Have you noticed how harshly we can view women leaders, especially in politics? Is it because of sexism? Or is there something more subconscious and deeply cultural happening? We have had women leaders in the past, but the ones that many of us know best from childhood are the virtuous women leaders of the Bible.
The Virgin Mary, Ruth, Esther, Sarah, and other women leaders of the Bible are virtuous women who are honest, ethical, modest, nurturing, caring, and chaste. They are a role model in the community, protecting, nurturing, and educating children, ensuring that their family is exhibiting proper behavior, and politely communicating their displeasure.
The “virtuous woman” has been the cornerstone of the Western Christian and Jewish faith for thousands of years. It peaked during the Victorian Era, which encouraged prostitution so men could do “what they do” and the virtuous woman could maintain her chastity (and receive orgasms at the doctor’s office). Freud conceived of the “Madonna-Whore Complex” to describe the phenomenon. We have moved forward in history, but the virtuous woman is a legacy role that many women unconsciously assume today, and it doesn’t only address sexuality.
I tried to research how religion perceives a woman and her virtue. There is a sea of academic work available – it’s an extensive topic. What I was able to learn quickly is that women are generally considered leaders in the virtue department. In Kabbalah, a woman’s virtue peaks once she is married; she raises her own and her husband’s virtue levels. Women are leaders, but they lead through example.
This could be a reason why women are scrutinized for their ethics and virtue. The cultural legacy ideal for a woman leader is the virtuous woman leading by actions.
I have been observing women leaders who I may or may not agree with politically or who simply may not be ethical. In all cases, these women share something in common: society expresses outrage for their less than virtuous actions. There are cases where men may do the same action and be rewarded. It’s the old-fashioned double standard but the twist is that society requires that men need little-to-no virtue compared to women.
Here are three examples of this in action in recent politics. I’m sure there are more examples as well.
Should Ivanka be responsible to “manage” Donald Trump’s virtue?
Is it fair to hold a woman responsible for the behaviors of her family? Some believe that a virtuous woman leads her family through example and holds them to a high standard, managing their actions. But this expectation isn’t realistic, or fair. How can anyone control other free-minded adults?
Ivanka Trump is accused of being complicit in her father’s administration by people who hope she can be a tempering influence. Despite showing some differing views during the campaign, she has been noticeably silent after the election when it comes to commenting on her father’s policies and viewpoints regarding immigration, refugees, women, LGBTQ rights, and other social justice issues. Many believe that she should use her influence to get him to change his policy directions, despite the fact that her silence means that we’re not really sure what she believes.
But, by accusing her of being complicit, those who ask her to impact her father’s opinions are subconsciously asking her to play the role of the virtuous woman leader, managing her family in the name of what they consider rational. Their actions demonstrate a bias towards her role as moderating the influence of her family, based on legacy ideals of women’s leadership. But is it?
Ivanka is not the President nor his spouse. She has influence as being First Daughter, which has earned her an unpaid role. But is it realistic to expect her to manage her father and influence him to change his viewpoints to a more moderate agenda? Shouldn’t the public hold the President himself, and his official, paid cabinet accountable for their views and actions?
Many Americans were outraged that Ivanka was still managing her fashion line while being “complicit” with her father’s viewpoints and being involved in government business. Many stores dropped it due to a claim of poor performance (or public outcry, the real reason is unclear).
But Ivanka isn’t the only Trump family member profiting from the presidency. Like the rest of the family, she is also experiencing scandal in the news. Should we hold her solely accountable for her family’s challenges? Or only her own fall from virtue? Why are we making her the virtuous woman responsible to save her family?
Betsy DeVos isn’t virtuous because she sees education as a profit center
Women have historically been the caretakers, the nurturers. They raise the children and support their learning at school or teach them at home. In the US we tend to believe that women support education, especially public education.
DeVos represents the antithesis of that perception. She and her family are connected to student debt collection firms and she supports the voucher system. It’s an unusual position for a woman to take regarding education and the public responded accordingly.
The public outcry against DeVos made her the most controversial education secretary nominee in history, and the first member of the Cabinet to need the vice president’s support just to be confirmed.
But DeVos might have struck a chord because education is a subject that many people take personally — and one that affects even white, upper-middle-class people who dislike Trump but aren’t as personally affected by his other policies.
While Americans are lukewarm on the quality of education nationally, they’re generally fond of their own public schools. “Education’s very personal for people,” Moser said. “We went to a school, or we had kids in school. … We know what it means never to have set foot into a public school and to take money from public schools.
I’m not sure that this tells the complete story. Given our subconscious view of women leaders being queens of virtue, I think so many were repelled by DeVos because she profits from education. Talking about money with education isn’t perceived as virtuous; it’s business-like. And given our subconscious beliefs about women, education and their role to support the education of children, I believe that there are many in society who subconsciously wonder if women leaders should be thinking this way and are repelled by DeVos.
The school voucher system is not a new idea and has been something that individuals across parties have been supporting for years. It shouldn’t be a surprise that someone would come to the White House supporting vouchers. Further, there was a study completed by Education Next and surprisingly, Democrats were more supportive of a voucher system in general (32% D vs 26% R). Is the voucher system really that offensive to cause such outrage? Probably not.
Additionally, we scrutinized her experience in education. She didn’t have any direct experience teaching, with educating, or with public loans. However, there were previous Secretaries of Education who had controversial experience, yet Congress supported them without hesitation.
…when President Obama nominated former New York commissioner of education John King to be secretary of education, King was greeted courteously and approved rapidly by the Republican Senate — despite King’s troubled tenure in New York, one that featured a disastrous rollout of the Common Core. In fact, King’s warm reception followed seven years of troubling activity at the Obama Department of Education itself.
It’s worth recalling, also, how Arne Duncan, Obama’s first secretary of education, was greeted when nominated in 2008. Duncan, who had never taught, had served for seven years as superintendent of schools in Chicago — where he presided over some of the nation’s highest-paid teachers, mediocre student outcomes, and a massively underfunded pension fund.
Why are candidates who had challenging backgrounds in education – disastrous rollouts of Common Core and mismanagement of the Chicago public schools – accepted and DeVos not? Why are school vouchers suddenly seen as a fringe topic when they haven’t been so far to date? The outrage for DeVos seemed far greater than the outrage for Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, and Scott Pruitt combined. Why?
I believe, something else caused the outrage, something that troubles our subconscious mind regarding women leaders, and it is her connection to education for profit. We were troubled by her perceived lost virtue as a leader because she valued profits as well as education.
Hillary lost the election because she wasn’t seen as a virtuous woman leader
What do you remember most about Hillary during the election? Probably “Lock her up!” or “But her emails!” I doubt you’ll remember her for her support of women, children and families.
Hillary had a mixed reputation when she ran for President in 2008. Some adored her but for many, the Clinton presidency included too many scandals that they didn’t want to experience again.
When Hillary first ran for the 2016 election, many recollected her more recent service as Secretary of State. Her response to the Benghazi scandal, which reflected poorly on her character, had cooled somewhat by 2015. But beyond that, her decisions while acting as Secretary of State positioned her as a warmonger, as opposed to a “strong leader.” Could this perception have been remnant of the expectations of the virtuous woman leader? Possibly.
