution to how we can act non-microaggressively when such situations arise, but in this post what I ask you to do is start looking around in your life, workplace and world and learn to SEE microaggressions coming out of your mouth (and the mouths of others.)
Learning to see bystanderism
Bystanders are different than microaggressors in that they know that what others are doing is aggressive or unfair, but they choose to say nothing and do nothing when witnessing inappropriate behavior of those around them. My gray-haired friend at the beginning of this post was a bystander of sorts, and in his anecdote, we can see how—like microaggressors who have no intention to harm— this issue is complicated.
My friend was NOT a bystander to the extent he called out his mentees on their inappropriate remarks about women in the workplace. He took one of many actions a man can take to stop harassment. He spoke up and helped younger men see the harm in their offhand comments. However, he admitted that in private, in the locker room or watching the game with a beer in hand, he had been known to let those things go by (if not participate in them). So my friend was not a bystander in the office but he was a bystander in the man cave. Is that okay? Should our private spaces to be safe from the need to worry about the needs of others who aren’t admitted there?
That’s a harder question than it looks on the surface to those who want to stop all harrassment. If your comfort zone is where you go to unwind and “be yourself,” it can feel like an affront to your authenticity to have bystanders who are also in that zone stop bystanding and ask you to quit “being yourself even in your comfort zone” If bystanders decide to speak up in our safe spaces, it could make even more people feel unwelcome in their own safety zones. Is that okay?
To my mind, it is okay–and even necessary–for bystanders to speak up in private comfort zones. The longer authentic, but harmful, behavior goes unchallenged in the man cave (or the ladies lunch or the executive washroom or the KKK rally or the fill-in-the-blank-tribal-congregation-place), the longer our melting pot cultures fail to evolve. And we need change at a faster pace than we’re seeing it today.
Like microaggression, bystanders feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, too. They are afraid of being ostracized, kicked out of the club, shamed and penalized. This fear is real. Clubs, formal and informal, organize around “who is like us an who is not,” and a bystander who stops bystanding is volunteering his or her differences for everyone else to judge. It is in this way that fear of shame, blame and reprisal is the common dynamic, between groups and within groups, that allows bias and discrimination to go unchallenged in public and private.
For example, a well-meaning white woman can watch a black man passed over for a job and feel afraid to challenge the decision because she doesn’t want attention as a “troublemaker” since, after all, she has her own problems getting noticed for a promotion. A senior man can feel equally uncomfortable championing the cause of a younger Asian woman for fear of ribbing in the men’s room about private interests, or as one man experienced, “We have enough women around here as it is…what are you trying to do? Upset the balance of power?”
Why we’re stuck
When those who would challenge the club’s status quo face anxiety for disrupting it, a culture that rewards bystanders thrives. In a bystander culture, microaggressions can thrive. And now we’re down to the true nut of the problem. These dynamics that are difficult to see in the first place, and uncomfortable to navigate even when they’re seen, self-reinforce each other. It’s hard to unpack one without spilling the other all over the discussion and so, instead, we simply leave it unspoken.
Recently I had the opportunity to participate in a large meeting of middle and senior managers of a U.S. company. It was a pretty diverse group on the surface, however, when you looked at the more subtle structures of power, white men held about 80% of the formal and informal positions of power. During one exchange about how the organization upheld the cultural value of “respect,” it had come out during small group breakout discussions that many did not believe respect was universally guiding the company culture. The discussions I overheard on this topic were sincere and they touched on many instances of microaggression.
In the larger group, when the question “How does disrespect show up in our culture?” was put on the table, several white men bravely, and even eloquently, asked for examples. None were forthcoming in this large setting which had not been set up for safety on this topic. Looking around the room I saw many non-white men and women shaking their heads and making other expressions of “he doesn’t get it,” and yet they did not speak up. They chose to be bystanders. They chose not to try to explain anecdotal microaggressions they felt but struggled to explain to a large and judging audience. They chose not to speak up in order to protect whatever level of power and credibility they already had. I am not sure I would have advised any of them differently, had they been my personal coaching clients. And yet because the issue went unaddressed, the powerful men walked away believing it was just some disgruntled employees making noises and that because they personally felt respected, everyone else did too.
This is not an easy knot to untie. I wish I had better answers to give. I will continue to write on these topics and explore them and I welcome your thoughts, anecdotes and insights. Perhaps simply by learning to see the parts of the problem that we do not already see, the answers will become clearer as well.
