Getting a promotion has never been so hard. The economy is in constant flux and burnout is running high, especially among women. One question many are asking these days is, “Do I even want a promotion? And if I’m unsure, why should I stay here?”
These words put chills down the spines of managers. Facing uncertainty many leaders can’t offer a lot of promotions to their teams and may find their top performers too tired to want them anyway.
Employee turnover costs businesses in real dollars as work is left undone and remaining employees who bear the burden burn out faster. So the eternal question, for workers and their managers both is, how do I motivate someone who wants a promotion I can’t give them, or doesn’t want a promotion at all?
Motivation Through Career Development
Most of us default to thinking the primary way to motivate the workforce is through getting a promotion for bigger title, more responsibility and more money. But for many reasons including those noted above, motivating yourself–or your team-with the “carrot” of more money or a bigger title is pretty passé. Yet as The Great Resignation/Rethink/Reshuffle continues, employee engagement and retention becomes an urgent challenge for every manager in 2022.
I recently interviewed Julie Winkle Giulioni about her book Promotions are SO Yesterday for strategies managers can use to motivate their employees without the option for getting a promotion. Her message: it’s time to look beyond traditional incentive structures. It’s time to focus on growing workers into strong, confident and empowered employees in order to achieve lower “cost” results by limiting turnover and building loyalty to their employer.
In our discussion (recorded below) Julie shared her research-based Multidimensional Career Framework – and actionable ways managers can develop, engage and retain employees
Here’s a high-level run down of the video discussion above:
0 min: opening & setup
2 min: why Julie wrote the book
5 min: research highlights
11:45 min: The Multidimensional Career Framework Model
19:30 min: the manager’s role in career development
31:15 min: “confidence” and the imposter syndrome as a motivator
45 min: the importance of “autonomy”
50 min: tools for managers
I really loved Julie’s book. It’s chalk full of practical tools and strategies managers can use in employee 1-1’s to engage them in many aspects of career development, far beyond “getting a promotion.” Buy it today.
There is no question that servant leadership for women and other historically under-represented leaders is an effective way to manage teams and organizations. Servant leaders achieve results, not by using their own positional power (e.g., telling people what to do), but by supporting and investing in their teams’ abilities to make things happen. Many leaders, especially those who are from historically under-represented backgrounds, are drawn to this “employee-first” approach to getting results.
While servant leadership is undoubtedly effective, one can argue that servant leadership for women can be tricky because it means that you choose not to use your positional power. However, I believe that positional power is still a critical element of success. Positional power includes the benefits (and detractions) of unconscious bias, which means that the positional power of a black woman, hispanic man and white man may well be different in different organizational cultures, even when they all hold the same title. So how can historically under-represented leaders develop their servant leadership style in ways that reinforce (not detract from) their positional power?
The challenges of today’s labor market and The Great Resignation, create an imperative for all leaders to balance their positional power with a servant leadership style in order to build employee loyalty and stem the tide of employee turnover. For actionable insights on this topic, I sat down with Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley, authors of the new book, Simple Truths of Leadership to explore the role of trust in leveraging positional power appropriately for under-represented leaders pursuing a servant leadership path.
Here’s a high-level run down of the video discussion above:
0-3min: Opening & setup
3- 9.5min: Discussion of positional power and servant leadership
9.5-15min: Discussion of how to be vulnerable and maintain credibility
15-19min: Both/and – Is servant leadership just warm and fuzzy feel goods?
19-23.5min: The 4 elements of trust – Ability, Believability, Connection and Dependability
23.5-25.5min: Deconstructing trust, control and change
25.5-27.5min: Controlling our ego and inner voice
27.5-min: The importance of taking time with your people
32.25-39min: Servant leadership in a toxic culture and situational leadership
Here are some of the principles in the book that are my personal faves (“ST”=Simple Truth):
ST #5: The key to developing people is to catch them doing something right
ST #12: Create autonomy through boundaries
ST#17: It’s okay to toot your own horn/catch yourself doing something right – if someone says something nice to you, accept it!
ST#30: Someone must make the first move to extend trust. Leaders go first.
ST#33: Fear is the enemy of trust
ST #45: The opposite of trust is not distrust, it’s control
ST #46: People don’t resist change; they resist being controlled
ST #50: Apologizing is not necessarily an admission of guilt, but it is an admission of responsibility
ST #52: Forgiveness is letting go of all hope for a better past
As more white collar and blue collar workers alike look to their jobs for more than a paycheck, many are wondering if it’s better to quit or try to shape their current job into something more meaningful. For the latter, a more self-directed career development strategy of job crafting the role you’re already in, can be a terrific strategy if you still enjoy aspects of your work and the opportunities it creates for you. But recrafting your current role takes some work so heed these job crafting tips. If you’re not sure whether to quit or job craft, decide first if you have the energy to negotiate with your boss. If the answer is “no,” then it may be better to start fresh elsewhere.
To be clear, it’s definitely possible to reshape your job without a direct, overt and open, negotiation. You can just be clearer about what you want to do and covertly try to move other responsibilities onto other people’s plates. This takes time to truly reshape your daily work and, unless luck is on your side, is less likely to get you exactly what you want. So negotiation is a good option, especially when you’re clear on what you want.
Let’s be honest. No matter how skilled a negotiator you are, putting your livelihood into play includes some uncomfortable risk. What if it all goes bad and they fire you? Or what if you “lose” and end up with a set of responsibilities you enjoy even less than what you’re already doing?
These are real concerns, however, they’re not very empowering. Fears like this tend to hold us prisoner to inaction. They obscure the fact that as we grow and change, we’ll outgrow our professional roles unless they grow and change as well. These fears keep us operating at the extremes, where we’re either happy or miserable. We have to quit or “put up with anything.” Operating at the extremes is often a “false choice” and is very energy-intensive. It leads to stress and burnout, which leads to poor health.
However, once you put yourself into a true negotiating mindset, knowing what you want and at what point you’ll walk away, it becomes easier to manage the risk. Psychologically, being ready for a negotiation means being able and willing to accept multiple outcomes (including the less desirable ones), before you begin the negotiation.
In short, don’t negotiate until you’re emotionally ready for the good, the bad and the happy surprise outcome.
Job Crafting Tips When Negotiating wtih Your Boss
“Winning” Mindset
Negotiation 101 advice: go in looking for a win-win. For you to win, you have to know what you want, and be able to help your boss understand it, too. For your boss to win, you’ll have to see your work through their eyes well enough to know where your perspectives align and where you can compromise. “Winning” is about clear communication, so start out with a clear understanding of your own wants and needs, and ask a lot of questions to help you see how your boss perceives their needs. With this understanding, and a willingness to be flexible, you can find the win-win.
For example, you may want more flexible work hours and your boss may need assurances that certain hours can always be covered. When you’re clear on what you mean by “flexibility” and what your boss means by “coverage,” you can often find a way for both needs to be met.
