Happy New Year!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

We are returning to your screens on Monday 9th January but we wanted to share with you the following opportunities:

This is our eleventh year of writing great content, career advice and exploring the research on advancing women at work and to that end we are looking for great writers, guests posts and people to profile.

For profiles: we profile senior women (Voice of experience profiles are for C level, SVP and Managing Directors ) and amazing “Mover and shakers” (VP’s ) in financial and professional services, technology firms and Fortune 1000 companies. We tend to not cover entrepreneurs because we believe the value of the glasshammer and our niche is to inform and empower women when they want to stay in big business and navigate that terrain.

We have themes as well as columns so we are looking for women to profile for Black History Month, Asian Heritage, LGBT leaders to name a few. International Women’s Day is everyday for us but open to posts for the month of March also.

If you want to write (paid as a journalist ) or contribute (non paid as you have a bio for your own expert service at end of column) then email and send unique posts to louise@theglasshammer.com

Finally, we want to tell you about what we have learned eleven years and 8000 articles later investigating how to empower women and their advancement. The conclusion in one word is “coaching”. There is no force more powerful than having a good coach as it pertains to figuring out how to get what you want and have a solidly good time doing it. Nicki Gilmour, CEO and Founder of theglasshammer.com has launched Evolved People Coaching for individuals and groups.

If you want to reserve an exploratory chat at no cost to see if coaching can help you, please email nicki@theglasshammer.com to find a time to talk.

Lets make 2018 the best yet.

Theglasshammer.com team

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Year End Review 2017: Professional Women and the Culture War

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Nicki Gilmour - Founder of The Glasshammer.comBy Nicki Gilmour, CEO and Publisher of theglasshammer.com

Every year in December I write about the runners and the riders, the losses and the gains for women in corporations. The usual statistical update of no movement in female leaders in aggregate can be seen by checking out the report compiled by McKinsey and Lean in called Women in the Workplace 2017.  More calls for increased hiring of female talent in the beginning of their careers to create parity at the top. Culture change, not just binders full of women is the key, as we know spreadsheets alone cannot fix this issue. Yes, there is much work to be done structurally with hiring bias, pay inequality for apples to apples jobs and flawed promotional processes, but we are missing the point; people leave jobs when their sense of purpose is brought into question. Sometimes it is related to money and recognition for the job done. Sometimes it is about competing agendas for men and women to fit life in and having babies is often cited as the issue that prevents women from succeeding. Yet, rarely are the power structures around who gets to keep their professional lives somewhat intact, supported and without question ever talked about.

Neuroscience and the psychology of advancing men

Our cognitive processes and confirmation biases make us assume that it is a given that men should advance at work and in life. Regardless of what men actually want or are actually capable of and the perception of white men knowing more persists through good times and bad times. Sallie Krawcheck wrote an excellent piece last week in the NY Times, in which she encapsulates the whole issue of how we devalue women. She was a leader at the world’s biggest finance shop but still had the guy in front of her, mansplain her business model to her. She commented in the article,

“I was astonished, because I have managed more financial advisers in my career than probably anyone in the country. I realized in that moment how deep our gender views run, how men are still seen as leaders and women as more junior.”

We are a long way off equality and the power of perception has a role to play, as many men and some women believe that things are close to equal, even in firms where the number of female senior executives is 1 in 10. Perception works both ways, it keeps us in and it makes us leave if we see no pathway forward.

Our brain creates inference and assigns values that we don’t even know about that then writes narratives making us think we know the outcome based on past experience and current norms. This surfaces as conscious and unconscious beliefs about the world and how it should work.

Why do women and specifically white straight women have a complicated history of complicity and collusion around men who are deeply flawed or incompetent? Internalized misogyny and white privilege and betting on what has always been is the underpinning element. Even if you think you are a progressive person, liberal and modern, I hear cultural programming mixed with personal experience that 99.9% of the time makes you accept biased structures as the benchmark. The “think manager, think male” research shows that most women consistently rank men as a group higher than women for preferential traits such as competency and productivity. We all have deep programming and cognitive dissonance. Even if we are not stereotyping in our language and individual actions, most people overlook the systemic influences that create our overall environment. That silent invisible operating system called the patriarchy dictates the entire scope of possibilities and weighted value of your actions. What gets preference? Much like your phone, you cannot see the mechanics of how things are ordered and valued for memory and battery unless you look very closely, but instead can only choose the app that can personally help you in the moment. Until we address the fact that the system has weighted preferences on outcomes, we will see surface choices only.

