Tag Archive for: career advice

Working Parents: Get Rid of Guilt, Blame, Shame and Regret, Once and for All

Supporting new parents

Guest contributed by Lauren Marie

With the rise of social media, the prevalence of judgment on parents has reached epidemic proportions.

This US study found that 90% of moms and 85% of dads feel judged by others, and nearly half of all parents feel judged almost all the time. This constant demand to conform to others’ rules not only undermines a parent’s wellbeing, it also stifles their ability to follow their dreams and create new financial opportunities for themselves and their families.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether you stay home to raise your children, put them in day care, have a nanny or family member caring for them, or something else. People feel they have the right to judge you for any choice you make involving children,

Is there a ‘right’ path for working parents? What if, rather than looking for what the right decisions are, you began to look for what your choices create, and choose what works for your family, regardless of other people’s judgments?

The modern family has grown undefined and can look completely different in every household. The idea that one size can fit all is a little crazy. What will work for you and your kids might not work for another family and that is okay!

Your choice creates awareness

Each choice you make will give you more clarity and direction to inform the choices you will make in the future. Instead of judging each choice as right or wrong, what if you look at the information you gained, and change course based on what occurs as you go? For example, let’s say you try out one day care based on a friend’s recommendation. Your child comes home unhappy, doesn’t want to go back, or cries every time you drop them off. This doesn’t mean that you made a bad choice. It is just more information you can use to make the next choice better and to give you more awareness of what works or doesn’t work for your child.

We think that we must make a decision and hold onto it, for fear that if we change our minds it will mean we were wrong or did something bad.

The capacity to change, to not have a fixed point of view, but rather a malleable reality that can look totally different in any moment, is one of your greatest gifts to the world and to your children.

Without having to hold onto a decision or a point of view, with no need of being right, and a total willingness to change on a dime, would you have to feel guilt or shame? What if you looked at the mistakes you’ve made as a chance to learn and grow and become greater?

Your children learn from watching and modeling you

If you judge yourself, you’re teaching your children to judge themselves too. Instead, have allowance for your choices, even the so-called mistakes, and you will teach your children to have allowance for themselves too.

That doesn’t mean you act without care or consequence. On the contrary, it means you ask questions all the time and choose based on what will create greater change for everyone involved.

Asking questions

When your children are at an age where they can reason and understand, begin asking them what works for them. Ask them where they want to go to school, who they want to play with, which nanny they like best? It doesn’t mean you have to do whatever your child wants, but it will allow them to feel empowered to make choices and gives you more information and feedback. You can also ask yourself questions… “I wonder what would happen if we chose to do: X, Y, or Z?”

What if you became curious again, about everything, the way children are?

Judging never creates greater

Guilt, blame, shame and regret are all based on judgment. Judging someone or something doesn’t make it better. It only locks what you are judging further into place. If you want something to change, you have to make a different choice.

We need to take pressure off ourselves by not looking at ourselves through other people’s eyes and by discovering what is actually true for us. Every time you begin to judge yourself, stop. It is a choice; it is not an automatic. Your point of view can actually become reality. If you believe you are not good enough, you never get it right, you’re a terrible mother … that’s what will reflect back at you.

You must put your kids to bed at a certain time, have limited amounts of “screen time,” read to them, give them appropriate social cues, teach them to play nicely with others. I’m sure you’ve heard all of this and more as the right way to parent and the right way to be a working mom. What you want to start looking at is which of these ‘rules’ are true and work for you and your kids, not just buy them all as real because someone else tells you it is so.

Judgments are not real. Let other people judge you however they judge you, don’t make it significant. You know you better than anyone. Trust in that; trust in you.

If you want to empower your children to love themselves, to trust themselves, and to make good decisions for themselves, you must show them by practicing allowance and trust for you first.

Practice gratitude for you

To truly get rid of guilt, blame, shame and regret, be grateful for who you are in the world, who you are in the workplace, who you are at home. This will start to shift the feelings of guilt and regret. When they come up, focus instead on something you can be grateful for about you. Watch the negative feelings shrink as the gratitude grows. Gratitude and judgment cannot coexist. It’s a muscle you can choose to build, and the more you use it the stronger it gets.

