Sally Helgesen describes 12 habits that hold women back from reaching out their goals
Easy to observe all of them on each corner here and there.
Do you relate to any?
👉 Reluctance to claim your achievements
Speaking up about what you contribute and detailing why you’re qualified doesn’t make you self-centred or self-serving. It send a a signal that you are ready to rise.
If you’re considering how you might promote yourself, it helps to bear in mind that you are your primary product. As you talk about what you have achieved, you are always selling you – not just details but the overall package.
👉 Expecting others to spontaneously notice and reward your contributions
Say what you are doing, what you’ve accomplished and say what motivates you. If you want to make a partner you need to say so, over and over. If you don’t, the top dogs won’t view you as committed. Just working hard won’t get you where you want to go.
👉 Overvaluing expertise
In Necessary Dreams, Anna Fels notes that feeling fulfilled at work requires two things: mastery and recognition. Mastery is the expertise part, the sheer enjoyment you feel when you do something you value really well. Mastery provides what psychologists call an intrinsic reward, meaning you take satisfaction from it. The effort and the reward are both internal.
Fels Second requirement for workplace
fulfillment is being recognized for what you do. Recognition is an extrinsic reward because it comes from the outside: you need someone else to recognize you.
It’s not surprising, then, that woman tend to overvalue expertise, since women often have a tougher time being recognized for their achievements.
You should think of every job as both a job and bridge to whatever comes next
Four kind of power in organization:
1. Power of expertise ( but cultivating expertise at the expense of other kinds of power will not position you as a leader)
2. Power of connections (whom you know)
3. Power of personal authority and charisma (rooted in confidence you inspire in others – a strong presence; a distinctive cast of mind; a way of speaking and listening that inspires loyalty and trust, or an unusual degree of gravitas) Personal authority is what sets the most successful leaders apart, whether or not their authority is tied to position
4. Power of position. Decision is always made by the person with the power to make the decision.
Organizations are most healthy when all four types of powers are in balance
The more you develop three complementary powers(1-3), the more prepared you’ll be to assume positional power
👉 Just Building rather than building and leveraging relationship
Successful leverage is the very definition of a win-win: it’s good for you and it’s good for the other person. And the more genuinely others see that you’re invested in the mutuality of the relationship, the more value you will create for them, and for the world
👉 Falling to enlist allies from day one
The view the path to success not as a matter of what or how, but of who.
The result of this who-centric approach? More support. Better positioning. Greater visibility. Less isolation.
And not incidentally, a lot less work
👉 Putting your Job before your Career
The most common reason woman put their job before their career is rooted in one of their greatest virtues: loyalty
Personal loyalty
Team loyalty
Woman failing to build the relationship that could position them for the future, they’re actively honing and advertising a skill that identifies them as suited for a less than senior level.
Top leadership roles tend to be more about potential for the next level of responsibility than management of the current level of responsibility, a reality often misunderstood at managerial levels.
So if you’re stuck in the loyalty trap, or problem admitting self-interest, prof you make a big point of disdaining the politics you see other people play, you can benefit by considering how well these attitudes really serve you, how suited they are for getting you where you want to go. Woman who use their jobs as a way to avoid thinking about their careers often have a problem admitting to ambition.
But the world needs ambitious woman – why not you?
👉 The perfection trap
Why woman?
Two reasons: gender expectations that start in childhood, and how those expectations get reinforced in the workplace
Be the healthy perfectionist. Delegate.
And for that – prioritize
You can best serve your long term interests by learning to delegate, prioritize and get comfortable taking measured risks
You will be the primary beneficiary of you lay your burden down
But only if you can accept not being perfect.
👉 The disease to please
Like perfectionists chronic pleasers usually have difficulty delegating.
Pleasing skills provide many advantages. The ability to read the needs of others gives you an edge when it comes to motivating, engaging, and communicating with customers, clients peers and direct reports.
Yet when the need to be liked or perceived as helpful overwhelms other considerations, the skills that should provide an advantage can prove detrimental. And while the need to please may serve you in the earlier stages of your career, it will impede you as you mover higher, eroding your capacity to demonstrate leadership and serving as the ultimate tool for giving your power away.
The only way off this accelerated treadmill is to be clear about your priorities and have the confidence to stand your ground and push back against expectations that have little to do with what really matters to you or, in many cases, your children. Otherwise the demands, being endless, will consume you.
To retain any serenity in this ramped up environment, you need to think long and carefully about your priorities. Not what would please others, not what would make everyone think you’re the most wonderful person whey‘ ever ever worked with or met, but what you in your heart want to brand achieve in your life. Given all the distractions and pressures you face, and the multiplicity of paths to feeling guilty, finding a way to push back against the disease to please is more essential than ever.
