Office Housework: Lean In, But Don’t Be Leaned On

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working from homeIf you make well-meaning, generous, happy to help contributions day in and out at the office and it goes without recognition or reward, do you make a sound? When it comes to your career, probably not. The truth is when it comes to both moving up and looking after yourself, too much helping might be hurting.

In a recent New York Times article, Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant write, “This is the sad reality in workplaces around the world: Women help more but benefit less from it.” After all, there’s a difference between leaning in and being leaned on.

Why We Help

Sandberg and Grant are quick to note that gender stereotypes are at play in creating expectations for women to “pitch in” thanklessly for the team: “When a man offers to help, we shower him with praise and rewards. But when a woman helps, we feel less indebted. She’s communal, right? She wants to be a team player. The reverse is also true. When a woman declines to help a colleague, people like her less and her career suffers. But when a man says no, he faces no backlash. A man who doesn’t help is ‘busy’; a woman is ‘selfish.’”

So it’s no surprise that Law Professor Joan C. Williams, author of What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know, says that for women, “Saying no without seeming touchy, humorless or supremely selfish is a particularly tricky balancing act.” Women continue to be left “holding the mop”, in the words of Senator Elizabeth Warren, for men in the office. Blogging on leadership, Williams defines office housework as:

“the administrative tasks, menial jobs, and undervalued assignments women are disproportionately given at their jobs.”

“Someone has to take notes, serve on committees and plan meetings — and just as happens with housework at home, that someone is usually a woman,” says Sandberg and Grant.

What happens when a woman says no? A study on altruistic behavior led by NYU’s Heilman tested how male and female employees would be evaluated based on choosing whether to stay late for an important meeting. A man was rated 14% more favourably than a woman for staying and helping. A woman was 12% more negatively than a man for declining.

It’s the equivalent of the “awww” factor daddy gets but not mom when he carries around the baby, and it’s unequally rewarded. Sandberg and Grant state, “Over and over, after giving identical help, a man was significantly more likely to be recommended for promotions, important projects, raises and bonuses. A woman had to help just to get the same rating as a man who didn’t help.”

If you’re finding yourself disproportionately engaged in leading mentor programs, coordinating the interns, taking notes, heading up thankless committees and special side initiatives, ordering the sandwiches, volunteering to stay late, and spending time behind the scenes coaching, you are helping organizational success according to many studies noted in the NYT article.

But the question is at what price to your career and to yourself?

Hindering Your Career

The NYT article stated, “Studies demonstrate that men are more likely to contribute with visible behaviors — like showing up at optional meetings — while women engage more privately in time-consuming activities like assisting others and mentoring colleagues.”

Behind the scenes help is valuable, but when it’s mostly women who are carrying the time and effort commitment on low-valued, low-visibility work, who is free to step up to the high-value, high-visibility opportunities?

“The person taking diligent notes in the meeting almost never makes the killer point,” Sandberg and Grant write in the NYT. And Williams asserts in the Washington Post, “We have to get women out of office housework and onto more projects that really matter, both to them and to their companies, if we want more women to be successful in reaching positions of influence.”

Sacrificing Yourself

Williams writes, “Women are often asked to play the selfless good citizen…by taking on assignments that men don’t want or that the organization doesn’t highly reward.” But what happens when women act selfless, or out of our need to be dutiful or helpful, is we too often neglect ourselves.

Women are more likely to feel burned out at work when it comes to emotional exhaustion, according to an analysis of 183 different studies across 15 countries. According to another study, women’s focus on and involvement with others to the exclusion of taking care of their own self can cause stress and depression underneath.

Being helpful can create personally rewarding interactions, but women need to be careful that they’re not exhausting their own energy and resources while colluding with multiplying expectations upon themselves.

If your identity becomes locked up in being the helpful one, which your gender already infers, then it becomes an expectation you serve and reaffirm. When out of balance, being of service to others at the workplace can mean being of dis-service to yourself.

A Mindset Change

Sandberg and Grant suggest that organizations should chose to value, track, and recognize acts of helping, as well as address the imbalance in assigning this work. They also suggest men could step up to contribute their share and help vocalize the unsung contributions.

In the meantime, they suggest breaking free of the cycle of mop-holding comes down to women, to you: “For women, the most important change starts with a shift in mind-set: If we want to care for others, we also need to take care of ourselves. One of us, Adam, has conducted and reviewed numerous studies showing that women (and men) achieve the highest performance and experience the lowest burnout when they prioritize their own needs along with the needs of others. By putting self-concern on par with concern for others, women may feel less altruistic, but they’re able to gain more influence and sustain more energy. Ultimately, they can actually give more.”

The NYT article pointed out an exec who found more efficient ways – such as a FAQ manual – to address requests for help, as well as caring ways to decline over-stretching. Only then did she make partner. You can be as giving, caring, and considerate in how you say no to others while recognizing your needs and limits as you can be in saying yes.

Women are quick at helping, and it’s part of the path to success, but that doesn’t mean we have to shoulder all the under-valued work at a cost to ourselves.

