Image via Shutterstock
By Aimee Hansen
As U.S. corporate boardroom diversity continues to fail desperately at reflecting the country’s rapidly shifting consumer power base, the question is no longer whether there are enough Hispanic or Latino/a leaders in the candidate pool to fuel diversity in the years to come.
But rather, how do companies redefine the candidate sphere to achieve greater diversity now? The real issue is that Corporate America doesn’t need a few more Hispanic faces trickling into the boardroom.
It urgently needs a boardroom selection strategy that is focused on magnetizing and magnifying diversity as the primary imperative to business.
Already the New Mainstream Consumer
More than 1 in 6 Americans claim Hispanic origin. As written in The Huffington Post, “The shifting demographics in America are an eminent reality.” By 2044, the U.S. will be a majority-minority nation according to U.S. Census Data, as “minorities drive 100% of population growth.”
“The Hispanic Imperative” report by Korn Ferry pointed out some compelling statistics on consumer spending power. Hispanic families were responsible for 51% of homes purchased in 2015. They also drove 73% of Toyota’s 2015 U.S. sales growth. Hispanic buying power was estimated at $1.4 trillion in 2016, more than Mexico’s gross domestic product and bigger than the economies of all but 14 countries.
“Hispanics are the new mainstream consumer, and if you’re not addressing them, you’re not going to be in business,” said international business executive Sol Trujillo, putting them above Millennials in purchase power.
Driving Entrepreneurial and Economic Growth
Latino entrepreneurs began 86% of new businesses across 2007-2012, with Latinas leading the charge. According to the 2016 State of Women-Owned Business Report, the number of Latina owned firms skyrocketed by 137% vs. 45% for all women between 2007 and 2016, with Hispanic-owned companies growing at a rate 15 times more than all other firms according to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
Meanwhile, a lack of access to capital and resources hinders the massive economic revenue boost these new businesses could represent. Latina business owners earn on average 36 cents to the dollar versus their non-minority female counterparts, meaning $172 billion in untapped potential.
Drastically Underrepresented in Corporate Leadership
Cid Wilson, President and CEO at HACR, writes, “Given the demographic and economic clout of our community, the absence of Hispanics in the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies continues to be a missed opportunity for long-term growth and market dominance.”
In a gross underrepresentation relative to population and contribution to economic growth, “Hispanics represent barely more than 2% of directors of boards of Fortune 1000 companies,” per the Korn Ferry report.
“The Missing Pieces Report” showed that among Fortune 500 companies, Hispanics/Latino/a held a total of 3.5% of board seats in 2016, and Hispanic men gained 8 seats between 2012 and 2016 while Hispanic women lost two.
Among Fortune 100 companies only, Hispanics/Latino/a held 4.5% of board seats, with men losing 2 seats and women gaining 4.
Diversity is greater among Fortune 100 companies, with women and minorities holding 35.9% of board seats, compared to 30.8% in the Fortune 500. There are also small but significant signs of progress in new appointments.
This year, two Latina women have broken into top leadership roles in politics and corporate America. Geisha Williams became the first Fortune 500 Latina CEO in March, after being selected as CEO and President of PG&E Corporation. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (Democrat, Nevada) became the first Latina member of the U.S. Senate.
After Heidrick & Struggles 2016 Board Monitor (which measures composition, experience, turnover and diversity) documented a seven year plateau for Hispanic new board appointments among Fortune 500 firms, their Board Monitor 2017: Is Diversity At an Impasse? report revealed an all-time Hispanic high of 6.4% of new appointments in 2016, up from 4% in 2015, where it’s lingered for years. 59% of these appointments were to consumer boards where Hispanics took 12% of available seats.
While a 60% year on year increase, it comes after a seven year flat and builds on a small base relative to nearly 18% representation in the population. It also comes with the first backwards slide on female representation since the report began, dropping 2 percentage points to 27.8%, ending a seven-year run of small annual gains, and causing Heidrick & Struggles to once again push back their predicted date for 50% women representation in the boardroom to 2032 (pushed back last year from 2026, and previously from 2024.)
Why The Candidate Pool Approach Is Broken
“Unfortunately, U.S. companies have a long way to go to achieve diversity in their boardrooms and their executive ranks,” said Deborah Gillis, president and CEO, Catalyst. “Progress is glacially slow and boardrooms don’t look anything like the customers and stakeholders they serve and represent. It takes intentional, bold action to accelerate meaningful change.”
Boards continue to pull from the usual suspects for new appointments – the opposite of intentional, bold action – which in turn keeps diversity influx low and slow by default, since most of these suspects are non-minority men. But every single opportunity to choose diversity matters.
“There is less director turnover than people think,” said Antonio Garza, former US Ambassador to Mexico, in response to the Korn Ferry report. “Boards must recognize that they will have a limited number of opportunities to diversify their composition.”
