Women Leading The Future Blog

International Women's Day 2012

maree — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 08:31:42 +1100

I recently gave a presentation to a group of Business and Professional Women on managing their careers. I left them with 15 strategies they needed to act on to achieve their goals.

On this 2012 International Women's Day I want to share them with you here.

1. Set Goals We Want to Achieve In Our Lives, Dreams We Want To Make Come True.

2. Work With Our Partners, Families Or Significant Others In Creating A "Plan" For Making This Happen.

3. Get Clear On What We Are Prepared to Negotiate On With Our Partner/Family And In Our Work And What Is Non-negotiable.

4. Get Ourselves The Support We Need to Make It All Happen.

5. Keep Our Focus And Clarity With An Accountability Or Performance Partner.

6. Become Part Of a Professional Women's Group- Where Like-Minded Women Hang Out.

7. Build And Maintain Our Relationships And Connections With The People Who Can Support Us In The Development Of Our Professional Selves And Our Careers.

8. Find The Men In Influential Positions Who Really Do Believe In the Contribution Professional Women Have To Make And Are Committed to Their Advancement.

9. Learn To Sself-Promote With Self-confidence And Integrity.

10. Learn To Be Assertive.

11. Seek Stretch Assignments And Projects.

12. Take Calculated Risks.

13. Always Present Ourselves in the Best Light.

14. Make Our Health And Well-Being a Top Priority.

15. Don't Give Up When The Going Gets Tough!

If you want to read about these 15 strategies in more depth, go to my International Women's Day Newsletter here.

Would Anyone Want To Buy A Poster Of Your Organisation's Mission Statement? Holstee's is Famous.

maree — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:47:46 +1100

It's a small clothing company in America but its mission statement has become famous. I'm grateful to Craig Ballantyne at Early to Rise for telling me about this. So famous is its mission statement that it has had it printed and now sells it as a poster. Would anyone want to buy the mission statement of your organisation? They usually don't inspire their own workforce let alone a nation or a global community. That's what's happened at Hostee however.

Have You A Mentor?

maree — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:29:20 +1100

No one today has everything they need within themselves to grow and become successful. The most successful people in the world – whether they be CEOs, elite sportspeople, doctors, entrepreneurs, experts of every kind or leaders in their chosen fields – will acknowledge that they didn't get there on their own. Other people helped them, inspired them, mentored or coached them.

Women, Success and The Fear of Self-Promotion

maree — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:23:20 +1100

As women moving up the ladder we tend to believe that we advance our careers and attain leadership by working hard. We make a 150% commitment. We give loyalty. We strive to excel by gaining additional qualifications. Behind the scenes we get a coach or mentor to improve our performance. Then we realise, after nothing happens, that it doesn't work that way.

Men, on the other hand, believe that their career is advanced by who they are close to, by knowing the right people. They devote significant amounts of time to developing these relationships. They get the right introductions. They belong to the right organisations. They take leadership positions on the right committees. They build their profile in their industry or professional group. They also make sure they are known and recognised as someone who wants to go somewhere, someone with leadership potential.

Most women have reservations about doing that. If they by chance meet the "right people" that is O.K., but it not O.K. to go out and consciously and deliberately look for the right people who will advance their careers and endeavour to build relationships with them for that purpose.

It's certainly not part of their nature to get someone who knows someone to set up introductions for them. They don't give conscious and deliberate thought to which organisations it is important to belong to for the growth of their careers. They don't either carefully plan how to make space in their lives so that they have the time to make a commitment to them by taking a leadership position on their committee or board. They feel very uneasy about putting themselves out there, where everyone knows they are on a journey to the top. They do, however, talk about wanting to make a difference, but they don't openly and deliberately focus on getting to the top. They often take a quieter, back road and hope they arrive.

Today is Equal Pay Day In Australia

maree — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 08:42:44 +1000

Today millions of women in Australia will go to work and be paid 17 cents less per hour than their male colleague doing the same work in the office beside them.

They will earn $237.50 less this week than that same male colleague.

They would have to work an extra 63 days in 2011 to end up with the same pay as that colleague at the end of the year.

In 2011, it hardly seems comprehensible that this situation could continue to exist.

It is now more than 30 years since the equal pay for equal work legislation was passed in Australia. Some progress has been made, but there is still a long way to go when the conditions above still exist.

I wrote about this last year on Equal Pay Day. Not wanting to repeat myself I went back to check what I wrote last year. To my surprise nothing has changed. I could have produced the same article.

Many women, when they find out that their employers are paying them less than their male colleagues, just feel so betrayed and cheated that they don't want to work for that organisation anymore and begin looking for another job.