About the Author

Lauren Marie is a Joy of Business facilitator, acupuncturist, entrepreneur and mother of twins. She travels worldwide, facilitating classes and changing her clients’ point of view about life, health and business. Born on the outskirts of Washington D.C., Lauren now lives on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. A passionate creator and conscious rule-breaker, Lauren seeks to inspire other mothers to see the possibilities they overlook and to embrace every challenge and choice that parenthood brings.

The opinions and views expressed by guest contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of theglasshammer.com

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How to Lead in a Fast-Isn’t-Fast-Enough World

female leaders

By Sara Canaday

Leaders are being challenged with increasingly complex demands every day, and they are expected to respond in record time.

Unfortunately, the conventional approaches they’ve always relied on simply don’t have the same impact in the context of this new business environment.

I work with thousands of leaders every year, and many of them feel like walking to-do lists and perpetual firefighters who never have enough hours in the day. These leaders recognize the need to change the way they respond to chaotic and inconceivable demands, but they aren’t entirely sure how to do that.

The common question is this: How am I supposed to lead successfully in a fast-isn’t-fast-enough world?

The good news is, we can uncover some clues to the answer by looking at the innovative approaches used by today’s modern thinkers and trailblazing leaders. Their strategic choices are oddly counterintuitive, undeniably successful, and downright fascinating.

I’d like to share with you six of the new practices and describe how they are helping talented professionals elevate themselves into modern leaders producing enviable results.

1. Shaking off the age-old bias for action and perfecting the use of the strategic pause.

Successful leaders in the modern era seem to have adopted a new habit. Instead of making action the default for every challenge, these leaders are pairing that alternative with an opposite response. It’s not about replacing action, which we know is a necessary leadership ingredient. We still need to reach our goals, meet deadlines, and produce results. This is different.

They think of it as developing a companion habit that celebrates BEING rather than DOING. It involves a strategic pause. A mental time-out. Space for their brains to percolate. Whatever we call it, this new habit requires consistently taking some time away from the chaos of business to let ourselves think.

2. Escaping from the prison of their own perspectives and passionately seeking out cognitive diversity.

Modern leaders know that their own decision-making doesn’t come from a mentally neutral position, so they push themselves to uncover other angles. Not a polite, obligatory surveying of the crowd to reach consensus, but a mold-breaking, eyebrow-raising exploration to prove themselves WRONG.

These leaders aren’t just finding success through an openness to new ideas; they passionately seek them out. They value cognitive diversity and invite team members to challenge them with radical alternatives. They let go of the need to validate their own perspectives, and they focus all of their energy on finding the best solution to meet shared goals. No matter where those solutions might originate.

3. Ditching the need to let hard data drive every decision and welcoming the insights of soft intelligence.

Trailblazing leaders today have recognized the tendency to be held hostage by information overload. Even though it feels unnatural, they give themselves permission to break free from their dependence on data. Do they still value the facts? Definitely. They just work to gain a broader context about its meaning. They’re willing to be informed by data but not ruled by it.

Leaders who are open to the idea of Whole Data—a more comprehensive view of the facts— stretch beyond the usual quantitative boundaries to incorporate intangible elements. They better serve their teams and their customers by paying attention to stories and narratives, emotions and attitudes, worries and complaints, risks and vulnerabilities. They search for the qualitative information that paints a more vivid picture.

4. Dropping their dependence on the usual routine and letting go of outdated tasks and deliverables.

Today’s forward-thinking leaders have realized that everything consuming their time must earn the right to be on their to-do lists. To establish that competition, they have adopted a new approach that defies their normal logic.

Most leaders have a competitive streak that pushes them to take on more rather than do less, but they are seeing the wisdom in that concept. Narrowing their focus to expand their perspectives. Minimizing their actions to maximize performance. Doing less to achieve more. Through the ingenuity of letting go, they are finding abundant success.

5. Defeating the drag on their communication and creating positive experiences that expand their influence.

Modern leaders embrace the idea of disrupting their typical approach to communication. They start in reverse. Instead of trying to determine what information needs to go out, they concentrate on the end result. What impact do they want to make? What are the challenges and perspectives of their audience members? What experience would they like to create?

With that in mind, they peel away all the layers of complexity that have been clogging up their communication and get down to messages that are authentic and engaging. They present them in novel ways. They aren’t afraid to open a window into their motives and rationale. And they create a meaningful, compelling experience that communicates in a more powerful way.

