by Guest Author | Apr 23, 2013 | Coaching Advice, Leadership
By: Mary Schaefer
Do you simply manage the people who work for you – or do you truly lead?
Consider utilizing what naturally engages human beings at work, like appreciation and a sense of being a meaningful part of something bigger than themselves. The result is an increase in your company’s bottom line – while you tap into that deep well of human potential and create a competitive advantage for your group and your business. Here are five tips for taking your leadership further.
1. Make decisions as if people matter
Business doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your computers or lab equipment don’t care if you hit quarterly goals. Leverage the resources who do care (i.e. employees) by meeting basic human needs at work. Remember what it’s like to be an employee. Even if you are a manager, you ARE STILL an employee, too. Show them you considered their needs and concerns in your thought process.
2. Be impeccable with your word
If you say you are going to do something, large or small, do it. Your employees are watching. They WANT to trust you. Give them a reason. It helps to tell them when you are following up on something you promised, like “I’m doing this thing as a result of our talk last week.”
3. Talk to people like YOU are a human being
People can see through stalling and spin. If you can’t discuss a matter, say so. Anticipate questions from your employees’ point of view, and practice. You may have to work with your response to ensure it’s authentic, sincere and respectful of their intelligence. Don’t shortchange this.
4. Make sure they understand what you’re saying
The meaning of the communication is the response it elicits. Why do we think we’ve communicated when we just drop people an email? And asking “Do you understand?” is fruitless. Who wants to look like a nincompoop by saying no? To test understanding, ask them what they heard you say, or what they are going to do based on what you said.
5. Get over yourself. Be open to what works
Leading is changing your behaviors so the other person follows. We wouldn’t put water in our car when it needs oil and expect it to perform. Why do we ignore what our employees need? Examples are appreciation, belonging, contribution and meaning. Using this knowledge doesn’t require that you be something you’re not. Make the adjustments that will work for you and your people – so they will WANT to work with you!
Originally posted on:Reimagine Work
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by Guest Author | Apr 22, 2013 | Coaching Advice, Personal Mastery
As I was taking a walk down memory lane the other day and remembering my teen years, I realized that many of us are acting like teenagers. Remember how we thought we were invincible back then? We did stupid things like drive too fast, drink too much and play with fire. We’re lucky to be alive with our cavalier attitude about mortality.
At some point, usually our late 20s to early 30s, we woke up and realized we weren’t invincible. People we knew died. We stopped doing the blatantly stupid stuff and start doing the “adult” stuff.
But the “adult” stuff turns out is just as dangerous as driving too fast. We work 60+ hours a week as if there are no consequences. We run around creating the perfect household. We try to be the perfect wife, perfect mom and perfect female role model. We get stretched thin with obligations, deadlines, soccer practice and trying to prove our worth.
With these efforts we are still blindly acting as if we’re invincible. The truth of the matter is stress is responsible for 70-95% of all doctor’s office visits. Stress contributes to heart disease, diabetes, obesity and autoimmune disease. We are not invincible. We burnout. We get sick.
Passion Burns Bright
As you can tell, I’m pretty passionate about this subject. That’s because I’ve been there, done that and gotten the t-shirt. I’ve worked too hard, stressed too much, burned out and got one of those nasty health conditions.
I’ve also recovered, re-energized, and learned how to fuel my life with passion and meaning, not deadlines, stress and obligations. And no, I didn’t quit my job to buy a winery or live in the Costa Rican rainforest. Instead I discovered a secret formula to de-stress, re-energize and live with meaning. I call it the Burnt Out To Balanced SystemTM. In honor of Stress Awareness Month, I want to share this formula with you.
Fuel Your Body
We have been taught that diet, exercise and sleep help us lose weight. But what we eat, whether we move or are sedentary and how much sleep we get is the foundation for living a stress “free”, energized life. Food, especially processed food, can leave us feeling anxious or even contribute to ADD. Regular exercise releases feel good, stress-relieving endorphins. Get 8-hours sleep and you can solve problems with a clearer mind, as well as boost your intelligence.
Fuel Your Body Stress-Relieving Tip: Nature has given a magic stress neutralizer that calms us, relieves muscle tension and allows us to sleep better. It’s called magnesium. Now before you run out to the drug store, check your crisper drawer. Green leafy and cruciferous vegetables – kale, broccoli, collard greens, spinach and swiss chard – are high in magnesium. Include these in your diet a few times a day and watch your stress levels drop.
