by Guest Author | Dec 21, 2024 | Commentary
Key Takeaways:
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Women and Success Aren’t Defined by Hard Work Alone: The myth that women must work harder than men to prove themselves often leads to burnout.
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Mistakes Are Part of Growth: Believing that women can’t make mistakes while proving their value stifles innovation and personal development.
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Humor Enhances Leadership: The notion that women must be serious to be taken seriously overlooks the power of humor in building connections and fostering creativity.
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Leadership Is Not Gender-Specific: The idea that feminine traits make women better leaders or that they lack the “killer instinct” is outdated; effective leadership transcends gender.
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Authenticity Is Empowering: Embracing one’s true self, without conforming to stereotypes, leads to greater success and fulfillment.
One of the greatest surprises and frustration I found when I did my doctoral research on today’s women in the workplace was how long it takes for research and literature to catch up with societal trends. In particular, in 2005 I found little had been written about the emerging numbers of strong, smart, goal-driven women in the workplace. As a result, many women felt, and still feel, misunderstood and mismanaged. Today, more speakers, articles and books give smart, strong, goal-driven women solid encouragement and useful tools. Yet I still find lingering myths about women and success that affect both their opportunities and their sense of well-being. Here are five of those myths. Some of these myths may still reflect reality in your workplace. Some are based on fading assumptions. You need to question if they are true for you today so you are free to make healthier choices for yourself.
1. Women need to work harder than men to prove themselves.
In a recent survey of working adults conducted by Accenture, 68 percent of the women thought it took hard work and long hours to advance in a company. Almost all of my female href=”http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/coaching”>executive coaching clients tell me they need to work harder than men. The result leaves them feeling burned out and resentful for the lack of appreciation for their efforts.
When I interview their bosses (male and female) and their colleagues, they all wish my clients would lighten up. No one has ever suggested my clients should work harder.There is a danger that if you work twice as hard as everyone else, you set up the expectation you will work twice as hard forever. Also, if you are working later than everyone else, does it appear that you have to work harder to keep up? Although this myth may be a truth in some workplaces, be careful you are not making these statements up because someone told you this when you first started your career. Your good results speak for themselves.
2. Women can’t make mistakes while continually proving their value to the organization.
This myth is the sister belief to the first myth. Yet being creative, innovative and an inspiration to others requires you make and learn from mistakes. You will stunt your growth if you only do what you know you will easily master. You will miss opportunities if you don’t take some risks.
3. Women can’t joke around or they won’t be taken seriously.
Victor Borge said, “
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people” Laughter is multi-cultural and never gets old. All people laugh at all ages. When we laugh with someone, it is hard to judge them negatively.
Giving people hope and a vision of what is possible helps people move forward. Laughter can also accomplish this. In fact, laughter can be more contagious than encouragement to those who are resistant. It’s hard not to smile when someone around you is laughing. Plus, the chemical reaction in the
brain increases
creativity and
productivity. Having a good sense of
humor should be on all lists of
leadership traits.
4. Feminine traits make women better leaders (or the reverse-women lack the killer-instinct and masculine skills to survive in top positions).
A
recent HBR blog found that although men account for nearly two-thirds of all leaders, the data Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman collected suggests female bosses may be outperforming their male counterparts. Women were rated higher than men by peers, bosses, workers and direct reports, with the most senior female business leaders being ranked a full 10 percentage points higher than the top male CEOs. What were these “good-leadership” traits? Examples include taking initiative, driving for results, and displaying high integrity and honesty.
We should no longer claim these traits to be “masculine.” They indicate traits of a good leader regardless of
gender.
And, no matter how many books or articles declare feminine qualities as essential to corporate success, traits such as compassion, insight and nurturing must be balanced with the stronger traits mentioned above. Even companies that want these more collaborative traits in their employees
still only promote people into upper management positions if they demonstrate they are confident, assertive and can speak with both brevity and clarity.
5. Women don’t support each other in the workplace.
Yes women do bad things to each other ranging from ignoring people, to outright backstabbing. I question if only women do this. I have experienced men who do this as well. I believe this type of behavior reflects the lack of trust in the corporate culture more than the habits of gender.
On the other hand, I know lots of
women who give their time and energy to mentor other women and to create opportunities for women to help each other inside and outside of the workplace. I would love for people to quit perpetuating the “cat-fighting” myth.
You can help make this myth go away when you quit repeating a related myth: I don’t have time to make friends at work. Friends open doors and connect you with other people. They also can talk with you and sometimes just be silent with you when work is overwhelming or discouraging. Coaches, mentors, and colleagues can provide critical eyes to help you stay on track. Biologically, when you socially connect with others, you activate the brain regions that improve health and increase creativity.
Take time to create your positive conspiracy of change. The more women stand together to remove these myths, the better off we all will be.
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.
by Dana Theus | Dec 19, 2024 | Coaching Advice, People Skills
Key Takeaways:
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Conflict Management Starts with Perspective: Recognizing and naming differing perspectives in a conflict can be the first step toward resolution.
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The “Right vs. Right” Principle: Understanding that each side in a conflict is often protecting something valuable can help in finding common ground.
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Acknowledgment Diffuses Tension: Truly acknowledging each party’s concerns can reduce defensiveness and open the door to constructive dialogue.
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Unpacking Emotional Baggage: Separating personal grievances from the core issues can clarify the real points of contention.
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Inner Work Enhances Leadership: Addressing your own emotional triggers can make conflict management tools more effective.
In my consulting and coaching practice, I often have to manage tricky meeting and conflict management dynamics and coach my clients to do the same. As I’ve mentioned before, many of my secrets are on Amazon.com in the simple and powerful principles of “The PRIMES” by Chris McGoff. These powerful principles can help anyone become a stronger leader, whether it’s your meeting going haywire or someone else’s.
Full disclosure: I helped McGoff edit “The PRIMES.” I’m a fan for a reason. This stuff really works!
Often when conflict arises in a meeting, you can manage it by seeing how the two sides are unable to appreciate each other’s perspective. Once you can see the divide, you can name it and as you name it, they begin to see it too. When you verbalize distinctions so others can see them more clearly, the conflict often clears up. But sometimes, just pointing out perspectives isn’t enough to actually resolve the conflict — it’s only step one. When this is the case, you need to deploy deeper conflict-resolution skills.
I gave an example of conflict management in a previous post and how the Big Hat-Little Hat PRIME was in play. In another meeting I attended with my client arecently, the accounting folks were championing a “big hat” perspective — working to protect the company’s broader interests in maintaining a uniform accounts receivable policy. This contrasted to the product team’s “little hat” perspective — where they were championing the narrower interests of a few beta customers who didn’t want to pay for a service that wasn’t working yet.