“Hillary is very much a member of the traditional American foreign-policy establishment,” says Vali Nasr, a foreign-policy strategist who advised her on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the State Department.
Hillary held the same traditional foreign-policy perspective as US male leaders who are portrayed as tough, strong, and powerful. But for Hillary in the eyes of many voters, this made her a cold-hearted hawk, even though she negotiated a cease fire between Israel and Hamas.
It was unclear during the email scandal if it was her ethics or her ignorance that allowed the clintonemail.com account to exist in the first place. Either way, a lack of ethics and ignorance aren’t virtuous qualities. A politician who isn’t using government IT systems for their communications, email, Twitter, and other electronic communication opens a potential security breech and is withholding content “owned” by the American people (what would happen if an FOIA act request were filed?). Other government officials have been severely reprimanded for less. A Naval reservist who mishandled confidential information by transferring a file to a flash drive got 2 years probation and a fine. Surely, using your own email system is worse. There were many ethical and technical (security, backup, storage) implications for Hillary. It damaged her credibility.
As the email scandal continued and DNC emails were leaked to Wikileaks, additional suspicious coincidences with the Clinton Foundation were confirmed (issues that go well beyond what happened with how they handled Haiti), as well as damaging information about the DNC.
Her hawkish foreign policy perspective, the emails, and the scandals (Clinton Foundation and DNC) all contributed to her loss of the most recent Presidential election to Donald Trump.
Although there was significant outrage over her emails and the DNC email leak, there was little media attention when select Trump staff members continued to use the RNC email system for federal communications rather than federal email accounts. A similar story emerged about a number of other Republican Congress people using gmail accounts for official government business. Few in the media or the public seemed to care. (Just for the record, the Bush administration lost 22 million emails for federal communications in the RNC system as well. No investigation was conducted. It quietly went away in the media.)
Since the start of his presidency, Trump has attacked Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and threatened North Korea. His approval rating improved after these actions. Americans seem to like the “strong” traditional foreign-policy perspective that they found distasteful in Hillary.
It’s as if it is ok for Trump to do the same as Hillary, but somehow, Hillary must be punished for her fall.
We like to think that we don’t hold women and men to different standards, but looking at these three examples, we do. We scrutinize women who don’t hold that stereotypical motherly, nurturing, virtuous ideal that we learned from our religious traditions and subconsciously hold close to our hearts. Be visible but not too visible. Be vocal but not too vocal. Correct and cover for the family. Be nurturing. Set the “right” example.
What do we do about the Virtuous Woman problem?
I think looking at the situations above in light of, “well if men do it and it’s ok, it’s ok for women too,” is just flawed thinking. We need to hold men accountable to the same standard we do women – a higher standard. We need to transition from the idea of the “virtuous woman” and support the idea of the “virtuous individual.” A woman cannot save the world with her virtue. We all save the world when we hold everyone — and ourselves — to a higher standard, a virtuous standard. Once we do that, then we will see change in our society. By accepting corruption, dishonesty, fraud and exclusion by men, we are indirectly and subconsciously approving this behavior. By not accepting it from women and expecting them to be virtuous, we are hypocrites.
Maybe it is time to punish the men and women who aren’t virtuous. Maybe it is time to shatter the age-old myth of the “virtuous woman leader,” hold leaders to a higher standard, and usher in the age of the “virtuous leader.”
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.
It’s counter-intuitive that if we don’t think we are biased, we probably are! But when you realize that bias is natural and that we all have it, then it makes sense that being aware of your bias is the best way to counter-act it. We love this advice from Dana on how to think about bias and work to limit it’s impact in your workplace. ~InPower Editors
(Another) Open Letter to Corporate Leadership:
Do you run a meritocracy? Does your company promote only the best and brightest? Is your hiring process color- and gender-blind?
If you said yes to any of the above, the chances are that your company is none of those things. Why? Because our biases towards hiring people who look and think like you over those who don’t are documented, unconscious and most prevalent in those who deny they have them. In fact research shows that:
“Meritocratic” reward systems like pay-for-performance and billable hours may seem equitable, they paradoxically increase gender inequality. One study found that managers in explicit meritocracies were less likely to award pay fairly and more apt to act on biases, such as by giving women smaller bonuses.” – Harvard Business Review
Don’t get upset, though; this certainly doesn’t mean you’re a sexist or a racist. It just means that you’re human and living in the 21st century.
But just because a non-diverse leadership team isn’t your fault, this doesn’t mean it’s not your problem.
Your biases, and the biases of your company’s current leadership may be quickly backing you into a corner when it comes to leadership development for the next wave of leaders who will move the company forward.
In a previous post, I described how women are the canaries in the coal mine for corporate leadership development. As women are leaving corporate America to start new businesses at one-and-a-half times the rate of men, these birds are flying out the entrance of your mine, and the millennials (who share similar values) may soon begin to follow them. They’re leaving companies like yours right and left for entrepreneurial endeavors in search of meaningful work and quality of life, and they’re taking their talent with them.
You need to recognize that this isn’t because you’re bad (you’re not necessarily a sexist, remember?) or because they’re going off to have kids (65% of mothers work, as compared to 63% of all men). In fact, the glass ceiling isn’t something that’s being “done to” women anymore; it’s the impact of unconscious leadership biases, which generally makes women believe (often correctly) that the only way up is to play a game they can’t win and aren’t particularly interested in to begin with.
So what can you do to combat your own unconscious bias, and the bias of those making hiring decisions?
First, accept that bias exists
This isn’t going to toss you into a lawsuit, it’s going to help you seek and find employee practices that reward true talent instead of unconscious bias, which may have you rewarding underperforming men as much as 63% of the time.
Second, institute bias-countering procedures
Which have been shown to help reduce bias, such as:
support mentorship programs designed to help leaders grow beyond their biases and stop passing on outdated tropes that perpetuate unequal workplaces
Third, begin a conversation with your employees
Talk to both sexes to understand what’s important to them and how your leadership culture can evolve to share those values and make your company a place where the truly talented want to climb the ladder.
This isn’t rocket science, it’s simply a sincere effort to counter-act the unconscious tendencies we all have to reinforce our culture’s stereotype of a “good leader.” It can be done. You can do it.
The good news is that, based on what the research says about the number of companies doing a good job at this (barely 20%), if you do a decent job at it, you’ll be a more competitive employer and attract a more talented and resilient workforce.
So, my questions is, why wouldn’t you confront your bias to reduce employee turnover, increase employee engagement and establish a true meritocracy?
Updated. Originally published August 2016
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.
It’s both a trope and a truth that working twice as hard will help you get ahead in your career. It’s also, not surprisingly, a key assumption that under-represented leaders assume they must overwork in order to prove themselves in order to advance their careers. Talk to most women, Black people or people of color, and you’ll find that most feel the pressure to work harder than more privileged worker in the next cube over, in order to receive less credit and less reward.
I believe there is truth in these assumptions, but I also think that too many under-represented leaders use these truths as an excuse to overwork and burnout. So let’s question the “work twice as hard to prove yourself” career advice and look at some alternatives to overwork that will still help you prove your worth and demonstrate your potential.