According to the Heidrick & Struggles report, new board appointments pooled from current and former CEOs and CFOs dropped a bit from 73% in 2015 (a high) to 66% in 2016, but still make up the vast majority. Nearly 75% of appointments had previous board experience.
In the Korn Ferry report, Patricia Salas Pineda, group vice president for Hispanic Business Strategy for Toyota Motor North America, speculates s that focusing unduly on finance expertise in boardroom recruitment may have contributed to stalling Hispanic advancement over the last years.
Redefining the Candidate Sphere to Drive Meaningful Change
“Boards need to be responsive to shareholders; that’s the traditional view,” said Gerry Lopez, CEO and President of Extended Stay America in the Korn Ferry report. “But they must also be attentive to all sorts of other stakeholders, which means, depending on the business that you’re in, employees, customers, regulators, other in influencers, and the population at large.”
Shareholders are no longer the only stakeholders and the population is broadening, which means broadening the boardroom selection process.
“Boards that are seeking to broaden their capacities may will be considering candidates from sectors far from their enterprises,” according to Latino Leaders. “If nominating committees narrow their searches too early, fail to reach out in appropriate ways to both rising and established but unfamiliar talent, and elect to limit interviews to too few aspirants, organizations can miss out on opportunities to make their boards deeper and more inclusive.”
In short, selection committees needs to look beyond the traditionally deemed boardroom ready CEOs and CFOs candidates. Boardrooms need to be accountable for diversity itself and abandon the idea that the best directors come from one predictable background.
“While great boards should have CEO as members, there are other strong skill-sets and experiences that can be found in those holding other senior positions, such as chief marketing officers, chief hr officers and chief finance officers that really enrich the board conversation,”Bonnie Gwin, vice-chairman and co-managing partner of the global CEO and board practice at Heidrick & Struggles, told Forbes. “In those roles, you will find more diversity and therefore more diverse options for the boardroom.”
“…farsighted boards have moved beyond viewing those backgrounds as the sole gateway and are looking to other skills that will add value in the boardroom,” said Garza in the Korn Ferry report. “The bottom line is that it takes real planning on the part of the board in order to use their opportunities wisely, and then the vision to commit to looking beyond traditional notions of who should be in the room.”
It’s official when it comes to Hispanic and Latino/a growth. Diversity itself has become a high stake matter (amidst diverse stakeholders) for U.S. boardrooms.
Voice of Experience: Priscila Palazzo, Legal Director, WEX Latin America
Hispanic Heritage, People, Voices of ExperienceBy Cathie Ericson
“While law might appear to be my main job, I also excel at understanding people and their behavior,” says WEX’s Priscila Palazzo. “It’s important to be open to new ideas and thoughts, but especially to feedback. If you seek it out and reflect on it, it can help show you areas where you can grow and improve. As women, we tend to follow our hearts and intuition, but we need to balance that with feedback.”
Law and Business Combine for Success
Palazzo’s “career” began at an early age when she worked with her dad as a child, making two pennies to start. But as she got older, he started including her in meetings which gave her a flavor for work situations. Although she had hoped to eventually work with him, she ended up pursuing a law degree. In her native country of Brazil, you can begin working as soon as you start law school, and so on her first day of class she started as a trainee in a law firm, experiencing the challenge of balancing work and school simultaneously.
With a specialty in labor and consumer law, Palazzo moved to the United States as soon as she graduated to take summer courses at Harvard, and on her return joined a firm specializing in business law. She became a partner at a young age, which gave her more exposure, and a larger law firm soon invited her to join the M & A team where she assisted the former company that became WEX.
She says that when WEX took over, she made what at the time was a joke that maybe they could actually sign her paycheck, but it wasn’t long before she realized that she was interested in leaving the law firm to go to the corporate environment. Though she had initially worried that she wouldn’t find it as inspiring to work for just one client, Palazzo has been there four years now and continues to appreciate the variety of work.
Recently she was invited to lead an exciting project that focuses on business, a fascinating intersection that keeps her connected to people all around the company. “Being a lawyer is amazing, but it’s also exciting to be able to reinvent yourself. I’ve had to learn how to communicate with different audiences, other than exclusively with lawyers,” she notes.
While she names her dad as her first sponsor, she also appreciates the foresight of the main partner at the boutique law firm who offered her a trainee job. As Palazzo says, since then she has been surrounded with good people who have been helpful in providing advice – and sometimes, most helpfully, sharing what not to do.
A Multi-Cultural Heritage Contributes to Success at the Global Company
Palazzo is delighted to be able to use her Latino heritage to make a difference; as WEX expands to multiple regions, the company has begun translating its internal communications into Spanish, and she has enjoyed sharing her knowledge.
