Catalyst Honors Gap for Pay Equity, Leadership Diversity

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diverse workforceBy Melissa Anderson

Gap, Inc. was honored last week with a Catalyst award for its achievements in building diversity and inclusion at the company. Not only has the company made strides in increasing the number of women in key leadership positions, it has also focused on improving opportunities for women of color.

Between 2007 and 2015, the company has increased the representation of women reporting directly to the CEO from 33% to 77%. Forty percent of those top level reports are women of color. Similarly, in the same time frame, the number of women serving on Gap’s board has increased from one to four, two of whom are women of color.

Women also lead four of the company’s five brands, and since 2007, the representation of women at the vice president level has increased from 44% to 49.7%.

“Equality is engrained in everything we do. For us, it was not only the right thing to do, but also a business imperative,” said Dan Briskin, VP of Global Employee Relations and HR Shared Services, Gap Inc., during a panel at Catalyst’s annual conference on Wednesday.

The company’s award-winning diversity initiative, “Women and Opportunity,” was made up of three key pillars, according to Heather Robsahm, Senior Director of Talent Management for Banana Republic, one of Gap’s brands. These include career mobility, results oriented work environments (ROWE), and pay equity.

The vast majority (83%) of Gap’s current female executives are promoted from within, and many, like Robsahm, come from the company’s field operation. As part of its career mobility pillar, Gap has created career readiness programs to ensure employees are able to build their skills and set their career trajectory.

“We have a deep bench for women who are poised the lead the company into the future,” Robsham says.

Instituting the ROWE has helped the company improve accountability and engagement, Robsahm says, and demonstrated that people can own their time and still be successful at their jobs.

Finally, in 2014, the company affirmed it had achieved gender pay equity across its global workforce of 150,000 people. When the company set out to track its workforce pay, executives expected they might come across some gaps, so the company set aside some money to make up the difference in pay for women. But after looking at the data and partnering with an external firm to verify the results, the company found it had no significant gaps and hadn’t needed to tap into the extra cash.

“When you are focused on paying people for the work they do, and you are focused on grappling to get the best talent and focused on paying the market rate for that talent, [pay equity] naturally follows,” Briskin said.

This was the first year Catalyst named only one award winner, which, conference organizers said, emphasizes the impressiveness of Gap’s achievements.

Leadership and Courage

Also speaking at the event was Marillyn Hewson, CEO and Chair of Lockheed Martin, the defense and technology firm that took in over $46 billion in revenue last year.

In a Q&A with Catalyst CEO and President Deborah Gillis, Hewson described her views on diversity. Several years ago, she noted, Lockheed’s senior management realized it needed to get more women and minorities into its leadership pipeline.

“It starts with leadership setting the tone from the top,” Hewson said. She emphasized the importance of taking meaningful action to build diversity.

Today 20% of Lockheed’s leadership and a third of its board are women. But earlier in her career, things were different, Hewson recalled. That’s why today she places such importance on mentoring other women, she said.

She recalled often being the only woman in the room coming up in her career and noted how difficult it can be to deal with negative comments or unintentional slights when there’s no one to share them with.

At one point she was greeted in an all-male meeting with a comment that the others were glad she’d arrived because they ‘needed a pretty face’ in the room. “I said, ‘I guess I’m in the wrong room because I have other things to do,’” she remembered.

“You can be caught off guard, and having the chance to talk to other women about those things makes a difference.”

Hewson chairs the diversity and inclusion council at Lockheed Martin, and requires business leaders to meet with her once per quarter to discuss their strategies and metrics on diversity. She expects them to share information on hiring, promotion and attrition with respect to the demographics of their division. The company has also recently made an effort to incorporate white men into the conversation on diversity, she revealed. Previously, this group had felt locked out of diversity efforts, she said, which was presumably doing more harm than good.

An audience member asked Hewson to discuss a quote by Gloria Steinem: “Women still require an adjective and males don’t.”

When will a woman CEO simply be referred to as a CEO, she inquired.

“This is my fourth year as a CEO, and I don’t get the woman question as much anymore,” Hewson said. “That’s why I want to talk about being a leader.”

