Emotional Intelligence – Part 2: Do Women Have Higher Emotional Intelligence than Men?

By Aimee Hansen

Emotional IntelligenceLast week, we wrote about Emotional Intelligence as a true leadership differentiator beyond IQ or “hard skill” levels or task mastery, and a prerequisite for real leadership belonging at the C-Suite level.

As Daniel Goleman, Ph. D, author of the New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence among other publications, highlights: “Members of a successful corporate team must, collectively, have a high level of emotional intelligence. On a team with high EI attributes, it is easy to spot those few who do not…”

But according to research, it would seem that women are significantly more likely to be amongst those who do.

Women Demonstrate More EI Competency More Consistently

Whether women have higher emotional intelligence than men has been a topic for debate by Goleman and others, though a Korn Ferry study of 55,000 professionals across 90 countries found that “women score higher than men on nearly all (11 of 12) emotional intelligence competencies, except emotional self-control, where no gender differences are observed.”

The authors, including Goleman, “found that women more effectively employ the emotional and social competencies correlated with effective leadership and management than men.”

According to the Korn Ferry results, women were 86% more likely than men to be seen as consistently demonstrating emotional self-awareness as a competency (18.4% of women compared to just 9.9% of men). Women were 45% more likely than men to be seen as demonstrating empathy consistently.

Women also outperformed men at “coaching & mentoring, influence, inspirational leadership, conflict management, organizational awareness, adaptability, teamwork and achievement orientation.” The most narrow margin was “positive outlook” (9% more likely), and the only gender neutral competency was “emotional self-control.”

When it comes to excelling at what we value, these findings complement research that shows that men are more likely to undervalue the relationship interaction with customers and clients, which women will tend to emphasize as important.

Closing the Gender Gap of Competency Perception

Generally speaking in the workplace, women tend to undervalue their skills competency and performance while men overvalue themselves on both.

These perceptual differences, reflected in the cultural mirror, can mean women preemptively take themselves out of the game. In one Hewlett Packard report, men went for the job if they were 60% qualified based on job criteria whereas women went for the job only if they were 100% qualified.

Zenger Folkman found that women’s confidence increases with age and experience so that by our mid-40’s, we’ve closed the gender confidence gap to meet men. But it’s the leaps we may have forgone in our 20’s and 30’s, when the gap was prevalent, that still factor in as lost opportunities.

Dr Richard E. Boyatzis, Distinguished University Professor, CWRU, spoke to women undervaluing, and men overvaluing, their competencies in the workplace: “Research shows, however, that the reality is often the opposite. If more men acted like women in employing their emotional and social competencies, they would be substantially and distinctly more effective in their work.”

“The data suggests a strong need for more women in the workforce to take on leadership roles,” said Goleman. “When you factor in the correlation between high emotional intelligence and those leaders who deliver better business results, there is a strong case for gender equity. Organizations must find ways to identify women who score highly on these competencies and empower them.”

Emotional intelligence is considered a key differentiator at the top leadership level, and it’s a competency asset women can deeply value even as we develop it.

How do you further develop your “EQ”?

According to a Forbe’s Coaches Council article from Cari Coats, there are four main attributes that can be recognized in emotionally intelligent leaders, paraphrased below.

Self-awareness of your own internal motivations and tendencies and emotions and both understanding and acceptance of “the good, the bad, and the ugly”. Emotionally intelligent leaders can take feedback without defensiveness. One practice that can help is to become aware of how you respond when challenged or when things don’t go well.

Transparency both in your own vulnerabilities and flaws and mistakes as well as in speaking with truth and clarity with others. As Dickson writes, “the key is showing up as a whole human and being unafraid of transparency, then working toward improving relationships within an organization, within team communications or with customers.”

Being present to perceive and listen and respond to the person or situation in front of them without judgment, while recognizing the emotional needs of others at play. An emotionally intelligent leader is able to appreciate and allow other’s emotions and handle them with empathy.

Self-mastery of emotional awareness so that they are not yanked into emotional reactions, but instead can more aptly choose how to respond in any given moment.

Want to go much further? For a comprehensive list of leadership training opportunities, books, tips, exercises, videos and assessments to help develop your emotional intelligence, please check out the Positive Psychology Program for resources.

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Unpacking Stress at Work Part 1: Mismatched Expectations!

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach, CEO and Founder of theglasshammer.com

As a coach, many clients come to me because they are somewhat dissatisfied at work. Often they have been happy for years and a new structure or a new job in the firm has made them question if they should leave the team or even the firm.

It is rarely ever the tasks that make people wrestle with the big question of “Should I stay or should I go” as senior people find ways of navigating and delegating where appropriate. In fact people can love their tasks, the day to day of what they actually do, but hate their role.

How come? Simply put, because a role can consist of responsibilities that are not aligned with the appropriate authority to execute leaving people feeling like they cannot succeed on their mission. This can show up as having no formal authority around managing the people who have to deliver on a product or a behavior, or having no budget or resources to make the goal happen.

If you suspect you are there, ask yourself three questions:

  1. “Does this role have definitive responsibilities that require tangible results?”
  2. “Am I the type of person who needs to see tangible outcomes for my own well-being/sense of self? or for my formal reward or evaluation?”
  3. “In this role, will I have the ability to deliver part or all of the solution or product via myself and a team that I have control over in some way or another such as reporting line, resources and budget? What could stop this from running smoothly?”