Others, will try to correct the situation by going through all the appropriate channels - talking with their manager and HR. If that fails they also will look for work elsewhere.

The Challenges for Women Aspiring to Leadership

maree — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:08:45 +1000

If there was an easy or obvious answer to the question of why women are not more strongly represented in management and leadership positions, the situation would have rapidly been reversed long ago. In recent years there has been a growing realisation by companies that they are losing enormous expertise, knowledge, experience, skills and insight as women decline management and leadership positions, opt out once they arrive or don’t return to their leadership position after maternity leave. More disconcerting for some of these companies is the fact that, in spite of their concerted efforts, making changes in their organisations that they believe will retain their women managers and leaders, they are not successful.

Is this the glass ceiling? Some women will want to debate whether there is a glass ceiling that prevents women from attaining positions of senior leadership. These are the women who have made it. They are also the women who we want to openly and honestly share their experience of how they did it because many women are not making it. The question is, however, whether it is a glass ceiling presenting an impermeable boundary to women as they climb the leadership ladder that stops them going further, or whether as women get to the top of the ladder – or even near it – they do not like what they see and experience and choose not to stay, or even go there.

What are some of the challenges women experience as they aspire to leadership and management positions in companies and organisations.

Some corporate cultures are foreign territory for women. They operate in ways that conflict with their value systems and challenge their sense of who they are and want to be. It becomes difficult therefore for women to find places to grow and develop in these cultures.
read more

Women Don't Do Leadership The Way Men "Do" Leadership

maree — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 16:50:31 +1000

Many women don’t like the way some men “do” leadership. They don’t like the way these men put themselves so out there. They see them as very ego-driven. Their leadership style is very much about them. They go after what they want very directly and specifically. This doesn’t sit well with women’s socialization and upbringing. Nor does it sit well with the way they want to create their relationships and connections.

Managers as Coaches of Their People

maree — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:32:01 +1000

Whenever I begin talking with managers about using a coaching process to motivate and inspire higher levels of performance in their people, there's always a hesitancy.

They know they need to give feedback and do performance appraisals whether they like it or not but they see coaching as optional and discretionary. More importantly they don't feel they could do it.

This feeling of inadequacy is more about them misunderstanding what coaching is, than it is about any real inadequacy on their part.

In 2008, Blessing White did a very interesting global study on coaching - The Coaching Conundrum. One of the important results in this study is very relevant to what we are talking about here.

They asked survey respondents to think of their "best coach" and then think of the one coaching action by that manager which they most valued. These were the answers:

20% - Stretched me beyond what I thought I could do.

18% - Asked questions to help me think through and solve work challenges on my own.

13% - Guided me by sharing personal insights, learnings and experiences.

10% - Treated me as an individual, understanding my unique needs.

10% - Recognized my talents and accomplishments.

9% - Provided useful feedback to help me achieve my career goals.

8% - Was candid; told me what others would not.

8% - Helped me understand where I could make a difference in the organisation.

4% - Established clear performance goals for me.

None of the respondents expected their coaches to have all the answers. What they wanted was something quite different.

Managers can take each of these points above and use as a guide to best ways to work with their people because a sizeable group of people have found these to be helpful.

Role Modelling for Women Leading The Future - "The Glass Hammer"

maree — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:04:30 +1000

One of the major obstacles for women who want to break through the glass ceiling is the lack of opportunity to gain wisdom and understanding from those who have already done it. They are out there, though not in the numbers at the top that we would like to see.

That road for women is not travelled easily. In fact women have to be twice as good as men to get there. Many more obstacles are put in their way.

So when they finally arrive and can sit on the same "stage" with their male colleague CEOs, are they going to want to talk about the struggle they had to get there. Of course not! They would be treated with derision.

It's only when these women leaders are given the opportunity to talk on a platform that is created by other women that they dare to share part of their story of struggle.

I heard Janet Dore, CEO of the Traffic Accident Commission in Victoria, and a woman who has broken through many glass ceilings in her professional life, say recently that she had to meticulously watch everything she did in her work and be excellent at it. This was from the way she acted and responded to the way she dressed because she was scrutinised in a way that her male colleagues weren't.

What Best Coaches Do - Stretch Us To The Limit Of Our Potential.

maree — Wed, 11 May 2011 12:37:19 +1000

If you’ve ever been working out with a personal trainer, you’ll know what it is like to be stretched to the limit? They always want us to go that bit further than we think we are capable of. They stand beside us and coach us to keep going. “But I can’t”, we say. “Yes, you can. Don’t stop. Stay with it. You can do it. I know you can.”

What happens? We do stay with it. Yes, we can do it, but we didn’t think we could. We wouldn’t have done it either unless we had someone beside us who believed in us more than we believed in ourselves and coached us.