Perhaps we need to qualify Sandberg’s call-to-action: Lean in, but don’t be leaned on.

By Aimee Hansen

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The Formula for Selling Anybody, Anything, Anytime

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women salesHere’s the thing: sometimes we’re selling our ideas, sometimes we’re selling our products and, these days, many of us are selling ourselves as the best candidate for the job/as the person who deserves a promotion. With this in mind, here’s the proven formula for selling your best self to anybody, anywhere, anytime.

First: Yale University did a study of the 12 most persuasive words in the English language. What they discovered is that the most persuasive word in the English language is “you.” Consequently, I recommend throwing it around a lot: “As I’m sure you know,” “As I’m sure you’ve heard,” “I wanted to talk to you today,” etc.

Second: California-based Social Psychologist Ellen Langer revealed that there is one word in the English language that increases the possibility of cooperation from 60 to 94%. No, that is not a typo. I will repeat: 60 to 94%. This word is “Because.”

Lastly: “The Duncan Hines Cake Mix Marketing Theory.” When Duncan Hines first began making cake mix, the decision to have you at home add the egg was made in the marketing department. Why is this effective? Because they realized that when we add the egg we feel proud because we contributed; we can say, “I baked!” How does this work in a business scenario? You need to articulate how you can contribute to the other person’s success and/or how they can contribute to yours so that what is created becomes your shared success.

So that’s your formula: you + because + the egg = success.

Following are three different ways you can apply this formula for success

Talking to an Interviewer:

Too often we spend our interviewing time talking about why we are right for the job. This sounds a lot like, “And I just think this company would be perfect for me/would help me meet my goals.” No. What you need to be talking about is how you are going to contribute to your future boss’s/the company’s success once you are hired.

What might this sound like?

“I wanted to talk to you today because your job description/your company’s mission statement/your bestselling product is X, and my skill set/my personal passion/my sales experience is in Y. Applying the full force of my expertise to this job will enable us both to reach our goals.”

Talking to Your Boss about a Brewing “Situation”:

The use of the word “situation” here is quite deliberate. The White House doesn’t have a “Crisis Room,” they have a “Situation Room.” Likewise, you don’t have a crisis– you have a situation that needs to be resolved.

So, what would the formula for success sound like here?

“I wanted to bring a potential situation to your attention immediately because it requires expert attention. X has occurred and I have come up with the following two, possible solutions. Is there one that you prefer?”

In this instance, their egg is not as much the mention of their expert attention, but the opportunity you are giving them to apply that expertise to two possible resolution strategies. Having them to choose which they prefer (and tell you why it’s far better) not only allows them to add their egg, but to choose the temperature at which the solution is “baked.”

Talking to a Potential Target at a Networking event

Too many networking events are about what others can do for us, rather than what we can do for them. In my experience, however, the most successful networkers aren’t asking, “What can you do for me?” but “What can I do for you?” In this scenario, then, the formula would likely sound like this:

“Hello, I’m X,” (if your target is standing with another person, or in a group, introduce yourself to everyone present.) “I wanted to introduce myself because I know you are the visionary behind X idea/product/company, and I wanted to introduce you to Y/write about you in my newsletter/ask if I could help you organize your next charity event.”

As you can see, the offer doesn’t need to be huge — the fact that you made it at all is what helps you stand out. Leaving room for them to add the egg of their choice is what will ensure your successful connection.

Happy baking!

Guest Contribution by Frances Cole Jones

Guest advice and opinions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com

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Career Tip of the Week

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woman typing on a laptopThis Week’s Tip Is…

Successful narrative

Think about how all business leaders tend to have an “arc” to their story. What is your arc? How does the tasks you do, and the projects completed, add up to a narrative for your career?

Welcome to Career Tip of the Week. In this column we aim to provide you with a useful snippet of advice to carry with you all week as you navigate the day to day path in your career.

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

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Happy Memorial Day!

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memorial-day-2015

We will be taking a short publishing break, but we will return tomorrow with the latest career advice, news, and inspiring women to help you advance your career.

Please join our LinkedIn community here in the meantime!

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Derailed but not Deterred: How Women Leaders Can Get Back On The Success Track

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Career-newsHow can women leaders increase their odds of being more successful after they’ve received negative feedback or suffered a work setback?

Answers to this question abound: Be more aggressive, capitalize on natural people skills, speak up more, avoid organizations with glass ceilings – the list can go on.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these answers except that they can sometimes have limited value, as we often struggle to succeed due to internal rather than external reasons.

For over twenty years, I have used a leadership assessment tool developed by well-known psychologist Robert Hogan that identifies and helps manage what he refers to as “derailers”. Hogan’s definition of derailers is personality traits that emerge under stress when we lose our ability to regulate behaviors because our brain goes into a self-protection mode. Unaddressed, these actions can sabotage relationships as well as careers.