* “Covering” is a term that I first saw explored by Deloitte in 2013 and their inclusion research on the subject is fascinating. In essence it puts statistics to what everyone (including 45% of straight white men) feels when they believe they can’t be fully themselves in the workplace for fear of cultural ostracization. Instead of being authentically themselves, people “cover” aspects of who they are. Covering makes people feel inauthentic, suppresses some of their natural talent, increases their stress and reducing their commitment to the organization.
————————- Updated. Originally posted August 2018
FREE PDF Guide to Women in Leadership
Executive Coach Dana Theus shares her tried and true strategies to help women excel in higher levels of leadership and achieve their executive potential.
Delegation is often seen as a low-level management and productivity skill when in fact it’s also a higher managementand leadership skill. How to Delegate is something even senior execs should know in order to help develop the people working for them. – InPower Editors
Delegation: It’s Not About You! via @DanaTheus on #InPower #Women” – Click to Tweet
The common management lingo, “how to delegate” has always bugged me. Why? Because we usually talk about delegation as though it’s something you do TO other people, not FOR them. When reframed correctly, delegation isn’t just a productivity skill you gain personally (which it is), it’s also a development skill you deploy to help others achieve greater value to the organization.
Here’s what I mean. The typical way we encounter the need to delegate comes when someone says, “I’m overwhelmed and can’t do all this.”
So we say, “Stop trying to be the hero and delegate some of this work to other people for goodness sake!”
This is a valid response to help someone be less overwhelmed.
Here’s an alternative approach.
“I’m overwhelmed!”
“Great! This is a great opportunity for you to take some leadership and decide who on the team needs to acquire some new skills, and it will let you focus on the new skills you’re developing, too!”
In the end, delegation is the sharing of workload, but the key distinction above is that the second approach goes for the win-win and development of greater capacity among the humans on the team. When you come at delegation through this frame, you make your choices about who gets what work more strategically.
This reframing doesn’t take away the extra work and brief duplication of effort involved in bringing someone else up to speed, but it does create an opportunity that the people being delegated to will see it as an opportunity to expand their skill set and value. They’ll be more likely to be more motivated to take on the new tasks.
This reframing also doesn’t fix anything if the true problem is that the workload and the resource availability are out of whack. Too much work is too much work. That’s another problem entirely and if people sense you’re trying to get them to do too much work under the guise of “development”, they’ll balk. So if what you need is a “work smarter, not harder” strategy, don’t mask it in a “development through delegation” strategy, or you’ll get a backlash.
Afraid that delegating too much makes you less valuable? When you frame it right it does exactly the opposite!
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.
Welcome to our newest blogger, Mary Brodie! Mary’s day job is at HP but she has a lot more going on than that! We love her leadership tips and “insights from the trenches” of leadership and hope you do too! Welcome Mary below. – InPower Editors
I’m often told that I have a unique management style and approach. I believe in leading through influence. Throughout my career, I have learned that you can get more done by influencing others to see things your way rather than using authority and being generally “bossy.”
Mothering isn’t a Management Technique
There are 4 key lessons in the Art of Influence that I learned that got me to significantly change my approach to management.
Lesson 2: Influence and true leadership is communication – or rather, listening and understanding
Lesson 3: Influence others to move blocks out of the way
Lesson 4: Appearance really does mean a lot
I’ll be reviewing the first lesson today – and other lessons in future posts.
Lesson 1: Mothering Isn’t a Management Technique
I was trying hard to make the creative team deliver the projects “entrusted to my care” on-time – 12 hour days, lots of stress, trying to control everything, and I was becoming visibly tired. I saw my project manager job as being like a mother with child. It was exhausting.
One day, the VP I reported to gave me a present – a statue of a line of baby ducks following a mother duck – and some leadership tips. I was puzzled why I got that gift. She told me that it was to remind me that it wasn’t my job to make sure that people did their job – I wasn’t hired to be a mother duck. I needed to give people the opportunity to take responsibility and succeed (which most people want to do anyway) or not and fail the team. I couldn’t protect my “babies” (projects) from failure. I had to change my perspective and help the team understand why a project was important. I needed to motivate them to get the work done on time.
