Career Tip of the Week! Archives | Page 16 of 25

Why Do Legal Level Playing Fields Matter For Your Career Progress?

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Pyschologist

“All men are created equal” is written without understanding that at the time it was penned women had no rights and people of color were slaves, so it really did mean men not people. (Disclaimer, I am not an expert so I mention it only to tell you why it matters to you now, at work, in your cube trying to make a living.)

The ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) was never ratified in the USA (there is still time and you can help with that) and the USA is the only country that won’t ratify the CEDAW agreement internationally (joining a couple of small islands only). What does that mean? Watch the great and slightly harrowing documentary Equal Means Equal to see how culturally this forgotten work on this inequality can play out from the wage gap to the mommy track to much more sinister criminal issues. It is 100% legal for companies to pay you less. Loop holes are everywhere it seems. You might be shocked to learn more about this topic that most of us thought was an issue that had been resolved by generations that went before us.

The law is very mixed when it comes to protecting Lesbians and Gays (and Bi and Trans) people at work. The person beside you could be literally fired in 50% of the States due to being suspected as gay (see ENDA). Did you know that?

Psychological safety in a human can be greatly reduced without equal protections and actual consequences can be real for all aspects of an LGBT person’s life, and increasingly so under certain legislation such as the religious liberties act. On paper, it is a good thing for people in America to be able to honor their belief set but in reality it sets up a paradigm of blanket at worst and pick and choose bigotry at best. One fellow was refused burial by an undertaker, the federal law because corporations have the rights of people in America, entire companies could make actual decisions that can refuse to serve people that they perceive as gay from life to death and all the pizzas you might want to eat in the middle. Some states are better than others at providing anti-discrimination protections but overall the picture is dire with only 19 states protecting their LGBT citizens against “corporation as people” potential bigotry. Many people do not realize is still very much in a fragile state.

So, what to do? I certainly cannot tell you who to vote for but I would ask you to understand what you are voting for when you cast your vote at local or presidential level. At work, if you are a woman who wants a level playing field (and some clearly do not consciously or unconsciously) then work for a good company who actively offsets uneven playing fields in a protected state. There are some very progressive companies out there who do their best to level the playing field and arguably with the state of affairs regarding any level playing field federally stalled at best or regressing at worst, great corporations, to their credit, are honoring the progress track.

Pick a winner but check out on issues like pay, promotions and benefits and where senior management show up or do not show up. It is a digital world and due diligence will only take you a moment.

June 13, 2017/by The Glass Hammer

Mentee to Mentor: Enhancing your Career through Diverse Perspectives

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!, Mentors and Sponsors

Guest contributed by Financial Women of San Francisco Board Member Shelby Duncan

A few years ago , I discovered the Financial Women of San Francisco (FWSF), a community of women who work in financial services and are dedicated to advancing the careers of women.

After learning about the organization and the importance of their mission, I applied for a scholarship and was fortunate enough to become a recipient. Not only did I receive financial support, but I was given the opportunity to work with a mentor. I had been fortunate enough to have informal mentors throughout my college career, but was extremely fortunate to be given three women from FWSF, all in varying stages in their careers, lives, and outlooks, to support me as formal mentors as I stepped into the corporate world for the first time. The wealth of knowledge and combined experience that they were able to share taught me an insightful and valuable lesson – the greater my mentorship network, the more I could learn and subsequently contribute to my community.

Image via Shutterstock

I applied this knowledge as I began my career – identifying mentors, creating partnerships across my organization, and directly expanding my network by asking for further referrals. I built mentoring relationships with C-Suite men with 30 years of corporate experience, senior women of color seeking to innovate within financial services, and hard-working software developers beginning their careers in the United States having transitioned from careers in India. In building these relationships across a diverse community of people I have been able to see life through many lenses and have benefited from others’ knowledge, intelligence, innovative thinking, and in some cases, their mistakes. The diversity of their perspectives has allowed me the freedom to be more creative and identify solutions to complex problems. The balance in the advice I have received has made me confident that I am being steered in the right direction by the leaders in my life.

For several years now, I have continued to foster my relationships and identify new mentors. As I have progressed in my career, I have had the opportunity to be a mentor myself and have enjoyed helping mentees as they strive to create and meet new career goals.

