Leaving one industry for another, what you need to know in your transition

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People waiting for an interviewPeople leave industries for many reasons ranging from transferable skills or vertical growth in skills creating new opportunities for professionals to the less talked about but real phenomenon of burnout. The Financial Services industry is vulnerable to peaks and troughs and being laid off without prospects such as the mass layoffs that happen every recession cycle on Wall street is fairly predictable albeit sometimes a small correction only.

Either way, it is time to transition to a new career. What are the top three things you need to consider in the move?

A. Do your skills apply to what you want to do next? If not exactly, can you weave a truthful narrative of how what you have done before will empower you to do the new tasks required? If there are gaps, before you leap from your current job you should close any skill gaps with formal education or informal means.

B. Who do you know in the new arena? How is your network? Start by meeting people who can tell you what you need to know about the product, processes and cultural norms of your desired future gig. These folks are much more likely to know of open opportunities and relevant networking opportunities than anyone else. Information is power.

C. Interview, interview, interview. Practice makes perfect and will give you a good benchmark on how viable it is to move into this space and help you understand your bottom lines regarding money and other factors such as hours, location etc.

Good luck!

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Contact nicki@glasshammer2.wpengine.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work

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Voice of Experience: Anissa Thompson, Managing Director, Accenture

Anissa Thompson“The best piece of advice I have ever received is that no one will, or should care, more about your career than you do,“ says Accenture’s Anissa Thompson. Thompson lives by this advice and is constantly seeking opportunities to expand her knowledge on a variety of issues, to stay relevant and to seek feedback on how she is doing. She believes it is essential that her and her peers make sure they build out their succession plans and ensure that they are full of diverse candidates whilst taking the time to nurture future leaders.

Thompson finished graduate school with a Master’s Degree in Public Administration. Eager to find work as a policy analyst she started her career at a global policy think tank and spent two years as a research assistant, working primarily on research for the United States Army and Joint Chiefs of Staff. She describes this experience as, ‘excellent,’ but was keen to effect actual solutions that solved problems facing the public sector and began to explore other career options. She found herself drawn to management consultancy and began working at Accenture in 2001.

Variety within the same career

Over the course of her 15 years at Accenture, Thompson has worked across industries serving a diverse array of clients ranging from the US Federal Government, to an energy corporation and a large telecoms firm. In 2009 she moved from working with clients to an internal role where she was asked to build and lead a sales support team to help Accenture respond more effectively to proposals. That decision and role represented a major turning point in Thompson’s career and ultimately led to where she is today as the Director of Accenture’s North American Proposal Response Center, where she manages a team of proposal development professionals.

“I’ve been extremely fortunate to be able to explore new career paths. My main professional motivations have always been interesting work and the opportunity to work with great people and I’ve experienced both at Accenture – I have never been encouraged to simply continue down the path on which I started. As a result of moving my career into a new direction of my choosing, I was able to build an internal sales support function that has achieved a very positive reputation and been replicated throughout.”

Currently, Thompson is excited about expanding the services that her Sales Support team provide at Accenture, so that they will be involved throughout the whole entire Sales lifecycle, enabling more sales and greater efficiency. An area that is of particular interest to her is how at Accenture they are doubling down on automation, especially in the area of content creation.

By conquering this work, Thompson comments, “we are able to create content for our sales collateral using software rather than “search and find” efforts, thus allowing us to respond to proposals with greater speed and efficiency.“

She is also enthused with how they are finding creative ways to better source and staff their resourcing needs through crowdsourcing platforms and are always looking at innovative ways to get their messages across visually, helping bring to life Accenture’s focus on all things digital.