A note about privilege: privilege is subjective and changes based on culture, context and interpersonal dynamics. However, we see many patterns across metrics as diverse as pay, hiring processes and workplace satisfaction that indicate a general privilege that men have over women and white people have over people of color. Thus, while you’ll see a variety of metrics in the data and links we use in this article, they all speak to this general pattern.
Why sometimes you should work twice as hard
First, let’s look for the truth in the you-must-work-twice-as-hard assumption many of us make.
If you only aspire to be employed, you probably don’t need to work harder than the average bear from day one in your career. But if you want to grow yourself through your work, using it to become your best self, and receive recognition and advancement in return, you’re going to have to work harder than all the other average bears out there.
I know many privileged people who bristle when under-represented leaders push back on this truthy trope, assuming that people with privilege don’t work hard, too. And these privileged leaders have some good reasons to resist any connotation that under-privilaged leaders are the only ones that have to work extra hard to get ahead. Why? because, especially early in their careers–everyone–even privileged leaders, have to work hard to get ahead.
Most privileged leaders who advance also worked very hard, and often two to three times as hard, to make it to their position. Especially at higher levels of leadership, competition gets fierce for everyone and no one gets a totally free ride. Of course, their privilege helped them in many many ways, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also get credit for their hard work.
This is especially true early in our careers, or in a new position, because to succeed everyone must:
Learn what you don’t know
Prove–to yourself and others–that you can do the job
Make a difference and produce results
There’s just no way around the fact that work is work and getting ahead requires hard work.
And there’s also no way around the fact that under-represented workers (including, but not limited to women) have to work even harder because they can expect to be penalized more harshly than privileged co-workers for the same mistakes, be judged against more criteria and be evaluated more harshly (especially if they are in traditionally male jobs.)
So it’s true that working hard is a prerequisite for proving yourself and getting ahead. For people with reduced privilege it can mean working extra hard to counter the biases that they run up against. But by itself the “working harder” strategy can drive you straight to burnout since there is literally no end to the work that generally needs to be done. So how do you know when to stop driving forward with a quantity-of-effort over quality-of-effort strategy?
Well, when it comes to quantity vs. quality I would argue quality always matters, in the form of meaningful results. Early in your career while you’re coming up to speed on everything, you need quantity to achieve quality. In other words, you have to work extra hard in order to learn what you don’t know and learn how to achieve results. But at some point you get better at what you do and can spend less time doing it. So to know when it’s time to start easing off the “moremoremore” train at work, start looking for efficiencies you can build into your process simply because you understand your work better. Here are a few examples of simple ways to build efficiency into your work, once you understand it:
Reorganizing your time to lump similar tasks together and optimize your personal time peak zones
Building a spreadsheet database or getting an app to track data you must collect and reference
Outsourcing and delegating tasks that underutilize your talent and help others develop
Finding new ways to do old things, more efficiently and effectively
Renegotiating your work and workload so you don’t have to exhaust yourself to succeed
But once you’ve squeezed some productivity juice from this turnip, you’ll hit a point where greater efficiency is hard to come by. And at this point the main thing you’ve proved about yourself is that you can work hard, and efficiently. Many people stop here. They believe they’ve proved themselves through effort and smarts and they want to be rewarded.
And early in your career you will probably be rewarded at this point. Which is great!
But too many people assume this holds through the rest of their career and say to themselves, “Well, to get the next reward I just have to work even harder and use that time I earned back with efficiency to do more stuff.” They double down on the tried-and-true work hard strategy and use whatever time they gain back with efficiency to keep working harder. This is the point where the never-ending ToDo list becomes a bottomless pit.
Chasing the pit to the bottom might work for another promotion, or even two, but at some point it actually starts to work against you. Because at some point in your career, what your bosses are hoping you will “prove” about yourself is that you understand the limits of pure effort, and have the judgment and the courage to make hard choices that create impact within the resource limits you have, including your own time and energy.
When you reach this point, the ways to prove yourself include management and leadership abilities like:
Taking time regularly to reflect on what success looks like and how to achieve it given current conditions and resources (which can change as often as daily)
Ruthlessly expunging non-priority (i.e., low-impact) activities from your todo list and project plans
Leveraging the effort, judgment, resources and motivations of others
When you’ve proven yourself capable of these kinds of things, others see you as ready for bigger assignments, more responsibilities and opportunities to make an even greater impact.
The downside to working twice as hard to prove yourself
This switch from working to optimize impact over effort is exactly the point where people with privilege begin to think differently than many without. If you have less privilege you can get stuck in the assumption that working extra hard to prove yourself is the only way to succeed. But here’s why it’s not.
While you can scale, your effort does not. There are only so many hours in a day and your body, brain and heart only have so many ergs of energy to spend after sleeping and eating. No matter how smart you get, those limits are finite. So your only opportunity to scale and improve is to use those limited resources to create a bigger impact. You don’t scale, but your impact can when you demonstrate the management and leadership abilities listed above.
Burnout is real, and expensive. There are so many reasons not to burn out. People who burnout risk their health, their happiness and well-being, their relationships and their jobs. Just don’t. Burnout is not an option.
Working twice as hard just trains everyone around you to give you more work. Especially once you show your interest in working harder instead of smarter, other people start to think you really like it. Even when you complain about it, at some level people see you doing it and assume that’s what you want, or know they can get away with giving it to you. The only way to train other’s expectations is to create boundaries, say no, and stick to your decisions. Whatever boundaries you lay down, that you adhere to consistently, will be the boundaries others learn to respect. You can also train people that you have a lack of (or lax) boundaries. Many of us want others to see our limits and respect them without us having to do anything. The truth of it is that they can’t see and respect what we don’t respect for ourselves.
Many fear that if they don’t work harder, they’ll lose the credit and credibility they’ve earned with all their hard work. This is a reasonable fear in the sense that if you just stop working so hard, others will notice. This won’t necessarily work in your favor, unless you demonstrate through smarter work that you can achieve as much (or more) with less effort. When they see you working as hard (or less hard) and achieving more, your credibility will go up. That said, you will probably have to make sure to give your results some visibility or else they won’t notice your results; instead they’ll only notice that you’re putting in a different/lower level of effort.
How to prove yourself without killing yourself: working smarter
People with privilege, who have proven themselves through effort, are more likely to feel reduced pressure and allow themselves to work less hard at some point. When they do this, they claim back more energy, turning away from “working harder” to turn towards “working smarter” approaches. They believe, usually correctly, that their past achievements will be fully credited to them, and they will be given the benefit of the doubt if they underperform now and then. They also believe correctly that they’ll more likely be judged for their potential rather than simply their past performance.
So what’s a person with reduced privilege to do? Because you don’t share the same benefits of privilege, does this mean you won’t be given credit for working smarter? No, this is not what it means. You will be given credit for working smarter, and proving yourself a capable leader who can work smarter. Working smarter can actually earn you more privilege than others like you who do not turn this corner.
Even though this is true, the unfortunate truth about privilege is that, in some situations with some people, you may be given less credit for working smarter than your more privileged coworkers. You may still have to work harder than your privileged coworkers.
