Coach John G. Agno is your own cultural attache; keeping you abreast of what's effective in leadership. People learn better and are positively motivated when supported by regular coaching.
PERSONAL COACHING Leadership onboarding coaching helps the executive adapt to the employer's culture, create rapport with their team and develop productive ways to achieve necessary goals.
SELF ASSESSMENT CENTER Leadership skills and style testing. Know how you motivate and coach people to gain success at work and in life.
WHAT IS LEADERSHIP? Leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment.
LEADERSHIP TIPS “The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)
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An insight is a thought we've never had before. It's a fresh thought.
Insights are those "Aha! moments" when the clouds part and the solution to your problem arises right in front of you. They happen when fresh new light is spread on a subject you've considered for some time. We all have experienced these moments of deep understanding, even if we might not know what to call them or how to describe them.
An insight is a discovery or realization that goes beyond face value, beyond the obvious. It is a deeper, more universal understanding that is often very relevant to you. With insight, a new cognitive structure is formed that is different from the sum of its parts, and it usually calls for a different action.
While the circumstances in which people have their insights are as varied as the individuals, everyone has reported a common state of mind. It's an easy going, unpressured, open, and ungripped state. The more often you reside in this state of mind, the more often you will have insights.
Conversely, when you are agitated and bearing down with your thinking, insights become more elusive. While the Insight State of Mind is our natural, default state, we inadvertently think ourselves out of it.
A strategic insight is a simplifying "Aha! moment" that often radically redefines business and the competitive advantage. Once articulated, these strategic insights seemed like simple common sense to everyone. They are easily understood and acted upon. In fact, implementation usually occurs with far less effort than forced march that often characterizes strategy implementation.
The Art of Insight is a new book that teaches readers how to have more "Aha! moments" in life. Based on the authors' years of research, reflection, and experiences, The Art of Insight presents practical methods of recognizing and cultivating an Insight State of Mind. Charles Kiefer and Malcolm Constable describe these thinking methods that are designed to foster fresh thoughts and perspectives. But this is not a rigid set of rules--it's a creative pursuit.
"Cage-Busting Leadership" (Harvard Education Press) is of profound interest and value to school and district leaders, as well as everyone, with a stake in school improvement.
Author Frederick (Rick) M. Hess aptly describes his aims at the start of this provocative book: "I believe that two things are true. It is true, as would be reformers often argue, that statutes, polices, rules, regulations, contracts, and case law make it tougher than it should be for school and system leaders to drive improvement and lead. However, it is also the case that leaders have far more freedom to transform, reimagine, and invigorate teaching, learning, and schooling than is widely believed."
Own Your Beliefs
Cage-busting requires clarity on what you're trying to do and what you think a great school or school system looks like. Saying "Raise test scores" or "Make AYP" are bad responses here. They're bad because they're secondhand goals, defined for you by policy makers and test developers. A good response identifies the destination and lights a path forward. Knowing what you care about frees you to push back on the stuff that you don't think important.
Think Bang-for-the-Buck
Educators make a well-meaning mistake when they focus on academic outcomes without also focusing on cost-effectiveness of programs and personnel. The relationship of results to costs is sometimes referred to as ROI (return on investment), but it's fine to just think of it as the bang you're getting for each buck you spend.
Today, it's easy to find out how well a school or system is faring in terms of academic outcomes, but it's harder to gauge bang for the buck. Performance outcomes are generally discussed without much regard for whether they're achieved while spending 20 percent more or 20 percent less. Consequently, school and system leaders focus on boosting achievement but pay far less attention to cost-effectiveness.
Yet, getting the same achievement results for 10 percent less means a district is freeing up millions to add services or invest in programs, staff, and practices that can drive improvement.
"Have you ever seen a winning team that had no coach? You cannot perform with excellence unless you have a coach. Even people who are the best, the top one percent or two percent in their field, still have a coach. Ironically, in business, we are expected sometimes to play without a coach. That's not the best way to play, either in sports or business. Business is a team event. Winning is about execution, so performance coaching always has a role. I can see people performing better because of the coaching." --Senior Executive, Global Manufacturer
Leadership is not just for people at the top.Everyone can learn to lead by discovering the power that lies within each one of us to make a difference and being prepared when the call to lead comes.
