Seven Tips for Leadership Success – for Introverts

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Confident business woman workingBy Laura C. Steele (New York City)

According to a survey conducted by TheLadders.com, 65% of 1,542 senior managers see introversion as an impediment to reaching higher management levels. That’s because more flamboyant, talkative, or exuberant extroverted employees can catch management’s eye, and tend to be well-known around the office.

In reality, however, “introverts can be better bosses,” especially in a dynamic and unpredictable environment, according to Adam M. Grant, an associate professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who studies this topic. Amid the uncertainty created by the increased pace of innovation and globalization, Grant adds, it’s probably better “to be an introverted leader now than at any previous time on record.”

Because they often have a very keen understanding about what works for them, introverts can be very effective in the corporate environment. Introverts often have an inner strength and personal commitment that allows them to succeed. Notable CEOs who are introverts include Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Steven Spielberg, Douglas Conant, former President and CEO of Campbell Soup Co., and Larry Page, co-founder of Google.

There’s no need for introverts to fight their own personality traits to get ahead. Here are seven expert tips for introverts on how to succeed as business leaders.

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Voice of Experience: Lupin Rahman, Senior Vice President and Portfolio Manager, Emerging Markets, PIMCO

LupinRahmanBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

“A valuable lesson I learned over the years is to make one’s mark head first,” said Lupin Rahman, Senior Vice President and Portfolio Manager for Emerging Markets at PIMCO.

Having navigated between academia, the public sector, and the investment management industry, Rahman has developed expertise in how to successfully transition to new opportunities.

When you begin a role in a new company or industry, she explained, focus on networking and building your personal brand. “The first six months are extremely critical to your brand capital and in shaping how others view your work. It’s also the time when networking is the easiest.”

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Perspectives: Three Women in Finance on Presenting Oneself Professionally

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Cheerful employerBy Savita Iyer-Ahrestani (New York City)

While finance is still a male-dominated industry, these days, women’s style needn’t be crafted to blend in. For example, stylists like Ella Goldin, founder of New York-based styling and personal shopping firm Chic Inspiration, believe that the no-frills look women in the financial world embraced for so long is no longer necessary. Women who want to succeed in finance today, she says, have a better chance of climbing the ranks if they celebrate their womanhood rather than trying to hide it.

“In the past, women in finance and other male-dominated fields wanted to be just like men so that they could climb the work ladder, and they stuck strictly to dark suits in order to better blend in,” Goldin says. “Now, things have changed and I find that those women who really achieve professional success and are at the top as decision makers are the ones who stand out and don’t mind having a unique, beautiful and sophisticated look.”

Goldin believes that women in finance have a greater chance of succeeding professionally if their style represents who they are. “Confidence comes from feeling comfortable in your own skin,” she says, particularly in today’s highly competitive world, where so many talented people are out of work. Women who have a personal style and work with it rather than trying to hide it are those that are going to go the farthest, she says, “because as a woman, you have to have something that differentiates you from the next person.”

Here, three successful professionals who work in the world of finance, each with a unique sense of fashion, share advice on personal style for the next generation of industry leaders.

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Empowering Women by Investing in Education

Student at WorkBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Yesterday, the Foundation for Social Change and the UN Office for Partnerships kicked off the second annual Global Conference for Social Change with a Women and Girls Education Summit. The Summit featured several programs across the world for educating and empowering females.

Louise Guide, Founder and CEO of the Foundation for Social Change, explained, “The idea is about driving social progress through education for women and girls.”

Guido explained that by educating disadvantaged girls and women, organizations can empower entire communities – that when you educate women, you create a multiplier effect, whereby knowledge and skills are reinvested in families and neighborhoods.

The Foundation recently launched its own initiative, eLife, an education program for girls in Columbia. It is also partnering with Nokia to launch three new mobile applications for women in developing regions: Smart Women (for business owners), Parenting Skills, and Job Training.

Amir Dossal, Founder and Chairman of the UN Global Partnerships Forum said, “Innovation only comes when you work together. You can have great ideas but you can’t implement them unless you partner with someone.”

The conference highlighted the partnerships between nonprofit organizations and corporations to empower communities by investing in girls and women.

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Delegate Better Now – Four Ways to Perfect Your Skills

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iStock_000013251275XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

What’s one difference between a manager and a leader? Leadership is about looking outward at your organization, rather than only back at your team. It’s the same thing with delegation – to be really great at it, you need to do it with purpose, looking back at your team, and looking broadly at the organization. It’s not just about doling out work, but it means really thinking about why you’re delegating a task, how it can help you and your team grow, and how it can better position you to be more effective for your organization.

“Sometimes leaders hesitate when it comes to asking for help,” began Mary Edwards, Managing Director and Senior Executive, Health and Public Service at Accenture. “But I think it’s important for every leader to have effective delegation skills.”

For Edwards, delegation is not just a way to get through the day, it’s a way to help her team build skills and make sure she has time and energy left to do the work that can help her company grow. Here are her top four tips on how to become a great delegator – and a great leader.

