Evolving digital technology demands more communication and accessibility from all employees, which leads to a culture of multi-tasking. But as leaders face increased communication demands, it’s important that they retain the value of listening.
Listening is Getting More Difficult
Active listening has been identified as one of the ten attributes of embodied leadership. Effective listening by leaders has been noted as the first step in creating trust within organizations. Also research shows that supervisor listening contributes to employee job satisfaction, satisfaction with the supervisor, and fosters a strong and beneficial exchange between leaders and team members.
Yet according to Accenture’s #ListenLearnLead study of 3,600 business professionals across 30 countries, the vast majority of professionals (64%) feel that listening has become more difficult in today’s workplace.
While nearly all (96%) of global professionals judged themselves to be “good listeners”, nearly all (98%) also report multi-tasking at least part of the day.
The study found that eight in ten respondents said they multi-task on conference calls with work emails (66%), instant messaging (35%), personal emails (34%), social media (22%) and reading news and entertainment (21%). In fact, professionals report distracted listening and divided attention unless they are held directly and visibly responsible within the context of the meeting.
“Digital is changing everything, including the ways in which we communicate. In turn, the way we communicate is changing how we listen, learn and lead in the workplace,” says Nellie Berroro, Managing Director, Global Inclusion & Diversity at Accenture. “Today, truly listening means not just watching our nonverbal cues in face-to-face meetings, but also maintaining our focus on conference calls, staying present, and resisting the urge to multi-task with instant messages and texts.”
Multi-Tasking Means More Quantity, But Less Quality
The attraction to multi-tasking seems to be a double-edged sword in the workplace that pins quantity against quality.
In Accenture’s study, 64% of Millennials, 54% of Gen Xers, and 49% of Baby Boomers reported multi-tasking during at least half of their work day. While 66% of professionals agreed multi-tasking enables them to get more done at work, 36% report that distractions prevent them from doing their best work. Millennials were at the extreme on each – feeling multi-tasking meant getting more done (73%) and yet distractions prevented them from doing their best work (41%).
However it’s traditional interruptions imposed by others (telephone calls & unscheduled meetings & visitors) rather than technology that were reported as most disruptive, perhaps due to the lack of control over these distractions.
What suffers? The trade-offs reported include decreased focus, lower-quality work, and diminished team relationships. But can leaders afford these trade-offs, too?
Despite the Benefits, Are Leaders Too Accessible?
“Our survey found technology both helps and hinders effective leadership,” says Borrero. On the positive side, 58% of survey respondents saw technology as a benefit for leaders enabling them to communicate quickly with their teams, allowing both time and geographic flexibility (47%) as well as accessibility (46%).
However, 62% of women and 54% of men felt technology made leaders over-stretched by being too accessible. 50% of respondents felt it forced multi-tasking and 40% felt it distracted from culture and relationship building. 55% felt a top challenge for leaders is information overload.
Borrero recommends practicing discipline when needed in disengaging from other technologies to give full focus to the material in front of you, such as putting your mobile device on silent during phone conferences and actively noting key points. “When you face information overload,” she says, “become comfortable with turning off technology. For example, you might disconnect at night, so you can recharge, and decide not to look at your phone until the morning.”
Importantly, when it comes to effective leadership and overcoming barriers to it, focusing on quality of communication and connection matters most – and that may very well start with listening.
The most important leadership attributes identified by the study were the “soft skills” of effective communication (55%), ability to manage change (47%), and ability to inspire others and ideas (45%), closely followed by understanding team members.
Yet this is also where skills suffer: the two most commonly perceived obstacles to effective team leadership were a lack of interpersonal skills (50%) and a lack of communication skills (44%).
Getting Better At Listening
While digital technology brings many advantages, leaders who compromise at listening may compromise their ability to lead effectively.
A Westminster Business School report highlights, “Listening is an essential skill in all situations and it is particularly important for leaders and managers to actually hear what others say, not simply what we think we hear them say…All great leadership starts with listening. That means listening with an open mind, heart and will. It means listening to what is being said as well as what isn’t being said.”
Despite its importance to leadership, leaders are too often ineffective at truly listening according to an HBR article by Christine M. Riordan. She notes, “The ability and willingness to listen with empathy is often what sets a leader apart.”
Riordan outlines three key behaviors leaders can practice that are linked with empathetic listening:
1) Hearing with all of your senses and acknowledging what you’ve heard.
This means “recognizing all verbal and nonverbal cues, including tone, facial expressions, and other body language.” It’s as much about listening to what is not said as what is said, and probing a bit deeper, as well as acknowledging others feelings or viewpoints and the act of sharing them.
2) Processing what is being shared and heard.
This means “understanding the meaning of the messages and keeping track of the (key) points of the conversation.” Effective leaders are able to capture and remember global themes, key messages, and points of agreement and disagreement.
3) Responding to and encouraging communication.
This means “assuring others that listening has occurred and encouraging communication to continue.” Acknowledging others verbally or non-verbally, asking clarifying questions, or paraphrasing reflects consideration of their input. This can also mean following-up to ensure others know listening has occurred.
According to Accenture’s Borrero, “Leaders are role models employees emulate, so it’s important for them to set a good example. In our increasingly hyper-connected digital workplace, we all need to practice ‘active listening,’ including paraphrasing, taking notes and asking questions. At Accenture, we offer a number of courses in effective listening, which is critical to our company as we focus on serving clients.”
In today’s leadership context, where effective leadership means showing social awareness not just self-awareness, leaders may employ technology to help them do it, but one way or another, it’s important they find a way to truly listen.