Sure, there has been a deep perturbation in the fabric of the status quo this year from the Women’s March in January to this month’s cover of Time magazine announcing the silence breakers as the person (now people) of the year. There are so many conversations going on now that just didn’t happen outside academia even a year ago. Themes are being explored editorially and widely that were only for the most studied this time last year. Topics like collusion, such as the unpacking of the Harvey Weinstein power play are written about daily now. But, the battle and the war is far from won and this moment in time is one we can spiral up or down from. The relief of surfacing of 2017’s #metoo is only the relief that we can speak about such things openly. Exposing that the system is weighed against certain people based on their social identity (gender, ethnicity etc) and the power given to a person depending on their biological sex and place therefore in society is not the same as addressing systemic inequities. Certainly, the Supreme court itself has distance to go since American women are not equal under law (Equal Rights Amendment is not ratified) and LGBT people are categorized first and foremost behaviorally and not legally recognized intrinsically as people.

What do we need to do?

Care enough to form full and informed thoughts and be heard on the topic. Good men are doing good things and walking the talk such as Unilever’s CEO Paul Polman who voiced his shock at the World Economic Forum’s report when it was revealed that it will take over 200 years to get parity. Men have to understand that this is not a women’s issue. While people are talking up and talking down feminism, maybe we should be speaking about redefining masculinity. This TED talk by Justin Baldoni called “Why I am done being Man enough” is inspiring for all to watch.

Cordelia Fine has written an award winning book called “Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of our Gendered Minds” that is my holiday recommended reading to you as it debunks the myths of Men are from Mars and other purported differences that stop us from solving the issues. We have to stop believing the faux science that divides us or falsely categorizes us as it actually contributes to a system of yore.  Unless we talk about what masculinity is, the good , the bad and the ugly of it shaped from the ancient Greeks to now, we cannot get to a better version. We cannot get to understand what it means to be a woman in society if we do not examine what it also means to be a man. What are boys and men messaged? What does peer pressure do and Tony Porter talks about the problem of the “man card” in his excellent TED talk. He states, ‘My liberation of a man is tied to your liberation as a woman’. Culture not just biology, is what we need to look at and understand that keeping to a binary instead of understanding spectrums of human nature is not helpful.  There are men and women ready to engage in this conversation and I am ready to have a more advanced conversation in 2018 with everyone and we are well placed to begin!

Seasons Greetings from us here at theglasshammer.com and check out our coaching website: evolvedpeople.com as the change starts with you!

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Persisting Through The Dark: Women in the Boardroom

