The meaning of success

January 25, 2014

“A magnificent career comes from being a magnificent woman first. It’s a flipped-up, upside down paradigm of success.” – Emily Bennington

Living in New York City, it’s tough not to fall for the traditional US version of success: a good job, lots of money, the right title, address, and so on. Time and again in recent years, as I’ve diverged from a traditional career path, I’ve berated myself for not being successful enough. Some friends my age have titles with ‘VP’ or ‘partner’ in them. They seem to have all sorts of secret knowledge about the business world. They earn very well and have plenty of nice clothes. Yet I don’t want those jobs myself, so why am I beating myself up? I genuinely love what I do, even if I find myself wondering if it’s as ‘grown-up’ as what some of my friends do. We all compare ourselves to others – it’s a common career/life curse – but also, the society I live in tells me those outward trappings constitute success.

So it was refreshing to talk to Emily Bennington recently. She’ll be appearing in the next episode of The Broad Experience, along with Kathy Caprino. The topic is success – the traditional definition of it, why some people seem to think it’s achievable overnight, and re-framing the whole idea of success.

Emily teaches mindful or ‘conscious’ leadership to women. You’ll hear more in the show about how she came to that. She was such a mass of anxiety and ambition (or fear, as she later described it) during her early career that she finally burned out. This is a woman whose boss told her during her first ever performance review that he couldn’t promote her “because no one on this team respects you.” More on that during the episode.

She contends – and I, ever the cynic, listen hopefully – that you can achieve a leadership role at work by pursuing your career in a mindful way – taking others along with you rather than stepping on them to get where you want to go.

One of the interesting things Emily told me that I couldn’t fit into the finished show was that when she was researching her latest book, Who Says It’s a Man’s World, she found that most of the women she was surveying wanted very different things from their work life than she had when she was in the corporate world.

“Just coming from my own career, I was thinking everyone wanted to climb to the top of the ladder and have that corner office…and it was super interesting to find what they wanted was to be happier in their own lives.”

It wasn’t that they weren’t ambitious, she says, but to them, success wasn’t ‘getting to the top’, it was being more content in their current situations. I think a lot of people feel the exact same way. We don’t all have the drive and energy to get to the top, but we do want to have more influence and to make our current work lives more meaningful than they are.

Tune in next week to find out about Emily’s prescription for a happier work life, which includes re-defining 'success'. For a more traditional view of what it is to be successful, and on why some groups in America do better than others, here's a piece from Sunday's New York Times by the controversial 'tiger mother' Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rosenfeld.

Are you really a good communicator?

January 17, 2014

“Women tended to come into the conversation being very hesitant about what was possible...I watched them ask for less than they could have and walk away from certain opportunities because they felt they shouldn’t speak up for themselves.” – Wokie Nwabueze

Many women consider themselves good communicators. It’s certainly one of the boxes I’ve always felt safest about ticking when I scan a job description. Women are, we’re often told, wonderful at this stuff. But what does that actually mean? If it just means that we’re more verbal than men, well, perhaps some of us are (although it’s untrue that women speak many more words per minute than men). Many of us like communicating, we are often (but not always) good at expressing ourselves, at forming relationships with other people, at catering to different people’s needs. But a recent 85 Broads ‘jam session’ I attended got me thinking about what being a good communicator really means, and whether those of us who think we’re doing it right actually are.

The speaker was Wokie Nwabueze of Women Prepared To Lead. She’s been a lawyer, a mediator, and a professional communicator for more than 20 years.

She started by acknowledging that many women see themselves as excellent communicators. But later, she made this point:

“Being a great communicator is being able to find the words to articulate and support your goal in speaking – words that will land as they should with the listener.”

So being a good communicator is about getting what you want. How many of us can say we always, or even usually, get what we want when we speak?

Her talk covered some of the topics we’ve spoken about on the show or on this blog before: how to negotiate effectively, how to ask for something you want at work (including a promotion or more responsibility), how to network, how to articulate what it is you do best and why someone should pay for that – all with an emphasis on the type of communication required to get those things.

Tips:

• When you ask for a raise at work you can’t couch it in terms of what you want or need. It’s surprising how often I hear about situations where the person went in and said, ‘I need X more money because I’m having a baby’, or ‘I need Y amount of money because so-and-so is getting it’. Wokie pointed out that you must think about what your boss is looking for, not what you are, and dress your request in those terms.

“You need to influence your manager. You must be driven by what motivates them – so only after that, choose your words.”

Being a truly good communicator is about empathy and listening to the other person.

• Part of getting what you want – a lot of it, I’d say – involves self-promotion, something plenty of women hate. But, says Wokie,“People getting raises and sexy projects are asking for them…it takes a certain level of confidence and a sense of deserving for one to do this. But without promoting yourself you’ll let opportunities pass that don’t necessarily need to.”

• Many of us, especially early in our careers, think all we need to do is work hard and we’ll be recognized. Most of that time that is simply not true. You have to communicate to your managers what you want from your career, and how you can serve the company's needs, otherwise don’t be surprised if they pass you over for that other person who has been working it behind the scenes for months.