The bottom line is that while working smarter is not the solution to reducing others’ privilege, it can be part of the solution to gaining more privilege for yourself. That privilege may come in the form of a raise, a new title, more interesting work, public recognition and many other guises. It can help you ease off the “work harder’ bandwagon of energy drain a bit more. And while it still won’t solve the privilege gap, it can reduce it.
Too many people miss a huge opportunity to advance in their careers because they think working smarter won’t help people “like me.” As a result they keep banging their head against the “work harder” wall until they are exhausted and burned out.
Just for fun (and as a way to work smarter) I asked an Artificial Intelligence engine for advice on how to prove yourself. I edited out the ones that required “work harder” solutions so here is the “work smarter” list of AI-generated strategies to prove yourself:
Develop a growth mindset to demonstrate your ability to adapt & grow
Celebrate your wins and acknowledge your achievements
Develop a positive mindset and healthy relationships for self-validation
Overcome fears and build confidence
Build an online portfolio to showcase your professional know-how
Be a team player & collaborate effectively for maximum impact
Take initiative & lead projects for a bigger impact on performance
If you’re not sure how to start working smarter, here’s a good trick: reduce your hours and commit yourself to finding a way to make a greater impact anyway. While this sounds paradoxical on the surface, the creation of scarce resources in the form of less time will force you into more creative solutions and a relentless focus on what matters. By withdrawing the option to just throw yourself at the problem with sheer force, you’ll find more nuanced, non-obvious and straightforward ways to think about both the problem and the solution. And sometimes it can’t be done and you literally must rethink your priorities from scratch. This is not a bad thing. Every time you rethink your priorities you’re likely to come up with a better approach.
And that’s the point. Constant improvement. Better results. Impact that makes a difference, not just activity that keeps you busy.
Try it. Draw boundaries. Reduce the time you spend. Don’t give up on your goals. Get curious. Get creative. See what happens.
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We love the strength’s-based leadership approach. It challenges us to know what our natural gifts are and build on them. But if we’re not careful it can make us blind to our opportunities to improve. – InPower Editors
I recently worked with a Vice President who was an up-and-comer in her firm’s global division. She was the “go-to” person on technical issues relating to Asian markets and she was intentionally developing her leadership style to incorporate coach, mentor and develop others in the company to work effectively with foreign partners. This was her primary career strategy until she ran into a buzz saw that threatened to leave her stuck at the VP level. It turns out that while focusing on the technical aspects of global operations, and developing employees to manage them well, she had failed to develop some of her bosses at the same time. Her “managing up” skills were weak at the executive level and she was uncomfortable with the delicate education and persuasion necessary to bring along some of her superiors.
Sticking with the strengths that got her to VP was going to flatline her career trajectory, so now what?
No matter what your strengths have been, you have more waiting to be used. Via @DanaTheus – Click To Tweet
The good news, whether you use an official strength-finding tool, work with a coach or just look more deeply into self-reflection, is that you’ll discover that you always have more strengths waiting to be developed. The human being is a deep and expanding well of talent and no matter what your strengths have been to date, you have more waiting to be used. But probing into these deeper waters may not feel comfortable at first. That’s when you need to look even more deeply at your strengths than you have before.
My client stepped into her stretch zone through her love of problem solving and her passion for global business. She approached her “managing up” challenge as a problem to be solved and infused her communications to her bosses with her genuine enjoyment of cross-cultural business and her love of Asia in particular. She invited them to accompany her to strategic meetings where they experienced the business potential she saw first hand, and she answered all their questions with enthusiasm.
She’s still a VP, but now she has a regular dialog going with the executive team about the company’s possibilities in Asia. She’s more regularly in her stretch zone in these discussions and has expanded her comfort zone of strengths. It’s just a matter of time until an opportunity opens up for her to take her next career step.
Sometimes we are afraid to develop new strengths in our stretch zone because we don’t want others to know we’re uncomfortable. But if we’re smart about it, we can use this discomfort to lead even more effectively.
This article was originally posted on Smartblogs for 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.
Leadership, career and success gurus place a huge focus on goals as keys to success. There are tons of articles, books, videos, classes and “systems” on how to set goals, how to organize them and how to “keep” them. Entire franchises have been built on this one productivity skill.
And with good reason; goal-setting and goal-keeping truly are the simplest keys to success in any form.
Want to get a job? Set an appropriate job-seeking goal and stay focused on it through your job search. Want to deliver a big project successfully? Set empowering goals for your team, manage them relentlessly, and success will be yours.
A lot of us figure this out over the course of our career to come up with personal goals systems, and yet overwhelm and stress still come along for the ride. What good are goals that stress you out and drain all the fun along the way?
To change the world around you, and how it interacts with you, you must change too. <=Click to Tweet
I believe the fun-draining part of goal systems is the key to why goals are hard, but perhaps not for the reasons you think. There are many kinds of fun, but when you set a goal, you’re tapping a very specific kind of fun, which is the fun of CHANGE. And too many of us don’t react to the idea of change with a “yay” emotion.
Turn your change instincts around and you can turn your goal-keeping systems around to achieve anything you want, easily and with less stress.<=Click to Tweet
Goal-Keeping Requires Change
Why is it exciting to set a goal about earning more money? Because you imagine your life changed by the freedom to do more, have more and give more.
Why is it fun to set a goal about getting a new job where you are valued for what you like best about yourself? Because you imagine going to work excited to come out of hiding, be authentic and achieve things that matter to you.
Why is it fun to set a goal about working in a place that has a more respectful work-life business culture? Because you imagine being able to turn off work once you leave for the day and truly enjoy your time off without guilt, shame or stress.
Why is it fun to set a goal to live a healthier lifestyle and have more supportive friends? Because you imagine feeling better every day while laughing and loving more.
I could go on, but you get the point. When goals work, they change our lives and they change our world. And when we imagine these wonderful changes, we get excited and feel motivated.
But here’s the hidden little truth, a wisdom that will help you activate your goal-keeping potential: to change the world around you, and how it interacts with you, you must change too. You can’t control the world, but you can control yourself. So what are you waiting for? Start changing now and your world will change along with you!
I know “change yourself” is easier said than done. Believe me, this is my life’s work, learning how to change myself and help others activate their higher potential to get jobs they love and become leaders who change the world. I know first hand how hard changing yourself can be. And yet, now that I’m succeeding, and helping so many others succeed, I’ve learned that the simplest key to success really does come back down to goals, setting them and keeping them. But I’ve also learned two other lessons along the way that exponentially increase our chances of success:
Goals don’t work if you don’t focus on them frequently enough
Goals don’t work if you don’t evolve them, as you evolve, along the journey
Goal Trick #1: The Productivity Rule of Three
This little productivity rule has saved my bacon when I’m under pressure to deliver, and it can save yours too. It’s pretty straight forward. When you set a goal, also set a deadline. When you set your deadline, also set three interim “Goal Check-in” deadlines along the way.
Life is an exercise in distraction. Want to stay focused on your goals? Focus on them! <=Click to Tweet
The Rule of Three is easy. If you have a goal to deliver something by the end of the day, check in on your goal at 9am, 12pm and 3pm. You may end up reorganizing your To-Do list constantly through the day, but I guarantee you’ll improve your chances of achieving your goal by at least 50%, if not 80%.