If you say yes to needing to see tangible results, your job requires it and your current position gives you the ability to execute on your responsibilities such as call clients, sell them a product and let a qualified and competent team fulfill on the order (or even deliver it yourself), then my guess is, things are good unless you are a horrible boss (which is for another day).

However, if you say yes to the tangible results piece and your job has you taking on a nebulous or aspirational mission, without any team, budget or ability to infiltrate and change core aspects of the company or system, then you might feel the tension.

Lastly, maybe you do not need or have not been given formal responsibilities around tangible results and in this case then advocacy or influencer work tends not create such a rub organizationally or for the individual except when the individual has a high sense of tangible achievements for their own validation.

If you would like to work with a coach because you are experiencing any of the above and want to talk through your options and make a plan of action, Nicki Gilmour is taking on 5 new clients for summer only and you can book a free exploratory chat with her here.

Nicki is a qualified coach and holds a masters from Columbia University in Organizational Psychology and is the Founder of theglasshammer.com

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Make Better Presentations: How Good Data Visualization Can Advance Your Career

presentation

Image via Shutterstock

Guest contributed by Stephanie Evergreen, PhD

Ever been in a meeting where each person’s presentation gets incrementally more boring, even though the data should be intrinsically interesting to everyone in the room. You present to a room where half of the folks around the table are checking email?

Are you capturing your audience’s attention with your presentation and more importantly, can they easily make sense of what you telling them? In fact, research shows that when we present decks with bullets and then proceed to speak to them, we literally interrupt our audience’s ability to make sense of what we are saying. This is because our brains aren’t wired to read and listen to the same content, delivered at two different paces, through two different avenues.

At worst, those around the table are overwhelmed by all of the information being presented and simply check out (or check email). You’ve lost control of your content and the agenda moves forward without your case being made and with decisions still left on the table, leaving you looking less than your totally awesome self.

Instead of the typical way slide decks are delivered, let me give you an effective alternative based on research of how human brains are wired. The brain is wired to first look at the pictures.

Researchers call this the pictorial superiority effect, which means we live in a pictures-first world. So if we focus our slideshow development on having clear, effective visuals, our content will be more readily understood. We will maintain control of the discussion. We will get decisions made. We will stand out.

Turning that slide into effective data visualization is surprisingly easy and can be done entirely within PowerPoint. The trick is to state your bottom line right up front.

I was a guest in an ops review meeting and I listened as the COO of this Fortune 500 company told his team that what he wanted to see on the slide was: (1) your claim, and (2) the visual evidence that supports the claim. What a lovely way of stating it.

In the example above, the bottom line is literally at the bottom of the slide: “Data suggests sales to women are improving.” This is key! It needs to become the title of the slide. We could also re-word it a bit to be more straightforward:

presentation

This, alone, will cut down on some meeting noise because people won’t be guessing at what you are trying to say.

But the visual isn’t really showing the evidence that supports that claim. It isn’t that easy to see the fact that women are buying almost as much as men. A better way to show data stories that have to do with closing the gap is a graph type I call a dumbbell dot plot.

presentation 1

A dumbbell dot plot encodes the data by a dot’s position and research shows that a set of dots, positioned on a scale, is the easiest graph type for our brains to interpret. We then connect two of the dots like a tiny Popeye dumbbell, where the line draws the eye to the space, the distance, the gap between the two dots. This graph type makes it much easier to see that sales are trending up for both groups and that the gap between genders is closing.

Dumbbell dot plots are so easy for people to decode but we don’t see them very often because they aren’t a default graph type in PowerPoint. Want to see how easy it is to make one, though?

I just started with a line graph with markers. Then right-click on one of the lines and select Format Data Series. Make the line No Fill. Then make the markers large.

presentation 2

To make the dumbbell stick, look in the menu bar for the Chart Design tab. On the left is a button called Add Chart Element. Open it, navigate to Lines, and select High-Low Lines.

presentation 3

So easy. Such a small change that makes such a huge impact. Of course, I used a better font, ditched the clutter-y slide template, and removed the bullet points and those things will also make it much easier for the audience to see what I came to talk about.

One note, so that you don’t get surprised in a meeting: In some versions of PowerPoint, when you go into full screen mode, the lines appear on top of the dots and it doesn’t look as cool. If that happens to you, copy the graph and paste it as a picture right on top of the graph. Test this out ahead of time.

Knowing which chart type will best showcase your data story is an essential skill that isn’t taught in business school (yet). With million-dollar business decisions and your career on the line, you can come out ahead by adding this skill to your knowledge base and I show you exactly how to choose the right chart type (with the peer-reviewed research that backs up my recommendations) and how make it, step-by-step, right inside Excel and PowerPoint in my latest book, Effective Data Visualization.

A tiny investment into clear, effective slides, where we state our bottom line and then show the evidence that supports it, reaps dividends in meetings. We get our points across without distraction or interruption, we represent ourselves as clear and collected, critical business decisions get made, and we shine. That is how you set yourself up for a promotion.

ABOUT DR. STEPHANIE EVERGREEN

Dr. Stephanie Evergreen is an internationally-recognized speaker, designer, and researcher. She is best known for bringing a research-based approach to helping researchers better communicate their work through more effective graphs, slides, and reports. A Fulbright scholar, she holds a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University in interdisciplinary research.