6. Committing to metaphorically resigning their roles as experts and approaching tasks with the spirit of a beginner.

Modern leaders are accelerating their careers by breaking free from the expert trap. They no longer allow themselves to remain captives of their expertise. They are finding the courage to change the tired, old narrative with a new attitude, some genuine vulnerability, and the never-ending desire to learn.

Success for these leaders means deliberately putting themselves in positions to humbly learn and grow. Every single day. They have learned to value questions just as much as the answers. And, perhaps more importantly, they work hard to ask the right questions—many of which start with, “What if…?”

While these exciting new principles are remarkably effective, the most compelling thing about them is the way they are applied. It’s a selective process. Not a simple swap of out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new. There’s a firm acknowledgement that the old rules aren’t completely obsolete. The most successful leaders have a knack for knowing when to stick with the traditional approaches and when to break away. They’ve adopted a new brand of wisdom, and they know when to use it.

If you’d like to learn more about the strategies behind this fresh approach to leadership—one that is ripe for our challenging times—I invite you to read my new book.

Author Bio

Sara Canaday is a leadership expert, keynote speaker, LinkedIn Learning instructor and author. She works with leaders and high-potential professionals from organizations around the world to expand their capacity to innovate, influence, engage, and perform. Her new book, Leadership Unchained: Defy Conventional Wisdom for Breakthrough Performance, is now available on Amazon. For more information, please visit SaraCanaday.com.

The opinions and views expressed by guest contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of theglasshammer.com

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4 Ways to Avoid Slipping Off the Glass Cliff

glass cliff

Guest Contributed by Meredith Wood

The glasshammer has written extensively about the phenomenon of the glass cliff over the years whereby women have been put in turnaround high profile positions that are for lack of a better word, an impossible task or poison chalice.

The best research on the topic is still by Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam, of the University of Exeter which shows that there is a quantifiable tendency for women to be hired to elevated positions in times of crisis and uncertainty only to be unfairly penalized when they fail.

The effect of this is to create an unrealistic expectation for women executives, setting them up for failure. When, because they were handed a rather stacked deck, expectations are not fully met, often a company feels justified in going back to a status quo leadership by putting a man back in charge. They can then feel satisfied that though they tried to promote equity, it just didn’t work out this time. A 2013 study demonstrated just how prevalent this is. In over 600 transitions from female executives in Fortune 500 companies, only four women were succeeded by another woman.

The system, to put it bluntly, is rigged. And research demonstrates this happens over and over again in many industries.

Ways to avoid slipping off the cliff

It’s not shocking that women must do more than men to protect their agency in the workplace. Throughout the business world, women have routinely faced difficulty that men do not register. From securing business loans to facing a growing gender pay gap, women in executive level positions have been systematically discriminated against.

However, in many cases there are lessons from those who have come before that will help navigate the cliff. These include pieces of advice that men have routinely taken advantage of where women have traditionally had a hard time embracing them:

– Learning to say “NO”: Before taking any position, find out if the company is facing a difficult situation or transitional period. Just because something is offered doesn’t mean it is a step up. Recently, Uber had difficulty finding a female CEO because it was facing allegations of sexual misconduct and security concerns. The women who turned down the position may have done so because they saw it as a glass cliff waiting to happen.

– Set up expectations beforehand: One of the ways companies get away with Glass Cliff behavior is because expectations for women executives are set at an unrealistic level. By coming up with feasible metrics that symbolize success it will be more difficult for anyone to point to the idea that replacement is necessary.

– Outline a long term solution: Part of the issue with a Glass Cliff is that it usually has to do with relatively immediate results. With a long term plan in place, there is less recourse for those who seek to oust a women executive just because the situation seems dire in the short term.

– Negotiate to handle risk: If the company is in a precarious situation, make sure the position is made to be worth your while. Women are 4 times less likely to negotiate their salary than men. Also be certain to research comparable salary and benefits for a position that fits the situation.

Most importantly, to successfully scale the glass cliff you have to first know of its existence. By learning the lessons of the cliff, it is then possible to understand how to be in the best position to deal with it.

For more tips on how to navigate the glass cliff, check out this infographic from Fundera.