Business Value
While you’re a human being with a diverse, rich and complex set of skills, needs and interests, the organization can only afford you if you use all those assets to deliver meaningful business value. If the value you want to deliver is meaningless to your boss, your negotiation is doomed to failure from the outset. Get super clear on what business value matters to both you and your boss, and be sure that your proposed role changes allow you to deliver it.
For example, if you want to deliver new value on new types of projects but your boss needs to be sure you can still deliver on one “old” (but critical) project, be sure your new role configuration allows you to do both.
Development Framework
Your boss may be surprised by your request to change up your job, so help them see your request to negotiate in a professional development context. Share some of your career goals (or remind them of what you’ve shared before). Point out that you’re requesting these changes so you can stay in the organization and keep growing,and that you want your role to change and grow along with your own growth and change.
For example, instead of asking your boss to “change your job,” share with them your desire to keep growing and ask for their help to make adjustments to your responsibilities that allow you to develop new skill sets.
Ultimatums
Think very carefully about whether you want to give any ultimatums such as wording that implies “if I can’t negotiate changes to my role, I’m going to quit.” Most of the time, ultimatums in a negotiation are a bad idea because they take away your own flexibility to compromise or respond to opportunities you haven’t previously considered. An ultimatum also assumes you have a lot of power in the discussion, which may or may not be true (and even if it’s true, it can make your boss angry that you’re flaunting the power you do have.) For these reasons and more, it’s better not to reveal a potential walk-away point unless you’re 120% sure to follow through.
For example, if you know that you will quit or look for a new job if you can’t move XYZ off your plate, tell your boss that XYZ is really holding you back and that this is the main reason you’d like to discuss revising your responsibilities. Don’t tell them you plan to quit if they say “no” — unless you’re truly ready to walk out the door when they do.
Keep salary separate
You may find yourself negotiating your way into a new job that should come along with changes to your salary. This is fine, but I suggest leaving salary to the side until you’re closing in on what the responsibilities actually are. Once the job changes themselves are clear, you can bring up and negotiate salary. This is because it will muddy your motivations, in your own mind and in the eyes of your boss. Of course, if the real issue is salary to begin with, just say so and start there. One key to successful negotiations is trust on the part of both parties. When motivations become unclear, trust erodes.
Look for the surprise option
The best negotiation reaches an agreement that neither party was originally aware was even on the table. This is because no one can see all possibilities on their own, but in dialog, all kinds of ideas can come up. You begin a negotiation for exactly this reason, to explore opportunities and possibilities that aren’t apparent unless you’re looking for them with the other party. So go into the negotiation with a:
Clear understanding of your intention, what you want
Willingness to listen to the other person
Ear to what other possibilities exist
For example, you may think you want the opportunity to run a team, but when presented with the opportunity to run a matrix project, only managing people’s work (without administrative accountability for the people themselves), you may find yourself very happy to accept even though no one “reports” to you.
Sometimes these job crafting tips won’t work, because the other person isn’t a very good negotiator, because there truly aren’t very many options for win-win possibilities or because luck wasn’t with you. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
Even if you don’t get what you want by negotiating with your boss, you increase your chances to get it anyway. After negotiating with your boss, regardless of the outcome, you will be clearer on what you want and because the universe was probably listening in, help may come from surprising directions. In either case, if you decide to quit or move on, you’ll do it with greater clarity and focus. And that will absolutely increase your chances of success in the long run.
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Work is hard work. How to find purpose in your work is a hard question. Even when you know you are doing important things, showing up to do the hard work can start to feel like a grind. Pointless. Meaningless. Joyless.
I don’t want it to be this way. I want every moment of work to be joyful.
Unfortunately, regardless of who we work for, including ourselves much of the time, imperatives other than our own joy are always present. Organizational mission, revenue generation, boss and customer expectations and so much more compete for our time and energy.
Last month in a group mastermind call one member put it squarely on the table. She said, in a lessons-learned-kind-of-voice after helping manage a merger integration, “While leadership is often about big ideas and plans, a good bit of it is just showing up for others, making hard decisions so others know where they stand. Sometimes being a leader is just hard work and there is no way around it.”
All this can easily lead us to give up on the idea that we should even bother to find purpose at work. But I think giving up on this idea leads to the no-win zone. This is where the leader in you has to show up.
When you and others around you are struggling, lost in grind of it all, finding purpose at work acts like a lighthouse in the fog. Taking the next step to purposefully craft your work in ways that help you stay connected to this purpose is like having a compass and a map.
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Organizations with women in their executive suites regularly out-perform others. Yet rising female executives (and their mentors) are frustrated at how hard it is to break through the glass ceiling. In this extensive guide, Executive Coach Dana Theus shares her tried and true strategies to help women excel into higher levels of leadership and achieve their executive potential.
Want to build a muscle? Work it hard until it’s stronger. Those who look for meaning and find purpose at work live longer and healthier lives. They’re also more motivated and tend to be more productive.
In my own life and my client work as well, I consistently find that the best antidote to stress and burnout is to tap into the deepest sense of purpose available. From such a purposeful connection I can always unleash a wellspring of professional and personal energy. It never fails.
Purpose isn’t everything, but sometimes it’s magical.
After much pondering and experimentation myself, I’ve come to believe that the search to find purpose at work is more than just a shortcut to motivational energy when I need it. I believe that focusing on the meaning in my work is also necessary for broader career and life satisfaction as it can guide us beyond surviving to thriving in the workplace.
Like a compass, north star or light house, which can always center and direct you on your journey, you don’t want to leave your purpose behind. Keep it close and consult it often. Your purpose can help you:
find (or make) your path when you feel lost.
tweak up a good situation to make it better.
see small accomplishments as big wins.
decide whether to stay or go when the workday BS factor seems too high.
Keying into your purpose–for your life and for your day–has a magical ability to provide perspective and point out priorities. It has the power to shortcut the noise and point to what needs attention. It can also shine the light on your achievements and give them greater meaning.
Is the Effort to Find Purpose at Work Really So Hard?
I don’t really believe that trying to find purpose at work is as hard as finding the time to find our purpose seems to be…
What is my purpose? Why am I working so hard? What can I do that matters? Who do I want to matter to? These are not questions anyone else can answer for you, and the answers you have to sit with, mull over and refine over time. Others can support you and offer clues in your search, but ultimately–much like leadership itself–keying into your purpose (much less your purpose at work) is a personal and inward journey before it becomes an external motivating force, propelling you towards success.
And of course one thing that definitely makes finding your own purpose challenging is that most companies don’t even pretend to care that much about their employees. A ‘shareholder value’ focus of organizational purpose permeates our business culture, justifying “always-on” work practices as well as ethically compromising mission sets. The result (especially in the midst of pandemic stress) is that too many people are burning out from both too much work and moral injury, which is now spreading beyond soldiers and health care professionals to many other job categories where people’s sense of ethics feel at odds with what they have to do every day.
As an employee and as a leader, if you want to bridge the gap, for yourselves and your employees, you will definitely need to make a commitment. You’ll need to take the time to find your purpose at work, connect and reconnect to it frequently.
How to Find your Purpose at Work
Start by looking at patterns throughout your career.
