You Are Much More Than Your Job
A few months ago, I received a call from a woman looking for help to position herself for employment. She had been out of work for 18 months having a baby and was now ready to begin the process of finding a job. So I asked her what she did. There was a long pause and then she replied in a soft voice. “This is my problem. I can’t talk about myself at all, let alone articulate why someone should hire me.”
Wow! I thought. This was an extreme case of someone who had identified herself with her job and because she had been away from it for a while, she was lost. She was no longer connected to what she believed was her identity and value (her job).
Most of us spend more time at work than we do with our families and friends. We work long hours and our jobs consume a tremendous amount of our energy and focus. It’s understandable that we begin to “become” our jobs, and it’s a challenge to separate our identity and value from our work. That being said, we need to take the time to understand what value we bring to the job and how our value benefits the company and our clients if we want to be successful in moving our careers and businesses forward.
We are much more than our jobs. If all of you reading this had the exact same background and experience, the same position in the same company, you would still be unique and special because of the way you DO your work. Each of us brings something different to our work that defines us and sets us apart. Zeroing in on how you “deliver” the work is the first clue to identifying your unique value proposition and what differentiates you.
Charlotte Beers, former CEO of Olgivy and Mather, writes in her new book, I’d Rather Be In Charge, that it’s not about the work, but the way you deliver the work.
The way you deliver the work comes from an interior place. You know all about the exterior you; it’s right there on your resume. But your delivery is about the essence of who you become when you’re at work, your deepest, truest self sent out to play in the field of work.
Delivery means the way you get your work in front of the right people. It’s how you manage to get the work used properly and, drum roll please, ‘appreciated’.
Ask yourself this: How do you “deliver” the work? What is your contribution? This is your value and identity that will follow you to any job or any company because it’s not about the job, it’s YOU.
When you want to promote or position yourself for a job or attract new clients, remember this. Your value and how it benefits others is what people want to know about; not just what you do but how you do it.
The Challenges Facing Business Leaders Today
Leading an organization presents many challenges in today’s business environment. There is an atmosphere of continual change and economic pressure to survive and to be on top of the curve in terms of marketing and delivering exceptional service. So how do senior executives lead successfully in this environment? On Wednesday’s show, May 2nd, I’m going to discuss the challenges facing executives in business today and what leaders and managers need to know to create a culture that embraces the flexibility required for today’s environment and supports inclusion and high performance.
Featured Guest
My guest is Susan Annunzio, CEO of the Center for High Performance in Chicago. Susan is a strategic advisor to CEOs of leading global companies on strategy attainment and business transformation. Susan partners with senior executives to increase their ability to simplify complex strategic decisions through enhanced collaboration and creativity. She is a globally recognized speaker and thought leader on shaping and maintaining high-performance business environments. She has a strong track record helping leaders maximize returns on strategic, financial and human-capital investments. A former Adjunct Professor of Management at the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business, Susan still teaches the most popular Executive Education Program, High Performance Leadership. She is the author of Contagious Success (Portfolio, 2004), a dynamic management book that revealed a global standard for high performance. Contagious Success was voted Fast Company’s Readers’ Choice. selection in January 2005. Additionally, Susan authored two more prominent business books: Communicoding and Evolutionary Leadership. Susan has been a guest on numerous local and national television and radio news programs and has been quoted extensively in the business press, including The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, BBC, USA Today and Bloomberg.
Listen to the May 2nd show or download the podcast.
The Key to Success is Knowing Who You Are
When you look in the mirror, who is looking back at you? I’m not talking about your appearance. I’m talking about who you really are. Do you know? 
Many of us are distracted by external factors that we let define us; our job, our looks. We allow these things to become our identity and the way we present ourselves to the world. Sometimes we hide behind them so we don’t have to really do the work to discover our essence.
But, to get outside results, you need to do the inside work. (I just wrote that down from a podcast I listened to yesterday by Suzanne Evans.) It’s so true!
Last week the New York Times published an interview with Charlotte Beers, former CEO and Chairwoman of Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide. In this article, The Best Scorecard Is The One You Keep For Yourself, Charlotte talks about the importance of doing a self-assessment and soliciting feedback from trusted colleagues to help you discover who you are. Sometimes painful, the feedback she received helped her become a better manager and leader.
Charlotte says, “it’s a mistake to just let the quality of our work speak for itself because sooner or later the quality of your relationships will prevail over the work.”
Charlotte talks about moments of crisis. “ When those moments come along and you need to draw on resources that are internal and your personal belief system, if you don’t know what they are, others will tell you what they are.”
Self-knowledge is so obvious-sounding that I hate to use it like that, but in fact you can be masterful at doing the work and you can be good in team relationships, but one day you will be called on to have difficult, complex relationships and a different part of you has to be used for that.