Meredith Wood

Meredith is Editor-in-Chief at Fundera. Specializing in financial advice for small business owners, Meredith is a current and past contributor to Yahoo!, Amex OPEN Forum, Fox Business, SCORE, AllBusiness and more.

The opinions and views expressed by guest contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of theglasshammer.com

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How To Get Promoted

If getting promoted at work is on your goal list for the rest of the year, or part of early ruminations for a new year resolution for next year, how then can you do your best to achieve your goal?

How To Get PromotedHere are some things to consider:

1. Do you know what the formal promotional process is? Are you in it? What do you need to do criteria wise to get into it? Who drives it in your firm? What roles respectively do your boss(es) and HR play? What other stakeholders are important?

2. What job do you want? Do you want to take the next promotional step as defined by the company? If so, great, take time to understand the competencies needed to make the leap – both hard skills and behaviors. All jobs have tasks that we prefer over other tasks. Be honest with yourself, how strategically important are the tasks that you are avoiding and how will that impact you when being considered for the promotion?

3. If you do not want the linear next step, think about what you like doing, with who and why you enjoy it. This is a great way to distill what would be a good expansion of your role or even a lateral or a non-linear upward move to a different department. Then, work with your sponsor, boss and HR to craft your path.

4. Culturally, take a long hard look at what behaviors get rewarded at your firm. Do they equally get rewarded no matter what gender you are? What flies? What does not get tolerated? What grabs senior management’s attention? This is an important analysis to do as these data points are all keys to seeing what the future could look like so that you can proactively manage your career, every step of the way.

If you would like to work with an executive coach on navigating the terrain, schedule a free exploratory chat with Nicki Gilmour here.

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Women, Men, and the Two Sides of Confidence

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Professional Women

Guest Contributed by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Even when our assessment of other people’s competence is wrong, their self-confidence can still have self-fulfilling effects, opening doors and opportunities to those who simply seem more confident.

This is one of the reasons that so many well-intentioned people have advised women to be more confident to get ahead at work and in their careers. There are several problems with this kind of advice.

First, it fails to recognize that confidence has two sides. Although confidence is an internal belief, it also has an external side, which concerns how assertive you seem in the eyes of others. This external side of confidence is the most consequential because it is often mistaken for real competence.

The bottom line: regardless of how confident we feel internally, when we come across as confident to others, they will often assume that we are competent, at least until we prove them wrong.

This link between perceived confidence and competence is important. Although women are assumed to be less confident than men and some studies have shown that women appear to be less confident, a closer look at the research shows that women are internally confident. In fact, men and women are both overconfident—even if men are still more overconfident than women.
As Harvard Business School’s Robin Ely and Georgetown’s Catherine Tinsley write in the Harvard Business Review, the idea that women lack confidence is a “fallacy”:

That assertion is commonly invoked to explain why women speak up less in meetings and do not put themselves forward for promotions unless they are 100% certain they meet all the job requirements. But research does not corroborate the idea that women are less confident than men. Analyzing more than 200 studies, Kristen Kling and colleagues concluded that the only noticeable differences occurred during adolescence; starting at age 23, differences become negligible.

A team of European academics studied hundreds of engineers and replicated Kling’s finding, reporting that women do feel confident in general.21 But the researchers also noted that women’s confidence wasn’t always recognized by others. Although both women and men reported feeling confident, men were much more likely to be rated by other people as appearing confident. Women’s self-reports of confidence had no correlation with how others saw their confidence.

To make matters worse, for the female engineers, appearing confident had no leadership benefits at all. For the men, seeming confident translated into having influence, but for women, appearing confident did not have the same effect. To have any impact in the organization, the women had to be seen as confident, competent, and caring; all three traits were inseparable. For men, confidence alone translated into greater organizational clout, whereas a caring attitude had no effect on people’s perception of leadership potential.

We are, it seems, less likely to tolerate high confidence in women than we are in men. This bias creates a lose-lose situation for women. Since women are seen as less confident than men and since we see confidence as pivotal to leadership, we demand extra displays of confidence in women to consider them worthy of leadership positions. However, when a woman does seem as confident as, or more confident than, men, we are put off by her because high confidence does not fit our gender stereotypes.

If women don’t lack confidence, then why do we see differences in how men and women behave? Why are women less likely to apply to jobs or to request a promotion unless they’re 100 percent qualified? Why else would women speak less in meetings and be more likely to hedge their bets when making recommendations?