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The 2017 Heidrick & Struggles Board Monitor: Is Diversity at an Impasse? highlighted that after seven years of slow progress since the survey began, “women directors lost ground” in Fortune 500 companies.
The share of women-held seats dropped by 2 percentage points to 27.8%. The 50% projection pushed to 2032, yet again moved further off in the future.
So it’s no surprise that in their inaugural survey, Nevertheless, She Persisted: The Challenges and Opportunities Experienced by Senior-level Executive Women as They Journey to the Boardroom, Women in the Boardroom (WIB) found that the two words senior-level, executive women are mostly likely to use when it comes to the process of seeking a boardroom seat are “excited” and “frustrated”.
WIB surveyed over 500 senior-level, executive women who were either already serving as corporate board directors (25% of sample), or were interested in service, about their experiences.
The report found a tension between “the excitement that women feel at the prospect of service – and the frustration of securing that opportunity.”
Boardroom Journey: Obscured, Unsupported & Opaque
In their previous 2016 Board Monitor, Heidrick & Struggles pointed out that a major reason women representation is not moving forward is that “most boards are seeking new members from among ‘the usual suspects”, applying the same old process to the candidate selection pool, criteria and picks.
Indeed the WIB survey found that 90% of respondents felt that male networks dominate corporate boardroom searches and over 60% felt they function more effectively than their own women’s networks. 39% of women felt they had no board influencers in their personal network. Yet networking (and broadcasting their intention) remains a core tactic among women who seek, and especially attain, a board seat.
The report authors say, “there are exclusionary practices at play” including that often corporate culture doesn’t seem to actively support women’s boardroom ambitions, as 28% of senior-level, executive respondents chose not to talk about their boardroom aspirations at work.
Only 16% of respondents indicated their employer makes gender diversity in the boardroom a priority that is backed with action, policies and standards, and only 4% feel personally supported in their boardroom intentions.
While the candidate selection process is a well-worn default that fails to serve diversity, or ultimately business itself, pushing oneself towards the boardroom as a woman remains confusing. It’s still far from clear to most senior-executive women just how to break into the boardroom, from what remains a position of outsider status: being a woman.
Among respondents, 66% felt that the selection process is “opaque and mysterious” compared to other aspects of career advancement. 36% have no or only occasional interaction with their company’s board, and 30% of women who have boardroom ambitions don’t have a strategy for securing a seat.
The Persistence of Imposter Syndrome and Unconscious Bias
Even though the WIB survey was among senior-level, executive women that by all indications have achieved professional success, nearly 70% believed that high -achieving women are still deterred by both the inability to internalize and own their success and their fear of being exposed as inadequate.
The third most popular term used to describe pursuing a boardroom seat is “intimidated”. Despite that, 62% of respondents felt confident they are qualified and will get a board seat, and more women felt “excited” and “empowered” by the process than overwhelmed.
Even more prominent is the contextual reality of unconscious bias, such as how boards tend to end up gender matching, meaning they replace men with men and women with women.
Research has shown that awareness alone can’t mitigate unconscious bias – there is a level at which influences on decision making remain unconscious.
Showing You Mean Business About Boardroom Aspirations 
The WIB survey found that women who get through the door were more likely to prioritize securing a seat as a top career priority (83% vs 70% of all respondents).
These women “create a plan, market to their network, work on crystallizing their value add as a candidate, and invest in expert help, whether through coaching or membership in specialist organizations.”
The results revealed these women are taking specific and visible initiative, showing it matters to put your hat in the ring while being vocal about it.
Among these women, 80% belong to a networking organization (vs 66% of women), 67% belong to a board-specific networking organization (vs 40%) and 83% have alerted their network of their ambitions (vs. 54%).
So it’s fair to say that speaking up about boardroom intentions and getting specific in your actions, whether you feel supported by corporate culture, matters to reaching the coveted seat.
This not only means reinforcing your own right to put yourself forward, but advocating for other women, which only 34% of respondents agreed that women do.
For A Different Story: A Different Candidate Pool
Ultimately, we need a story about women on the boardroom that’s not about how some women beat the odds to break into the boardroom. We need a report that doesn’t have to say, as the WIB report states, “executive women thrive often in the absence of supportive structures and culture at work.”
Sure they do. But how much longer will that be the requirement these women have to meet?
We need a story in which the odds are for women rather than against them, in which they are invited into the boardroom not breaking into it, in which there isn’t too often a glass cliff hiding underneath the welcome mat when it appears, in which a corporate culture of both support and access are present rather than lip service and evasiveness, and where senior-level, executive women don’t see the path to the boardroom as mysterious, even from their relatively advanced position.
The report authors urge companies to look at communication, connection and culture as three key areas in which they can better support women into the boardroom.
And the one thing that makes a difference to increasing female selection to the board, according to Stanford research, is simply putting more women candidates into the candidate pool.
Boardrooms that truly hold themselves accountable to diversity will broaden their candidate pool and use vision to change the way the candidate sphere is defined.
Until then, we’ll celebrate the women who swim upstream – and often through the dark – to claim their too rare place in the boardroom. a
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The Motherhood Penalty: Overcome this Career Advancement and Wage Blocker

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Guest contributed by Josie Sutcliffe

motherhood

Image via Shutterstock

Despite considerable attention, the gender wage gap has only improved by 8% in the last 20 years — a slow pace of improvement that indicates removing the gap entirely is more than a generation away.

What’s holding up progress?

A Visier Insights report analyzed an aggregated database of over 160,000 US-based employees of over 30 large US enterprises and found that there’s an underrepresentation of women in manager positions — in particular during the key childcare years — directly driving the overall gender wage gap. This finding is known as the Manager Divide and has a strong correlation to motherhood.

The Motherhood Penalty

Simply put, during the key childcare years women are increasingly less likely to hold manager positions, which directly impacts their average earnings compared to men.

At the time the gender wage gap begins to widen (starting with women at age 32 earning on average 90% the wages of men and decreasing to just 82% by age 40), women are increasingly underrepresented in manager positions. This directly drives the gender wage gap as managers earn on average two times the salary of non-managers.

diagram

The Manager Divide occurs during the key childcare years: most women in the US who have children give birth to them between the ages of 25 and 34. And with most children entering school (and, therefore, requiring less childcare) at age 5, women who have children are most likely to experience increased childcare demands up until the age of 39. Despite an increased trend towards equal parenting, in today’s society women still typically take on more of the family care responsibilities. These responsibilities impact their careers.

It’s worth noting that, when reviewing promotion events by age, there is no significant difference in the overall rate of promotions in any age range for women or men. In other words, women are promoted at the same rate as men during the Motherhood years, but men are more likely to be promoted into manager.

If the Manager Divide was removed and, therefore, the same proportion of women held manager positions as men, the gender wage gap across all workers would be reduced by just over one third for those over age 32. If this “augmented” population of female managers were then given the same average salary as male managers, the gap would be cut in half.

diagram

Taking Steps to Finally Close the Gender Wage Gap

If a company pays women and men the same for equal work, but then underrepresents women in the better-compensated manager roles, that company has not achieved gender equity.

