Tag Archive for: career tips

Build Your Career by Optimal Networking

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By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

On the 20th June, theglasshammer.com will convene the top women in the asset management industry to talk about the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead, especially as it pertains to big data and technology.

We organize this peer breakfast so optimal networking can take place between women who run the money world, or least lots of assets that make the world turn.

Optimal networking in my opinion, is in a format that allows women to do serious business with each other. Qualified discussions with qualified people is key. Having a cocktail and making gestures to find common ground can be useful and certainly it does feel nice to have support by people who may be going through similar challenges but that is not the same as power networking. By going to events where people are interested in your skills and experience, you may be more effective in your connections, because if you can help someone solve their firm’s pain points, then there can be a follow up meeting and a process to see direct results. It is also good to know people as well for future meetings.

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Are You a Sexist Woman at Work? Part Two

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Following on from last week’s column on how our brains assign positive and negative traits to men and women without asking us, we look at how we all hold bias ubiquitously.

Or in plain English, women can be as sexist and upholding of the patriarchy as men. How does this play out in the workplace? It appears in small and large ways in offices, hospitals, orchestras, schools and governments.

When some women work for female bosses, the experience can sometimes be perceived by them as less than optimal? Is the female boss truly awful as an individual ? Maybe or maybe not, as we can look to deep behavioral theory to explain why people act the way that they do. Social psychology theory by Lewin suggests that behavior is a function of a person’s personality activated by the environment that they are operating in. So, when you are working for a female boss who happens to be taking on traits that you do not expect her to (as a woman), you might consider that this boss might be beholden to the systemic forces that encourage behaviors that are activated in their personality. She might have consciously or unconsciously chosen that path as assimilation is what most career blogs and experts have spat at women for the last thirty years. Doesn’t make it right, but certainly explains things.

Or it could be you who has deep rooted issues about who the boss should be? You could be jarred as she isn’t meeting your stereotypical traits imagined for her as a female manager. This is only worsened by the gender segregation that is peddled falsely as brain science. Men are not from Mars, Women are not from Venus. Newsflash, we are all from Earth and we all need to do a better job on Earth at reducing bias that comes with instant thoughts of who the other person is. We all are socially conditioned to believe the differences between the sexes are the same for everyone and this discredits the real work of letting people speak and act as individuals at work while understanding that by virtue of having a social identity, has legacy trait and role assumptions in society and therefore at work too. Outwardly we see gender, ethnicity etc as a feature of the human in front of us but we have to stop that from being a definition of capability and capacity and actual experience.

Are you wrestling with challenges at work? Consider coaching with nicki@theglasshammer.com

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Are you a sexist woman at work? Part One

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Recent revelations about banks paying women less for the same job seemed to surprise everyone, yet nobody, given the recent wake up call that we aren’t as avant garde on equality as we once thought.

Let’s assume good intentions for now and review the brain science behind managers and leaders’ decisions to promote and pay men more than women for the same job.

How is this still all happening in 2018? Simply put, it is our brains fault and how we give the benefit of the doubt to certain people based on their social identity (sex, race, nationality, class etc) and the associative brain process kicks in. Basically, what we have seen before generates positive and negative stereotyping that we silently attribute without knowing the individual (if we let that happen).

The brain and the way it processes information actually puts association to things in the ‘collection’ stage of data which was not previously believed to be the case. Literally if you see (or moreover don’t realize you have just seen) four red cars go past and then a blue one, your brain is busy assigning category and value to observed data without your conscious knowledge or permission. Likewise, pattern breaking is hard for the brain regarding that a leader/techie/mechanic/astronaut looks like based on images it has seen before.

Many social psychologists, naming two here; Chris Argyris (and his ladder of inference which can be used today by you in meetings for better bias breaking) and Virginia Schein have been telling us for years that we think our way into biased decisions unconsciously is based on our own beliefs. Now, neuroscience concurs that our brains trick us into thinking some people belong in a job because of their category type and the implicit value assigned to it. Notice use the of word “belong” because deserving on actual present moment merit has nothing to do with past patterns of other people’s performance. The average brain in its categorization of things and does not even attempt to predict future shapes and sizes of anything, hence it was Steve Jobs and not just anyone who could think up the iPod by looking at the walkman. It does however work pretty hard to tell you what is unfamiliar to you as Dr Banaji and colleagues’ impressive body of work on cognition and unconscious bias work has shown around ethnicity and gender.