If the answer is not how women feel internally, it must be how they are perceived externally. In other words, differences in behavior arise not because of differences in how men and women are, but in how men and women are treated. This is what the evidence shows: women are less likely to get useful feedback, their mistakes are judged more harshly and remembered longer, their behavior is scrutinized more carefully, and their colleagues are less likely to share vital information with them. When women speak, they’re more likely to be interrupted or ignored.

In this context, it makes sense that even an extremely confident women would behave differently from a man. As Ely and Tinsley observed at a biotech company, the female research scientists were far less likely to speak up in meetings, even though in one-on-one interactions, they shared a lot of useful information. Leaders attributed this difference to a lack of confidence: “What these leaders had failed to see was that when women did speak in meetings, their ideas tended to be either ignored until a man restated them or shot down quickly if they contained even the slightest flaw. In contrast, when men’s ideas were flawed, the meritorious elements were salvaged. Women therefore felt they needed to be 110 percent sure of their ideas before they would venture to share them. In a context in which being smart was the coin of the realm, it seemed better to remain silent than to have one’s ideas repeatedly dismissed.” Thus, because we choose leaders by how confident they appear rather than by how confident or competent they are, we not only end up choosing more men to lead us but ultimately choose more-incompetent men.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, and an associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. He has published nine books and over 130 scientific papers. His most recent book is Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It)?

This article is adapted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It)? by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic Copyright 2019 Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. All rights reserved.

The opinions and views expressed by guest contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of theglasshammer.com

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Calling Great Writers- Guest Articles Welcome!

We are planning content for the Late Summer and Fall already here at glasshammer2.wpengine.com

Nicki GilmourWe get sent many requests from guests to contribute articles, but we turn many away because we are only accepting the best articles from guest writers who are experts or practitioners and can truly honor our mission to inform, inspire and empower professional women.

If you would like to be considered as a guest contributor, please send your pitch to jennifer@glasshammer2.wpengine.com and she can send you guidelines, deadlines and style tips.

We always appreciate academia dissected into useable advice when it comes to career advice for women in financial and professional services/big law/ Fortune 500.

We look forward to hearing from you.

We built the campfire so we can tell the stories that matter, together.

With Gratitude,

Nicki Gilmour – Founder and Publisher of glasshammer2.wpengine.com – smart women in numbers.

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Enjoy our LGBTQ and Ally coverage all of June

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Here at theglasshammer.com we celebrate diversity and differences all year long but give extra focus in certain months to certain themes.

June is Pride Month in many countries in the world, with NYC hosting World Pride this year. This coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising which is the place where civil rights for LGBTQ Americans began.

The bad news is that fifty years later, someone can be legally fired from a job, because a manager or business owner doesn’t approve of the person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, in a majority of US states. The Employment Non Discrimination Act or ENDA which has been in circulation since 1994 and has not yet passed despite a historic recent victory of the passing of the Equality Bill. This important bill was passed on 17th May by the House of Representatives to try prevent this type of discrimination but still has to clear Congress so LGBTQ people are far from safe from subjective decision making by a person who decides to create a ‘less than me’ dynamic.

The good news is that we will shine a light on amazing LGBTQ women and Allies this month as well as talk about what you can do to be a great Ally.

We will also look at how great companies are pushing for progress in the legislative vacuum and are making positive changes in the world. Sometimes, it is about changing the world and sometimes if all you can do it change your corner of the world to make it better for the people around you, then that is a good start.

Enjoy the articles and profiles.

And, walk the talk on your values.

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Emotional Intelligence – Part 2: Do Women Have Higher Emotional Intelligence than Men?

By Aimee Hansen

Emotional IntelligenceLast week, we wrote about Emotional Intelligence as a true leadership differentiator beyond IQ or “hard skill” levels or task mastery, and a prerequisite for real leadership belonging at the C-Suite level.

As Daniel Goleman, Ph. D, author of the New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence among other publications, highlights: “Members of a successful corporate team must, collectively, have a high level of emotional intelligence. On a team with high EI attributes, it is easy to spot those few who do not…”

But according to research, it would seem that women are significantly more likely to be amongst those who do.