On a personal note she is excited about the impact they are making in the local D.C community.In January she volunteered with Urban Alliance – a local non-profit that empowers disadvantaged youth to succeed through internships, training and mentorship – during Accenture’s Martin Luther King Day of Service, one of the largest corporate efforts in the country. 1,500 Accenture people volunteered at more than 85 projects in the Metro DC area. Thompson is presently involved in another exciting project outside of her day to day role, leading Accenture’s relationship with the 11th Street Bridge Park Organisation – one of Accenture’s non-profit partners in the D.C area.

Thompson describes it as ‘a multi-partner project to transform an old bridge into the city’s first elevated park: a new venue for healthy recreation, environmental education and the arts’.She recently completed a pro bono skills based volunteering project to refine their strategic plan.

Mentoring and Sponsoring Others

The professional achievement of which Thompson is most proud, is the number of women and minorities that she has helped excel to executive level at Accenture, both on her own team and in her mentoring circles. She has received great mentoring at each stage of her career and very much believes in ‘paying it forward’. Thompson began by registering as a mentor on Accenture’s Global Mentoring Program and shortly thereafter was matched with an African American Female who was a new hire at the company. Over the course of 18 months she helped her navigate her path at Accenture, sharing career advice along the way.

“For me”, Thompson adds, “it was very gratifying when I received an email from her announcing that she had been promoted to the next level.”

For women across every industry she would encourage them to find a sponsor internally and seek support from mentors formally and informaly. Throughout her career Thompson has learnt that you will face challenges.

“The reality is, many of the decision makers you will encounter may not look like you, but it is important to understand that this is not a deterrent to success,” she states. She believes that for women especially, it is important to seek sponsorship and support from a diverse array of people versus turning to just those within your demographic.

Thompson is proud to work for a company that has not only announced its’ commitment to gender equality, but one that is committed to supporting the professional goals and aspirations of its’ more than 130,000 women globally. Accenture recently announced an investment of over $840 million in learning and professional development in 2015, which includes a range of training programs to develop the next generation of women leaders. Personally Thompson mentors four women personally and many more informally.She partakes in learning and networking opportunities during events like Accenture’s celebration of International Women’s Day, which she has previously co- hosted in D.C.She has also had the great fortune to work directly for a strong woman leader who also serves as her career counsellor- helping her to define her own path to success and to ensure she achieves it – and to sit in a highly diverse organisation with many senior women reporting in to her.

In her spare time she loves to travel and recently spent time in Buenos Aires, Rio and San Juan, Puerto Rico over the holidays. She expresses that she is fortunate to have a geographically dispersed set of friends and that she spends time abroad almost monthly. She is an avid reader and is never without her kindle. Some may find the most surprising thing about Thompson is her love of football, or soccer as it’s called in the US. She supports FC Barcelona and DC United and given the opportunity will happily while away a weekend watching the various European leagues play on television!

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Surviving Even the Most Grueling Interview Process

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People waiting for an interviewInterviewing for a new job – especially one you really want – is always nerve-wracking. These days, it seems the entire process is more grueling than ever. In an annual review of the “Top 25 Most Difficult Companies To Interview”, Glassdoor.com reported that recently “…the average length of the entire interview process is increasing, from an average of 12 days to an average of 23 days.”

Read more

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Mover and Shaker: Shirley Murray, Senior Lead Program Manager, TIAA-CREF

Shirley Murray, TIAA-CREF“With every new role, you have to try to understand the bigger picture: what is being done and why,” says TIAA-CREF’s Shirley Murray. “After you have that ‘aha moment,’ you can often find better ways of doing something instead of sticking with how they always have been.”

Murray attributes that mindset to one of her mentors, her high school math teacher. “I really blossomed under her new approach that helped me understand both the ‘what’ and the ‘why,’” she says.

That perspective helped Murray in her first career as a math teacher. It still helps in her current role at TIAA-CREF where she focuses on deciphering the ‘why,’ instead of just doing what was done in the past.