She encouraged women who aspire to be leaders to be courageous and take difficult assignments that showcase their capabilities and experience.

“Importantly, you bring the character and integrity that the team needs,” she said.

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5 tips to being happier at work

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ProfessionalWoman-comfort-zoneLook, we cannot all be in our dream jobs (or can we?) but while we are working on that, here are three tips to be happier and more productive at work.

  • Find your passion in the small things. Which tasks are enjoyable to do and how can you do more of them?
  • Find kindred spirits to connect with at work. People are happier at work if they have positive interactions with other people so try and find common ground with co-workers on professional topics as well as personal connections. If you so inclined, join an employee network or committee because this is also a good way to know about future opportunities in other teams etc.
  • Enjoy your life outside work so that you can plow through tough days knowing that work is just one element that you need to feel wonderful about. (This last point is often difficult for so many of us who are so invested in our careers but try it, smell the roses more.)

Good luck!

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Contact nicki@glasshammer2.wpengine.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work

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What We Can Learn from Powerful Women, Past and Present

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diverse-women-across-the-globeMarch is Women’s History Month, which gives us even more of a reason to recognize powerful women, both past and present, who continually inspire us to move forward. Regions, a bank that features a Women and Wealth initiative to educate, equip and empower women, is celebrating Women’s History Month by honoring the contributions of women who have made a difference in countless facets of life.

From media entrepreneurs to leaders impacting their own communities, we can learn from these women’s successes and apply their knowledge to improve our own careers and lives. Here are some key examples of inspirational leaders and their advice for reaching – and exceeding – your goals:

Develop Your Leadership Skills with a Mentor

As the president and CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Pam Iorio is a shining example of women leaders who are making a difference in their own communities and beyond. Her gift for leadership shows not only through her work with Big Brothers Big Sisters, but also in her past career as Mayor of the City of Tampa and her tenure as leader-in-residence at the John H. Sykes College of Business at the University of Tampa. The author of Straightforward: Ways to Live and Lead, Iorio delivers a strong message about the importance of developing leadership skills. Her message: Learn to lead yourself well so you can, in turn, lead others.

Regions Bank commends Iorio’s work to change communities across America through the power of mentoring and recognizes that career-oriented women can grow and learn from this inspiration. One way women can develop their own leadership skills is by cultivating a relationship with a female mentor

Define Your Personal Brand

Wendy Lane Stevens, the founder and president of national public relations firm LANE, advises women to spend time developing a personal brand that reflects your core beliefs. Every day and in nearly every situation – board meetings, conversation with clients, coffee with girlfriends – your personal brand is on display through your actions, words and decisions. It’s never too late to create a personal brand or modify your current one. Stevens suggests these steps:

Brainstorm and write down 30 to 40 words that describe who you are and the traits you like about yourself or want to improve. After thoughtful consideration, narrow the list to about six words.
Compare your descriptions to the words that three of your role models would use to describe themselves. Use this as a gauge to refine your list.

Ask a family member or close friend to review your words. Are they aspirational and achievable? “You want these words to be authentic and transparent, so you want honest feedback,” Stevens says.

Use the words to develop an elevator speech that describes who you are and what you believe – this becomes your personal motto. Keep it near you – like on your computer or on your phone so you’re constantly reminded of your core values or brand.

Every several months, grade yourself on how you’ve integrated your values and brand into your life.

No matter what your profession, you can glean valuable insights from smart, successful women all around you, including all of the powerful females Regions Bank is recognizing this March. If you’re interested more career insights and guidance for women in the workforce, Regions has shared with us some additional resources:

For Entry-Level Women – Learn How To Budget After Landing Your First Job. When you’re starting your first job, it can be difficult to learn how to budget your money. Regions shares four tips to help you separate your wants from your needs and set yourself up for financial success.

For Female Business Owners – Learn About, and Leverage, the Resources Available to Women and Minorities in Business. The government helps foster growth for women and minority business owners in part by offering tax breaks to companies that work with these businesses. Make sure you thoroughly understand these programs, and take the steps necessary to qualify for them.