Women Demonstrate More EI Competency More Consistently

Whether women have higher emotional intelligence than men has been a topic for debate by Goleman and others, though a Korn Ferry study of 55,000 professionals across 90 countries found that “women score higher than men on nearly all (11 of 12) emotional intelligence competencies, except emotional self-control, where no gender differences are observed.”

The authors, including Goleman, “found that women more effectively employ the emotional and social competencies correlated with effective leadership and management than men.”

According to the Korn Ferry results, women were 86% more likely than men to be seen as consistently demonstrating emotional self-awareness as a competency (18.4% of women compared to just 9.9% of men). Women were 45% more likely than men to be seen as demonstrating empathy consistently.

Women also outperformed men at “coaching & mentoring, influence, inspirational leadership, conflict management, organizational awareness, adaptability, teamwork and achievement orientation.” The most narrow margin was “positive outlook” (9% more likely), and the only gender neutral competency was “emotional self-control.”

When it comes to excelling at what we value, these findings complement research that shows that men are more likely to undervalue the relationship interaction with customers and clients, which women will tend to emphasize as important.

Closing the Gender Gap of Competency Perception

Generally speaking in the workplace, women tend to undervalue their skills competency and performance while men overvalue themselves on both.

These perceptual differences, reflected in the cultural mirror, can mean women preemptively take themselves out of the game. In one Hewlett Packard report, men went for the job if they were 60% qualified based on job criteria whereas women went for the job only if they were 100% qualified.

Zenger Folkman found that women’s confidence increases with age and experience so that by our mid-40’s, we’ve closed the gender confidence gap to meet men. But it’s the leaps we may have forgone in our 20’s and 30’s, when the gap was prevalent, that still factor in as lost opportunities.

Dr Richard E. Boyatzis, Distinguished University Professor, CWRU, spoke to women undervaluing, and men overvaluing, their competencies in the workplace: “Research shows, however, that the reality is often the opposite. If more men acted like women in employing their emotional and social competencies, they would be substantially and distinctly more effective in their work.”

“The data suggests a strong need for more women in the workforce to take on leadership roles,” said Goleman. “When you factor in the correlation between high emotional intelligence and those leaders who deliver better business results, there is a strong case for gender equity. Organizations must find ways to identify women who score highly on these competencies and empower them.”

Emotional intelligence is considered a key differentiator at the top leadership level, and it’s a competency asset women can deeply value even as we develop it.

How do you further develop your “EQ”?

According to a Forbe’s Coaches Council article from Cari Coats, there are four main attributes that can be recognized in emotionally intelligent leaders, paraphrased below.

Self-awareness of your own internal motivations and tendencies and emotions and both understanding and acceptance of “the good, the bad, and the ugly”. Emotionally intelligent leaders can take feedback without defensiveness. One practice that can help is to become aware of how you respond when challenged or when things don’t go well.

Transparency both in your own vulnerabilities and flaws and mistakes as well as in speaking with truth and clarity with others. As Dickson writes, “the key is showing up as a whole human and being unafraid of transparency, then working toward improving relationships within an organization, within team communications or with customers.”

Being present to perceive and listen and respond to the person or situation in front of them without judgment, while recognizing the emotional needs of others at play. An emotionally intelligent leader is able to appreciate and allow other’s emotions and handle them with empathy.

Self-mastery of emotional awareness so that they are not yanked into emotional reactions, but instead can more aptly choose how to respond in any given moment.

Want to go much further? For a comprehensive list of leadership training opportunities, books, tips, exercises, videos and assessments to help develop your emotional intelligence, please check out the Positive Psychology Program for resources.

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Make Better Presentations: How Good Data Visualization Can Advance Your Career

presentation

Image via Shutterstock

Guest contributed by Stephanie Evergreen, PhD

Ever been in a meeting where each person’s presentation gets incrementally more boring, even though the data should be intrinsically interesting to everyone in the room. You present to a room where half of the folks around the table are checking email?

Are you capturing your audience’s attention with your presentation and more importantly, can they easily make sense of what you telling them? In fact, research shows that when we present decks with bullets and then proceed to speak to them, we literally interrupt our audience’s ability to make sense of what we are saying. This is because our brains aren’t wired to read and listen to the same content, delivered at two different paces, through two different avenues.