👉 Minimizing
It’s easy to interpret the women’s gesture as welcoming, inclusive, generous, a measure of how attuned they are to other people and their needs. And it fact, all of this is true. And there is nothing admirable about men sprawling all over the place, taking up multiple chairs and speaking their belongings about. Being clueless about the needs and physical comfort of others is not a behaviour you want to adapt if you’re seeking to move to the next level. But trying to shrink yourself isn’t a great idea either.
When you draw in your arms and legs, tighten your body, hunker down, or move aside – you undermine your ability to project authority and power.
Not only do others read you as diminished, you begin to feel that way yourself.
That’s because your physical attempts to shrink send a message to your brain that your really shouldn’t be occupying your space, either physically or metaphorically.
You are not big enough, so you don’t belong. Others are more deserving that you are. That’s how your brain interprets your actions.
You “shrink” with your language also
– I’m sorry
– Just (I just need a minute)
– Little; tiny; small; quick
– If I could make a minor point
– “Please don’t mind me”
– Using “we” instead of “I”
Given the choice between sounding self-centred and underplaying your hard-earned achievements, you’re probably better off forthrightly using “I”
You have right to take up space – to hold it, to occupy it, to inhabit it fully.
The key component of leadership presence is the opposite of cosmetic: it lies in the capacity to be fully present
Present for task; for a conversation; for the moment; for an opportunity. Present for your larger purpose in the world.
Ability to rest in the moment and hold your space is vital for women seeking to project leadership presence.
Start pushing back against compulsive multitasking because it diminishes you by giving the impression that you are overly responsive to random events.
👉 To much
To much emotion, to many words, and too much disclosure
To much emotion
Let’s be clear. What you feel is not the problem. There’s no such thing as good or bad emotion. Your emotions have enormous value. However, speaking while in the grip of strong emotion is usually a bead practice.
Feeling and identifying your emotion gives you power. Reacting to what you feel squanders it.
To many words
Taking to much time to get to the point, prefacing a suggestion with a lot of background, speaking in sentences instead of bullets, obscuring the main topic with side observations, over explaining, offering multiple rationales and examples, chatting during awkward pauses, and volunteering explanations instead of waiting to be asked
Become more concise. Being concise takes preparation.
To much disclosure
Woman deploy personal information as the primary means of bonding with another.
Man are in fact most likely to bond with one another by doing things together, often in highly competitive situation
But trust at work is generally viewed as a matter of competence and reliability rather than frank exchange about what makes you tick.
This is why routine personal disclosure, especially the sharing of doubts and weaknesses is more likely to diminish your credibility that to win you a place in your co-workers hearts.
👉 Ruminating
Men who cling to the past tend to blame others for what they believe has gone wrong in their own lives or careers, making excuses for themselves and turning their regret outward. The result is anger. Women, by contrast, are more likely to turn regret inward, blaming themselves and dissecting their own mistakes.
Routinely mulling over your mistakes, regrets, and negative experiences is called rumination.
If you spend time ruminating, you may tell yourself that you’re being reflective. You may imagine it will help you avoid mistakes in the future.
But in fact, there’s little protein to be extracted from the well-chewed morsels of self-contempt that you as a human ruminant keep coming up with.
Rumination is counterproductive cause it always makes you feel worse and it gets in the way of your ability to resolve your problems.
Analysis = Paralysis
Men move on.
Rumination is for cows
👉 Letting your Radar distract you
One of women great strengths is their capacity for broad spectrum notice, the ability to notice a lot of things at once.
Women brain works as radar, men brain works as laser
One problem is that organizationally still privilege laser notice – “just get to the bottom line” – and view it as a leadership behaviour.
The shadow side of radar is that it can make it difficult for you to filter out unhelpful distractions, scattering your attention and undermining your ability to be present.
Chris Arguris
How humans allocate their attention:
In your left-hand column are the random thoughts and observations that run through your brain while you’re doing something else, forming your stream of consciousness. In your right-hand column is the task or conversation you’re supposed to be showing up for.
Don’t let your left-hand column to overwhelm your right hand column
Trying to suppress is not a good idea
Ignoring or blocking out left hand thoughts is a good way to become a less effective and less intuitive communicator
Reframe!
Manage those pesky left-hand column thoughts. Revise the story you tell yourself about what you notice.
Reframing is powerful because it doesn’t force you to choose between the thoughts racing through your mind and whatever it is you’re actually trying to communicate. It enables you to access all the richness of your left-hand column without getting bogged down in the trap of either/or. By acknowledging what you’re feeling and finding strength in that, you harness the power of your radar to banish its shadow side.
☘️☘️☘️
❤️Remember what got you hear won’t get you there
Successful woman tend to be avid self-improvers
Remember every limiting behaviour is also rooted in a strength. Your strengths is what got you here. They might not get you there – that is where you want to go
#goodread #howwomenrise #quiettenacity
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