During her time as a math teacher, Murray realized her love of programming when she created an introductory computer course for students. She then leveraged these skills to take a programming role in an actuarial firm. Soon after, Murray moved from her native Jamaica to the United States, where she joined TIAA-CREF in its New York City office. Murray began her career as part of the rotational development program within the actuarial department and has been with the financial services firm for the past 27 years.

A Focus on Efficiencies

Murray has served in several roles that involved programming and managing operations across many different groups, including both insurance services and the corporate actuarial department. She helped oversee the production of the firm’s financial statements and helped develop a tool for management reporting, an application that is still in use.

After this success, she had the opportunity to move to the firm’s Charlotte office to lead a group responsible for calculating accumulation values and overseeing financial controls. In this role, Murray helped install a suite of applications as part of the organization’s master record-keeping initiative. In 2013, she moved to the information technology department to lead a newly created group that supports the actuarial function, with the goal of streamlining their technologies to allow the group to devote more time to their analytical roles.

Streamlining processes has been important to Murray throughout her career; in fact, one of the accomplishments she’s most proud of was a project in 2011 that helped create more efficient processes that ultimately decreased the time involved in the daily pricing of products by two hours. “We overcame lots of challenges to roll it out,” she says.

She’s also excited about a current project that entails tracking data to see how it changes over time and how they can use that historicalinformation to create assumptions that can help them project into the future. “Using past behavior as a model helps our business divisions,” she says. Two of the projects she’s working on are also breaking new ground by providing automation for processes that were formerly completed manually.

Her work was recently acknowledged with TIAA-CREF’s “IT Outcomes that Matter” award, which she received for her work as part of a cross-functional team with members from across IT.

Learning the Ropes of the Corporate World

From her background as a teacher, where she was able to determine the delivery of her curriculum, she had come to the corporate world excited to get involved in a faster-paced industry. Murray realized that regardless of the industry or firm, there are always going to be challenges. “I learned that you have to be patient and find ways to be proactive to overcome obstacles.”

Having benefitted from the support of mentors and a sponsor, Murray has learned the importance of having someone watch out for you and in turn has become the mentor of other African-American females throughout the years.She recognizes that being a minority in the workplace can be difficult, yet advises those in similar situations to focus on your performance. “Sometimes only positive experience can overcome these biases, so I just do the best that I can regardless of my role or the challenges I face, and ultimately this mentality has allowed me to progress in my career.”

Another one of her best pieces of advice for others is to make sure that you plan for the long term, not just the short term – whether for your career or a project. “You have to move knowledge from one role into the next, thus building rather than compartmentalizing.” And, she adds, don’t be afraid to take risks and challenge the status quo.

Among Murray’s hobbies when she’s not at work are doing puzzles, particularly jigsaw puzzles, and traveling, especially to Jamaica to visit her mother and brothers.

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Black Women Are Raising Their Hands For Leadership

careersclub-webinarsBy Aimee Hansen.
It takes both ambition and confidence to aspire to a top corporate position, and many professional black women have both in spades according to recent research.

Not only would Corporate America benefit to listen up, but there may also be a message for non-black women when it comes to owning our impact within leadership roles.
 
Despite facing many difficulties and obstacles, black women are even more ready to lead.
 
Power Women At The Top
 
Skim Fortune’s“Most Powerful Women”2015 and you’ll find Rosalind Brewer (#15 – CEO and President of Sam’s and Walmart), Ursula Burns (#17 – CEO and Chairman of Xerox, and Anne-Marie Campbell (#37 – President, Southern Division, Home Depot) holding steady rank, with Brewer and Burns hailed among “first ladies in Corporate America”by Black Enterprise.
 
Burns (#29) and Brewer (#65) also appear in Forbes latest “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women”, among 11 black women including Loretta Lynch (#34), the first African American woman to be sworn in as U.S. Attorney General.
 
Even though African American women make up only 2% of science and engineering employees, four black women were named on Business Insider’s “23 of the most powerful women engineers in the world”.
 