Have a goal to deliver a project by Friday? Check-in on it Monday, Tuesday afternoon and Thursday morning. By the end of the month? Week 1, 3 and 4. Etc. You get it. Life is an exercise in distraction. Want to stay focused on your goals? Focus on them!
Goal Trick #2: Let Your Goals Evolve You
Goal focus is great for the reasons mentioned above, but to avoid the challenges related to change we talked about even before that, you have to do something very instrumental during each of these “check-in” focus sessions. You must willingly open yourself and your goals to change. You must reconnect with your original enthusiasm for that imagined life, the one where you and your world are changed, that results when your goal is accomplished.
There’s only one problem, your original enthusiasm will be changed, too, and require an update to reactivate your motivation to achieve it.
Your path towards your goals is a fluid journey of change, because life is a fluid state. You are not the same person you were when you set your goals. <=Click to Tweet
How often do you look at your To-Do list and some of the things that you were excited about when you wrote them down have now lost their lustre? Or maybe as you’re working towards a goal, you find yourself bored by it? If you’re like me, your answer is “all the time.”
Your path towards your goals is a fluid journey of change, because life is a fluid state. Since you set your last goal, even a few hours or days ago, you have changed! You have learned things, made decisions, gotten hungry, worked out, fought with a family member, been consoled by a colleague, toyed with (or committed to) other goals… You are not the same person you were when you set the goal. So this new and different you must align yourself to your goal from where you are now, not where you were when you set the goal in the first place.
Evolving your goals is the best way to see and take advantage of opportunity when it knocks. <=Click to Tweet
And the world has changed, too. Other people have made progress towards the goal (or not), Acts of God (e.g., weather) happened that may be affecting your goal. Other people’s lives and goals have changed too. You, others and the world are in a constant state of flux and when you learn to use your goal check-ins to recalibrate, refocus and realign your “new” self and world to the goal, you’ll find yourself activating your potential to evolve, change and grow more quickly and less stressfully. You’ll even find yourself meeting some goals earlier, jettisoning others that have lost their relevance and postponing and/or changing the goals themselves.
In addition to helping you stay motivated and goals-focused, there’s one other, critically important reason you want to update and evolve your goals very regularly: to take advantage of opportunity. Since you set your goals way back when, some of the changes that have come your way are good! Some of them offer you shortcuts to your goals, or ways to avoid having to pursue them entirely. Opportunity is always knocking. But if you don’t take the time to examine and align these new opportunities and your original goals, too often you ignore the opportunity completely, or you get distracted by it and forget to focus on your goal, which might still be important. Evolving your goals is the best way to see and take advantage of opportunity when it knocks.
Why Personal Change and Goal-Setting is Hard – and What to Do About It
Nice philosophy, right? Sounds so fun and easy. But then there’s real life where stuff happens that makes trying to evolve and change with your goals feel exhausting. I get that because I experience it, too. So here’s what I’ve learned about why that is, and what to do about it to make that easy, fluid journey a reality.
Most of us don’t know how to set the right kind of goals. We set goals that are too limiting to allow us to evolve, or we set goals in ways that don’t motivate us to focus on them
Even if our goals motivate us to begin with, we don’t learn how to stay motivated by our goals over time. Self-motivation is a skill to be learned. The good news is that we have amazing inner powers to help us motivate ourselves (and others), but we very rarely use them.
We don’t take the time to check-in and evolve. Life is an exercise in distraction, remember? If we don’t learn how to give ourselves the right kind of support to stay focused and manage distraction, we lose the game and distraction wins.
I actually have an entire coaching practice built around teaching people these lessons and giving them tools and support to truly activate their personal potential to achieve their goals on a regular basis. This is actually what our InPower GROW community is all about. If you’re looking for tools and support to help you learn how to become a master of personal change and goal-keeping, then a GROW membership might be just what you need.
Not sure what kind of help you need to master the skills of personal change to meet your highest goals? For a limited time, I’m opening my calendar to readers for the next few weeks to give you a free 30 Minute Goals Coaching session where I’ll help you zero in on a powerfully motivating goal you should focus on right now and get you started on a goals-focus plan to achieve it. Book your complimentary session soon.
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If you’re focused on achieving your highest potential, you need to set long-term goals for your career. In any situation, goal-setting gives you clarity and direction, which helps you stay focused. In career planning and strategy, however, goals are the critical piece in helping you achieve personal fulfillment, income and impact, all at once.
Many people assume that if you set a goal, you have to achieve it to be successful, and this is particularly true of short-term goals. But long-term goals work a little differently. Think of your long-term goals as a North Star, providing direction. Rather than trying to achieve them literally, longer-term goals give you a vision of success to aim for, and guidance when you run into obstacles (and opportunity) along the way.
Long-term goals for your career also help you measure your progress over time. When you take the time to check in on your progress you can look back at a previously documented goal and immediately know how on- or off-track you are. These check-in points are also the best time to adjust your goals to the life you’re actually living, which is all-too-often less than the ideal you’d planned for when you first set your goals.
Creating an Actionable Plan for Achieving Long-Term Goals for Your Career
Achieving your long-term career goals requires a deep understanding of success. What does success look like—and feel like—for you? Next year? In five years?
It is these deeper intentions that describe success, which make success emotionally and intellectually clear to you, which give goals life and which make it clear which actions will help you achieve them. Intentions allow you to break down complex goals into achievable tasks, enabling you to track your progress and stay motivated.
Regular check-ins on your goals and intentions also helps you to focus on specific steps that move you closer to your desired future, and build in opportunities to check-in and course correct along the way. This makes you feel accomplished, building your confidence, and helps you stay turned towards your North Star.
Set your long-term career goals and intentions using the following four steps:
Identify one specific vision of success in your worklife (your North Star)
Write down all ways that achieving this goal will make you feel purposeful and bring meaning to your life (hint: incorporate your values)
Set a timeline for achieving this goal – how long you plan to work toward it, and how quickly you will accomplish it after setting it as your North Star
Schedule check-in points on your calendar to evaluate your progress, adjust your strategy and even the goal itself, to help you stay on track
Should You Create Goals That Make You Happy or Make You Rich?
Setting goals is an essential part of life and it can be difficult to decide whether to focus on goals that make you happy or make you money. On one hand, achieving goals that make you happy can bring a sense of meaning and well-being. On the other hand, achieving goals that make you money can help create wealth and security. So, how do we decide which type of goal should take priority?
I recommend that you try to set one goal that can help you achieve both fulfillment and prosperity. Prosperity means different things to different people, but in general, it means having the resources you need to be healthy and happy. So you can see how these goals go hand in hand. If you have a meaningful career that supports your desired lifestyle as your goal, you’re going to be more motivated to achieve it.
However, if you elevate financial wealth to the most important goal, you’re less likely to be able to achieve both. Why? Because you’ll be more likely to choose career paths that promise great wealth but are not meaningful enough to motivate you to overcome the inevitable challenges. Work is work after all, and you have to be doing something that matters to you to make it all that work worth it.
Developing the Skills & Knowledge Necessary to Reach Your Career Objectives
Achieving career success is more than just having a job. It requires that you grow and change because of the jobs you have, qualifying you to do ever more interesting work in the future. To achieve this, you can start by creating a professional development plan. Professional development happens when you have a learning mindset and work consistently and intentionally to develop new skills and capabilities in your stretch zone.