In my book, Beauty Queen: Inside the Reign of Avon’s Andrea Jung, I wrote extensively on the impact of Andrea’s pleaser “derailer” – avoiding conflict or the tough calls and trying to appease others in order to maintain harmony. Andrea was a brilliant and highly successful leader, but the combination of intense stress and difficult circumstances (the loss of her second-in-command) allowed her derailer to diminish her effectiveness. I have coached many women who possess this derailer and I’ve witnessed how it causes them to stay quiet and fail to speak up. This derailer is related to risk taking, and it affects not only business decisions but also taking personal risks such as voicing a minority opinion in a meeting or making a controversial comment. In these women’s minds, the self-protection mode can kick in and often unconsciously, they believe it is better to “play it safe” and not say anything versus having their opinions disparaged.

Be aware, too, that understanding the context is crucial when it comes to assessing the impact of derailers on women leaders. For example, I coached Joan, a senior vice president with a large organization. Her derailer was mischievous – under stress she circumvented the rules or created her own rules to get results. In Joan’s previous organization, this behavioral mischief resulted in her being labeled a true innovator who broke through outdated processes to turn around a tired brand. In Joan’s current role, she is being labeled as non-collaborative and a lone ranger. Her previous organization’s culture was more aligned with her values and personality while her current organization’s culture is known as more conservative and operating by the book. Recall that all derailers possess a flip side. In Joan’s case, the daring and provocative moves that helped her succeed in one organization are causing her to fail in another company. Context means a lot, especially for women leaders who tend to be given labels that are difficult to shake.

I worked with another woman, Tanya, who was overly cautious and worked in an organization with an overly cautious culture and business strategy – they were never the first to market but followed the market leader with decreasing success. As part of a corporate shake-up, more aggressive managers were brought in. Tanya’s new manager gave her some pretty tough feedback about not only the need to speak up but to push the envelope with her plans and programs. Again, a changing context affected how Tanya’s overly cautious behavior was perceived. What helped Tanya succeed in one context caused her to struggle in another.

Derailers are part of who we are, so you can’t get rid of your derailers. But you can learn to manage them. The management process can be more difficult for women leaders than men, in part because bosses are sometimes more willing to give tough feedback to men because it’s assumed they can “take it”. In some companies, too, male leaders are more likely to receive coaching than female leaders. Therefore, you may need to learn how to manage your derailer yourself.

Here are some tips for doing so:
  • Know what the “buzz” is about you–what people say about you behind your back usually leads right back to your derailers. Ask your friends, partner and spouse what you do under stress. They always know and can often be your best coach. If you hear that you have too much pride, never ask for help and have trouble admitting you’ve made a mistake, then arrogance is your likely derailer.
  • Discover what pushes your buttons. I worked with one colleague who always got under my skin with her cynicism and bitterness, and I became a different and very untrusting individual when we tangled. Every time we argued, I became confrontational and angry—this was not my usual mode of operation. By identifying how you react when your buttons are pushed, you can receive additional clues about your derailing trait.
  • Understand your context. Be aware of how your derailer fits within your organization’s culture. Figure out the norms of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Ask yourself whether this has changed with new leadership and how it’s affected you.
  • Take action and get tactical. Tanya, the overly cautious woman I coached, needed to speak up more, so she set a target of stating her opinion at least 5 times in every meeting she attended. After a while, speaking up became a habit.

Finally, be aware that in many organizational settings, women are reluctant to admit to themselves or others that they have a flaw. We’ve been conditioned to believe that we have to be better, stronger, and smarter than our male counterparts if we want to succeed. Thus, we can be reluctant to consider that we might have a derailing tendency.

But all of us have them, be we men or women, young or old, CEOs or neophytes. By being aware of your most impactful derailer and making an effort to counteract its effect especially when you’re under stress and it’s causing you problems, you can counteract its negative effect. Managing your derailer doesn’t guarantee women leaders success, but it certainly levels the playing field in more ways than one.

Guest Contribution by Deborrah Himsel

Deborrah Himsel is the author of Beauty Queen: Inside the Reign of Avon’s Andrea Jung. She is also an educator and executive coach – www.himselandassociates.com

Guest advice and opinions not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com

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Accountability, Leadership Responsibility, and Common Sense: Leaders Share What Makes Diversity Initiatives Work

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Professional WomenGender diversity and inclusion doesn’t just happen, as Catalyst shows every year at its awards conference. A sustained improvement in the percentage of women in corporate workforces and leadership comes from hard work by companies to achieve and maintain set goals. It also requires a visibly demonstrated commitment to diversity by those in charge.

Honorees at this year’s Catalyst Awards Conference shared their companies’ secrets to success in increasing the percentage of women in leadership levels and throughout their companies’ workforces. The winning programs at Chevron Corporation and Proctor & Gamble combined three tried and true ingredients for advancing women at work: accountability, common sense, and leaders who took personal responsibility for improving diversity and inclusion at their companies.

“How we are behaving in any interaction speaks louder than any company effort,” said Melody Boone Meyer, president of Chevron Asia Pacific Exploration and Production Company. “Your behavior is how people read what’s real or not. The communication is there, but much more important is whether you’re living that.”

“Your behavior is how people read what’s real or not. The communication is there, but much more important is whether you’re living that.”