Skipping Over the Corporate Wall
 
African American women are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the USA, and most keen to make themselves boss. They own 14% of female-owned businesses, with the number of black women-owned businesses having risen 322% since 1997 compared to 74% for all women-owned businesses.
 
Meanwhile in Corporate America, according to Catalyst 2015 data, black women make up 7.4% of employees in S&P 500 companies yet hold only 1.2% of executive and senior level positions and only .2% of CEO jobs. They hold 11.7% of female board seats, or just 2.2% of board seats.
 
In Fortune, CEO of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce Margot Dorfman speaks to the rush towards entrepreneurism, “Women of color, when you look at the statistics, are impacted more significantly by all of the negative factors that women face. It’s not surprising that they have chosen to invest in themselves.”
 
Black Women Understand Power and Are Ready To Lead
 
A recent report, entitled “Black Women: Ready to Lead” by the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI), which gathered responses from 356 black women and 788 white women in professional roles, reports the frustrating corporate paradox experienced by black women:
 
They are more likely (than white female counterparts) to recognize the personal and collective potential of holding the top jobs and aspire to them yet more likely to feel stalled in their careers.
 
According to the CTI report, African American professional women are 2.8 times more likely to want the top jobs – 22% aspired to a powerful position and prestigious title, compared to only 8% of white professional women. They were 50% more likely to say that the “ability to earn well”was important to their careers (81% vs. 54%).
 
The report, by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Tai Green states, “Perhaps because they’ve been ‘leaning in’ for generations, black women on track for leadership are more likely than their white sisters to see an executive position as the means to getting what they want from their careers.”
 
The report reflected that African American women had a stronger sense that holding a leadership position would enable them to positively influence their own lives and their field.
 
On an individual level, black women “without power”were more likely than white counterparts to perceive a leadership role as “enabling them to flourish”(26% vs. 14%) and as an opportunity “to be empowered and empower others”(22% vs. 12%).
 
On a community level, African American women also were more likely to recognize as important aspects of power the ability to shape the direction of their field or profession (39% vs. 29%), the ability to guide other’s career development (33% vs. 25%), and the ability to exert influence on other powerful people (32% vs. 21%).
 
Indeed African American women “with power”were much more likely to report having meaning and purpose compared to their black peers “without power”(51% vs. 33%) and the ability to empower others and be empowered (57% vs. 42%).
 
The report also highlighted greater clarity and confidence. Black women were more confident than white women in their ability to succeed in a position of power (43% vs. 30%) and were more likely to have clear long-term goals (40% vs. 32%).
 
“Manifestly Invisible”
 
Despite stronger ambitions, more confidence and even more graduate degrees (49% vs. 40%), the report found black women were more likely than white women to report feeling stalled in their careers (44% vs. 30%) and to feel their talents weren’t recognized by their superiors (26% vs. 17%).
 
As the authors wrote in HBR, “our interviewees report being both painfully conspicuous –‘unicorns,’ as one put it —and manifestly invisible.”
 
Many of the dynamics and challenges African American women face differ to those of white women, because of racial stereotyping and their “double outsider”status, sharing neither gender nor race with those in power, leading to issues such as lower sponsorship (unconscious bias means we chose those who remind us of ourselves) and harsher performance judgement.
 
Columbia University Professor of Psychology Valerie Purdie-Vaughns writes in Fortune, “I’ve examined how people’s brains are biased to ignore black women. When many think about ‘black executives,’ they visualize black men. When they think about ‘female executives,’ they visualize white women. Because black women are not seen as typical of the categories ‘black’ or ‘woman,’ people’s brains fail to include them in both categories. Black women suffer from a ‘now you see them now you don’t’ effect in the workplace.”
 
Turning Inequality into Motivation
 
Inequality -along with increased likeliness of being the primary breadwinner for the household, single motherhood, and a sense of personal and community responsibility -may just be the extra fuel that motivates African American women to strive for positions of power that would enable them to influence change in organizations.
 