By Aimee Hansen
Voice of Experience: Eliza Swann, Partner, Shearman & Sterling
Voices of Experience“I wanted to go to law school for as long as I can remember, but ending up on the M&A team at Shearman & Sterling was a bit of an accident. I had never considered a business transactional type of career,” Swann said.
It’s funny how things turn out. Swann, who became a partner at Shearman & Sterling in 2007 after eight years with the firm, works on domestic and cross-border deals. In recent years, she has worked on several of the highest-profile M&A transactions in the world, including last year’s acquisition by Liberty Global of Virgin Media in a $23.3 billion transaction.
As an associate just out of law school, Swann found herself on Shearman & Sterling’s M&A team, in large part because she had clerked for the Delaware Supreme Court. Because so many companies incorporate in Delaware (more than 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies are Delaware companies), it is a major venue for business law litigation, with a judiciary that is extremely sophisticated in reviewing corporate law issues. Swann’s clerkship gave her valuable insight into issues fundamental to a transactional practice.
“I was so lucky to have been offered the clerkship and accepted the position without realizing how truly interesting the work would be,” Swann said. “About halfway in, I decided that I wanted to work in a New York firm with a strong M&A practice. I got the job at Shearman & Sterling and have been interested every day since.”
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Voice of Experience: Sarita Mohapatra, Partner, PwC US
People, Voices of ExperienceSarita Mohapatra, a tax principal with PwC, talks often about how to balance family life and her busy client schedule.
She’s been with PwC since 2001, becoming a partner in 2010. She initially studied economics in India and after earning her MBA came to the United States. A PhD in Economics followed, and she realized she had a love for teaching and spent four years as a faculty member at Utah State University. She decided she wanted to get back to the corporate world and subsequently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, seeking a position in professional services that incorporated her background in applied economics. After briefly working at another firm, she joined PwC.
Her work remains constantly fascinating to her, particularly the technological advancements that seem to occur on a daily basis. With changes occurring globally related to transfer pricing and the intersection of economics and tax, she finds herself delving into new areas to identify solutions for her clients who are under lots of pressure to deal with regulatory compliance issues.
Don’t Make a Decision for Your Whole Life Based on Today
She worries that young women walk away from opportunities because they sometimes anticipate difficult situations than may never happen. She says that when she started, there weren’t many structured programs to help working moms. Even though she had no idea how to make it work, she knew she wanted to. She saw her male colleagues who have kids and still work, and she figured there was no reason why she couldn’t do the same.
“I learned that you can’t make a life decision based on the one problem ahead of you that day,” she says, citing child care coverage as an example of an issue that is transient in the big picture of your whole career.
Mohapatra says she took her clients into confidence early on, and set boundaries — for example, that two days of the week she had pick-up duties.
“I was fortunate that I had a lot of support and my colleagues and clients, both male and female, always supported me. Women wonder if it’s possible to have it all, so I try to talk to as many as I can to say, yes, it is possible. Even though everyone’s story will be different, this is how I did it. I really try to be a good role model for working moms because even though I had great support from my mentors, I wish I had more working moms as my role models when I was making those decisions.”
Speak Up To Get the Opportunities You Need
Mohapatra advises women to be outspoken and open about their aspirations. She says that while male candidates will routinely ask how long until they make partner, she’s found very few women will start a discussion to find out their prospects for career advancement potential.
“It’s not that they’re not ambitious — I see that drive and hunger — but they hold back,” she says. “I think they are concerned that I might think they are getting ahead of themselves. I coach my managers and staff constantly that if they want to advance, then they need to tell someone, because speaking up allows managers to give interested people the opportunity to acquire the skills and expertise they need.”
She says she focuses on this through her own experience – she had assumed everyone knew she wanted to make partner, so was surprised when she found out they didn’t. Someone asked if others knew, and she said “I think so! This is why I’m working this hard.” But she found out you can’t assume and went back to amend her career plan with long-term and short-term goals.
And the advice can translate for women she would consider her peers. She says that sometimes even at the higher levels, she still sees women will hold back in meetings and discussions.
She credits her viewpoints with her upbringing in India, when her parents would tell her that to succeed in the corporate sector in India without losing her identity she needed to be proud of who she is and what she brought to the table. “They would say, ‘We don’t want you to emulate men to be successful! Be yourself.’” Those words stick with her as she maintains her authenticity in her career.
Networking for Success
Mohapatra says that when she began in public accounting, there weren’t too many learning and development programs so she tried to build up her network naturally by participating in firm-sponsored events or organizing informal lunches or drinks.
“If I could, I would go back and cast my net a lot wider,” she says. “I tell my team to step outside their comfort zone from immediate coworkers and be more strategic about networking beyond those you meet organically.”
Mohapatra is very engaged in PwC’s Office of Diversity initiatives and recently gave the keynote address on the power of networking at the national convention of Ascend, a Pan-Asian organization with which she is involved locally and nationally.
Family Focus
Mohapatra remembers that one of her partners had suggested she network more outside of business hours, which seemed challenging in light of the many long hours she already put in. But she realized that many of her clients also had kids around the same age so she started planning events that included families. “I realized I had to incorporate both my life and work to make better use of the time I had.”
She carries that double-duty ethos into her community service outreach as well, helping in her son’s school and working with Habitat for Humanity, which she combines into a team-building activity with her staff.
When she’s not working, she enjoys gardening, a hobby that she and her family can do together.
Her family loves to travel, looking for areas off the beaten path to get a true flavor of the culture. Her son, who is 12, has already been to 13 countries. “When people ask him to tell a fun fact about himself he loves to say that he’s been to more countries than he is years old.”