Leadership is applicable to all facets of life: a competency that you can learn to expand yourperspective, set the context of a goal, understand the dynamics of human behavior and take the initiative to get to where you want to be.
Effective leadership coaching can happen on the dance floor of conversation. Here are five guiding principles that guide respectful conversations:
1. When peers connect change happens. Effective coaching can happen on the dance floor of conversation.
2. It's OK to begin a conversation by confronting the other person with questions that seem awkward but set the stage for a respectful exchange. Why waste time on small talk? Just ask to-the-point information-seeking questions, like: "What are you here for? How do you wantto spend our time together?"
3. Conversations are not meant to be structured. Be open to conversations that you are unprepared for and focused on theinterests of the other person (not your purpose).
4. Don't get pulled into solving problems that may not matter to the other person. Allow time for the person to get to what's really important. Provide spaces where they can express their doubts and fears by being a thoughtful listener--without taking on the responsibility to fix or debate the issue. After all, you have invited the person to talk about what matters to her or him, not you, so allow time for the articulation of those thoughts and feelings.
5. Personal transformation happens when the right questions get asked--not by providing answers. When you focus on the solution, you are trying to sell the person something. When you allow people to answer their own questions, they discover what they were not aware of---and what is needed to move forward. Personal transformation leads corporate transformation--one person at a time.
That is why leadership development is not an event. It is a process of participating in respectful conversations where the leader recognizeshis or her own feelings and those of others in building safe and trustingrelationships.
Performance coachingis dialogue that recognizes excellence and achieves business goals by specifying areas for improvement and learning. Managers who coach others do so to help them develop new skills, initiate a desired competency or goal, stretch performance to the next level or redirect behavior to solve existing problems. Performance coaching must occur regularly and consistently, not just once or twice per year.
People who receive performance coaching usually look forward to it, knowing that it has the power to make them even better at what they do, thus opening up opportunities. Unlike other processes, performance coaching focuses explicitly on business results. Performance coaches spend most of their time discussing high-impact behaviors and linking them to results. They aim not just at addressing performance problems per se but more often at achieving high performance and reaching a person's full potential.
However, many executives, who have not been personally coached, have trouble understanding how to coach for high performance. With companies rarely observing the quality of performance coaching and managers sometimes exaggerating their time reporting on coaching activities, leaders often don't understand the nature of coaching actually taking place.
However, a single leader who coaches for elite performance can make a big difference within an organization. Yet, the real power comes when companies share high-performance coaching capability across all managers and leaders. Since most companies don't do this, scaling high performance coaching is a significant source of advantage, available for the taking.
The key success factor to integrate high-performance coaching across all managers and leaders is to strategically select a few emerging leaders for a six month engagement of weekly hour telephone coaching sessions with an outside executive coach; in order to understand, appreciate and be ready to implement with their team members the power of performance coaching.
These executive coached managers will then be ready, willing and able to structure performance coaching conversations with their direct reports to gain useful feedback and skillfully pinpoint the right workplace behaviors. Coaching can be hard to do and feel uncomfortable at first. But by being professionally coached and recognizing the benefits of their own personal development, these new leader coaches will begin to achieve exceptional team results within the organization.
Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it.
Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of self-interest: financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other peoples’ lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.
“Give and Take” incorporates scores of studies and personal case histories that suggest the benefits of an attitude of extreme giving at work. Many of the examples — the selfless C.E.O.’s, the consultants who mentor ceaselessly — are inspiring and humbling, even if they are a bit intimidating in their natural expansiveness. These generous professionals look at the world the way Grant does: an in-box filled with requests is not a task to be dispensed with perfunctorily (or worse, avoided); it’s an opportunity to help people, and therefore it’s an opportunity to feel good about yourself and your work. “I never get much done when I frame the 300 e-mails as ‘answering e-mails,’ ” Grant told me. “I have to look at it as, How is this task going to benefit the recipient?” Where other people see hassle, he sees bargains, a little work for a lot of gain, including his own.
The message sounds terrific: Feel good about your work, and get more of it done, and bask in the appreciation of all the people you help along the way.
Relationships between people or institutions are based on exchange in which all parties have an understanding of their rights and obligations. Relations can be forged through personal favors and bring with them obligations and expectations. For every action, something is expected in return. Those who do favors are highly esteemed; they are recognized as people who have respect for those around them. Every previous or current situation produces expectations for future behavior on the giver and gift recipient.
