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. The result often leaves women feeling burned out and resentful for the lack of appreciation for their efforts.
In reality, people don’t advance into top positions just because they work harder and give up their lives for the company. Most successful men will tell you that if you want power, you have to take it. You have to speak up, acknowledge your value and love your power.
Speak UP
I do live 360 interviews for my executive women clients. No one has ever suggested my clients should work harder. Most often the suggestions for improvement include: (more…)
Sure, sometimes you’re the lucky recipient of spontaneous innovation, but according to business gurus, consistently good innovators actually have strategies for leveraging luck (the good and the bad) when it trips across their paths.
In “Great by Choice” Jim Collins and Morten Hansen have unearthed a fabulous idea they’re calling Return on Luck, and we all have something to learn from this concept. (more…)
As many of my clients and other readers know, I believe we need a societal change in order to gain a great many more women in leadership roles.
I read two articles in the past few days that prompt me to want to write about this today.
The cover story in this week’s Time Magazine, the March 26th issue, is titled The Richer $ex: Women are overtaking men as America’s breadwinners. It’s by Liza Mundy, whose book is about to be published.
While a lot of what is contained in the article I applaud, i.e., that women are finally getting attention for all they bring to business, there still are facts that make me grind my teeth. For example, women generally are paid 25% less than men for the same job! Another example, while women are 54% of the workforce, they hold just 38% of the managerial positions, and this percentage goes way down as the positions get higher. In fact, women hold only 3% of CEO positions. (more…)
Fortunately, humans love happiness. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Unfortunately, it turns out that plenty of us don’t seem to, based on the way we stick our noses to the grindstone and assume that if we work harder we’ll achieve success and happiness. Fortunately, the relatively new science of positive psychology is finding ways to help us achieve business success. Unfortunately, many of us are currently doing it backwards, and hobbling our professional capability in the process. Fortunately, all we have to do is be happy and grateful in the present moment, and we become more effective at what we do and more likely to achieve success.
Most leadership books and gurus will tell you that leaders are learners and full of curiosity. Sometimes, this penchant can get you into trouble and – as many entrepreneurs learn the hard way – lead you traipsing off after some little bright shiny thing, letting your business languish. This kind of curiosity is the not good kind. But the good kind of curiosity takes you deeper, not far afield. It digs you into the root cause of the problem you need to fix – for your customers with a product, for your employees with an operational issue or for your investors for a financial issue.
How does one focus their curiosity to get to the bottom of the problem where the gold lies? (more…)
Have you ever been in an airplane when it stalls? I was twelve when dad tipped us straight up into the solid blue expanse of sky – allowing gravity to grip our chests – and gunned our little single prop Cessna vertical. We chugged forward briefly until the lift over the wings dissipated, the engine choked for lack of air and the prop stopped. One heartbeat later, gravity won and our little metal pod literally tipped sideways away from wide open blue to begin its rapid descent towards the green-brown hard crust of the earth. Dad, being a military, commercial and recreational pilot, smoothly brought us back to steady flight.
How do you measure leadership? It’s an odd question, isn’t it? Leadership is inherently challenging to even describe because it’s a quality of being human. Psychologists and Change Management Consultants find ways to measure everything and I’m sure they have some metrics for this. However, my Google research on this subject reinforced my experience that most people’s take on measuring leadership is really one of two things: 1) measuring management metrics (e.g., did revenue go up?) Or 2) measuring behaviors, absent their impact.
Nancy and I bonded in the late ’90’s workaholic days of an internet startup when our kids were little. More than a decade has passed and she’s VP of a growing company and I’m consulting and coaching, both of us busy as can be. We don’t see each other enough now, and the reason I know that is that at the end of every lunch that survives our schedules, we hug and say things like, “which college did Jeff decide to go to? Is Alex already graduated? Really!?” We’ve been so busy talking business, leadership challenges and career strategy that we don’t manage to squeeze the kids in until the end.
And this is so refreshing to me, and Nancy too. How many women’s networking lunches do we go to where everyone is so busy catching up on the personal stuff that we don’t get around to business? Another friend of mine recently complained about her women’s professional group, because the business issues she cares most about haven’t gotten a chance to surface due to others chatting up their family dramas. (more…)
I ran a survey last month asking people about their experiences with Speaking Truth to Power. One hundred and fifty five professionals – mostly women – responded and said loud and clear that:
Almost half of them withheld their truth from their bosses a good deal of the time;
82% had been penalized in the past for speaking their truth; and
76% felt regret when they did not feel safe speaking their truth. (more…)