Fuel Your Mind
When I ask audiences “what is stress”, I find the answers include deadlines, traffic, over commitment, not enough time, and even having to deal with “stupid” people. We believe stress is something that happens to us. In fact, stress is our response to all those things.
The stress response is a function of our autonomic nervous system’s flight-or-fight response. Specifically, it is triggered by a thought or belief that we are in danger and our body then goes into overdrive producing cortisol and adrenaline to get us out of danger. The danger of stress is the fact that in modern life we spend far more time engaging this stress response than we do in our relaxation response. This accelerates the aging process, suppresses our immune system and leaves us fatigued.
The key take away here is that stress begins in our mind with a thought or a belief. The key to neutralizing stress is to fuel our mind with more positive, happy, gratitude-filled thoughts and you will trigger your stress response less often.
Fuel Your Mind Stress-Relieving Tip: Meditation has been used for centuries to reduce stress. It works by triggering our relaxation response simply by getting us to stop and breath. But it also allows us to train our mind to let thoughts pass instead of obsessing over them and creating stress internally. Start a daily meditation practice. Sit quietly, focusing on your breath for 20 minutes a day. Please don’t get hung up on being perfect about this. You can start by meditating 5 times a day for 4 minutes.
Fuel Your Purpose
Just as important as fueling our body and mind, is fueling our purpose – our creativity, relationships, spirituality, and soulfulness. Fueling our purpose is the keystone for less stress and more happiness.
What is purpose and what does it have to do with stress? Purpose is your calling in the world, but it’s really broader than that. It’s everything from meaningful work to your relationships to your hobbies that brings you joy and meaning. Purpose is the expression of your spirit.
When we starve our purpose either by not engaging with our work, suppressing our creativity, or ignoring our relationships (including the one with ourselves), we trigger our stress response. When we are all work and obligations, we begin to get bitter, resentful, depressed and even angry. Fueling all facets of our life is the antidote and gives us even more for which we can be grateful.
Fuel Your Purpose Stress-relieving Tip: Remember how much fun you had as a kid doing crafts. You might have stopped because your last creation wasn’t perfect. Or you didn’t have the time. Carve out some time to be creative and tap into your inner kid. Creativity can be cooking dinner, handwriting a card to a friend or creating a vision board. Get out the scissor and glue stick and just play.
We are not invincible. We cannot eliminate or escape stress. Yet we can neutralize stress by fueling our lives with better actions, thoughts and beliefs. We all deserve to live a happy, contented life. How will you neutralize stress this week?
Laurie Erdman, JD, MS, CHHC is a sought after Get More Energy Expert, coach, speaker and writer who inspires, trains and mentors companies and individuals to extinguish burnout and unleash their energized potential and profitability. Creator of the Burnt Out To Balanced SystemTM, Laurie’s mission is helping high performing individuals recover from or avoid burnout so they can accelerate their careers and create their best life. Laurie brings her experience in the legal, business, coaching and health fields, as well as her personal experience with burn out, to help companies create sustainable growth through engaged employees. Visit www.LaurieErdman.com to download her new book: Burnout. Identify It. Extinguish It. Ignite Your Life.
by Téa Blake | Apr 19, 2013 | Gender Research, InPower Women Blog, Work-Life Blend
Study: What Moms Think: Career vs. Paycheck. (Working Mother Media, 2012)
Finding: Attitudes determine outcomes in this research on women and work, but experience matters too. Women who are career minded are more positive about their careers. Male managers who have experience with working moms are also more likely to promote them.
InPower Insight: Experience can overcome attitude, so be careful to believe all the stories apply to you – even the ones validated by research!
Summary:
This broad-ranging research into attitudes of women and men about working mothers turns up some interesting and almost contradictory findings. Highlights include:
- Women who self-identify as having a career (as opposed to just working for the money) are more satisfied with their work, their decision to work and their life outside of work.
- In general, working fathers have more positive attitudes about working mothers than men with no children. Men and women with no children have poorer perceptions of working mothers.