That multi-cultural bent extends to her mentors, including José Roberto Kracochansky (CEO for WEX Latin America) and two colleagues, Hilary Rapkin and Keith Rodda, with whom she’s been working for four years. “Hilary is Canadian and Keith is from South Africa, so it’s not only language but behaviors and customs we have to integrate,” she says, adding that everyone has a different idea of the ideal model for practicing law.
Being attuned to different cultures is something that’s always been part of her makeup, with a big family who is half Spanish and half Italian. She speaks several languages and is an avid traveler, which began at an early age when she participated in exchange programs. Over the years, she has grown to appreciate the significant upsides that come from meeting new people and learning about their cultures. “The more you learn from other people, the more you can relate to others and learn cues to their behavior,” she says.
“I am also not a traditional lawyer; I laugh out loud and am not the buttoned-up stereotype you might imagine,” Palazzo says, to the point that she finds sometimes people are surprised to learn her occupation.
“I was always encouraged to live outside the box, and it has paid off in my ability to face different challenges,” she says.
Hispanic Heritage: Why Corporate America Needs to Shake Up How Boardrooms Are Filled
Career Advice, Featured, Hispanic HeritageImage via Shutterstock
By Aimee Hansen
As U.S. corporate boardroom diversity continues to fail desperately at reflecting the country’s rapidly shifting consumer power base, the question is no longer whether there are enough Hispanic or Latino/a leaders in the candidate pool to fuel diversity in the years to come.
But rather, how do companies redefine the candidate sphere to achieve greater diversity now? The real issue is that Corporate America doesn’t need a few more Hispanic faces trickling into the boardroom.
It urgently needs a boardroom selection strategy that is focused on magnetizing and magnifying diversity as the primary imperative to business.
Already the New Mainstream Consumer
More than 1 in 6 Americans claim Hispanic origin. As written in The Huffington Post, “The shifting demographics in America are an eminent reality.” By 2044, the U.S. will be a majority-minority nation according to U.S. Census Data, as “minorities drive 100% of population growth.”
“The Hispanic Imperative” report by Korn Ferry pointed out some compelling statistics on consumer spending power. Hispanic families were responsible for 51% of homes purchased in 2015. They also drove 73% of Toyota’s 2015 U.S. sales growth. Hispanic buying power was estimated at $1.4 trillion in 2016, more than Mexico’s gross domestic product and bigger than the economies of all but 14 countries.
“Hispanics are the new mainstream consumer, and if you’re not addressing them, you’re not going to be in business,” said international business executive Sol Trujillo, putting them above Millennials in purchase power.
Driving Entrepreneurial and Economic Growth
Latino entrepreneurs began 86% of new businesses across 2007-2012, with Latinas leading the charge. According to the 2016 State of Women-Owned Business Report, the number of Latina owned firms skyrocketed by 137% vs. 45% for all women between 2007 and 2016, with Hispanic-owned companies growing at a rate 15 times more than all other firms according to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
Meanwhile, a lack of access to capital and resources hinders the massive economic revenue boost these new businesses could represent. Latina business owners earn on average 36 cents to the dollar versus their non-minority female counterparts, meaning $172 billion in untapped potential.
Drastically Underrepresented in Corporate Leadership
Cid Wilson, President and CEO at HACR, writes, “Given the demographic and economic clout of our community, the absence of Hispanics in the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies continues to be a missed opportunity for long-term growth and market dominance.”
In a gross underrepresentation relative to population and contribution to economic growth, “Hispanics represent barely more than 2% of directors of boards of Fortune 1000 companies,” per the Korn Ferry report.
“The Missing Pieces Report” showed that among Fortune 500 companies, Hispanics/Latino/a held a total of 3.5% of board seats in 2016, and Hispanic men gained 8 seats between 2012 and 2016 while Hispanic women lost two.
Among Fortune 100 companies only, Hispanics/Latino/a held 4.5% of board seats, with men losing 2 seats and women gaining 4.
Diversity is greater among Fortune 100 companies, with women and minorities holding 35.9% of board seats, compared to 30.8% in the Fortune 500. There are also small but significant signs of progress in new appointments.
This year, two Latina women have broken into top leadership roles in politics and corporate America. Geisha Williams became the first Fortune 500 Latina CEO in March, after being selected as CEO and President of PG&E Corporation. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (Democrat, Nevada) became the first Latina member of the U.S. Senate.
After Heidrick & Struggles 2016 Board Monitor (which measures composition, experience, turnover and diversity) documented a seven year plateau for Hispanic new board appointments among Fortune 500 firms, their Board Monitor 2017: Is Diversity At an Impasse? report revealed an all-time Hispanic high of 6.4% of new appointments in 2016, up from 4% in 2015, where it’s lingered for years. 59% of these appointments were to consumer boards where Hispanics took 12% of available seats.
