by Guest Author | May 29, 2012 | Coaching Advice, Leadership, People Skills
The higher you go, the harder it is to advance because you’re in more competitive territory. You have to stand out and offer something unique. Your best leadership asset at the top is your authentic leadership style — the one that gives you energy instead of draining you and the one that makes you effective at all times with all audiences.
If your authentic leadership style isn’t obvious to everyone who meets you, you have work to do to build your Invisible Resume that helps you land the executive job — and then succeed once you’re there.
In this three-part video series, I’ve covered several diverse aspects of your Invisible Leadership Resume, your global perspective, your leadership presence and, below, your authentic leadership style.
Part III: Build your authentic leadership style (more…)
by Guest Author | May 29, 2012 | Career Development, Coaching Advice
When someone you have worked with, known as a friend, colleague and thought leader writes a book – you buy the book and read it. And then you tell the world about it. That’s what I’m doing with Kristi Hedges and her new book, The Power of Presence: Unlock Your Potential To Influence And Engage Others. My advice to you is to go out and buy it and read it! That’s also why we’re cohosting a webinar tomorrow, to help you beef up your own presence and get it working for you in your career.
Any successful businessperson needs to have a noticeable presence, but women in particular benefit from developing this skill. There’s lots of research that points to the fact that when women stick their nose to the grindstone, get stuff done but don’t ensure others know about their success, their careers suffer. Many of us worry about bragging. What I love about Kristi’s new book is that she provides lots of advice on how to develop an executive presence that helps you gain credibility and influence people in a very authentic way.
How To Establish Presence Without Bragging (more…)
by Téa Blake | May 25, 2012 | Gender Research, InPower Women Blog
Study: Gender, Motivation, and Coping in the Evaluation of Leadership Effectiveness (Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research 1996)
Finding: When women couple non-defensive coping capabilities with high levels of self esteem and confidence, they are seen as more effective leaders.
InPower Insight: To overcome stereotypical expectations in leadership styles, develop your ability to handle outside stresses non-defensively and high self-esteem. (more…)
by Guest Author | May 24, 2012 | Career Development, Coaching Advice
Recently, I’ve seen the term “resilience” applied to everything from real estate, to the economy, sports, current events, business, and more. Resilience is a popular buzzword, but what really is resilience? Most people are able to define it as the ability to bounce back from adversity, but few realize that resilience is made up of a number of different skills and abilities. Self-awareness, creating meaning from life lessons, self-efficacy, optimism, and building strong relationships are a few foundational factors that make up resilience.
Even better, there are easy ways people can build more personal resilience – here are seven of them: (more…)
by Guest Author | May 17, 2012 | Career Development, Coaching Advice
If you’re like most of us, you see people get promoted over your head that are less talented and less capable. This is particularly frustrating when you’re trying to make the tough leap from a management to a leadership position.
What have the folks getting promoted over you learned that maybe you haven’t? That a strong leadership presence is one of the keys to being hired into the executive and C-suite ranks. And that your leadership presence is at the core of your Invisible Resume that helps you land the executive job, and succeed once you’re there.
In this three-part video series, I cover several diverse aspects of your Invisible Leadership Resume, your global perspective and your leadership presence and your authentic leadership style.
Part II: Develop Your Leadership Presence (more…)
by Guest Author | May 17, 2012 | Coaching Advice, Leadership, Personal Mastery
Today’s business environment can be frustrating because we all live with the widely-accepted cultural myths that “someone” can just make a decision that will clear the path for us to get our job done. And yet, the complexity of modern business often puts us in professional situations where no one seems to be able to make a decision – for example, working in matrixed groups where the responsibility for a project is spread between different functional units with “no one in charge.” Often it seems as though the people with the power to make decisions choose not to decide way too often, making our jobs practically impossible and making us feel powerless and out of control.
How can you access power in these situations? I believe that the answer to this question is both a solution to work-induced stress and career success – and it is a fundamental distinction between how managers and leaders operate. (more…)
by Guest Author | May 15, 2012 | Coaching Advice, Leadership, Personal Mastery
Moving from managing to leading is a challenge because the skills that make you a good manager aren’t enough to help you excel in leadership positions. Men and women alike sometimes perceive the gap between managing and leading to be a glass ceiling when, in many cases, it’s not necessarily that at all; it’s a subtle group of skills you must have to be considered for leadership.
Many people who make it into leadership, even the ones who don’t appear to deserve it, have mastered skills that don’t show up on a traditional resume. They have built a strong Invisible Resume that helps them get into — and succeed — in the executive and C-suite ranks
In this three-part video series, I’ll cover several diverse aspects of your Invisible Leadership Resume, your global perspective, your leadership presence and your authentic leadership style. (more…)
by Guest Author | May 10, 2012 | Career Development, Coaching Advice, Leadership
Moving from managing to leading is a challenge because the skills that make you a good manager aren’t enough to help you excel in leadership positions. Men and women alike sometimes perceive the gap between managing and leading to be a glass ceiling when, in many cases, it’s not necessarily that at all; it’s a subtle group of skills you must have to be considered for leadership.