- The exception is male managers, whether they have children or not. Male managers have a higher regard for working mothers than any other group, including working mothers themselves in some cases.
- Flexible working opportunities work for women and men, but appear to have even better outcomes for men.
- Women and men both are more comfortable with the idea that the man in a relationship earns more than the woman.
- Women and men have different perceptions of whether the men in a relationship are pulling their weight at home.
Career Coaching Tip: If you feel that life as a working mother is harder, it is. Whether you have children or not, try to look more objectively at your attitudes about what working moms are capable of, and their challenges, and note that those who may have the most experience, and thus best insight, into their actual capabilities – male managers – think so highly of them they’re willing to give them responsibilities even other working mothers are. No matter what your situation, recognize that attitudes matter and that when you adjust yours you can have a significant impact on your own work satisfaction and your fairness towards others around you.
Keywords: male managers, working mother, attitudes, flexible work arrangements, flexibility
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by Dana Theus | Apr 15, 2013 | InPower Women Blog, People Skills
I want you to meet an InPower woman. Dallice Joyner has risen above the most abject circumstances of poverty and prejudice to be an effective and motivating leader of an organization doing much needed work in our society. Dallice is the Executive Director of the Northern Virginia AHEC, an organization providing cultural competence and language translation services in 75+ languages to health services agencies that need to communicate with an ever-diversifying population.
Here is our 16 minute interview.
Dallice Joyner Interview
What impressed me most about Dallice was the way she positively accepts the fear associated with being a good leader. We get so afraid of fear, and yet as Dallice demonstrates, it can become our best friend. It can tell us when to lean in and break away from things we use to let limit us.
Enjoy these few minutes with Dallice as I did. And if you are interested in contributing to her work (maybe to practice your own language skills?), consider volunteering at a Virginia AHEC .
Know someone we should interview for InPower Women? Tell us about them! (Feel free to propose yourself too!)
Complimentary Webinar: You’re invited to an upcoming, InPower webinar for women – Communicating With Confidence to Build Credibility. It’s free! Register here.
by Téa Blake | Apr 12, 2013 | Gender Research, InPower Women Blog
Title: Employee Satisfaction Is Down, Women Respond Differently
Study: Reinvent Opportunity: Looking Through a New Lens (Accenture 2011)
Finding: Women and men have different strategies for handling job dissatisfaction.
InPower Insight: Women and men have similar desires to make their current jobs work for them, but have different strategies for doing so.
Summary:
Employee satisfaction is low. A meaningful number of employees, both men and women, are dissatisfied with their current work situation (a little over 40% report being unsatisfied). The top reasons for employee dissatisfaction were: being underpaid, lack of opportunity growth, little opportunity for career advancement and feeling trapped. Nonetheless, researchers found that most women and men (nearly 70% of women) planned to stay in their current job situation, many seeking more education than men in the same situation. .
While both women and men will ask for pay raises, fewer women than men will ask for promotions. Most notably, only 14% of the women surveyed plan to reach the C- level suite of their companies.
Women and men are both being mentored, but using a mentor’s assistance for different reasons. Women are more likely to use a mentor as a sounding board where men are more likely to ask for a mentor’s help in career planning. The Glass Hammer summarizes this finding as, “What this boils down to is that more men are discussing the next level with their mentors. And more women are discussing the status quo.”
Sixty- eight percent of women cite working hard and long hours as means for career advancement. Both men and women agree that better compensation, challenging assignments, flexible work situations, and leadership positions as reasons to pursue career advancements. Of all these factors, 65% of women cite better compensation as the top reason to advance.
Personal Coaching Tip: If you’re feeling stuck in your job, you’re not alone. Some will get ahead, however, so it’s good to look at what they’re doing and decide whether you want to do that too. Can you use your mentor to help you strategize your career more proactively? Can you be more assertive in asking for a promotion? The guy in the cube next to you may be doing this, and the stats say he’s got a better chance of rising through the ranks because of it. You don’t have to succeed like a man; you can – and should – develop your own style, but don’t ignore what’s working for the men who succeed.
Keywords: Advancement, Compensation, Dissatisfaction, Job Satisfaction, Employee turnover
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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.
by Jennifer Miller | Apr 10, 2013 | Coaching Advice, Communicating With Confidence, InPower Women Blog, People Skills
I like working with men, I really do. Of my clients and colleagues, the gender mix is evenly distributed. Over the years, I’ve become accustomed to being the only woman in a room full of businessmen and have never felt excluded or diminished.