For Moms in the Workforce – Balancing Career and Home. When it comes to work/life balance, find the right fit for you rather than an equal balance.

This article was sponsored by Regions Private Wealth Management.

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Know your values and know their values when interviewing for a new job

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business meeting at office deskWould you apply to work at the meat factory if you are a strict vegetarian? Most people would say no (dire circumstances excepting), and some people would say yes. This is obviously an extreme example of how our values control which job we do and who we will happily work for.

However, how work gets done in your team or firm often is to do with values (the leader or manager’s values mostly). When interviewing for a new job it is sometimes hard to ascertain what the team or company culture is. Ask these three questions to get closer to the answers that otherwise remain hidden to the naked eye:

  • What is the trait or behavior that makes people succeed here?
  • What is the most challenging part of working here?
  • Value x (insert your value) e.g. fairness, is important to me- how does that rank here in the top 3 lived values and is that stated anywhere in the mission or charter?

If you can get honest answers to these questions, you will get a handle on the culture and of course you need to know your values also!

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work

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Beating Bias: How Technology Is Changing the Recruiting Game

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women at computer
By Aimee Hansen
The hardest part of diversity can be the “how.” How do you stay awake to your own unconscious bias? Can you?

With no evidence that it’s possible to eliminate unconscious bias, a rising trend on the crossroads of diversity and tech is to mitigate bias with the help of technology tools.

New apps are helping to eliminate and filter the blindspots in the communications and decision-making that go into recruitment, hiring and promotion.

If You Can’t Stop it, Mitigate It

Diversity training helps individuals to become aware of their own bias, but unconscious bias, by definition, often evades our awareness to blindly drive our decisions. It can’t necessarily be trained away.

As Tony Greenwald, a University of Washington psychology professor who conducted seminal research on unconscious bias said, “Understanding implicit bias does not actually provide you the tools to do something about it.”

While increasing awareness of unconscious bias can enable individuals to be a bit more conscious of their own thought patterns and actions, it can also make bias socially normalized, which can backfire by condoning stereotyping.

We’re all doing it, right? If everybody is guilty, then is anyone?

One place where bias famously runs riot is in Silicon Valley. As Vivian Giang in Fast Company writes, “the percentage of underrepresented minorities is so low, (Silicon Valley) employers shouldn’t trust their own judgment anymore.”

But the dearth of diversity in tech town has recently catalyzed a booming counter-effect in app development.

As Ellen Huet writes in Forbes, unconscious bias has become the newest target in Silicon Valley and “demand for bias-busting solutions, in the form of consulting firms and anti-bias hiring software, has shot through the roof.”

Want Diversity? Watch Your Language

Something as seemingly innocuous as a job listing can bring bias into the hiring process through turning some candidates on and others away.

For example, research has shown that women are more drawn to/less threatened by companies that emphasize growth and development rather than boasting they hire the most awesome talent.

Two examples of companies who get the power and influence of words in the hiring process are Textio and Unitive, both of which have created software that tackle workplace bias in hiring and recruiting in “real time”.

Co-founder and CEO of Textio, Kieran Snyder, is a PhD in linguistics, who also researches gender bias in office dynamics. According to Textio, “the future of writing is knowing how well your words will work before anyone else reads them.”

Textio Talent, which has been used by companies like Twitter, Microsoft, Starbucks and Square, is “like a very smart word processor” that helps to predict how your documents, such as job listings and candidate e-mails, will perform.

As you write, the software highlights phrases, calls out their potential impact, and suggests alternative choices to appeal to a wider range of job seekers.

Textio has found that “proven track record” means more men will apply, “passion for learning” will attract more women, “mentoring” is generally more attractive than “coaching”, and “high performer” is more widely appealing than “rock star.”

There’s even an attraction difference between “manage a team” (more male) versus “develop a team” (more female). The tool also highlights when you’re just talking corporate jargon such as “synergy,” which makes listings less popular.

Snyder told Fast Company, “Everybody hates that language, but underrepresented people hate it more, probably because it’s a cultural signifier of some kind. It sort of communicates, this is an old-boy’s network kind of company.”