Reciprocation flows from Divine Law that can neither be ignored or put aside. Perhaps, the most important of these laws is the 'law of love.' Put simply, "Love is Law, Law is Love. God is Love, Love is God." This amounts to the same thing as "the gift of giving" without the "hope of reward or pay," or serving others. This 'law of love' is identified in many different ways--for example, in Wayne Baker's bestseller, "Achieving Success Through Social Capital"(Jossey-Bass), this law of love in the workplace is described as the "law of reciprocity."
The law of reciprocity is not what can best be described as "transactional reciprocity." Baker says that, "Many people conceive of their business dealings as spot market exchanges--value given for value received, period. Nothing more, nothing less. This tit-for-tat mode of operation can produce success, but it doesn't invoke the power of reciprocity and so fails to yield extraordinary success."
Baker explains, "The lesson is that we cannot pursue the power of reciprocity. When we try to invoke reciprocity directly, we lose sight of the reason for it: helping others. Paradoxically, it is in helping others without expecting reciprocity in return that we invoke the power of reciprocity. The path to reciprocity is indirect: reciprocity ensues from the social capital built by making contributions to others.
The deliberate pursuit of reciprocity fails, just like the pursuit of happiness. Acts of contribution, big and small, build your fund of social capital, creating a vast network of reciprocity. And so those who help you may not be those you help. The help you receive may come from distant corners of your network."
Rule for Reciprocation:"One of the most potent of the weapons of influence around us is the rule for reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us."Robert B. Cialdini, author of "The Psychology of Persuasion" (William Morrow, 1993)
Grant’s book, incorporating several decades of social-science research on reciprocity, divides the world into three categories: givers, matchers and takers. Givers give without expectation of immediate gain; they never seem too busy to help, share credit actively and mentor generously. Matchers go through life with a master chit list in mind, giving when they can see how they will get something of equal value back and to people who they think can help them. And takers seek to come out ahead in every exchange; they manage up and are defensive about their turf. Most people surveyed fall into the matcher category — but givers, Grant says, are overrepresented at both ends of the spectrum of success: they are the doormats who go nowhere or burn out, and they are the stars whose giving motivates them or distinguishes them as leaders.
Driving in the "blind spot" is dangerous both personally and corporately.
After working with entrepreneurs for several years now, one major failing keeps surfacing -- too many have a fatal marketing "blind spot".
These entrepreneurs thoroughly understand their technology. They may well be on their way to mastering the engineering and operational issues involved in delivering their product or service. Yet they persist -- often until it is too late -- in believing that the marketing issues are relatively simple -- because everyone will surely love their new product or service as much as they do.
Only after that product or service is "ready" -- or worse, after early sales attempts have bombed -- will someone like me get a call. Of course, at that point most of the money's gone. Sometimes huge amounts! There's neither time nor money to do a competent marketing plan, let alone execute it -- and the venture fails -- needlessly.
In my experience, this marketing "blind spot" is the single most common cause of startup failures -- in fact, I'm starting to believe, more common than all others combined.
The most important piece of advice that I can give entrepreneurs is to get a marketing "reality check" early on -- like at the beginning, before you even know that your product or service will do what you're hoping it will do.
Is it really there? Can it be penetrated (or developed) and what's likely to be required to do so? This is just a "look." It doesn't have to be an expensive, complicated project. In fact, at this point, it shouldn't be. But it's absolutely certain that it will be much less "expensive" than if it's done downstream.
Leaders at all levels are reluctant to openly acknowledge their struggles for fear of appearing weak, indecisive or even incompetent. In "Leadership and the Art of Struggle: How Great Leaders Grow through Challenge and Adversity," author Steven Snyder argues that struggle is an innate part of leadership that should be embraced as an opportunity for breakthrough success rather than feared as a career-killer.
"Fulfilling your potential as a leader requires that you think differently about leadership," Snyder writes. "You must recast your struggles as positive learning experiences and view them as necessary steps in your leadership development." Developing a solid understanding of the root of struggle--change, tensions, and/or being out of balance--is the first step to mastering the art of struggle.
For example, blind spots are the product of an overactive automatic mind and an underactive reflective mind. A blind spot is anything that can hinder or undermine your performance that you are either unaware of or have chosen to overlook.