When I read the vigorous (and occasionally venomous) debates online about women in leadership roles, I’ve not felt called to chime in. Even though women are underrepresented in senior leadership roles and disenfranchisement does exist, I didn’t have a personal story to tell in that regard.
I’ve admittedly taken the easy way out by not contributing much to the conversation online. So, I have cruised along, occasionally taking note of “women in the workplace” articles, but not really giving them much thought.
Until . . . I saw a Facebook post from a female friend congratulating fellow colleagues on being named to yet another online list of “top leadership thinkers in XYZ topic”. Out of curiosity, I clicked the link and sure enough, the list was comprised of mostly men.
I rolled my eyes, per usual and went along with my day. But this time, there was an annoyance that persisted. These lists invariably frame leadership very narrowly; they feature predominantly male authors or people with c-level titles in large organizations. There is more to leadership than a title and there are certainly more women with interesting things to say about leadership than these online lists indicate.
Weary of these constricted inclusion parameters, I decided to speak up. But there was a giant elephant in the room: my worry that people might criticize my observations. As I said, I’ve seen some ugly commentary out there and I wondered: was I up for the potential backlash?
Dana Theus, creator of the InPower Women blog is often encourages us to consider our personal narrative; of how the “stories” we tell ourselves and others influence how we are perceived. I decided to put myself smack dab in the middle of this story – to be my own protagonist in this claiming of leadership – and then inviting others to join me in claiming theirs.
In the end, it boiled down to summoning my courage and frankly, just getting over myself. I decided to claim my right to contribute on the topic of leadership in a public forum and wrote the post 37 Women with Interesting Things to Say About Leadership on my blog The People Equation.
The response to the post was overwhelmingly positive. Far from disenfranchising men, the post was a catalyst for conversation; both women and men joined the conversation on Facebook and Twitter to share the post and offer commentary.
Lesson learned – speaking up pays off. My message in the 37 Women blog post was genuine and heartfelt, with a method that invited conversation and reflection. By refraining from labeling my list as “best” or “top” I was able to broaden the meaning of leadership. In turn, many others helped me broaden my thinking as well through their contributions.
Most importantly, I found out that the biggest thing I feared – nasty discourse on my blog – never materialized. It was a non-issue. Plus, the “speaking up” has had a positive “spill over” effect for my consulting practice. As a result of being more outspoken on my blog, I’ve made inroads in several other aspects of my business, garnering plum writing assignments for several well-known publications.
Sometimes it seems like putting yourself “out there” and communicating with confidence is a huge leap of faith. It is, but the leap is internal. Those around us are more than willing to hear our story, if we are willing to share it.
Why share this personal reflection with you? Because I’ve come to realize there are many more women out there, wanting more for their careers and struggling to find the courage to speak up. For me, a watershed moment came when I stuck my neck out and offered opinions on the sometimes controversial topic of women in leadership. For you, the call to “step out” may be completely different. Perhaps you want a revised work schedule, or a job promotion. No matter what you are seeking, to be taken seriously, you must speak up with confidence.
Are you telling your most powerful, persuasive story? If not, and you’d like to learn how to do so, I invite you to join a free webinar called Communicating with Confidence, led by Dana Theus. I’m a graduate of the InPower Coaching program Self-Promotion Strategies for Women; I can vouch for the quality of content that Dana’s coaching programs offer. The Communicate with Confidence program contains many of the same powerful communication strategies as the Self-Promotion series. You owe it to yourself to check it out.
Don’t fear what might happen when you speak up. Plan for what great things will happen when you master the art of communicating confidently.