At worst, those around the table are overwhelmed by all of the information being presented and simply check out (or check email). You’ve lost control of your content and the agenda moves forward without your case being made and with decisions still left on the table, leaving you looking less than your totally awesome self.

Instead of the typical way slide decks are delivered, let me give you an effective alternative based on research of how human brains are wired. The brain is wired to first look at the pictures.

Researchers call this the pictorial superiority effect, which means we live in a pictures-first world. So if we focus our slideshow development on having clear, effective visuals, our content will be more readily understood. We will maintain control of the discussion. We will get decisions made. We will stand out.

Turning that slide into effective data visualization is surprisingly easy and can be done entirely within PowerPoint. The trick is to state your bottom line right up front.

I was a guest in an ops review meeting and I listened as the COO of this Fortune 500 company told his team that what he wanted to see on the slide was: (1) your claim, and (2) the visual evidence that supports the claim. What a lovely way of stating it.

In the example above, the bottom line is literally at the bottom of the slide: “Data suggests sales to women are improving.” This is key! It needs to become the title of the slide. We could also re-word it a bit to be more straightforward:

presentation

This, alone, will cut down on some meeting noise because people won’t be guessing at what you are trying to say.

But the visual isn’t really showing the evidence that supports that claim. It isn’t that easy to see the fact that women are buying almost as much as men. A better way to show data stories that have to do with closing the gap is a graph type I call a dumbbell dot plot.

presentation 1

A dumbbell dot plot encodes the data by a dot’s position and research shows that a set of dots, positioned on a scale, is the easiest graph type for our brains to interpret. We then connect two of the dots like a tiny Popeye dumbbell, where the line draws the eye to the space, the distance, the gap between the two dots. This graph type makes it much easier to see that sales are trending up for both groups and that the gap between genders is closing.

Dumbbell dot plots are so easy for people to decode but we don’t see them very often because they aren’t a default graph type in PowerPoint. Want to see how easy it is to make one, though?

I just started with a line graph with markers. Then right-click on one of the lines and select Format Data Series. Make the line No Fill. Then make the markers large.

presentation 2

To make the dumbbell stick, look in the menu bar for the Chart Design tab. On the left is a button called Add Chart Element. Open it, navigate to Lines, and select High-Low Lines.

presentation 3

So easy. Such a small change that makes such a huge impact. Of course, I used a better font, ditched the clutter-y slide template, and removed the bullet points and those things will also make it much easier for the audience to see what I came to talk about.

One note, so that you don’t get surprised in a meeting: In some versions of PowerPoint, when you go into full screen mode, the lines appear on top of the dots and it doesn’t look as cool. If that happens to you, copy the graph and paste it as a picture right on top of the graph. Test this out ahead of time.

Knowing which chart type will best showcase your data story is an essential skill that isn’t taught in business school (yet). With million-dollar business decisions and your career on the line, you can come out ahead by adding this skill to your knowledge base and I show you exactly how to choose the right chart type (with the peer-reviewed research that backs up my recommendations) and how make it, step-by-step, right inside Excel and PowerPoint in my latest book, Effective Data Visualization.

A tiny investment into clear, effective slides, where we state our bottom line and then show the evidence that supports it, reaps dividends in meetings. We get our points across without distraction or interruption, we represent ourselves as clear and collected, critical business decisions get made, and we shine. That is how you set yourself up for a promotion.

ABOUT DR. STEPHANIE EVERGREEN

Dr. Stephanie Evergreen is an internationally-recognized speaker, designer, and researcher. She is best known for bringing a research-based approach to helping researchers better communicate their work through more effective graphs, slides, and reports. A Fulbright scholar, she holds a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University in interdisciplinary research.

Dr. Evergreen has trained future data nerds worldwide through keynote presentations and workshops, for clients including Mastercard, Verizon, Chick-Fil-A, Rockefeller Foundation, Brookings Institute, and the United Nations. Dr. Evergreen writes a popular blog on data presentation at StephanieEvergreen.com. Her two books on designing high-impact graphs, slideshows, and reports both hit #1 on Amazon bestseller lists weeks before they were even released. This May Dr. Evergreen has published the second edition of one of those bestsellers – Effective Data Visualization: The Right Chart for the Right Data and the brand new Data Visualization Sketchbook with templates for making infographics and dashboards.