Do you know what your internal resources are? Can you see beyond your reflection in the mirror to connect with your core essence?
This is the stuff that makes you unique; your unique fingerprint. This is the stuff you call on to be successful and here’s the KEY: When you know this, you can not only draw from this resource to be successful, but you can let people know who you really are and what differentiates you from others who may hold the same position or sell similar products and services.
Charlotte’s new book is I’d Rather Be in Charge and I am thrilled that she will be on my new radio show June 13th. You will be able to call in live with your questions for Charlotte! Stay tuned for more details.
If you are interested in taking this journey of self-discovery for yourself so that you can better position yourself for success, please sign up for my next four week GPS Your Career Coaching Group or come to the live full day workshop in Boston, May 5th, GPS Your Way to Success Boot Camp.
The Next Challenge: Toppling the Invisible Barriers That Hold Women Back
If you have an interest in advancing women’s leadership in the corporate sector or perhaps advancing your own career, you should read McKinsey’s latest report, Changing Companies Minds about Business.
This important report speaks to the fact that there has been little progress of women to senior leadership and board positions in corporate America despite what appear to be significant initiatives to do so.
What are we missing? Why despite a solid business case tying women’s leadership to improved bottom line performance are we still stuck? Is anyone listening?
There is still much to do to change the invisible barriers that still exist and according to the McKinsey report, it’s not an easy task to change the mind set of managers that block the way for women’s advancement. Much of this bias towards women still remains under the covers.
Some companies have been successful in changing their corporate culture. Companies such as Pitney Bowes, Time Warner and Shell have taken what McKinsey calls a “hard edged” approach with specific metrics and targets. These initiatives started and supported from the top are changing the work environment with clearly defined goals and accountability. The efforts of these companies demonstrate that to affect real change a consistent targeted approach is necessary.
What can we do? The McKinsey report recommends “making it personal”.
Make no mistake. As a senior executive, you are already influencing your company’s approach. If you’re not paying attention to the issue of women’s advancement, you’re ensuring that things won’t change.
Women need to support and sponsor other women to the top.
The report also cites the importance of building a business case about the positive impact women are having in your organization, “whether hard business results or indirect results, such as building better teams”.
Build a business case for yourself.
You can take responsibility for your own credibility and success by understanding what value you bring to the organization, your contribution to business results, and learning how to communicate this to key people within your organization.
Take the McKinsey example. Do you build better teams? What that means to the organization is these teams are more productive and directly affect net income by completing more projects each quarter. Or maybe, these teams are also loyal as well as productive and therefore, are less likely to resign. This means the company spends less on employee acquisition and training.
We all need to do our part to help advance women in the workplace if we want to affect change. We also need to take responsibility for our own advancement.
This fall, I am starting two new projects to help women advance their careers and successfully navigate the corporate environment. GPS Your Career Day and GPS Your Career Group are both designed to help you uncover and understand the value you bring to your organization as well as effectively communicate your value to key people.
GPS Your Career Day is an intense full day program and GPS Your Career Group is a 6 week group coaching program. Both are limited to 10 participants.
If you are interested in learning about one or both of these programs, please email me. I am in the process now of finalizing the plans for the launch.
Revisiting the Double-Bind
Women have had to deal with the double-bind or “backlash effect” in business for decades and it has frequently been the topic of many discussions about how women can overcome this prejudice to advance their careers.
In a nutshell, this double-bind is:
To be successful, you must be assertive and confident, but if you are aggressive as a woman you are sometimes punished for behaving in ways that are contrary to the feminine stereotype.
Now, there is a new study from Stanford Graduate School of Business that shows:
In the business world, women who are aggressive, assertive, and confident but who can turn these traits on and off, depending on the social circumstances, get more promotions than either men or other women.
The research suggests that for women to be successful they must simultaneously present themselves as self–confident and dominant while tempering these qualities with displays of communal characteristics.
Women who had more masculine traits (defined as aggressive, assertive, and confident) AND who could temper their behavior (self-monitor their behavior) depending on social circumstances, were actually more successful than either men or other women.
The key is to learn how to self-monitor your behavior. It is still vitally important to assert yourself confidently in the business environment. If you want to advance your career, you need to establish visibility and credibility for yourself. People associate competence with confidence so the more confident you are, the more others will perceive you as competent.
“There is no evidence that ‘acting like a lady’ does anything except make women more well liked,” O’Neill said. “Women with ultra–feminine traits, in fact, are still seen as less competent in traditional managerial settings.”
That being said, it is also important to know when to listen, acknowledge others, and work and empower your team. When your behavior comes across as too self-serving, you will get that “backlash effect”.
“The interesting thing here is that being able to regulate one’=’s masculine behavior does not simply put women on par with men, it gives them even more of an advantage,” notes O’Neill. “This shows that for women who do want success at the managerial level, the paths are there.”