Career strategist Jennifer V. Miller is a former HR manager and corporate trainer who helps mid-career professionals chart the course for their next big leap. A self-described “professional opportunity cultivator”, Jennifer provides one-to-one and small group professional development coaching via her company SkillSource. Jennifer is the co-author of The Character-Based Leader and her work has appeared in Forbes, SmartBrief on Leadership, Executive Travel Magazine and The Huffington Post. She offers up tips for leading yourself and others at The People Equation and tweets at @JenniferVMiller.
by Guest Author | Apr 9, 2013 | Across Generations, Emotional Intelligence at Work, Employee Engagement
I recently published my Harvard study in Harvard Business Review: Busting Gen Y & Gender Myths and Why Your Company Should Care unleashing new research on the work-life aspirations of elite Gen Y women and men. Surveying a group of Harvard and MIT MBAs, I found that they hold more traditional attitudes about gender roles in the workplace than the rest of the Gen Y cohort. What is more, the driver for these traditional attitudes about the work-life balance was not personal belief, but the career structure and expectations of the high-level organizations they enter.
As a follow-up to this piece, many corporate leaders have asked me:
What does this mean for companies hiring Elite Gen Yers? And what should my company do about all these Gen Y & Gender myths in the workplace?
As Gen Y rises in the workplace, Gen Y men and women still struggle to balance work and home. Gen Y men still feel the burden of being breadwinners and women feel more responsibility at home.
This is a conversation that few Gen Y men and women are having–in companies. They need safe spaces to hash out these challenges – together. And your company needn’t make it a work-life issue; it can be coached in terms of leadership, performance, and strategy
Here’s what I think your company should do about it:
- Navigate the leadership conversation with language like strategy, and leadership, not work-family issues. This type of language makes it easier for organizations and Gen Y men and women to discuss why family issues play a role in career strategy.
- Understand the link between the bottom line and employee engagement of Gen Y: According to Gallup, engaged employees are “more productive, profitable, safer, create stronger customer relationships, and stay longer with their company than less engaged employees.”
- Know that the diversity of talent among Gen Y leads to better innovation. Dorothy Leonard’s concept of “creative abrasion” shows that innovative products and services derive from well-managed, diverse individuals across generations and genders.
- Retain and engage Gen Y men and women – it leads to more effective innovations. Show your Gen Y workforce why this matters to their future.
For the full report and findings, sign up for my mailing listserve here and receive a free copy of the Busting Gen Y & Gender Myths report. For a deep dive at your company, check out Erica’s talent development young professional program.
Check out the resources in the InPower Coaching EQ at Work and Soft Skills Research Index.
by Dana Theus | Apr 3, 2013 | Career Development, Coaching Advice, People Skills
Networking” is a word I often see accompanied by a slump of the shoulders, a groan or a roll of the eyes – in both women and men. We know it’s critical to our business and career success, but so often when we think “networking” we think stiff smiles, exposing ourselves to rejection from strangers and time wasted when we could be vegging after a hard days’ work. Because like it or not, when you engage in it intentionally – as an investment in your career, your business and your efforts to change the world – it is work.
However, work doesn’t have to be hard.
Remember how early in your career writing an important email could take you an hour? You struggled to get the language and the tone just right? Now you can bang it out in five minutes, but you had to focus on it to get the skill down. Business networking isn’t quite the same, but it is a business skill that can be learned so that it doesn’t have to take so much energy and so that you can weave it into your work life naturally.
There are lots of good advice columns out there for how to think about networking events, including this one from our own Stacey Gordon, so I’m not going to repeat them here. I’m going to give you a new way to think about networking and a new definition of success for your networking efforts.
How Do You Know Networking Is Successful?
Most of us default to a narrow definition of success when it comes to networking. We think we’re successful if we attend an event and meet someone who can help us immediately. Give us a job, introduce us to a vendor we need, meet a new client. Sometimes this happens and it’s great – a clear payoff – but research says that networking’s primary benefit is not at the event itself.
This fascinating study from The Toulouse School of Economics says that a key factor in how men advance into upper management is that they develop through their careers a broad and shallow network of connections. By developing such a broad network, they are exposed to more potential opportunities and thus tend to have more opportunities. By contrast, women tend to develop fewer ties that run deeper. While these can certainly pay off, they do not lead to as much potential exposure.
Thus, a key definition of networking success is to look at how much any single event or activity expands your network of “shallow” connections. Over time you can look at your networking success in terms of how extensive your shallow connection network is and in what ways it benefits you. This takes the pressure off the events and activities themselves and puts it on the quality of your network as a whole.
Is your network working for you? Don’t look at the last event you attended for the answer.