Here are some actions leaders can take to promote and ensure gender equity:

  • Get a high-level understanding of the state of gender equity within your organization. Start with simple metrics like “female ratio” (looking at the percent of total headcount that are female) by department, role, and/or location, and in your hiring pipelines.
  • Dig deeper by finding out if pay and performance ratings are unbiased for men and women. Compa-ratio is a classic compensation calculation that indicates how close a person’s base pay is the pay level midpoint for the role they perform. If women have a lower than average compa-ratio, then it is likely that pay decisions are not being made equitably. Similarly, understanding the proportion of employees who receive each level of performance rating and then comparing this to the proportion of each rating for female employees will uncover if performance ratings are handed out in an unbiased manner.
  • Measure not only promotions by gender, but also the nature of the promotions: by role, department, or location, find out if the percent of women promoted to or holding manager positions is lower than the percent of men promoted to or holding manager positions.
  • Take steps to correct gender inequity, starting with your processes for hiring and promotion. Implement the Rooney Rule: for every manager position you have open to fill, consider “at least one woman and one underrepresented minority” in your slate of candidates. Consider blind screening of resumes (removing names or other gender identifiers from resumes) when selecting applicants for interviews. And introduce consistent and gender bias-free performance management processes.
  • Given that the Manager Divide is connected to the years when women are most likely to have increased childcare demands, look into ways your organization can better support paid parental leave. It should be equally available to mothers and fathers, and be socially acceptable not just for mothers, but also for fathers to take. Flexible working time arrangements could be a key part of your solution.

Make the business case for gender equity at your organization. It isn’t just about fairness, avoiding lawsuits, and protecting (or building) your employer brand (check out the InHerSight for an idea of what the future holds — a Glassdoor-type site that focuses on rating companies from the perspective of their support of women). Research by McKinsey shows that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians. According to a  2016 McKinsey Global Institute report, if full gender equality is attained, $4.3 trillion could also be added to the U.S. economy by 2025.

Disclaimer:  The views and opinions of Guest contributors are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com

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Increasing Accountability in Yourself and Others

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Guest contributed by Linda O’Neill, VP of Strategic Services at Vigilant

accountability

Image via Shutterstock

Almost every executive I talk with desires a more accountable organization. Many of them are running highly effective and profitable companies and it is their goal to keep the bar moving up and to the right.  There is room for improvement. In an accountable organization each employee understands his/her role and each employee can be counted on to do his/her job with no surprises. When a company’s culture embraces accountability, employees are self-motivated to contribute to the success of the organization.  It’s important to remember that accountability is voluntary – you can’t make employees (or anyone else) more accountable. There are, however, steps you can take to increase the likelihood your employees will choose to be accountable.

  1. Define it. It is important that everyone in your organization define accountability in the same way. Spend some time on this as a leadership team. Webster’s dictionary uses words like “answerable” and “explainable” to define accountability. To me, the most important element of accountability is the obligation to answer for our actions. It’s not just completing the actions.  It’s being responsible for the consequences of our actions in addition to completing them. It involves taking ownership of your job. There is no room for blaming others. What’s more important than the way I define accountability, however, is the way you define it for your organization. There is no right or wrong answer.
  2. Communicate it. Communicate the company’s expectations around accountability – broadly, consistently and frequently. You will be the most successful when you communicate accountability in context with the company’s mission, values and goals. When each employee understands that the way his/her job is done affects the company’s performance, you will experience greater individual and collective accountability. Put more control in the hands of employees for how they meet the expectations of their job/role. Employees who feel responsibility will also more willingly embrace accountability.
  3. Reward it. Just as you spent time defining accountability, spend equal time understanding how you will measure and then reward it. As the company makes progress toward its goals, share the information broadly. “The Carrot Principle” by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton is a great book to gather ideas about rewards. The authors stress that rewards must be deliberate. Create a system for yourself. You won’t just “remember” to reward employees. Tie the rewards to company goals and the employees’ role in meeting those goals. Communicate how the employees’ accountability (obligation to answer for actions) affected the goals.

Wanting more clarity around measuring accountability

It is important for every employee at every level in the organization to have a document articulating his/her accountabilities (similar to a S.M.A.R.T. goal document). I like calling this document simply “<Name> <Year> Accountabilities” (i.e., mine would be “Linda O’Neill’s 2017 Accountabilities”). Identify the categories important to your business, such as financial performance, customer service, team leadership and executive maturity. Clearly articulate the accountabilities in each area. Once you have a complete list of an employee’s accountabilities, define how you will measure success. For example, an employee may be accountable for bringing in $15 million in service billings for the fiscal year. The employee would record the results achieved at the end of the period.