Take The Bias Out of Resumes & Interviews

Research that has shown that applicants with names that sound African-American have a 14% lower call-back rate. When it comes to tackling bias in hiring, developers are also focusing in on the resume and interview process.

Unitive has created an app that helps with creating word-optimized job postings, as well as resume reviewing and interview structuring, helping hiring managers monitor their decision-making and mitigate the effect of bias throughout.

The technology requires hiring managers to first “pre-commit” to what they most wish to see from an applicant, and presents resumes stripped of bias-triggering details like name and gender. Through the resume and interview process, the app reminds the manager of the key pre-committed criteria they choose.

In Fortune, Unitive Founder and CEO Laura Mather explains, ”We found a way to operationalize psychological findings so that hiring managers avoid bias as much as possible,” explains Mather.

It’s as much as about efficient hiring, and efficient hiring lends itself to more diversity. According to NPR, when cybersecurity firm RedSeal wanted to expand its employee base to increase women and minority representation, the CEO brought in Unitive to help filter out bias.

As a result, the firm received 30% more job applications, and the percentage of female engineers doubled. The candidate pool both increased and diversified. The technology helped to move away from “culture-fit”, breaking the mold on who fits into the company.

Unitive Founder and CEO Laura Mather told NPR that research shows “getting in different perspectives into your company makes your company more innovative, more profitable, more productive.” Mather said, ”All kinds of really great things happen when you stop making decisions based on how much you like the person’s personality.”

The Blind Audition

Another firm, GapJumpers helps remove bias from the hiring process for tech talent through blind auditions, just as blind auditions cracked the orchestra world open for female musicians. Candidates are given a challenge related to the job, rather than submitting a resume, which gives clues to gender and race. Not only is the process less biased, it allows those hiring to see how a candidate delivers.

Blendoor is just one other example of a new app which connects candidates and recruiters with faceless and nameless profiles, with a Tinder-like interface.

Nicki Gilmour, Founder of theglasshammer and organizational psychologist emphasizes that new technology is a valuable part of the equation in addressing unconscious bias. ”Like any behavioral change project, but especially anything to do with habits, assumptions and stereotypes, many parts of the system need to support the change structurally, to make individual change easier.”

”I also feel executive coaching is important as assumptions can be part of the cultural wallpaper and engrained,” Gilmour commented. “When they are interwoven with individual value sets that might be traditional to start with, making the unconscious conscious is only the beginning of this work.”

If You Talk the Talk, Try the Technology

More and more start-ups are entering the space of developing the technology that filters bias out of hiring efficiency and diversity, and current players have plans to expand beyond hiring to addressing promotions and reviews.

As the “how”’ of diversity becomes increasingly demystified and tangible, companies have a chance to do with unconscious bias what they would do with any inhibiting factor to their business: bring in the tools to address it.

Save

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International Women’s Day

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women smilingInternational Women’s Day known as IWD is on Tuesday 8th March this year and we have great coverage from our writers, our clients and our partners all month long.

The career tip of the week has a distinct hint of counting our blessings as we look at the broader scope of women everywhere. My advice today is to get out of the weeds and do some big picture perspective taking today. Never mind the nitty gritty at work, list the 3 regular tasks that you enjoy most at work currently. Now look ahead at what you want to achieve in the next 18 months. Are you on track to increase the number of things that you enjoy doing? If so, excellent! if not, time to think about what is your next move to improve your work life and while you are at it, take a look at the big picture also. What can you commit to doing to make your life overall better and more fulfilling?

Check theglasshammer.com all month for our International Women’s Day coverage and our usual selection of excellent profiles.

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work

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Why You Should Avoid Overwork To Be Effective In Your Job

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women stressedRecently in Fortune, Besty Myers, founding director of the Center for Women and Business at Bentley University, called the 24/7 workday “the biggest setback for women in corporate America.”

Professor Robin Ely of Harvard Business School has said the 24/7 work culture “locks gender inequality in place.”

But this is not an article about gender. The chronic overwork culture doesn’t need to change only because it works against women: it needs to change because it’s not working.