By Cathie Ericson
Listening Is Getting Harder, but It’s Necessary for Leaders
Career Advice, LeadershipListening is Getting More Difficult
Active listening has been identified as one of the ten attributes of embodied leadership. Effective listening by leaders has been noted as the first step in creating trust within organizations. Also research shows that supervisor listening contributes to employee job satisfaction, satisfaction with the supervisor, and fosters a strong and beneficial exchange between leaders and team members.
Yet according to Accenture’s #ListenLearnLead study of 3,600 business professionals across 30 countries, the vast majority of professionals (64%) feel that listening has become more difficult in today’s workplace.
While nearly all (96%) of global professionals judged themselves to be “good listeners”, nearly all (98%) also report multi-tasking at least part of the day.
The study found that eight in ten respondents said they multi-task on conference calls with work emails (66%), instant messaging (35%), personal emails (34%), social media (22%) and reading news and entertainment (21%). In fact, professionals report distracted listening and divided attention unless they are held directly and visibly responsible within the context of the meeting.
“Digital is changing everything, including the ways in which we communicate. In turn, the way we communicate is changing how we listen, learn and lead in the workplace,” says Nellie Berroro, Managing Director, Global Inclusion & Diversity at Accenture. “Today, truly listening means not just watching our nonverbal cues in face-to-face meetings, but also maintaining our focus on conference calls, staying present, and resisting the urge to multi-task with instant messages and texts.”
Multi-Tasking Means More Quantity, But Less Quality
The attraction to multi-tasking seems to be a double-edged sword in the workplace that pins quantity against quality.
In Accenture’s study, 64% of Millennials, 54% of Gen Xers, and 49% of Baby Boomers reported multi-tasking during at least half of their work day. While 66% of professionals agreed multi-tasking enables them to get more done at work, 36% report that distractions prevent them from doing their best work. Millennials were at the extreme on each – feeling multi-tasking meant getting more done (73%) and yet distractions prevented them from doing their best work (41%).
However it’s traditional interruptions imposed by others (telephone calls & unscheduled meetings & visitors) rather than technology that were reported as most disruptive, perhaps due to the lack of control over these distractions.
What suffers? The trade-offs reported include decreased focus, lower-quality work, and diminished team relationships. But can leaders afford these trade-offs, too?
Despite the Benefits, Are Leaders Too Accessible?
“Our survey found technology both helps and hinders effective leadership,” says Borrero. On the positive side, 58% of survey respondents saw technology as a benefit for leaders enabling them to communicate quickly with their teams, allowing both time and geographic flexibility (47%) as well as accessibility (46%).
However, 62% of women and 54% of men felt technology made leaders over-stretched by being too accessible. 50% of respondents felt it forced multi-tasking and 40% felt it distracted from culture and relationship building. 55% felt a top challenge for leaders is information overload.
Borrero recommends practicing discipline when needed in disengaging from other technologies to give full focus to the material in front of you, such as putting your mobile device on silent during phone conferences and actively noting key points. “When you face information overload,” she says, “become comfortable with turning off technology. For example, you might disconnect at night, so you can recharge, and decide not to look at your phone until the morning.”
Importantly, when it comes to effective leadership and overcoming barriers to it, focusing on quality of communication and connection matters most – and that may very well start with listening.
The most important leadership attributes identified by the study were the “soft skills” of effective communication (55%), ability to manage change (47%), and ability to inspire others and ideas (45%), closely followed by understanding team members.
Yet this is also where skills suffer: the two most commonly perceived obstacles to effective team leadership were a lack of interpersonal skills (50%) and a lack of communication skills (44%).
Getting Better At Listening
While digital technology brings many advantages, leaders who compromise at listening may compromise their ability to lead effectively.
A Westminster Business School report highlights, “Listening is an essential skill in all situations and it is particularly important for leaders and managers to actually hear what others say, not simply what we think we hear them say…All great leadership starts with listening. That means listening with an open mind, heart and will. It means listening to what is being said as well as what isn’t being said.”
Despite its importance to leadership, leaders are too often ineffective at truly listening according to an HBR article by Christine M. Riordan. She notes, “The ability and willingness to listen with empathy is often what sets a leader apart.”
Riordan outlines three key behaviors leaders can practice that are linked with empathetic listening:
1) Hearing with all of your senses and acknowledging what you’ve heard.
This means “recognizing all verbal and nonverbal cues, including tone, facial expressions, and other body language.” It’s as much about listening to what is not said as what is said, and probing a bit deeper, as well as acknowledging others feelings or viewpoints and the act of sharing them.
2) Processing what is being shared and heard.
This means “understanding the meaning of the messages and keeping track of the (key) points of the conversation.” Effective leaders are able to capture and remember global themes, key messages, and points of agreement and disagreement.
3) Responding to and encouraging communication.
This means “assuring others that listening has occurred and encouraging communication to continue.” Acknowledging others verbally or non-verbally, asking clarifying questions, or paraphrasing reflects consideration of their input. This can also mean following-up to ensure others know listening has occurred.
According to Accenture’s Borrero, “Leaders are role models employees emulate, so it’s important for them to set a good example. In our increasingly hyper-connected digital workplace, we all need to practice ‘active listening,’ including paraphrasing, taking notes and asking questions. At Accenture, we offer a number of courses in effective listening, which is critical to our company as we focus on serving clients.”
In today’s leadership context, where effective leadership means showing social awareness not just self-awareness, leaders may employ technology to help them do it, but one way or another, it’s important they find a way to truly listen.
By Aimee Hansen
Mover & Shaker: Aoife Flood, Senior Manager, Global Diversity and Inclusion Program, PwC
Movers and Shakers, PeopleThat philosophy has shaped Flood’s career at PwC. Unsure what she wanted to do, Flood began her career, as she puts it, “at the very bottom of the chain.” But for her, it became a powerful awakening. “I had struggled with my confidence, and at first I was intimidated by how highly educated all my colleagues were. But, I embarked on part-time studies and started to raise my hand to see if I could help design or deliver a program, and that’s when my trajectory started to shift.”