While a 60% year on year increase, it comes after a seven year flat and builds on a small base relative to nearly 18% representation in the population. It also comes with the first backwards slide on female representation since the report began, dropping 2 percentage points to 27.8%, ending a seven-year run of small annual gains, and causing Heidrick & Struggles to once again push back their predicted date for 50% women representation in the boardroom to 2032 (pushed back last year from 2026, and previously from 2024.)
Why The Candidate Pool Approach Is Broken
“Unfortunately, U.S. companies have a long way to go to achieve diversity in their boardrooms and their executive ranks,” said Deborah Gillis, president and CEO, Catalyst. “Progress is glacially slow and boardrooms don’t look anything like the customers and stakeholders they serve and represent. It takes intentional, bold action to accelerate meaningful change.”
Boards continue to pull from the usual suspects for new appointments – the opposite of intentional, bold action – which in turn keeps diversity influx low and slow by default, since most of these suspects are non-minority men. But every single opportunity to choose diversity matters.
“There is less director turnover than people think,” said Antonio Garza, former US Ambassador to Mexico, in response to the Korn Ferry report. “Boards must recognize that they will have a limited number of opportunities to diversify their composition.”
According to the Heidrick & Struggles report, new board appointments pooled from current and former CEOs and CFOs dropped a bit from 73% in 2015 (a high) to 66% in 2016, but still make up the vast majority. Nearly 75% of appointments had previous board experience.
In the Korn Ferry report, Patricia Salas Pineda, group vice president for Hispanic Business Strategy for Toyota Motor North America, speculates s that focusing unduly on finance expertise in boardroom recruitment may have contributed to stalling Hispanic advancement over the last years.
Redefining the Candidate Sphere to Drive Meaningful Change
“Boards need to be responsive to shareholders; that’s the traditional view,” said Gerry Lopez, CEO and President of Extended Stay America in the Korn Ferry report. “But they must also be attentive to all sorts of other stakeholders, which means, depending on the business that you’re in, employees, customers, regulators, other in influencers, and the population at large.”
Shareholders are no longer the only stakeholders and the population is broadening, which means broadening the boardroom selection process.
“Boards that are seeking to broaden their capacities may will be considering candidates from sectors far from their enterprises,” according to Latino Leaders. “If nominating committees narrow their searches too early, fail to reach out in appropriate ways to both rising and established but unfamiliar talent, and elect to limit interviews to too few aspirants, organizations can miss out on opportunities to make their boards deeper and more inclusive.”
In short, selection committees needs to look beyond the traditionally deemed boardroom ready CEOs and CFOs candidates. Boardrooms need to be accountable for diversity itself and abandon the idea that the best directors come from one predictable background.
“While great boards should have CEO as members, there are other strong skill-sets and experiences that can be found in those holding other senior positions, such as chief marketing officers, chief hr officers and chief finance officers that really enrich the board conversation,”Bonnie Gwin, vice-chairman and co-managing partner of the global CEO and board practice at Heidrick & Struggles, told Forbes. “In those roles, you will find more diversity and therefore more diverse options for the boardroom.”
“…farsighted boards have moved beyond viewing those backgrounds as the sole gateway and are looking to other skills that will add value in the boardroom,” said Garza in the Korn Ferry report. “The bottom line is that it takes real planning on the part of the board in order to use their opportunities wisely, and then the vision to commit to looking beyond traditional notions of who should be in the room.”
It’s official when it comes to Hispanic and Latino/a growth. Diversity itself has become a high stake matter (amidst diverse stakeholders) for U.S. boardrooms.
4 Types of Discrimination Mothers Face (and What to Do)
Career Advice, Guest ContributionGuest contributed by Sarah Landrum
Image via Shutterstock
Many women are faced with the struggle of feeling like they need to choose between family and career. Unfortunately, the feeling that new mothers are unable to perform their duties goes further than just a societal stereotype — it’s a sentiment that infests businesses at all levels.
New mothers or expecting mothers face all kinds of discrimination in the workplace, holding them back from achieving their career goals, even though these acts of discrimination may be illegal.
Understanding what kinds of discrimination a new or expecting mother may face is important for any woman hoping to grow her family and her career simultaneously. Whether you’re hoping to have a child soon or you’ve just had a baby, here are a few of the most prevalent forms of discrimination – and what you can do to fight it.
Under the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, employers can’t legally discriminate against job applicants or employees based on race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or age. Under this law, pregnancy is considered a form of gender discrimination.
Despite this protection, almost 31,000 women had to file pregnancy discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between the years 2011 and 2015.
With pregnancy discrimination lawsuits making up over 18% of the EEOC’s Title VII suits in 2014, it’s important to know what constitutes pregnancy discrimination. If an employer is refusing to hire or promote a pregnant woman or has fired a woman for being pregnant, these are all forms of pregnancy discrimination.