Wanting greater accountability to self

Accountability comes from the inside out; it is a choice. Let me say that again: Accountability comes from the inside out; it is a choice. As a result, it makes sense that learning greater accountability to self enhances accountability on the job. Positive change begins with individuals changing themselves. You can translate the same strategies listed in the “wanting more accountability from others” to yourself. First, define what accountability means to you. Do you take an “owners” mentality to the commitments you make to yourself as well as the commitments you make to others? Next, spend some time noticing how your actions compare to your definition of accountability. You might want to write down every commitment you make to yourself or someone else for a week and then notice what supported or what got in the way of your accountability. What conclusions can you draw about you learned? What small change will you make to increase your satisfaction with your accountability to self? How will this enhance the way you model accountability for others?

Conclusion

Accountability means being doing what you said you would do, and being answerable for all of your actions –those that influence others and those that affect only you. When there is little accountability in an organization, stress levels tend to rise, communication is reduced, and territorialism is pervasive. When accountability is strong, employees are engaged, performance is high and company goals are met. What choice will you make to improve accountability both within your organization and within yourself today?

Disclaimer: Opinions and views of guest contributors are not necessarily those of the glasshammer.com

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The Multitasking Way of Life

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office

Image via Pixabay

 

Guest contributed by Terri R. Kurtzberg and Jennifer L. Gibbs

There’s an old joke that says that if a man wants to know what a woman’s mind feels like, he should imagine having a browser with 2,857 tabs open ALL THE TIME. Indeed, we do, as a society, promote the image of women as multitaskers—balancing the needs not only of our families alongside our careers but also serving in caretaking roles as well as more content-filled ones, even in the workplace. In addition, many have noted of late that women are predominantly the ones who are expected to keep track of information—across domains—in their heads. While there may be some real truth to the fact that expectations for women’s roles and knowledge do cross boundaries more often (in the big picture sense as well as in the minutes-of-the-day sense), there’s also a great fallacy in this line of thought.

Unfortunately, the truth (as we know it from cognitive science research) is that human brains, of any gender, are poorer at multitasking than is generally thought to be the case*. Our brains just weren’t meant to do the amount of parallel-processing that we so often attempt in today’s world. So, for example, trying to answer a text message while still holding onto the thread of a conversation or meeting already in progress is generally not fully successful. It may be successful enough—that is, it may be possible to string together enough of the information in the conversation or presentation even though there are gaps in what you heard or could process while you attended to something else—but there are two problems with this. First, there are indeed gaps, since our brains in fact cannot process two language-based tasks at once, and so we don’t always know what it is that we missed and whether it would have been important to our overall understanding of the topic.** Second, there is the issue of burn-out.*** Simply put, it is exhausting to have multiple streams of unfinished business (or “open tabs”) ongoing in the mind. Most people, but perhaps women especially, underestimate the toll that this takes. We assume that through sheer force of will, we can be successful at keeping all the balls in the air.

Thus, while research on distraction and multitasking has not yielded strong differences in the way it plays out for men and women, there certainly are important lessons for women aiming to make strides into higher positions. These fall into three categories:

  1. Know thyself: Understand that we are doing ourselves a disservice by constantly trying to keep track of too many things simultaneously. Then, do an “audit” for yourself by watching your behaviors and your incoming messages for a week. How many of them actually needed your attention immediately? Find the worst offenders, and make changes. Turn off notifications for blocks of time, set expectations by letting people know (perhaps through an outgoing email note) that you will respond to messages at the end of each day and not continuously, but to do X in case of truly time-sensitive needs, and remove your phone from your line of vision whenever possible.
  2. Know that you are being watched: People see you on the phone when you are in front of them. They can even reliably tell when you’re not listening with your full attention even if you’re not visible (say, on a conference call or one-on-one phone call). And yes, they absolutely do think differently of you for this lack of focus.**** Give the gift of your full attention. If you do need to pull your attention away, own up to it by explaining why to those engaging with you.
  3. Know the power of setting the tone from the top: Leaders have an opportunity to step in and make decisions to help rein in the problems stemming from the over-use of mobile devices. For one thing, there is a strong “monkey see, monkey do” effect that happens with respect to use in the professional setting. This problem is exacerbated since communication technologies have only existed for a tiny sliver of time, relative to human development, and continue to change so rapidly. Therefore, the “rules” are still being established for when and where it is appropriate to be engaged with technology instead of with the surrounding people. Being the social animals that we are, we are thus very tuned in to watching how other people are using their mobile devices, and tend to follow suit. For example, it is common to see one person bring a laptop to a meeting one week, followed by a whole crowd of people with their laptops open the next week. Similarly, seeing your colleagues answer emails at all hours of the night and on weekends put tremendous pressure on you to follow suit—a pattern that results in both lower productivity and higher turnover. These slippery slopes can be avoided by a wise manager attuned to the dangers of too much connection, and who makes explicit policies to the contrary.