Building skills and abilities in your stretch zone means that you have to be aware of what is in your comfort zone, your stretch zone and your panic zone (where you’re truly in over your head). The goal is to always balance your energy between your comfort and stretch zones. As you learn more, and gain confidence in new skills in your stretch zone, you’ll naturally expand your comfort zone. Eventually you’ll find things from your panic zone looking a little less scary and they’ll begin migrating into your stretch zone.
How can you identify what skills to put into your skill development plan and then into your stretch zone? Start by looking at your long-term goals for your career and imagining you have achieved them. Ask yourself, “What will I be capable of doing when I’ve achieved my goals, which I haven’t yet mastered?” If you need to do some research to come up with a complete list, do it.
Look at people who hold that job on LinkedIn and see what they list as their skills.
Look at job descriptions for these jobs and extract the job requirements you don’t meet.
Ask people in your network for advice on what skills you should focus on developing.
This will help you develop a desired job skills list for yourself. Now rank your desired job skills according to which ones you can easily master today, and which might need to wait.
Here’s how to stay in your stretch zone on the ones you can master today:
Inventory your skills and capabilities in your comfort zone (this means both hard/technical and soft/people skills)
Identify new abilities you must master, and can master now, in order to achieve your career objectives
Choose 1-2 of these new skills to develop in your stretch zone and ask for help if you need it to getting set up to practice these new skills
Give yourself a deadline and focus on building these skills by that time. Be sure to come back and reflect on your progress regularly, and definitely once you reach your deadline.
As you move skills and capabilities from your stretch zone to your comfort zone choose new areas to grow and learn in (only focus on learning 1-2 new skills at a time)
Never stop learning!
By taking the time to evaluate your current skill set and understand what additional skills are required for success, you can build an effective professional development plan that will help you reach your goals while keeping yourself within a healthy stretch zone. Why be always learning in your stretch zone? Because with the world changing so rapidly, you must ensure that you are always one step ahead of your competition.
Strategies for Overcoming Barriers to Achieving Long-Term Goals for Your Career
Achieving your long-term career goals can seem daunting and overwhelming. However, with the right strategies and mindset, you can overcome all kinds of barriers to your success. Let’s take a look at the most common forms of resistance you’re likely to encounter when you start developing your career with greater intention and focus.
High Expectations – The approach I outline above is powered by an exciting vision of your future, which should light you up and boost your confidence. But if you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself very disappointed when tomorrow arrives and you’re back where you started because goals designed to be achieved five years out don’t happen overnight. The trick here is to maintain your high expectations but cultivate a mindset of learning and celebrating incremental progress. You do this through regular reflection and giving yourself credit for both your incremental successes and your lessons learned from failures and setbacks. When you recover from a setback and succeed, this will build your confidence and help you weather disappointments, large and small.
Procrastination and Time Management – If you’re like most of us, it’s all too easy to get stuck in day-to-day weed whacking and get lost there. Getting lost in the weeds makes even short-term goals hard to focus on, much less longer term goals. Regardless of how short or long-term your goals are, it’s a good idea to set up both daily and weekly check-ins on your status. In each check in, take a look back to celebrate what you accomplished, and then rewrite your list of goals for the future. This allows you to adjust the list, and your priorities, dynamically. Here’s the key for staying focused on long-term goals for your career: have two different to-do lists—one for short term/tactical goals and another for long-term strategic goals. Check-in on your tactical goals daily and your strategic goals weekly and monthly. This will give you a healthy perspective for allocating your time and energy appropriately.
Lack of Direction – Sometimes long-term planning can make you feel like you’re in an echo chamber, talking to yourself. It can get old and boring fast. So get some outside help and invite mentors, coaches and career buddies into your long-term goal checkins. Coaches, in particular, can help you articulate a vision of success so meaningful and exciting (to you) that it pulls you past the natural proclivity to get lost in the weeds. Coaches can also help you stay accountable to your goals to research more about the skills and create other career assets (e.g., certifications, connections etc.) you’ll need to stay motivated and make the incremental progress you need for a truly inspiring long term goal.
With these strategies in place, you will be well on your way to achieving long-term goals for your career.
How to Monitor & Adjust Your Long-Term Career Plan as You Progress
As I mentioned above, it is important to take time to regularly reflect on your goals and make adjustments as needed. This helps with both motivation and direction. Here’s a short guide to reflecting on your goals:
Look back since your last reflection: What went well? What went poorly? What have you achieved and accomplished? What have you learned?
Look forward: What challenges do you have coming up? What do you envision success looks like for these growth opportunities? What will you do to prepare?
Schedule the date for your next reflection: I recommend you do this at least once a quarter, if not once a month
Having a mentor or coach can also be invaluable when it comes to staying on track and achieving success. With their expertise and experience, mentors and coaches can provide personalized guidance and help you identify areas and strategies to accelerate your development. Furthermore, having someone to offer support, advice, and accountability can make all the difference when it comes to achieving ambitious long term career goals. It’s surprising how much more quickly you can evolve your own thinking in dialog with someone else skilled and motivated to help you. Who do you have on your team?
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Practical experience and research both tell us that women struggle more than men to speak up and promote themselves. Even women who speak up often find it hard to “sell” themselves. If you’re on the corporate ladder this can slow (or stop) your climb; when you’re self-employed, it can kill your business. Obviously the stakes are high! Personal branding can help.
I’ve been on the ladder and on the self-employed track a lot through my career, and while I’ve never been known for keeping my mouth shut, I have struggled with how to “market” “sell” and “promote” myself. All those words just feel too inauthentic when talking about myself, my business and my abilities – which is weird because I spent over 15 years as a professional and executive marketer! However, in the journey to launch my InPower businesses, I’m finally onto the secret of how to do it, and it turns out my years of marketing expertise (while coming in handy tactically) have actually been one of my major strategic disadvantages. While I’ve been working to unlearn and relearn this for a few years, it was when I lost my biggest client this summer that the joyful ah-ha! finally hit me.
Who Am I?
This is a hard question to answer and despite years of writing business plans, I’ve never seen that question asked or answered in the kind of plan that goes to Venture Capitalists and other wielders of external power. Nor have I seen it on a resume. Even so, it IS the question that drives the authentic answer to “What can you do for me?.” It’s a hard question to answer because there are so many answers! I’m a business exec, leadership consultant and change management junkie, a coach, a mom, a business advisor and loyal friend. I’m a volunteer, a writer, a sometimes poet, a stonetosser and beadlover, a spiritual seeker, a meditator and wannabe yogi – a creative spirit. What? You don’t need to buy that?
The fact is that there is still a role for marketing and promotion to “package” who we are into who our customers need us to be, and to communicate it to them in a way they can easily understand. This was the first lesson I had to relearn. In the age of social media, the old marketing truism, discovered by the brand giants like Coca-Cola and P&G – that you should become whatever your core customer segment wanted you to be (regardless of whom you actually are) – is no longer valid for the individuals, entrepreneurs and even many small business owners. For individuals and entrepreneurs now the exact opposite is true. When the Internet can deliver you to everyone on the planet your professional identity doesn’t work like Coke’s. You have to be who you are, which allows the people who need you to see you amidst the clutter and clamor of daily, onscreen and offscreen life – whether they’re customers or employers.
