For many female employees, working in a male-dominated jungle, can be frustrating.
Gender-based stereotypes seem to pigeonhole women, holding them back from pay increases, promotions and mobility. Finance professional Tamara Lashchyk gives women the inside track to getting ahead, sharing her go-to tips and career insight with her new book, "Lose the Gum: A Survival Guide for Women on Wall Street."
"I've watched as dozens of young women sabotage their own careers and shut themselves out of opportunities," Lashchyk said. "As a result, few women succeed. One thing that stands in the way of female success, on an individual and collective basis, is ourselves."
In the competitive environment of business world, what differentiates you from others is your brand. The value of your brand is determined by the credibility that you've established through consistent behaviors over time. When properly managed, your brand is an asset, which can open doors of opportunity and pave the way to a successful career.
It is all well and good to be told to lean in, but in reality, nearly two-third of Americans believe that women continue to face barriers to career advancement, and statistics show that more than 75% of millennial women identify gender bias as a workplace problem.
On the flipside, women ran 4.2% of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index as of December 2015. While these women encountered a variety of setbacks in their career, their challenges often provided useful leadership lessons that helped propel their ascent and success.
Drawing on interviews with present or former female CEOs of Hewlett-Packard, Hearst Magazine, Avon, Sara Lee, Campbell Soup, Ogilvy & Mather, and many other companies, EARNING IT author Joann Lublin gleans important lessons from these women's trailblazing business achievements. Their experiences offer a road map that will enable other women to find their way when it comes to launching their career.
Women keen to get ahead must learn to manage men well, especially those who don't want to be managed by women.
Nowadays, executive women managers rarely face openly hostile resistance from their male deputies. Yet, their career progress continues to be slowed as a result of less obvious sex-role stereotypes, which "manifest themselves in all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle ways," says Robin J. Ely, a Harvard Business School professor who specializes in gender issues.
Using street smarts, a sense of humor, strong belief in themselves, and empathetic ability to walk in their employee's shoes, the women who share their wisdom in EARNING IT crafted innovative approaches that helped them win at work.
Many women struggle with assertiveness, but if you’re prone to anxiety and avoidance, it is especially difficult.
While assertiveness is focused on speaking up in a specific situation, our overall ability and willingness to communicate is influenced to a large part by our past relationship experiences, particularly those with our early caregivers. This emotional bond with another person is called an attachment.
Our early attachment relationships provide a template for future relationships. Though of course not guaranteed to dictate behavior, this template guides how we see ourselves, how much we trust others, what strategies we use to manage our emotions, and how confident we are in sharing ourselves. Our attachment style influences our comfort level and skill level when it comes to being assertive.
When you’re assertive, you’re able to communicate your needs and wishes clearly while respecting yourself and anyone else involved in the interaction.
But when you aren’t assertive, you may stop yourself from saying anything when your needs aren’t being met, or end up lashing out in hostile or hurtful ways.
People with different attachment styles struggle with being assertive for different reasons, and even women with a secure attachment style may have difficulty expressing emotion when faced with challenging circumstances.
Whether you’re anxious and overwhelmed by the intensity of your emotions, become avoidant and struggle to identify your emotions, or otherwise have difficulty expressing yourself, “The Assertiveness Guide for Women,” will help you become more aware of your own thoughts and feelings, and empower you to ask for what you need, set boundaries, and speak your truth for a more fulfilling life.
Mentoring and Sponsoring are compelling in the context of the new economy because they are consistently effective in helping women get ahead.
This is true regardless of participants’ specific objectives, industries, or roles.
What is Mentoring?
Mentoring is a relationship between the mentor and the mentee based on mutual respect, total confidentiality, and a shared understanding of how to achieve the mentee’s objectives.
Mentoring can occur naturally, informally or formally. It can be a formal part if a program within a professional organization or an informal relationship.
It can last a day, several weeks, just long enough to help an individual over a “hump,” or it can last several years. We usually encourage our coaching clients to seek out several mentors over the course of their career.
Corporate sponsored mentoring is sometimes used to achieve strategic business goals, such as retaining new employees and/or for leadership succession planning.
A mentor could be a highly visible and experienced company executive advising a rising star. Although a senior manager may be helpful to your career, working with someone from outside your organization, who is not invested in organizational politics, can ensure that conversations, concerns, and issues are kept in strict confidence. An experienced executive/business coach will also offer an objective view from the outside looking in.