Summary
To be a successful leader, you can’t be a mother or baby sitter. You have to do 3 things:
Stop seeing your projects as your own personal creation
Get your team to understand your goals and motivate them to make it happen
Trust people enough to know they will meet deadlines
What about you? Have you ever gotten your staff confused with your children? Too personally wrapped up in getting things done to help you staff help you? Too jittery trusting your people to give them the space to succeed? I’d love your insights below!
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.
When it comes to unconscious bias, the bad news is that the game is rigged–against women, people of color, introverts and others that don’t fit a certain “success” stereotype that is often male, white and extroverted. But the good news is, it’s not really a game so there are no rules you can’t modify and break, if necessary.
Recent research has identified thirty individual biases that work together to disadvantage women in the workplace. Myriad other research shows that managers reliably exhibit biases based on gender, race, education, ability and sexual orientation, to name just a few. And there is also evidence that bias negatively affects men in their careers, as well.
The bottom line for all of us is that no matter who you are and what you look, sound or act like, you encounter unconscious bias that either works for or against you–and sometimes both.
And–not to let any of us off the hook–we all exhibit some combination of unconscious biases when evaluating ourselves and other people we work, live and play with.
So what do we do? How can we work to better understand and deal with the fact that the deck is stacked against us?
Unconscious Bias Strategy #1: Know You’re Not Crazy
If you’re struggling to keep up with all the ways the game is rigged for or against you, you’re not alone. Since unconscious bias (AKA implicit bias) was first ‘discovered’ in 1995 there has been a fair amount of research and raising of public consciousness about the different ways our brains process preferences and judgments about people based on their physical, psychological, behavioral and demographic characteristics.
Our understanding of unconscious bias continues to grow and change as we learn more and–at least as importantly–learn to see such biases operating around us. Here is the short list of the 30 biases that both genders often hold that disadvantage women (taken from the research linked above.)
You may look at this list and find some of these things no surprise, and others a bit shocking (Veteran status? Really?). And I bet you would have had a different reaction to this list in 1995 than you do today.
Part of the reason it’s hard to keep up is because social norms, when it comes to biases, are changing rapidly. If you need a reminder of this, just look at some of the TV and movies you enjoyed as a kid and watch them through a modern lens. Then watch the Barbie movie. It’s not your grandmother’s media landscape anymore because our popular understanding of what are acceptable gender stereotypes is shifting all the time. The only thing that isn’t changing is the fact that there are stereotypes and biases. Those are built into the human brain and our culture.
This makes it possible for us to have a bias that one day is assumed to be normal (i.e., just the way things are), and then shortly thereafter, appears biased and even malicious after we’ve been exposed to seeing a compelling alternative.
To make things even more confusing, social norms that help us see and respond to bias are not changing evenly throughout our society. Different political affiliations, age groups and racial/ethnic groups view gender bias differently. Men and women also tend to see gender issues, including barriers to success, differently as well.
Sometimes this feels like gaslighting when you see a bias, and its costs, very clearly and others tell you you’re making things up, that no bias exists.
I believe that the research is becoming very clear on the fact that you’re not crazy, we all are.
Biases are real. They affect us all. They affect us all differently and that makes it hard to “prove” when others simply don’t see or believe in them. But if you see it, if you believe it, it’s probably true for you.
Unconscious Bias Strategy #2: Be Angry. Then Let it Go.
In the face of bias, against you or anyone you care about, it’s easy to become so angry that you’re an ineffective advocate for change. And we do need change that recognizes that bias creates injustice and that these biases can change, as can our view of what is just. This becomes the basis for change.
Here are a few examples of issues that result from biases against women. I personally once thought of these as ‘normal burdens’, but I’ve changed my thinking on them in recent years now that I understand the role of bias in creating them. Now I believe we need to see change in each of these areas.
Believing women and people of color need to “work twice as hard” to prove themselves in professional settings. I have come to see this as a bias that burns them out mid-career while white men are more often allowed to work less than twice as hard, at home and at work, to get ahead.
Understanding that a bias that tells us that women are “good at office housework” often hurts us in our efforts to advance our careers
Biases that lead women to shoulder most of the care for children and elders cost them significantly in terms of wealth, health and security
Here’s my advice. Let yourself be angry. Find people who understand and will validate your anger. Learn to detrigger your anger and the unhelpful behaviors it creates for you.
Then let it go. You won’t be effective in making change, for yourself or others, if you’re emotionally charged.
Let me clear. Letting it go does not mean not being angry. It means not reacting from anger when you speak and act. Reactionary emotions can be devastating and they can hurt your career and close relationships if you’re not careful, in addition to skyrocketing your stress levels.