At the conference in March, Meyer, along with Mike Wirth, executive vice president of downstream and chemicals at Chevron; William P. Gipson, chief diversity officer and senior vice president of research and development at Proctor & Gamble; and Colleen Jay, president of global hair care and color at Proctor & Gamble, took to the stage to describe not only how their companies changed their approach to improving gender diversity, but also their personal journeys with taking responsibility for diversity as well.

As Meyer said, “Leaders need to live it.”

Accountability

Leaders from both companies detailed how they were held accountable for meeting corporate gender diversity goals.

Wirth explained that, at Chevron, leaders have to answer for their diversity action plans as part of their performance reviews. He also described an exercise the company’s CEO had leaders undertake: “The CEO said I want you to go out and spend time with three people who are very different from you and I expect you to respond,” he recalled.

“Accountability is nothing unless you have goals,” Gipson agreed. “Targets change everything.”

Proctor & Gamble ties diversity goals to executives’ stock options, he said. But the goals aren’t easy to meet and they aren’t merely window dressing to placate investors who care about diversity – they’re stretch goals.

“To really move the needle, you need to have some stretching,” Gipson said.

Indeed, Wirth commented, Chevron even employed reverse inventives at one point. “If you didn’t make progress, the bonus would be affected for everyone in that group,” he said, explaining that Chevron’s leaders wanted to make sure executives understood that diversity was a shared responsibility.

Common Sense

Diversity initiatives wouldn’t work without a heavy dose of common sense, as well. For example, Gipson explained that a few years ago, leaders at Proctor & Gamble realized women were leaving the company at a disproportionate rate. The company undertook a workforce survey to figure out why.

One of the reasons, P&G discovered, was that the company’s flex work program just wasn’t working. Offering employees the ability to work flexibly is one way companies can help their entire workforce meet their personal responsibilities. Since women as a group bear the brunt of child- and elder-care disproportionately compared to men, flex programs have been identified as a way for companies to retain female employees.

It turned out, Gipson said, that P&G’s flexible work program wasn’t flexible enough.

“We were trying to mandate when and where to work flexibly, but life is not really that way,” he explained. The company amended its program based on the survey results.

Leadership Responsibility

Finally, the panelists described what is possibly the most important part of an effective gender diversity initiative. Leaders have to internalize the value of diversity and demonstrate that value in their personal actions.

For example, Johnson said she and other P&G executives help each other keep track of blind spots.

“We help keep everyone sharp so we can role model that going forward,” she explained.

Similarly, Wirth described how he had to face his own personal blind spots a few years ago when Chevron undertook a dramatic restructuring. He picked all white men to lead his new team.

“I got a lot of feedback from the CEO, my kids, and women in my organization,” he said. “I had to do a lot of reflection on myself. I genuinely believed I had the right beliefs and behavior, but that’s not good enough. People need to see action.”

“I got a lot of feedback from the CEO, my kids, and women in my organization,”

He continued, “As a white male, I’ve got an extra responsibility to catalyze the discussion [on diversity], and create an environment where everyone is supported and everyone understands the expectations.”

Gipson described how, as an R&D executive, he had to learn to “embrace the soft stuff.”

“It’s the hardest stuff,” he said. “But no matter how much progress we’ve made, we can always get better.”

That attitude – that we can always get better – is an important one in diversity and inclusion. Simply meeting the numbers isn’t good enough. True inclusion will require everyone in the workforce – especially leaders – to keep pushing themselves harder to identify and change their own personal weaknesses when it comes to diversity and working to change their companies for the better.

By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

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Listening Is Getting Harder, but It’s Necessary for Leaders

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women in technologyEvolving digital technology demands more communication and accessibility from all employees, which leads to a culture of multi-tasking. But as leaders face increased communication demands, it’s important that they retain the value of listening.

Listening is Getting More Difficult

Active listening has been identified as one of the ten attributes of embodied leadership. Effective listening by leaders has been noted as the first step in creating trust within organizations. Also research shows that supervisor listening contributes to employee job satisfaction, satisfaction with the supervisor, and fosters a strong and beneficial exchange between leaders and team members.

Yet according to Accenture’s #ListenLearnLead study of 3,600 business professionals across 30 countries, the vast majority of professionals (64%) feel that listening has become more difficult in today’s workplace.

While nearly all (96%) of global professionals judged themselves to be “good listeners”, nearly all (98%) also report multi-tasking at least part of the day.

The study found that eight in ten respondents said they multi-task on conference calls with work emails (66%), instant messaging (35%), personal emails (34%), social media (22%) and reading news and entertainment (21%). In fact, professionals report distracted listening and divided attention unless they are held directly and visibly responsible within the context of the meeting.

“Digital is changing everything, including the ways in which we communicate. In turn, the way we communicate is changing how we listen, learn and lead in the workplace,” says Nellie Berroro, Managing Director, Global Inclusion & Diversity at Accenture. “Today, truly listening means not just watching our nonverbal cues in face-to-face meetings, but also maintaining our focus on conference calls, staying present, and resisting the urge to multi-task with instant messages and texts.”