After five years with PwC Ireland, she saw an opening for a global opportunity but the position was more senior than hers. However, something about the job posting made her think the role was for her. She spoke to her director about why she thought she thought it would be a good fit. Though the director managed her expectations, she encouraged her to take a chance. Flood applied, creating an entire appendix that included a portfolio of all the work she’d done, and was offered what was described to her as a “courtesy interview,” given the effort she’d put in since she was the least-qualified candidate.
During the interview, Flood says she felt surprisingly calm, and they ended up talking for two hours. Three more interviews followed and she secured the position, which started with a six-month international assignment in Boston. “It was the first time I took a really brave step, and I still sometimes wonder who that person was,” she says.
Only 25 at the time, she had never lived outside her family home much less lived abroad. Once she arrived, it proved tougher than she had imagined as it was a new role that didn’t have a large team, so at times Flood felt very isolated.
“Through that experience I realized how it feels to be brave, which has made me less career risk averse. In fact, now I grow bored when I’m inside my comfort zone. I found out that variety is the spice of life in my career.”
She subsequently moved into her next global role, her first management position and then moved into global diversity. With every role at PwC, Flood feels she has had the opportunity to facilitate positive cultural change which is very important to her.
Growing Through New Assignments
Not only did that first global experience earn her a coveted position, it earned Flood her first sponsor as well. The initial interviewer, Coeni Van Beek, became the global ethics and business conduct leader at PwC and continued to monitor her progress. After three weeks of being in Boston, he told her that she was already outperforming what he had expected.
“I will make sure you’re a manager by the time you finish this tour of duty,” he said, and followed through on the promise by advocating for Flood when she was interviewing for her next position. “The team had concerns since I didn’t have any technical expertise, but he told them that they needed to take a chance on me and would not regret it.”
Right now, Flood is excited about a recent thought leadership research project she delivered focused on the female millennial, having led the project from initial concept through execution. “As a millennial woman it’s fascinating to take something from my own experience and help shape the end deliverable.”
In her current role, she also co-authors PwC’s Gender Agenda blog. Flood identifies that being positioned as a global expert with a strong external profile has also had a catapulting effect on her internal profile. While she had a very strong internal global network at PwC based on those she had worked with during her career, this external profile has really strengthened her profile with those she had not been exposed to through the course of her career. “It’s been really powerful for me to change their mindset of me in my starting position to a global diversity expert.”
Ultimately, she believes that success lies in being willing to take on stretch assignments, being passionate about what you do and willing to deliver more than is expected.
Role Models Shape Her Professional Success
Her first role model is her mother, who works but doesn’t have a “career,” per se. Flood says her mom grew up in an economic climate in Ireland where she did not have very many opportunities, but she always advocated for her four children to have opportunities she didn’t have. Specifically, she encouraged Flood to enroll in speech and drama classes as a child, which although she didn’t like them at the time, increased her comfort level with speaking. “My mom is a very powerful role model of resilience in the face of adversity.”
At work, Flood cites her current bossAgnès Hussherr, whom she says is the perfect role model of someone who can have it all: a leader, who is quintessentially female but strong and successful, has a family and even managed to become a pilot in her spare time.
Reading and Writing Are Passions Outside of Work
Flood has always enjoyed reading and loves to go on holiday with her Kindle loaded with books. But over the past few years she’s been surprised to find how much she enjoys writing. Over the course of writing many papers and a 30,000-word dissertation during an executive master’s program she completed three years ago, she discovered she had a flair for it so she appreciates that her current role provides her the opportunity to write. “I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up but now I do – a writer. And if I won the lotto tomorrow, I’d quit and write for fun!”
By Cathie Ericson
The Way You’re Coping With Stress Is Making It Worse: What You Should Do Instead to Build Your Resiliency
Career Advice, Guest ContributionYou just need to find better ways to reduce or manage your stress, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, there’s no way to reduce your stress. Your job is never going to ask less of you, nor are your loved ones. The demands in your life will only continue to increase as you move up in your career and your personal life becomes more complex. In addition, stress is not just something that happens in your head. It’s a chemical, hormonal event that radically changes your chemistry and physiology.
The hormones released in response to stress can have many negative effects on your body and brain. As just one example, the stress hormone cortisol kills cells in the brain relating to memory, learning and goal setting. It’s responsible for insomnia. It makes you crave high-fat, high-sugar foods in large amounts, and to store a majority of it as fat, specifically around the midsection.
But the good news is, when we understand the physiology of the stress response, we can build our resiliency to stress. We can train our bodies to recover from stress more quickly and efficiently, as well as raise our threshold for stress. And if that’s not enough, resiliency training can also improve our health and help us lose body fat.
Up until now, many of the things you’re doing to cope with the stresses you’re facing are actually making things worse. You may skip meals and workouts, sacrifice sleep to get more work done, grab sweets or salty snacks, rev yourself up with caffeine and bring yourself down with alcohol. Here are four things you may be doing that are exacerbating your stress, along with tips to build your resiliency:
1. You sacrifice sleep to get things done.
It’s tempting to trade sleep for extra hours of productivity, but lack of sleep ramps up our sympathetic nervous system, pushing us in the direction of the stress response. Simultaneously, it makes the parasympathetic nervous system – which is related to restoring balance and calm — less effective. Sleep deprivation also increases body fat levels, specifically around the midsection. This abdominal fat is not only frustrating, it also increases our risk of diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and even premature death. Keep to a regular sleep and wake cycle, and aim to get between 7-9 hours each night. Sleep is one of the best tools we have for the body to recover from stress.