But back to that vexing question – how to answer the “who are you?” question in ways that helps your ideal clients, employers and bosses – your business tribe – pull you through their filters (i.e., attract your ideal clients)?
Discovering My Archetype
The answer for me turned out to be totally not where the business and brand books I studied told me where to look. It was much more intuitive and deeply authentic than anything I’d ever read. I’d known for years that I was drawn to the concept of magic, delighting in magic shows, fantastical stories and business processes that delivered huge ah-ha! moments. But when I met Cindy Atlee, head of The Storybranding Group (actually, remet – we’d worked together in the dark ages of the ‘90’s) she introduced me to a professional and personality identity typing system that pegged my dominant archetype. Of course, I was not surprised to discover I was a Magician! Knowing my archetype somehow, intuitively unlocked my personal brand from the confines within me.
Archetypes are what Carl Jung coined the characters in our collective human play. They are the Ruler, the Caregiver, the Sage, the Everyman and more. We each have them all living in our personalities and yet – in all our glorious weirdness – we each express a unique blend of them. Keying into my personal Magician archetype (and the Creator and Explorer living just beneath it) was the key to unlocking the HOW I could tell my story (which is the authentic way to market, sell and promote yourself).
InPower Is Born
In 2011 I had one of those intuitive shoves from the Universe that told me I had to launch a women’s web site and it had to be about power. My leadership consulting and coaching brand at the time didn’t really have room for this but as I worked through the branding and marketing challenges of my new business positioning, my Magician came to my rescue. By letting her come through and tell my story, my deepest and most core belief – that each of us carries within us all the power we need to succeed – came to the fore and the “InPower” brand was born. You see, the secret trick of all magicians is to evoke the feeling of magic in others by helping others get their logical brain out of the way to allow their intuitive, learning and knowing inner self make “the connection” (whatever it is). At its smallest, this produces delight and relief and at its most magical it produces transformation. The magic is not produced by the magician, but by those the magician serves. That’s the mission of InPower, to help those we serve to tap into their own inner well of power.
Seeing my budding business this way opened up a whole new way for me to talk – authentically – about it and the values on which it is based. Instead of telling my old story (that I fired myself from a startup and went out on my own to learn my true value so I could help others discover theirs) I am now telling a story of following the joy-driven passions that transformed my life to discover my own power – and sharing the most transformative techniques I’ve discovered through my business.
All of which leads me to that client I lost this summer and why I was so happy – as you might imagine, it turned out that the client wasn’t really looking for a Magician. To hear the full story, discover the identity of your own personal archetype and learn the three biggest mistakes I (and most entrepreneurs) made with personal branding, I’m honored to be partnering with Cindy Atlee on a free webinar. I hope you’ll join us and discover, as I did, the most fun and powerful way to answer the question “Who am I?” in ways that will attract your best clients so you can stop wasting time with all the others.
What about you? Have you ever explored archetypes to understand yourself, your gifts and your business power more deeply? How has personal branding helped you and your business? Tell us about it in comments!
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.
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We like to keep up with the newest data on women in leadership, updating our primary catalog, Guide to Women’s Leadership, about twice a year.
Thanks for my colleague, Jennifer V. Miller we keep this extensive documentation pretty current. The guide now includes 109 citations in four categories and 27 subcategories :
The Facts on Women in Leadership
Mentoring Tips
Coaching Tips
Personal Brand and Career Advice
The links below have been added to the InPower Coaching Guide to Women in Leadership as of our most recent update this month.
A push to get more women on U.S. boards slowed in 2022, raising concern among recruiters that some firms may have “ticked the gender box” by hitting minimum levels of female representation or moved on to focus on other diversity issues.
More women are leading in government than ever before; here are the latest stats on women in elected government positions.
The data is clear that unconscious bias wires the human brain to favor and emphasize some information, including information about people’s gender, color and other attributes, in a variety of predictable (and less predictable) ways.
Like people of color, ethnic and other under-represented groups trying to fit into the dominant culture, women often feel the need to code-switch, which creates additional levels of stress, and can lead to feelings of inauthenticity.
Cultural and gender biases pervade many organizational processes, including performance reviews, where research shows that critical feedback given to females is framed negatively while the same feedback given to men is written more favorably.
Weight discrimination penalizes women, as it’s been found that for every 6 pounds gained by a woman, her salary drops $2 an hour.
The way to address unconscious bias is to learn to see bias and find alternative ways to judge women authentically.
Although the gender pay gap gets a lot of attention, another important metric is the “wealth gap” – in which several gender-based biases influence how much money women have (or keep) in comparison to men.
Workplace biases that view women’s contribution to non-promotable work as more important to the team than men’s contributions place an unfair burden on women, while freeing up men to focus on tasks that will advance their careers.
When you’re mentoring someone, what do you call the person to whom you’re imparting all your wisdom? Mentee seems the easy, opposite of mentor, but I don’t like the term. Putting an “ee” on something makes it sound like something you’re “doing to” someone else.
Key Takeaways:
Mentorship is a Gift: It’s about giving and offering wisdom to stimulate growth, with both mentor and mentee experiencing personal development.
Mentoring Requires Effort: The mentee plays a pivotal role in the relationship, doing the bulk of the work by implementing advice, reflecting on outcomes, and sharing insights with the mentor.
Sponsors vs. Mentors: Sponsors provide opportunities, while mentors offer guidance and support. Understanding the distinction is crucial for career advancement.
Introduction of Protégé: The term “protégé” implies a deeper, more personal investment in the mentee’s success, fostering a mutually beneficial relationship between mentor and mentee.
Building Meaningful Relationships: Effective mentorship involves getting to know one another, overcoming biases, and creating inclusive environments conducive to growth and learning.
Mentorship is a Gift
If mentorship is about anything, it’s about what you’re “giving to” or “offering to” the person you’re trying to help. Mentoring is about creating a relationship to stimulate your “mentee” to develop and grow. And make no mistake, it’s the “mentee” that’s doing the growing and development for themselves.
When a mentor does their job well, they also grow, but each partner in the relationship is doing their own growing. No one’s doing anything “to” the other.
When you have a mentor, regardless of how formal or informal the relationship is, you need to understand that you —the mentee—are doing most of the work in the relationship. Part of this is practical. Most likely you have more time and energy than your mentor to give the relationship. You’re also more likely to get the biggest benefit. More importantly, by doing the work to build the relationship and demonstrate growth to your mentor because of it, you are much more likely to achieve your goals.
What does it mean to “demonstrate your growth” to your mentor? Basically it means that you should:
Even if some of their advice feels a bit off to you, assume they’ve give you some pearls of wisdom worth your time to explore
Parse through their advice and choose the bits you want to try out
Try them out
Reflect on the results
Share your reflections with your mentor and ask for more advice/insight
Keep the cycle going
Sometimes people get to trying out some advice, but don’t finish the cycle by reflecting and sharing the results with their mentor. This can be from simple distraction or embarrassment when things didn’t go amazingly well. This is a real lost opportunity, for both parties. Actually it’s in the reflection and discussion—finishing the cycle even if it wasn’t “successful”—that the greatest learning and growth occur. Why show your growth to your mentor? Why finish the cycle regardless of the outcome? So many reasons!
