Tag Archive for: career advice

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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Who Do You See in the Mirror?

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Janelle BrulandNo matter how successful we become, for some of us there is a whisper we hear that never quite goes away.

Call it imposter syndrome or just self-doubt, but it’s there if we allow it. I have learned that we can silence this intruder to our success. But it takes effort and consistency.

How we see ourselves is directly related to how we portray ourselves to the outside world. We will either limit ourselves in what we are able to accomplish or may desire to prove what we can accomplish, but those successes do not bring peace and fulfillment. I like the picture of a small kitten who looks at its reflection in the mirror and sees a mighty lion. If we feel small with not much to offer, we won’t invest in ourselves and will limit what we can accomplish. On the other hand, if we see ourselves as strong and capable, the possibilities are unlimited.

Why do so many people fail to grow and reach their potential, or accomplish many things and be unable to experience joy and satisfaction from it? I’ve concluded that one of the main reasons is a low self-image. When we have a low self-image, we feel poorly about ourselves, and tend to make the situation worse through negative thoughts and critical self-talk. If we don’t feel worth the effort, the image we have of ourselves will remain low without the chance to improve.

Unfortunately, negative, critical self-talk can be ingrained in us from childhood. In their book The Answer, businessmen-authors John Assaraf and Murray Smith speak to the negative messages children receive growing up. “By the time you’re seventeen years old, you’ve heard ‘No, you can’t,’ an average of 150,000 times. You’ve heard ‘Yes, you can,’ about 5,000 times. That’s 30 no’s for every yes. That makes for a powerful belief of ‘I can’t.’”

You can choose to silence your inner critic. For some of us it is easier to let go of this lens we view ourselves through, for others it feels like a constant battle with our inner critic. It takes time and work to change this perception that has been reinforced for years. The good news is by choosing to have positive thoughts about yourself, you can begin the process to change and improve your self-image. Here are a couple of ways I have found to be helpful in silencing our inner critic:

Guard Your Self-Talk

One way to build your self-image is by guarding your self-talk. If you think about it, you will realize you talk to yourself many times a day. Is that self-talk positive or negative? Are you being kind to yourself or critical? When faced with a problem do you tell yourself, “I’ve got this. I will figure it out” or instead say, “I’ve messed up again – I never get it right.” It can be helpful to log your thoughts to determine how you are doing.

Take time to be kind to yourself. You can be kind to yourself with the intention of being more kind to others, but it starts with you.

When you realize your own special value, you will see yourself as strong and capable. You will believe you are worth investing in. The result will be growth and development and living up to your full potential.

Focus on Your Strengths

Change your focus to all the things you excel at. What are your strengths and how can you choose to use them to make life better for yourself and others? Turn around the negatives and focus on your positive attributes. Anytime you struggle with feelings of inadequacy, take the time to stop, take a breath, and reassess why you are having these feelings. Often, we overlook our greatest assets, so by intentionally examining ourselves in the mirror to find our inner lions we can choose who we see.

If you want to formalize the process take a strengths self-assessment like Birkman. Spend time with the results. Live with them and remind yourself often about your unique gifts and talents. I found this particular assessment so helpful that we took our entire management team through it, and I am now certified to conduct the assessment for others.

Another way is to ask your friends and colleagues what they see in you. You might be surprised at how others view you. It is a great exercise, and a very encouraging one. Again, live with the positives you glean from it.

You are a Lion

If you are reading this, you are a lion. You have ascended to leadership or started a business or are just getting started on a life of accomplishment, but there is so much more to do. Silence the whisper that holds so many people back. Be proactive about reminding yourself often that you are more than capable. You are strong and you have proven it over and over again.

Janelle Bruland is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and high-performance coach who inspires others to live impactful and successful lives. She is Founder and CEO of Management Services Northwest, a company she started in her living room in 1995 and has grown into an industry leading company, named one of the Fastest Growing Private Companies by Inc. magazine. The CPO of Microsoft, Mike Simms, describes her as a true pioneer in her field. Janelle is also the Co-Founder of Legacy Leader, a leadership development company that teaches business professionals how to build a legacy, transform their leadership, and love their life. She is the author of The Success Lie: 5 Simple Truths to Overcome Overwhelm and Achieve Peace of Mind.

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

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Why Self-Care Matters Most In Leadership (Yes, for you too!)

You know the first things you are quick to sacrifice when it comes to meeting all the demands of work (self-care, well-being, downtime)? Well they are the last things you should.

Self-care in leadershipIf you have been able to reach and stay at the executive level, then you are more likely to have learned that self-care is inextricable to leadership. You have ideally dropped the cultural self-sacrifice story a long time ago in your leadership journey.