Many people who make it into leadership, even the ones who don’t appear to deserve it, have mastered skills that don’t show up on a traditional resume. They have built a strong Invisible Resume that helps them get into — and succeed — in the executive and C-suite ranks
In this three-part video series, I’ll cover several diverse aspects of your Invisible Leadership Resume, your global perspective, your leadership presence and your authentic leadership style.
Part I: To be a leader, you must get out of the weeds (more…)
by Téa Blake | Apr 27, 2012 | Gender Research, InPower Women Blog
Study: Women of Tomorrow: U.S. Multicultural Insights (Neilson Consultants, 2012)
Finding: U.S. women are optimistic, expect to be earning a greater percentage of their household income in the future and feel in control of their household spending.
InPower Insight: Regardless of what you believe women’s impact is within an organization or culture, our economic impact is in fact very significant. Take your economic power seriously and spend your money wisely. (more…)
by Dana Theus | Apr 25, 2012 | Corporate Culture, Emotional Intelligence at Work, Gender Equality, InPower Women Blog, The Woman Effect
I have been honored with a regular writing gig at the Smartblog on Leadership – an extention of the Smartbrief empire. This was my first post as a contributing author and it generated a lot of interesting comments (read them here). The comments reminded me that there are plenty of people (men AND women) who hear “women are good” as “men are bad”. I ran this by several men before I posted trying NOT to poke men in the ego. Why does the subject cause such an emotional reaction? What can we women do to tamp down the tone of the dialog for more constructive results? This subject is perplexing me and I welcome your input – men and women alike.
For some 20 years, companies have been running women’s leadership development programs a lot like sensitivity seminars, to develop awareness in both women and men that business women are, well, “different” and to help women understand how best to integrate into the existing business culture.
The good news is that these efforts, combined with education and encouragement, have helped put women on 15% of the boards of the Fortune 500. More good news is that studies show that companies with about 30% gender diversity on their boards actually outperform those with no women by a wide margin measured through multiple metrics (e.g., an 84% return on sales).
The bad news is that 15% is paltry for the Fortune 500, and it looks like midcap firms’ leadership teams may be even less gender diverse. Worse news is that progress is slowing at exactly the time we need women’s strong leadership skills in upper management more than ever; and women — especially young, highly educated women — are bailing out of the system. They’re not all leaving the workforce to have babies either — many of the best and brightest are going to start entrepreneurial ventures.
This puts business leaders interested in recruiting and developing the next generation of leadership in quite a bind. On the one hand, we have an economy — in need of powerful up-and-comers — struggling to right itself into productivity, ethics, sustainability and profitability. On the other hand, we have an up-and-coming, educated, appropriately skilled resource in plentiful supply (representing over half the workforce) who is choosing to opt out of the system.
You see the danger ahead, don’t you? We’ve identified talent pool key to our economic success who’s not making it into leadership positions where they can deploy that positive impact, and thus our leadership class is becoming systematically weakened at the very time we most need to strengthen it.
This isn’t new news — the seminal research on this subject was published by McKinsey in 2007 — but discussion and action on this subject in the U.S. is far behind Europe and even developing nations. Are we asleep at the switch? As importantly, why are so many women taking the path of least resistance?
As many women entrepreneurs tell me, “Why should I put up with a culture that doesn’t meet my needs and let me shine? I know I’m good. I’ll go make money for myself.” And then — thanks to the Internet — they do, along with many creative-thinking, industrious young men. When I talk to women both in and outside corporations about why they have left, or are tempted to leave, corporate culture is most frequently cited as the barrier to bringing more women into leadership.
Corporate attempts to support “women’s leadership programs” are often seen as a burden — another job on top of the one they already have and the family they value. But as importantly, many women’s development programs are viewed as attempts to “fix them,” which leads many to conclude they’re just round pegs being stuffed into square holes and might as well leave, taking their talent and potential with them.
It’s easy for a corporation to throw up its (metaphorical) hands and say, “It’s our culture, we can’t change,” but I submit that there’s simply too much at stake now not to change. And this change isn’t only for social justice reasons – there are hard metrics to motivate it too. Change isn’t hard when you understand what you have to lose and what you have to gain. After all, what would your financials look like with an 84% increase in return on sales or a 46% increase in return on equity?
I believe, after scanning almost 100 research studies on the subject, that by bringing more women into leadership, their mere presence in balanced numbers (i.e., 30% or more), with men will strengthen the capabilities of any organization’s leadership culture. This phenomenon, The Woman Effect, has already been validated through the research above and has the power to revitalize our economic engines to spur yet another wave of phenomenal growth.
However, to activate The Woman Effect in our economy, we’ve got to do it in our companies; and to activate it in our companies, we’ve got to stop running sensitivity seminars to adapt the women to the existing culture. We’ve got to take on the challenge of systemically adapting our culture to bring out the strengths of both female and male leaders, working together. This is a core strategic investment in profitability and sustainability, even more strategic than implementing a new ERP system.
The good news is that many of the same change management practices we use to implement technology can help us adjust to gender-partnered leadership. My colleagues and I will be running some change management pilot programs to do this and I’ll report back here. Go ahead and get started. You won’t be alone!
This post originally appeared on SmartBlog on Leadership. For more insights on business leadership, sign up for SmartBrief on Leadership.