When have you felt most purposeful?
What were you doing during these times?
Who were you being during these times?
Connect the dots to find the common throughline
Next, put this throughline into words that matter to you and give you goosebumps. Put those words into how you talk about yourself, your job and your career. Put them on your LinkedIn profile. Craft your job to let you live and talk like this more often. Become an expert at this so you can help your team do it too. Keep doing this over and over, every day, month and year. Before you know it you’ll realize you’re not looking for your purpose anymore, you’re living it.
Want the shortcut to find purpose at work? Do a Worklife Reset to give you a personal brand storyline and roadmap to success.
Mary finally received her promotion! After years of positioning herself and working on her personal brand she finally achieved her goal and had been put in charge of a product division for a major manufacturer. Predictably, our first executive coaching call in her new role centered on one subject, how to overcome the Imposter Syndrome and her elevated feelings of doubt in herself since stepping into the new job.
I wasn’t surprised Mary wanted to discuss how to overcome the Imposter Syndrome because I can’t think of a single client, woman or man, who’s risen to a position of significant authority and who hasn’t run smack into some version of this debilitating mindset, with its insidious sense of sham and shame. Feeling fake, underqualified and bound to disappoint people is normal and natural when you take on significant new responsibilities, especially in an unfamiliar environment or context. If you’ve never done it before, of course you’re not 100% sure about how you’ll do it now, especially in the spotlight when the stakes are high.
While many of us experience challenges with the Imposter Syndrome earlier in our careers, high stakes jobs bring on imposter feelings with ferocity. For most of us, as the cost of failure rises, our enthusiasm for “failing forward” diminishes. This is why the Imposter Syndrome bedevils us more and more as we rise higher in an organization or move out farther away from organizational groupthink into entrepreneurship to take on more accountability and (potentially) make more costly mistakes.
Imposter Syndrome in Context: It’s Lonely at the Top
Mary came on the phone for our first call after her promotion and admitted immediately that part of her self-doubt stemmed from the fact that she felt isolated in a new way. Her entire team suddenly looked to her for answers and final decisions, as did her boss and his peers. Even though she was happy to have greater authority, and confidence in her knowledge and judgement, she felt a new pressure to be “right” in her financial projections, her staffing choices and her approvals. She felt more competitive dynamics with her new peers and found her boss less willing to indulge her doubts than previous bosses. She quickly learned that her new boss was even busier than she was and spent all his mental energy focusing on the bottom line–of everything. Conversations with him were short and to the point, with little room for ruminations.
She told me, “I’m not at the top yet, but it is getting lonelier.”
As Mary discovered, the lack of social support as your responsibility grows often exacerbates the usual imposterish thoughts that come along with new authority. Also, the higher you go there are simply fewer people who share your experience and perspective to engage. Because there’s more competition for fewer slots higher on the ladder, you’ll find fewer colleagues able and willing to help you figure stuff out. And finally, the problems become more unique at the top of any organization. There are fewer precedents, role models and very little certainty that any particular way forward is the “right” way.
“Imposter Syndrome. It’s not about you.“ @DanaTheus #impostersyndrome <=Click to tweet
It seemed to be a new idea to Mary that perhaps her boss and his boss, the CEO, who faced these issues at even more intense levels, probably felt imposterish sometimes, too. But after thinking about it for a moment, she got it. “So the Imposter Syndrome really isn’t about me, is it? It’s about my situation and the fact I don’t have enough experience in this role to feel confident—yet.”
Bingo. Give Mary a star.
This insight is one of the key differences between how women and men generally encounter challenges with how to overcome the Imposter Syndrome. As with many doubts and criticisms, men tend to project imposterish feelings onto external sources, such as the situation itself, whereas women are more likely to internalize it and believe a feeling of uncertainty means something is wrong with her. Often, men need to be reminded that they bear responsibility for their half of any dilemma. However, no matter what level she’s at, the moment a woman* understands that her imposterish feelings are normal and natural—about a moment in time she’s passing through rather than a feature of her very being—she can more easily put them in context, live through them and ultimately, beyond them.
*or a man stuck in the Imposter Syndrome self-definition trap.
Imposter Syndrome: Bellwether of Maturity
Internalizing the basic dynamics of the Imposter Syndrome I described above helps many people shift their perspective on how to manage it. However, if you simply “tough it out” in a new position until the new stuff becomes “normal,” you’re actually missing out on a major gift the Imposter Syndrome offers you at deeper and very personal levels.
The deeper dynamic at play when you encounter imposterish feelings is the opportunity to shift further from your “socially-authored” identity, begun in childhood, to a “self-authored” adult identity. Described succinctly by Bob Anderson, founder of The Leadership Circle Profile and co-author of Mastering Leadership, this distinction is at the core of adult growth and development: “The Socialized Self (reactive development stage) is defined by what others have told it, that it must be in order to be worthy, good, and successful…The Self-Authoring Self (creative development stage) is the first wherein the self discerns its own internalized definition and identity.”
In short, every human being moves through these stages of psycho-social development, from childhood, where we learn to define ourselves initially through the language and perspectives of others (i.e., socially-authored), to adulthood, where we have the opportunity to define ourselves on our own terms (i.e., self-authored).
In this context of psychological self-development, the Imposter Syndrome comes along to notify you that you’ve grown beyond the limits of your existing socially-authored identity. The onset of imposterish feelings is a knock on your door offering you the opportunity to stay in your socially-authored anxiety, working primarily to meet others’ expectations, or shift your mindset into self-authorship. The self-authored approach to confronting the Imposter Syndrome requires making your own definition of success primary, fully taking responsibility for your goals, intentions and actions as you live into, and up to, your own expectations. Once you’re following the self-authored path, others’ expectations play a secondary role, and you’ll more easily find personal success in public failure.
In most cases, of course, we manage imposterish feelings through both socially- and self-authored strategies. A healthy adult never fully loses sight of social requirements, especially those related to maintaining community and strong stakeholder relationships. However, our motivation switches from mostly extrinsic to mostly intrinsic. And as we mature, our personal power and resilience grows exponentially as we step into self-authorship.
Here’s an interview I did about Imposter Syndrome that explores this topic more:
How to Overcome the Imposter Syndrome: Turn it into an Ally
So back to Mary, as we explored these deeper ideas of self-authorship she began connecting more dots and soon understood that her Imposter was actually helping her out. It was pointing a flashlight at the specific areas of her confidence that had become over-reliant on others’ expectations and definitions of success. Together we identified a few specific actions she could focus on to help her self-author and grow into her leadership identity more fully.
For Mary, she found her path to self-authorship at this point in her journey through the lens of authenticity, finding her own particular ways of solving certain types of problems without trying to copy things others had done. Everyone’s creative leadership strategy at this point may differ. Others may find greater self-authorship in shifting how they relate to and empower team members to better leverage their diverse talents, how they organize resources to build leverage through systems or how they foster team dynamics to complement their own skills.