2. You drink caffeine to get energy and make up for lack of sleep.
In addition to increasing blood pressure, caffeine stimulates the release of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. To make matters worse, caffeine has been shown to work synergistically with mental stress to further increase cortisol levels. From a stress perspective, cutting out caffeine is ideal. Why voluntarily pump more stress hormones into your body? If you choose to consume caffeine, do so in small amounts.
3. You skip meals because you’re too busy to eat.
When we skip meals or go too long without eating, blood glucose (a form of sugar the body uses for energy from many of the foods we eat) drops. When there’s not enough glucose, the body thinks a famine is occurring, the stress response is stimulated and the body secretes cortisol. This puts us into food seeking mode to get much needed energy into the body. Cortisol makes us eat large amounts of food containing fat and sugar, and to store much of this extra energy away in our fat cells for the next glucose emergency. Maintain blood glucose levels and minimize stress by eating about every 3 hours, alternating between moderate sized meals and small snacks.
4. You skip your workout because you don’t have time.
Stress hormones are specifically designed to fuel a short burst of intense physical activity – fighting or fleeing. When we do this, it burns them off and releases another class of hormones that restore balance and counteract the negative consequences of stress. The good news is just 30-60 seconds of intense exercise produces these feel good hormones. Sprint up a flight of stairs, or do a few jumping jacks or burpees. Worst-case scenario, do a few of these shorts bursts to hit the reset button on stress, or squeeze in a few minutes here and there. Exercise can be accumulated throughout the day in 10-minute bouts, which can be just as effective for improving fitness and decreasing body fat as exercising for 30 minutes straight.
For more strategies on how to build your resiliency to stress, read Jenny’s book The Resiliency rEvolution: Your Stress Solution for Life, 60 Seconds at a Time.
Jenny C. Evans is the author of THE RESILIENCY rEVOLUTION: Your Stress Solution For Life 60 Seconds at a Time (Wise Ink Creative Publishing; 2014). She is also founder and CEO of PowerHouse Performance, where she works with thousands of C-suite executives, leaders, and employees worldwide to help them improve their resilience, performance and productivity, while enhancing their health.
Guest advice and opinions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com
Career Tip of the Week
Career Tip of the Week!, Thought LeadersReverse Mentoring- join forces with someone from a different social identity group from you (perhaps generationally or culturally?) to see a fresh perspective on things.
This is a great way to work with grow with new lenses on old situations.
Welcome to Career Tip of the Week. In this column we aim to provide you with a useful snippet of advice to carry with you all week as you navigate the day to day path in your career.
By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
Voice of Experience: Stephanie Holt, Chief Financial Officer, North Capital Inc.
People, Voices of ExperienceCreating an International Career
Born and raised in California, Holt met her husband as an undergrad at University of California – Riverside. After a short sabbatical to have her first daughter, she graduated and started working at a small medical technology firm. Soon after, she had her second daughter and then embarked on graduate school at the University of Redlands.
When her husband’s job moved them to the Bay area, in January 2000 Holt started working in finance at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a semiconductor company that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. She started in Sub-Micron Development working with research and development Engineers buying equipment to design microchips that wouldn’t be produced for 10 years.
“About a year and a half later, the CFO asked me if I wanted to manage the manufacturing plant in Singapore,” she said. “My husband and I had a brief discussion about it and five weeks later we were on our way to Asia.”
That was July 2001 and Holt admits that if she knew the challenges that were ahead for a 5’10’’ blonde woman in Singapore, she may not have gone.
“Some of the things I saw were shocking. For example, when you apply for job in Singapore, you have to include a picture with the application,” she said. “Questions about your personal life and when you want to have kids are part of the interview process.”
At one point, Holt was pulled aside and advised to try and acclimate to the culture around her instead of trying to have them acclimate to what she was used to.
“I might have been cavalier when I first got there but I learned some great life lessons, such as not everything is black and white,” she said. “If I am passionate in my beliefs about something, someone else is just as passionate but on the other side of the table.”
Even though AMD wanted to extend her stay in Singapore another four years, Holt and her family moved back to the States after two years in Asia. They moved her into a financial sales role where she spent a lot of time traveling to Latin America.
Three years later, when her oldest daughter was in high school, Holt decided she wanted to take some time off to be a stay at home mom.
“It was then that I realized just how important my job title had become to me and it took me six months to reconcile that,” she said. “I didn’t know any women who had left a high profile corporate job to be a mom, and then come back after some time to another senior level position. I learned that if you are confident, you can do it.”
Joining an Investment Advisory Start-Up
After her second daughter went to college, Holt wanted to go back to work as a consultant. She called Jim Dowd, managing director of North Capital and a man she has known since high school.
“One of the reasons I was interested in the North Capital companies was because of the JOBS Act passing in 2012. This was designed to give individual investors better access to private investment deals. I remembered when I was at AMD, we had a sales rep who told us about an amazing company that was pre-IPO but past the start-up phase,” said Holt. “That company was Google and everyone was trying to figure out a way get money in but only the big investors had access to it. The JOBS Act is supposed to make it easier for people to invest in these private placement deals.”
Holt was excited about the new product availabilities and started thinking about all of the people in her life that could take advantage of this new landscape.
“We get a lot of referrals from our current clients’ children who don’t have a lot of money themselves but want advice on how to invest. Each client is deserving of your time and attention. That’s what I learned working with Jim Dowd and appreciate about him,” said Holt. “North Capital is a business but it’s also a friendship that has been 37 years in the making.”
