Four Tips for Becoming a Visionary in Challenging Times

jo-miller-headshot-smlContributed by Jo Miller, CEO, Women’s Leadership Coaching

During a recent women’s leadership webinar, I asked Krista Thomas, Vice President, Marketing and Communications for The Calais Initiative at Thomson Reuters, how a person should determine what their organization needs in these challenging economic times.  In addition to answering the question, she addressed a more intriguing issue – how to provide visionary leadership during challenging economic times:

1.   Don’t keep your head down / check in often

“You really can make a mistake by keeping your head down and staying quiet, because sometimes you get caught up in a stream of activity that really isn’t core or strategic to your company,” said Thomas.

“My policy is to check in often,” she added, “Make sure that the goals and the metrics that you’re measuring are still priority number one in executing on your goals for the company.  Also, don’t be afraid to raise your hand, go personally to your management, and really make sure you’re still on target.”

2.    Be adaptive and go with the flow

“It can be tempting in troubling times like this to get flustered and frustrated and be upset when things go off-plan, or when the plan changes.  You may not necessarily always be in the loop.  If you’re not at that senior level, you may not know when some of the strategies change, which can happen in real time.”

She continued, “The key is to be able to be flexible, to demonstrate your ability to not get stuck in the old thinking when the thinking has changed.  Check in, know what’s going on, know where others’ thoughts are going, and show that flexibility. Show your adaptability and ability to go with the flow.”

3.    Move toward the next opportunity

“Things are going to be chaotic, especially in this economy. We saw this when ‘Web 1.0’ imploded all around us.  The way to survive was to look for the next opportunity and walk towards that as opposed to being afraid,” she explained.

4.    Create an environment of calmness and creativity

 In a final point, Thomas emphasized the importance of generating new ideas. “Nothing is more helpful in a difficult time than creativity.  If you’ve got creativity and you can bring problem solving or people skills, you’ll help mitigate other people on the team being upset. If you’re one of those people who can come in and calm people down, and get them re-focused on new priorities, you’re very valuable right now.”

Since 1998 Jo Miller, CEO of Women’s Leadership Coaching, has developed and implemented coaching programs that have benefited women worldwide. Jo created the Women’s Leadership Coaching Inc. leadership coaching system, and has logged many thousands of hours coaching women who are in executive and management positions, or aspire to be.  She was named one of Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal’s 40 people to watch under the age of 40 in 2006, and one of Silicon Valley’s Women of Influence in 2008.

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5 Ways To Make Mondays Better

A New WeekBy Elizabeth Harrin (London)

Do you dread Mondays?  Is it always a hassle to get out of bed after the weekend and drag yourself to the office?  It doesn’t have to be like that, says Roxanne Emmerich, CEO of Emmerich Financial, a consulting firm specialising in community banks.  She has a stack of tips in her new book, Thank God it’s Monday!  Here are The Glass Hammer’s favourites, designed to help you start the week with a spring in your step.

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The Convincing Side of Change

Contributed by Marsha Egan, CEO of The Egan Group, Inc

Struggling with people resisting making the changes you know you need to make in your organization or group? Don’t know how to get buy-in from people so that you can change things for the better? Challenged by an undercurrent of resistance to your attempts to move your organization forward?

Have you ever tried to change anyone? Everyone knows how difficult it is to change their spouses (ever TRIED it? Not a pretty sight!)  Even more, have you ever tried to change something about yourself?  Not an easy task, is it?! Just think of those failed New Years’ Resolutions…  It takes a lot of effort and concentration to change—even small things.

So, why would it be any easier to change things in a business or community organization?

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Executive Women’s Competencies, Benchmarked.

Contributed by Tracey Carr of eve-olution

Over the past seven years, we have had the privilege of having over 1500 hundred women go through our leadership programmes. The women have largely worked in the professions for large Blue Chip organisations and have been in the marshmallow layer, ready to take the next step into senior executive positions. In other words they are within the top 15% of employees within their organisation and already enjoying considerable success.

A significant proportion of these women also completed eve-olution’s 360 degree performance review, developed in 2004 and based on well researched leadership theory. We have utilised the aggregate data from these reviews to come to some conclusions about competency benchmarks for women leaders. This information is being made available to you, the readers of theglasshammer.com, as we believe it may be a helpful tool to assist with drawing up a developmental plan to progress your career to a more senior executive position.