A blind spot is most likely to come into play when leaders move to a new role or a new company. They arrive so eager to show off what they know that they don't pay close enough attention to their new circumstances. The risk is that they continue on autopilot without noticing the need for radical change. Their automatic mind continues to tell them that all is well, and their reflective mind is too lazy to blow the whistle. Is it any wonder why 40% of new leaders fail?
A blind spot doesn't necessarily mean that you are unaware of a problem; blind spots can occur even if you have some level of awareness but fail to take appropriate action. By definition, you are blind to your blind spots. That's why it's so important to proactively seek to discover them. It can be helpful to work with an executive coach to help hear what you are not hearing and see what you have chosen not to see.
Thousands of leaders attend leadership training every year to glean insights into how to lead better. At the end of the training, most of these leaders will resolve to become more effective by using these new insights; hopefully with the guidance of a personal executive coach. Unfortunately, few of them will implement these good intentions. Yet, they need to pay attention to their intentions in order to get to where they want to be.
Although the executive education debate still rages on whether leadership is learned or innate, there is no doubt that the subject is being taught. Back in October 2003, BusinessWeek reported that 134 companies from 20 nations spent $210 million to enroll 21,000 employees in executive leadership programs. Since leadership development is not an event, that's a significant investment in classroom activities that may or may not produce company leaders or even better managers.
Resources: Support desired changes with coaching and infrastructure.
The most important resources for leaders to access are human resources, both for themselves and for their organizations. It turns out that when desired behaviors are reinforced by personal coaching and institutionalized in human resources (HR) practices, they are much more likely to be sustained.
Coaching sustains change because it personalizes and reinforces a leader's intent for the future. In the last 20 years, as leadership coaching has mushroomed, the range of coaching expectations and services has exploded. To use coaching to sustain change, leaders should answer these four questions:
To lead to sustainable change, coaching needs to be based on a more rigorous typology of outcomes. Leaders sustain personal behavior change when they identify specific behaviors that can and should be changed: coaches provide feedback and advice about how to make those new behaviors consistently happen. Leaders sustain change when their coaches help them to see the valued corporate outcomes or personal results that come from the change.
Expert coaches can help leaders to sustain changes in both behavior and results. They may explore candid (and at times brutal) information about the leader's behavior and performance. They may make suggestions about how to improve and challenge the status quo. They may help the leader to create a personal leadership brand by combining behavior and results into a leadership identity.
When leaders use coaches to help sustain their behaviors, their chosen behaviors will be more likely to endure over time.
Yahoo—that has struggled to come up with new ideas—is making a smart call.
Most studies of telecommuting focus on how working from home affects employees. Less often discussed is how telecommuting affects employers. And the research on this suggests that for Yahoo the costs of telecommuting dwarf its benefits.
On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interaction that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliché of business writing, but that doesn’t make it less true.
When employees just hang out in the coffee room (or meet when leaving the rest room) they aren’t wasting time; rather, they are having highly productive conversations about problems encountered on the job.
To illustrate the importance of knowledge to a company, think back in time to remember the disruption that occurred when a key person left the company without sharing his understanding of how to get things done. Effective corporate leaders know that unshared knowledge loses value. Yet, how knowledge is shared is crucial in determining whether it serves to enhance the reputation of the person sharing it or not.
Success is not an individual matter--it depends upon our relationships with others. Connection and coordination with others matter. The manner in which the professional connects with others matters. Increasing one's social capital is all knowing how to share knowledge so it not only adds value to the organization but also to your recognized worth within it.
Effective corporate leaders know that unshared knowledge loses value. Yet, how knowledge is shared is crucial in determining whether it serves to enhance the reputation of the person sharing it or not. The formula for both personal and corporate success is:
Success = Human Capital (what you know and can do) X Social Capital (who you know and who knows you) X Reputation (who trusts you).
While all industries are knowledge-based today, personal knowledge and social capital capabilities are critical to professional service firms (such as consulting, investment banking and law) and research-driven firms that depend upon the capabilities of knowledge workers, both individually and working together.
The professional knowledge worker needs to look at him or herself as the hub of his personal and business networks. How he or she connects to a community of networks will determine if s/he obtains the resources when s/he needs them.
By making the 'invisible structure' of personal and business relationships visible, s/he will work more effectively through increasing one's personal bandwidth.
Since personal development leads business development, understanding and practicing social capital building methods should be an important element in a company's business development strategy. Professionals need to make skills of influence and collaboration part of their everyday tool kit.