It makes your mentor feel respected, appreciated and motivated to keep helping you
It helps them see where you still need their support
It helps them understand how to help you grow into the next step of your journey
Most importantly, it helps them get a feel for your potential and be more inclined to help sponsor you
No mentor can give you what you want, they can only give you resources, insights, advice and introductions to help you get it. They can also give you support to understand your experiences and help you learn from them. This last bit is invaluable.
Sponsors help create opportunities for you. You mean all mentors aren’t sponsors? Nope! When you get a mentor you can hope they become a sponsor, but you’ll have to earn their additional support and this won’t always happen, especially if you don’[t take their advice and share the results with them.
Mentors provide information, support and encouragement. They help you understand what’s going on behind the scenes where the hidden dynamics of your business or industry operate. They help you understand what kind of opportunities may be out there for you and things you can do to access them. But their contribution to you is private and 1-1. Mentorship does not imply that they act or advocate on your behalf to anyone else.
Of course, sometimes they do! They cross the threshold from mentor to sponsor when they champion you for jobs, encourage others to give you a chance or in other ways put their own reputation on the line for your benefit. As you move along in your career, and the positions you want become more competitive, and this is why sponsors become at least as important as your own achievements for helping you realize your goals.
Getting the attention of either a mentor or a sponsor requires different strategies from the mentee’s point of view as well. You can actually ask a mentor for advice. Most actually appreciate your directness. But mentors are only giving their time, not their reputation. Mentors don’t see the decision to help you as making their own reputation at least partially dependent on your ability to succeed.
Sponsors, on the other hand, are attaching some of their personal and professional capital to your results. This is a bigger decision and one that’s very personal to them. If you happen to be close to a potential sponsor—either because of a long-standing mentor relationship, personal ties or work history—it might, sometimes, be appropriate to ask for their help championing you for a specific role or opportunity. But generally I don’t recommend it. In most cases you want your results and presence to speak for you in front of potential sponsors. Let them choose to support you because you’re just that good.
Want insights into how to get the attention of Executive Sponsors? Learn more.
Let’s Introduce the Idea of Protégé
All that said, mentors can do a lot to help a mentee succeed, even if they don’t go to the extent of sponsoring them in a public way. But to do so a mentor needs to feel personally invested in their partner’s success. As I said above the word “mentee” is rather neutral and doesn’t connote the kind of true support a mentor should be giving their partner in a deep and meaningful mentoring relationship. In my experience the best mentors feel from the outset that they have a personal stake in their partner’s success, even if not a reputational on, and are more motivated to help them as a result.
(That said, I don’t believe every mentor should have the obligation to become that person’s champion or sponsor. Their partner must earn this opportunity, independent of their mentor’s direct support.)
But I believe every mentor should go into their mentoring relationship with the hope that they will want to become their sponsor and champion their mentee to third parties. The best mentors should try to guide them in ways that make this possible. I like the idea of the mentor feeling they have a personal stake in the other’s success and this is why I like the word “protégé better than mentee. It implies more respect and possibility for mutual benefit.
It can be challenging for a mentor to feel so deeply connected to a proteegé, especially if that person is assigned to them. When mentors are assigned, both parties have an extra burden to get to know each other and find reasons they want to work together. The best mentorship programs support this and provide opportunities up front, and even mentor partnership coaching, to learn each other’s career experience, goals and points of interconnection.
For mentors and mentee-protégés alike, this is the work of mentorship. To get to know your partner, even if they are unlike you due to age, background and culture. This is often a learning opportunity for the mentor as well, to move beyond their own biases (and we all have them) and to learn to be a more inclusive leader who can work well with people across age, gender, racial and other divides. It’s important for mentors to go beyond the tropes of leadership; to be a little vulnerable in sharing the ups and downs of their journey; to be open to learning from the experience of your partner, regardless of their relative inexperience.
So whether you’re called a mentor, a mentee or a protégé, ask yourself how invested you are in the other’s success. Create the kind of relationship that makes it more likely you can do more and go deeper to help the other.
Welcome to “Dear Dana”, our weekly column to give you career and workplace advice/coaching. Please write in and tell me about a career challenge or frustration you’re facing at the office! – Dana Theus
Dear Dana, I have done a lot of research on my dream job (thanks to your tools!) but I have an interview coming up for a job that I am not very excited about. I think I’m overqualified for it. I will probably go on the interview to practice, but I’m worried they’ll offer me the job and I won’t take it and then I won’t be able to find a dream job that I really like. Advice? – Confuzzled in Connecticut
Dear Confuzzled,
You’re asking the right questions! You don’t want to waste your time or the interviewer’s if you’re sure the job isn’t going to be a good fit, but if you have even an inkling that you could be happy there, I suggest you go on the interview. But don’t “just practice” generic interviewing, use the interview as the opportunity to explore the following questions:
Could this be my dream job? What am I not seeing about it that might make it the perfect fit for me?
If this isn’t my dream job, why not, specifically?
Why does it help to find out specifically why the job isn’t a good fit? Because the more you understand what you don’t want, the easier it is to create a vision of what you do want, and why. That way when you’re networking and talking to others, including interviewers, about what your dream job looks like the more easily they may know of the perfect opportunity or contact to help you get it.
Getting your dream job means turning down all the others. – Click To Tweet
Here’s how NOT to get your dream job: accept another job that is not close enough to your dream. Learning to say “no” when the fit isn’t right is important, and you need to do it on more than just “gut” because sometimes your gut is speaking so softly you’re not hearing it. This is how you end up in a job that you end up being “done with” all to soon.
A while back in my career, I met an old boss, one I hadn’t really enjoyed working for and he offered me a job. He sold it hard and I fell for it. I shouldn’t have, but my gut was speaking too softly, and I wasn’t very clear on what my true dream job looked like at the time. I wish I’d listened harder and not tried to talk myself into making it my dream job when it really wasn’t. Don’t make the same mistake I did!
There’s more to getting your dream job than saying no to anything that doesn’t feel like the perfect fit, though. You have to take the experience you’re getting in the interview (and networking with others for your dream job) and use it to keep updating your Perfect Job Description so that you become better and better at talking about what you’re looking for and why you’re a great fit.
I worked with a client recently who really wanted a job overseas but was worried it would be too hard to find, so she applied for a lot of domestic jobs. After doing the Perfect Job Description worksheets she realized she was a pretty good fit for a narrow type of job and she put all her resources into that and turned down some domestic offers. She wrote me ecstatic to tell me that she’d found a great job in Africa, closer to her family. She said that saying no to not-good-fits, and having a solid reason why, really helped her gain confidence in the job interview for the job she took. She believed it helped her present herself as a strong candidate because she knew exactly what her dream job looked like, why she was a good fit and how committed she was to getting it. She gained greater confidence networking and interviewing for a dream job because she knew she wasn’t going to “settle” – and she got her dream job!
Good luck in your search and let me know how it turns out!