Dr. Evergreen has trained future data nerds worldwide through keynote presentations and workshops, for clients including Mastercard, Verizon, Chick-Fil-A, Rockefeller Foundation, Brookings Institute, and the United Nations. Dr. Evergreen writes a popular blog on data presentation at StephanieEvergreen.com. Her two books on designing high-impact graphs, slideshows, and reports both hit #1 on Amazon bestseller lists weeks before they were even released. This May Dr. Evergreen has published the second edition of one of those bestsellers – Effective Data Visualization: The Right Chart for the Right Data and the brand new Data Visualization Sketchbook with templates for making infographics and dashboards.

The opinions and views expressed by guest contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of theglasshammer.com

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Emotional Intelligence – Part 1: The Higher Your Go, The More It Matters!

By Aimee Hansen

Research has shown that leadership accomplishment at the most senior levels is highly correlated with emotional intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence in LeadershipEQ is said to be responsible for up to 58% of performance outcome. Whereas cognitive ability and IQ are “threshold competencies,” emotional intelligence is a differentiator at the leadership edge.

Emotional intelligence is so important in leadership that research has found that within groups with no dedicated leader, having the highest emotional intelligence is one of the driving factors for who will ultimately emerge as a leader. It’s not only an asset for leadership, but a predictor of leadership success.

It’s been called “the next sign of great leadership” in a Forbes Council Post, and in the quiet and remarkable transformation happening in business, “Honesty, intelligence and empathy are required.”

“Yes, this requires a level of vulnerability that makes old school CEOs and COOs cringe,” writes Rebecca T. Dickson, “But for those open to it, leaders are building trust they were never able to when they hid behind authority.”

No Soft Skill

Dr. Daniel Goleman, the most famous of the emotional intelligence researchers, highlights that EI is especially critical in the C-Suite. Goleman told Acertitude, an executive search firm, “what I found is that for jobs at every level, emotional intelligence is about twice as important as cognitive ability. The higher you go in the organization the more it matters. For top-level C-suite jobs, 80% to 90% of the abilities that distinguish high performers, as identified by the company itself, is based on emotional intelligence.”

Goleman told Acertitude, “What they’re looking for is the ability to manage yourself and to handle relationships effectively. That’s the definition of emotional intelligence. That’s what really matters.”

When IQ and technical skills are similar, emotional intelligence (no soft skill) is what moves people up the ladder. It pays too.

One study found that participants with high degrees of emotional intelligence made an annual average of $29,000 more than those with a low degree of emotional intelligence.

What is Emotional Intelligence

Goleman breaks the emotional intelligence framework into four areas:

• Self-Awareness: accurate self-assessment, self-confidence, and emotional self-awareness
• Social-Awareness: empathy, organizational awareness, and service
• Self Management: emotional self-control, transparency, adaptability, achievement, initiative, and optimism
• Relationship Management: inspirational leadership, influence, developing others, change catalyst, conflict management, bond-building, and teamwork

With emotional intelligence, you’re able to bring awareness to your brain’s fast operating system, which is automatic, default, irrational and often quick to interpret events negatively rather than as opportunities and react with disproportional emotion to the situation in front of you now. You attune more to your slower, more cautious and intentional second operating system so that you may respond rather than react.

Within self-awareness, empathy plays a particularly important role when it comes to C-Suite leadership:

• Cognitive Empathy is being able to see the world through other’s perspectives (mind-to-mind connection).
• Emotional Empathy is being able to feel what others are feeling.
• Empathic Concern is being able to relate to how others think and feel and to care about helping them (heart-to-heart connection).

The best leaders possess these empathic characteristics and can articulate and inspire others in a common vision.

Primal Leadership

Goleman introduces the concept of “primal leadership” – “No matter what leaders set out to do—whether it’s creating strategy or mobilizing teams to action—their success depends on how they do it. Even if they get everything else just right, if leaders fail in this primal task of driving emotions in the right direction, nothing they do will work as well as it could or should.”

“This emotional task of the leader is primal—that is, first—in two senses: It is both the original and the most important act of leadership.” Goleman states. “Leaders have always played a primordial emotional role.”

Fred Kofman, an Argentinian economist and author writes, “Hearts and minds cannot be bought or forced; they can only be deserved and earned. They are given only to worthy missions and trustworthy leaders. This applies not only to organizations but also to many other domains of human activity.”

A leader who is highly effective is often a leader that has done substantial work on herself or himself when it comes to emotional mastery through what Nancy Koehn has called “the gathering years” of harnessing one’s emotional awareness to access her or his deeper strength.

At the helm of any organization are those who navigate the relationship of that organization’s behavior to the very ideology it operates from, the relationship with all those who it serves and the relationship to all those who support it to exist.

Cultivating a sophisticated relationship with yourself, with your emotions and with relating to others emotions is the prerequisite to C-Suite leadership, and more than ever, to evolving how leadership shows up.

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Who Do You See in the Mirror?

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Janelle BrulandNo matter how successful we become, for some of us there is a whisper we hear that never quite goes away.

Call it imposter syndrome or just self-doubt, but it’s there if we allow it. I have learned that we can silence this intruder to our success. But it takes effort and consistency.