This is certainly encouraging news. Yet I find that learning to assert oneself appropriately in the work place, still remains an issue for many women.
What are your thoughts about the double-bind?
Celebrating Women on Mother’s Day
It’s in our DNA. All women, whether or not they gave birth, have the innate qualities to nurture others. In essence, we are all mothers who spend a great deal of our time and energy motivating, supporting, comforting, and loving those around us. These qualities are the foundation of who we are as women; how we present ourselves to the world.
These feminine traits have not always been viewed favorably in the work place. Women have often been squeezed into a box of “traditional maleness” that made us feel uncomfortable and phony. The most efficient path to success in business has always been to take on the qualities of our male colleagues and mimic their leadership and management style. After all, that was the only acceptable model.
But slowly things are changing. Traditional leadership models are changing with the increased realization that feminine qualities of compassion, empathy, listening and nurturing create well-rounded leaders who can move our businesses forward to prosper with integrity.
This Mother’s Day, let us recognize and celebrate what is special about mothers and women in general. Not only do we nurture our family and friends, but we have the unique ability to lead our businesses, country and world to a better place.
Owning Our Success
Women are well positioned today to change workplace dynamics and use their strength and talent to assume more leadership positions. Thirty four percent (34%) of American women between the ages of 25 and 34 have bachelor degrees compared to 27% of men, and women have higher GPA’s and are more likely to receive higher graduate degrees.
We have what it takes to make significant changes, but we need to own our success to move forward. The reality is that currently women only hold 18% of top leadership positions. Yes, there is still gender bias as well as challenges balancing work and family for women who want to advance their careers. I believe it’s time, however, to change the focus from the obstacles to the opportunities. It’s time to take responsibility for our own advancement.
In 2010, McKinsey and Company published a report called “Women Matter 2010. Women at the Top of Corporations: Making it Happen.” As part of their research they asked 1500 executives across different industries what are the biggest barriers to increasing gender diversity within the top management of the company? Thirty eight percent (38%) of the women executives interviewed said they see the biggest factor as their hesitancy to promote themselves. In other words, the biggest factor was within their control to change!
It’s time to focus on what we can control; what we can do personally to own our own success and promote ourselves.
What does it take to own your success?
- Belief in yourself and an understanding of your value proposition.
- Taking credit and acknowledging your accomplishments.
- Speaking up and letting others know your opinion and thoughts.
- Advocating for yourself. Requesting sponsorship.
- Negotiating what’s fair and appropriate in salary and benefits.
- Letting go of language that minimizes and sabotages your credibility.
- Communicating your value to others.
- Being visible within your organization and community to showcase your skills and talent.
- Building and leveraging relationships that will assist you to reach your goal.
- Having a strategic and intentional focus to advance your career.
We need to own our success to be successful.
Embrace it.
Believe it.
Nurture it.
Communicate it.
Celebrate it.
Take advantage of my FREE 7 Day Boot Camp on Promoting Yourself for Career Success. Sign up on my home page. or on the right sidebar!
What Holds Middle Managers Back?
This past weekend, I had the opportunity to speak at Harvard Business School’s Dynamic Women in Business Conference. Our panel discussion was titled, Working in Heels: Women in the Workplace today, and the focus of the discussion was the internal barriers and external barriers that women hold women back from advancing their careers and assuming leadership positions.
Internal barriers such as our limiting beliefs about gender, success, our ability to balance family and work can contribute to our lack of advancement. Also mentioned was the hesitancy to promote ourselves, take credit for our accomplishments, and speak up.
External roadblocks are the cultural biases that still prevail in the workplace today against women in leadership positions. Men still occupy the top level positions and women don’t seem to be making the expecting progress of winning more board seats or c-suite placement.
I thought it was particularly interesting that this video interview from Harvard Business Review with Anne Morriss, also focused on what holds us back and offers some very different reasons that middle managers do not advance to leadership roles. Anne’s research was not gender specific. Here are the five major ways she found that managers hold themselves back.
1. Overemphasizing personal goals. Leadership is not about you, but providing the structure for others to be successful. The focus needs to move from yourself to other people.
2. Acting like a leader can get in the way of leading. We can get distracted by our public image.
3. We turn our competitors into our enemies. Making other people wrong disconnects us from reality and the ability to take in data and be open-minded.
4. We wait for permission. This is especially true of entrepreneurs.
5. Going it alone. We need a strong team around us who compliment our strengths.
Here is the link to the video interview:
What are your thoughts? Do you relate to any of these reasons?
I currently have two coaching packages to help middle managers advance their careers. These programs are designed to help female middle managers overcome their limiting beliefs and behaviors and strategically navigate the corporate environment.
The Executive Mentor Program is a year long one-on-one coaching program that develops your leadership and management skills with the specific goal of advancing your career.
