By: Kathryn Sollmann, Co-founder Women@Work Network
Last week, we covered the first of seven signs that your resume needs to be updated. Here are the remaining six ways you can keep your resume as up to date as this season’s fashions.
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Contributed By: Carol Frohlinger, Esq., Managing Director, Negotiating Women Inc.
Emotions and our ability to control them, make all the difference in our negotiations. The more important the negotiation is to us, the more challenging to manage our emotions. I had a personal experience recently when my temper flared and, as a result, I didn’t get the outcome I wanted. Yes, I knew better but still fell into the emotion trap.
Deepak Malhotra, Gillian Ku and J. Keith Murnighan’s Harvard Business Review article, “When Winning Is Everything” (May, 2008) discussed the problems negotiators face when they get so emotionally invested in besting the other party that their judgment suffers. These experts isolate three drivers of what they call “competitive arousal”:
Contributed by Maureen Frank, Managing Director, Emberin
Become a ‘marketer’ to women
In order to successfully retain and attract female employees, employers have to be successful ‘marketers’ to women. We are trying to ‘sell’ to our female employees the concept that they really want to work for our organization. So how can we do that?
Why not try applying some of the principles associated with marketing to women generally? The concept is the same – how do we get women to buy our concept? Women are the largest customer segment group for retail products and there is a body of research on the rules and techniques that apply when marketing to women. Since women make 80% of all purchasing decisions, marketing to them has become a science.
Connie is a co-founder of SixFigureStart, a success coaching firm for college students and professionals.
Most Fortune 500 companies agree that 360 degree feedback (feedback from your boss, your peers, and your team) is the best way to identify and then improve your performance on the job. These four basic principles form the logical underpinning of the 360 degree feedback theory:
- Behavior can be observed and measured.
- Behavior is a direct reflection of leadership.
- Leadership is a direct reflection of performance.
- Performance can be observed and measured.
In response to recent reader requests, The Glass Hammer decided to publish an article on special issues that gay and lesbian people might face in the workplace. We wanted to find out what it’s like to be “out at work” at a major financial institution, and offer some advice to our readers about how to make the most of networks and affinity groups for gay and lesbian employees, as well as how to address sexual orientation issues at work.
To help us examine this topic, we interviewed Arden Hoffman, Vice President and Head of Learning and Development for the Technology division of Goldman Sachs, and former Co-Chair of GALN, Goldman’s gay and lesbian network of employees. Ms. Hoffman has been at Goldman for four and a half years, and was head of GALN for three and a half years.
I never liked business lunch meetings, especially if it was with a more senior person. One tomato stain on your shirt and you look sloppy. One dot of balsamic vinegar on your tie and you look more junior than you ever wanted to be. Well, here is a way to relax during your lunch meetings. Let’s first start with the dos & don’ts of what foods to order:
For this Expert Answers column, The Glass Hammer turned to Catherine Costley, Assistant Solicitor in the Family Department of Rooks Rider Solicitors, a top British law firm known for its expertise in Employment Law. Here, Catherine provides her expert opinion to Glass Hammer readers about how to protect your assets in the event of a divorce. Erin Abrams, a New York divorce attorney, also contributed to this article with respect to divorce law in the United States.
There’s a saying favored by women divorcing their husbands… “What’s mine is mine but what’s yours is mine too.” There’s a misconception that upon a divorce, most women are out to take their husbands for all the money they’ve got. Flowing from that is the misconception that the courts will actually endorse such thinking when it comes to financial settlements in a divorce. To the contrary, today more and more women are amassing wealth in their own right and instead of wanting to take her husband’s assets upon divorce, it is a case of preservation of the fruits of their labor.
Although this advice may come a little late for those of you reading this with a wedding band on your hand, the best place to start the preservation of your assets is with a prenuptial agreement.
It doesn’t get much better than receiving an amazing bonus after you’ve worked hard all year. However, bonus season can be fraught with anxiety. But it doesn’t have to be that way and in fact, it should not be that way. Here are some sure fire ways to plan ahead in the New Year ensure that you get the amazing bonus that you deserve next time around.