How we see ourselves is directly related to how we portray ourselves to the outside world. We will either limit ourselves in what we are able to accomplish or may desire to prove what we can accomplish, but those successes do not bring peace and fulfillment. I like the picture of a small kitten who looks at its reflection in the mirror and sees a mighty lion. If we feel small with not much to offer, we won’t invest in ourselves and will limit what we can accomplish. On the other hand, if we see ourselves as strong and capable, the possibilities are unlimited.

Why do so many people fail to grow and reach their potential, or accomplish many things and be unable to experience joy and satisfaction from it? I’ve concluded that one of the main reasons is a low self-image. When we have a low self-image, we feel poorly about ourselves, and tend to make the situation worse through negative thoughts and critical self-talk. If we don’t feel worth the effort, the image we have of ourselves will remain low without the chance to improve.

Unfortunately, negative, critical self-talk can be ingrained in us from childhood. In their book The Answer, businessmen-authors John Assaraf and Murray Smith speak to the negative messages children receive growing up. “By the time you’re seventeen years old, you’ve heard ‘No, you can’t,’ an average of 150,000 times. You’ve heard ‘Yes, you can,’ about 5,000 times. That’s 30 no’s for every yes. That makes for a powerful belief of ‘I can’t.’”

You can choose to silence your inner critic. For some of us it is easier to let go of this lens we view ourselves through, for others it feels like a constant battle with our inner critic. It takes time and work to change this perception that has been reinforced for years. The good news is by choosing to have positive thoughts about yourself, you can begin the process to change and improve your self-image. Here are a couple of ways I have found to be helpful in silencing our inner critic:

Guard Your Self-Talk

One way to build your self-image is by guarding your self-talk. If you think about it, you will realize you talk to yourself many times a day. Is that self-talk positive or negative? Are you being kind to yourself or critical? When faced with a problem do you tell yourself, “I’ve got this. I will figure it out” or instead say, “I’ve messed up again – I never get it right.” It can be helpful to log your thoughts to determine how you are doing.

Take time to be kind to yourself. You can be kind to yourself with the intention of being more kind to others, but it starts with you.

When you realize your own special value, you will see yourself as strong and capable. You will believe you are worth investing in. The result will be growth and development and living up to your full potential.

Focus on Your Strengths

Change your focus to all the things you excel at. What are your strengths and how can you choose to use them to make life better for yourself and others? Turn around the negatives and focus on your positive attributes. Anytime you struggle with feelings of inadequacy, take the time to stop, take a breath, and reassess why you are having these feelings. Often, we overlook our greatest assets, so by intentionally examining ourselves in the mirror to find our inner lions we can choose who we see.

If you want to formalize the process take a strengths self-assessment like Birkman. Spend time with the results. Live with them and remind yourself often about your unique gifts and talents. I found this particular assessment so helpful that we took our entire management team through it, and I am now certified to conduct the assessment for others.

Another way is to ask your friends and colleagues what they see in you. You might be surprised at how others view you. It is a great exercise, and a very encouraging one. Again, live with the positives you glean from it.

You are a Lion

If you are reading this, you are a lion. You have ascended to leadership or started a business or are just getting started on a life of accomplishment, but there is so much more to do. Silence the whisper that holds so many people back. Be proactive about reminding yourself often that you are more than capable. You are strong and you have proven it over and over again.

Janelle Bruland is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and high-performance coach who inspires others to live impactful and successful lives. She is Founder and CEO of Management Services Northwest, a company she started in her living room in 1995 and has grown into an industry leading company, named one of the Fastest Growing Private Companies by Inc. magazine. The CPO of Microsoft, Mike Simms, describes her as a true pioneer in her field. Janelle is also the Co-Founder of Legacy Leader, a leadership development company that teaches business professionals how to build a legacy, transform their leadership, and love their life. She is the author of The Success Lie: 5 Simple Truths to Overcome Overwhelm and Achieve Peace of Mind.

The opinions and views expressed by guest contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of theglasshammer.com

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Voice of Experience: Angie Sabel, Managing Director at Abbot Downing New York

Being curious will get you far on your professional journey, finds Angie Sabel. “It drives your understanding of the ‘why’ and the people and the process.”

Angie SabelAnd that’s an approach that helps Sabel always anticipate how she can best serve her clients. “I am always anticipating and prepared with solutions no matter what the discussion might be with clients and colleagues.”

Helping Families Drives a Successful and Fulfilling Career

Sabel started her career in public accounting with a goal of advancing to a position where she would work hands-on with family offices or family enterprise. She gravitated toward this work because of the desire to be an inclusive contributing partner across all touch points of a client’s financial vision. “Helping future generations offers a connectivity and longevity that has been very rewarding,” she says. She finds that the best part of her position is meeting the entire family and understanding each individual’s role and how they want to use their wealth to positively impact their families and communities.

Sabel finds fulfillment in knowing that her team of thought leaders provides the most knowledgeable resources to help her clients. “Wealth clients are unique in their needs and clients realizes we have a depth of resources available, including connecting with other clients, that provide options to assist with decision making,” she says. “I’m proud to work with people who have spent their whole career developing their craft. Because each one is unique in its own way, we can share our knowledge, research and experience to help them achieve their goals.”