Naming these perspectives didn’t clear up the conflict, though it did diffuse it a bit. To bring the meeting to a satisfactory conclusion my client had to deploy a deeper principle.
The Power Of Acknowledgement
When naming the perspectives in a meeting works and moves the meeting to more productive direction, it’s because naming the two sides actually begins to invoke a deeper principle that McGoff calls Right vs. Right. This deeper principle recognizes that in most arguments, the energy driving the conflict is the simple need for each side to feel that the most important thing they are trying to protect is heard, acknowledged and appreciated.
As soon as the combatants feel their deepest point has been truly acknowledged, a lot of the angry wind falls out of their sails, and even if it doesn’t all dissipate, everyone else in the room gets a clearer view of the true challenges that must be managed. Right vs. Right conflict cannot be “won,” it can only be managed. Once everyone realizes this, things move forward more smoothly.
This principle honors the fact that everyone in an argument is working to protect something “right and good.” Even if they are doing a bad job of identifying what that is, when the “right and good” thing they want to protect is surfaced, everyone can appreciate it more clearly. When the group can acknowledge the “right” thing each side is advocating, then leader can guide the group into a productive problem-solving dialog that seeks to manage this collision of “right and good” interests.
In the example above, the accounting department’s “right” thing was the fact that uniform accounting standards allow for efficiencies in processing the financial lifeblood of the company and build in principles of fairness in how the company deals with customers. These are right and good objectives.
Despite the way the accounting team heard the argument, the product team wasn’t arguing for an exception because they wanted to create inefficiencies. Their “right” thing was an interest in maintaining a strong relationship with an important customer base using a beta product. They recognized that when the product isn’t working, insisting on payment is likely to damage the customer trust that the company is working so hard to establish during the (often painful-by-necessity) beta process.
To move the group towards productive resolution, my client had to actually name both the “right and good” aspects of this discussion — accounting efficiency and fairness vs. customer trust-building and relationship — and specifically point out that neither of these perspectives was wrong. Both perspectives were important to the company’s success. She then tasked the people in the meeting with managing the two right perspectives in the discussion instead of trying to make someone on the other side wrong. The meeting concluded with an agreement to develop an accounting exception policy that would honor beta customers’ unique experience and allow for payment requests when the product was functioning to meet their needs.
Managing Baggage
Broken down like this example, the two “rights” can seem rather obvious, but many of us are not very skilled at unbundling the “right thing” we are championing and distinguishing it from the baggage we carry. The baggage often becomes even harder to unbundle because it’s all tangled up with relationship dysfunctions we might have had with the individuals or teams on the other side of our arguments. Sometimes we go into a meeting about accounts receivable policies without having put aside resentment about how the revenue-recognition debate ended last quarter. Before you know it, the two “right” issues at the core of the present argument are confused in our minds — and everyone else’s — and the argument is completely out of control.
Using tools like Big Hat-Little Hat and Right vs. Right are powerful ways to manage these kind of meeting dynamics, move past baggage and initiate productive discussions. In some cases, one of the “rights” at issue has to do with baggage, and Right vs. Right will help you unveil the old baggage without making anyone “wrong,” thereby avoiding teeing off the old argument again.
Sometimes, these conflict management tools aren’t enough to manage other people’s baggage because you have some of your own. When your own baggage triggers you, do some inner work on yourself and you’ll be surprised to see how these tools become ten times more impactful almost immediately. (Our inner selves are just that powerful!)
You don’t have to be leading the meeting for these techniques to be effective — anyone can do this. I had a senior executive client come to me last week aglow because in a joint venture meeting she’d attended (but not chaired) she’d used the Right vs. Right principle to bridge a conflict between partners, turning a 3-year-old argument into a productive discussion in less than 30 minutes.
This post originally appeared on SmartBlog on Leadership. For more insights and tools to help you become a great leader, check out our InPower Leadership Program.
InPower Women’s Mastermind
We don’t Mastermind your business. We Mastermind YOU!
by Dana Theus | Dec 17, 2024 | Coaching Advice, Insights & Inspiration
Key Takeaways:
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Leadership Begins Within: InPowered Leadership emphasizes that true leadership starts with self-awareness and inner strength, enabling leaders to navigate challenges with authenticity and purpose.
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Embracing Reality Over Idealism: This approach encourages leaders to confront the present moment without fear, focusing on actionable steps to create meaningful change.
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Purpose-Driven Action: Leaders are guided by a deep sense of trust and purpose, aligning daily objectives with a higher mission to inspire and motivate their teams.
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Effective Group Dynamics: InPowered Leaders excel at facilitating group processes, fostering collaboration, and managing energy to achieve shared goals and outcomes.
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Sustained Personal Power: By maintaining personal integrity and autonomy, InPowered Leaders navigate organizational dynamics without compromising their core values.
The cohort of leaders who will reclaim leadership to achieve great things in the world won’t succeed out of idealism, an extreme sense of perfection or personal heroism. We will succeed because we see ourselves and the world for what is and because we master the ability to motivate groups we lead to access their full power to create transformative outcomes.
InPower Leaders derive our power from within ourselves first and foremost, owning who we are and freeing ourselves to be at choice and at cause in the world, regardless of our external circumstances. We move through the world with intention and trust, taking what is and working with it productively. With such clarity and perspective we excel at group process and choose our own actions purposefully to manage relationships, energy and intention in ways that make our teams powerful too. With powerful and purpose-driven teams alongside us, InPower Leaders advocate and create organizations, movements and cultures that unfold amazing change in the world.
Recognizing InPower Leaders Among Us
InPower Leaders come in all forms, business managers, nonprofit directors, PTA presidents and everything in between, including women in leadership. What characterizes them is not the role they play but the way they play it. Here are some dead giveaways that you’re dealing with an InPower Leader.
- They know reality but do not let fear inform their actions when living in it.
- They are driven by a sense of trust and purpose, pursuing a higher goal through the specific objectives of their day-to-day efforts.
- They work with what shows up and do not waste energy in judgment and attachment.
- They are effective at achieving group agreement and shared intent.
- They are masters at managing group energy towards shared goals.
- They create form and culture in the world, which allows amazing things to become possible.
- Their standard of success is their own, persisting in bringing the gifts of failure and success forward into each successive effort.
The External Trappings of Power
Some InPower Leaders have the external trappings of power – title, authority, financial reward – but many do not. InPower Leaders recognize that if we accept someone else’s external power symbol by giving up our own self-directed leadership abilities, we give our personal power away. We understand this potential paradox of being “in power,” which is that too many sacrifice their own personal power to be “in power” in the world.