A study of self-care among executive leadership in healthcare organizations found that “Leaders’ with high self-care ratings were likely to be from an organization with a high profit margin, while leaders with low ratings were likely to be either in their role for less than a year or from an organization with a lower profit margin.”

How much leaders practice self-care has a trickle down effect within organizations, and especially, in your own life and ability to show up.

Sacrificing Self-Care Benefits Nobody

We already know that playing the long hours game has a strong adverse impact on women’s short and long-term health relative to men. We know that a female-skewed over-conscientious approach to work can lead to emotional exhaustion. And research has shown that high work-related fatigue is even stronger for highly educated women.

Mindfulness researcher and author Jacqueline Carter shared with theglasshammer, “it was amazing to see how basically the higher you got in an organization, the higher the level of the executives, they all took time to exercise, they slept well, even despite ridiculous travel schedules and ridiculous scopes of jobs,” says Carter. “It was really clear that if you don’t start taking good care of yourself and setting good boundaries and saying no at an earlier level of your leadership journey, you’re gonna burn out.”

According to Harvard Business Review, “burnout cuts across executive and managerial levels…the major defining characteristic of burnout is that people can’t or won’t do again what they have been doing.” Identifiable characteristics include: “(1) chronic fatigue; (2) anger at those making demands; (3) self-criticism for putting up with the demands; (4) cynicism, negativity, and irritability; (5) a sense of being besieged; and (6) hair-trigger display of emotions.”

When in burnout, you lose your heart for where you’ve come to and where you’re at and what you’re doing.

Investment: Healthy You, Healthy Leadership

“I think there’s a mind-set shift that happens when people start to take this seriously, which is to go from seeing the investment of time in sleep, exercise, and mindfulness as a cost to thinking of it as an investment,” says Caroline Webb, senior adviser to McKinsey and author of How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life.

“In fact, it’s not just an investment that pays back long term, it’s an investment that pays back, all the evidence suggests, rather immediately,” says Webb. “The idea of that shift—that this is not down time, it’s simply investing in your ability to have more up time—is something which I’ve seen at the heart of everybody who makes a difference in the way that they’re living their lives, and also in the way that their teams around them are living their lives.”

The Value in Reset and Renewal

There are many ideas for how to incorporate self-care into your daily routine – such as meditation, being in nature, spending pockets of time in silence, drinking more water, starting a gratitude practice, scheduling your day to include work and non-work activities, practicing affirmations, getting massages and more. The thing is when you approach these things as something else on the task list to fit in when you’re already at overload, self-care can feel like yet another chore.

Research shows it can be valuable to step away from it all, take a bigger breath and dedicate attention for yourself to reset and renew. The right health-related vacation can shift things – it can bring you back to yourself, to open perspectives and return to a center of clarity and expansiveness, with benefits that last long beyond the time you spend away.

Research has shown that “individuals who attended a spiritual retreat for 7 days experienced changes in the dopamine and serotonin systems of the brain, which boosts the availability of these neurotransmitters” that relate to positive psychological effects. Additionally, meditation retreats have shown “large effects” on anxiety, depression, stress, mindfulness and compassion. Studies have also shown improvements in physical health, tension, and fatigue.

“A one-week wellness retreat (including many educational, therapeutic and leisure activities, and an organic, mostly plant-based diet),” according to a scientific study, “resulted in substantial improvements in everything from weight to blood pressure to psychological health – and sustained at six weeks (the last check-in point of the study).”

Beth McGroarty, director of research at the Global Wellness Institute, said to Travel Weekly, “in a wellness retreat, therapies/experiences often happen in concert and over multiple days, and combining them may have unique outcomes.”

As the research report states, “Retreat experiences provide a unique opportunity for people to escape from unhealthy routines and engage in healthy practices and activities that lead to immediate and sustained health benefits.”

For transparency, the writer of this article hosts women’s retreats, and my direct experience in facilitating a space in which a woman can connect with other women in vulnerability, return to her own center, show up from this place, and impact her own life trajectory is the inspiration for my personal commitment to this work.

No Matter How You Do It…

The bottom line is that no matter how you start or improve self-care – whether taking small moments for big impact changes in your daily routine or taking a bigger break away from it all to truly reset and renew – what’s most important, on all levels, is that you do.

Writer Bio:

Aimee Hansen, freelance writer for the theglasshammer, is the Creator and Facilitator of Storyteller Within Women’s Retreats, recommended by Lonely Planet Wellness Escapes. Since 2015, she has hosted nearly 150 women across 18 intimate retreat experiences. Her Journey Into Sacred Expression Retreats involve meditation, yoga, self-exploratory writing and sacred ceremonies, all in beautiful natural surroundings. She’ll be hosting two upcoming women’s retreat events this summer – in late June and late July – on the stunning Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, for women seeking self-renewal.