For Sabel, building these long-standing relationships has been one of the professional achievements she’s most proud of. “In school you’re always encouraged to earn the best scores in order to show you’re prepared and capable, but I have realized that even more important is really understanding the person with whom you’re working—whether it’s a client or manager. By focusing more on them and less on yourself, you’ll find ways to connect and that is how you are going to create the relationships that will lead to a rewarding career.”

Embracing the Benefits of Being a Mentor and Mentee

As Sabel nurtures the next generation of wealth advisors, she assures rising talent that no one needs to feel as though they have to strive for perfection. “It’s more engaging when we come as our real selves,” she says, adding that she wishes she had known this earlier in her career, as she would have been more prone to making decisions faster and being more confident knowing that she didn’t have to come with all the answers.

To that end, she encourages rising talent to explore avenues to build their self confidence. The good news, she says, is that this trait isn’t relative—it’s about what makes you personally confident. And for that reason, there’s no single prescribed path to success, but everyone needs to think about what they want to do and why they are seeking a particular position. “Be honest with yourself and trust your instincts to make good, informed decisions,” she advises.

Sabel always looks for opportunities to build her professional skills, and knows that learning can come at any time, and from any direction. She finds her direct manager to be an important resource and frequently learns from the mentees she has met through her work as a mentor with Smith Family Business Initiative at Cornell, noting that their energy and questions inspire her.

Professional development is important, and she particularly appreciates participating in roundtables, as she finds them to be a very practical model for sharing what you’re dealing with in real time, and obtaining advice and best practices from others who have been in applicable situations. “Because roundtables are less formal and structured, they encourage people to come together and share ideas in a more free-form manner, without having to rely on a prepared agenda. It’s a forum where people feel comfortable to share their vulnerabilities, and learn from each other.”

Sabel enjoys exploring new restaurants in New York with her husband, and sharing her experiences with friends, family and colleagues. She considers her husband to be one of her most influential advocates. “It’s important to have someone outside of work who can serve as a mentor in another way—someone who offers a different perspective, but always encourages you.”

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Akila Raman, Partner, Investment Banking Division, Goldman Sachs

Akila Raman recommends to others: “Treat the senior people you work with as clients.”

Akila RamanRaman, who graduated with a degree in political theory and a certificate in finance from Princeton University, said she “found her home” in corporate derivatives at Goldman Sachs. She says of her decision to pursue a career at the firm, “I wanted to work at Goldman Sachs because I knew it was a very team-oriented culture.”

While she originally thought she would remain for only two years at Goldman Sachs, Raman stayed at the firm during the financial crisis and beyond.

“During the financial crisis I had a unique vantage point for observing the firm’s leaders coming together to adapt to changes and anticipate client needs,” said Raman. “As volatile markets became an increasingly important focus, our corporate hedging business became even more important for our clients, and I was ultimately asked to lead a joint risk management and debt financing effort.”

Hard Work Yields Results

After several years, Raman was named head of Natural Resources Debt Capital Markets and Risk Management within the Investment Banking Division. Reflecting upon her most significant client achievement, Raman cites her work advising Great Plains Energy, the local utility company in her Missouri hometown, on its merger with Westar Energy.

“Goldman Sachs was one of few banks that could have structured the Great Plains-Westar transaction given its unique complexities. We were able to bring together a variety of resources across GS and deliver comprehensive solutions, which ultimately resulted in value for our client and its stakeholders,” notes Raman. She continues, “Working on that transaction allowed me to form deeper relationships with the management team and also had a meaningful impact on the people in my hometown, making the deal extremely rewarding.”

Looking ahead, Raman is also interested in the effect of technology and renewables on the natural resources space. “We’re at a very interesting time in the energy space, particularly as energy policies globally are responding to changing dynamics due to technological advances, consumer preferences and investors’ ESG objectives,” says Raman. “I expect we’ll see the natural resources sector evolve over the coming years to adapt to these factors.”

Reflecting on her career, Raman, who was recently named a partner, said that being asked to join Goldman Sachs’ partnership was a career-defining moment. “As someone who began her career as a summer analyst looking up to senior bankers, being welcomed into the partnership was such an honor.”

Serving Clients Is a Priority

Raman is also keeping busy on several transactions that include complex financing and risk management solutions. She notes that Goldman’s involvement in these deals is a result of “many years of hard work and relationship-building in order to gain the trust of clients to be tapped as an advisor on these large-scale, intricate transactions.”

Raman places the same level of priority and focus when preparing deliverables for internal clients: “Treat the senior people you work with as clients – because they are,” advises Raman.

Carving Out Time for Your Passions

“Speak out, and don’t be afraid to have open lines of communication with your manager and your team around deadlines and deliverables,” recommends Raman. “Being able to carve out time for your own interests and your life is so important, especially as a junior team member.”

Outside of the office, Raman is passionate about supporting entrepreneurs: “I enjoy spending time investing in women-led companies. We don’t talk enough about wealth generation among women. I feel very passionately about having my investments reflect my values, and working towards making the next generation of entrepreneurs more diverse.”

In addition to investments she makes in her own time, Raman is also involved with Pursuit, a nonprofit that helps adults with the most need and potential receive technology training so they may get their first tech jobs and become the next generation of leaders in technology. Given many of Pursuit’s graduates are immigrants, this mission resonates with Raman, who is the daughter of Korean and Indian immigrants herself.