As shared in the Washington Post by report co-author Green,”Themajority of black women we interviewed were raised by parents and grandparents who instilled in them this sense of not having a voice, and feeling they have a responsibility to go after it themselves and pave the way for other women to come up.”
 
African American women are raising their hands for leadership. It’s time the corporate blinders came off.
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Help, my manager is killing my career

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women stressedChances are if you like your manager, your team mates and the tasks at hand are still interesting, then you may be less likely to jump ship unless you are vastly underpaid or you have a personal situation that requires your attention. There is a saying that “People leave managers, not companies,” and a bad manager changes everything. If your relationship is less than cordial with your manager, this can permeate daily interactions to a point where you feel that he or she is a hindrance to your advancement or even your emotional wellbeing in the worst case scenario (and I hear about this more than you think with serial offenders showing patterns with the new hires.) This issue is very tricky and I hesitate to give advice in a one size fits all matter since there is nuance to this topic and I would advise you to speak to your career coach or a trusted advisor first.

What can you do? Explore other options within the same company and navigate the politics by lunching with peers from other teams and even get a sponsor who a leader (the boss of your boss, or higher or a different team leader) so that you can start to understand the bigger picture of mobility, project allocation and promotional tracks. Also, sometimes a bad manager isn’t just someone who has a bad personality but someone who is stuck between a rock and a hard place themselves suffering from systemic constraints ( such as lack of resources, understaffed etc.) and so you have to figure out if this is a temporary issue or a true sign of dysfunction of the entire company.

Failing that, sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade and move on. There are other firms out there.

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work

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Office Romance: A No, No For Your Career?

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office loveHalf of us have done it, according to the latest Office Romance Survey by Vault, and if we have, we’re likely to be up for it again (64% would).
 
We’re also much less likely to hide it than ever before. Sound like a yes, yes to office romance?
 
Office love affairs are no fringe incident, though relatively less common in biotech, accounting and law, according to Vault. If roses by the dozen start popping up on desks from admirers this week, there’s no telling if they’re coming from across town or around the corner. The 24/7 work culture means there’s a lot of opportunity for relationships to build and sparks to ignite.
 
Any dalliance in love brings both reward and risk. But when it comes to pursuing a love connection at work, you may want to take a moment to mind the career risk.
 
Who and Just What Kind of Affairs?
 
The longer you’ve been in the workplace, the more likely you’ve been romantically involved with a co-worker, and likely more than once. While only 44% of Millennials have been involved (18-34) in office romances according to the Vault survey, this increases to 59% for Gen X (35-49) and 66% for Baby Boomers (50+).
 
However, experience may lessen the desire. Baby Boomers are also most likely to have avoided an office relationship (43%) compared to their younger counterparts (34% of Millennials). Among those who have been involved in office romances, Baby Boomers are least likely to want to do it again (54% vs. 67-68% for Millennials and GenX).
 
Office romances range from casual ongoing relationships (42% have had one), random hook-ups (36% have had one), serious long-term relationships (29% have had one), and even finding a spouse or partner (16%).
 
Beyond romantic connections between single employees, 46% of respondents said they’d known a married co-worker to have an office affair. 24% of those involved in an affair found it ended another long-term relationship in their life.
 
Men, Women, and Hierarchy
 
Women are more likely to report having been involved in an office affair then men (52% vs. 50%) and it’s more likely to have become a long-term serious relationship (17% vs. 13%). Women are less likely to have a random hook-up than men (15% vs. 22%), though the classification of romance is a very subjective thing.
 
But here’s the real deal – “hierarchical romances”which involve power differences are more frequent than “lateral ones.”Women are much more likely to date a supervisor than men (20% vs 13%). Men are much more likely to date a subordinate than women (32% vs. 12%). Previous research has even indicated that 10% of mentor-protégé relationships become sexually intimate, which reflects a clear power imbalance.
 