In three years, Holt and Dowd have been able to build the company from 3 to 15 employees with over 20 registered representatives. Holt believes the time is right for the company to give back and launched an initiative aimed at educating women, in various stages of their life, to start the conversation about money.
“I really feel that money is still a taboo topic for women,” she said. “Since money is such an important aspect of your career and personal life, we need to be comfortable with talking about the topic.”
Lessons Learned
Holt has also recognized throughout her career that it is okay to say no.
“When I would make requests to colleagues and they would say no, I would figure out how to make it work and yet I was always reluctant to say no myself,” she said. “I would never think less of that person, I would just think that they had other work to do. I finally realized that no one thought less of me as an employee, or a person, if I said no.”
She said that this also makes you a better worker.
“When you say no, you are also able to avoid over extending yourself,” she said.
Holt also advises to be open and honest about what you don’t know at your job.
“I am the type of person that is always upfront about what I don’t know because I have always been surrounded by great people who could fill in the gaps,” she said. “In Singapore, I knew my role but I didn’t know the way people did business in Asia. I learned that if you ask for help, people are willing to work with you.”
A Career of Breaking Misconceptions
Just like Holt transitioned from Asia to Latin America and from accounting to technology; Holt has also been able to transition from a high profile, career focused women to a stay at home mom and back again. By learning to talk about money, by avoiding over-extending herself and by having the confidence to put her family first when she felt it was needed, Holt has become a role model for women with young families.
She believes it is a misconception to think women can’t take a break and then come back. She points to a change she has seen in the past 15 years.
“When I started, there weren’t a lot of women in senior management positions in technology. We were taught to wear pantsuits and act like a man because that was what it took to succeed. Now that women have become more visible as role models, females in finance and technology are better able to envision a path for themselves,” she said. “Just remember, you don’t need to take the point A to point B path to get to the right place.”
By Jessica Titlebaum
Being Connected on Wall Street Reaps Big Career Benefits, If You’re a Man
Career Advice, NetworkingA new working paper by Lily Fang, an associate professor of finance at INSEAD, and Sterling Haung, a PhD candidate at the school, focuses on the links between gender, connections, and career outcomes among 1,815 Wall Street analysts and their work across 8,242 firms between 1993 and 2009. Analyst-firm connections (41,000) were defined as alumni-ties with one or two senior officers or board members within the firms that the analysts cover.
Women and Men are Equally Connected
Previous research had found that “connected” financial analysts, who went to the same university as senior officer of the firms they covered, significantly outperformed in their stock recommendations and more effectively in their jobs compared to analysts without connections. Fang & Haung wondered if the impact on job performance and career trajectory differed between men and women.
The great news is they found no gender difference in how well-connected analysts are – both men and women have a connection in about 25% of the firms they cover. The bad news is they found a “big difference in how much these connections help male and female analysts in their jobs.” According to Fang in her INSEAD article, “men overall reap more benefits from connections than women both in terms of job performance and in terms of subjective evaluation by others.”
How Connections Impact On Job Performance
The study measured how analyst connections impacted upon “objective” and “subjective” performance and career outcomes: accuracy of their earnings (EPS) forecasts; price impact of their buy/sell stock recommendations; and being elected to the All-American Research Team (AA) as a “star analyst”.
The researchers found that connections led to a much stronger impact on forecast accuracy, for men. Fang notes that “while connections lead to a 2 percent improvement in accuracy rankings in general, among men, there is a further improvement of about 1.8 percent.” Put more bluntly in the report, “the connection effect is present only among men but not women.”
For women, connections to a female executive in firms they handled led to a slightly higher improvement in forecast accuracy (2.5%), but not nearly as much as male-male connections (4.7%). As Fang puts it, “Thus the value of the ‘old boys club’ is hard to refute in our data.”
Fang writes that among analysts, “The effect of connections is even greater in their stock recommendation impact or how the market reacts to their buy and sell calls. Connections improve male analysts’ recommendation impact by about 1.2 percent, but not at all for female analysts.”
Fang notes that the differing impact on job performance was strongest among young analysts, setting women back way before they approach the glass ceiling. “This vastly different ability to capitalise on connections at such an early point in their career paths could explain gender gaps that exist throughout long-term career trajectories. The cycle, it seems, starts at the entry level.”
How Connections Impact on “Star Analyst” Status
The third measure was more subjective, promotion as a “star analyst” through an opinion poll, an evaluation by thousands of institutional investors, organized by Institutional Investor – a title given to less than 8% of analysts, which impacts significantly upon career profile and salary earnings (up to 3-fold). Much of the top evaluation criteria is highly subjective such as industry knowledge, communication, responsiveness and written reports.
The researchers found connections directly contributed to male analysts’ odds of being elected an AA but had zero impact for female analysts. Importantly, there’s no gender inequality in numbers promoted to all star status: “In general, [women make up] 12% of the overall [analyst] population, but they are 14% of the star analysts so it’s not like people are not awarding women,” says Fang in Fast Company, “but the factors for them to be selected are very different than men.”
For women, those impacting factors appear to be Ivy League education (35% of women in the total sample had one compared to 25% of men) and a record of forecasting accuracy – neither of which is significant in determining whether men are elected to being a star, or promoted within it.
According to the researchers, “The results reveal that investors value analysts of different genders differently: While connection is valued by investors and affects positive career outcomes for men, for women, it is measurable achievements and competence that seem to play a larger role.”
An Insidious Gender Bias
The researchers offer two potential interpretations of their findings. One is that “men are evaluated on ‘potential’ while women are evaluated on ‘performance.’” The other is that women benefit less from connections than men because they’re still seen as “outsiders” by investors whereas men are seen as “insiders/one of our own.” Both are plausible. Neither are pleasing.