Multi-Tasking Means More Quantity, But Less Quality

The attraction to multi-tasking seems to be a double-edged sword in the workplace that pins quantity against quality.

In Accenture’s study, 64% of Millennials, 54% of Gen Xers, and 49% of Baby Boomers reported multi-tasking during at least half of their work day. While 66% of professionals agreed multi-tasking enables them to get more done at work, 36% report that distractions prevent them from doing their best work. Millennials were at the extreme on each – feeling multi-tasking meant getting more done (73%) and yet distractions prevented them from doing their best work (41%).

However it’s traditional interruptions imposed by others (telephone calls & unscheduled meetings & visitors) rather than technology that were reported as most disruptive, perhaps due to the lack of control over these distractions.

What suffers? The trade-offs reported include decreased focus, lower-quality work, and diminished team relationships. But can leaders afford these trade-offs, too?

Despite the Benefits, Are Leaders Too Accessible?

“Our survey found technology both helps and hinders effective leadership,” says Borrero. On the positive side, 58% of survey respondents saw technology as a benefit for leaders enabling them to communicate quickly with their teams, allowing both time and geographic flexibility (47%) as well as accessibility (46%).

However, 62% of women and 54% of men felt technology made leaders over-stretched by being too accessible. 50% of respondents felt it forced multi-tasking and 40% felt it distracted from culture and relationship building. 55% felt a top challenge for leaders is information overload.

Borrero recommends practicing discipline when needed in disengaging from other technologies to give full focus to the material in front of you, such as putting your mobile device on silent during phone conferences and actively noting key points. “When you face information overload,” she says, “become comfortable with turning off technology. For example, you might disconnect at night, so you can recharge, and decide not to look at your phone until the morning.”

Importantly, when it comes to effective leadership and overcoming barriers to it, focusing on quality of communication and connection matters most – and that may very well start with listening.

The most important leadership attributes identified by the study were the “soft skills” of effective communication (55%), ability to manage change (47%), and ability to inspire others and ideas (45%), closely followed by understanding team members.

Yet this is also where skills suffer: the two most commonly perceived obstacles to effective team leadership were a lack of interpersonal skills (50%) and a lack of communication skills (44%).

Getting Better At Listening

While digital technology brings many advantages, leaders who compromise at listening may compromise their ability to lead effectively.

A Westminster Business School report highlights, “Listening is an essential skill in all situations and it is particularly important for leaders and managers to actually hear what others say, not simply what we think we hear them say…All great leadership starts with listening. That means listening with an open mind, heart and will. It means listening to what is being said as well as what isn’t being said.”

Despite its importance to leadership, leaders are too often ineffective at truly listening according to an HBR article by Christine M. Riordan. She notes, “The ability and willingness to listen with empathy is often what sets a leader apart.”

Riordan outlines three key behaviors leaders can practice that are linked with empathetic listening:

1) Hearing with all of your senses and acknowledging what you’ve heard.

This means “recognizing all verbal and nonverbal cues, including tone, facial expressions, and other body language.” It’s as much about listening to what is not said as what is said, and probing a bit deeper, as well as acknowledging others feelings or viewpoints and the act of sharing them.

2) Processing what is being shared and heard.

This means “understanding the meaning of the messages and keeping track of the (key) points of the conversation.” Effective leaders are able to capture and remember global themes, key messages, and points of agreement and disagreement.

3) Responding to and encouraging communication.

This means “assuring others that listening has occurred and encouraging communication to continue.” Acknowledging others verbally or non-verbally, asking clarifying questions, or paraphrasing reflects consideration of their input. This can also mean following-up to ensure others know listening has occurred.

According to Accenture’s Borrero, “Leaders are role models employees emulate, so it’s important for them to set a good example. In our increasingly hyper-connected digital workplace, we all need to practice ‘active listening,’ including paraphrasing, taking notes and asking questions. At Accenture, we offer a number of courses in effective listening, which is critical to our company as we focus on serving clients.”

In today’s leadership context, where effective leadership means showing social awareness not just self-awareness, leaders may employ technology to help them do it, but one way or another, it’s important they find a way to truly listen.

By Aimee Hansen

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The Way You’re Coping With Stress Is Making It Worse: What You Should Do Instead to Build Your Resiliency

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women stressedOn a typical day, you’re most likely squeezing in three days worth of work. You have your scheduled work time consisting of meetings, servicing clients and customers, managing communications, and connecting with colleagues scattered around the globe. Your second workday consists of the one before, after and in-between. You get up early to get a jump on emails, you stay late to get work done, and you multitask during the day in an attempt to be as productive as possible. Your third workday begins when you leave the office. You have to pick up food for dinner on the way home, perhaps get the kids to practice, run a load of laundry and make sure the house hasn’t fallen apart. Before you go to bed you see the opportunity to get on your computer to get more work done. No wonder you’re completely stressed and exhausted by the end of the day!