InPower Leaders choose to stay in their personal power. We may accept external power symbols to help us achieve our goals, but we do not become beholden to them and stand prepared to give them back in order to retain what is ours. InPower Leaders persist beyond any job, project or organization.
Achieving InPower Leadership Is Yours The Moment You Claim It
InPower Leadership is accessible to us all. It is a way of being in the world, not an achievement in itself. Each step we take in our power is its own achievement and every skill gained on the path of gathering our power back to us (for we’ve all given much of it away), is the path of success.
Don’t expect it to be easy if you’re looking for external support. The world does not necessarily think it wants to change and there are plenty of people who don’t want us in our power, because they perceive our success to be their failure. Don’t buy into that either/or mentality. That game only matters if you let it.
Your power is living inside you at this very moment. Celebrate your strength to lead and change the world that you were born with and take your next action – and every other one after that – in your own personal power.
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.
by Dana Theus | Dec 15, 2024 | Coaching Advice, Employee Engagement, Leadership
Key Takeaways:
- Coaching Leadership Style Empowers Teams: Instead of providing all the answers, coaching leaders guide their team members to find solutions, fostering independence and confidence.
- Focus on Development Over Control: This leadership style emphasizes developing others’ capabilities rather than micromanaging, leading to a more engaged and competent team.
- Encourages Accountability: By promoting self-reflection and responsibility, coaching leaders help individuals take ownership of their actions and outcomes.
- Builds Trust and Collaboration: Open communication and mutual respect are hallmarks of coaching leadership, creating a supportive and collaborative work environment.
- Adapts to Individual Needs: Coaching leaders recognize that each team member is unique and tailor their approach to support individual growth and development.
The more authority you gain in an organization, the more you realize that your greatest impact results from growing other leaders rather than simply making decisions and doing things yourself. This basic dynamic of leadership isn’t always obvious to those with less authority. When you don’t have it, authority looks like power. When you have it, you know you’ll never have enough authority or power to solve all the problems that have landed on your shoulders. When leaders come to this realization, I usually gear up my executive coaching services to help them develop their own Coaching Leadership Style. Generally we begin by getting clear on what is (and isn’t) Coaching Leadership, and debunk some common myths about leadership along the way.
What is a Coaching Leadership Style?
Your leadership style essentially refers to patterns in the way you typically deal with things. If people who are late with assignments regularly receive an angry blast from you, you have an angry leadership style and “don’t suffer fools.” If you take on disagreements and work to develop consensus, you have a mediation leadership style and “don’t shy away from conflict.” If you give out assignments with more vision than instruction and provide input while they achieve success, you have a coaching leadership style. Coaching employees is like coaching a baseball team, you stand on the sidelines, lead in the creation of strategies and pray a lot on the sidelines when the team is on the field executing the strategies.
The sports analogy does break down at certain points, of course, but it is essentially valid. When you’re coaching others, even if you could do their job, you choose not to. You choose to give them the experience of working through problems, gathering information, deciding what to do and (as much as possible) living with the results. You don’t do this because you’re lazy. You do it to help them become more capable leaders. You do it to learn what their capabilities are, so you know how and when to rely on them in the future. You do it so you can trust them to manage the details of their areas so you can focus on other areas where less capable leaders are in charge.
Coaching leadership can be either formal or informal, depending on the person and the organization. Personally I encourage all my clients to develop a comfort level with this style of leadership so they can decide when and where to use it most effectively.
Myth #1: Good leaders always know the answer
I have one client who has to stave off a panic attack whenever her team comes to her expecting her to solve their problems, especially if she doesn’t know the answer. She intellectually knows she shouldn’t do their jobs for them, but she’s emotionally petrified that if she doesn’t answer their questions, they’ll think she’s full of hot air. She fears they’ll lose respect for her. Their requests for her to solve their problems trigger her imposter syndrome and the mere fact that she’s not all-knowing is enough to upset her to the point of anxiety.
Part of her challenge is an irrational fear of being disliked. She’s worried that if she sends them away to resolve their own issues, they won’t like her and her natural desire to please becomes triggered also. With this mass of triggers, it’s hard for her to take the necessary steps back to see the best solution in the moment. Coaching isn’t always the best option for every problem — especially when the stakes are high — so you need to have the ability to get perspective before stepping into coach.
Over our time working together, my client has become better at detriggering her anxieties so she can see her choices more clearly. But even when she’s emotionally focused, she fights the urge to be the hero and solve the problems. Most good leaders are good problem-solvers, which is how they got where they are, so it can seem counterintuitive to let others solve challenging business puzzles, especially if it means letting them fail occasionally in order to develop. With less triggered emotions and more experience coaching others to success, my client is learning how to step back and decide in each situation whether to coach or solve. When she chooses to coach, she’s better now at letting others succeed (and sometimes fail) in order to learn important lessons of their own.
This tension between solving the problem and letting others solve it isn’t only relevant in a coaching leadership situation, but to be effective in deploying a coaching leadership style it’s a challenge you must become adept at managing. You’ll be a better coach leader if you’re comfortable with allowing others to be uncomfortable. In discomfort is where the biggest growth can occur. So letting others struggle with a problem you could easily solve yourself can take some getting used to. I’ll tell you this, however, the first time they come out of their discomfort with a better solution than you would have come up with, it might be even more disconcerting! So get ready to learn a few things yourself!
Save them from taking the hard road and you may miss out on a new path to success
Myth #2: Good leaders have “a style”
Consistency in leadership style, just like parenting and being a good friend, is valuable. It’s important that people be able to predict (within reason) how you’ll respond when they reach out for help. That said, too much consistency can be a liability for leaders, because different situations require different kinds of responses. For example, when time is short effective leaders don’t start broad, consensus-generating decision processes if they want to make a timely decision. Conversely, when they have the luxury of time, good leaders engage a broad range of employees to contribute to a collaborative decision-making process. Excellent leaders learn to develop consensus in short periods of time.
The point is that capable leaders develop multiple styles that they can deploy easily in different circumstances and with different groups of people. Research has shown that developing a good sense of when to lead in what way can actually contribute to your positional and financial success. This makes sense. Like a like an offensive squad in a football game, if you only have one play you’ll lose when you have to face a defense who’s figured it out. You need a full book of plays and a team trained to use them all.
A Coaching Leadership style is one tool in your playbook. It’s not always the best approach. Particularly when the risk is high and you’re not willing (or able) to pay the cost of failure, consider putting your coaching hat on the bench. At times like these it’s appropriate to jump into the game yourself.