I personally find LinkedIn fabulous for managing this shallow network, which I consider a business asset. Not only does it allow me to follow up with people I meet at events (i.e., sending them a LinkedIn invite) but also brings me periodic opportunities as people seek me out or I find them and connect about a particular project or question. It does take “work” to maintain, but when you take the pressure off yourself to make every connection payoff in a huge way, more frequent, smaller connections become easier. Here are simple ways you can put on your calendar to maintain your LinkedIn network:
- Post or respond to status messages weekly
- Look at your LinkedIn update emails and find one person’s news you can respond to (e.g., congratulations on a new job)
- Create lists of contacts interested in similar subjects and post an update to one a quarter (so no individual gets more than one a year.)
- When you need information or resources, mine your LinkedIn network for people to ask (and help them when they ask you.)
There are plenty of other ways to maintain your shallow network and you should find the way that is most natural to you. The point is that you need to build one and maintain it so that you are present in other’s minds when opportunities come up.
What If It’s Not Paying Off?
For many years I had an extensive network (online and offline). It paid off here and there but not consistently and I used to wonder what I was “doing wrong.” Now it’s working much better for me and in studying career development strategies for my coaching practice I realize why. Your shallow network connections can only help you if they think of you in association with the kinds of opportunities you are looking for. If you were out there saying you wanted small business clients in 2010 and then in 2011 you got a new job targeting larger corporations – but forgot to mention this to your network – they’re looking for the wrong kind of client for you!
This means that in addition to growing your network, you need to refine your “pitch”, which actually isn’t a (sales) pitch at all. It’s just a short description of who you are, what you care about, what kind of opportunities/information/advice you’re looking for and how much you’d be happy to help them. What I’ve learned is that your networking focus is always evolving – just like you are – and that’s as it should be. The key is to get it clear in your mind at any point in time and have a simple way of introducing yourself that people can remember. If you’re onto a big idea, let them know about that too, but if not, don’t sweat it. Just make a personal connection and add the ones that seem interesting to your shallow network and move on. Once they’re in your network you’re likely to run into them again and maybe that’s when your big idea and their network will intersect beautifully.
In my coaching practice I find that many people struggle to focus on how to build and leverage their network in ways that feels powerful and natural. But once we walk through the few simple steps to help them get their focus, they start enjoying networking, and that’s when they start popping open doors they didn’t know were there.
Would you benefit from developing an easy personal networking plan? Check out our straightforward worksheets to start building yours today!
by Téa Blake | Mar 29, 2013 | Gender Research, InPower Women Blog
Title: What If Women Ran Wall Street?
Study: What If Women Ran Wall Street? (Sheelah Kolhatkar, New York Magazine 2010)
Finding: A certain amount of risk-taking is biologically driven by testosterone, and women can use this to their advantage in producing less emotionally-driven results.
InPower Insight: Despite the common story that women can’t control their emotions, studies that look at women and risk and biology show that men sometimes have more trouble with it than women do.
Summary:
Despite what we’ve been led to believe, the market isn’t rational or efficient at all—it’s all about feelings. According to new research, “Wall Street’ volatility is…driven by our body chemistry.” Research shows that because men have more testosterone, their actions are more impulsive and that more female presence on Wall street could “prevent extreme behavior” and “irrational exuberance”. Men produce fifteen times the amount of testosterone as women and in highly competitive environments testosterone levels tend to rise.
Researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School say that there is something “biological [that] explains risk-taking” and its found that testosterone is the most imminent. In a study conducted at Harvard, economist Terry Burnham, higher-testosterone male rejected money offers if “someone else was getting a larger share.” Burnham also purports that having too many men contributing to major business decision might cause them to take more risks.
Women are found to view an offer more holistically and predict all possible outcomes before making a final decision. Women are more likely to put aside their egos and admit that they are mistaken. Researchers in the field of neuroscience suggest that the disaster on Wall Street could have been predicted because the highly competitive environment was dominated by men, more detrimental risks were taken. Among 1, 200 traders at one of the largest propriety firms in the country, 5 out of the twenty women present were very successful. Thus, the success rate for women was 25 percent in contrast to 2 percent for men.
Personal Coaching Tip: Don’t believe the stories you hear about women being unable to control their emotions or take risks. Women have less testosterone, which actually makes them less impulsive when it comes to risk taking. In the case of Wall Street traders, successful women were able to turn this to their advantage. So can you.