As Fang says in Fast Company, “The type of gender bias that we document, I think is more subtle, but perhaps even more insidious than the simple numbers game. We’re not finding women are under-represented. We’re finding that they’re evaluated in different ways. How do you change people’s subjective interpretation? That’s a much more difficult [issue], I think. It probably has more to do with social norms and the ways people see things.”
Fang also points out in her INSEAD article, “It is telling that while 14 percent of Wall Street all-stars are women, virtually none of the top bosses in any of the big firms are. It could be argued that even the most competent women remain in analytical roles rather than being promoted into general management because that kind of promotion entails subjective evaluations by others.”
Mentorship & Sponsorship Still Matter!
Senior Associate Editor Sarah Green at the Harvard Business Review, uses Fang & Haung’s research as a springboard into “Why ‘Network More’ is Bad Advice for Women”e, noting that “we need to stop telling women to follow a male playbook.”
She’s got a point on the playbook. But using Fang & Huang’s findings to also question the value of mentorship and sponsorship in a woman’s career advancement is dangerous. Connections with top executives in other companies who went to the same university isn’t a parallel to the support that well-formed mentorships with strong chemistry or sponsorships can provide for a woman navigating her career.
Should a proven track record be more important for the career advancement of male analysts than female analysts? Absolutely not.
But if it is, isn’t it better if you’ve got somebody in your corner – whose attention you’ve earned through your achievements and abilities – helping you wave your impressive track record around when the next career opportunity presents itself?
By Aimee Hansen
Values-Based Leadership: How It Can Improve Your Effectiveness
Career Advice, LeadershipA recent article in The Journal of Values-Based Leadership reminds us that Steve Jobs said, “The only thing that works is management by values.” It’s no surprise that companies like Apple who foster a values-based approach in their leadership culture create connections that have a significant impact on company performance.
Your ability to focus on and motivate through core organizational values can have an impact on your effectiveness as a leader, too.
HOW FOCUSING ON ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES HELPS YOU AS A LEADER
Raises you to a leadership perspective
The Financial Times defines value-based leadership as “Motivating employees by connecting organizational goals to employees’ personal values.”
A Harvard Business School paper asserted that when leaders focus on the technical or administrative side of their work, they become too fixed on short term returns. The paper stated, “If leaders instead sought to uphold values and maintain integrity, they could establish the long-term perspective and commitment to innovation necessary for sustaining their competitive position in an increasingly global economy.”
Effective leaders keep focused on the visions and values of the organization as a compass for action. Indeed, having women in the boardroom has helped at aligning corporate action to company values. International research has shown that “the positive impact of women on the board on financial performance, and on ethical and social compliance, indirectly affects firm value.”
Also, keeping your eye set on organizational values, and above the daily tasks, may help you from getting too drawn into office housework that can be peripheral to your leadership goals.
Increases bonding with you as a leader
Building relationships with those who work with you is important, but when they’re built through a common bond around organizational values, it strengthens your position as a leader.
The ability to compellingly communication organizational values is a key attribute of leadership success. Communication research shows that optimized messages can garner a “shared sense of purpose, which is achieved when multiple employees possess the same understanding of the purpose of the work.” In particular, the combination of “a large amount of vision imagery with a small number of values” increases performance by creating a shared sense of organizational goals and coordination towards them.
Effective leaders also create a motivational sense of belonging. Leadership research shows that people feel more bonded to a leader with which they feel a “shared social identity” that is representative of their in-group. Leaders who effectively convert organizational values to a shared identity would seem able to create deeper commitment from those they manage.
In fact, values coach & author Joe Tye asserts that values-based leadership can create a culture of ownership rather than a culture of accountability, which he asserts relates to motivation, productivity, and retention.
Affirms your leadership integrity
Values are meaningless unless put into action, and the standard for integrity within an organization is set by its leaders.
Speaking to values-based leadership, Mark Fernandes, Chief Leadership Officer at Luck Companies, says “In order for these values to be authentic within the organization, it’s imperative that the leaders be fully committed to demonstrating the values in everything they do. There’s a level of inauthenticity that associates will notice and it can erode their trust in the leadership if they’re not actively seeing the behaviors exhibited in the actions and words of their leaders.”
The HBS paper asserted that by embodying the values they espouse, leaders enable employees to find meaning and value in their own work: “Members’ interactions with the organization and their actions on its behalf are not just transactional but are imbued with meaning. As members internalize the organization’s purpose, to the extent that their own actions further this purpose, they come to regard these actions as meaningful. They further view themselves as part of a valued community. They are motivated to exert effort on behalf of that community, to defend it when threatened, and to advocate on its behalf.”
Being able to connect individuals to the values of your organization is especially important when it comes to motivating Gen Y. Research has shown that for Millenials, job fulfilment hinges partially on believing in the vision and strategic direction their organization is pursuing in the world and feeling personally connected to it.
If leaders don’t uphold the values the company espouses, employees lose faith and begin to disengage. If they do, they inspire.
Ignites your potential and the potential of those around you
When your personal ambition is aligned with your company’s vision, you are more engaged, more productive and more able to reach your potential according to research. This is true not only for you, but for those you manage and motivate. When you feel corporate values are more closely aligned to your personal values, it creates intrinsic motivation.
Fernandes focuses on igniting the full potential in others, “Values-based leadership is defined by living, working and leading in alignment with your core values, principles, beliefs and purpose to, in turn, ignite the extraordinary potential in those around you.”
Values-based leadership has also been linked to creating a culture of creativity and innovation. The Journal of VBL article states, “When an individual has a personal and professional commitment to align personal values with those of the organization he or she works for, a powerful connection is created. This connection creates numerous possibilities for both individual growth and company productivity.” The article suggests that motivating a “work culture or atmosphere that sparks creativity” is increasingly a matter of customizing motivational strategies to align employee values with organizational values.
