Contributed by Beate Chelette
The recent Atlantic cover story on whether or not women can “have it all” has certainly hit a national nerve. The week after the article came out it had received more than 1.1 million online views. Women and men all around the country are registering their objection or approval of author, mother of two, and former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter’s premise that the ‘70s feminist mantra of “having it all” is, in reality, not so easy – and maybe not even possible unless women push for changes in society.
Women who juggle career and family know well how tough it can be. I certainly do. I nurtured a baby and a start-up alone, after my divorce, squeezing time to write my business plan in between my day-to-day duties as a single mom. I worked past midnight many nights and on weekends to get everything done – and it was exhausting.
As a former corporate director, and now an entrepreneur and professional career coach, I’ve trained and worked with hundreds of professional women – and men – who say they feel overwhelmed by trying to “do it all.” Reality check – come on, who doesn’t feel this way? There is always something that needs pressing attention and hardly enough time in a day to get things done – ever.
But there is a better way than running after your life and trying to catch up 24/7. Let’s take a closer look. As women, many of us spend our lives wondering where we are and, in the words of that old Talking Heads song, “How did I get here?” This is not some existential malaise, a sense that the world is too much for us. This is real. It is real because over the last few decades all we did was add more to our workload. From having been focused entirely on home and kids, things are decidedly different.
Women have had 50 years of breakthroughs in society, becoming more the equal, but still not the equal, of men in earning-power and opportunities. But, we are the same as far as responsibilities are concerned. Here is the issue though: the majority of us can’t outsource having children (albeit I do see a celebrity trend emerging). And because we continue to find a partner, tie the knot, and set out to start families, we in essence continue to do all we ever did – plus add all the new exciting stuff like career, money, and feeling good about ourselves.
Because it is so overwhelming and because we have close to no role models that show us how it can be done successfully, we end up and remain self-doubting, self-sabotaging, self-hating, even. Why? Because what is on our plate is impossible to manage. When I was going through some of these things myself, I also wanted to figure out why this was. And Iwanted to find a solution – one that could help women everywhere. And, I did.
The solution is a concept I named ego-Rhythm. It states in its simplest essence that there is a designated time where you have everything in ONE rhythm at a time. You can have it all, over time, and eventually all at once, but it’s a process.
Bring Your Soul To Work Day
Ask A Career CoachI have recently talked with many women who are looking for ways their work can, as they say, “feed their soul.” Our work drains us. Many of us are looking to transition to other jobs, start businesses on the side, or work for non-profits in order to find work that fulfills us.
On the other hand there are many of us that are stuck. We either fear giving up the steady paycheck and benefits or we just can’t seem to find the next job, business, or career that would feed the soul. So we go to work every day trying to make the best of a situation where we are not engaged. We express our passions (the very best we have to give) outside of work. Consider that according to a Gallup study only 29% of people in the U.S. are fully engaged in the work that we do. The personal and organizational impact of this is tremendous in terms of the lost productivity, creativity and sense of wellbeing.
So how do we bring soul back to our work? How about we declare a “Bring your Soul to Work Day”? How about we challenge ourselves as individuals and leaders to seek the soul in the work that we do and the environments we create for our people. How do we do that?
In my opinion it is through work that engages us. It inspires us. It stretches us. It connects us to a bigger sense of ourselves and something bigger than ourselves. It takes daily practice to find this kind of soul and joy in the work that we do. Here are five ways to do that.
Read more
New Debate Ignites on Maternity, Motherhood, and Executive Women
Work-Life“Mayer’s appointment contradicts the common wisdom that maternity and motherhood are incompatible with top executive positions. It may increase the willingness of organizations to consider pregnant women for top positions. It may also increase the aspirations of executive women. They may see that it is possible to combine maternity and motherhood with a position at the top.”
– Laura Graves, Associate Professor of Management, Graduate School of Management, Clark University
When Marissa Mayer was named CEO of Yahoo last week, many wished to be able to simply cheer the arrival of the newest member to join the small group of women CEOs in the Fortune 500. But celebration over Mayer’s appointment to become one of only a handful of women to hold the top spot in a major U.S. company was quickly overshadowed by the announcement that she is also seven months pregnant—and that she plans to largely work through her maternity leave.