There is no one path to self-authorship, because the path is literally your journey into your own, personal, highest potential. Each challenge as you take on more responsibility becomes an opportunity to dig deeper into the social-authorship your family and community have given you to date, or step more and more into becoming the person you choose to be. In learning how to overcome the Imposter Syndrome, you’ll find just a friend to help you out.
Happy trails!
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Discussions about how women can rise to the top have traditionally focused on discriminatory dynamics. And there are many of those dynamics to discuss, but that’s not all there is to it. In addition to navigating unconscious bias, harassment and discrimination, women often succeed by cultivating an effective executive mindset. Yet even the most executive minded of my clients still find one piece of advice their mentors and sponsors give them confusing: the advice to work on their executive presence. And executive presence for women is often anything but straightforward.
Key Takeaways:
Executive Presence Defined: Often misinterpreted as lacking confidence or conforming to a certain style, executive presence for women is about instilling confidence in others amidst uncertainty.
Navigating Unconscious Bias: Women face a double-bind in leadership, being penalized for behaviors that their male counterparts are rewarded for, due to unconscious biases that expect a stereotypical leadership style.
Beyond Style and Confidence: While style and confidence play a role, mastering an executive mindset—effectively leading amidst competing priorities—is essential for reaching the top of the corporate ladder.
“I keep hearing that I don’t have ‘executive presence.’ What does that even mean?” – every female executive coaching client I’ve ever had. Via @DanaTheus <=click to tweet
Executive Presence for Women: More than Style
Many women bumping up against the invisible barriers to the top hear a particularly mystifying piece of feedback, which they often bring to their coach for interpretation. That would be me. So I often ask their bosses, the executives who give them this feedback, what they mean when they tell these promising female leaders to develop a stronger executive presence. Struggling to describe this secret sauce of executive abilities they’re looking for, these mostly male executives generally explain it to me as a lack of confidence.
Sometimes the confidence they’re looking for is truly a function of style. For earlier generations conforming to the expected leadership style meant wearing a masculine-but-feminine style of clothing. Thinking back on my own early career wardrobe (*cough*), this was rarely the answer to being taken seriously in meetings. By the 90’s, researchers “discovered” that women were not being mentored as often as men, so companies instituted more intentional mentoring programs. When women still didn’t make it into the leadership ranks, researchers in the early aughts focused on the critical role of sponsorship, in addition to mentorship, and how it helped leaders rise. Over the ensuing decade numbers of women in leadership have barely budged, their C-Suite representation growing a mere 4% (to 21%) since 2015. Today, in decrypting why women don’t make up a larger percentage of the executive suite, we better appreciate the role of unconscious bias in screening women and other underrepresented leaders from the top jobs.
Viewing “the problem” of getting women into leadership through the lens of unconscious bias is helpful. It helps us work to become more conscious of things we just don’t see very clearly. Style truly does affect us unconsciously. Different kinds of people have different styles of leadership, expression and presence, and a woman in particular can struggle to code switch into the stereotypical leadership style others expect in an executive leader. Where men are often rewarded for an aggressive style, for example, women are far more apt to be penalized. You’ll hear this unconscious bias when both men and women describe a kick-ass female leader as “a bull in a china shop” and for this reason “not a good cultural fit for our executive suite.”
This dynamic often leaves women leaders in a double-bind, penalized for the same behaviors their male counterparts receive rewards and recognition for, and it’s a particularly challenging road to navigate. Yet, in my experience, leadership style is not the most important block to the top. All the style in the world won’t help someone get to the top who hasn’t mastered the ability to come at issues with an executive mindset, get out of the weeds and lead effectively among competing priorities, strategically across disciplines all while instilling confidence in others. And yet, even an executive mindset does not always help women avoid the nebulous trap of executive presence.
After having coached many highly competent female leaders, I have come to believe there is more to the criticism about women’s lack of presence than style, or even confidence. I believe that in seeking people with ‘executive presence’, many executives are essentially looking for a particular kind of confidence, which is the ability to instill confidence in others in the face of extreme uncertainty.
Executive Presence for Women: instilling confidence for others in the face of extreme uncertainty
All the style in the world won’t help someone get to the top who hasn’t mastered the ability to help others believe success lies on the other side of chaos. Via @DanaTheus <==Click to tweet
If leading a business is anything, it’s uncertain. Change, whether from customers, employees or the market as a whole, is constantly threatening a business’ ability to survive, much less thrive. And it’s the executives’ job to steer the ship and keep everyone focused on the horizon instead of the deadly waves and gale-force winds bashing against the hull. [Having recently rewatched Master & Commander, a testosterone-saturated flick about a benevolent but tough-minded and strategic male sea captain in the body of Russel Crowe, I am reminded that the masculine myth of confident bravado is highly celebrated in Western culture. How many ships lie at the bottom of the sea because of it?]
‘Executive presence’ essentially means the ability to ‘demonstrate confidence in the face of extreme uncertainty.’ Via @DanaTheus <==Click to tweet
Even women who are the most confident in their knowledge and expertise can find this call to extreme levels of confidence required to keep up morale in others deeply challenging. Women do struggle, in ways men often don’t, with achieving the kind of confidence that–to a reasonably rigorous analysis–may seem unwarranted. Here are only a few of the reasons:
they believe, not unfairly, that they have to be twice as good and work twice as hard as the guy in the next cube, to be taken seriously and that extra bravado only increases their workload and others’ expectations to possibly unrealistic levels
they have been acculturated to expect to have to clean up other people’s messes
they have been talked over, ignored and treated less seriously than their male colleagues throughout their entire career, to the point where part of them believes that maybe they aren’t ‘all that’
For women, the combination of these experiences can be truly exhausting. Making confident statements that you’re not sure you fully believe, especially when you expect to be left having to clean up the mess when reality reasserts itself, takes a special kind of energy, and not everyone has it. This decision not to step up to unreasonable claims can be costly in more ways than one. One client of mine refused to back up a C-Suite colleague who made claims not supported by company data. Instead of being rewarded for finding a vulnerability in the business plan, she was let go in an effort to sweep the data that jeopardized overly confident projections under the rug. A year later, the board discovered the deception and fired the offending colleague, but not in time to save her job, or the company as it turned out. Did she lack executive presence? Or did she have ethical judgement?
In hindsight, that question is easy to answer. But in the moment, to her colleagues, my client simply looked as though she lacked confidence in the business. She felt like a risky company representative to put in front of the board. Worried she would undermine their efforts to keep the board on board with the business plan, they got rid of her for her lack of ‘board readiness’ and ‘executive presence.’
Should she have gone along to get along? Probably not in that case, since the CEO was sued for personal liability when the truth came out, and she may have been equally liable had she stayed to toe the line. However, in less liability-laden situations, there may well have been strategies she could have pursued to become a trusted voice of truth, a voice that could instill confidence in the board that the company’s risks, based on truthful data, were worth taking.
Executive Presence for Women: turning risk into success
For every story like my client’s above, there is a Master & Commander-version of the opposite, which we see when business titans such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson are lionized in the press for their mythical ability to create riches out of risk. In fact, some executives have described a woman’s lack of executive presence to me as a discomfort with risk.