Sarah Green Carmichael, senior associate editor of Harvard Business Review (HBR), posed in a recent article that the bigger question is not what has driven us to a 24/7 work culture, or who is to blame, but rather, “Does it work?”

The answer, according to many studies related to employee effectiveness, is no. Within her article, Carmichael highlights that a culture of chronic overwork backfires on employees and companies. Yet the number of hours worked has increased by 9% in the last 30 years. It seems Corporate America is clinging detrimentally tight to the false truth that overwork is a requirement for effective employees and driving company-level success: overwork is overvalued.

Here are four solid reasons why you shouldn’t chronically overwork if you wish to remain engaged and effective in your job and why your firm shouldn’t want you to, either. May this provide insight both for you and the men and women you manage.

1) Overwork may lower your engagement with work.

According to Gallup, nearly 61% of college graduates feel disengaged at work – meaning not “intellectually and emotionally connected,” even when they are physically present in the office, resulting in a major ROI loss for companies.

Data shows that 2/3 of employees feel overwhelmed and 80% would like to work fewer hours. The 24/7 work culture and feeling overwhelmed are major contributors to disengagement. While an “always on” expectation makes it difficult to mentally switch-off, research has suggested that being able to psychologically switch-off from work protects both well-being and work engagement.

If you feel you can never turn off, it would seem you begin to tune out. To stay engaged at work, it’s important not to give into the expectation to live it.

2) Overwork may hurt your productivity.

Research showed that a company couldn’t tell the difference in performance if an effective employee was working 80 hours or just pretending to, so working longer hours may not mean accomplishing more, career-wise too. As graphed in The Economist, longer hours are correlated with decreased productivity. In fact, research has even shown that when working hours are excessive, cutting hours back can actually increase your productivity.

Also, in research with a consultancy firm, required and predictable time-off from work including being digitally switched-off, increased productivity – even if time completely off had to be strictly enforced because employees were in the habit of being constantly switched on. Not only did it improve communication, learning and the client product, but it also resulted in greater job satisfaction, sense of work/life balance, and commitment to managing a career at the firm.

3) Overwork may hinder your ability to lead effectively.

As Ron Friedman writes in an HBR article, while putting in the excessive hours may have marked you as motivated and helped your “early career advancement,” maintaining overwork as part of your work identity once you’ve already arrived to a position of leadership can significantly damage your career prospects.

Leaders need to disconnect to optimize the interpersonal skills, critical thinking, and visionary skills important to their roles. Overwork contributes to mis-reading others (often negatively) and emotional reactivity such as lashing out. Management performance also depends upon judgement, and being tired from overwork impairs your decision-making abilities and clarity of perspective when it comes to identifying problems and creative solutions.

An overworked leader, concentrating to the point of fatigue, is often a cloudy leader, who is also more vulnerable to technology distractions, such as the 3pm workplace Facebook rush.

As Reid writes, overworking also models the behavior as an expectation for those you manage, and there’s enough evidence in this article alone to illustrate why that’s a questionable management practice.

4) Overwork may harm your health.

On top of compromising your job effectiveness, overwork compromises your well-being, a major component of feeling satisfyingly engaged in your work. Studies have shown that overwork is associated with emotional exhaustion and impaired sleep, which is a massive performance killer in addition to compromising health.

It’s also associated with depressive symptoms, heavy drinking, and long-term with heart disease and impairment of brain function when it comes to reasoning. Nothing about this says top management potential. If you’re to be a thriving executive, it’s probably best to start as a thriving human.

What Can You Do To Be More Effective?

But you’re still surrounded with a culture of overwork, so what can you do?

Friedman recommends starting with these small behavior changes:

Find a way not to have your smartphone at your side constantly when away from work, interrupting your present – instead check it with intention. Program evening emails to arrive in the morning, so they don’t catalyze a back and forth conversation after hours. Discern when a response is necessary immediately from when it’s not. Find an activity that you’re excited to leave work for, something else that will give you a sense of gain. While at work, schedule a few breaks in your day so that you can step away, clear your head, and refresh both your energy and perspective.