The multi-layered news struck different chords with thought leaders throughout the tech industry, as well as the larger business community. To explore the full range of issues and implications for other executive women, we spoke with a wide range of industry experts and academics about their thoughts on Mayer’s groundbreaking career moves.
Read more
Voice of Experience: Shona Milne, CFO EMEA, Deutsche Bank
Voices of ExperienceAfter spending more than twenty-five years in investment banking in London, Shona Milne has taken on quite a few big roles. Now CFO for EMEA and Managing Director of EMEA Finance at Deutsche Bank’s London office, Milne is responsible for 27 countries.
But today, she’s also passionately focused on her position as a role model for women and LGBT individuals at the firm.
“I suppose I should be telling you my proudest achievements have been something like building a global finance function for equities or EMEA,” she said. “But actually what gives me more pride is my involvement in Deutsche Bank’s diversity networks, particularly being a senior sponsor of the LGBT network.”
“A few years ago I realized that I had to give something back, that I had the ability as a Managing Director to be a positive role model. There are not many people who are out at the Managing Director level, and it’s a privilege for those of us who are to be able to make a difference on this topic.”
She mentioned her involvement in Deutsche Bank’s web videos on diversity, participation in chairing diversity networks, and speaking on LGBT issues at events. “It’s incredibly rewarding. And maybe as you get older you become more comfortable about doing these things. You want to be a role model, not just for LGBT, but for senior women as well, and other diversity networks.”
“That gives me personal pride,” she added.
Read more
Can Women Have it All? Here’s What’s Missing In The Debate
Expert AnswersThe recent Atlantic cover story on whether or not women can “have it all” has certainly hit a national nerve. The week after the article came out it had received more than 1.1 million online views. Women and men all around the country are registering their objection or approval of author, mother of two, and former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter’s premise that the ‘70s feminist mantra of “having it all” is, in reality, not so easy – and maybe not even possible unless women push for changes in society.
Women who juggle career and family know well how tough it can be. I certainly do. I nurtured a baby and a start-up alone, after my divorce, squeezing time to write my business plan in between my day-to-day duties as a single mom. I worked past midnight many nights and on weekends to get everything done – and it was exhausting.
As a former corporate director, and now an entrepreneur and professional career coach, I’ve trained and worked with hundreds of professional women – and men – who say they feel overwhelmed by trying to “do it all.” Reality check – come on, who doesn’t feel this way? There is always something that needs pressing attention and hardly enough time in a day to get things done – ever.
But there is a better way than running after your life and trying to catch up 24/7. Let’s take a closer look. As women, many of us spend our lives wondering where we are and, in the words of that old Talking Heads song, “How did I get here?” This is not some existential malaise, a sense that the world is too much for us. This is real. It is real because over the last few decades all we did was add more to our workload. From having been focused entirely on home and kids, things are decidedly different.
Women have had 50 years of breakthroughs in society, becoming more the equal, but still not the equal, of men in earning-power and opportunities. But, we are the same as far as responsibilities are concerned. Here is the issue though: the majority of us can’t outsource having children (albeit I do see a celebrity trend emerging). And because we continue to find a partner, tie the knot, and set out to start families, we in essence continue to do all we ever did – plus add all the new exciting stuff like career, money, and feeling good about ourselves.
Because it is so overwhelming and because we have close to no role models that show us how it can be done successfully, we end up and remain self-doubting, self-sabotaging, self-hating, even. Why? Because what is on our plate is impossible to manage. When I was going through some of these things myself, I also wanted to figure out why this was. And Iwanted to find a solution – one that could help women everywhere. And, I did.
The solution is a concept I named ego-Rhythm. It states in its simplest essence that there is a designated time where you have everything in ONE rhythm at a time. You can have it all, over time, and eventually all at once, but it’s a process.
Read more
Movers and Shakers: Linda Beaudoin, SVP, Compensation, ING U.S. Investment Management
Movers and ShakersLinda Beaudoin, Head of Compensation for ING U.S. Investment Management (ING U.S. IM), spent the first 20 years of her career in finance. She started at Aetna working in management reporting, and then moved to the investment side supporting budgeting and analysis and product profitability. A few years after the firm was acquired by ING in 2000, she decided she was ready for a change.