Looking closely at the women I coach and their comfort with risk-taking, I don’t really see this risk aversion in the best of them. Research has found that women are equally competent at managing risk as their male counterparts. The women who enjoy the game of leading a business understand that while more serious than your average game of Risk, achieving success is very game-like. And taking considered risks is part of every winning strategy.
Yet the challenges mentioned above, which every working woman experiences on a regular basis, often encourages women to play the game of business from a more personally conservative position. They hold back from making bold claims, feeling inauthentic because they expect to be blamed when a risk goes bad. (Not always an unwarranted concern considering the prevalence of the glass cliff at the top of many companies struggling to stay afloat.) This conservatism isn’t always a bad thing. As we saw in my client’s case above, such conservatism can help an organization steer clear of the wrong kinds of risk.
While a potential benefit to the health of the business, sadly for too many women, such conservatism is exactly the opposite of the “executive presence” many male CXOs and boards are looking for.
While often healthy for the business, conservative risk-taking behavior is the exact opposite of the kind of ‘executive presence’ many male board members are looking for.’ Via @DanaTheus <==Click to tweet
Where’s the Win-Win for Women?
How can women exit these double binds? Women who understand these dynamics can learn to more effectively manage risk, project confidence for others and develop a reputation for knowing the difference between considered risk and foolhardy risk. They can learn to step out from behind their personal discomfort with failure and bring others along to help clean up after the plays that don’t pay off. They can avoid the trap of being either a risk taker or a safe player and learn to champion well-founded risks and caution against more dangerous plays.
Eyes open have the ability to see. Becoming conscious of unconscious bias starts by looking for what you’re not seeing. Via @DanaTheus <==click to tweet
When they take this gameswoman-like approach to leadership, they can more easily develop confidence in the kinds of bold plans stakeholders and shareholders expect top executives to develop. They can more easily champion the business and lead others through the uncertainty that is all around them.
In doing so, everyone will see their executive presence for the leadership asset it is, and more doors will open.
If you ask a bunch of high-level executives what they think executive presence is — for any gender — what would they say? Here is the answer, according to the Harvard Business Review!
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Does everything really happen for a reason? I’m not so sure.
2020 has been a year like no other in my memory. The earth is giving us so many challenges and then there’s the political and cultural shifts afoot that can truly challenge your beliefs about everything. COVID19 has brought tragedy to our life in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of souls.
It’s staggeringly overwhelming. The human brain is really not built to process these things. And I’m not kidding. Our brains are built to compel us to action more generously and reliably when we learn about a single human being’s suffering or opportunity, while faceless statistics leave us numb and less willing to take action. And then this happened…
A Contemplation on the Passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg
For decades, Justice Ginsberg supported our constitutional rights, first as a lawyer and judge, then for 27 years as a U.S. Supreme Court judge. If you haven’t seen it her workout with Steven Colbert is both hilarious and endemic of her gentle and strong spirit.
I have wanted to say so many things about what Justice Ginsberg, affectionately known as “RBG”, has meant to women in our country, but my friend, Karen Vasquez has said it so much better than I ever could, so I’ll share your words with you here:
If you are a woman and hold a job, you have Justice Ginsburg to thank. If you got to keep that job even when you became pregnant, you have Justice Ginsburg to thank. If you hold a credit card or a bank account or a house in your name, without the permission of your husband or your father, you have Justice Ginsburg to thank. If you were able to marry the person you love, regardless of their gender or yours, you have Justice Ginsburg to thank. If you don’t even know the number of rights that you have, because there are too many to count, or maybe because you just take them for granted, you have Justice Ginsburg to thank. Every single woman stands on the shoulders of this tiny giant, every second of every day; there are not enough thanks in this world for Justice Ginsburg.
While I always appreciated Justice Ginsberg’s voice on the court, I never truly understood the impact she has made with her entire life until I watched the movie On the Basis of Sex and RBG, a documentary. These films remind us that it has been within my lifetime that women truly have the rights in our society that so many of us–myself included–take for granted every day. With her passing it’s clear to me that the responsibility to ensure that we use these rights responsibly and proactively falls to each of us individually.
What have I done today to protect and advance the rights of women in our society? This is a question I will now ask myself daily.
Did RBG’s Death At This Crucial Time Happen for a Reason?
Like so many things that have happened this year, breaking all our expectations, Justice Ginsberg’s death at such a crucial time, right before a pivotal election, puts me deep in the question, does everything REALLY happen for a reason?
This comforting thought has truly brought me solace in the past. When things go wrong it has helped me relax into the silver linings of tragedy and sadness. It’s helped me find meaning in absurdity and chaos. It’s helped me console others. There’s something calming about the passage of time, as emotions cool and the brain finds patterns and meaning in events that feel brutally random as they occur. And then, sometimes things do just flow perfectly in a way that allows me to enjoy the idea that things have happened for a reason.
But in recent years–even before 2020–I’ve been challenged to find such comfortable meaning in every downturn and upturn. Contemplating the historic sweeps of change from climate to global politics, I’ve come to believe that everything does NOT happen for a tidy little reason. Some happenings are just too big, too overwhelming, too systemic in systems so vast as to be unthinkable by the human brain.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe there may be higher forces at work in our lives. I do, actually. But I no longer believe EVERYTHING happens for a reason. I believe in a certain amount of luck; I believe in a certain amount of true randomness that opens doors for us to walk through, if we have the courage.
Having given up the tidy comfort of destiny embodied in “everything happens for a reason,” I can now actually find comfort in believing both ideas are true:
Things do happen for reasons we can and can’t imagine
Luck happens
In believing both are true, doors open everywhere. Where there may be a reason, we can find meaning. Where there may be chaos, we may find opportunity.
In the end, I am comforted most by the idea of Return on Luck, researched compellingly by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great. His exhaustive research on businesses who experienced both good luck and bad luck showed one simple truth, when companies responded to any luck as an opportunity waiting to be taken, they succeeded.
And I think that’s the key, if we lean into everything that happens–whether it feels “good” or “bad”–we win. I do believe that the human mind operates best when it finds meaning in things (at least mine does), so looking for what might be at play if XYZ “happens for a reason” is a very effective mind game I can play with myself to give my life, moment by moment, more meaning, more direction and more focus.
Did RBG’s death on September 18, 2020 happen for a reason? It doesn’t matter. It happened. And her life, and her death, is now the reason I am going to ask myself today and every day:
What have I done today to protect and advance the rights of women in our society? via @DanaTheus <==Click to Tweet
How about you? Does it matter to you whether everything happens for a reason? Or will you use whatever happens to find meaning and focus in your life and in your day? We only have the time we have. Use yours to make a difference.
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Equity in Pay Matters: Achieving pay equity is a crucial step in addressing social injustices and biases in the workplace, but it requires confronting discomfort around salary transparency.
The Evolution of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I): From diversity initiatives to inclusion efforts, the focus is now on equity, recognizing the importance of fair treatment and opportunity for all employees.