Keywords: Competition, Risk, Testosterone
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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.
by Guest Author | Mar 27, 2013 | Career Development, Commentary, Entrepreneurship, InPower Women Blog
by: Laura Calandrella
Ten years ago, social entrepreneurship was a pretty lonely field. There weren’t degree programs or associations; impact investing and microfinance were barely even recognized terms. Even organizations like Ashoka – which has a 25-year history of investing in entrepreneurs with high potential for solving social problems – would have struggled to promote their “Everyone a Changemaker” vision.
All of that has changed. Economic bubbles have burst and sent us searching for meaning first, money second. Social media has transformed global into local. And Generation Y, my generation, has grown up believing that they can do anything – especially change the world. Social enterprise is not only mainstream, it’s superbly cool.
Even though there are still no “how-to” manuals, I see more and more women stepping up to carve out their place in this rapidly changing business environment. They are undaunted by the uncertainty. I believe that women play an essential role in shaping what it means to be a purpose-driven entrepreneur with a for-profit enterprise. But if we are going to get ahead and create the impact we know we are here to make, we have to break the unwritten rules of what it means to be a change agent.
Here are four ways to get ahead as a female social entrepreneur:
- Collaborate with competitors. It may seem counterintuitive to befriend the founders and organizations that are competing for the same market share as you, but in the social change space, your competitors may be your best supporters. We share the goals of eradicating poverty, solving global environmental issues and reinventing the systems that are pushing us towards an unsustainable future. We face increasingly complex and multi-layered challenges that require dynamic solutions. According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, there is one nonprofit for every 200 people in the United States – which doesn’t even begin to account for the number of for-profit social ventures that exist. In that kind of landscape, competition cannot be the only driver of innovation. We are spreading our financial, human, intellectual and political resources thin on issues where we have common aims. We have to get over the “hero complex” – the desire to be the one to make the world right – that plagues social enterprise. Women have a chance to embrace collaboration as a tool to build capacity to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
- Get over the “social entrepreneur” label. You either are an entrepreneur or you aren’t. The fact that your business has a mission that delivers financial and social returns does not change the requirement that it make sense and there is demand in the market for it. By definition, social entrepreneurs upset the status quo and revolutionize industries. It just so happens that they do this while maintaining a strong commitment to create social outcomes. If you are doing this – and doing it well – the fact that you are a social entrepreneur won’t matter to your customers or investors. Get over the label and focus on using social value to provide a competitive advantage.
- Hire more women for leadership positions. A client recently came to me with a concern raised by a member of her board of directors. He had advised her to hire a man and give him the title of co-founder. Specifically, he told her, “You’ll attract more investors and gain more credibility in the [technology] sector.” While it’s true that women are less likely than men to pursue technology and engineering careers, there is also strong evidence that women in leadership positions engender more trust and financially outperform their male counterparts. For a full list of evidence on why you need women leading your organization, consult this bulleted list from Magus Consulting.
- Invest in personal development. As a caveat to the point above, being a woman doesn’t guarantee your success as a leader, a change agent or in life. A compelling mission and a strong business model are only as successful as the strength of the individuals that implement them. Early-stage ventures often fail to focus on personal and team development, choosing instead to focus solely on technical skills and market knowledge. Yet, leaders who learn to face their fears, develop their intuition, and translate their inner vision into powerful action create lasting results and are better able to deal with the complexities of change. From the outset, establish a leadership culture by investing in coaching, developing learning communities, and taking the time to engage meaningful dialogue on the issues that matter most to you and your organization. As Warren Bennis says in his book On Becoming a Leader, “First and foremost, find out what it is you’re about, and be that.”
Laura Calandrella is a social change coach, educator and speaker. She helps social innovators unlock the power of their leadership to create a better world. Through her company she provides one-on-one coaching, team incubation, and live + virtual trainings for individuals and organizations who are ready to influence the world around them.
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.
Originally posted on The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC)
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.
Laura Calandrella is a social change coach, educator and speaker. She helps social innovators unlock the power of their leadership to create a better world. Through her company she provides one-on-one coaching, team incubation, and live + virtual trainings for individuals and organizations who are ready to influence the world around them.