So, here is the bad news, even as a woman your brain exercises bias against other women. Your whole life you have lived in the operating system of the patriarchy with more boys and men in leading roles from the first book you read, first job worked at, to the movies you watch. Then there is the messaging you heard from your grandparents and everyone else around you and how you were supposed to be as a girl and then a “young lady” then a nice woman. If you broke from heteronormative cisgender or even ethnicity molds, you got to have a pejorative label. Sound familiar? You can be a nice or nasty women and that doesn’t even begin to address the intersectionality issues that create much worse dichotomies or lose-lose stereotypes for non majority grouped people.

There is good news and that is you can override your cognitive processes. Recently, 3 out of 10 school children when asked to draw a scientist drew a woman. That is the best ratio we have ever seen, but we have ways to go.

You can start to be conscious of your thoughts and feelings in crucial moments like hiring and challenge your own assumptions around the constructs and paradigms you are holding. Put them on the table, shed light on them and see if they serve you and your mission? If you espouse a goal or a way of being, what are you actually doing behaviorally and not doing to achieve that goal?

How do your thought patterns match up to the person who you say you are? How do your unconscious beliefs help or hinder you at work?

Book an exploratory session with Executive Coach and theglasshammer.com‘s founder Nicki Gilmour (nicki@theglasshammer.com) to figure out how to get what you want today!

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Getting visibility for career advancement

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Visibility matters in your career.

It is important for bosses, sponsors and even peers to know what you are capable of and see what projects you are working on. Externally it is good to be seen by people in other firms too as although you might choose to be a “lifer” in one firm, you may also one day look for a change. Building a network is crucial to a career that is broad and long as people drive processes and innovate new products.

For eleven years here at theglasshammer.com we have profiled a senior woman on a Monday in our Voice of Experience column and on some Thursdays we profile Mover and Shakers and Rising Stars. We also have addressed intersectionality since the beginning, making sure in our profiles, interviews and panel events that all types of women are visible.

We have written over 800 profiles in total and we have not finished yet so as we look ahead for the rest of 2018, we are looking for great women to profile in financial and professional services and Fortune 1000 companies for the rest of the year. Thematically. we are looking for LGBTQIA Leaders for our June Pride series and then Men who Get it for July and then Latina leaders for September.

Please apply to louise@theglasshammer.com if you wish to be considered as a “profilee”.

We do not cover entrepreneurs for one reason that we have had in place from the beginning and that is because women are often encouraged to leave big business. Our site has always been about navigating your career inside industries (money, oil, big law) that have formal and also implicit male structures and hierarchies

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Self-Awareness – What Can You Not Access Yourself and What to Do About That?

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By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Reading is the supreme life hack – medium.com recently declared gifting a list of psychology and philosophy books, a couple of which got added to my (long) reading list.

Reading is an executive habit, with top executives reading at a much higher rate than others, with some stats quoting one book per week. But, it is what you do with what you read that counts.

Behavior change is notoriously hard for anyone. Addiction theory and neuroscience tells us that it takes sixteen weeks to bring a habit.

There is no doubt that our habits are socially acceptable like over working, over extending and never believing enough is enough. Then there is the whole topic of feeling worthy! Our fires are fueled by our self- talk, our mental models and our beliefs – implicit and explicit. Are you consciously goal setting or is the driver of your bus your unconscious mind? Just what role does the belief set that has been formed since childhood play right now? Our fear can fuel us without us ever realizing the agenda it creates while we go about our business.

Are you ready to talk about it and go on a journey of discovery?

Work with nicki@evolvedpeople.com as your executive coach to kill those gremlins!

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Behaviors of the Incumbent Leaders and Their Effects on the Rest of Us.

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By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

The CEO Genome Project states that there are four behaviors that show up for senior leaders to set them apart.

A Genome project on anything is fascinating to me as it of course only can replicate on what went before and I am interested in futurism in conjunction with historical trends. Why? because otherwise from day dot until the end of time, we are going to have to live in denial that the legacy masculine trait data is skewing the potential of women and ironically modern evolved man. Why no one has really dwelled on this is a bit of mystery to me, or is it a conscious or unconscious omission? If we only talk about how old testosterone straight white American men have led, how do we expect women or other men who naturally are or aspire to not fit the mould of the stereotype?