“After twenty years of finance, I decided to take a risk and totally shift gears and move to HR. And it’s the best thing I could have done.” She started out as a generalist, but because of her finance background, Beaudoin quickly took on a comp focus. “That was my niche. I wish I had known that many years ago.”
“Never be afraid to take those risks – as you mature it’s something you become more comfortable doing,” she added.
One of Beaudoin’s proudest achievements came as the result of several acquisitions ING made in 2002 and 2003, including four separate asset management firms. “They had varied company philosophies and plans,” she explained, and the company had to figure out how to integrate them all. “And it was the first time I had worked intimately with senior management,” she recalled.
“I was new to HR and I realized I had a voice at the table. I realized I wasn’t going to get by on hard work alone. I started speaking up and being seen as a leader.”
She continued, “I wish I was more confident earlier in my career – that I had the confidence to speak up, offer my opinions, and ask questions I should have asked.”
“I always got kudos for the quality of my work, but not the recognition I should have gotten. If nobody knows you, it’s hard to progress in your career. My daughter is 27 and I give her that advice all the time. I’m trying to instill in her that guidance.”
Read more
The Case for Paid Parental Leave
Work-LifeIn a 2008 examination of 21 high-income countries, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) found that the U.S. ranked 20th in terms of generosity of parental leave and policy designs for couples – just ahead of dead last Switzerland. And the situation hasn’t improved much since. When Australia began its Paid Parental Scheme last year, the United States became the only member of the 34-country Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that does not offer some form of paid leave to working parents after the birth or adoption of a child.
The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 entitles eligible employees of covered employers to take unpaid, job-protected leave for certain family and medical reasons with continuation of group health insurance coverage under the same terms and conditions as if the employee had not taken leave. The FMLA does not apply to all employers or to all employees, however. According to the CEPR report, “about 40 percent of American workers are not eligible for FMLA, and only about a quarter of U.S. employers offer fully paid maternity-related leave of any kind.
In many ways, work/family debates are as much about class as they are about gender – highly educated and relatively wealthy professional women likely fare better in that they can afford high quality child care. Yet, in the U.S., the lack of maternity benefits is one of the few things that affects all working mothers, at all income levels, in all stages of their careers. But this is not just a women’s issue and discussing it as such only makes progress more unlikely. Only 50 nations offer paid leave for fathers and, though paid parental leave is not mandated in the U.S., there are some state-run programs, such as California and New Jersey.
When work/life balance was framed as a women’s issue, progress was slow, but as it continues to be framed as a topic that affects all workers, flexible work options are becoming more prevalent. How can we continue to restructure the debate – and the reality – so women, men, families, and employers win?
Read more
Voice of Experience: Melissa Butler, Partner, Capital Markets Group, White & Case
Voices of ExperienceAfter graduating from the University of Colorado – Boulder, Melissa Butler, now partner at White & Case, went on to study law at Georgetown. In 2001, she started her career working in corporate finance at Thacher Proffitt & Wood. “Then in 2006, after a particularly horrendous transaction, I got a call asking if I’d like to move to London… and I said sure,” she recalled with a laugh.
The call came from White & Case, and shortly thereafter, she joined the firm’s London Capital Markets Group focusing on US securities. Early this year, Butler was named partner – and, she says, this is her proudest achievement. “It’s the most amazing thing I’ve accomplished in my professional career.”
Currently Butler is fascinated by her current work in Africa. “It’s so exciting to work in a places that are not tainted with this idea that everyone knows everything. My clients really appreciate my advice as counsel, and I’m really contributing to the development of the market. I love it.”
In general, she continued, “As a securities lawyer, there are a lot of interesting developments, like issues around the new JOBs Act. As the world changes, the question is how we apply security acts from nearly 100 years ago to today’s markets.”
Read more
5 Ways to Manage Your Emotions at Work
Expert AnswersLast month, America got a peek behind the smooth façade of morning television to witness something raw and real: After months of media speculation, NBC’s Today show co-host Ann Curry was shown the door, and on June 28th, her emotionally naked, on-air goodbye became the story. And she wasn’t alone. Around the same time, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg admitted in a speech at Harvard that she cries at work. Last year, another high-profile woman revealed her true emotions publicly: Former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, well known for liberally using profanity at work and in the media, made news with her accusation that the board that fired her “…f—— me over.”