Women are indeed pulled in many directions at once, and do keep track of many, many different “open tabs” each and every day, especially as they rise to higher levels at work. However, it is important to understand the natural limitations on human cognition as new technologies stretch the amount we ask of ourselves and our minds. Only then can you best out of yourself and those who count on your leadership.

 

*Ophir, E., Nass, C., and Wagner, A. D. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 106, 15583-15587.

**Bowman, L. L., Levine, L. E., Waite, B. M., and Gendron, M. (2010). Can students really multitask? An experimental study of instant messaging while reading. Computers & Education, 54, 927-931.

***Wajcman, J., & Rose, E. (2011). Constant connectivity: Rethinking interruptions at work. Organization Studies, 32, 941-961.

****Kurtzberg, T.R, Naquin, C. E., and Krishnan, A. (2014). The curse of the blackberry: Multitasking and negotiation success. Negotiation Journal, 30.

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Why Does Being Recognized in Our Job Matter?

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 By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational PyschologistNicki Gilmour

 

We all have different personalities and we all have different needs, some based on personality and some based on the constructs and paradigms that we have become attached to over time.  Some people care about status and title and others care about responsibility or money regardless of title. No one is right and no one is wrong as it is just who we are and how we have been formed via socio-norms, our own experiences and also our interpretation of those experiences.

While need for recognition scores on psychometric tests vary person to person, we all have in common a basic need to feel that people see us  in the most primal human sense and that it matters that we are there.

So, what happens if you feel that you aren’t making a difference? That if you left tomorrow, if wouldn’t matter? If it’s at work only* then its time to review what can you do to feel better about your visibility. Or it is possible that you are experiencing burnout and just need some renewal from the grind. So, how do you get that renewal in a busy world with situations that seem to need resolution as quickly as they appear on your radar?

I read an interesting piece yesterday about coming at a hard project with renewed vigor yesterday with  “Rest and Return” being one strategy when feeling stuck. Equally, having a learner mindset, by that I mean, knowing you are there to learn and not judge yourself harshly but rather learn from what happened. This can really help with longevity in any career and in life generally.

If you are in the mood for post Thanksgiving read, there is an easy book that can make you reflect a little of how you frame things to yourself. “Change your questions, change your life”  by Marilee Adams. Or an exploration of your mindset and how a fixed mindset can hinder you will take you to Carol Dweck’s mindset work. 

As a coach, I firmly believe that growth and renewal can only be achieved when you look at past patterns and current mental models and see how they are affecting your future plans.

Sign up for a five session coaching package with me for $2000 to get you off to a good start for 2018. Book an exploratory call here to see if I can help you thrive not just survive, advance, change jobs or figure out the next 12-24 months at work.

 

**If you are  feeling blue about other areas of your life its probably best to see a therapist or clinical psychologist as well as a coach.

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Is it a Concrete Ceiling for Women of Color?

Guest contributed by Funmi Ogunlusi

When it comes to improving women’s access to professional opportunities, there is an elephant in the room. It is intersectionality: the appreciation of the various ways in which different aspects of our identity intersect to create different experiences of privilege and discrimination. A white woman fighting to break through an old boys’ club certainly faces an uphill battle but how does it differ for women of color? Jasmine Babers calls this a concrete ceiling – one even more difficult to break through than glass – and arguably this set of circumstances can make it easier to find common ground along racial lines.

Well, as a woman of color I can only tell you about my experiences. One in particular stands out. I was meeting two senior members of a company for a chat about a job I was qualified for, based on my experience as a writer and PR account manager. One of them, through several thinly veiled attempts, had been questioning me about my proficiency in English. It made me feel uneasy but I told myself that it made sense for him to want evidence that I could be a good editor, given the job description. However, he wasn’t asking about attention to detail, or my ability to draft the required documents. He was struggling to understand how I could speak English in the first place.

The questions kept coming, in spite of the fact that the interview was being conducted in English and I had two essay-based degrees from British universities – one of which is a First Class. There they were, still wondering if I could string a sentence together. His colleague then tried a more direct approach and asked me if English is spoken in Nigeria, my home country. Before I could respond, this question seemed to jog the other man’s memory. He exclaimed,

“Oh but of course… It was once part of the Great Empire, wasn’t it? They must speak English there!”

And so, colonialism – not my experience, not my aptitude, not my performance during the interview – immediately became the confirmation that I could do a job I had done in the past. Proximity to whiteness, not my actual lived experience.