You just need to find better ways to reduce or manage your stress, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, there’s no way to reduce your stress. Your job is never going to ask less of you, nor are your loved ones. The demands in your life will only continue to increase as you move up in your career and your personal life becomes more complex. In addition, stress is not just something that happens in your head. It’s a chemical, hormonal event that radically changes your chemistry and physiology.

The hormones released in response to stress can have many negative effects on your body and brain. As just one example, the stress hormone cortisol kills cells in the brain relating to memory, learning and goal setting. It’s responsible for insomnia. It makes you crave high-fat, high-sugar foods in large amounts, and to store a majority of it as fat, specifically around the midsection.

But the good news is, when we understand the physiology of the stress response, we can build our resiliency to stress. We can train our bodies to recover from stress more quickly and efficiently, as well as raise our threshold for stress. And if that’s not enough, resiliency training can also improve our health and help us lose body fat.

Up until now, many of the things you’re doing to cope with the stresses you’re facing are actually making things worse. You may skip meals and workouts, sacrifice sleep to get more work done, grab sweets or salty snacks, rev yourself up with caffeine and bring yourself down with alcohol. Here are four things you may be doing that are exacerbating your stress, along with tips to build your resiliency:

1. You sacrifice sleep to get things done.

It’s tempting to trade sleep for extra hours of productivity, but lack of sleep ramps up our sympathetic nervous system, pushing us in the direction of the stress response. Simultaneously, it makes the parasympathetic nervous system – which is related to restoring balance and calm — less effective. Sleep deprivation also increases body fat levels, specifically around the midsection. This abdominal fat is not only frustrating, it also increases our risk of diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and even premature death. Keep to a regular sleep and wake cycle, and aim to get between 7-9 hours each night. Sleep is one of the best tools we have for the body to recover from stress.

2. You drink caffeine to get energy and make up for lack of sleep.

In addition to increasing blood pressure, caffeine stimulates the release of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. To make matters worse, caffeine has been shown to work synergistically with mental stress to further increase cortisol levels. From a stress perspective, cutting out caffeine is ideal. Why voluntarily pump more stress hormones into your body? If you choose to consume caffeine, do so in small amounts.

3. You skip meals because you’re too busy to eat.

When we skip meals or go too long without eating, blood glucose (a form of sugar the body uses for energy from many of the foods we eat) drops. When there’s not enough glucose, the body thinks a famine is occurring, the stress response is stimulated and the body secretes cortisol. This puts us into food seeking mode to get much needed energy into the body. Cortisol makes us eat large amounts of food containing fat and sugar, and to store much of this extra energy away in our fat cells for the next glucose emergency. Maintain blood glucose levels and minimize stress by eating about every 3 hours, alternating between moderate sized meals and small snacks.

4. You skip your workout because you don’t have time.

Stress hormones are specifically designed to fuel a short burst of intense physical activity – fighting or fleeing. When we do this, it burns them off and releases another class of hormones that restore balance and counteract the negative consequences of stress. The good news is just 30-60 seconds of intense exercise produces these feel good hormones. Sprint up a flight of stairs, or do a few jumping jacks or burpees. Worst-case scenario, do a few of these shorts bursts to hit the reset button on stress, or squeeze in a few minutes here and there. Exercise can be accumulated throughout the day in 10-minute bouts, which can be just as effective for improving fitness and decreasing body fat as exercising for 30 minutes straight.

For more strategies on how to build your resiliency to stress, read Jenny’s book The Resiliency rEvolution: Your Stress Solution for Life, 60 Seconds at a Time.

Jenny C. Evans is the author of THE RESILIENCY rEVOLUTION: Your Stress Solution For Life 60 Seconds at a Time (Wise Ink Creative Publishing; 2014). She is also founder and CEO of PowerHouse Performance, where she works with thousands of C-suite executives, leaders, and employees worldwide to help them improve their resilience, performance and productivity, while enhancing their health.

Guest advice and opinions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com

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Being Connected on Wall Street Reaps Big Career Benefits, If You’re a Man

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women in technologyIf you’re a female analyst on Wall Street, you’re probably achieving lower returns on your social connections than your male peers. Because who you know matters when it comes to firms you handle, but it matters way more if you’re a man.

A new working paper by Lily Fang, an associate professor of finance at INSEAD, and Sterling Haung, a PhD candidate at the school, focuses on the links between gender, connections, and career outcomes among 1,815 Wall Street analysts and their work across 8,242 firms between 1993 and 2009. Analyst-firm connections (41,000) were defined as alumni-ties with one or two senior officers or board members within the firms that the analysts cover.

Women and Men are Equally Connected

Previous research had found that “connected” financial analysts, who went to the same university as senior officer of the firms they covered, significantly outperformed in their stock recommendations and more effectively in their jobs compared to analysts without connections. Fang & Haung wondered if the impact on job performance and career trajectory differed between men and women.

The great news is they found no gender difference in how well-connected analysts are – both men and women have a connection in about 25% of the firms they cover. The bad news is they found a “big difference in how much these connections help male and female analysts in their jobs.” According to Fang in her INSEAD article, “men overall reap more benefits from connections than women both in terms of job performance and in terms of subjective evaluation by others.”