However, I do advise you to stop and think twice before getting on the field. As I said above, if you’re a good leader you’re probably also a good problem-solver. You like to get your hands dirty and this can lead you to create situations where you believe it’s always appropriate for you to jump in and do the work. Be strategic and, where you can, create at least as many situations where your presence on the field isn’t necessary.
Myth #3: Coaching someone means giving up control
Some clients have told me they struggle to get off the field and be content coaching others because it makes them feel vulnerable. They believe it’s their job to produce results and when they hand over control to others so they can play the role of coach, they’re anxious and uncomfortable. Even those skilled in delegating can fall prey to this fear because unlike delegating specific tasks, coaching requires that you give people more room to decide how the work gets done. Coaching a team member means you give them a clear sense of the end goal, the what, and let them explore multiple ways to get there.
If you hand over complete control to others over things that are (a) important and (b) in your area of responsibility, you should feel anxious! That’s not how leadership works. Having a coaching leadership style means that you mete out responsibility to others within limits and use these boundaries to retain an appropriate amount of control. As they do the work within the boundaries you establish, you’re there with advice and guidance. These coaching leadership boundaries look like:
- Deadlines
- Budgets
- Resources
You establish deadlines and then you hold them accountable. You give and take projects away as rewards for work well done. You give advice instead of making decisions, but you do it in the context of project boundaries that establish the limits on their control, which are sub-limits of your own span of control.
Some coaching leaders get into trouble with this approach by not allowing enough time for mistakes and learning. Even if you’re good at predicting how much time a particular project might take, you may not be as good at predicting how many mistakes will have to be made (and made up for) along the way when someone else is in charge of the day-to-day process of doing the work. A good rule of thumb here, stolen from the project manager’s handbook, is to double your estimate. If you think you could do the work in a week, plan two weeks when someone else is doing it to give you time to coach them along the way. If you don’t have the luxury of two weeks, and aren’t sure of your coachee’s abilities, maybe that project isn’t the best one to coach them through. Use your judgement; that’s what you’re getting paid to do.
Coach others through the work and you’ll gain a more strategic perspective yourself. <=CLICK TO TWEET
The bottom line is that by developing a coaching leadership style you’ll be able to develop your team to take on greater challenges, expand your own impact (through them) and step back more often from the day-to-day. A great byproduct of this leadership style is that doing it regularly helps train you to see the larger perspective. By stepping out of the weeds, you become practiced at the treetop view. You learn to see new patterns and gain strategic insights you don’t really have the opportunity to experience when you’re in the scrum. Best of all, unlike a sports coach, you can choose to jump back into the fray from time to time when the situation calls for it. It does take intention and guidance to accomplish, of course, so make sure you have mentors and coaches to back you up, too!
FREE EBOOK
Coaching Tips:
How to Avoid the Most Common Career Mistakes
by Guest Author | Dec 13, 2024 | Coaching Advice, Personal Mastery
Key Takeaways:
- Get Comfortable with Chaos: Embracing chaos as a natural part of life can reduce stress and open doors to growth.
- Use Your Voice: Assertively expressing your needs and offerings fosters connection and agency.
- Find Your Community: Building supportive networks provides strength and resilience during turbulent times.
- Run Some Experiments: Trying new approaches in chaotic situations can lead to innovative solutions.
- Play: Incorporating playfulness into challenges can enhance creativity and reduce stress.
So much stress results from our sense of chaos. Most of us are not comfortable with chaos, and we need to be! When we feel out of control we tense up, releasing all that stress-hormone confusion into our body and brain. Lex reminds us that a certain amount of chaos is inevitable. When we get used to it, it can actually help us get ahead. – InPower Editors
By: Lex Shroeder
I don’t know anyone who enjoys chaos. Most of us don’t go seeking it out, we aren’t thrilled to encounter it. Even for those of us who have a track record of shaking things up (or who want very much to shake things up one way or another), chaos can be a deeply uncomfortable thing. Still, we know it’s inevitable sometimes and often essential to any real meaningful change and growth.
One of my favorite “power tools” in No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Must Change the Way We Think About Power is “Carpe the Chaos.” I love this principle because it’s very difficult to put into practice, but—I imagine because she has the longview of history after many years of activism—Gloria Feldt approaches this idea with playfulness… with a carpe and an exclamation point! and a very real challenge to women to not only trust that chaos can be good, but watch our own response so we can keep learning how to work with it more effectively… with more ease and less struggle.
In this spirit, here are five ways I’ve learned to carpe the chaos, either when I stir things up myself or stumble upon it in a system.
Unsure how to manage the anxiety some of these strategies bring up? Learn to detrigger yourself.
Learn how to surf
Some of the best advice I ever received about work was, “Listen, you just have to learn how to surf.” You might think, for example, you’re supposed to stay on the straight path in your career or in a particular situation, but you actually need to take a hard left. When this happens, you can fight fight fight, or you can stretch yourself and go with the current. Who cares if you don’t know the outcome! It will almost always be better than not listening to the water around you, insisting you know a better way, or giving in to fear. Learning how to surf is especially important when it comes to movement building. The waters run deep, there are plenty of storms, there are so many different actors all trying to work together (or not work together) at once.
Use your voice
In my work with groups and organizations, and in my own life, I try to use a simple practice: Offer what you can, ask for what you need. The beauty of this is that it’s contagious. In any area of your life if you go around doing this, people tend to respond in kind. So many women leaders tell young women Use your voice! but it isn’t easy to do in many of the environments we find ourselves in. As Gloria Feldt says, “Women are more likely to engage, or be engaged by, not screeching vehicular feats of daring, but rather equally intense though too often silent tests of their personal agency.” Asking for what you need and offering what you can provides a light structure to this vague idea of using one’s voice.
Find your community
Whether it’s thinking more deeply about where our food comes from and organizing farmers markets, or starting local entrepreneurship chapters to support each other in building new businesses that pay a living wage, or creating new platforms for connection online, I am convinced that we are relearning how to do community all over again. Community and connection have always been crucial to movements for social progress throughout history and will continue to be essential to the movement for parity by 2025.
Run some experiments
When things feel chaotic, many of us get quiet, do nothing, and wait for the storm to pass. Sometimes this is wise, other times it gets us into more trouble because it reinforces a pattern we don’t want to reinforce. In the midst of chaos is opportunity. When we don’t know what to do next, we have a chance to try something new and introduce new patterns. Of course it takes courage, but courage is another one of those beautiful words worth putting into practice.
Play
As Ellen Lempereur Greaves from the Life is good Kids Foundation reminded me recently, play is not just about being “positive” all of the time. Like any good actor, musician, or artist will tell you, it’s much more about creating space for new learning than keeping everybody happy. How are you rigid in your approach to change-making? How might you be more playful? Also, dancing is generally a good idea.