Many black women I know have similarly ridiculous stories about blatant, unapologetic and casual racism at work. One friend was told, after complaining about a faulty toilet in her building, that she should be used to foul smells because of where she’s from. Another friend was denied an improved job title which appropriately reflected her role and forced to remain in an “internship”, only for that title to be given to a less qualified and experienced white woman who replaced her. I have too many more foul anecdotes like this to mention, and they all have one thing in common: black women on the receiving end of the perfect storm of sexism and racism.

White women continue to be paid and promoted less, but they wouldn’t have had to answer questions about knowing how to speak, read and write English in an interview. A white woman wouldn’t have had to sit across a casual reference to imperialism as a justification for her eligibility for a role. She wouldn’t have her hair tugged by clients for its “intriguing” and “wild” appearance. She wouldn’t be called “sassy”, unofficially appointed as the spokesperson for all black people and always called upon to comment on rap and/or any famous black person in the news. These are real experiences many women face at work today. Not fifty years ago. Today. Issues like this create an additional layer of obstacles women of color have to surmount in order to progress.

This interplay between race and gender is simply not discussed enough, but things are slowly changing. This issue is a subtle theme in the latest season of the HBO smash hit series Insecure, which has been lauded for its portrayal of the experiences of young black women in Los Angeles, California. Molly – a brilliant lawyer – discovers that she is paid significantly less than her white male counterpart despite comparable achievements. It is quite telling that she then turns to a black male colleague at another firm instead of another woman at her own firm.

Many black women might recognize the subtext here. Perhaps Molly could not turn to another woman of color because there simply weren’t any to turn to. Being “the only one in the room” is not an infrequent experience for black women climbing the career ladder. Perhaps she could not turn to her white female colleagues, either because they wouldn’t understand or because they weren’t doing that much better anyway. Whatever the reason, we as viewers are left to fill in these blanks. In a situation where Molly could have aligned with other women in order to face this problem, she didn’t.

I know too many Mollies, forced to navigate worlds of unfamiliar pop culture references, alienating inside jokes, and sometimes frankly inappropriate behavior, all while accepting that they are not being paid what they are worth. In almost all cases, I see them leaning more on other black women or networks built around ethnicity – rarely do they congregate around gender. Why is that?

I think there is one simple reason.

Failure to address this is a major blind spot in most efforts geared towards women empowerment, and much more needs to be done.

These conversations need to stop happening in silos, but we all have to be willing to listen. We have to recognize that these differences exist, and they persist till this day. Acknowledging this does not downplay the common battles all women face in male-dominated spaces. It simply highlights the fact that women do not all experience these battles in the same way – and some have fewer tools in their arsenal than others. Discussing how to move forward, without appreciating that we’re not all starting from the same point, will get us nowhere.

 

Disclaimer: Opinions and views of Guest Contributors are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com

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Square Zero: Hidden Habits Females Need For A Successful Career in Tech

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Working In Tech - Space Station

 Guest contributed by Andrea Goulet

Quick question. Let’s say your friend gave you a list of fruit: apples, oranges, bananas, and strawberries. She asks you to bring her the item that’s labeled as number three on the list, which one would you pick?

Bananas? That’s the logical one, right? When we count items in most spoken languages, we list things out starting at one: first, apples. Second, oranges. Third, bananas. Ah! Grab a bunch and off you go. To your surprise though, when you bring her your bright yellow fruit, she looks disappointed. You clearly didn’t bring her what she was expecting. So, where did you go wrong?

Here’s what we didn’t tell you. Like many programming languages, your friend uses what’s called zero-based indexing. That means she starts her counting at zero, not one. So she was expecting you to bring her strawberries. In her world, apples = 0, oranges = 1, bananas = 2, and strawberries = 3. She was operating under a different framework from what you’d learned your entire life. Knowing this unwritten rule would have been incredibly useful, right?

Building a career in technology is much the same way. While there is a tried and true path to success, it’s often quite different than what many of us learned in school.

There are invisible forces at play that are obvious once uncovered. However, if you navigate your career without understanding this hidden framework, you’ll usually come up with the wrong answer, just like in the above situation.

Let’s take a peek at some of these hidden habits that are likely holding you back. It took me YEARS to uncover some of these. Hopefully, by seeing them now, you’ll save yourself a lot of aggravation and frustration.

Stop Calling Yourself “Non-Technical”

“Are you technical or non-technical?” Me? I’m both. And I went on a long journey of soul searching to figure that out. Saying you’re “non-technical” means you have absolutely no clue on how to interact with technology. That’s not really the case, right? Chances are, your technical skills are relative, not binary.

You can also get incredibly technical about a wide range of topics. On a recent podcast, the host was surprised at how much technical knowledge I had about cognitive empathy. What’s a topic where you have a deep understanding? This single language hack was the most profound for me on my journey to developing a career in tech.