- Set critical objectives early – January at the latest
Write down your three top priorities for 2008 and review it with your manager. Make sure the two of you are on the same page because nothing brings in the bonus dollars like clarity and transparency. Try to set aside an hour for this discussion, but no less than half an hour. Many of us let the urgent crowd out the important, but there is no better time spent in January than ensuring that your list of objectives is understood and approved by your manager. Give this a lot of thought BEFORE the meeting. Make no mistake about it, your good work is a direct reflection on your manager, who by the way, really cares about his or her bonus as well! - Set deadlines for accomplishing these objectives
You should put specific deadlines on paper for your quarterly, mid-year and year-end goals. Everyone wants to do more strategic work rather than focus on day-to-day responsibilities. What better strategy is there than to use these goals to build upon each other towards an outcome that will benefit you, your manager, and your company? Ensure that these deadlines are realistic and do not over-promise. Under-promise and over-deliver and those bonus dollars should fly to you at year-end! - Schedule a mid-year discussion with your manager
Only Santa checks his list twice … you need to check it every quarter to ensure you are on track. And let your manager know what you are doing, which will impress upon him or her how serious and committed you are. Schedule a mid-year review of your objectives and your accomplishments to date. Remember, there are many things you can’t control (the economy, your CEO’s decisions, etc.) so control what you can and you’ll be in a much better place. Stay close to your objectives and make the necessary adjustments to ensure you complete what you need to. - Set aside some time each month to brainstorm about what you can do better
Few of us do this and many of us can benefit from this investment of time and energy. When you are home, turn off your Blackberry and set aside some time to think about how you can improve your work. Perhaps you can think about a better way to format a report, or an easy way to ensure your work is shared with people that will benefit from it. Perhaps your department can better leverage the work done by another group. Think about how to do things better and write your ideas down. - Ensure you have a mentor that can help you throughout the year
There are many benefits to having mentors in your field or in another field:
- You learn from other’s mistakes and you don’t waste time reinventing the wheel.
- If your mentor is in your company, you can adapt quicker to your company’s culture.
- You can share your thoughts in a safe environment and test your ideas before you roll them out.
- In tough economic times, your mentor can advise you on how this might impact your firm and your career.
Mentors can help you navigate your career and they can also be guardian angels when you need someone to watch your back. Cultivating this type of relationship can pay off down the line, both in terms of your bonuses and non-monetary compensation.
Now its time to schedule a year-end discussion with your manager. If you’ve followed steps 1-5, your year-end meeting will be filled with positive feedback, and will lead to the desired outcome in terms of bonuses. Your bonus should be a good one because you’ve planned well, you’ve constantly innovated, and you’ve gotten exceptional advice along the way. You are now in the best possible position to receive an amazing year-end bonus. Enjoy it because you’ve earned it!
All information is copyright © SixFigureStart 2007. Caroline Ceniza-Levine and Connie Thanasoulis are two founding coaches of SixFigureStart, a career coaching firm for people in six-figure careers (www.sixfigurestart.com). Ask a question or give us your feedback at 212-501-2234 or at info@sixfigurestart.com.
Contributed by Rebecca Chong of Rooks Riders Solicitors
Accountants, bankers and analysts are increasingly finding that they have more in common with celebrities than they ever realized or wanted. It is no secret that Tinseltown and the media have been unkind to women who dare to age. For Hollywood, this led to some of the industry’s finest hitting Cannes with “Searching for Debra Winger,” a documentary exploring Hollywood’s treatment of the aging actress. Across the Atlantic, a high profile campaign was launched against the removal of OBE-awarded and respected British journalist Moira Stuart from Sunday AM, reportedly eased out because she was too old for TV (although this was always denied by the BBC). For women of all ages working in a society ruled by the commercial power of image, particularly for those working in the financial sector where the big institutions fix their eyes on the keen and capable amongst the freshly graduated, it appears that sexism and ageism is the double glass ceiling to progression in the work place.
A study on working women and ageism, by Women in Journalism, reveals the hidden fear:
71% of women are worried about being forced out of their careers as they reach their 40s and 50s.
As the cosmetics industry feeds off the resulting frenzied quest for the fountain of youth, it perpetuates the fallacy that has permeated society; that whatever the profession, only the young and vital are valuable. For example, Liz Walker, proprietor of the House of Beauty in Barnsley, Yorkshire, recently commented to The Guardian Unlimited that it is Botox that her increasingly younger clientele are ‘clamouring’ for.
Several recent Glass Hammer posts have focused on finance jobs in quantitative analysis, and how to help women break into this mostly male-dominated field. For a background, take a look at “Why Do Girls Hate Algorithms?” and “Breaking the “Quant Jock” Stereotype.” To continue this series, I interviewed a friend of mine, “Mr. B,” who is a strategist as a quantitative hedge fund and asked him to share some suggestions to help women pursue jobs in the field.
Why Are There So Few Women in Quant?
I asked Mr. B to try to help me understand why there weren’t more women in quant jobs. Maybe it’s a problem of lack of information, and the funds need to do a better job of recruiting top-notch female PhD students right out of university. He explained that many firms are interested in hiring women and would like to add more gender diversity to their rosters, but that, in his experience, quant funds receive very few resumes from women. While women might be underrepresented in graduate programs in the sciences as well, there are still many qualified female PhDs who pursue academia, government work or private sector work in biotech, chemistry, engineering or computer technology. So what’s so scary about quant?
Perhaps the fact that most offices have so few women creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby women applicants don’t see a job in quant as a viable option or think that they would be intimidated in the workplace, and thus don’t apply. To a certain extent, plenty of quant guys like their “boys club” environment just fine, and don’t see any reason to change it. When asked about this subject, another male quant strategist interviewed for this article, let’s call him Mr. C, commented “I don’t know why women would want to work in quant, when there are plenty of other opportunities for them to make money. Their personalities would be better suited for sales, no?” All of them? Hmm. I’ll look into it. This attitude is nothing new, but it makes it hard for women to break into the field.