The fundamental point is that much of the value that gets created in a company comes from the ways in which workers teach and learn from each other. If telecommuters do less of that, the organization will be weaker. On top of this, there’s evidence that telecommuting can make it hard to foster trust and solidarity—an issue that matters a lot to Yahoo right now. Face time is still the easiest way to build connections.
Researchers are finding that wearing a smile brings certain benefits, like slowing down the heart and reducing stress. This may even happen when people aren't aware they are forming a smile, according to a recent study. The work follows research that established that the act of smiling can make you feel happier.
A study published in the journal Psychological Science found that people who smiled after engaging in stress-inducing tasks showed a greater reduction in heart rate than people who maintained a neutral facial expression. The study, which involved 170 participants, got people to smile unknowingly by making them hold a pair of chopsticks in three different ways in their mouth. One way forced people to maintain a neutral expression, another prompted a polite smile, and a third resulted in a full smile that uses the muscles around the mouth and the eyes.
"We saw a steeper decline in heart rate and a faster physiological stress recovery when they were smiling," even though the participants weren't aware they were making facial expressions, says Sarah Pressman, co-author of the study and an assistant psychology professor at University of California, Irvine.
Studies have found that the intensity of a person's smile can help predict life satisfaction over time and even longevity. What's unclear is whether smiling reflects a person's overall happiness or if the act of smiling contributes to that happiness. Marianne LaFrance, a psychology professor at Yale University, believes it is a bit of both.
"It's probably bidirectional," she says. "People who smile more tend to elicit more positive connections with other people," which in turn help make you happier and healthier.
And what effect do people who smile have on others?
Experts say there is a real positive impact. Marco Iacoboni, a lab director at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center, says when people see a smile, so-called mirror neurons fire in their brain and evoke a similar neural response as if they were smiling themselves.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2013
The book "Leadership Conversations" by Alan S. Berson and Richard G. Stieglitz challenges managers to become great leaders by holding effective conversations.
In developing others, you must engage in two kinds of critical conversations to create alignment and eliminate assumptions--both yours and theirs:
Baseline conversations set mutual expectations; define ground rules; provide metrics to evaluate performance; calcify boundaries; and establish alignment around strategies, objectives and tactics.
Feedback conversations maintain alignment, address changes and unexpected developments, and resolve issues in order to follow an effective path toward the agreed-on objectives.
You currently may avoid these conversations because they can be difficult, time-consuming, and uncomfortable--especially if not handled properly. Hold these conversations--nothing is more urgent. If you do not hold them, the actions you and your people take will be based on differing assumptions and will deliver less than optimum results.
Leaders are innately curious about how the world works--and that curiosity propels business, technological, and social progress by asking great questions.
A program manager encouraged his staff to be open and blunt with him, with each other, and with other organizations. One day he asked his coach, "My people don't suggest as many ideas as they once did. Sometimes I feel like they aren't telling me the whole story. Why"
The coach provided feedback: "Do you recall last week's staff meeting when you said the new approach that Ian suggested was the dumbest thing you had ever heard?"
The program manager responded, "yes, I said that--but even you thought it wasn't a viable option."
The coach continued, "As presented, his idea did seem unworkable. But judgments like that derail creativity. I was actually curious why an experienced engineer like Ian would think it was a good idea. If you had asked him, you might have uncovered the golden nugget behind his idea. Your more outspoken staff aren't affected by judgments, but mild-mannered ones like Ian become reluctant to suggest controversial ideas."
The reluctance had turned the program manager's conversations into one-side rituals instead of the vigorous discussions of bold strategies that he wanted to encourage.
Experts make decisions instantly because unconsciously they believe they know everything they need to know. Effective leaders see the fallacy in that thinking and escape from the "knowing trap" by keeping an open mind and asking questions to learn more.
The leader as coach can use these 10 coaching points to open up the creativity of the group conversation:
• Accept that the leader is not in control.
• Listen. Even though this skill is included in virtually every interpersonal skills course, most of us still have not mastered it.
• Pay attention to what is not being said, as well as to what you hear.
• Probe for information without conducting an inquisition.
• Help others create a clear goal for the conversation.
• Give everyone a complete picture of what is currently happening in regard to the goal.
• Provide an opportunity to generate a number of options for closing the gap between what’s happening now and what the group wants.