What many women don’t know is that this includes failure to accommodate pregnancy, not allowing women to pump at work or retaliating against pregnancy employees. Most states require companies to provide reasonable accommodations to employees based on the needs of pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions. This may include providing a stool for employees who typically stand during the day or even moving an employee’s desk closer to the bathroom.
Women face many different kinds of harassment in the workplace, and harassment over pregnancy isn’t that much different. Pregnancy harassment is a form of sexual harassment, which is illegal and should not be tolerated. People like to talk about pregnancy, but if that discussion crosses a line into how you became pregnant or implies anything negative about you for becoming pregnant, it becomes sexual harassment.
Harassment can come from many different places, including from clients, customers, employees, supervisors and coworkers. No matter where the harassment is coming from, be sure to follow the proper steps to file a sexual harassment case at work.
The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) gives new parents 12 weeks of job-protected time away from work after having or adopting a child, though it is unpaid. During this 12 weeks, your employer is not allowed to permanently fill your position or they must be able to offer you an equivalent position when your leave is over.
This law doesn’t cover everyone — only 55.9% of workers are covered under FMLA. That means almost two in five women do not have any federally protected maternity leave.
For women serious about advancing their career, it is tempting to take a short maternity leave and get back to work quickly. While this is fine for some, others may find it can have negative consequences on their health and some infants have higher needs at birth than others.
In situations where women aren’t covered by FMLA, taking short-term disability offers a way to take time off work for pregnancy and post-natal care. You don’t have to have a pregnancy complication or be unable to do your duties in a traditional sense. It may feel like a misnomer to pregnant women who aren’t disabled, but it can offer the necessary time-off that is legally protected.
Women may face discrimination in the workplace from needing to take this short-term disability leave either for a traditional pregnancy or one with conditions or complications related to their pregnancy or for the labor and delivery itself.
Businesses can’t treat short-term disability leave for pregnancy differently than another employee taking short-term disability for an illness, the care of a sick family member or another condition. If a woman returns to work after having her child and is fired, demoted or retaliated against for taking time off, these may be forms of discrimination.
With 42% of household breadwinners being mothers, it feels like we’re moving in the right direction to becoming a society that accepts women who are both mothers and professionals. But for those who dream of having both the family and the career, there are still many challenges they may face day-to-day.
Advancing your career and growing your family depends on knowing the signs of discrimination and the various laws protecting women and their right to procreate. If you feel you’ve been passed over for a job, ignored for a promotion or even penalized for wanting to become pregnant or becoming pregnant, be sure to follow the proper protocols for making a discrimination case.
To begin creating your case, talk with the HR department. They should be ready and willing to point you in the right direction of forms, paperwork and other important pieces of filing your claim. If you’re unable to talk with your HR department or they are unhelpful, you can go straight to the EEOC.
Disclaimer: The opinion and views of Guest contributors are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com
Self-Regulation is the Key to a Successful Career
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!You don’t have to be a robot but you do need to know how to apply emotional intelligence (EQ). If you are short of EQ, then work with a coach to develop it and if you still don’t have it then you have to learn how to fake it until you make it.
Reactions matter. It’s a virtuous circle to stay calm and carry on.
People want to work with people who are going to show real but positive emotion regarding regular and especially stressful situations.
Equally, be aware of passive aggressiveness which is a productivity killer and is mistaken as self-regulation. It typically takes the form of team members leisurely ignoring each other and pursuing their own agenda. If you are saying yes to a task but really are saying no, then you should step back and think about other ways to communicate that you would like to do the task differently.
Treat others how you would like to be treated.
Voice of Experience: Kathleen Ziegler, Head of Distribution, AIG’s new technology-focused subsidiary
People, Voices of ExperienceThe Long Hours Game
Career Advice, Work-LifeThe 24/7 hour work week marches on and on. The get up and go and keep on going. The long hours game. We all do it from time to time.
How can you have a healthy, sustainable lifestyle and build your career?
The action-packed day of the executive continues to be a glorified image of leadership, and arguably one that is dangerously unsustainable and at best questionable in effectiveness. At theglasshammer, we’ve covered how the 24/7 work week is not only disastrous for gender equality on a whole, but also diminishes your personal leadership effectiveness and your health.
The Atlantic has noted the tendency of elite, wealthy American men to be “the workaholics of the world,” but just because long hours are the status quo doesn’t mean it’s the key to successful business or career development.
It’s a rising argument in the context of today’s information age workplace, in which we tend to be knowledge workers conceiving of and implementing ideas, that a five hour work day would be a business hack for more productivity and profitability.
So what’s with the persistence – and over-valuation – of long hours in the corporate world?