How do you carpe the chaos in your work and life?
Break Free from Emotional Triggers
Free eCourse
When you’re emotionally triggered, your reactions to stressful situations (and people) feel out of control.
All the stress reduction in the world can’t help you if your emotional triggers are in charge.
These 3 lessons will get you back in the driver’s seat.
Lex Schroeder is a writer and speaker on mindful work, leadership, and systems change. She is an advisor with Take The Lead, an editor at The Lean Enterprise Institute, and a host with the Art of Hosting community of practice. Lex lives in NYC and works in NYC and Cambridge, Mass. She can be reached at lexwrites@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @lexschroeder.
This post about becoming comfortable with chaos originally appeared on Take The Lead. Take The Lead prepares, develops, inspires and propels women to take their fair and equal share of leadership positions across all sectors by 2025. It is today’s women’s movement – a unique catalyst for women to embrace power and reach leadership parity.
Updated. Originally posted June 2015
InPower Women’s Mastermind
We don’t Mastermind your business. We Mastermind YOU!
by Dana Theus | Dec 11, 2024 | Insights & Inspiration, Personal Mastery
Key Takeaways:
- Intentions help cut through overwhelm: When the chaos of daily life clouds your vision, setting clear intentions brings perspective, helping you distinguish what truly matters.
- Intentions activate your intuitive mind: Instead of relying solely on logic, engaging your right brain through intentions gives your inner wisdom a seat at the decision-making table.
- Intentions clarify priorities: Visualizing your future state as if it’s already true helps your intuitive self guide your rational brain to focus on what must happen first—naturally sorting your to-do list.
- Intentions offer calm and concentration: With one clear intention in place, your mind relaxes. You’re able to focus fully, allowing the noise of everything else to temporarily fade.
- Intentions create progress one step at a time: By choosing just one meaningful intention a day, you reclaim your sense of agency and satisfaction, gradually navigating out of overwhelm.
Overwhelmed? Try setting intentions. Set ONE THING as your intention to achieve by the end of the day and be satisfied when you achieve it. Do this every day.
Overwhelm results from a lack of distinction. When you’re flying over the forest the gullies, fallen trees and open spaces are clear. It’s easy to chart a path. But when you’re in the thick of it, weeds tickling your cheek, you can’t see the obstacles until they’re blocking your way. Every step is overwhelming because you don’t have the perspective to see the distinctions that would help you chart an easier course. Setting intentions can help.
We can’t always fly up to see the territory ahead as clearly as we’d like. Our information is imperfect and the future is a moveable target, but most of us leave a key tool in our toolkit untapped. We ask our left brains to figure out as much as they can to guide us, but we let our right brains go unused. We don’t ask our “knowing” self for advice often enough.
This is too bad. Our intuitive right brain has powerful skills to help us prioritize how we spend our time and energy, even when the future is unclear. We can use intentions to activate our intuitive skills to help us.
Intentions tap our right brain knowing skills fluidly and easily, helping us create distinctions that immediately begin to prioritize the mess of tasks and opportunities in front of us.
Intentions result from an intuitive state and when your successful future state is clear in your mind, as though you’d already achieved it, everything overwhelming you begins to come into prioritized focus very quickly. Before you know it your intuitive self will begin to show your rational brain that in order for your intention to be true, some other things must become true first. Your rational mind begins to calm down and focus on the priorities that make the rest of it possible. Intentions allow you to relax, concentrate and let everything else recede for a while, until they become critical to your intention.
Intention allows you to focus on what’s in front of you without worrying about the rest of it. All that other stuff will still be there when you’ve achieved your intention, though some of it may have simply fallen off your list.
Worklife Reset for an Energized, Authentic Personal Brand
Workbook & Toolkit
Feeling like you need to hit the reset button on your job, career or business?
This uplifting 8-step process will help you find meaning, motivation and momentum in your career and work
by Dana Theus | Dec 9, 2024 | Gender Research, InPower Women Blog, Women in Leadership
Key Takeaways:
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The Battle of the Sexes in Leadership: Traditional leadership models often favor masculine traits, but modern perspectives recognize the value of integrating both masculine and feminine qualities for effective leadership.
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Desirable Leadership Traits: Studies indicate that qualities such as connectedness, humility, empathy, and flexibility are increasingly valued in leaders, challenging the conventional emphasis on assertiveness and decisiveness.
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Gender Disparities in Leadership: Despite the recognition of diverse leadership qualities, women remain underrepresented in top leadership positions, with only a small percentage holding CEO roles in major companies.
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The Need for Balanced Leadership: Organizations benefit from leaders who can balance assertiveness with empathy, and decisiveness with collaboration, leading to more inclusive and effective leadership.
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Empowering Women in Leadership: Supporting women to embrace a full spectrum of leadership traits, without being confined to traditional gender roles, can enhance their confidence and effectiveness as leaders.
I recently saw Iron Man III with my family and it was a good time. Bad guys. Good guys. Destruction. Even a humble pie big enough to go around. As I enjoyed the pyrotechnics and good-guy triumph, however, I was reminded of how completely our comic books reinforce the most unhelpful of bad boy leadership stereotypes.
In the three-part saga of Iron Man, Tony Stark is the lovable cad. The Hamletesque heir to the throne, who takes his place as King by killing off his crown-aspiring Uncle through brute force – in robot suits. The arrogant-but-brilliant, unstoppable and always-victorious hero, he runs a multi-billion dollar global corporation into, and out of, a financial nose-dive through sheer intellect and hutzpah while personally defeating terrorists and saving the planet from aliens. Of course he gets the girls, all of them. Spoiler alert – so that he doesn’t appear inhuman, in this final installment Tony suffers and survives the modern wounds of anxiety attacks, while saving the President of the United States from a fireball crucifixion of death.
It sounds comical written out this way because it is, but ask yourself, how many leaders do you know who aspire on some level to a leadership model of personal heroism that justifies bad behavior and unhealthy risk-taking? Delusions of grandeur included, a less comical but equally unrealistic vision of leader-as-hero is operating in our business culture.
This is too bad because it’s not what the people of the world want.
Literally, 32,000 of them were asked, and they pretty much said, “We’re done with that guy in the real world.” Thus ensues a battle of the sexes for dominance over modern leadership values.
What People Want
You may not have heard of this study yet, because it arrived on the wings of a Goddess. The Athena Doctrine (Jossey-Bass, April, 2013) summarizes two years of research conducted by John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio on their research panel of 64,000 people in 13 countries. The authors made their name in 2010 by finding that global spending patterns were shifting fundamentally after the 2008 financial crisis. The research behind The Athena Doctrine, conducted with the same research base, shows that in addition to spending differently, people want a different kind of leadership in the halls of power.