And, Raman makes sure to set aside plenty of time each week for her family. “No matter where I am each week, whether I’m in New York or traveling abroad, I always carve out time for my partner, and we try to make sure we have at least one kid-free evening together each week.”

She notes, “It’s important to make clear to my family that they are just as important to me as my career.” During this dedicated family time, Raman loves to experience New York’s parks and galleries with her husband and daughter, insightfully commenting, “It’s always a joy to experience New York through our daughter’s eyes.”

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Why Self-Care Matters Most In Leadership (Yes, for you too!)

You know the first things you are quick to sacrifice when it comes to meeting all the demands of work (self-care, well-being, downtime)? Well they are the last things you should.

Self-care in leadershipIf you have been able to reach and stay at the executive level, then you are more likely to have learned that self-care is inextricable to leadership. You have ideally dropped the cultural self-sacrifice story a long time ago in your leadership journey.

A study of self-care among executive leadership in healthcare organizations found that “Leaders’ with high self-care ratings were likely to be from an organization with a high profit margin, while leaders with low ratings were likely to be either in their role for less than a year or from an organization with a lower profit margin.”

How much leaders practice self-care has a trickle down effect within organizations, and especially, in your own life and ability to show up.

Sacrificing Self-Care Benefits Nobody

We already know that playing the long hours game has a strong adverse impact on women’s short and long-term health relative to men. We know that a female-skewed over-conscientious approach to work can lead to emotional exhaustion. And research has shown that high work-related fatigue is even stronger for highly educated women.

Mindfulness researcher and author Jacqueline Carter shared with theglasshammer, “it was amazing to see how basically the higher you got in an organization, the higher the level of the executives, they all took time to exercise, they slept well, even despite ridiculous travel schedules and ridiculous scopes of jobs,” says Carter. “It was really clear that if you don’t start taking good care of yourself and setting good boundaries and saying no at an earlier level of your leadership journey, you’re gonna burn out.”

According to Harvard Business Review, “burnout cuts across executive and managerial levels…the major defining characteristic of burnout is that people can’t or won’t do again what they have been doing.” Identifiable characteristics include: “(1) chronic fatigue; (2) anger at those making demands; (3) self-criticism for putting up with the demands; (4) cynicism, negativity, and irritability; (5) a sense of being besieged; and (6) hair-trigger display of emotions.”

When in burnout, you lose your heart for where you’ve come to and where you’re at and what you’re doing.

Investment: Healthy You, Healthy Leadership

“I think there’s a mind-set shift that happens when people start to take this seriously, which is to go from seeing the investment of time in sleep, exercise, and mindfulness as a cost to thinking of it as an investment,” says Caroline Webb, senior adviser to McKinsey and author of How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life.

“In fact, it’s not just an investment that pays back long term, it’s an investment that pays back, all the evidence suggests, rather immediately,” says Webb. “The idea of that shift—that this is not down time, it’s simply investing in your ability to have more up time—is something which I’ve seen at the heart of everybody who makes a difference in the way that they’re living their lives, and also in the way that their teams around them are living their lives.”

The Value in Reset and Renewal

There are many ideas for how to incorporate self-care into your daily routine – such as meditation, being in nature, spending pockets of time in silence, drinking more water, starting a gratitude practice, scheduling your day to include work and non-work activities, practicing affirmations, getting massages and more. The thing is when you approach these things as something else on the task list to fit in when you’re already at overload, self-care can feel like yet another chore.

Research shows it can be valuable to step away from it all, take a bigger breath and dedicate attention for yourself to reset and renew. The right health-related vacation can shift things – it can bring you back to yourself, to open perspectives and return to a center of clarity and expansiveness, with benefits that last long beyond the time you spend away.

Research has shown that “individuals who attended a spiritual retreat for 7 days experienced changes in the dopamine and serotonin systems of the brain, which boosts the availability of these neurotransmitters” that relate to positive psychological effects. Additionally, meditation retreats have shown “large effects” on anxiety, depression, stress, mindfulness and compassion. Studies have also shown improvements in physical health, tension, and fatigue.

“A one-week wellness retreat (including many educational, therapeutic and leisure activities, and an organic, mostly plant-based diet),” according to a scientific study, “resulted in substantial improvements in everything from weight to blood pressure to psychological health – and sustained at six weeks (the last check-in point of the study).”

Beth McGroarty, director of research at the Global Wellness Institute, said to Travel Weekly, “in a wellness retreat, therapies/experiences often happen in concert and over multiple days, and combining them may have unique outcomes.”

As the research report states, “Retreat experiences provide a unique opportunity for people to escape from unhealthy routines and engage in healthy practices and activities that lead to immediate and sustained health benefits.”

For transparency, the writer of this article hosts women’s retreats, and my direct experience in facilitating a space in which a woman can connect with other women in vulnerability, return to her own center, show up from this place, and impact her own life trajectory is the inspiration for my personal commitment to this work.

No Matter How You Do It…

The bottom line is that no matter how you start or improve self-care – whether taking small moments for big impact changes in your daily routine or taking a bigger break away from it all to truly reset and renew – what’s most important, on all levels, is that you do.