How Connections Impact On Job Performance

The study measured how analyst connections impacted upon “objective” and “subjective” performance and career outcomes: accuracy of their earnings (EPS) forecasts; price impact of their buy/sell stock recommendations; and being elected to the All-American Research Team (AA) as a “star analyst”.

The researchers found that connections led to a much stronger impact on forecast accuracy, for men. Fang notes that “while connections lead to a 2 percent improvement in accuracy rankings in general, among men, there is a further improvement of about 1.8 percent.” Put more bluntly in the report, “the connection effect is present only among men but not women.”

For women, connections to a female executive in firms they handled led to a slightly higher improvement in forecast accuracy (2.5%), but not nearly as much as male-male connections (4.7%). As Fang puts it, “Thus the value of the ‘old boys club’ is hard to refute in our data.”

Fang writes that among analysts, “The effect of connections is even greater in their stock recommendation impact or how the market reacts to their buy and sell calls. Connections improve male analysts’ recommendation impact by about 1.2 percent, but not at all for female analysts.”

Fang notes that the differing impact on job performance was strongest among young analysts, setting women back way before they approach the glass ceiling. “This vastly different ability to capitalise on connections at such an early point in their career paths could explain gender gaps that exist throughout long-term career trajectories. The cycle, it seems, starts at the entry level.”

How Connections Impact on “Star Analyst” Status

The third measure was more subjective, promotion as a “star analyst” through an opinion poll, an evaluation by thousands of institutional investors, organized by Institutional Investor – a title given to less than 8% of analysts, which impacts significantly upon career profile and salary earnings (up to 3-fold). Much of the top evaluation criteria is highly subjective such as industry knowledge, communication, responsiveness and written reports.

The researchers found connections directly contributed to male analysts’ odds of being elected an AA but had zero impact for female analysts. Importantly, there’s no gender inequality in numbers promoted to all star status: “In general, [women make up] 12% of the overall [analyst] population, but they are 14% of the star analysts so it’s not like people are not awarding women,” says Fang in Fast Company, “but the factors for them to be selected are very different than men.”

For women, those impacting factors appear to be Ivy League education (35% of women in the total sample had one compared to 25% of men) and a record of forecasting accuracy – neither of which is significant in determining whether men are elected to being a star, or promoted within it.

According to the researchers, “The results reveal that investors value analysts of different genders differently: While connection is valued by investors and affects positive career outcomes for men, for women, it is measurable achievements and competence that seem to play a larger role.”

An Insidious Gender Bias

The researchers offer two potential interpretations of their findings. One is that “men are evaluated on ‘potential’ while women are evaluated on ‘performance.’” The other is that women benefit less from connections than men because they’re still seen as “outsiders” by investors whereas men are seen as “insiders/one of our own.” Both are plausible. Neither are pleasing.

As Fang says in Fast Company, “The type of gender bias that we document, I think is more subtle, but perhaps even more insidious than the simple numbers game. We’re not finding women are under-represented. We’re finding that they’re evaluated in different ways. How do you change people’s subjective interpretation? That’s a much more difficult [issue], I think. It probably has more to do with social norms and the ways people see things.”

Fang also points out in her INSEAD article, “It is telling that while 14 percent of Wall Street all-stars are women, virtually none of the top bosses in any of the big firms are. It could be argued that even the most competent women remain in analytical roles rather than being promoted into general management because that kind of promotion entails subjective evaluations by others.”

Mentorship & Sponsorship Still Matter!

Senior Associate Editor Sarah Green at the Harvard Business Review, uses Fang & Haung’s research as a springboard into “Why ‘Network More’ is Bad Advice for Women”e, noting that “we need to stop telling women to follow a male playbook.”

She’s got a point on the playbook. But using Fang & Huang’s findings to also question the value of mentorship and sponsorship in a woman’s career advancement is dangerous. Connections with top executives in other companies who went to the same university isn’t a parallel to the support that well-formed mentorships with strong chemistry or sponsorships can provide for a woman navigating her career.

Should a proven track record be more important for the career advancement of male analysts than female analysts? Absolutely not.

But if it is, isn’t it better if you’ve got somebody in your corner – whose attention you’ve earned through your achievements and abilities – helping you wave your impressive track record around when the next career opportunity presents itself?

By Aimee Hansen

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Values-Based Leadership: How It Can Improve Your Effectiveness

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Values-Based LeadershipAs a leader, do the values of your organization speak through your actions?

A recent article in The Journal of Values-Based Leadership reminds us that Steve Jobs said, “The only thing that works is management by values.” It’s no surprise that companies like Apple who foster a values-based approach in their leadership culture create connections that have a significant impact on company performance.

Your ability to focus on and motivate through core organizational values can have an impact on your effectiveness as a leader, too.

HOW FOCUSING ON ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES HELPS YOU AS A LEADER

Raises you to a leadership perspective

The Financial Times defines value-based leadership as “Motivating employees by connecting organizational goals to employees’ personal values.”