Not only does the modern alternative hero NOT look like Tony Stark, in a twist sure to puzzle Superman when he comes out this summer, it doesn’t even look male.
Gerzema and D’Antonio followed a hypothesis that the world’s population was tiring of paternalistic leadership styles, which it associates with delivering little more than scandal, gridlock and a shaky-at-best economy. They questioned 32,000 people to find out what characteristics people thought were inherently masculine and feminine, and then they asked another 32,000 people to rank the qualities of the ideal leader. According to 64,000 people, more than half the characteristics of the ideal leader are “feminine” – here are the top ten “feminine” leadership qualities of the ideal leader.
- Connectedness -Form/maintain human connections
- Humility – Listening, learning, sharing credit
- Candor – Willingness to speak openly and honestly
- Patience – Recognize that some solutions emerge slowly
- Empathy – Sensitivity to others that promotes understanding
- Trustworthiness – Track record and character that inspires confidence
- Openness – Being receptive to all people and concepts
- Flexibility – Ability to change and adapt as circumstances require
- Vulnerability – The courage to be human and make mistakes
- Balance – A well rounded sense of purpose
What’s really going on here? Are global citizens become reverse-sexists? Hardly. Unfortunately the percentage of women in leadership has barely budged in the last 10 years (roughly 15%, except CEOs, which is 4% in the U.S.). Other stats that speak to our cultural regard for women, such as rates of sexual and domestic violence, remain frighteningly high. No, the people of the world really have a simple request.
The secret sauce that people so desperately seek in their leaders is nothing more than emotional intelligence.
So ask yourself and the women and men you work with, what could we accomplish if we left our heroes at the comic store and decided that in the real world of leadership, it’s time to grow up?
Watch the video of John Gerzema discussing the results of this study.
Rewriting the narrative on women and power
by Dana Theus | Dec 7, 2024 | Corporate Culture, Leadership
Key Takeaways:
- Employee Engagement Requires Two-Way Communication: True employee engagement is not just about top-down directives; it thrives on authentic, two-way conversations between managers and employees.
- Policies Should Facilitate Personalized Work Approaches: Organizations should review policies to ensure they allow managers the flexibility to negotiate work approaches that accommodate individual employee needs, fostering deeper engagement.
- Metrics Must Reflect Quality and Enable Meaningful Decisions: Tracking metrics should focus on quality output and empower managers to make decisions that enhance employee engagement, rather than merely measuring activity.
- Managers Play a Crucial Role in Engagement: Managers must be equipped and incentivized to engage in meaningful dialogues with employees, addressing their concerns and aligning work responsibilities with individual goals.
- Engagement Is a Continuous Effort: Organizations should move beyond one-time initiatives and focus on creating an environment where ongoing, authentic engagement is the norm, leading to sustained employee satisfaction and retention.
As the job market gets tighter for employers in the ongoing wake of The Great Resignation, the watch word to mitigate staff turnover is employee engagement. Employee engagement has been a hot topic in Human Resource (HR) circles for the last decade as research continually shows strong correlations between engaged employees and business results. This strong business case encouraged many companies and consultants to launch employee engagement initiatives, and thanks to this focus, engagement trends recently hit a ten-year high of 36% (which still isn’t that high).
This upward trajectory stalled abruptly last summer, in alignment with The Great Resignation, and employee engagement began declining for the first time in a decade. Between May and August 2021 the number of employed people looking for a new job nearly doubled, to 65%.
Why are the employee engagement gains made over the last decade so vulnerable to the dynamics of The Great Resignation?
Talking to clients at all organizational levels about what drives them away from their employers, I see a pattern I think reveals a dirty little secret in many of these employee engagement programs, which is that many have nothing to do with engagement at all. Often what passes for engagement is little more than “employee communications,” and employee communications is not the same as employee engagement.
The secret to employee engagement
The secret to employee engagement lies in the word “engagement”, which indicates two-way communication and interaction between employees and their managers. Yet, too many employment agreements (overt and otherwise) don’t foster actual engagement because they operate as though the employer-employee relationship is one-way. I call this more typical approach the disengagement model of one-way employee relations.
The dirty little secret hiding in many corporate investments in engaging employees–the thing that makes the outcomes in these programs so fragile–is that not enough managers (as the representative of the company) are skilled, incented or willing to do the work necessary to engage in a two-way exchange on work responsibilities, practices, compensation and culture.
And these are the primary issues employees care about.
The typical one-way “engagement” model follows a more industrial, cog-in-the-wheel, approach to human resources. The disengagement model finds the manager (on behalf of the company) telling the employee what to do and then providing feedback when they don’t do it right (this is often called a performance review.) When the employee has a contrary opinion, it usually falls on the deaf ears of company policy or uncaring management. In more extreme cases employee opinions become a complaint, with the burden of proof generally weighing down on the employee.
The employee is at a decided disadvantage in this kind of employer relationship and their primary leverage if they don’t want to, or can’t, fit into the round hole allocated to them, is to leave.
Not every employer is this employee-unfriendly, but a friendly employer is judged a “good egg” in comparison to the typical, disengaged employer. In this employee-friendly market, many companies are making the effort to accommodate workers’ square edges by developing more flexible work approaches, which is great, but I don’t know if these more enlightened policies will be enough to impact disengagement numbers at scale since employee issues are as individual and unique as the employees themselves. Company policies can only go so far to accommodate individual employee needs, and then they have to rely on the managers to help employees navigate the individual fit with the work that needs to be done.
Sadly, I believe managers are often the weak link in creating real, authentic, two-way dialog with employees. Most employees are lucky if their manager ever has a development conversation with them, inquiring about their own goals. And even fewer find supervisors willing to reconfigure work responsibilities to help achieve them. This reconfiguration and accommodation is the “two-way” aspect of engagement that too rarely takes place.
In fact, I’d suggest that to achieve true engagement employers, managers and employees would all do better to recognize that they are in constant negotiation with each other to balance the tension between what the employee wants and finds meaningful and what the organization needs and is willing to pay for. As a negotiation, both sides must recognize the right to request as well as the need to compromise. And neither side can become complacent as needs and wants change for both people and organizations.
For employee-manager engagement to become more successful, then, how can the parties become better negotiation partners?
How managers can engage employees
Generating an authentic, two-way supervisory relationship with employees is pretty straightforward, however, most managers miss the critical piece. They are more than willing to tell employees what they must do to change, but they are typically less willing to make accommodations and institute changes themselves that adapt the work, and team, for the employee’s benefit.