The effect of us bowing to the patriarchy is serious. Lewinian Theory ( the foundation of organizational psychology and systems thinking) suggests that behavior is a function of our personality and the environment we are operating in. In real life, just about all of us can point to a female leader who has assimilated to what I like to call “Jack Welsh in a skirt” mode and with disastrous results for her and most who have to be part of that team. Yet, to punish that individual is to misunderstand the systemic forces and rewards that are real and active as long as the masculine trait pattern of leadership is considered the only one, or the superior one.

I have zero interest in stereotyping men into one group. I think there are amazing men out there but they too are subject to systemic forces that make them behaviorally choose (albeit consciously) to be people that given other conditions, they might not be.

This work is the key to Diversity. Diversity is culture work, it is not Noah’s Ark and until companies truly view it this way, there are only strategies to provide not real change to achieve.

So, in the meantime, if you want to navigate your career optimally and authentically, consider working with a coach who can help you.

Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com or nicki@evolvedpeople.com for a free 15 mins exploratory session.

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Productivity – Is It All About Prioritizing to Feel Good at the End of the Week?

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By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

We all have tasks within our job that we like better than others, and most of us have some level of procrastination ability with the tasks we like less.

So, I use a system that works for me and it may work for you depending on several factors including how you think, learn and approach work as discussed in our “Do you know how you learn” career tip

I like to write down on a Monday morning all the things I need to do this week and then I assign priority- one being needs to happen ( like this weekly career tip column), to sales work (which I quantify by how many people I will talk to in a week), to admin and even life admin. Some things have a two, three, four or five assigned to them. If I get through all my ones, and half of my twos then by the end of the week I feel a sense of achievement and can have a reward of some kind. Possibly because I score very low on hedonism on the Hogan personality test this works for me and I can understand how other people would not like this feeling but the point is, there are ways to know yourself and get a system that works for you.

The next week I look back at the same list and ensure things dont stay low ranked. Even if it’s something I hate doing, I commit to making it a one within 3 -4 weeks( if that works for whatever the task is).

Have a go! It might help.

If you would like to figure out more about how you optimally work, Nicki is a qualified organizational psychologist and Exec coach. Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com or nicki@evolvedpeople.com for a free 15 mins exploratory session.

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Bonus Banked? What’s Next?

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By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Bonus season is over for another year and so the should I stay or should I go question could loom again for you?

Chances are, if you work in banking and financial services, you stayed put until this payday. But, with a year ahead, its a good time to look at what makes you happy at your job, beyond the money.

If the bonus was good, this can make you stay for a little while longer even if you know you need something different. Money is always a factor, but look at culture, growth opportunities and ultimately the job you want to actually do.

Dream a little, scribble and journal- what do you want more of? What do you want less of? Just what would the ideal job look like for you? What are the other lifestyle based factors that you want to have more of? More travel? Less travel? Less of a commute? Picasso, it is your picture, don’t forget that!

Good luck!

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Black History Month and Your Role in Helping Others

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By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Black History Month is about celebrating amazing people of color.

For us on theglasshammer.com we celebrate women of color and all types of women all year long but we do recognize that intersectionality is real (simply put, being a woman with another social identity that is “other”, or from the historically non majority group.)

Do a network audit- is there only one type of person in your network? If this cuts along the lines of social identity (gender, ethnicity, LGBT status, class, nationality etc) then make a conscious effort to go to lunch with someone different to you. If you only eat lunch with white women and white men (and you are a white women) then what are you missing? How can you sponsor and advocate women of color on your team? How can you mentor and be mentored by a person of color?

If you are a woman of color reading this column, how can you stay authentic and not assimilate ?

All of these discussions are of course theory and make assumptions that all white women are one way and all women of color are another, which we work very hard on theglasshammer to dispel such stereotypes.

So, go have multiple conversations with people who have had a different journey to you and just listen with an open mind and open heart, because this is how we learn.

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Do More of What You Like Doing at Work (and What You Get Paid For)

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By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

All jobs have tasks that we prefer over other tasks.

Be honest with yourself, how strategically important are the tasks that you are avoiding? If they rank highly either for your current role or as a development skill, then consider setting time aside formally in your calendar to undertake them on a regular basis as habit can be a great way to embrace them.

What are you recognized and rewarded for?

Are you experiencing task creep?

Have a look (or make a list) of what you do every day for a period of a week to see what is officially within your remit and what creeps in there. It might be illuminating to see how you are paid for driving the train but also at times asked tolay the track, clean the engine etc which is time consuming and often not conducive to your time management or skill set.

Contact nicki@glasshammer2.wpengine.com is you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work.

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