The Power of Salary Transparency: Salary transparency empowers employees to advocate for fair wages and exposes systemic biases, but it remains a challenge due to organizational resistance and individual discomfort.
Overcoming Resistance to Pay Transparency: Despite challenges, embracing salary transparency and pay equity can lead to more just workplaces, mitigating biases and promoting diversity and inclusion.
Although many organizations profess to support diversity and inclusion (D&I) practices, not as many have stepped up to the E in DE&I: Equity. But what does equity in the workplace actually mean and why is pay equity, in particular, so important?
This is a tricky subject. There are many reasons that pay equity helps fight the social injustices of privilege and bias (read below). However, along with commitments to fair wages comes salary transparency, which is uncomfortable for everyone. Many of us feel self-conscious talking about salary information with fellow employees. Unless we’re unionized or work for an organization with clear pay transparency policies already in place, we worry that we’ll lose favor with our management if we share our salary. Why? If we share our salary, this information immediately becomes bargaining leverage with our employer for everyone else when seeking a raise.
This anxiety is not an idle threat. In fact, I was fired from my first job out of college for “looking at someone else’s paycheck,” while I was handing out salary envelopes. After the fact I came to believe that my boss (a sole proprietor) was just cash strapped and didn’t want to tell me why he was letting me go, but at the time I was mortified and internalized the idea that sharing salary information was illegal. As I learned many years later, it’s not illegal to share your salary, but the informal culture of every company I’ve ever worked for encouraged me to keep money issues to myself, hampering me and all my peers in negotiating for a fair wage.
A Brief History of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
While diversity used to be a goal in and of itself a few decades ago, ‘diversity’ programs alone have not achieved the outcomes many originally hoped for, including expanding the number of blacks, people of color, women and people with disabilities in positions of leadership. Adding “inclusion” to program names within the last 10 years acknowledged that bringing diverse people into a company’s hiring process wasn’t the same as retaining them and promoting them. Companies discovered that simply hiring more diverse people, without also changing the culture to make them feel welcome, had little positive effect on creating diversity in leadership.
And while there have been recent efforts to create cultures where people feel they “belong,” the more meaningful and potentially impactful work is in adding equity to an organization’s aspirations. Equity goes a step farther than diversity, inclusion, and even belonging. It recognizes that “diversity” can be accomplished by looking at the external facts, such as a percentage of employees who are black or women, whereas “equity” offers a more sustainable form of cultural openness, where people of all stripes feel invested in the company’s success, because they feel the organization truly values them. However, equity can only be accomplished when all employees have the felt experience of being treated fairly and equitably.
The Role of Privilege in Achieving Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
To accomplish equity, an organization must accept the fact that their employees all experience different disadvantages and advantages based on aspects of their lives they do not control, and to which most people are virtually always unaware because this is simply “the way things are.” We all have these blind spots about the social and cultural norms within which we live and work. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson likens these cultural blind spots to the social practices that generate a caste system in every human society, including in the United States and Western Europe.
Employers are uniquely empowered to counter unjust cultural norms by committing to salary transparency and pay equity. #paygap #genderequality <=click to tweet
Individual blind spots aside, based on the luck of the draw, manifested in someone’s skin color, gender, socio-economic background and many other factors, each person represents a unique blend of experience that bestows on them privileges, or a lack of privilege, in the eyes of their colleagues. An organization’s efforts to achieve equity requires them to accept that not everyone has bootstraps to pull up. When a company accepts this truth, they put themselves in a unique position in our culture. Because employers pay people’s wages, they are in an unusually powerful position to help right the wrongs of unjust cultural blindspots to the extent they treat people, and pay them, equitably. To do so, they must put in place policies, practices and cultural touchstone efforts that minimize the impact of disadvantages that a person can do nothing about individually.
It’s important to note here that “equity” is important but it doesn’t fully solve the diversity and inclusion problem. Just because people are paid fairly, doesn’t mean they are hired into leadership positions or given advancement opportunities open to their more privileged peers. This is why the “E” of equity is important alongside the “D” of diversity and the “I” of inclusion.
Why is Pay Equity So Important to Employees?
While companies talk about strategies to achieve diversity, equity and inclusion, workers just want a fair shake. From an employee’s point of view being treated fairly means that you have the same shot at success as the person next to you. It means that you don’t have disadvantages that you can’t control and can’t make up for in the eyes of your employer. It means that your managers are less likely to purposefully (or unconsciously) limit the opportunities you receive or how you are recognized and rewarded, due to their own blind spots or even conscious prejudices.
But how can we tell if people are being treated fairly? Any measuring stick for fairness is somewhat squishy and subjective, especially when you factor in the impact of unconscious bias, which makes everyone unaware of their prejudices and preferences. Within the workplace, there is one very measurable indicator of fairness, which employees, company leaders and external stakeholders can look at to evaluate fair treatment. It also happens to be something that matters deeply to everyone: a person’s salary. Unfortunately, when salaries are compared across industries, there is very clear evidence that the gap in pay between genders and races indicates systemic oppression, baked into organizations’ compensation practices.
So, clearly the answer should be straightforward. When organizations large and small implement salary and compensation strategies that include policies and procedures of pay transparency and fairness, equity will become more likely because it will become visible. Right? Well, in theory, yes. An employee working in such an organization can look at the published policies and see if their compensation fits within the proper salary bands.
It’s important to note here that “equity” is important but it doesn’t fully solve the diversity and inclusion problem. Just because people are paid fairly, doesn’t mean their managers are free of unconscious bias, that they are hired into leadership positions or that they are given advancement opportunities open to their more privileged peers. However, pay equity would go a long way towards empowering employees to identify situations where they are being under-compensated and perhaps treated unfairly. This is why the “E” of equity is important alongside the “D” of diversity and the “I” of inclusion.
Knowledge is power. Salary transparency and equitable pay policies (like salary bands) give employees leverage to achieve fair wages, regardless of their privilege, or lack thereof. #payequity #equality @DanaTheus <=click to tweet
Why is Pay Equity so Hard?
As we see above knowledge is power and a fundamental element of pay equity is salary transparency. With knowledge about what others are paid, a worker has a basis on which to advocate for a higher salary, or feel fairly compensated. Many organizations claim that they work for pay equity behind closed doors, but given the fact that a lack of pay equity benefits the employer, most people don’t really trust their motivations.
And there is ample evidence that without transparency pay equity can’t be achieved when we look at the pay gap statistics, which haven’t moved significantly in years. The lack of change in the pay gap indicates that organizations are in fact highly unmotivated to enforce fair pay policies, even if they exist on paper. There is a famous anecdote from Sheryl Sandberg who sat on a panel with a male CEO when she was promoting her book, Lean In, about white collar working women and the challenges they face, including pay inequality. The male CEO joked to her that, “(If you tell women they’re not making as much as men,) you’re going to cost me a lot of money.” Sandberg replied, “Well, I hope so, because that would mean the women working for you are getting paid fairly.”