Office romance too often mirrors the uneven power dynamics between genders and women may pay a price, especially when it comes to how others perceive the affair.
 
Office Love Is Always a Triangle
 
You. Him or her. The rest of the office.
 
The inevitable thing about office romances is that it’s hard to keep the feelings between two people. Research shows that office relationships often foster negative feelings among co-workers, and these feelings tend to be targeted disproportionately at women.
 
While, only 6% of us find it totally unacceptable to get into office romance, we are more resistant to certain relationships. 33% feel office romances between co-workers of different levels are unacceptable. 30% disapproved if the co-workers are assigned to the same projects, and 27% if the lovers are in the same department.
 
Vault found 26% of people reported feeling uncomfortable because of co-workers’office romance. 32% felt a co-worker “gained a professional advantage”because of their office relationship.
 
One survey participant noted, “People just take more interest when they feel like their love interest is getting slighted, and it is hard not to feel like that is favoritism, even if they are the supervisor and have to get involved anyway.”
 
Studies have shown that hierarchical office relationships can result in hostility, where gender bias rears its ugly head. Women are more likely to be judged negatively for office affairs by other co-workers and female subordinates are more likely to be suspected of career-climbing motives, rather than love or ego motives, which ruffles more organizational feathers.
 
Previous research has found that subordinates in hierarchical office affairs are more likely to lose their job or be relocated, especially if female, and co-workers are also more likely to feel they should.
 
Play Smart at Work Love
 
The best strict career advice might be “just don’t do it”, but at a human level, nobody is immune to a rewarding and fulfilling relationship finding them at work.
 
Most importantly, Business Insider advises to steer clear of any relationships that are with your direct supervisor or subordinate, as this raises substantial career complications.
 
Know the company’s policies, if any. A bit of distance at work (another team, another department, another floor) may make for a better love match. Also, play out the scenario and consider the implications and ripple effects, whether love were to go sweet or sour or your roles changed.
 
Bottom line – if you’re going to play at love at work, then play it smart.
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Voice of Experience: Carol Noel, Senior Director, Team Leader, BNY Mellon Wealth Management

Carol Noel, BNY MellonBy Cathie Ericson

As important as hard work is, success is built on your relationships, says Carol Noel, senior portfolio manager and team leader for BNY Mellon Wealth Management. “The skill set you needed in the beginning of your career is not the skill set that will drive you forward. In the early part you focus on hard work, and while that’s important to provide access and recognition, you have to constantly ask for feedback, course correct and build out relationships in order to move to higher levels,” she says.

Making a Difference in Private Wealth Management

After earning her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and her master of business administration from Georgetown University, Noel worked at Bankers Trust Company for five years, and then joined BNY Mellon’s rotational leadership development program. From the beginning, she was part of private wealth management, a group that focuses on client relationships to help high-net-worth families achieve their financial goals.

Noel’s career epitomizes longevity: She has been with the group for 18 years and now leads a team of 13 professionals.Over the years, she has mastered all aspects of the business, from managing portfolios and researching stocks to managing people, executing business plans and guiding important client relationships.

She is particularly proud that her team earned recognition from BNY Mellon’s corporate leadership, which welcomed the group into the prestigious Chairman’s Circle in 2014 as the top revenue team. “Our successes represent a team effort of doing well for both our clients and the firm,” Noel says. “I work with an amazing group of people who care as deeply about the clients as I do, and we appreciated the recognition for our collective success,” she adds. “It was a nice topper to our efforts.”

The team continues to explore new ways to grow the business, including reaching out to new client segments where they have expertise. One such area is in supporting endowments, where they are working to provide services around philanthropic endeavors.

Over the years, she has watched the wealth management industry change dramatically, with clients seeking a more holistic approach to their wealth planning. Clients today expect more than just investment performance: They might be seeking advice on how to handle the long-term care of a grandparent or to provide for a child with autism. Approaching them with a 360-degree view of their financial and family situation allows her team to provide better solutions.