WALK THE WALK ON VALUES
So given how values-based leadership can positively impact your leadership potential, how do you begin to walk the walk? Perhaps the first question to ask yourself is what the organizational values really mean to you.
Conscious Manager recommends to, “Develop a personal understanding of your organization’s values. Think about what the company’s values really mean to you and to your unique leadership style. You need to know which of your behaviors demonstrate those values. If the business’ beliefs and principles don’t have meaning for you, you won’t be able to make them meaningful for anyone else.” Ultimately, it’s your actions, not your words that speak to how well you represent values – in being a role model, in teaching the values, and in recognizing them. “Bringing values to life is a behavioral issue.”
Embodying Values is one of five key behaviors of great leaders, says Author Ken Blanchard. He asserts, “Leaders must establish, articulate, and enforce the core values of their organization. More important, they must model the behaviors that support the values.”
He suggests leaders ask these four questions:
“How can I integrate our core organizational values into the way my team operates?”
“What are some ways I can communicate our values to my team over the next thirty days?”
“How can I create greater personal alignment with our values on a daily basis?”
“How can I recognize and reward people who actively embody the values?”
Inspiring leaders motivate us towards a common goal. Values-based may be less a type of leadership, and more a requirement of it.
By Aimee Hansen
About That Positive Mindset…
Career Advice, Guest ContributionBut if you’ve somehow escaped the daytime talk shows, multitude of online articles, and your friends’ comments about the subject, the idea in a nutshell is that your thoughts determine your circumstances. In other words, you attract positive or negative situations into your life by the way you think about things. It’s along the same lines of these familiar adages: You reap what you sow. Be careful what you wish for because you may just get it. What goes around comes around.
Do you remember the craze around The Secret a few years back? What a load of nonsense. Did you really believe you could sit on the couch watching TV and simply think your way to a fabulous reality? I mean seriously, how could that advance your career? You and I know that only hard work and determination create long-term career success and opportunities.
While many career oriented women don’t dismiss the idea that our thoughts can affect outcomes, it’s sometimes hard to swallow that our present life is a direct result of our thoughts—especially if we are not yet where we want to be. Building a career takes time. But if our thoughts can contribute anything at all to our realities, then isn’t it worth paying close attention to what we tell ourselves?
If you own a business, you believe your products or services are needed. If you work for someone else, your employer is purchasing your contributions, ideas, and expertise. You don’t think twice whether you are needed as an employee because, like a business owner, you have something of value to offer.
The importance of a positive mindset comes into play when we consider the value of our skills or our products or services. Yet, it seems to be difficult for many of us to identify our own personal value proposition and talk with ease and confidence about the real dollar value associated with what we personally offer. Women especially struggle with determining their worth and communicating it clearly and fearlessly.
Why is it that verbalizing our value to others can be pure torture? Why is it so difficult to ask with confidence for that promotion/raise/hot job/ or the next big opportunity? Why don’t others simply see our worth and volunteer to compensate us accordingly?
While that would be great that’s not how business works. It is up to us to tell and sell.
Before I share with you my personal tips that propelled me from $135,000 in debt to becoming a multi-millionaire, here is something that may help you wrap your head around how thoughts affect outcomes. I find it fascinating how quantum physics relates to Law of Attraction and the power of positive thinking. It is all about how energy influences everything around us. Here’s a YouTube video that will shed some light on creating our perfect lives and attracting abundance. There was also a wonderful experiment where researchers focused energy into water then studies the crystalline structures of frozen droplets. They discovered good vibes created the most beautiful crystals and bad vibes created formless blobs. You can find the astonishing results here.
Now let’s translate that into our everyday world. Have you ever had a bad morning that snowballed into a bad day? From the bank teller who miscounted your withdrawal, to the grumpy grocery store clerk, to your dog barking all night long for seemingly no reason… Conflict all day long. In comparison, have you ever had that day when you woke up feeling on top of the world and good things kept coming your way from morning through night? In essence, each of these examples illustrates the principle. The mindset that exudes happiness and confidence from within is completely irresistible and attracts success.
But what if we are not in a good place emotionally and we can’t stop our mind from pulling us into the abyss of our own negative thinking?
Personally, I got myself out of my downward spiral by searching for statements that I could truly believe in. During what I call it the decade of disaster for a reason I refused to believe I would be a failure and have to declare bankruptcy. My first thought was, “This can’t be all there is for me.” The entire story can be found in my book, Happy Woman Happy World.
That little adjustment to my thoughts is what helped me get from bad to great. At the time, I couldn’t believe I was going to be making millions, but I did believe that declaring bankruptcy would not be the end of my story.
If you want a six-figure income, you’ll never get there if you don’t truly believe you are worth it. And it’s the connection between wanting it and believing it’s possible that can make all the difference. You’ll never close the gap between those two points with a negative mindset.
What is a thought in which you can truly believe? “I am making an impact.” “I will change the world.” “I am creating a better future for my children.” “I am able to operate at a much, much larger scale.” These thoughts are the first steps to a positive mindset.
Be careful to avoid turning these thoughts into their negative opposites. “I am not making the impact I should.” “How could someone like me change the world?” “I am trying to do my best.” “Why don’t they see how good I am?” Practice switching negative statements into positive ones.
Beginning today, I ask you to pay close attention to the way you think. Success will still take hard work, determination, and time. But with a positive mindset, your energy will be flowing in the right direction propelling you forward. Please do let me know how this is going for you—I’d love to hear your story of success!
By Beate Chelette