Many managers make the unfounded assumption that accommodating an employee request is setting an inappropriate example, or that it requires them to do whatever the employee requests. The beauty of a true negotiation is that both parties make accommodations and, in order to get more of what they want, they are both willing to give something up.
Managers also often miss the fact that the best solution won’t always be bilateral, between the manager and the employee, but may involve other team members. While it may be hard to create the flexibility to reconfigure one person’s job, within the boundaries of what others do, reconfiguring the teams responsibilities, and roles on the team more generally, opens up other opportunities to help everyone on the team find the right fit.
The keys to a real, manager-led employee engagement negotiation on roles and responsibilities that meet employee and employer needs include:
- Deep listening (reserving judgement to hear) to identify what all parties truly want and need
- Openness to accomplishing top priorities in new ways
- Flexibility and accommodation
- Relentless focus on aligning everyone’s vision of what success looks like
- Willingness to invest time and resources into helping employees develop and grow
- Agreement on accountability practices
- Regular review and adjustments
At the end of the day, the manager must recognize that both the people and the work are evolving, and that their role is to keep these changes in alignment as much as possible.
How employees can engage managers
What if you’re the employee and your boss isn’t this enlightened? For an employee, it can be quite daunting to initiate a process to renegotiate your job responsibilities and/or practices with your boss. But if you still find value in your work, and can see yourself succeeding in your organization, it’s good to make the effort before you give up and leave.
Here are a few keys to success:
- Go into the negotiation with a clear understanding of what you want and what’s important to you
- Have a willingness/backup plan to leave your role if you don’t get enough of what you want and need (though don’t threaten)
- Be open to new possibilities your employer comes up with you haven’t thought of
- Recognize that the employer needs you to produce meaningful results and be sure you understand what these are and deliver what you agree to
- Be willing to grow and develop your skills and approach
Pending contractual commitments to the contrary, you have every right to leave if you’re not happy and fulfilled, but you do need to respect the organization’s need to manage its resources (including you) against its priorities.
How companies can support them both
Companies that truly wish to foster employee engagement must review their policies with an eye towards whether it facilitates true two-way engagement.
- Review whether the policies give managers leeway to negotiate different kinds of work approaches with their employees.
- Evaluate whether tracked metrics relate to quality output and enable meaningful decision making
- Look at how the policies support managers in trying to accommodate employee needs while also keeping them accountable to mission-critical goals.
When the company policies, communications, metrics and incentives enable and facilitate two-way negotiations between managers and employers, the organization can stop spending so much energy talking about employee engagement, and focus more on accomplishing it.
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by Dana Theus | Dec 5, 2024 | Corporate Culture, Featured, InPower Women Blog, Leadership
Key Takeaways:
Executive Mindset as a Leadership Foundation: Developing an executive mindset is crucial for women aiming to break the glass ceiling. It involves thinking strategically, managing both the business and its people, and demonstrating judgment and influence beyond your immediate role.
Overcoming Unconscious Bias: Recognize that the modern glass ceiling is often influenced by unconscious bias. Even with strong sponsors, women may face challenges due to perceptions of cultural fit, highlighting the need for awareness and proactive strategies.
Building Executive Presence: Cultivate an authentic executive presence by aligning your actions with your values and consistently demonstrating confidence, competence, and integrity in all interactions.
Strategic Networking: Expand your influence by building relationships with key stakeholders, mentors, and sponsors who can provide guidance, support, and advocacy for your career advancement.InPower Coaching
Continuous Self-Development: Commit to lifelong learning and self-reflection to adapt to evolving leadership demands, ensuring sustained growth and effectiveness in executive roles.
Discussions of the “glass ceiling,” an invisible barrier to the progression of women (and other underrepresented leaders) from management to the executive ranks, has traditionally focused on discriminatory dynamics. But there’s more to the glass ceiling than discrimination. Executives who make it to the top learn to build an effective executive mindset, demonstrating proficiency in working ON the business in addition to IN the business, and project an authentic executive presence.
The modern glass ceiling is largely a function of unconscious bias
Most executives today think of themselves as tolerant, open and accepting of people who look different than they do and come from diverse backgrounds. They often have a desire to see more diversity in their leadership ranks. And yet, that diversity at the top doesn’t happen often enough. Despite comprising less than 50% of the population, men still hold two to four times the number of senior management positions compared to women, and far more than black professionals of any gender. Despite their stated intentions, it is clear that unconscious bias is at play. This is easiest to parse out when candidates are rejected for the only reason that “they’re not a good cultural fit.” And so, the glass ceiling remains strong.
However, there are many executive groups that do operate in a more diverse and open group dynamic, and yet those who have not made it into the executive ranks yet still feel the solid bump into an invisible barrier that looks and acts like a glass ceiling. What’s happening there?
The modern glass ceiling is about more than discrimination
In my work with female leaders, and working on executive teams myself, I have come to understand that the glass ceiling is more complex than the relatively “straightforward” effects of unconscious bias. Many promising women in leadership I work with have strong senior executive champions and sponsors (some of whom hire me to help these leaders.)
These strong sponsors are critical to any leader’s ascension into the executive suite, but even they cannot help some people get past this other dimension to the glass ceiling. Why? Because receiving an invitation to the executive ranks, and succeeding there, is a rare thing and requires more than smarts and even superior performance. The fact is that there just aren’t that many slots at the top. It is by nature a highly competitive path and what distinguishes someone ready for the executive suite goes beyond proficiency and excellence.
What distinguishes someone as ready for the executive suite goes beyond proficiency and excellence. Via @DanaTheus <==Click to tweet
To invite a high-performing leader up to the top, current executives have to believe the aspiring executive can operate effectively IN the business as well as ON the business, which is what the top leaders must do. Executives who make it past this invisible barrier must prove they can:
- produce business-critical results in their areas of expertise (these are table stakes to join the game)
- strategize business dynamics across disciplines while also contributing directly by managing their own discipline
- have excellent judgement in others they entrust to carry out day-to-day business critical functions, and the ability to coach those leaders effectively
- inspire confidence in employees and investors alike, especially during challenging times
…among other things.
To understand why these additional levels of performance and talent are so critical, it’s important to know that the top level executive team is more than the sum of its parts. Running a business is its own challenge, apart from marketing, operations, product development or any other individual business discipline. By the nature of their jobs, typically the CEO, CFO and COO are the ones who see the business more holistically than other senior leaders. But as CXOs have begun filling out the C-Suite in recent decades, it provides the opportunity for people with specialties in other disciplines to contribute to the synergies of the business at the most strategic level. Candidates for these top slots can be excellent at their own disciplines, and still fail to inspire confidence that they can see and lead the business effectively from this strategic and holistic point of view.
