Much is written about how few women make it into the top leadership positions. The reasons are complex and multilayered, so there is much to write. But I consistently find several mentoring tips for women both maximally effective and minimally understood when I talk to women pursuing leadership positions: DO HARD.
On its face, this advice is pretty simple: stay in your stretch zone and learn to master feelings of uncertainty, discomfort and periodic failure while you learn and grow. This can be more challenging for some women than men, which is actually a dynamic that is written about often (e.g., imposter syndrome). But what’s less often explored is WHY it’s so important for women to overcome their culturally ingrained reservations about taking on big challenges, and how to do it authentically in our modern business culture.
The truth is that regardless of your gender, race, personality type or upbringing, leadership is hard. The leaders who are leading now, who are selecting their replacements for the future, are keen to spot talent that knows this, who takes on “hard” with enthusiasm, and who succeeds more often than not. A woman may have to overcome unconscious bias to be selected, but if she isn’t viewed as someone capable of “doing hard,” she’ll never get the shot at it at all.
So if you want into leadership, it’s never too early to take on “hard” and learn to succeed at it. This will look different at different points in your career, and the path is not always a straight line up the ladder. Below are the career development mentoring tips for women I never received, and which would have dramatically reshaped my own career and that of many other women I’ve helped along the way.
Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe
Mentoring Tips for Women: Learn to DO HARD
Master Risk Management in Your Stretch Zone
Women are often accused of being risk averse. Like men, some are, some aren’t and overall women are no more risk averse than men. Women do tend to pay a high price for failure and work harder for success, so it’s understandable that they do not seek opportunities to fail as eagerly as the men who are more likely to be given “a pass” while learning to manage risk.
Learning to manage risk, in your business and in your career, is a leadership skill that is learned in your stretch zone. The mentoring tips for women here are that your goal is to learn how to stay in “the butter zone” of your stretch zone, the place where you’re exploring risk, stretching and learning without exposing yourself (or your business) beyond your risk tolerance.
Mastering your stretch zone to become friends with risk is not the same as taking a stretch assignment once in a while, it’s a way of working that ensures you’re always operating in your stretch zone in one way or another. It means you’re always pushing yourself to take on and mitigate risk, learn from failure and hone your instincts for success. You don’t have to wait until you’re managing a team or company to stretch yourself and learn about risk. You can start day one in your career.
- What risks are you taking now?
- What responsibility is stretching you to learn and grow?
- How can mastering this level of risk and learning set you up for success in your next assignment or the one after that?
Focus on these questions and check in on them weekly and monthly. Pretty soon you’ll be comfortable with the discomfort of your stretch zone.
Broaden Your Career Experience
In addition to learning to manage risk, to become a trusted senior leader in an organization, you have to develop knowledge and competencies outside your functional expertise. This helps you to develop your executive mindset, which focuses on the holistic and strategic success of the entire organization, not just your piece of it.
Practically speaking, women tend to find (and are mentored into) a typically female career path in various overhead functions such as human resources, marketing and customer care. While these areas are certainly important to the healthy functioning of any organization, they are very rarely the talent pools from which CEOs and top executive leaders are chosen.
Rather than being a sign of sexism it’s important to see this dynamic as one that identifies the kind of knowledge and experience needed to run a complex organization successfully. CEOs need to understand the nuts and bolts of revenue generation and revenue and expense balancing. Particularly in commercial companies, experience managing a profit and loss business line is critical.
This understanding opens up a clear opportunity for women to more proactively seek experience in the kinds of roles that do lead to executive and CEO appointments, such as general management (P&L responsibility), business development/sales and technical fields.
Even for women who do not specialize in such “leadership-critical” fields, they can seek broadening assignments that allow them to gain knowledge and experience outside their area of specialization. Such experiences make them more appealing candidates for leadership positions in their own field, as well as open doors for career change.
- How many functional areas do you have experience in?
- What projects or roles can you take that will broaden your understanding of the business and the industry?
- How can you gain experience managing large budgets and/or profit and loss business lines?
It’s never a straight shot to the top. Take your career “sidesteps” with intention and use them to expand your understanding of the business, and yourself. And pass on these mentoring tips to women early in their career, with room to explore before picking their primary path to the top.
Commitment to a Mission without Self Sacrifice – Moving Beyond the Inner Critic
I spent three years interviewing founders and CEOs of small businesses. I asked every person what made them successful through the ups and downs of leading a business from nothing to something (of which there are many). Looking for patterns in education, background, values and demographics, I could find no commonality except one. The single, consistent success characteristic for these top leaders was a total unwillingness to give up in pursuing a purpose outside themselves and their immediate families. This strong mission focus kept them coming back from what others considered defeat, survive bankruptcies and market setbacks, overcome personal failings, doubts and mistakes.
Everyone has an inner voice which helps us become more self-aware and to help us evaluate our performance and improve. This voice is sometimes a champion and sometimes a critic. It will come to no one’s surprise that women’s inner critic voices are usually well developed, if not overly developed. This too often leads women to hold themselves back, give up and burn out.
While there are many strategies to reshape and reframe our inner critics to become useful facilitators of personal growth and development, at some point we have to get out of our heads.
It’s a good idea to take on your #innercritic. Learn when to talk back to it and when to listen to it. But don’t forget to get out of your head and act. Via @DanaTheus ⇐ Click to Tweet
A key driver in leadership success, to help us overcome obstacles both internal and external, is to lean into a mission that matters, without sacrificing ourselves in the process. Committing to a vision of a better future, which is specifically defined for external people and organizations, can help us become willing to fail, be imperfect and get over our personal deficiencies in service to a greater good without becoming martyrs.
Many men have been acculturated, especially through stories of military campaigns and participation in team sports as kids, to identify and motivate themselves with an external mission set, for which they train and prepare themselves to overcome hardships. Girls are less likely to be encouraged into such strong, group and societal-level mission sets. Their acculturation is more likely to be that of helping and serving individuals and more likely to include a belief that sacrificing themselves personally to help others succeed is not only acceptable but preferable.
There is nothing wrong with either of these models for purpose and mission, however to succeed in organizational leadership, a healthy focus on external, group-level missions is vital. It operates as a natural incentive to help us get past our personal doubts, become willing to learn from failure and invest in our own resilience so we have the reserves to keep going when times get tough.
- What purpose drives you to take personal and organizational risk?
- How does your current work move you closer to achieving your personal mission?
- What is so important to you that you will invest in yourself in order to make it successful?
Leadership is hard. When you develop the habit of “doing hard” in your career, you can hone yourself into the person who can and will lead others to success. Be kind to yourself along the way, but do hard to achieve great things.
And if you’re working to help reduce gender inequality in your sphere, please give share these mentoring tips for women that may help them see their career challenges in a new light. And thank you.