Building Your Career Involves Others

Noel has found that women will often believe it’s their responsibility to fix any problem on their desk. But that’s not the case, she says, underscoring that having the right team to resolve an issue is just as good as doing it yourself. “Bring together the right people to share the challenges that have to be met” she says, adding that a robust network should include people in your department as well as in others, and should cross cultural, gender and hierarchical lines.

She also advises women to start off by differentiating themselves from the pack. “There are lots of talented people, but you have to show that you can be successful, whether that’s meeting financial goals or working collaboratively with internal partners.” She says that if you take accountability for managing your career, you’ll go farther by being intentional and strategic.

“It’s not offensive behavior to be offensive about your career,” she says, even though that might seem contrary to what many girls learned growing up. “Having and executing a plan is vital to moving ahead. It’s not a negative thing to say you want a certain role and go for it. Have coffee, ask colleagues for an informational interview.”

And while she believes that women should help each other, she sees value in having both men and women as sponsors. “The diverse background in your network will help you get where you want to be.”

To that end, Noel is active in Impact, a multicultural Employee Resource Group where she’s a mentor and also participates in the Women’s Initiative Network (WIN). In addition, she has piloted a leadership development program designed to encourage people with diverse backgrounds to seek senior leadership.

“The firm is a strong supporter of building up good people internally, as much as hiring externally. They’ll look anywhere for the best people.”

A CFA charter holder, she also stays active in professional groups, including the New York Society of Security Analysts and the CFA Institute.

A Balanced Life

Noel finds her quest for a balanced life is getting easier as her two kids get older. She and her husband enjoy traveling as a family and her children “are enjoying the ride now too,” she says.

Equally important to that balance is giving back, and Noel is a member of the finance committee for the Havens Relief Fund Society, a foundation that provides one-time grants to help struggling families overcome imminent financial crises.

“I do what I love, and I never run away from a challenge. “

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Black History Month 2016 – Honoring African American Women in Business

Nicki-Gilmour-bioIn honor of Black History Month 2016, this month The Glass Hammer will feature interviews with notable African American women at leading firms on their career experiences, aspirations, and advice for other women in their field. Theglasshammer.com all year long and over the past nine years ensures we profile women of all social identities and experiences and we have always stated from the beginning that we want our readers to have many different role models.

Much of anyone’s success depends on two factors, this begins with you and your personality traits and then the second factor is the direct environment you are in, so yes working in a good team and an inclusive firm does matter. But, do multicultural women have a different set of challenges? This is a very interesting and debated question and you are sure to get a different answer from every person that you ask. Research such as Catalyst’s work on the “Concrete Ceiling” for African American women in Corporate America, would show that there are specific systemic issues hindering the progress of this group.

Are you looked at for your gender or your ethnicity first? This is often a question that is pondered on this topic by academics and women in the trenches alike. The fact remains that when we look around we see fewer black women at the top than white women and much fewer women generally than men but this is not new news.

That is why we are here to show you that African American women are in senior positions and are leading teams and leading change. Like any of us, we can talk about our own experiences, since we cannot speak for all women everywhere, we cannot speak for all Black women everywhere either when we profile a small group, but we can provide a platform for interesting dynamic women to share their stories and personal career journey.

Black History Month for me at least is not only about celebrating African Heritage and Black people in history who should be remembered for their feats and contributions but also as a time for other people to acknowledge their whiteness and some of the systemic and historical privileges that have gone with that identity. A recent article published on medium.com demonstrates in a very visual way how we have privilege in different ways. How would you answer the questions asked? How does that match us with how others see you?