All career-minded individuals can benefit from a mentor. However, be sure to respect their time and confidentiality. And be prepared for your conversations. Arrive ready to discuss issues that are most important to you. Meeting with a mentor six times a year for approximately and hour or so would be appropriate. You might also ask if impromptu phone calls would be welcomed.
Sponsoring is a step beyond mentoring.
It’s mentoring taken to the next level: the sponsor champions the mentee, suggests and supports their promotions, puts them forward for positions of responsibility and, especially for entrepreneurs, opens doors, acts as a reference, uses their networks to create opportunities and then supports them to take these opportunities.
The benefits of mentoring and sponsoring are tangible. 70% of small businesses receiving mentoring or sponsoring survive more than five years---double the survival rate of non-mentored businesses.
"This Way Up" is not your standard self-help book. It begins with the beautifully--written and engrossing allegorical tale of 50-something Kat, a widow and a recent empty-nester. The second half of the book is a satisfying and practical workbook that includes 12 weeks' worth of daily journaling exercises, thought-provoking questions and reader support.
"This Way Up will appeal to any woman who is seeking a life filled with enthusiasm, creativity and joy. It's a fun book to read and the workbook is engaging and can be life changing," says author Patti Clark
Many of today’s up-and-coming, eager professionals are articulate, talented, well-educated and technologically savvy, but many of them are also unaware of the nuances to manage their career and may become labeled as obtuse. They simply lack the political perception and professional skills to get ahead.
Author Jena Abernathy is a passionate advocate for women in executive and governing board roles. Inspiring, down to earth, and straight talking, “THE INEQUALITY EQUALIZER” is the mentoring guide that most of us will wish we had read a long time ago, much earlier in our careers. Abernathy shares her practical, proven real-world techniques to strategize your career, and gain the confidence, know-how, and respect to get results, make winning impressions, and build long-lasting success.
Regardless of how much we might like to think that everyone believes that men and women are equal, the truth is that every woman will face a variety of gender issues throughout her career. Among those challenges is simply getting to the top spot. We see this every day when we witness the dearth of women in leadership positions.
As women, we have to get down to brass tacks and claim what we want. We can’t be afraid of a desire to get ahead, of ambition, or of success.
Maybe it does mean that we have to work harder in general or even harder than men. Resolving gender bias won’t mean that we as women suddenly get to work less hard in order to succeed in business. We’ll still have to work hard and over-deliver, and so will men.
Despite their best efforts, women still face obstacles pursuing a career and being a mother. Unconscious to the many limitations placed on their choices, women still believe that they face a stark choice of either their careers or a happy home.
Aspiring women deserve a solid "heads up."
Women who ascend the corporate ladder are expected to give up, to go up. This is a critical consideration for women with children.
Countless mothers of young children have surprised themselves by creating professional opportunities while they've been home with children. Others have impressed themselves and others when they demonstrate how their organizational abilities at work translate well on the home front, in locating the right support network and helpers to make both work and home function smoothly.
It was Gloria Steinem who said, "I've yet to hear a man ask for advice about how to combine marriage and a career."
“Women and False Choice: The Truth about Sexism,” by Muna Jawhary extends the logical conclusion of gender bias in society to the workplace, and shows how our unconscious sexist beliefs translate into a sexist behavioral reality. Throughout her book, Jawhary suggests powerful ways of creating a healthy work environment that is equally supportive for both sexes.
Leader stereotype leads to two forms of prejudice:
First, women’s potential for being endorsed as leaders is less than men’s, because the male stereotype is closer to the leader stereotype.
Second, women’s actual leadership is evaluated less favourably than men’s, because women’s assertive behavior is perceived as undesirable or threatening, particularly to men.
Women tend to employ democratic leadership styles that allow subordinates to participate in decision making. Generally speaking, women leaders more than men leaders tend to be inclusive and aim for consensus-building. Research also shows that women are more interpersonally oriented than men – more concerned with the welfare of the people they work with and with maintaining good professional relationships.
Compared with men’s directive style, therefore, women’s leadership style can be described as collaborative.
According to a recent study released by the Peterson Institute for International Economics and EY (Ernst & Young), women in leadership positions are linked to stronger company profits.