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Hard Talk: Work, Motherhood and the Unfinished Discussion

By Nicki Gilmour

Welcome to my new column called Hard Talk.

Nicki GilmourThis column will surface the topics that are buried by most of us due to many reasons including fear, exasperation, denial, taboos and lack of information until we stumble upon the topic itself as a challenge. Also, happy Mother’s Day.

I am going to start by telling you I do not have all, if any, of the answers, but I do want to create the space for each of us to come up with our own answers while offering insight into the individual and common psychology that binds us. I believe there is value to putting on the table the systemic and psychological reasons that explain why important topics are often ignored by the best of us as it pertains to careers and the person we are inside and outside of the office building.

How to spot a difficult subject

There are so many things that we aren’t willing to talk about in society and, in this instance, corporate life. How do you spot a taboo or something that just isn’t “on the table,” or, weirdly, is half on the table, whereby the topic seems like it is being dealt with or is resolved already, but really isn’t?

A sign to look for is when the topic is mostly talked about in a personalized (subjective) way, pitting women or people against other women or other people, suggesting somehow it is not a systemic issue but rather a matter choices and opinions. This is false reasoning when the so-called choices are a binary revolving around a lose-lose paradigm that only one societal group has to participate in.

The topic must be identified for real solutions to be found.

Why is motherhood a minefield topic?

Motherhood is a tricky topic as it is an identity and a job in itself. Fatherhood, when played out as many fathers do now in the legacy mother role of primary caregiver, also begs analysis for bias, but for now we shall discuss motherhood. Not everyone wants (another taboo) or can have (another under-discussed taboo) babies. But for those who do, there is not a woman alive in a defined career trajectory who has not given serious thought to the timing and logistics of how having a kid will affect her career. Anxiety at worst, mindshare at best. Once in it, motherhood can become both a Chief Operations Officer job and an internship as moving parts and project scheduling and learning plus actual execution are all very much part of the job. This is on top of a (big, busy and important) day job.

Just to be clear, this column is not one of judgment or even grouping as everyone has different feelings towards ambition, guilt and their own individual needs regarding work and what they glean intellectually, emotionally and financially from doing it. Additionally, there are so many influencing elements around each person’s spousal division of labor, capacity to organize and delegate support. Then there is the other topic of how much money each person has to throw at solutions should their preference lie there. And if the primary care giver is your spouse – man or woman – the conversation certainly changes slightly.

The difficulty of saying small humans disrupt life as we know it

Why has it taken me 13 years and 8,000 articles published to touch this topic? Simply put, we were in another time era. It is only very recently that corporations are in a place to discuss policy around parental leave as opposed to maternity leave. Equal pay for the same job in the US and elsewhere – such as the UK – is still being truly decided and addressed. We are not as advanced as we think we are.

The perception around women and babies and how that somehow negatively affected productivity or competence was just too strong. It felt like even indulging in the conversation of babies impacting careers was an admission that there was validity to the possibility that it was so. Instead of speaking in terms of systemic changes, we were very much stuck in an individual choices discussion.

The denial around impact of any kind was necessary because it felt like a betrayal to the messaging around “you can do it,” “just lean in” and other Generation X messaging to women. Good men with willingness to change have continued to be messaged more or less the same “provider” talk until recently and those who bucked the trend have had their own bias to deal with, from being excluded from mommy coffee dates to how to enter a bathroom to change their babies.

Motherhood has been said to be the unfinished work of feminism in a matricentric theory and movement being proposed by Andrea O’Reilly. Motherhood has been largely left out of feminist theory and I think this is why my usual “push the envelope and talk about it anyway” trait, which has allowed us to talk about intersecting identities at work in so many forms, has not attracted me to this topic until now. Apparently I was not on my own but like my evolution on the willingness to talk about it, others indicate a sea change with The Guardian’s Amy Westervelt opining that, “Most surprising to me, as someone told by women’s magazine editors for years ‘we don’t cover motherhood’, is the fact that publications like Elle and Marie Claire appear to have lifted their long-standing ban on motherhood.”

Still an issue to resolve

Ann Crittenden, in her book “The Price of Motherhood”, states, “once a woman has a baby, the egalitarian office party is over thoroughly.”

And other people have written at length regarding the bias of motherhood for pay and promotions so it is felt currently by some and is far from a resolved issue, culturally. In fact, if you look at Wikipedia’s definition of “mommy track” it is interesting to see that they define it almost as a choice for women to take, instead of an action that happens to women by others.

No company has this issue cracked. But, some are trying hard to create conditions culturally and programmatically. It still feels like the conversation needs to be reframed and developed to redesign the workplace of the future with a society to match. In the meantime, look for those companies that remove the subjectivity of flextime or where parental leave is taken by men for real amounts of time. Live your values and instead of the lean in message, and perhaps focus on personal renewal while the system catches up.

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