A Man’s (Ego) Game
According to Professor Joan C. Williams in HBR, the long hours fascination is underpinned by an elitist male value system based on class, status and morality. As sociologist Michèle Lamont states, ambition and a strong work ethic are “doubly sacred – as signals of both moral and socioeconomic purity.” Along these lines, commitment is “‘singular’ devotion to work,” where it must be the central focus of one’s existence.
Within this elitist moral construct, “being consumed” by one’s work is both a status symbol and moral badge. As Williams writes, “‘being slammed’ is a socially acceptable way of saying “I am important.” Whereas fifty years ago, the elite working class showed their status by displaying their abundant time for leisure, today it’s about displaying your extreme schedule.
Research has found that the long hour craze is also yet another masculine test of endurance and perceived heroism. When it comes to what’s really behind the persistence and glorification of putting in the midnight oil, Williams writes: “It’s not productivity. It’s not innovation. It’s identity.”
So what does this ego-driven identity booster do for business, really?
Productivity or Priorities?
Across a 9.4 hour work day, we often only do 2-3 hours of real work, while working excessive hours hurts our productivity. After 50 hours, our productivity decreases and it plummets at 55 hours, with studies showing no discernible effect between working 56 hours and 70 when it comes to creating results.
As David Bolchover writes in an FT thought leadership piece, a decade long McKinsey study found that when senior executives were experiencing a ‘state of flow’, they were five times more productive than during other work hours. Senior level leaders felt especially more productive when they achieved flow.
Flow is akin to being able to immerse, focus, and apply your core abilities to a given goal or challenge, but most people only feel they are in that space 10% to 50% (at the very high and rare end) of the time. Sleep deficit or screen fatigue is not conducive to having an immersive focus. Bolchover writes, “Clearly, there is an inverse relationship to exploit: more focus for fewer hours.”
In fact, an over-abundance of time and resources can actually be a downfall for business. “When you spend too much time on an activity, just as when you have too large a budget, your priorities can become murky. You risk losing the precision and focus that come from having limited resources,” writes Chairman of JetBlue Airways, Joel Peterson. Peterson argues it’s not the hours we have, but the clarity of priorities we set, that drives productivity.
Worse for Women
While there are many studies showing how overworking adversely impacts health on a myriad of measurements for everyone, a recent study involving 7,500 people over 32 years from Ohio State University found that working long hours is far worse for women’s health than men’s.
Within the study, “fifty-six percent of the people studied worked 41 to 50 hours a week, 28 percent worked 30 to 40 hours per week and 16 percent worked more than 51 hours per week.”
Working 60 hours or more per week on average for three decades was found to triple the risk of diabetes, cancer, heart trouble, and arthritis for women. Risk increased after 40 hours, and became heightened after 50 hours, for women, but not for men.
The researchers hypothesized that this was reflective of the multiple roles women juggle and disproportionate pressure at home. In fact, when men worked moderately longer hours (41 to 50 hours), they had lower risk of heart disease, lung disease, and depression than men who worked under 40 hours, at least when it comes to early onset disease.
However you feel about the results, it’s yet more proof that chronically playing the long hours game is no path towards gender equality or thriving personally. “Being consumed” – even when it comes from a place of intrinsic motivation – often ends in burning out.
The Smart Hours Game
If not by playing the long hours game, how can you strategically use your time to build your leadership qualities?
What you could do, rather than work endless hours, is model a leadership strategy of carving out prioritized, focused time. Here’s a tip based on top leaders such as Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey: spend an hour or day (or five hours a week) in some way engaging in active learning – whether reading, listening, experiencing, experimenting or reflecting.
The long hours game is too often misguided. It’s time we moved from the long hours game to the smart hours game. To do this, we need companies to get “it” and according to Inc., it’s the difference of valuing improvement (not just productivity and not just presenteeism) that will set you apart as a leader.
How to Nurture Independent Employees (Who Still Stand by You)
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!, Guest ContributionImage via Shutterstock
Guest contributed by Lisa Messenger
Ten years ago, you rarely heard the term ‘intrapreneur’ – the buzzword used to describe an employee who has an entrepreneurial spirit. But these days, it’s front and centre of every work place as we all do our best to engage and develop those working within our ranks who could easily run their own. Perhaps you have one (or you are one) – the staff member who follows their initiative, turns an idea into reality and works with passion and purpose. Basically, the ideal employee – or are they? The downside of giving your staff total autonomy in the office is their independence might backfire on leaders, if you’re not careful. Driven, ambitious and determined, an intrapreneur can follow their dreams right out the door, if a company doesn’t give them a reason to be loyal.
And while they can be hard to handle at times, there is great value in having an intrapreneur as part of your team, or company.
