Contributed by Anna Marie Valerio, Ph.D.

Have you ever heard any of these statements in the course of your career?

• “You need one more job assignment in the field before we can promote you to the next level.”
• “A lot of decision-makers in the succession-planning session just did not know your work or even know you very well. Other candidates had more people who could vouch for them.”
• “You need to exude more executive presence.”
• “You have been in staff roles in your career, so no one knows how you perform with Profit & Loss responsibility.”

If any of the above statements have been said to you, then you probably need to figure out how to overcome roadblocks to the executive level. Although many companies have learned that including women at the top is just good business, there have been many obstacles for women in the path to the executive suite. In my book, Developing Women Leaders: A Guide for Men and Women in Organizations (Wiley/Blackwell, 2009), I suggest that there are strategies and tips that organizations, managers and women can apply to women’s leadership development. Before explaining how you can be proactive in your own leadership development, it helps to understand the challenges in your path.

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Contributed by Geraldine Gallacher, Founder and Managing Director, The Executive Coaching Consultancy (London)

My teenage son set me a riddle recently: “A man and his son were injured in a car crash. They were taken to hospital as the little boy was wheeled into emergency surgery the operating surgeon said, “Oh no, that’s my son!” How could that be? Actually I had heard it before and so I knew the answer. The surgeon was his mother. It is funny to think that this old riddle is still doing the rounds. Is it still a surprise that the surgeon could be female? The point of my telling this is that in that moment of working out the answer, people still toy with the boy having two dads as the solution rather than the surgeon being female. This is a neat example of unconscious bias.

These days people know better than to openly discriminate on the basis of gender, race or disability. However, what is much harder to control are our unconscious biases. These biases make some of the headline statistics harder to change. In the UK, the University of Sheffield’s Institute of Work Psychology points out that the unemployment gap between ethnic minorities and the general population has been around 15% to 16% for the past three decades. Women are still a minority when it comes to senior positions. Women represent 13% of FTSE 100 directors and more widely, in Europe, just 10% of the highest level executives in the top 50 publicly quoted companies are female.

So what’s the answer? Offering flexible working to women during the phase of their career where they are seeking balance is critical. However, you need to be sure you are not unconsciously biasing your views of their performance as a result of them being part-time.

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Contributed by Sandra B. Richtermeyer, Ph.D., CMA, CPA

Women are often drawn to accounting or do well in it because of their organizational skills. It is a personal belief that many women are “hard wired” to consistently look at the most efficient way to accomplish tasks and meet deadlines, while never losing site of the family needs – managing kids, schedules, making sure their house is in order, etc. Women are often required to be multi-taskers in every aspect of their lives.

Deadlines, Deadlines!

No matter what area of the accounting profession you are in – public accounting, industry, etc. – deadlines will be front and center. There will be deadlines for reports due to internal stakeholders as well as external stakeholders. On the external side, there is often a multitude of tax filings, financial statements and various compliance activities. On the internal side, deadlines may be more focused on internal financial statements and related financial reports, budgets, planning, forecasting and analysis activities.

Depending on the industry, size of organization and accounting role, the deadlines vary but the skill sets to manage the deadlines are largely the same. Developing skills in time and project management as well as mastering the art of prioritizing can be a lifesaver!

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Contributed by Marlene Chism, author of Stop Workplace Drama

Your staff sits at your meeting with arms crossed and mouths closed. You have invited engagement, but you get nothing. You can’t put your finger on it, but you perceive some negativity. Maybe it’s resentment. Maybe it’s just a manifestation of the “us versus them” mentality. Or maybe, it’s a lack of trust. This article offers four trustbusters and the four antidotes.

Trustbuster #1 Poor Listening
Very few of us admit to being a poor listener, therefore as the saying goes, you can’t fix what you don’t acknowledge. Awareness is the key, so here are the signs of poor listening: Broken promises, multi-tasking while an employee is talking to you, interrupting, discounting, and one way communication which includes preaching, or the opposite–failure to ask questions in a conversation.

Antidote to Poor Listening
When an employee (or anyone else for that matter) speaks to you, become fully present, and use eye contact. Ask a question to clarify that you understand what is being communicated. Acknowledge the other person’s experience. If you say you will do something, schedule it in your calendar, and communicate back to the person when you have completed your agreement. If an employee catches you at a bad time, let them know you have other pressing priorities and set an appointment where you can be present

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Contributed by Lynne Morton, President, Performance Improvement Solutions

We increasingly see statistics about where women are in the workforce: more of us, locally and globally, in graduate schools and in organizations, yet not earning enough and not senior enough. The organizations that generate that data are doing terrific work making the progress (or the lack thereof) clear and present.

Equally clear and present, though, is a danger on the horizon. If, as The Economist has said, “women’s economic empowerment is arguably the biggest social change of our times,” then the time has come for us to seize the momentum of that change and make it powerful, meaningful, and lasting. When trying to engender change, a motivating phrase used to be “Carpe Diem,” or seize the day. Today, a more appropriate phrase seems to be “Opt In.”

We can “Opt In” by knowing more about the power we already have in society and using that power in our professional lives. We can “Opt In” by becoming more aware of what is constraining us and preventing that from controlling us. We can “Opt In” by taking more actions that move our professional goals forward step by step. Sometimes it may just be easier to Opt Out. But the only way that change will really happen is by each of us, one person at a time, Opting In in three ways and then joining hands.

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