It’s ok to be angry and let that fuel your desire for change, just don’t speak and act from anger. Get to a better place before taking action. And yes, sometimes you have to change out your friends and the people who originally validated your feelings if they are not also evolving to help you get to–and stay in–that better place.
It’s complicated and confusing, but definitely worth the journey through the anger and confusion to get to the place where you can take more informed, practical action steps from a place of strength and commitment instead of anger and bitterness.
Unconscious Bias Strategy #3: Get Practical.
Once you have the anger under control, you can be more practical. Biases exist in you and in other people. You’re not going to get away from them. You have to deal with them, which doesn’t mean you have to accept them. It means you have to accept that they are there and moderate your behavior to adapt to this reality in ways that help you achieve your goals. This can require reframing your view and intention behind certain behaviors. For example, instead of using tentative language, and other unassertive behaviors, to cater to other’s biases that women should not be aggressive, I use it selectively to communicate emotional sensitivity, a strategy used by many women successfully to be viewed as cooperative and collaborative.
We can change our biases with intentional effort. But when the biases are in others, you need to be practical and accept that while you can’t change their behavior directly, you can change your own in ways that can influence them. You can:
Call their attention to their bias in ways perhaps they can hear
Make rational and emotionally positive cases for change
Vote with your dollars and your feet, engaging with people and organizations who do not display the biases you want to change
You can choose conflict and confrontation if you believe that is the best route to calling attention to the issues, but be sure you are prepared for the likely backlash
To do this, it’s healthy to interrogate your own biases, and this is true if you’re a woman, person of color or any other kind of human being. Gender issues persist in industries that employ many women, including in leadership. You are human and have biases. Learn to identify your own and speak to new ways to view them so others can learn from your example.
It’s also important to become a role model for what healthier biases look like, because many people can change their biases when they can see a compelling alternative to something they didn’t know was an issue. Here are a few examples of biases and beliefs I’m working to shift for myself and model for others. It’s a work in progress, feedback welcome!
Instead of “working twice as hard” to prove themselves I am biased to view the most capable women as those who “find high road shortcuts to greater impact” that produce results with less stress on themselves, others and the system overall
Instead of discounting a woman’s experience caring for children or older adults as relevant to their work experience, I’m taking a page from Christine LaGarde’s decision to count motherhood as management experience when evaluating their management experience
Instead of seeing women who are “not nice” as incapable of leading others, I’m looking for signs that they are clear, directive, decisive and capable of making hard decisions and managing difficult conversations. If I find evidence of the latter, I see them as capable leaders who choose impact over approval.
To help you figure out how to shift your own unconscious biases, here’s a tip: shift from the negative to the positive. Instead of being biased against something, figure out what you can be biased for that is helpful and positive, to you and others. By doing this you’re shifting your biases from unconscious to conscious.
Unconscious Bias Strategy #4: Be Authentically You.
As you do this work, you will feel uncomfortable. Part of this is because change is uncomfortable by definition. It’s the price of developing personal power, which is valuable all on its own, and especially in the search for external power. Part of it is because you, along with a lot of other people in the soup of changing social norms, are pioneering new ways of thinking, believing and applying traditional values. What was respectful in the past can become disrespectful in the present.
You will have stories in your head that try to talk you out of shifting your perspective. For example, giving up on the “work twice as hard” belief is profoundly uncomfortable for those of us who ingrained it into our professional being. You may feel that if you’re working a normal amount you’re slacking off, or you could feel worthy of being fired for slacking off when you’re actually working a normal workweek, a workweek a white man assumes is normal and worthy of a very high salary.
Do you believe that not being “nice” all the time means you have to be a jerk? It doesn’t. There are ways to be “not nice” that are not confrontational or jerky. You can be clear. Strong. Declarative. Decisive. None of which are “jerky”.
As long as you own the way you choose to be, think and believe as you shift your biases, you will be authentic. And at the end of the day, authenticity tends to win. In part I believe this is because people who do the work to choose what is authentic for them–including their biases and beliefs–gain respect for having chosen who they are at their best. And by making these choices, they are making the choice that they don’t have to be liked to be effective.
The real question for each of us when it comes to looking at unconscious bias, is “Who do I want to be?” “What biases am I willing to own?” “What biases do I want to become an example for?” and “What biases do I want to be conscious of?”
Good luck on this journey.
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