It’s clear that when you chronically over-extend yourself at work, you may still be there or still be on, but you stop being the same employee. Being an effective leader means managing the asset of your leadership effectiveness, not working until it’s lost to diminishing returns or worse.

By Aimee Hansen

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Leaving one industry for another, what you need to know in your transition

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People waiting for an interviewPeople leave industries for many reasons ranging from transferable skills or vertical growth in skills creating new opportunities for professionals to the less talked about but real phenomenon of burnout. The Financial Services industry is vulnerable to peaks and troughs and being laid off without prospects such as the mass layoffs that happen every recession cycle on Wall street is fairly predictable albeit sometimes a small correction only.

Either way, it is time to transition to a new career. What are the top three things you need to consider in the move?

A. Do your skills apply to what you want to do next? If not exactly, can you weave a truthful narrative of how what you have done before will empower you to do the new tasks required? If there are gaps, before you leap from your current job you should close any skill gaps with formal education or informal means.

B. Who do you know in the new arena? How is your network? Start by meeting people who can tell you what you need to know about the product, processes and cultural norms of your desired future gig. These folks are much more likely to know of open opportunities and relevant networking opportunities than anyone else. Information is power.

C. Interview, interview, interview. Practice makes perfect and will give you a good benchmark on how viable it is to move into this space and help you understand your bottom lines regarding money and other factors such as hours, location etc.

Good luck!

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Contact nicki@glasshammer2.wpengine.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work

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Black Women Are Raising Their Hands For Leadership

careersclub-webinarsBy Aimee Hansen.
It takes both ambition and confidence to aspire to a top corporate position, and many professional black women have both in spades according to recent research.

Not only would Corporate America benefit to listen up, but there may also be a message for non-black women when it comes to owning our impact within leadership roles.
 
Despite facing many difficulties and obstacles, black women are even more ready to lead.
 
Power Women At The Top
 
Skim Fortune’s“Most Powerful Women”2015 and you’ll find Rosalind Brewer (#15 – CEO and President of Sam’s and Walmart), Ursula Burns (#17 – CEO and Chairman of Xerox, and Anne-Marie Campbell (#37 – President, Southern Division, Home Depot) holding steady rank, with Brewer and Burns hailed among “first ladies in Corporate America”by Black Enterprise.
 
Burns (#29) and Brewer (#65) also appear in Forbes latest “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women”, among 11 black women including Loretta Lynch (#34), the first African American woman to be sworn in as U.S. Attorney General.
 
Even though African American women make up only 2% of science and engineering employees, four black women were named on Business Insider’s “23 of the most powerful women engineers in the world”.
 
Skipping Over the Corporate Wall
 
African American women are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the USA, and most keen to make themselves boss. They own 14% of female-owned businesses, with the number of black women-owned businesses having risen 322% since 1997 compared to 74% for all women-owned businesses.
 
Meanwhile in Corporate America, according to Catalyst 2015 data, black women make up 7.4% of employees in S&P 500 companies yet hold only 1.2% of executive and senior level positions and only .2% of CEO jobs. They hold 11.7% of female board seats, or just 2.2% of board seats.
 
In Fortune, CEO of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce Margot Dorfman speaks to the rush towards entrepreneurism, “Women of color, when you look at the statistics, are impacted more significantly by all of the negative factors that women face. It’s not surprising that they have chosen to invest in themselves.”
 
Black Women Understand Power and Are Ready To Lead
 
A recent report, entitled “Black Women: Ready to Lead” by the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI), which gathered responses from 356 black women and 788 white women in professional roles, reports the frustrating corporate paradox experienced by black women:
 
They are more likely (than white female counterparts) to recognize the personal and collective potential of holding the top jobs and aspire to them yet more likely to feel stalled in their careers.
 
According to the CTI report, African American professional women are 2.8 times more likely to want the top jobs – 22% aspired to a powerful position and prestigious title, compared to only 8% of white professional women. They were 50% more likely to say that the “ability to earn well”was important to their careers (81% vs. 54%).
 