Corporate cultures and behaviors can hinder women's progress toward leadership positions.
"Given that men maintain critical mass in leadership positions, they control the evolution of their organizational structures and the pace at which women will be allowed into leadership," says "Not in the Club" author Janet Pucino. "Statistically women are the extreme exception at the executive level and in boardrooms. Only 16 percent of board positions are held by women and less than 4 percent of Fortune 500 companies have women CEOs."
Pucino cites other data on gender biases, women's experiences and human behaviors and concludes that, despite a prevalence of such findings, there's been virtually no impact on today's corporate structures, labor laws, governmental policies or business programs in the country's top business schools.
There is an abysmal lack of executive coaching and mentorship of emerging women leaders. Coaching and mentoring for women is a key success factor. If you ask male executives if they've mentored women during their careers, most would say they have not done so, but there aren't yet enough women executives to mentor other women. Women don't have the critical mass to do it alone. The solution is to engage a male executive coach to help you understand how male executives think and engineer the best work experiences in more diverse environments.
Career success is really all about having choices and making choices in your current work environment and throughout your career. The higher up you go, the more expectations you have placed on you. It becomes imperative to take control--you don't have to respond to everything. Working your choices through with your coach or mentor can bring clarity to your thought processes. Here is what one executive woman said about her coaching experience, "John has a unique style, a solid set of tools and an approach that will enable an individual to validate the direction they want to pursue both professionally & personally. You will benefit from the breadth, depth and diversity of his knowledge."
Why Gender Matters
The context of a woman's role within a culture directly correlates to how women are accepted and perceived in the workforce by that culture. These different perceptions lead to different inquiries and conclusions. For example, it is common for women executives to feel isolated because they are not socialized in the ways men are. As women move up the corporate ladder, this feeling of isolation occurs because women are held to different standards than men and are not always supported by the people they have brought along with them.
In recent years, scientists have discovered that differences between the sexes are more profound than anyone previously guessed. Right down to the cellular level males and females are different. The sex hormones estrogen in women and testosterone in men have a significant impact on behavior.
Men and women are not only markedly different in the hormones that drive them, but they are also different in the way they think. The brains of men and women are actually wired differently. When we add to this our unique personalities, our cultural upbringing, and the environment in which we live and work, we come to appreciate why the sexes view the world differently.
It is these differences that create interpersonal problems when we have the irrational belief all men, or all women, respond in a similar manner. The truth is that both men and women routinely approach a broad range of personal and business issues quite differently.
Men in business will expect women to behave like them, while women will expect a female counterpart to behave in a more feminine manner. It is a fine pink line that women in leadership roles walk. Men and women tend to respond differently—not better or worse, just differently. Yet women continue to be faulted for their feminine attributes.
As you can imagine, this gender gap can create all sorts of problems when neither side feels valued, inappropriately judged or misunderstood. The key to success will be to recognize that some ingrained behaviors can create natural “gender gaps." We know that the corporate world has vast room for improvement when it comes to incorporating women into top professional positions.
As you know, the culture at most companies has been shaped over centuries by male executives. You also know that the natural outcome of a male-dominated business is that it has the tendency to be conducted like a team sport. Today, more and more women are playing competitive sports, but it is only recently that they have begun to recognize the need to adapt some of these same skills to the workplace. Even then, women can find the rules of the game elusive; they don’t completely understand its approach to power, money, control, and status. Sometimes the elements are more subtle than that.
You know, and we know, that you are skilled and brighter than average. You work hard, you stay late, and yet others who are less dedicated are too often the ones who get recognized and rewarded.
This fact is sad but true: it will be exceptionally difficult to move ahead if you don’t appreciate the unwritten rules of the game. Keep in mind the truism: “Star players don’t become star players on the field. They are merely recognized there.” If you want to understand how someone succeeds, don’t just watch them accept the award. You have to observe their daily preparations closely.
To bridge gender gaps, successful women key into the rules of the game and actively study the culture of their organization. For starters, women must understand what is considered a win, what behaviors and goals will be rewarded, and what qualities are characteristic of a strong team player.
Gender-based differences play out in leadership nearly every day influencing how men and women communicate, act, react, problem-solve, make decisions and work together. One is no more effective than the other; but joined holistically within a balanced leadership team, can lead to a better business outcome.