Through this lens, it’s easy to see why organizations would find pay transparency problematic to their financial spreadsheets, and many of them informally encourage their employees not to share salary information for this reason. Because we’re discouraged from sharing our salary information, many actually believe sharing salary information is illegal. However, it’s very legal. Since 1935 the National Labor Relations Act has protected employee salary discussions to ensure competitive markets.
Perhaps, then, individuals should share salary information to change company policy? Sometimes they can, within a company or within an industry. The recent #publishingpaidme campaign, begun by novelist L.L. McKinney, has shown the power of sharing such information very publicly on social media.
However, it’s important to remember that it was exactly this issue that played a major part in the formation of labor unions in the last century, because without such coordinated and formal conversations, employers could—and did—pit employees against each other, and engage in other culturally punitive actions to discourage such salary sharing. This is why almost one hundred years later, regardless of legality, most of us are still uncomfortable taking the risk that our boss will be upset with us for sharing salary information.
Of course, there’s also the general discomfort with comparing ourselves with other people. Knowing that you’re paid more or less than [name the co-worker you’re most insecure about] is information you can’t forget once you know it. It can lead you to feel great, or terrible, about yourself for a long time. Individuals considering sharing their pay information will colleagues informally have to ask themselves, is it really worth the risks of angering our employer and feeling bad about ourselves?
The bottom line for many of us working in the private sector is that it’s tough to consider sharing salary information with colleagues, and we find it hard to imagine a situation where we know what others make. However, millions of employees in the U.S. have exactly this kind of visibility. Government, military, nonprofit and public company executives all have their salary ranges publicly available for everyone to see, and there is evidence that this works to minimize the pay gap.
There’s also the general truth that once information is in the light, it becomes more of a source of empowerment and less a force for injustice. A friend of mine worked for a company preparing for acquisition that transitioned to published pay scales to bring salaries into line with some standard prior to the purchase. He reported that people were curious and uncomfortable for about a week and then went on with their business, feeling somewhat more protected from discriminatory pay practices. For this reason, some companies even think of pay transparency as a recruitment tool.
So the bottom line is that salary transparency and pay equity are a powerful tool in the fight against social injustice, unconscious bias and a lack of diversity in the workplace. Although it won’t be simple for organizations or individuals to transition to a pay equity system, the outcomes are likely to be positive for both employees and employers. All we need is courage.
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Meetings are the one thing today’s workforce loves to hate. And now, with many office workers still working remotely in the pandemic, there’s an added layer to the meeting pain: “Zoom burnout.” Initially a fun way to stay connected to colleagues during the early weeks of the pandemic, workers are now reporting fatigue with non-stop virtual meetings.
As social distancing measures move into their sixth month, we’re all missing the informal connections that crop up throughout our day. Social gatherings are seriously curtailed, workplaces are shuttered (or operating only with essential workers) and vulnerable populations are taking extra care to isolate. Even essential workers are discouraged from “hanging out” with each other on the job. Connection is a basic human need. Without it, we feel isolated, and such detachment can create a kind of “background” drain on your energy, like an unnoticed app running on your phone that’s depleting its battery life.
Are You Causing Zoom Burnout?
As a leader, you may even inadvertently contribute to Zoom burnout by calling unnecessary meetings. While it’s normal to want connection, both for human reasons and to keep your team accountable, feelings of isolation may drive you to call a Zoom meeting a little too often. It’s a natural impulse and one that’s rooted in good intentions. But let’s examine those motivations for a moment.
In a virtual teaming environment, you may feel like if you’re not holding a meeting, people will forget you’re leading them, but that’s not the case. This worry is what Dana Theus calls an “out of power” mindset that sometimes causes us to call a meeting. She points out that the mere act of calling a meeting isn’t leadership. Leadership shows up in a variety of ways beyond leading meetings.
So, instead of defaulting to “Let’s hop on a Zoom meeting to sort this out,” consider for a moment why you’re calling a meeting. Is it to gather information, check in with team members, share good news, collaborate on an idea? Of course, it’s natural to want to connect to your team members. And you should! But you don’t always need to do it en masse. Perhaps a quick text or phone call would be better. Consider this: if you have a team of six and you call a one-hour meeting, you’re using seven hours of human potential to “check in.” But when you become more intentional about the reason for the meeting, you may find a different way to create that connection, and avoid creating Zoom burnout for your team.
Want to know more about running an effective meeting — in person, or remotely? Check out InPower’s AMA video, “How Do I Run a Great Meeting?” in which Dana and I discuss five “out of power” mindsets that derail effective meeting leadership.
Avoiding Zoom Burnout for the Rest of Us
Of course we’re not all in charge of the meetings we feel we “have” to attend. So what do you do when your schedule is full of meetings other people schedule? Here are some quick tips to help you avoid meeting burnout for everyone else:
Know why you’re attending a meeting before confirming your attendance. Even if it’s a staff meeting, get clear with your boss on your role, what you’re contributing and whether there’s a portion of the meeting you can skip. Often just asking these questions helps the leader think more intentionally about structuring the meeting.
Use meetings to help shape your personal brand reputation. Show up with a clear idea of what you plan to contribute. Look for an opportunity to contribute in the first 15 minutes (when research says you’re most likely to be seen as an influencer.) Show up with a clear idea of what you want to take away. Engage proactively to ensure you get this result.
Try to schedule breaks for yourself and block your calendar so others can’t put you into back-to-back sitting marathons. The human body wasn’t meant for nonstop Zoom!
Battling Zoom burnout is a fact of the modern workday. Get proactive about fighting it! Everyone else struggling with the same challenge will thank you!
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One coach’s approach to becoming a better human being
I am profoundly uncomfortable.
I recently wrote an article for Smartbrief about how to lead in response to the protestsroiling our cities. While I stand by what I said, here is what I did not say in that article: I’m really not feeling like the expert right now. This is hard for a coach to admit, especially where clients and potential clients can see it. But there it is. Truth. Privilege, social justice and equity demand more of me now.
Despite having a personal intention to understand sexism and racism through the lens of privilege since Charlottesville in 2017, I’ve been largely unsuccessful engaging people who don’t look like me in a deeper dialog and on these topics. I’ve learned since beginning the journey that intention alone is not enough. Outreach is not enough. Even education is not enough, because this effort is not about me and solving my discomfort, but about me doing the work to get educated and be uncomfortable in order to begin to see things through a different lens. When I desire to “be educated by someone else” it means I’m still not understanding, or doing, or saying or thinking the thing that would help me become a better contributor in the healing process we as individuals and a society need right now. The fact is that I’m a middle class white woman, and this reality veils my eyes to degrees I’m still learning to see. It contributes to my own biases and struggles to clearly see the problems others feel in their bones. It makes it harder for me to contribute to solutions.
My clients (of all races, genders and nationalities) are also dealing with how to think and act in response to the issues which Black Lives Matter is pointing the spotlight on so effectively right now. So I feel compelled to be of service on this topic, despite my discomfort and inability to know the right way forward.