So what holds so many of us back from acting on this?

Fear, of course.

Wokie elaborated: “Fear of rocking boat, fear of offending others, of appearing too bossy, needy, desperate, too masculine, fear of not being liked, fear or losing what you have because it’s good enough right now. Fear of being out of your league and out of your game. And of not knowing what to say in those situations [when you want something].”

I can identify with most of those flavors of fear and suspect a lot of others can too. The fact is, women still tread a fine line between societal/cultural expectations for our behavior and what we actually want to be able to do in life. Sometimes it just seems easier not to wade into what appear to be the treacherous waters of advocating for ourselves or putting ourselves 'out there'. But life can be so much more fulfilling when we learn how.

When daughters take over

January 15, 2014

Lady Mary Crawley, played by Michelle Dockery

This morning I had a conversation with Amy Katz, who heads the consultancy Daughters in Charge. I came across her by accident when I was on the 85 Broads site last week filling out my profile details. I spotted her company name and immediately gravitated towards it. I’ve done various stories on family businesses over the years, including one in 2012 on Generation Y business owners who hire their parents (in my interviewees’ case, it was their mothers who joined the company). But I’d never thought much about what happens when a daughter, rather than a son, steps into the family business, most often run by her dad.

If you’re one of those daughters, or if you know someone who is, I’d love to hear from you, because I’m planning a future show on this topic.

Amy says various issues can crop up when a daughter joins the family firm:

• Some fathers alternate between being extremely protective of their little girls and wanting them to be gung-ho about the business. So on one hand they encourage their daughters to be at the company all hours, learning everything they possibly can and putting it into practice. But when the daughter gets pregnant, Dad becomes highly traditional and feels she should leave work to raise her family – something he would never suggest to his son if the son’s wife or partner had a baby.

• Some parents use the ‘don’t call me Dad’ tactic – they want a daughter to get used to calling them by their first name at work. Amy says this kind of approach can inhibit a lot of women from being able to develop a style of their own at the office. This is often particularly tough for women in a male-dominated environment. 

• Managing authority can be tricky for the daughter walking into the family business. She’s known many of the employees (often men) since she was a kid. Now she may have power over a lot of them. Discovering what kind of leadership style is comfortable for her, and them, is a challenge.
  
  Lady Mary of PBS’s Downton Abbey (above) is dealing with some of this at the moment. Her father doesn’t want her pretty head bothered with matters of business related to the family's vast estate, even though she has ideas about how to improve things. Attitudes have changed considerably since the early 1920s - today, after all, fathers are actually welcoming their daughters into the family firm. But old perceptions about women’s roles and demeanor are still lurking in most workplaces - and in the brains of many parents.

The curse of career comparison

January 13, 2014

Well, you could say both careers were related to those particular assets

I began my newsletter today by admitting that I'm finding it tough to get back into the swing of things this month. I've been feeling sluggish, unmotivated, like I'm not quite strong enough to set in motion the heavy wheels of machinery that make up my work life. These wheels came to an all but complete halt over the Christmas/New Year break. They needed to, as I was exhausted. But as someone who works for herself and is usually pretty driven, I'm feeling bad that my usual motivation is not rushing back in the new year.

As I've looked around me over the past week I've come across plenty of people who seem to be thoroughly motivated, have work raining down on them, people who are, in short, doing very well for themselves. Inevitably, I compare myself, and that results in me doing myself down even more ("What is wrong with you?"). So I was glad to come across this piece today called Escaping the Comparison Loop - it's by Lauren Bacon, who has appeared on a past show and writes a thoughful blog at LaurenBacon.com. She points out far more eloquently than I could (there you go - comparison in action) that by constantly ranking ourselves next to other people we are: 

• Losing sight of our own priorities and values
• Sucking away our productivity
• Making a world where if one person is excellent at something - the person we envy - then there's no room for anyone else to be good at it too (which is false)
• Making other people into 'gurus' when they're actually human beings like the rest of us
• Missing the fact that when we look down on - or up to - someone else, it may be because they're doing something we don't dare to do ourselves. Lauren uses the example of someone she used to work with who was an avid self-promoter - an office experience I can relate to. She hated it (as did I), but ultimately realized the problem was her, not him (again, ditto). She didn't have the guts to go all out and talk about herself the way he did, didn't think she was worthy enough to merit the attention and questioned what people would think of her if she did show off a bit - all common female reactions to the idea of letting others know about our achievements. 

This may seem petty, but I believe a lot of these small things can add up and sap our energy over the long term, making us less effective overall, and certainly less happy.

Lauren and Tanya Geisler, who did a TED talk on impostor syndrome, another largely female affliction, are soon launching a workshop on how to quash your inner comparison freak and get out of that mindset altogether.

I'd love to know whether women are more apt to compare ourselves with others than men. I suspect so, but have no proof.