What they lack is what I call an executive mindset, and the skill at knowing when and how to use it.
Executive mindset: flying from the weeds into the treetops across disciplines
Broadly speaking, an executive mindset is a strategic perspective that inherently includes a systemic understanding of:
- The organization’s business model and profitability dynamic
- an understanding of the broader/global market context and trends
- the operational drivers and dependencies within the business
- the needs and desires of all key stakeholders.
This is a “treetops” view of the business and its environment that is impossible to gain if a leader, no matter how capable, has never had accountability outside their core discipline.
This explains why executive development mentoring programs, both formal and informal, seek to put rising leaders into broadening assignments, running operations outside their specific areas of expertise. It’s also why effective executives typically have career-defining accomplishments in more than one discipline. For example, a senior sales executive likely to make it through the glass ceiling to Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) may have negotiated key business partnerships and launched successful product campaigns in addition to blowing out their regional quota year after year. And a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) on her way to CEO may have led a major operations refit or merger integration.
How do they do it?
While each person who makes it to the top has a unique story, one skill consistently appears in their narrative. Top line executives master the ability to operate in the treetops. Looking at the big picture, motivated past obstacles by the vision, undeterred by bushwhacking details; successful executives master the ability to sidestep overwhelm, ferret out key priorities and dip from the treetops to the weeds with a deft skill. Successful executives also gain the ability to determine when a weeds-level intervention is truly warranted on a situationally appropriate basis.
All the ‘executive presence’ in the world won’t help someone succeed as an executive who hasn’t mastered the ability to get out of the weeds. Via @DanaTheus <==Click to tweet
Thus, to excel in higher levels of leadership, and to gain credibility with the executives already operating there, high potential leaders must develop the ability to get “out of the weeds” and operate “in the treetops” with this higher level perspective. They must think, act and speak at this level with confidence and a clear eye on which details matter to the big picture and why.
This isn’t a skill most people have the chance to learn until they reach mid-career positions. Early career professionals inherently focus on developing skills, experiences and accomplishments within their specific field, for example, sales, engineering or finance. Having achieved a certain level of mastery in one or more of these disciplines, they have developed competence managing and leading “in the weeds,” which is good because down in the details of the business (e.g., customer transactions, testing code and financial audits) the devil truly does lurk. However, being effective ferreting out devilish details does not give a person the perspective, exposure and opportunity to see what happens in the weeds in its larger context. A treetops view, puts the weeds (and their details) into perspective.
The glass ceiling is more than a function of discrimination, which it most certainly is. Via @DanaTheus <==Click to tweet
This can be especially challenging because getting into the treetops isn’t always a skill encouraged early in one’s career, so it’s easy to run into the “what got me here won’t get me there” challenge mid-career when most leaders start to target the top.
Challenges for Women in Adopting an Executive Mindset
Do women struggle more to think in strategic, tree-tops-level, ways? No and yes. No, in the sense that once they understand the importance of thinking this way, those who do belong in the executive suite quickly learn to fly up and down the tree trunk as necessary.
And, yes. In my experience more women than men struggle to get their minds around this concept of tree-top level thinking and leading. They don’t struggle because they can’t do it but because they’ve had so few mentors in their life giving them positive reinforcement for being in the treetops.
Here’s what I’d like these women, and their mentors to understand. A professional woman who’s made it to the point in her career where she’s being considered for an executive position has gotten there in large part because she’s mastered the details. She’s worked harder and smarter than many of her colleagues (women and men), she’s cleaned up after other people’s messes and she’s made managing the details a big part of her comfort zone. To go to the treetops, where over-focusing on the details isn’t possible or helpful, often makes these women feel vulnerable and uncertain how to succeed.
Without a strong mentor or coach helping her see that the tree-tops aren’t an alternative to the weedy details, but a new skill set to explore in her stretch zone, many women find it more comfortable to stay in the weeds. They bake their weeds-level proficiency into their personal brand identity. When they deliver awesome results this way and believe they should receive an invitation to the top but feel the bump of the glass instead, they believe they’re being discriminated against.
And maybe they are.
Men are far more likely to receive informal mentoring — and role modeling — that show them the value of tree-tops level thinking. Men are far more likely to feel comfortable letting other people clean up the messy details. And men who want women to join them in the treetops are far more likely to tell women what they shouldn’t do (e.g., “get out of the weeds!”) than what they should do (e.g., “come check out these super cool treetops and learn to fly!”)
There is no simple answer to these dilemmas. But I encourage women seeking executive appointments, and the mentors who want to help them get there, to focus on helping them develop their executive mindset. Help them get comfortable living and leading in the treetops and see what happens.
Photo by Ono Kosuki from Pexels
InPower Women’s Mastermind
We don’t Mastermind your business. We Mastermind YOU!
by Guest Author | Dec 3, 2024 | Communicating With Confidence, InPower Women Blog
Key Takeaways:
Understanding Confidence: Confidence isn’t about perfection; it’s about knowing what to expect and how to handle it. Building confidence involves learning from experiences and practicing responses until you find what works.
Identifying Areas for Growth: Recognize areas where you lack confidence, whether it’s a specific skill or knowledge. This awareness is the first step toward improvement.
Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone: Take deliberate actions that challenge your comfort zone, such as seeking expert feedback, contributing in meetings, or initiating conversations.
Observing Outcomes: Pay attention to the results of your actions, noting both successes and areas for improvement. This reflection helps you build on what works and adjust what doesn’t.
Continuous Practice: Regularly repeat these steps to gradually expand your comfort zone, leading to authentic self-confidence that aligns with your unique leadership style.
Why would anyone follow a leader with no self-confidence? They wouldn’t.
Do women struggle with self-confidence more than men? Yes.
Then why are we surprised when there aren’t as many female leaders as male leaders in our businesses and society? We shouldn’t be.
Now, I know very well that moving women into more leadership positions is a bit more complicated than this and I’m not trying to suggest an easy fix to women’s inequality… but I am saying that for too long women have “bought” the stories society has told us about how we “can’t lead like a man” (which, by the way, research says is true) and that “leading like a woman won’t work” (which, by the way, research says is not true.)
The truth is we can do a lot more ourselves to build our confidence levels that will give us credibility on the leadership track.
Do women actually manage business risk better than men, and personal risk worse? Research says: Yes.
Can we learn to apply this kind of risk-management skill we use so effectively in business to ourselves? Absolutely! – Click To Tweet
(more…)