Writer Bio:

Aimee Hansen, freelance writer for the theglasshammer, is the Creator and Facilitator of Storyteller Within Women’s Retreats, recommended by Lonely Planet Wellness Escapes. Since 2015, she has hosted nearly 150 women across 18 intimate retreat experiences. Her Journey Into Sacred Expression Retreats involve meditation, yoga, self-exploratory writing and sacred ceremonies, all in beautiful natural surroundings. She’ll be hosting two upcoming women’s retreat events this summer – in late June and late July – on the stunning Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, for women seeking self-renewal.

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Voice of Experience: Charlotte Hsu, Asia Pacific Diversity & Inclusion Leader and Singapore General Assurance Partner, PwC

Charlotte HsuFrom her leadership vantage point, PwC’s Charlotte Hsu knows that it is critical to help build a robust pipeline by encouraging other women in the industry.

“Now that you are there, don’t forget to look out for the little girls who were once you,” she says.

To that end, Hsu herself devotes time to helping bolster the careers of younger colleagues. The key, she shares, is that while basic technical competency or product knowledge is important, soft skills—or as she calls them, “fundamental skills”—are equally or more important in advancing your career. In fact, that attitude is what allowed her to build her audit career.

An Unconventional Start Leads to a Successful Audit Career

Hsu was a groundbreaker from the start, considering that she did not graduate with an accounting degree, yet is now an assurance partner in a Big Four firm. When she started her career in Singapore in the ‘90s, the most attractive jobs were management trainee programs with banks and oil and gas companies; however, as she acknowledges, her university grades weren’t sufficient to earn a spot in one of those programs.

Instead, she pursued qualification as a Forex dealer and life insurance agent—also lucrative professions—and it was through her insurance instructor that she became introduced to the auditing profession. She found herself fortunate to be recruited by a Big Six firm as an audit trainee, the program offered to non-accounting graduates.

From there her audit career took off, and she has worked in Hong Kong, New York and Shanghai over the past 20 years. She came full circle back to Singapore in 2011, while still an assurance partner, and was given the opportunity to head the Learning and Development department and is now PwC’s Asia Pacific Diversity & Inclusion partner, as well as a member of PwC’s Global Corporate Responsibility Board. “If I had not taken the chance to try a new qualification and had let my graduate status hold me back, I would not have this career, one that has made my life so meaningful,” Hsu says.

Looking back at her 27 years as an auditor, the professional achievement she is most proud of so far is the relationships that she has built—clients who became good friends and coworkers who are now part of her personal life. “When you have coworkers who are willing to go above and beyond with you, it speaks volumes about the relationship, and to me this is an achievement that outweighs any awards on the wall or the titles behind your name,” she says.

Hsu also is proud of the role she has played in professional development for her colleagues, especially the junior ones. Recognizing the need for job rotation in order to motivate and develop non-client-facing colleagues, she was able to secure buy-in from various stakeholders to allow more junior colleagues to explore short-term internal secondment and job rotations. That has allowed them to develop new skill sets, as well as get out of their comfort zones to take on new tasks.

Right now, she is taking an active role with the PwC’s Global Corporate Responsibility Board to fulfill an ambitious global target they set in 2018: to invest in the future and growth of 15 million people, NGOs and social and micro enterprises to help them maximize their potential by 2022.

“I am excited to be working with my counterparts across the PwC network in coming up with ideas to achieve that ambition,” she says, adding that it is not about meeting the KPI, but the ability to make a significant difference in so many lives. “At PwC, we believe businesses have a key role to play in solving societal challenges, alongside other stakeholders.”

In addition, like many in the field, she is wrestling with the potential for AI to transform the accounting industry. Rather than take over accounting jobs, though, she believes AI will help accountants improve their efficiency and root out fraud detection.

The Ongoing Quest to Promote Balance and Equity

Work-life balance is important, and she dispels the myth she heard back in the day that you have to leave the office after your bosses in order to be promoted. She tells her younger counterparts that it is not impossible to pursue a thriving career and have a family at the same time. “Many people have done it successfully, and there will be more and more such cases,” she says.

Unfortunately she sees that women are often tested when making choices in balancing work and personal lives, largely because the auditing profession is known for demanding hours. “For women who have to put in those hours at work and at the same time fulfill their obligations as a mom—call it maternal instinct or social pressure—most women choose family over career,” Hsu says. And even though they are seeing a rise in the number of men homemakers, the pace of the increase is still slower than that of females leaving their job to assume the role.

That’s why she sees a gap in women who are reaching the upper echelons of the industry. In fact, the fairly equal representation of females in the industry, particularly in managerial positions, should yield a reasonably strong pipeline of highly qualified women to become partners. However in reality they are seeing that women tend to drop out of the pipeline at the managerial level as that is usually the age when they start a family.

Still, she is proud of the strides that PwC has made, with women making up approximately 53 percent of managerial positions and above. As a Diversity & Inclusion partner, she has the privilege of sitting in promotion meetings to encourage equal opportunities and diversity in decision making. The firm recently reviewed its internal policies for everything from recruitment to job allocation to promotion to ensure there are no policies biased against women. In the coming months they will be running a refresher program on unconscious bias and are looking into better support for new parents and women returning from maternity leave. “We understand that returning to work after maternity is tough; thus if we are able to help smoothen the transition, we believe more new mothers will choose to stay in the profession,” Hsu notes.