I am particularly aware of this when nurturing my staff. Our entire magazine is built on an ‘anything is possible’ premise; our pages filled with the inspiring stories of professionals, creatives, thought-leaders and artists who work without limits, take chances and aren’t afraid of risky decisions. I encourage my team to think independently, freely and rebelliously but every day, I still need them to come into the office and commit to my company.
I’ve happy to say my core team has been with me since the start of Collective Hub, helping the magazine to expand to a global publication sold in 37 countries and the online platforms to go even further. It’s been an amazing journey and I couldn’t have done it without both their commitment and self-sufficiency.
But intrapreneurs have their challenges. It’s an interesting contradiction but one that leaders of the future have to master. How can you nurture independent employees who think like renegades but are as loyal as family? Here are my top tips:
Create a Safe Space. I’m not talking about installing smoke alarms and ensuring there’s no loose floorboards. It’s important to create a culture where employees feel like they can make their ideas heard, without feeling judged, overpowered or ignored. Be aware that different people communicate differently. Forcing everyone to pitch ideas at a weekly meeting may be a nightmare for introverts. Instead start a ‘cyber comments box’ – it could be a shared Google document where employees can suggest ideas, either under their name or anonymously.
Act Like an Owner. This is one of the employee principles at LinkedIn. As one former intern explained in a blog post, “For some [this] means making wise financial decisions on your budget, others it is turning off the lights as you leave a room, or picking up trash that someone left behind.” This mindset is vital for employee loyalty – encouraging people to look past their job description and feel responsible for the 360-degree outcome of a company. It only takes small changes. Research has found that an employee’s sense of ‘psychological ownership’ can be boosted simply by personalising their office with family photos or allowing them to choose their own job title.
Get Out of the Office. On a hot summer’s afternoon, when you’re sitting at a desk behind a window, the freelance life can seem very tempting. That’s why I encourage my team to escape into the outside world, whether that means scheduling a meeting at a pavement café, taking a micro-break in the park or hosting a brainstorming afternoon beside a hotel pool (yes, we’ve done this). Airbnb applies its brand motto – ‘You belong anywhere’ – to its employees, who can roam between different workspaces in their global offices, inside and out.
Money does Matter. There’s sometimes a misconception, especially in the startup, that loving your job is enough to make up for an appallingly low salary. Studies do show that wages are less important to Gen-Y than baby boomers but it’s still important for a worker to feel financially valued. As a leader, this may mean thinking creatively, especially if an accounts department is watching you carefully. If a junior staff member has an idea for a new platform or product, can you offer them a percentage of the profit in exchange for overseeing it? It’s a morale boosting gesture, plus we’re all more likely to give a project our all if it could potentially fill our pockets.
Explain Your No-Moments. At some point even your star employee will have to deal with one of their key ideas being rejected. This can lead to a dejected worker scouring job boards for vacancies, which is why it’s so important to explain your reasons using hard facts and data. Why isn’t the concept commercially-viable right now, could it be explored in the future or could you evolve the idea to make it more do-able? Always remind employees that not every idea can be implemented. As Steve Jobs said, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on… It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.”
Disclaimer: The opinions and views of our Guest contributors are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com
8 Cover Letter Writing Mistakes You Should Avoid
Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!, Guest ContributionGuest contributed by Gloria Kopp
Image via Shutterstock
Even seasoned professional women who have years of experience working on Wall Street can make mistakes when writing cover letters and trying to get promotions or change jobs. These mistakes can really derail a promising career, and stall your professional development by several years. Fortunately, this resource for professional women can help you avoid making mistakes that can hold you back and instead you can really thrive as you soar up the career ladder.
1. Sending the Same Generic Letter to Every Application
While it may be a hassle, the truth is that you need to personalize every letter to the specific job you are applying for, you can’t send anything generic out, or all you will receive is a very generic rejection.
2. Making It All about You
Your cover letter should highlight all of the reasons that the job and the company can benefit from you, not all of the reasons you want to job. You need to state the benefits that the company will receive from hiring you, not vice versa.
3. Update Your Details
Make sure you have a mature and professional email address, so you may need to update the Hotmail you’ve had since you were a teenager. You need to make sure that every piece of information you provide is accurate, and that your LinkedIn, phone number, and address, are all up to date, and easy to reach you on.
4. Not Using Basic File Types
If you make it difficult to open or view your application, for example by using unusual file types when you send your documents, the HR manager is very unlikely to go to the trouble of figuring out how they open them. More likely, you will simply end up being sent to the trash pile, as there are plenty of people with easy to access resume and cover letters.
5. Not Focusing on Your Introduction
Your introduction needs to really grab the attention of the reader, and you absolutely must make sure it is catchy, and shows you as smart, capable, and apart from the crowd. Many people brush over the introduction to try and get into the content which they consider more important. By doing this, you may lose the interest of the HR manager before you’ve even been able to sell yourself.