From a career advice perspective which is what we tackle here on The Glass Hammer, no matter who you are reading this article, you need to know that “You according to you and you according to them” are often different versions of you due to other people’s stereotypes. Having differing visible aspects such as being a woman or being of color has real consequences, often unseen to certain people in the dominant societal group who often are built to experientially learn and so find it hard to conceptualize other people’s experiences. Some less kindly call this a lack of empathy. On a side note, I would love to see a study of overlaps traits like empathy and voting patterns in US politics if anyone has that to share. Back to the point however, if you are a right handed person do you ever really have to think about how life is for left handed people? Probably not.

You don’t have to look too far in the press right now to see all sorts of weird mutations of racial issues that rage on. From people arguing all sides of the Oscars with #OscarsSoWhite with the entertainment industry’s seeming preference to reward one type of people, to Michael Jackson being played by Ralph Fiennes (really, too much to discuss here from all angles), to important issues regarding a potential future President being an overt racist. As a non- American, I have no issue getting political and I recently found myself intrigued by people who insist on saying “All Lives Matter” in response to the statement “Black Lives Matter”. The activist group aside for a second, let’s look at the constructs behind that rebuttal. As an organizational psychologist specializing in the diversity topic, this very sentence is so close to the themes I see daily in my gender work as men and women defend the patriarchy in a similar way, that being a system which favors men over women albeit often in a deeply held unconscious way. Even people with good intentions in that sentence who want to say they value all lives (those who have bad intentions need their own article) completely overlook the historical and actual dynamics in play. I see this often as it is a way for us all to cognitively convince ourselves that somehow by saying all people should be treated equally we find a way to dismiss, discredit or deny (the 3 d’s) the actual weighted and skewed reality of what is happening in terms of how people are grouped and on some level, treated.

Even the word multicultural can be considered controversial and many women who get pegged with this label ask why their culture is not considered like any other Americans. Good question and from my perspective as an actual foreigner working in America with Americans who then tack a heritage qualifier such as African, Irish or Italian onto their American nationality, I often wonder where the need comes from to differentiate so strongly. I do believe however there are legitimate reasons to do so as an uneven playing field based on one’s ethnicity seems to very much still exist in the USA and translates into the workplace due to humans being humans and carrying their biases and constructs into the skyscraper with them in the morning.

So what can you do? Ask yourself who is in your network and sponsor and mentor different types of people. Assume nothing and don’t expect people to educate you at their expense yet go the extra mile to break your own stereotypical notions of people in your team. Go to the multicultural network events with a friend just as you would expect men to be interested in your career as a woman, white women can lift as they climb and so if you find yourself ascending take all women with you, conscious that you are being inclusive in your actions and choices.

I hope I have made you think today. That is all I can ask, the rest is up to you.

We coach leaders in being inter-culturally competent and help them address how their constructs have been formed and how preferences that cause bias can be overridden when necessary. Political correctness can often hinder the real work.

Check back all month long to read about African American women who are making a difference at work.

By Nicki Gilmour

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Can you see a clear path forward? How motivation theory works in practice

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clear path way featuredThis week as week 3 of our series of decision making around staying out or getting a new job, we explore what happens when you see less of a career track where you are and you think you can get further in another firm. Basically, it boils down to the old saying “dead men’s shoes” or in this case, “dead women’s heels” as if you cannot see a promotional track ahead of you, chances are you are ready to look elsewhere and who could blame you?

Goal setting theory and other organizational psychology theories and basic principles suggests that motivation is not a specific trait in any one person but rather it is a combination of your ability to do the job and experience more successes than grinding organizational obstacles, along with your ability to see a clear path forward otherwise known as “opportunity”. This is how you stay motivated at work.

However, make sure you are actually seeing the big picture- firms often offer much more mobility than you can see with the naked eye. First port of call is to ask your manager how he or she feels you can grow in the firm and how you can grow in the next year or two? Network outside of your direct team as openly as you see fit in your specific situation. Look at job boards and see what opportunities are being advertised.
The art and the science is knowing how much trust you can have in your manager to sponsor you. Next week we shall talk more about this.

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work

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