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Team Building: Lessons from the Mountain

mountaintop.jpgby Liz O’Donnell (Boston)

What do mountain climbing and team building have in common? Plenty, according to Alison Levine. Levine is the founder and president of Daredevil Strategies™, a consulting firm specializing in leadership development, organizational effectiveness, and team dynamics. Her company is appropriately named. That’s because Levine is also a world-class mountaineer who has climbed Mount Everest, Mount McKinley, and the Rwenzori Mountains, as well as skied across the Arctic Circle and the South Pole.

Mountains aren’t Levine’s only specialty. She has also climbed the corporate ladder at Goldman Sachs. In fact, while training for and organizing the first American Women’s Everest Expedition, Levine was working full time in investment banking. It was after her experience serving as team captain for the women’s Everest Expedition that Levine realized many of the strategies used in the business world are the same as the strategies used climbing mountains.

At the recent Simmons School of Management Leadership Conference Levine shared hard- learned lessons for succeeding and building a team.

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Building Leadership Capacity

by Liz O’Donnell (Boston)

Annie McKee believes we are witnessing one of the greatest changes in human history. The rapid growth of new forms of communication — Facebook, Twitter, texting — all offer an incredible opportunity for women to make a powerful impact on the world.

“We have to admit that things have gone fundamentally wrong,” says McKee. “We can pretend this is a blip or we can craft a new change.”

McKee knows something about creating change. She has taught leadership at Wharton and helped the University of Pennsylvania’s senior team bring about a large scale organizational change at the school. She is also the founder of the Teleos Leadership Institute, an international consulting firm. Clients include Merrill Lynch, Reuters, UniCredit Group, United Nations, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Unilever, and Schering-Plough.

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Factors that Sustain Successful Women Leaders

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iStock_000006050792XSmall_1_.jpgBy Nicki Gilmour, CEO Evolved People Media (New York City)

Women seek meaning in work while men seek status and pay and that gives women an advantage over men in the workplace.

So declared Joanna Barsh, a director at McKinsey and co-author of the McKinsey report “Centered leadership: How talented women thrive” in a lively keynote speech at the Forté Foundation’s annual corporate best practices conference hosted by Ernst and Young in NY on Tuesday, April 30th.

According to the report, the McKinsey leadership project – “an initiative to help professional women at McKinsey and elsewhere – set out four years ago to learn what drives and sustains successful women leaders….It’s about having a well of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual strength that drives personal achievement and, in turn, inspires others to follow,” says Joanna and her co-authors in the report. More than 85 women where interviewed worldwide. From those interviews a model was created with 5 broad and interrelated dimensions of leadership – Meaning (finding your strengths and putting them to work in the service of an inspiring purpose); Managing Energy (knowing where your energy comes from, where it goes, and what you can do to manage it); Positive Framing (adopting a more constructive way to view your world, expand your horizons, and gain the resilience to move ahead even when bad things happen); Connecting (who can help you grow, building stronger relationships, and increasing your sense of belonging) and Engaging (finding your voice, becoming self-reliant and confident by accepting opportunities and the inherent risks they bring, and collaborating with others).

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Tactics for Shameless Self-Promotion at Work

WomanHandshakeHI_1_.jpg“Today, more than ever before, it’s important that those who are in a position to benefit your career know who you are and what you’ve accomplished,” says John M. McKee, author of Career Wisdom–101 Proven Ways to Ensure Workplace Success. He’s put together a list of “shameless self-promotion” tactics he recommends to help establish a positive high profile and let others know about your achievements “but in a way that is not construed as bragging or conceit.” McKee, who works predominantly with women executives, recently spoke with The Glass Hammer about the ins and out of implementing such tactics.