The opinions and views expressed by guest contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of theglasshammer.com

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Emotional Intelligence – Part 1: The Higher Your Go, The More It Matters!

By Aimee Hansen

Research has shown that leadership accomplishment at the most senior levels is highly correlated with emotional intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence in LeadershipEQ is said to be responsible for up to 58% of performance outcome. Whereas cognitive ability and IQ are “threshold competencies,” emotional intelligence is a differentiator at the leadership edge.

Emotional intelligence is so important in leadership that research has found that within groups with no dedicated leader, having the highest emotional intelligence is one of the driving factors for who will ultimately emerge as a leader. It’s not only an asset for leadership, but a predictor of leadership success.

It’s been called “the next sign of great leadership” in a Forbes Council Post, and in the quiet and remarkable transformation happening in business, “Honesty, intelligence and empathy are required.”

“Yes, this requires a level of vulnerability that makes old school CEOs and COOs cringe,” writes Rebecca T. Dickson, “But for those open to it, leaders are building trust they were never able to when they hid behind authority.”

No Soft Skill

Dr. Daniel Goleman, the most famous of the emotional intelligence researchers, highlights that EI is especially critical in the C-Suite. Goleman told Acertitude, an executive search firm, “what I found is that for jobs at every level, emotional intelligence is about twice as important as cognitive ability. The higher you go in the organization the more it matters. For top-level C-suite jobs, 80% to 90% of the abilities that distinguish high performers, as identified by the company itself, is based on emotional intelligence.”

Goleman told Acertitude, “What they’re looking for is the ability to manage yourself and to handle relationships effectively. That’s the definition of emotional intelligence. That’s what really matters.”

When IQ and technical skills are similar, emotional intelligence (no soft skill) is what moves people up the ladder. It pays too.

One study found that participants with high degrees of emotional intelligence made an annual average of $29,000 more than those with a low degree of emotional intelligence.

What is Emotional Intelligence

Goleman breaks the emotional intelligence framework into four areas:

• Self-Awareness: accurate self-assessment, self-confidence, and emotional self-awareness
• Social-Awareness: empathy, organizational awareness, and service
• Self Management: emotional self-control, transparency, adaptability, achievement, initiative, and optimism
• Relationship Management: inspirational leadership, influence, developing others, change catalyst, conflict management, bond-building, and teamwork

With emotional intelligence, you’re able to bring awareness to your brain’s fast operating system, which is automatic, default, irrational and often quick to interpret events negatively rather than as opportunities and react with disproportional emotion to the situation in front of you now. You attune more to your slower, more cautious and intentional second operating system so that you may respond rather than react.

Within self-awareness, empathy plays a particularly important role when it comes to C-Suite leadership:

• Cognitive Empathy is being able to see the world through other’s perspectives (mind-to-mind connection).
• Emotional Empathy is being able to feel what others are feeling.
• Empathic Concern is being able to relate to how others think and feel and to care about helping them (heart-to-heart connection).

The best leaders possess these empathic characteristics and can articulate and inspire others in a common vision.

Primal Leadership

Goleman introduces the concept of “primal leadership” – “No matter what leaders set out to do—whether it’s creating strategy or mobilizing teams to action—their success depends on how they do it. Even if they get everything else just right, if leaders fail in this primal task of driving emotions in the right direction, nothing they do will work as well as it could or should.”

“This emotional task of the leader is primal—that is, first—in two senses: It is both the original and the most important act of leadership.” Goleman states. “Leaders have always played a primordial emotional role.”

Fred Kofman, an Argentinian economist and author writes, “Hearts and minds cannot be bought or forced; they can only be deserved and earned. They are given only to worthy missions and trustworthy leaders. This applies not only to organizations but also to many other domains of human activity.”

A leader who is highly effective is often a leader that has done substantial work on herself or himself when it comes to emotional mastery through what Nancy Koehn has called “the gathering years” of harnessing one’s emotional awareness to access her or his deeper strength.

At the helm of any organization are those who navigate the relationship of that organization’s behavior to the very ideology it operates from, the relationship with all those who it serves and the relationship to all those who support it to exist.

Cultivating a sophisticated relationship with yourself, with your emotions and with relating to others emotions is the prerequisite to C-Suite leadership, and more than ever, to evolving how leadership shows up.

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