While many experts have explored the challenges of women in leadership, Morgan and Jay focus on solutions; what individuals and organizations can do to actually begin the transformation.
In the last several years, while coaching executive women, we began to see a trend. Organizations wanted to advance women and were trying but not succeeding….mainly due to the feedback input women got from the sources all around them.
Feedback remains treacherous for women.
The Center for Talent Innovation reports:
Women are 32% less likely to receive any feedback from male superiors.
When they do get feedback, 81% of women say they have trouble responding to it, because it’s so “distressingly contradictory.”
However, women have control over their ability to get good feedback. You can educate yourself about how good feedback should work and take the initiative to get it for yourself.
Being unaware, we unconsciously engage our default behavior. Only when we become aware of something, are we able to make choices as to the action we wish to take. Sometimes, just being aware, allows the problem to solve us--rather than requiring us to solve the problem.
For example, self-assessments are research-based quizzes that reveal your attributes. Each assessment will yield different information. Another form of self-assessment is ongoing reflection during the conversations you have with your executive coach and/or mentor.
All you need to succeed is three simple questions:
What’s working?
What’s not working?
What do I need to change?
Ask these questions often and you’ll have an ongoing gauge as to how you’re doing and where to focus your attention.
When you receive feedback and are seen to be acting on that feedback, your stock goes up in the eyes of others.
Books on women’s leadership are having a major cultural moment, but can you overlook the question of how women make decisions?
The research is making increasing clear that when a man faces a hard decision, he needs to make a judgement; when a woman faces a hard decision, she needs to make a judgment and navigate being judged.
Why is it still the case that of the 195 independent countries in the world, only 11.2% of them are run by women?
Drawing on voluminous research and the vivid experiences of women, from diverse industries and backgrounds, author Therese Huston Ph.D unpacks the mechanisms with which women make decisions and the unconscious biases underlying how the world reacts to their choices.
Decision-making, especially at work, is a different process for women. “HOW WOMEN DECIDE” is a remarkable book in that it gives the reader insight into how to improve decision-making skills, creates options, and makes optimal choices.
Women’s Confidence Advantage
Things to remember:
Men and women alike find it hard to believe that they’re average. But compared to women, men tend to think they’re much better than average. The confidence gap is largest on skills that society considers masculine or feminine. Women underestimate their knowledge and abilities on masculine skills, but men still believe they’ll be proficient in skills deemed feminine.
Things to do:
Think of confidence as a dial, something you can turn up or down. You need to keep your confidence turned down when you’re making a decision, when you are weighing your options and need to hear more.
Dial up your confidence when you’ve already make a decision and the task at hand is more about persuading others to accept it and follow you. Pay attention to your body, your self-confidence. To provide a quick injection of confidence, strike a high-power pose or lower the pitch of your voice. To lower your confidence, assume a low-power pose.
The ever dreaded, “Do you have any questions for me?” does not mark the end of an interview.
Author Ron Fry, asserts that it marks the beginning of the last and perhaps most importantly interview phase, one that’s so important that failing to properly prepare for it can undo all the rest of your hard work, including providing great answers to tough questions.
It’s your moment to shine—to show off the depth and breadth of your research, to remind that the interviewer of how perfectly your credentials fit the job description, and to actually ask for the job.
101 Smart Questions to Ask on Your Interview shares how to take charge of the interview process, presenting yourself as the self-managing, versatile, and confident candidate most employers are seeking.
Every now and then a person runs across a great book that really helps improve the quality of life. This is such a book! Written by top coaches of executive women, Barb McEwen and John Agno, the goal ofWhen Doing It All Won’t Dois to develop solutions and strategies to help women’s lives be easier, richer, happier, and saner.
It’s based on the premise that doing it all won’t do. If you are a woman who is weary and stressed and taking on too much and struggling to juggle it all, this book is dedicated to helping you find the enjoyment and satisfaction you expected with your success.
Well-organized with real solutions and a helpful workbook section, this book focuses on developing your signature talents to do what you do best, developing a formula for success, and prioritizing your values and goals. A great read!
Privacy Policy We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you.
For example, Google, as a third party vendor, uses a DART cookie to serve ads on this site based upon your visit to our sites and other sites on the Internet. You may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting Google ad and content network privacy policy at: www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, please contact the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) at (207) 467-3500 or www.networkadvertising.org.