Her own “off time” includes indulging in a wide variety of interests that include cooking, cars, collecting whisky, electronic gadgets and video games—in fact she just bought a VR set for the home. But what interests her most is finding ways to help the elderly and less-privileged women. “We talk a lot about gender equality but often times it’s in reference to professionals. We should not forget to care for those less-privileged women around us who are not professionals,” she points out.

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Hard Talk: Work, Motherhood and the Unfinished Discussion

By Nicki Gilmour

Welcome to my new column called Hard Talk.

Nicki GilmourThis column will surface the topics that are buried by most of us due to many reasons including fear, exasperation, denial, taboos and lack of information until we stumble upon the topic itself as a challenge. Also, happy Mother’s Day.

I am going to start by telling you I do not have all, if any, of the answers, but I do want to create the space for each of us to come up with our own answers while offering insight into the individual and common psychology that binds us. I believe there is value to putting on the table the systemic and psychological reasons that explain why important topics are often ignored by the best of us as it pertains to careers and the person we are inside and outside of the office building.

How to spot a difficult subject

There are so many things that we aren’t willing to talk about in society and, in this instance, corporate life. How do you spot a taboo or something that just isn’t “on the table,” or, weirdly, is half on the table, whereby the topic seems like it is being dealt with or is resolved already, but really isn’t?

A sign to look for is when the topic is mostly talked about in a personalized (subjective) way, pitting women or people against other women or other people, suggesting somehow it is not a systemic issue but rather a matter choices and opinions. This is false reasoning when the so-called choices are a binary revolving around a lose-lose paradigm that only one societal group has to participate in.

The topic must be identified for real solutions to be found.

Why is motherhood a minefield topic?

Motherhood is a tricky topic as it is an identity and a job in itself. Fatherhood, when played out as many fathers do now in the legacy mother role of primary caregiver, also begs analysis for bias, but for now we shall discuss motherhood. Not everyone wants (another taboo) or can have (another under-discussed taboo) babies. But for those who do, there is not a woman alive in a defined career trajectory who has not given serious thought to the timing and logistics of how having a kid will affect her career. Anxiety at worst, mindshare at best. Once in it, motherhood can become both a Chief Operations Officer job and an internship as moving parts and project scheduling and learning plus actual execution are all very much part of the job. This is on top of a (big, busy and important) day job.

Just to be clear, this column is not one of judgment or even grouping as everyone has different feelings towards ambition, guilt and their own individual needs regarding work and what they glean intellectually, emotionally and financially from doing it. Additionally, there are so many influencing elements around each person’s spousal division of labor, capacity to organize and delegate support. Then there is the other topic of how much money each person has to throw at solutions should their preference lie there. And if the primary care giver is your spouse – man or woman – the conversation certainly changes slightly.

The difficulty of saying small humans disrupt life as we know it

Why has it taken me 13 years and 8,000 articles published to touch this topic? Simply put, we were in another time era. It is only very recently that corporations are in a place to discuss policy around parental leave as opposed to maternity leave. Equal pay for the same job in the US and elsewhere – such as the UK – is still being truly decided and addressed. We are not as advanced as we think we are.

The perception around women and babies and how that somehow negatively affected productivity or competence was just too strong. It felt like even indulging in the conversation of babies impacting careers was an admission that there was validity to the possibility that it was so. Instead of speaking in terms of systemic changes, we were very much stuck in an individual choices discussion.

The denial around impact of any kind was necessary because it felt like a betrayal to the messaging around “you can do it,” “just lean in” and other Generation X messaging to women. Good men with willingness to change have continued to be messaged more or less the same “provider” talk until recently and those who bucked the trend have had their own bias to deal with, from being excluded from mommy coffee dates to how to enter a bathroom to change their babies.

Motherhood has been said to be the unfinished work of feminism in a matricentric theory and movement being proposed by Andrea O’Reilly. Motherhood has been largely left out of feminist theory and I think this is why my usual “push the envelope and talk about it anyway” trait, which has allowed us to talk about intersecting identities at work in so many forms, has not attracted me to this topic until now. Apparently I was not on my own but like my evolution on the willingness to talk about it, others indicate a sea change with The Guardian’s Amy Westervelt opining that, “Most surprising to me, as someone told by women’s magazine editors for years ‘we don’t cover motherhood’, is the fact that publications like Elle and Marie Claire appear to have lifted their long-standing ban on motherhood.”

Still an issue to resolve

Ann Crittenden, in her book “The Price of Motherhood”, states, “once a woman has a baby, the egalitarian office party is over thoroughly.”

And other people have written at length regarding the bias of motherhood for pay and promotions so it is felt currently by some and is far from a resolved issue, culturally. In fact, if you look at Wikipedia’s definition of “mommy track” it is interesting to see that they define it almost as a choice for women to take, instead of an action that happens to women by others.

No company has this issue cracked. But, some are trying hard to create conditions culturally and programmatically. It still feels like the conversation needs to be reframed and developed to redesign the workplace of the future with a society to match. In the meantime, look for those companies that remove the subjectivity of flextime or where parental leave is taken by men for real amounts of time. Live your values and instead of the lean in message, and perhaps focus on personal renewal while the system catches up.

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