Get Comfortable with Discomfort

Speaking of getting stumped, get used to it. It’s impossible to understand everything. The industry is so big and moves so fast that it’s tough to keep up, but that’s the fun part. Learn to enjoy the process and see challenges as a way to stretch the brain and grow. Dr. Carol Dweck, a researcher on the topic, suggests the following:

“The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.”

The fixed mindset says, “I’m not technical. I’ll never learn this.” Then they shut off their computers and stop trying. A growth mindset says, “Wow! This is such an interesting challenge. How can I find resources to help me?”

Mind the Confidence Gap

A few years ago I was at a luncheon for women in business and learned about a study that found women wouldn’t apply for a job unless they met 100% of the criteria on the description. Yep. That felt about right, I thought. Then I learned that the average man would have applied if they met 60% of the criteria.

Katty Kay and Claire Shipman have tackled this topic at length. “Success, it turns out, correlates just as closely with confidence as it does with competence: underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in. Overqualified and over prepared, too many women still hold back. Women feel confident only when they are perfect. Or practically perfect.”

Knowing that men are taking risks without having all the information has made a huge difference in how I approach my work. I may not know everything about a specific technology right now, but I trust my skills, attitude, and abilities. I know that I can learn whatever I set my mind to. That trust in myself has boosted my confidence and led to some amazing opportunities.

Acknowledge Your Biases

At one of my very first software conferences, I was one of two women in the room out of nearly three hundred attendees. It’s really tough to stand confidently when you feel like you so clearly don’t belong. Luckily, I knew from my marketing days that the brain relies on hacks and shortcuts to make decisions. Learning about these biases has helped me not take things so personally.

That person who assumed I was a recruiter when they first met me? That didn’t have as much to do with me as it did with confirmation bias. That person held the belief that women aren’t technical, so when they were met with a new input, they sought to confirm their existing world-view.

Familiarity with the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people believe “the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge,” is also helpful. In software, when people would scoff or use lots of jargon to make themselves look smarter, I initially wondered if it was me who wasn’t smart enough and didn’t belong. I stopped asking questions and noticed that I felt intimidated by how “technical” other people were. I stopped trying. Turns out, that ended up being another bias that crept in — imposter syndrome. Being aware of these unintentional posturing techniques makes a huge difference when it comes to committing to the long and difficult path of learning to code.

Andrea Goulet is the CEO & Co-Founder of Corgibytes in Richmond, Virginia. She was named a LinkedIn Top 10 Professional Under 35 in Software.

Disclaimer: Views and opinions of Guest contributors are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com

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Women in Tech- Just Do It

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By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational PyschologistNicki Gilmour

We know that there are barriers for women in technology, from hiring and promotional bias to pretty awful cultural issues, making the day to day environment hard going. I could go on and on about the ugly underbelly and about the fact the system is stacked but I am not going to do that because it isn’t going to help you at your desk today.  Firms must fix the systemic elements but in the meantime, and whether you like it or not women have to pioneer and keep going.
But, we can reward the good firms by going to work for them. Give your business and your talent to people who deserve it.
Get out if your firm’s culture is totally toxic. If that seems like not the right choice for you, realise nothing is perfect and that you can find ways to be the change leader or work with the change agents if you can identify them. Easier said than done and this is dependent on three things that you need to look at.
Firstly, your desire to be the person who created the change (history tells us it is rarely at no personal or emotional cost). Dig deep and see if it’s in your personality to do this work. It will involve all sorts of things including smart power, conflict and conflict resolution. I was often the hammer in the the glass hammer and I have learned that there are other ways of tackling problems and the hammer is held for special occasions only as I am all too ready to pick it up and whack a mole (what rhymes with mole?). Look at what is natural for you and then do a 180 and look at what is not naturally within your skill set and understand you will need both for change leadership.
Secondly, on the context of the situation, how change ready is the environment? There are ways to test this and a simple question to a leader will tell you as much as you need to know. A question such as, “How would you explain how we do what we do here to a new person?”  Listen to their response carefully, as it is in their digestion of the ‘how’ and  ‘by whom’ work gets done and what gets rewarded behaviorally that you will know where they are at in their own diversity journey. Ask them, what do they think their vision is for the team?
Thirdly, what systems or policies and procedures are in place to make the culture a good place to work for all humans regardless of your biological status?
There are some amazing women in technology out there – some in big firms and some in firms that they have started. Women who code just announced their winners this past week.
We have held many career events for women in technology  round navigating the terrain. Like any career planning advice,  or in fact coaching advice i can give you, you need to know what you want, understand what is consciously and unconsciously stopping you, then go for it. Be the change you want to see in the world!
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