Contributed by Lynne Morton, President, Performance Improvement Solutions

You want to get ahead – you’re working hard – your clients like you – you get good performance reviews. But you’re still not getting where you want to go professionally, or not fast enough. Sound familiar? That wouldn’t be surprising. It’s the situation in which many High Potential professional women find themselves. And it doesn’t seem “fair,” does it?

Well, “fair” is not a word that is part of the organizationally-savvy professional’s vocabulary. Yet it is often in a woman’s vocabulary. Women are more likely than men to slip into the posture of being victimized. We don’t always harness our full potential to achieve our professional goals. Reaching full potential, by which you generate FUSION energy, requires knowing how to “play” the organizational game.

Catalyst’s 2010 report of MBA professionals, The Pipeline’s Broken Promise, shows that men are more satisfied than women with their career advancement. As the study shows, despite the fact that aspirations are equal, a man’s first post-MBA job is more likely to be at a higher level than that of a woman. Furthermore, men outpaced women most when they started at the bottom of companies or firms. Additionally, more women left their jobs because of a difficult manager.

This data is very interesting since it may shed light on areas of improvement for women, as well as for organizations. It addition to driving for organizational change, we/ women can improve our abilities to understand organizational politics, see where the “land mines” are and, as is colloquially said, “play the game”. There is ample evidence to show that organizational systems do not support the advancement of women and that bias exists in many respects (compensation, flex-time, etc). However, observational and anecdotal evidence also shows that women are not as adept in finding out which organizational networks are most important, in knowing which connections they must make and nurture, nor in seeking out career advancement opportunities.

Men think more about how to get what they want, how to win the game. They set their sights on what will get them where they want to be. Knowledge of organizational politics, the rules of the game, is critical. Many management theorists believe that their earlier experiences of playing sports make men more inclined to think that way. But there is a hugely popular WNBA now. There are women sports announcers and women covering news stories on the front lines of war zones. Women know how to be team players broadly speaking. Now we have to do that within the business arena. There aren’t enough women in senior leadership to change the rules yet, so what we need to do is play by the rules that currently exist. And we can.

Women need to: Learn the (Unwritten) Rules. Make Connections. Have Sponsors.

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