Here are my steadfast tips and tricks for being a successful mentee:

1. Give back to your mentor – Ask yourself, “What can I do for my mentor?” Mentors set aside time, share contacts and other resources in support of your growth. It’s imperative to identify opportunities to give back and support your mentor. This can come in the form of supporting an organization they are part of, for example volunteering time; supporting them at a speaking engagement by sharing the event with your network and introducing them to people you know; or introducing them to one of your other mentors.

Oftentimes, mentees believe they don’t have much to offer their mentor based on their age or level of experience – but that is not the case! Time, energy, and a fresh perspective are important resources to share with your mentor.

2. Seek diverse mentorships – Leverage your network to identify diverse mentors. Look across industries, levels of experience, age, gender, and ethnicity to cultivate a well-balanced outlook.

3. Maintain the relationship – Building relationships is easy, but maintaining them requires thoughtfulness and time. Be sure to establish a plan with your mentor to determine how often they would like to meet, a location that is convenient for them, and always be willing to treat for coffee or lunch. Ask thoughtful questions about their work, and frame questions that ask for advice. Get to know them, as they are investing their time in getting to know you!

Mentorships are invaluable relationships that are imperative to growing, maintaining and propelling your career. I know that my successes are not solely my own, but a function of the leaders who support me. With that, I encourage you to reflect on the mentors in your life, identify opportunities to gain new mentors, and consider becoming a mentor yourself.

I recently read an amazing book called “We Should All Be Feminists” and here the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (LINK PLEASE TO BOOK) states,
“Today, we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes.”

We Should All Be Feminists, to me, is one of the most critically important works I have read. Written by an immensely insightful and accomplished author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, deeply inspires me as her work is centered on the empowerment of women and their use of community as a tool to reach their objectives. She acknowledges that the collective is more powerful than the individual and that diversity – in gender, ethnicity, culture, and age – are some of societies’ greatest assets. I couldn’t agree more.

June 7, 2017/by The Glass Hammer

Values – As a Leader Are You Living Them?

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Pyschologist

This past year all over the world, the geo-political landscape has been dramatic.

We have watched countries swing wildly, some with populism and conspiracy, creating new scenarios that would have been possibly unimaginable just 12 months ago, while other nations are choosing to elect leaders who refuse to regress on social and environmental issues.

What both of these versions have in common is that they demonstrate values-led leadership as we are seeing many leaders determined to take paths that line up into two narratives- go back to something they think we had before or go forward to what they think will be a new future.

Although I have my opinions and emotions like the next person, I am not expressing them here and not judging here, so, before I get emails telling me not to be political (code for what the Dixie Chicks experienced as ‘Shut up and sing”) I want to explain why we can look at this and understand our career paths and leadership style.

One of the things we look at in coaching is what are your values, how do you live them against your espoused goals in real life? Do your paradigms serve you? Do they truly meet your actual needs of where you want to go?

Can you take other people’s opinions and face a little conflict and work through it to filter what values they are espousing beyond the emotion of difference? And then how that truly sits against your values? Full circle then is, how do your actions sit against your values and are they really your values? Where did they come from? Why do they matter at this moment? What other values mean more to you in reality?

This isn’t just about looking at outdated negative views that a person might hold but also about examining the positive self perceptions that we do not actually live up to. If we say we want to lead, how is our audio matching our visual? If we say we support women, how many do we promote, hire or defer to as an expert?

If we say you are pro-equality then what actions do we take from the voting booth to the banker we use?

Closing the cognitive dissonance gap is not always the aim but understanding and recognizing what it all means to us is pretty key to moving forward in life and work.

June 6, 2017/by Nicki Gilmour

Laid Off? Do Not Get Derailed

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

By Nicki Gilmour Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

At some point in your career, you will probably get laid off due to many factors that are usually beyond your control like downsizing, mergers and acquisitions and cyclical market turns in financial services. Do not take it personally! Hard advice if you have given the job 110% of your time and energy and have shown a loyalty that you perceive has not been returned.

Often people come to coaching at this point threatening to leave their industry and wanting to transfer their skills and make a pivot. My job as a coach is to help my client really have an honest look at what is going on- beyond the hurt and the emotion to see if they are truly done with their sector and not just their firm.

Sometimes, after testing the reasoning around why you might want to leave, the answer is then yes and we set about working out a plan on how to transition into the right job in the right firm in the right industry.