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What You Seize is What You Get

LynneMortonContributed by Lynne Morton, President, Performance Improvement Solutions

Today’s work environment is tougher than ever. The pressure to find or keep a managerial level position is immense. The pressure to deliver high performance and maintain a leadership role is intense. For many women, the challenges are coupled with the added pressures of striving to maintain personal or family balance. Yet that needn’t be seen as a sign of weakness. Women continue to want to achieve more professionally, and continue to show their abilities to do that well; there’s no weakness evident. Yet we need to be stronger than ever to survive. Today, survival is based on success. And that success can be achieved by those who go after it. In other words, success is achieved by those who see opportunities and who seize them.

In today’s tight job market, it is the person with the confidence and the qualifications who gets the job. Even though women are still, unfortunately, being paid less, companies are not rushing to hire women as a way to keep payrolls down. They are relying on what they think they need: strength during tough times. It’s time for us to get in touch with our inner strength and project that to the world.

According to the Pew Research Center, men outpace women in getting jobs. And women are getting laid off more so than men, at least in some industries. In financial services, long a male-dominated world, from 2007 to 2010, 12.5% of women in the financial industry lost their jobs, compared with 8.8% of men, per the Economic Policy Institute. It would seem that part of the problem comes from women being seen as weak, perhaps indecisive, and not standing up for themselves. Women are not making a strong enough case for the value they are bringing to their organizations… perhaps because they do not see it themselves. Clarity of vision is needed, internally and externally. Then action.

This is a time for bold action, for being decisive, and for standing up against fear or uncertainty. If what you see was what you got, we now know that what you see and seize is what you get. If times are tough, so are we and here’s how.

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Voice of Experience: Dr. Sonja Koerner, Partner, Risk, Financial Services, Ernst & Young

SonjaKoernerBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

According to Dr. Sonja Koerner, Partner, Risk, Financial Services at Ernst & Young, women in senior roles in the industry need to see themselves as role models.

“Make yourself available as a mentor,” Dr. Koerner said. She also encouraged senior women to support diversity and inclusiveness in their organizations and drive the debate around things like flexible work arrangements.

“Many women – and some men – would hugely benefit [from these programs]. We should make sure that once women sign up for them, this does not mean the end of their career progression,” she said.

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Crying in the Office: OK or No Way?

iStock_000004601196XSmallBy Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

A recent Bloomberg article by writer Anne Kreamer is proving to be quite controversial. In “Tears for Peers Are Newly OK in Modern Workplace,” Kreamer contends that women have distinctly female parts—their essential femininity, their nurturing impulses, and aspects of their intrinsic emotional biology, such as crying. According to Kreamer, these things are not socially-conditioned, but rather “neurobiologically hard-wired.”

While researching her latest book, Kreamer discovered that 41 percent of women and 9 percent of men reported that they had cried in the workplace during the past year. “This finding conforms to the national gender split that neurologists have found. Women, who produce higher levels of prolactin, the hormone that controls tear production, cry on average 5.3 times a month, compared with 1.4 times for men,” Kreamer wrote. “Women’s tear ducts are also anatomically different from men’s — they are smaller, which means that when women cry, tears tend to spill out and down their faces, whereas when men cry, their tears merely well up.”

She concludes by writing that tears at work aren’t necessarily a moral failing or a sign of weakness. While that may be true, claims of tears not being socially-conditioned are not only biased, but dangerous. Here’s why.

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Voice of Experience: Carole Berndt, Head of Global Treasury Solutions, EMEA, Bank of America Merrill Lynch

CaroleBerndtBy Cleo Thompson (London), founder of The Gender Blog

At an early stage in her career, Carole Berndt, winner of the 2011 Women in Banking and Finance’s Award for Achievement, stood on a mountain in Hong Kong and was asked to quote on the risk element of turning the side of the mountain into an airport. She duly quoted, the site was purchased and developed and is now Hong Kong’s Chep Lak Kok international airport – a story which reflects Berndt’s geographically diverse career, first in insurance and now in banking.

“I was born in the UK and in 1970 my family moved to Australia; I grew up in Sydney and went to university there. My first job was as a book keeper with an insurance company – subsequently purchased by Allianz – and they invested in me. I did accounting, then computer science, then an MBA in international business. I led the very early efforts in the e-commerce space in the 1990s for the company’s Asia region and spent considerable time in Singapore and Indonesia.

“Around the late 1990s, I became known in my company as the “grandmother of the internet” – that’s when I knew I’d become part of the furniture and life had become too easy. I was offered and took a role with Citi in Hong Kong running the project office for their e-business unit, which then become known as Global Transaction Services.”

Berndt stayed for eight years, leading the client delivery services team before moving to New York following her promotion to global head of client delivery. She was then approached by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, so with a great opportunity on offer, she relocated to London in 2010 into her current role of head of global treasury solutions for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

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