The report, by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Tai Green states, “Perhaps because they’ve been ‘leaning in’ for generations, black women on track for leadership are more likely than their white sisters to see an executive position as the means to getting what they want from their careers.”
 
The report reflected that African American women had a stronger sense that holding a leadership position would enable them to positively influence their own lives and their field.
 
On an individual level, black women “without power”were more likely than white counterparts to perceive a leadership role as “enabling them to flourish”(26% vs. 14%) and as an opportunity “to be empowered and empower others”(22% vs. 12%).
 
On a community level, African American women also were more likely to recognize as important aspects of power the ability to shape the direction of their field or profession (39% vs. 29%), the ability to guide other’s career development (33% vs. 25%), and the ability to exert influence on other powerful people (32% vs. 21%).
 
Indeed African American women “with power”were much more likely to report having meaning and purpose compared to their black peers “without power”(51% vs. 33%) and the ability to empower others and be empowered (57% vs. 42%).
 
The report also highlighted greater clarity and confidence. Black women were more confident than white women in their ability to succeed in a position of power (43% vs. 30%) and were more likely to have clear long-term goals (40% vs. 32%).
 
“Manifestly Invisible”
 
Despite stronger ambitions, more confidence and even more graduate degrees (49% vs. 40%), the report found black women were more likely than white women to report feeling stalled in their careers (44% vs. 30%) and to feel their talents weren’t recognized by their superiors (26% vs. 17%).
 
As the authors wrote in HBR, “our interviewees report being both painfully conspicuous –‘unicorns,’ as one put it —and manifestly invisible.”
 
Many of the dynamics and challenges African American women face differ to those of white women, because of racial stereotyping and their “double outsider”status, sharing neither gender nor race with those in power, leading to issues such as lower sponsorship (unconscious bias means we chose those who remind us of ourselves) and harsher performance judgement.
 
Columbia University Professor of Psychology Valerie Purdie-Vaughns writes in Fortune, “I’ve examined how people’s brains are biased to ignore black women. When many think about ‘black executives,’ they visualize black men. When they think about ‘female executives,’ they visualize white women. Because black women are not seen as typical of the categories ‘black’ or ‘woman,’ people’s brains fail to include them in both categories. Black women suffer from a ‘now you see them now you don’t’ effect in the workplace.”
 
Turning Inequality into Motivation
 
Inequality -along with increased likeliness of being the primary breadwinner for the household, single motherhood, and a sense of personal and community responsibility -may just be the extra fuel that motivates African American women to strive for positions of power that would enable them to influence change in organizations.
 
As shared in the Washington Post by report co-author Green,”Themajority of black women we interviewed were raised by parents and grandparents who instilled in them this sense of not having a voice, and feeling they have a responsibility to go after it themselves and pave the way for other women to come up.”
 
African American women are raising their hands for leadership. It’s time the corporate blinders came off.
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Help, my manager is killing my career

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women stressedChances are if you like your manager, your team mates and the tasks at hand are still interesting, then you may be less likely to jump ship unless you are vastly underpaid or you have a personal situation that requires your attention. There is a saying that “People leave managers, not companies,” and a bad manager changes everything. If your relationship is less than cordial with your manager, this can permeate daily interactions to a point where you feel that he or she is a hindrance to your advancement or even your emotional wellbeing in the worst case scenario (and I hear about this more than you think with serial offenders showing patterns with the new hires.) This issue is very tricky and I hesitate to give advice in a one size fits all matter since there is nuance to this topic and I would advise you to speak to your career coach or a trusted advisor first.

What can you do? Explore other options within the same company and navigate the politics by lunching with peers from other teams and even get a sponsor who a leader (the boss of your boss, or higher or a different team leader) so that you can start to understand the bigger picture of mobility, project allocation and promotional tracks. Also, sometimes a bad manager isn’t just someone who has a bad personality but someone who is stuck between a rock and a hard place themselves suffering from systemic constraints ( such as lack of resources, understaffed etc.) and so you have to figure out if this is a temporary issue or a true sign of dysfunction of the entire company.

Failing that, sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade and move on. There are other firms out there.

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work

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