In her book, It’s Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace, author Anne Kreamer cites a 2009 survey she conducted with colleague Mark Truss of 701 respondents. Their results showed that 41% of the women they polled had cried at work in the preceding year. Are you among the ranks of women who’ve lost their cool at work? I am.
It’s no secret that we can’t turn off our hearts at the office. The challenge is knowing how to manage yourself. Enter emotion management, a branch of emotional intelligence, defined by noted researchers John D. Mayer, Peter Salovey and David R. Caruso as the culmination of a subtle, iterative process that empowers an individual to make a conscious decision about how to act on or express an emotion. Salovey and Caruso wrote a book, The Emotionally Intelligent Manager: How to Develop and Use the Four Key Emotional Skills of Leadership, that interprets their academic work for practitioners.
Emotion management is a critical skill for professional people, particularly women—for whom the display of emotion can mean being perceived as unable to handle stress or just another example of the hysterical/bitch stereotype.
While emotion management sounds great in theory, there are several challenges to practicing it in the real work world, and some obstacles might be surprising: for one, the more successful you are, the harder it may be even to identify your genuine feelings, the first requirement of emotion management. Social scientist Arlie Russell Hochschild wrote about this risk in her landmark book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, a risk that increases as one grows in rank and accrues tenure in a company or organization.
It makes sense—the more integral you are to the power structure of your company, the more likely you are to embrace its implicit values (including how to feel), possibly at the expense of your own. And wherever you sit on the totem pole, in these unstable economic times, it can be more tempting than ever to do what’s necessary to survive. But at what cost?
The good news is that you don’t have to sell out or move to a yurt to manage your emotions and be authentic at the same time. As I do with many complex work questions, I scheduled a telephone chat with my own executive coach-cum-emotion-genius Hemda Mizrahi, to talk about this topic. Hemda’s practice includes a majority of women in financial services. After our conversation and some reflection on my experiences with individuals and organizations as an HR practitioner, here are five suggestions to stay cool and stay real at the office.
Read more
Law Firms Less Willing to Promote Women to Equity Partner
Next LevelAccording to a new report by The National Law Journal, despite years of hard work on behalf of some law firms to attract and retain female lawyers through networking and mentoring initiatives, the percentage of female partners at the US’s largest law firms is still only 18.8%. When it comes to equity partnerships, women are an even smaller minority: 15.1%.
But, even considering the small numbers, as Vivia Chen points out for the Journal, that’s still an improvement. She writes:
Nevertheless, an increase of two or three percentage points for women in partnership roles hardly yields a number even close to representative of the number of women in the profession – and that’s not just true today, but has been true for many years.
In fact, Catalyst data published this month shows that for over two decades, the percentage of women enrolled in law school has hovered between 40% and 50%, a significantly higher percentage than that of women in any partnership role, let alone equity partnership roles. Why do we see such a striking disparity? The answers aren’t easy – and point to a vicious cycle keeping women out of leadership.
Read more
Success and the System: Brave Female CEOs Wanted for Systemic Change Gig
Featured, Industry Leaders, LeadershipApparently, Marissa Mayer, the new pregnant female CEO of Yahoo, dislikes feminism and taking maternity leave. Should we feel betrayed by her attitudes? Or should we rejoice that a woman gets a coveted spot as a CEO of a Fortune 500 company?
I believe that everyone, including Marissa Mayer, is entitled to her opinion around feminism (however much I personally disagree with her) and around her own boundaries for returning from maternity leave as much as the next person. Nitpicking about her choices would be a distraction from the real issue: why systemic bias in most workplace cultures results in protectionist behaviors from female executives that make them look more like their fathers than their daughters.
However, what Marissa Mayer may not fully realize is that with great power of being a CEO comes great responsibility.
All leaders need to be conscious that their actions and words heavily influence company culture. Behaviors shape the system and the system dictates workplace culture, often invisible to the naked eye, but can be simply defined as “how we do things around here.” The workplace culture in which you operate dictates whether you are running with a weight around your ankle on a potholed road or running on the latest Olympic track with the wind at your back.
Read more