Contributed by CEO Coach Henna Inam

Does this situation sound familiar? You have worked hard to climb the corporate ladder. You’ve had to burn the candle on both ends to get there. When you get to the corner office or the next rung in the ladder, after the initial euphoria of meeting your goal wears off, the grind remains. The rewards can seem a bit empty relative to the sacrifices made and the energy expended to get there. At various points in your career it is easy to burn-out. Or you decide to opt out by physically leaving or disengaging. According to a Gallup survey, 71% of US employees are disengaged. Your disengagement is not just linked to your productivity but also your health and wellbeing.

It’s easy for us to disengage either by leaving our work or leaving our full passionate selves at the door when we enter our workplaces. We ask ourselves, “Is the effort worth it to continue to climb the corporate stair master?” The answer to the latter question is very personal. However, one thing is pretty clear. As women leaders, our passion for what we do is a big part of our success and fulfillment, as well as our power. So how do we reignite that passion when it’s beginning to fade?

Here are five steps to reignite the passion and fall in love again with what you do. Remember the five P’s to reigniting the passion in your work.

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Contributed by CEO Coach Henna Inam

It’s the end of the year. You’re scrambling to make the numbers, completing performance reviews for your people, finalizing business reviews so plans for next year can be fine-tuned. Sound familiar? For each of the last 20 years of my corporate career, as each year drew toward a close it was a mad scramble to year end. This year as an entrepreneur, I followed some of the familiar steps.  Then I had a bit of an epiphany. I was leaving out perhaps one of the most important measures of my future success and fulfillment – how did I do as a leader this year?

So this year I am planning to give myself the gift of reflection during the week between the Christmas and New Year. I hope that each of us takes some quiet time, a journal, and the inspiration to do a “Personal Leadership Review”. Most leadership is fairly unconscious, based on habits and behavior patterns we’ve learned over time.  A “Personal Leadership Review” helps us become more conscious of ourselves as leaders and over time we can choose to adopt leadership practices that will help us grow as leaders. According to Emotional Intelligence 2.0, the traits of knowing and managing ourselves and knowing and managing others are highly correlated with our success and fulfillment. On average, those who score higher on Emotional Intelligence earn $34,000 more that those who don’t.

Here are some questions I am planning to ask myself during my “Personal Leadership Review.” What will you ask yourself?

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Contributed by executive coach Ann Daly PhD

Back to school!

It’s a rallying cry we usually associate with kids’ backpacks and notebooks, but don’t forget about mom. More and more, working women are heading back to school to upgrade their skillsets and resumes with an advanced degree.

In fact, this fall a record number of women will be entering two of the country’s top MBA programs–the Harvard Business School and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Women will make up 39% of Harvard’s class of 2013, and at Wharton, women will represent 45% of the incoming class.

Those happy numbers are the result of national efforts by groups such as the Forté Foundation, a consortium that advocates the MBA as a career-advancement and leadership-development strategy for women.

That said, a concurrent MBA – attending classes while keeping your job – isn’t for everyone. “If you’re looking for career advancement within your current company or within the same industry, the part-time/executive route is a good option,” advises Elissa Sangster, Forté’s executive director. “But if you are looking to change your career or industry, I highly recommend taking the full-time route.”

The pay-off for a concurrent MBA is big. “You get your education while continuing your career progression and drawing a salary.”

But there’s also a downside, Sangster adds: “Your life will be very complicated.”

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Contributed by executive coach Ann Daly, PhD

Once upon a time, when managers made implicitly gender-biased judgments about which staff got the pay raises and the promotions, we called a spade a spade: gender discrimination. When Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Betty Dukes et al. was recently heard by the Supreme Court, we gained a new euphemism for structural sexism in the workplace: “excessive subjectivity.”

This phenomenon is no news to most women: When a company fails to establish objective criteria for its managers to decide on pay raises and promotions, then personal, subjective, unexamined biases kick in. And if you’re operating in a male-dominated environment, you can bet that those cultural biases ain’t gonna benefit the women. If the workplace lacks a rational process for making a decision (it’s called a “policy”), then bosses fall back on the most primitive assumptions, including sexist ones.

The result? In the case of Wal-Mart: Women fill 70% of the hourly jobs but make up only 33% of management employees. Women working in the company’s stores are paid less than men in every region, and the salary gap widens over time even for men and women hired into the same jobs at the same time.

Lawyers for the female employees argued that local managers exercise their discretion over pay and promotions disproportionately in favor of men, which has an unlawful disparate impact on female employees, and that Wal-Mart’s refusal to restrain its managers’ authority amounts to disparate treatment.

While the Supreme Court minority opinion, including all three female justices, found that excessive subjectivity was sufficient grounds to proceed with the class action suit, the majority did not. For reasons both technical and ideological, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s opinion that the women of Wal-Mart constitute a legitimate class with a common complaint. Women employees at Wal-Mart can move forward with gender discrimination suits, but on a smaller scale rather than as a single class.

As you can imagine, women’s advocates are dissatisfied with this diminished legal protection against gender discrimination in the workplace.

But not to despair! If you find yourself facing the invisible hand of excessive subjectivity, you are far from powerless.

Remember “subliminal advertising”? Take a page from that playbook and launch a subliminal counter-campaign of your own. Here are four simple, on-the-ground tactics to protect yourself from excessive subjectivity. These tactics will enable you to transform it into an objective framework for conversation, evaluation, and decision-making:

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