A Harvard Business School paper asserted that when leaders focus on the technical or administrative side of their work, they become too fixed on short term returns. The paper stated, “If leaders instead sought to uphold values and maintain integrity, they could establish the long-term perspective and commitment to innovation necessary for sustaining their competitive position in an increasingly global economy.”

Effective leaders keep focused on the visions and values of the organization as a compass for action. Indeed, having women in the boardroom has helped at aligning corporate action to company values. International research has shown that “the positive impact of women on the board on financial performance, and on ethical and social compliance, indirectly affects firm value.”

Also, keeping your eye set on organizational values, and above the daily tasks, may help you from getting too drawn into office housework that can be peripheral to your leadership goals.

Increases bonding with you as a leader

Building relationships with those who work with you is important, but when they’re built through a common bond around organizational values, it strengthens your position as a leader.

The ability to compellingly communication organizational values is a key attribute of leadership success. Communication research shows that optimized messages can garner a “shared sense of purpose, which is achieved when multiple employees possess the same understanding of the purpose of the work.” In particular, the combination of “a large amount of vision imagery with a small number of values” increases performance by creating a shared sense of organizational goals and coordination towards them.

Effective leaders also create a motivational sense of belonging. Leadership research shows that people feel more bonded to a leader with which they feel a “shared social identity” that is representative of their in-group. Leaders who effectively convert organizational values to a shared identity would seem able to create deeper commitment from those they manage.

In fact, values coach & author Joe Tye asserts that values-based leadership can create a culture of ownership rather than a culture of accountability, which he asserts relates to motivation, productivity, and retention.

Affirms your leadership integrity

Values are meaningless unless put into action, and the standard for integrity within an organization is set by its leaders.

Speaking to values-based leadership, Mark Fernandes, Chief Leadership Officer at Luck Companies, says “In order for these values to be authentic within the organization, it’s imperative that the leaders be fully committed to demonstrating the values in everything they do. There’s a level of inauthenticity that associates will notice and it can erode their trust in the leadership if they’re not actively seeing the behaviors exhibited in the actions and words of their leaders.”

The HBS paper asserted that by embodying the values they espouse, leaders enable employees to find meaning and value in their own work: “Members’ interactions with the organization and their actions on its behalf are not just transactional but are imbued with meaning. As members internalize the organization’s purpose, to the extent that their own actions further this purpose, they come to regard these actions as meaningful. They further view themselves as part of a valued community. They are motivated to exert effort on behalf of that community, to defend it when threatened, and to advocate on its behalf.”

Being able to connect individuals to the values of your organization is especially important when it comes to motivating Gen Y. Research has shown that for Millenials, job fulfilment hinges partially on believing in the vision and strategic direction their organization is pursuing in the world and feeling personally connected to it.

If leaders don’t uphold the values the company espouses, employees lose faith and begin to disengage. If they do, they inspire.

Ignites your potential and the potential of those around you

When your personal ambition is aligned with your company’s vision, you are more engaged, more productive and more able to reach your potential according to research. This is true not only for you, but for those you manage and motivate. When you feel corporate values are more closely aligned to your personal values, it creates intrinsic motivation.

Fernandes focuses on igniting the full potential in others, “Values-based leadership is defined by living, working and leading in alignment with your core values, principles, beliefs and purpose to, in turn, ignite the extraordinary potential in those around you.”

Values-based leadership has also been linked to creating a culture of creativity and innovation. The Journal of VBL article states, “When an individual has a personal and professional commitment to align personal values with those of the organization he or she works for, a powerful connection is created. This connection creates numerous possibilities for both individual growth and company productivity.” The article suggests that motivating a “work culture or atmosphere that sparks creativity” is increasingly a matter of customizing motivational strategies to align employee values with organizational values.

WALK THE WALK ON VALUES

So given how values-based leadership can positively impact your leadership potential, how do you begin to walk the walk? Perhaps the first question to ask yourself is what the organizational values really mean to you.

Conscious Manager recommends to, “Develop a personal understanding of your organization’s values. Think about what the company’s values really mean to you and to your unique leadership style. You need to know which of your behaviors demonstrate those values. If the business’ beliefs and principles don’t have meaning for you, you won’t be able to make them meaningful for anyone else.” Ultimately, it’s your actions, not your words that speak to how well you represent values – in being a role model, in teaching the values, and in recognizing them. “Bringing values to life is a behavioral issue.”

Embodying Values is one of five key behaviors of great leaders, says Author Ken Blanchard. He asserts, “Leaders must establish, articulate, and enforce the core values of their organization. More important, they must model the behaviors that support the values.”

He suggests leaders ask these four questions:

“How can I integrate our core organizational values into the way my team operates?”

“What are some ways I can communicate our values to my team over the next thirty days?”

“How can I create greater personal alignment with our values on a daily basis?”

“How can I recognize and reward people who actively embody the values?”

Inspiring leaders motivate us towards a common goal. Values-based may be less a type of leadership, and more a requirement of it.

By Aimee Hansen

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