6. Failing to Back Up Your Claims
When you write about certain skills or qualifications that you have gained in your career, you need to explicitly exhibit where you gained them and how you used them.
7. Just Repeating Your Resume
Your cover letter should significantly expand on the information in your resume, not just repeat it in a different format.
8. Failing to Edit and Proofread Properly
Many competent women simply assume that they haven’t made mistakes when they’re writing, simply because they don’t tend to make mistakes. The truth is that these small errors can happen to anyone, anywhere, and failing to check over your work out of pride, arrogance, or even ignorance that there could be anything wrong. The following online tools can make your life a lot easier and ensure that every part of your application is flawless:
By avoiding the mistakes above, you can make sure you are doing everything you can to fast-track your career.
Gloria Kopp is a digital marketer and an elearning consultant from Manville city. Now she works as a content manager at Boomessays company. Besides, she is a regular contributor to such websites as Engadget, Huffingtonpost, Essayroo, etc. Read her Studydemic posts.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions of Guest contributors are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com
Summer Publishing Break
FeaturedCall Nicki Gilmour on +1 646 6882318 or nicki@theglasshammer.com if you want to sign up for individual or group coaching sessions this Fall.
Mover and Shaker: Noelia Torres, Market Development Lead, WEX Europe Limited
Movers and Shakers, PeopleBy Cathie Ericson
Although WEX’s Noelia Torres began her career as a journalist, then as a public relations practitioner for large consumer brands, her career has been linked to the payments industry for the past 16 years.
She made the move when she realized that although she enjoyed advising clients on strategy, she yearned to see how it all played out and decided to try the client side. She began her finance career at Barclaycard, an independent division of Barclays, in Dublin and then entered what she calls “the exciting world of payments,” where she enjoys contributing to the constant evolution and progress in the payments world.
Over the years she has worked in a wide variety of different markets and geographies, starting in a local market in Spain and then moving on to WEX initially with responsibilities throughout Europe and now she embraces her new challenge of working in global strategy.
Right now Torres is focusing on new ways to innovate and simplify the ways that companies make and receive payments, using a design thinking approach that employs a creative process to solve business problems. . She describes herself as passionate about the methodology because it always begins by looking at people and their unmet needs.. “We have to remember we are always designing for people: You have to understand what each customer wants and needs and how they behave and think when they’re interacting with products or services.”
Teamwork is Goal Number One
When she first entered the corporate world, she expected it to be full of uncertainty and overly competitive, organized in silos where everyone had their own specialization as a sole focus. While her expectation of embracing uncertainty came true, she has since seen that over the years much of the corporate world has evolved, particularly the team orientation. “It’s not about just my sales volume or my meeting,” she says, but doing the best for everyone.
In fact, she considers her ability to build teams as the professional achievement she is most proud of so far — bringing disparate teams together to work toward the same goal. “No matter what department we are in, we want to discover our customers’ problems and solve them,” she points out.
Over the years that has been one of Torres’ biggest learning moments, that the most relevant asset a company has, no matter the size, is their team. She learned that early on when she worked for a Spanish savings bank, Caixa Galicia, with a team composed of only eight people who covered the entire spectrum, from consumer to business to government accounts.
While other, larger companies might have devoted at least 100 people to covering that breadth, her firm wanted to play in the big leagues and strove to provide supreme experience even with a smaller team. “I learned early on and have taken this lesson with me that if you want to achieve a goal, it’s all about the team that surrounds you,” she says.
In fact, that is the first “ingredient” in her professional recipe for success – knowing that working in silos or isolation is ineffective. Secondly she encourages others to listen a lot and then go outside the company to listen more. “Don’t get trapped inside your company; when you go to your customer and ask ‘why,’ you can gain insight that will help you improve.” And finally, she adds “Never give up. I know that we can get better;” as another touchpoint : A leader’s function should be to transform the team to improve.
Opportunities to Learn Are Everywhere
Torres says that both sponsorship and mentorship have been crucial to her success, helping guide her professional career, but also providing direction in her personal domain. “My sponsor in Europe believed in me from the very first day and was key in opening the doors to my most recent move to the United States,” she says.
She names Carina Szpilka, former CEO of ING Direct, as her role model. “She is not only a super charismatic and authentic woman, but she was foundational in revolutionizing banking culture by putting the customer at the heart of business decisions,” Torres notes. But mentorship doesn’t have to just come from the top; she notes that it’s important to remember that you can always learn from everyone you are working with, by finding people on your team who are great leaders or motivators.
WEX, in particular, has been empowering because of the many example of women in key strategic positions throughout the company, which has been inspiring to Torres throughout her career there.
And finally, Torres knows that you can learn from the world around you. She and her husband have a motto that “the world is a book and those who don’t travel read only one page.” They are eager to read the whole book, lived in different countries in Europe and now moving to the United States , learning about people and culture.