By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
What is your arc? How does the tasks you do, and the projects completed, add up to a narrative for your career?
Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com is you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work.
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.
By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
Make 3 columns and in the first list what you like doing. In the second column, list what you are good at (task wise) as these lists might differ.Then in the third column list what you really don’t like doing. This is a great way to start to thinking about transferable skills for the job that you do want to do next.
So many people spend time in roles where the expected promotion takes them into work they simply don’t like doing (for example, managing more people). The thing is,you have choices, it is your life.
Be honest with yourself, how strategically important are the tasks that you are avoiding? Do they rank highly for your current role? How will they play into your future role?
If there are skills that you need to develop, 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.
But, if you realize that you need to be developing a different set of skills for your next role, then try to identify what those might be.The gap may be small and easy to bridge, or not, but at least you will have a sense of perspective on what you have to do.
Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com is you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work
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
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!
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
By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
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!
By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
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.
By Nicki Gilmour, CEO of theglasshammer
My takeaway from the 2018 Catalyst Awards and Dinner is that owning your experiences is the first step and the second step is to not let them negate other people’s experiences if you are truly going to be a man or a woman who is going to see progress in our lifetime for gender equity.
Catalyst, the oldest and leading research and advisory nonprofit organization for advancing women at work, has a conference that is second to none for translating theory and research into practice with CEOs of major companies and theglasshammer.com was honored to attend the annual conference.
‘Workplaces that work for women, are workplaces that work for everyone’ was the theme and mantra of the day, with great companies getting to share some of the best practices that they have implemented to understand results beyond the rhetoric. And, the sub theme of the day was how to be a male ally or gender champion as men in the room spoke of how they wanted to see change. A stunningly sincere and impactful dinner speech by Carnival Corporation (Cruise Lines) CEO Arnold W. Donald, the dinner chair of the gala, created a genuine sense that some men really get it. Quoting Maya Angelou saying “When you know better, you do better” regarding gender equality and diversity. Mr. Donald spoke of his own experiences as a man of color while acknowledging humbly and implicitly that he knows experience does not in itself equal enlightenment; although for me, he was the most enlightened man of the day. It is so important to hear people and more importantly men to acknowledge that other people may individually or systemically due to their social identity (gender, ethnicity, orientation, nationality) have experiences that are not yours and that does not invalidate yours or theirs. I heard this man recognize his male privilege in a way which showed me real commitment to being an ally because his foundation was one of acceptance, not denial around his own gender’s historic position at work.
Deborah Gillis, President and CEO of Catalyst spoke at lunch regarding this topic of “how to” be a male ally or champion of women, advising the confrontation of the fact the level playing field has not always been there, and how men can “call it out” when everyone’s voices are not being heard.
She stated that Catalyst wanted to send out a beacon of hope in this watershed moment of #Metoo. She asked rhetorically, “How can we focus (on work), if we don’t feel safe?” and later in breakout sessions, Hilton panelist Laura Fuentes, SVP, Talent & Rewards, and People Analytics reiterated the need for psychological safety. Fuentes commented that behaviorial data was part of the ongoing evaluation and development process for managers which created an accountability to those who they lead and to the values and culture of the firm.
This method of actually measuring opinion and perception was also discussed by panelists from West Monroe Partners who took steps to formalize policy and communicate it in their firm. They did this so that perceived cultural norms such as time off and flexibility could be used positively and inclusively for all and equally implicit negative norms could be addressed also. Betsy Bagley, Senior Director and Consultant, Advisory Services, Catalyst and Katherine Giscombe, PhD, Vice President and Women of Color Practitioner, Advisory Services, Catalyst skillfully moderated this discussion around what actually can be done to create better workplaces for women with an organizational model worth checking out in Catalyst resource section.
Carla Harris, Vice Chairman, Managing Director and Senior Client Advisor at Morgan Stanley led a superb closing session with her usual candid and engaging style, opening with, “we cannot manage, the way we were managed”.
Harris explained first how to get to management and the important difference between performance and relationship currency. In her “pearls” (of wisdom) session, she explained how sponsors do not need to know the good, the bad and ugly, but rather, “the good, the good and the good”. She advised women and men in the audience to understand that performance currency has diminishing returns, as the baseline is always to do a great job but to understand that over time people come to expect excellence from you. She stressed the importance of relationship currency in the advancement formula. She also stressed the importance of improvement via feedback saying, “data is your friend, you cannot fix it, if you don’t know its broken.”
Regarding leadership and change regarding diversity, Harris stated, “I cannot believe that three decades later, we are still talking about the business case for diversity. If you still aren’t clear,” she quipped, “I will tell you right now” and went on to explain that it’s about innovation and to innovate you need a lot of perspectives and that comes from multiple experiences and that experiences are born from having different people in your team.
Harris explained that people need to be courageous in soliciting other people’s opinion and that the trait of courageousness is needed for intentionality to happen for change with accountability and consistency present.
The initiatives that were recognized this year were The Boston Consulting Group with their Women@BCG, IBM with Leading the Cognitive Era Powered by the Global Advancement of Women, Nationwide with Our Associates’ Success Drives Business Success and Northrop Grumman Corporation with Building the Best Culture, Leveraging the Power of Women.
Great work, Catalyst! And good luck to Deborah Gillis in her new role.
By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
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.