Capitalize on Fortuitous Chance Meetings

As we have reported many times on The Glass Hammer, having an elevator speech—a two- or three-line message about your contributions— is an important first step in self-promotion according to McKee. “Being in an elevator with someone is a great chance. If you know who they are, it is a great opportunity to introduce yourself, using your name and department, thus increasing you get visibility. All you are trying to do is to get with anybody who is in a position to have impact on your career to know who you are and understand your contributions. Memorize your speech so you may capitalize on fortuitous chance meetings.” He adds, “Based on my experience with my female clients, women miss this opportunity more often then men because they tend to answer the [“how are you?”] question quite literally, sharing how they are personally, while guys use it as self-promotion. A guy in the same situation might just say ‘I’m just delighted with the way the project is going.’”

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Media Myth Busting

by Liz O’Donnell (Boston)

The mainstream media continues to grind out traditionalist messages about women, even though the economic recession has created some very untraditional realities for women at work and attitudes about working women are starting to shift. So say Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers. Barnett is Research Director, Community, Families & Work Program, Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. She is considered an international expert on women’s issues and has written seven books and many articles on the topic. Rivers, a professor of journalism at Boston University, is the author of “Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women” among other books. The two spoke recently at the Women Action Media Conference in Cambridge, Mass.

Consider this new reality: women now outnumber men on the national payroll. This means more women are juggling work and family responsibilities. It also means more families are being supported with less income. After all, these facts haven’t changed: women still do more hours of housework than their husbands and women still earn, on average only .78 cents for every dollar a man earns. Recent findings from the Families and Work Institute2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce, however, are encouraging and demonstrate a shift in the traditional reality of working couples. For example, women in dual-earner couples are contributing more to family income. The earnings of women in the workforce have increased from 39 percent in 1997 to 44 percent in 2008.

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Social Media as Social Capital

iStock_000007155263XSmall_1_.jpgby Liz O’Donnell (Boston)

You may be sick of hearing about Facebook, but you need to get over it. It’s not going away. In fact it’s growing. Rapidly. The site has 175 million active users. According to Inside Facebook, an independent blog based in Palo Alto, California, that tracks Facebook statistics, Facebook is growing in every demographic, but the fastest growing segment is women over the age of 55. As of February 1, women comprise 56.2 percent of Facebook’s audience, up from 54.3 percent late last year. This is good news because Facebook, and other social networking tools, provide women a way to help raise their social capital.

Susan Mernit, a former vice president at Netscape and AOL and long-time social media strategist says social capital is something you can both earn and spend. That capital, according to Mernit and Deanna Zandt, a media technologist and consultant, comes from your connections, your reputation and your influence. The two experts recently spoke at the Women Action Media conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts about the ways men and women build and use social capital differently.

They say that women are more likely to use social networking tools to keep in touch with friends and family whereas men are more likely to use the tools to entertain and gain audiences. Women are also more likely to be concerned with the affects of social networking on their personal security whereas men tend to be more open with their digital profiles.

In addition to Facebook, there are other popular social media tools such as Flickr and Twitter. As of December 2008, 11 percent of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The fact is the game has changed. When played correctly, social networking can help women build their reputations and increase their networks and therefore their influence.

The first step in building a social media strategy according to Mernit and Zandt is to establish goals. Are you hoping to increase your network or establish a professional expertise? Begin with the end in mind. This will help drive your online strategy.

The second step is to remember that social networking is all about authenticity. It is important you put yourself out there, but wisely. Women in financial services are especially hesitant to join social networks as they think it can be reckless and damaging to a career. And it can, if you post too personal data or blur the lines between your personal life and career. But there is no reason you can’t project an authentic, professional and controlled image of yourself on the Web. And as Mernit says, “Honey, if you don’t have a picture, it doesn’t count.” If you are going to use social media, you must commit to it and embrace it. “We are in a culture of public opinion,” says Mernit. “The web has become the means to measure that opinion.”

The third step is to understand that after authenticity, the most important value on social networking sites is reciprocity. Taking a “me, me, me” approach will backfire,” says Zandt, “Understand you are part of a gift ecosystem.” What she means is, just like with networking in the physical world, you can’t show up just to take, take, take. You need to earn social capital before you can spend it.

After the privacy concerns, perhaps the next biggest barrier for professional women is finding the time to participate in social networks. Zandt says “grooming” your social media sites, once they are set up, can be done in just one hour a day. You may be thinking you can’t possibly find another hour in the day. But haven’t you also been thinking you should really find more time to network in these troubled times? Building social capital can pay dividends in the physical world too.

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