I am here to announce that I’m not looking for a solution, only a process by which I can grow. Anyone interested in growing with me is welcome on this ride. I welcome your experiences and opinions, if you feel compelled to share them. But this post is not about politics or rights and wrongs, only about the process I’m using to grow myself personally to be a stronger contributor to racial justice, equity and equal rights for all oppressed people. This is not global advice for everyone, or even all my clients. It’s just one coach’s approach to becoming a better human being.
Here are the key ways I’m challenging myself right now. I’m sure I’ll have more to say in the future.
Being Uncomfortable on the Ladder of Privilege and Inequity
When I coach and teach change leadership, I tell people that we succeed at change when we become comfortable in our discomfort, particularly when we encounter resistance. If the protests in the streets aren’t resistance, then nothing is, so I guess I’m taking my own advice by being uncomfortable thanks to them. Because I’m definitely uncomfortable, and not just about my non-expet feelings. It’s about being privileged and part of the problem.
Here’s how I’m thinking of privilege and inequity right now: as a ladder. Like most ladders, it’s narrow and can only hold one person at a time on any particular rung. Everyone has a place above or below the next person in line.
Even though I don’t like hierarchies and spend a lot of energy trying to exist outside them, it’s a simple fact of human nature that when people are in a group, they compare themselves to each other and start falling into subgroups, some of which have benefits and status, which is then denied others. Absent very intentional efforts to offset these natural human dynamics, these denied benefits become inequities that look like racial, sexual, gender, age and ability-related discrimination and harassment. I’m not going to unpack the why’s and wherefore’s of this further except to say that this unfair sorting is both caused by, and reinforcing to, unconscious bias.
Unfortunately, privilege and inequity shows up in ways that look like this in our society today:
Historically oppressed people are dying at alarming rates due to COVID-19, Blacks three times more often and Native Americans are suffering more than whites both economically and through health outcomes.
Upward mobility in the US has been stagnant for 40 years, and wealth on Wall Street is no longer a reliable indicator of economic health for the average American.)
Clearly, I could go on.
Whether we want them to or not, these hierarchies create a ladder and confer upon people on the different rungs various privileges, which then create inequities. These inequities are both external (e.g., money, influence, power) and internal (e.g., safety, confidence, aspiration). This complex view of privilege isn’t new either, as evidenced by the video below from 2015, but I would say most people haven’t really gone through an exercise like this, much less taken the opportunity to process it for themselves and with the other people they experience it with. I know I haven’t.
These ladders of privilege and inequity are found in all human societies, on the playground and in the halls of leadership. They show up in ways that are physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually harmful to everyone, most detrimental to those denied the benefits that privileged people enjoy. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but it bears repeating: the stress and other factors that accompany a lower position on the privilege hierarchy will literally kill you more often, even when no one points a gun at you.
In other words, black people have a right to be majorly pissed off, and have been for centuries. Native Americans do too. And poor people. And women. And LGBTQIA people. And, and, and…
Focusing on the present for a moment, I’m connecting the last few years of social discomfort to the ladder. Just like #metoo helped give women a voice long silenced in the ‘discussion’ on sexual violence, harassment and discrimination, Black Lives Matter has been, and is, fighting to raise the voice of people too long oppressed about the discussion of privilege. I’m grateful that they’ve kept it up so that everyone can hear, including people like me who unintentionally, but did, allow our own privilege to blind us to their deepest pain.
Just like we women ask men to listen to “us” women for gender rights, black people have the right to ask “us” white people to listen to them. And so I’m trying to shut up and listen.
Seeing Myself on the Ladder of Privilege
I don’t want there to be a ladder. Just as many middle class white women, led by Sheryl Sandberg, have tried to redefine the career ladder into a jungle gym, I’d like there to be a social equity play space that allows people to crawl around to where they’re most comfortable, without having to knock other people off. I will continue doing what I can to build a bigger ladder to make this possible, but I need to be less naive and present to the reality that I don’t personally have the power to build such a cultural space by myself. I have to live on the ladder society has conferred on me while I work to build a bigger playground.
By listening more deeply to the conversations around inequity I’m coming to understand that the ladder of privilege is much taller and more complex than I thought. And almost no one, myself included, actually sees ourselves on this ladder at all. Seeing the ladder is the first act of seeing privilege in many ways. We know who’s above us because we feel stepped on and it hurts. For myself I can say that until Charlottesville I was so busy looking up, I forget to look down and, more importantly, see that there are many rungs above and below me. When we don’t look down, we’re by definition failing to acknowledge the advantages that our rung gives us vis a vis all the other people on the ladder. And to the extent we can’t be as authentically proactive in taking action to help people experiencing inequity below us, we continue to be part of the problem. This means me. And you.
Here is the simplest and most quantifiable way I know to see the kind of harm our inaction creates in cold, hard cash, by looking at the gender and racial breakdown of the wage gap. The fact that “women earn less than men” has too often overshadowed the fact that white women are paid more than black and brown women. This deeper look at the wage gap represented below sadly mirrors other privilege ladders in health and mortality, police brutality, education, job opportunities and too many other aspects of what it takes to achieve health and happiness on this planet. And when white women cannot acknowledge the privilege our “status” on charts like this confers on us, we’re doing a deep disservice to our sisters who experience even less fair treatment than we do.
To be fair, the chart above is a poor representation of the entire privilege picture, since it leaves out other ethnicities, such as Asians, who report marginalization related to their race, and who earn more than the average white person. It also leaves out many other kinds of privilege, but the visual this chart offers is striking. When it comes to privilege, we’re not all on the same rung. But it is an excellent depiction of what pay INequity looks like in our society today..
This issue is not new. The inability for white women to understand and appreciate our privilege has been crystal clear to black women for a long time and black women have been trying to bring this to our attention since the days of bra burning and are still standing up with their truth.
So I’m working to be uncomfortable about my place on a ladder which I’m coming to see more clearly. I know what it’s like to feel unequal and unprivileged when I look “up” the ladder at men who don’t understand what it’s like to be in a female body. And I have to admit that I’m on that ladder in a place that confers upon me privileges others don’t have and leaves me without easy insight into issues this position creates for them.
I am open to learning more about the experiences of others on the ladder. Being open, I’m hearing more. And it is painful to listen to. Not just from a place of guilt but also from a place of compassion for those whose pain has been too long denied, gaslit and ignored. Here is an example I find particularly compelling. I have watched the video below many times and will continue to do so as Kimberly Latrice Jones taps into her well of knowledge, pain and anger to educate me, not only on the facts but on the emotions of the black experience in America.
What I’m learning is that like sexual discrimination I’ve experienced and helped female clients through, racism and privilege is a systemic inequity we all affect and are affected by. If you don’t believe me, watch this:
In addition to listening, opening and educating myself, I am learning to hold space for pain that is not mine, especially as it relates to my own privilege and using all this to choose who and how I want to be. I will share more on these strategies in future posts. For now, I’m interested in listening to your experience with privilege, racism, discrimination and inequity. Feel free to contact me at danatheus@inpowercoaching.com to share your thoughts and the questions and discomforts you’re sitting with. Together we’ll move forward one way or another. We always do.
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.