Sometimes however, doing the deep work results in you realizing that you love doing the tasks that you were doing, in the industry that you know and love and it was just the shock of being laid off or being somehow displaced in a shuffle that has made you feel resentful, done or stuck. In some cases, people have even taken another job only to find that they want back in. All scenarios are valid and none are really that bad when you have a little perspective. My job is to get you to where you truly want to be. We work out the destination and then figure out the journey together in a way that will get you there. The worst that can happen is that you took a small detour, or maybe you will find that a new destination is what you wanted all along.

May 30, 2017/by Nicki Gilmour

Fear of Change and Other Mental Models That Hold Us Back

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Last week, we spoke about how expanding your mindset can truly take perspective mentally and not be beholden to your home-grown beliefs, paradigms and basically anything that your granny and society told you that you had to think, act and feel. We talked about the more we can move things from purely subjective to being an object then we can be more open to working with new ideas. I describe this to my clients using the glass half full/glass half empty adage, if you reframe it to an object, let’s face it, it is just a glass with some liquid in it and you don’t have to have any feelings around that at all.

Nearly all of us show courage at work and life. Nearly all of us have fears. Those fears are often deeply rooted in paradigms and mental models that we hold that play out in our “inner theater” telling us we could fail, we could lose something, we could look silly (amongst many other things.)

How do you take these anxiety ridden based on nothing assumptions and recognize them as the Gremlins that they are? They are present to sabotage your ability to take the next step and embrace whatever comes with that change?

Kegan and Lahey in their brilliant book “Immunity to Change” offer actual exercises on how to understand what your worries are and how they are often competing commitments to your main objective. For example, you might be keen on delegating more but find that you ultimately want things done your way; making your goal harder to reach.

It is the assumptions (those built in paradigms) that create these competing unconscious and conscious thoughts and behaviors. By surfacing and testing your assumptions – such as what it is that makes you assume that your way is best, you can make real progress towards growing, succeeding and leading!

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May 23, 2017/by Nicki Gilmour

One Simple Step to Bust Out of Your Career Rut

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!, Guest Contribution

Guest contributed by Elizabeth Crook

There’s an epidemic in our country that’s impacting 40% of our population.

It’s lowering our immune systems, disturbing our sleep, breaking up our relationships, and creating depression and unwanted weight gain.

The epidemic seems very benign – it’s so common we often ignore it.

It’s called job dissatisfaction.

Historically there been more heart attacks on Monday morning than any other time of the week because so many of us are dragging ourselves to jobs that have depleted us. And even though the research was probably done on men, the implications for women are profound. Having the “wrong” job is not good for you.

Why do we stay?

Three simple reasons:

We are good at these jobs,
We may be too busy or too conscientious to recognize how stuck we are
We don’t know how to leave them.

We’ve been given accolades and compliments all our lives for what we do. We may be keeping our families afloat with these jobs. Our work may serve our social life or give us a strong sense of identity. We feel responsible to our team, our boss, or the company

Along with all that, we tend to see other options as more limited than they really are. We may even believe the industry or functional area the only ones we can be in, so we stay. And stay. And stay. Until our health is bankrupt, our relationships are compromised, and our dream of what we wanted has been lost.

Sound familiar? Don’t despair.

As a CEO coach and corporate strategist, many people from diverse arenas come to me because they want more than anything to love their work, but they don’t know how to get there.

Enter the energize/deplete paradigm.

In your everyday work, you encounter tasks that energize you and work that depletes you. Most people have don’t spend time thinking about it. However, identifying them is the is a big step toward getting to work that feeds your soul (and your bank account).

The first question to ask is: What do I know how to do?

Make a list. Brainstorm. Don’t hold back. Write down all those things you know how to do – think processes, not contents. This can include things beyond your work like your family or social life or even volunteer assignments. This isn’t your job description. This is what you know how to do.

The start of your list might look something like this:

Engage people in solving problems
Analyze data
Create narratives that give meaning
Recruit and hire people
Develop budgets
Manage projects
Manage people
Teach and mentor
Persuade
Sell ideas
Develop systems and processes

Identify the energizing activities.

Make a star next to the activities on your list that energize you – those things that even if your are working hard at them, you feel good doing them. Time passes in a minute when you are doing things that energize you, even if they take all day.

