Contributed by Lynne Morton, President, Performance Improvement Solutions

You want to get ahead – you’re working hard – your clients like you – you get good performance reviews. But you’re still not getting where you want to go professionally, or not fast enough. Sound familiar? That wouldn’t be surprising. It’s the situation in which many High Potential professional women find themselves. And it doesn’t seem “fair,” does it?

Well, “fair” is not a word that is part of the organizationally-savvy professional’s vocabulary. Yet it is often in a woman’s vocabulary. Women are more likely than men to slip into the posture of being victimized. We don’t always harness our full potential to achieve our professional goals. Reaching full potential, by which you generate FUSION energy, requires knowing how to “play” the organizational game.

Catalyst’s 2010 report of MBA professionals, The Pipeline’s Broken Promise, shows that men are more satisfied than women with their career advancement. As the study shows, despite the fact that aspirations are equal, a man’s first post-MBA job is more likely to be at a higher level than that of a woman. Furthermore, men outpaced women most when they started at the bottom of companies or firms. Additionally, more women left their jobs because of a difficult manager.

This data is very interesting since it may shed light on areas of improvement for women, as well as for organizations. It addition to driving for organizational change, we/ women can improve our abilities to understand organizational politics, see where the “land mines” are and, as is colloquially said, “play the game”. There is ample evidence to show that organizational systems do not support the advancement of women and that bias exists in many respects (compensation, flex-time, etc). However, observational and anecdotal evidence also shows that women are not as adept in finding out which organizational networks are most important, in knowing which connections they must make and nurture, nor in seeking out career advancement opportunities.

Men think more about how to get what they want, how to win the game. They set their sights on what will get them where they want to be. Knowledge of organizational politics, the rules of the game, is critical. Many management theorists believe that their earlier experiences of playing sports make men more inclined to think that way. But there is a hugely popular WNBA now. There are women sports announcers and women covering news stories on the front lines of war zones. Women know how to be team players broadly speaking. Now we have to do that within the business arena. There aren’t enough women in senior leadership to change the rules yet, so what we need to do is play by the rules that currently exist. And we can.

Women need to: Learn the (Unwritten) Rules. Make Connections. Have Sponsors.

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Contributed by Liz O’Donnell, Author of HelloLadies.com

Remember those reports of the “man-cession” and the “she-conomy” over the last couple of last years? It seems they may have been premature. According to a recent study from global accounting and consulting firm Grant Thornton International, the number of women in senior management positions globally decreased to from 24 percent in 2004 to 20 percent in 2009. Furthermore, the percentage of privately held businesses with no women at all in their senior management ranks has risen to 38 percent, up from 35 percent in 2009.

This decrease has surprised those who believed the recession was “The End of Men.” In the United States, economists had predicted the number of women on the national payroll would surpass the number of men in 2009 because 82 percent of recession-related job losses had impacted men.

While that prediction came close to reality in the fourth quarter of 2009, women never actually surpassed men and the numbers started gradually dropping off again by early 2010. In addition to that prediction, Wall Street-watchers were asking whether or not corporate diversity and more gender-balanced leadership was the key to a recovery.

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By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

A recent survey by Opportunity Now, a UK-based group working as part of the non-profit organization Business in the Community, showed that men are seriously in the dark about the challenges women face in the workplace.

Helen Wells, Acting Director of Opportunity Now, said, “The percentage of women at the top has not changed – and in fact 21% of FTSE Boards have zero women on them. We wanted to see why this might be.”

“The main takeaway from this research was that the vast majority of male line managers just couldn’t see the obstacles that women are dealing with,” she explained. “It’s quite important to understand that men and women had different perceptions of the same workplace.”

Wells explained that cultural assumptions were a key culprit in the slow pace of progress in terms of getting women to the top. She said, “Success will require engaging men in the dialogue around culture change.”

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By Jessica Titlebaum (Chicago)

How do you promote yourself? Many women may feel uncomfortable speaking about their accomplishments and don’t take advantage of simple procedures that can help advance their careers. But it’s something that can be critical to your career development. This week, The Glass Hammer talked to an array of experts to understand why women might need to improve their self-promotion skills, how to be better at it and what it takes to gain visibility in the workplace.

Walking the Fine Line

Lauren Rikleen, Executive-in-Residence at the Center for Work and Family at Boston College believes women walk a fine line.

“Women walk a fine line between being told that they need to promote themselves better,” said Rikleen. “On the other hand, women are sometimes seen in a negative light for promoting themselves too much.”

Rikleen believes that we should all reframe how we view self-promotion and look at it as something positive.

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