The Private Coaching for Mid-Level Managers is a one-on-one coaching program to help you identify and overcome what holds you back from advancement, and create an action plan to move forward.
Advocate for an Advocate
A recent Catalyst study demonstrates that mentoring does not help career advancement to the degree that sponsorship does. Mentoring is defined as career advice and guidance and sponsorship is advocacy. Usually sponsors have more senior positions than mentors, and it is their responsibility to advocate for an individual and pull them up the ranks to a top level position in the company. The study shows that men receive more sponsorship than women and this has a direct relationship to the number of men promoted to top positions. Women receive more mentoring and, in fact, are sometimes “mentored to death” with no upward mobility.
The recommendation from Harvard Business Review and Catalyst is for organizations to adopt formal sponsorship programs similar to IBM Europe. Companies now understand the impact of diversifying their talent pool, especially in leadership roles.
However, the companies that have formal sponsorship programs are few and far between.
High performing women need to take control of their own career advancement. They need to advocate for an advocate or sponsor. They need to be their own PR specialist every day.
Here are some suggestions:
- Be proactive, intentional, and strategic. Communicate your intention to advance your career.
- Let others know within the organization that you are seeking a sponsor. Your mentor might be able to help identify and facilitate this.
- Create visibility and credibility for yourself in the organization.
o Take on high profile projects.
o Make sure your position has P&L responsibility.
- Identify your value proposition. What do you bring to the table?
- Develop your web of influence (key stakeholders, decision makers, influencers, connectors) to assist you in reaching your goal.
o Build and leverage these relationships.
- Learn to communicate your value.
o Talk about what you bring to the table and tie it to business outcomes and results for maximum impact.
- Broaden your influence outside the company.
o Develop your subject matter expertise through social media, community organizations and board positions.
Here’s the bottom line: you need to take control of your career. If you have the goal of sitting in the C-Suite, start by communicating this goal to others and find out how you can get a sponsor to take you under his/her wings and move you up the ranks. You need to advocate for an advocate and create the visibility and credibility within the organization to get recognized and rewarded.
Need some help promoting yourself at work? I have 2 new programs designed to help you connect with your value and talent and communicate your unique value proposition to others to move up the corporate ladder.
It takes more than talent and hard work to get ahead, especially in this busy business environment. If you want to get promoted, you need to take control of your own career and learn how to differentiate yourself.
Both the Executive Mentor Program and the Private Coaching Program for Mid Level Managers can help you tackle your inner barriers to success as well as the external cultural barriers of your work environment.
Don’t waste any more time waiting to be recognized when you have the ability to move your own career forward. One-on-one coaching from an executive coach gives you the attention and focus to improve your leadership and management skills as well as your ability to promote your talent.
How to Be a Thought Leader
Last week I attended a panel discussion at Barclay’s in New York City on the topic of How to Be a Thought Leader. The panel included Nicki Gilmour, CEO of The Glass Hammer, Carol Hymowitz, Editorial Director of Forbes Woman, and Barbara Jones, of Editorial Director of Hyperion Books. The discussion focused on professional women and thought leadership.
According to Wikipedia,
A thought leader is a futurist or person who is recognized for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights.
The panel was in agreement that in order to be a thought leader, it’s not enough to be creative and innovative. One must also have the ability and confidence to promote their ideas.
Part of the discussion addressed how women are not really good at speaking up and promoting their ideas; how we often take the back seat to men in the workplace. What is the best way to communicate your ideas so that others will be inspired and motivated to support you?
I don’t know why it always surprises me that the majority of these discussions about women and leadership end up focusing on women and self promotion and self confidence. I was sitting in the audience nodding my head. Self confidence and self promotion are necessary ingredients for women’s leadership and career success. I can’t stress it enough. And though my readers are probably tired of reading this, you can have the best ideas and the best business concept, and if you don’t have the confidence to promote your ideas and the skill to communicate effectively, you will not become the thought leader you desire to be. Thought leadership requires both components; the thought and leadership skills. Leadership implies that you have the ability to get your message across to others to both inspire and motivate action on their part.
Of course, the discussion last week also touched on the “double bind” concept that as women we need to be mindful of the way we promote ourselves; men can get away with outright bragging and we can’t. The double bind is widely accepted as part of our current culture. Women need to recognize that there is an art to creating the credibility and visibility you need to be a thought leader without sabotaging your efforts.
First, clarify your thoughts and ideas.
Second, create a compelling and passionate message.
Third, be strategic. Identify the web of influence in your internal and external networks who need to hear your message.
Fourth, develop a communication/action plan to consistently be visible to these stakeholders to communicate your message.
Fifth, follow the action plan and modify as necessary.
Use the energy and passion you have for your ideas to propel you into action. Once you are motivated to action, as a thought leader you need to communicate your message to inspire and motivate others to action.
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