Do you feel depleted by managing people but are in a managerial position? Do you feel energized by being with people, but your work is behind an admin desk where you never get to interact? Are you energized by being creative, but your work is about collecting data?

Your starred activities are signposts, leading you to work that will feed your soul and make you feel like you are living large.

Your work now is to begin to increase the activities that energize you.

Shift your focus.

This may mean delegating the work that depletes you (anything that is not energizing you may very well be depleting you) or talking to your boss about shifting your focus at work towards what energizes you.

What if this list shows that nothing you do at work energizes you? What if all of your energizing how-tos are ones that you do out of work?

That’s fantastic information. And it might mean an overhaul of what you do for work. Chances are you can stay in your industry, but you may have to change what you do in this industry.

The Amazing Result.

What’s amazing about this simple exercise is that it activates something called the reticular activating system in the brain. The reticular activating system is the part of our brain that begins to notice red cars right when we decide we want a red car. Once we become aware of what energizes us, our subconscious begins to move us toward it.

As soon as we identify what depletes us, our defense system will begin to find ways to move away from those activities.We find ourselves making decisions about work that lead us toward those activities that we love.

Can it really be this simple?

Try it. See what happens.

Elizabeth Crook has been the CEO of Orchard Advisors for over 20 years, helping CEO’s grow their bottom line and have more fun. She believes that if everyone had the work and life they love, we could change the world! Her book, Live Large – The Achiever’s Guide to What’s Next will be released May 2017.

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

May 17, 2017/by The Glass Hammer

Developing Mental Complexity Will Help You at Work (and Life)

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

The world is increasingly complex and can be quite confusing these days.

How do you ensure you have the guts, glory, stamina and agility to survive all this change?

Mental complexity is the answer according Harvard psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey in their book “Immunity to change”. This is my personal favorite book right now for two reasons; I am writing a paper on behavioral change and also am grateful for the change I have personally experienced from committing to examining paradigms that no longer serve me.

This work can take the guise of coaching but touches on all aspects of your existence and is a vehicle for a happy sustainable life in my opinion.

Kegan and Lahey talk about how we tend to be in one of 3 “minds” or mindsets when it comes to our mental complexity levels and this has nothing to do with IQ.

So, level one is a “socialized mind” and is where the majority of people operate. Certainly, junior and middle managers can be successful here as part of being here requires following, caring what people think of you and generally towing the line be it within a corporation, culture or even a religion. People here are good team players. But, what does one lose by seeing life though this lens? If you do not fit with what the norm is, you might find yourself feeling inadequate and uncomfortable or undeserving in some way.

At work, you may be at the mercy of the effects of politics and feeling not aligned (and in society too). You will fight yourself to get aligned and reduce your cognitive dissonance. At what cost?

The next “mind” is the “Self-authoring” mind which with this increased mental complexity, you can relegate others opinions (and even your own opinions) to an appropriate place where they can be referenced within a bigger system than your own direct value set. Therefore, outliers from yourself and others will not consume you, and instead give you the power to bed the author of our own reality. You get to direct the movie in your head.

I can personally attest when I stared to think with this self-authoring mindset it was growth. It changed my life and I see it work well for my coaching clients and when (if) they get there then I can honestly say the ball is in their court which usually results in happier choices and happiness with choices made as well as robust future decision making ability.

This is particularly good for people who have set high standards for themselves or seek approval from others. This level of processing information will move you from having subjective feelings and suffering the emotional fallout from them to seeing things more objectively and in perspective.

By learning to look at as well as through certain lenses, you can evolve and as Kegan and Lahey put it “not be forever captive of one’s own theory, system, script, framework or ideology”. Then, you can start to be in the zone of the “Self-transforming mind” where expansiveness around what you see and hear at work is not uniquely filtered to meet your informational needs. In plain English, you can make meaning on a big picture level and not feel the anxiety around how it effects you which if you are in the socialized mind, will trigger you and make you take it personally. You can care and not be consumed by caring. Doesn’t that sound amazing?

So, how do you build mental complexity to thrive at work and in a crazy world? Tune in next week to find out more….

May 16, 2017/by Nicki Gilmour

Developing Mental Complexity Will Help You at Work (and Life)

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

By Nicki Gilmour

The world is increasingly complex and can be quite confusing these days. How do you ensure you have the guts, glory, stamina and agility to survive all this change?