How Women Can Succeed by Rethinking Old
Habits
Female
professionals looking to their next promotion or job should identify the
self-limiting behaviors that may stand in the way.
This
article is excerpted from How
Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise,
Promotion, or Job by Sally Helgesen and Marshall
Goldsmith. Copyright © 2018 by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith.
Ellen is a software engineer for a booming Silicon Valley company
that has made a high-profile commitment to developing women. She’s a talented
engineer, but is also more outgoing, empathetic, and socially skilled than many
of her colleagues. As a result, she’s been able to build unusually broad
connections during the three years she’s been with her company. She describes
herself as a “go-to person,” a fulcrum around which relationships form.
Coworkers frequently email her with queries or requests for help.
Because Ellen takes pride in her connectedness and sees it as an
essential aspect of the value she provides, she was stunned when, during her
annual performance review, her boss made the point in an otherwise excellent
assessment that “she needs to get better known in the organization, have more
of a presence, and more actively promote what our division is doing.” “I
couldn’t believe it,” she says. “The very thing I’ve always thought I was best
at, and he’s telling me I fall short! He even makes it the center of his
critique.” Having her efforts and skills go unacknowledged made Ellen feel
unseen and undervalued, stuck in a thankless role working for an ungrateful
boss. “I really felt hurt,” she says. “How could he not recognize what I
contribute?”
It wasn’t until a few months after the review, when she heard a
career coach talking about the need to actively bring attention to the value
you provide, that Ellen realized what had happened. “I saw there was a very
simple reason he had overlooked my role as a connector: I had never told him
what I was doing. I’d never mentioned all the people I connected with in the
course of the day or the week or the month. I’d just somehow expected him to
know. But he didn’t monitor my email, he didn’t stand at my office door
watching who came in and out, so he had no way of knowing how many people I was
in touch with.”
Everyone has self-limiting
behaviors; this is simply part of being human. But our combined six decades of
professional experience coaching and working with women in virtually every
sector have taught us that even women at the highest levels can undermine
themselves with specific self-sabotaging behaviors that are different from
those that most frequently undermine men. Of course, not all women are alike.
Nor are all men. Gender is only one factor in determining how each of us
responds to feedback, observations, suggestions, or critiques. That said, women often face various external barriers as they seek
to advance in their career, which shape their experience of work. Take that well-known phenomenon of “speaking while
female.” A number of studies confirm the truth of a common female perception:
Men often have trouble hearing women when they speak. Because experience shapes
behavior, repeatedly having your voice ignored may begin to influence how you
respond, even when people are hanging on your every word. And your responses,
over time, become habits.
The
good news is that your behaviors lie within your control, whereas external
forces such as unconscious bias may not. For example, research has shown that when
being considered for a promotion, women are most likely to be evaluated based
on their contributions, whereas men are most likely to be evaluated based on
their potential — nebulous criteria that can result in a less qualified man
getting the job. If your company uses criteria that subtly penalize women, you
can be a voice for pointing this out and work with HR to explore alternatives.
But it’s difficult to persuade your company to immediately jettison how it
evaluates performance.
What you can do to seriously strengthen your chances of success is
uproot an unhelpful habit, behavior, or attitude you’ve picked up over the
course of your working life. At a minimum, making the effort should improve
your daily experience of work and better prepare you to reach your goals in the
future. Take Ellen, whose first engineering job was at a startup led by a
famously self-promotional lone wolf. There, she benefited by never singing her
own praises or talking up what she was doing. However, she now works for a
large company in which every division must compete for airtime. In these
circumstances, her established practice of “not wasting” her boss’s time by
talking to him about what she’s achieving ends up working to her disadvantage.
It didn’t occur to Ellen to give her boss the details about how she was
connecting with people in the company because she’d gotten in the habit of not
talking about herself. Keeping her head down had become her go-to response.
To let go of a behavior that is no longer serving you, you need
first to recognize it as a habit. You need to bring it to conscious awareness
so you can begin to try out new responses and see if they get you different
results. This can feel awkward and even dangerous. It can make you feel
vulnerable, foolish, and exposed. But we have seen it work — thousands of
times. When it does, it unleashes energy and confidence. And that energy makes
it easier to stay with the effort.
The State of Being Stuck
How do you know if you’re stuck? Stuckness usually manifests
itself in different ways that are nevertheless interconnected: You feel
something is preventing you from moving forward or leading the life you’re
supposed to be living, you feel unable to break through circumstances that are
conspiring to hold you down, you feel as if your contributions are not
recognized or appreciated. You feel that the people around you have no idea
what you’re capable of achieving.
Stuckness can seem circumstantial, the result of your situation or
the fault of someone who has power or leverage over you. And this perception
may reflect a degree of truth. But it’s also helpful to consider the ways you
might be keeping yourself stuck. After all, your responses help shape your
circumstances, and your behaviors shape how others respond to you. That’s why
being able to identify these behaviors is so important.
In addition to feeling situational, stuckness can feel deeply
embedded. As you become habituated to certain behaviors, you may start assuming
they are intrinsic to your character. So if you hang back from an opportunity
because you dislike speaking before large crowds, you may rationalize that
you’ve always been this way, even in grade school when you were among the last
to raise your hand.
This is why approaching change from a purely psychological
perspective can be daunting. You have to work through all the layers and
experiences that have habituated your responses: It’s a time-consuming exercise
that can be paralyzing and often requires professional guidance. But approaching
behavioral change by substituting new habits for old ones is empowering. It’s
also something you can do on your own, without help from a therapist or coach.
The thing about habits is
that they tend to hang around even when the conditions that got them started no
longer exist. That’s why spending time trying to figure out why you have them
is usually not the most fruitful approach. You have those habits because you’ve
followed them repeatedly in the past. In other words, your habits are not you.
They are you on autopilot. When you’re on autopilot, you are not really
thinking about this situation, thismoment, this challenge,
or the specific response your circumstances require. You’re just reacting in a
way that has become comfortable for you over time. Your brain saves energy this
way. But you’re not really present for what you are doing, which is why you are
not considering whether your behavior is serving you now.
The Art of Self-Promotion
When female professionals are asked to reflect on why they are
reluctant to claim their achievements, answers vary. But among the most common
is some variation of the following: “If I have to act like that obnoxious
blowhard down the hall to get noticed around here, I’d prefer to be ignored. I
have no desire to behave like that jerk.” Since the thought of emulating an
insufferable colleague’s behavior is repellent, a woman may keep her head down
instead of looking for ways to get recognized for her contributions.
There are two problems with
this approach. First, citing the jerk down the hall as an example of everything
you are not and don’t wish to become indicates an either/or way of thinking.
Either you exemplify the worst aspects of a given behavior or you behave in an
entirely different manner. Either/or thinking sees no possibility of a middle
ground — no graceful way, for example, to bring attention to the quality of
your work without becoming obnoxious and self-serving — and that thinking then
justifies your refusal to do so.
Second, contrasting your refusal to claim credit for your own good
work with an extreme opposite example can inspire you to feel morally superior
to anyone who is comfortable taking credit. This is unhelpful, because it is
ultimately a rationale for staying in your comfort zone. Instead of asking
yourself why you have trouble bringing attention to your successes and then
figuring out an appropriate way to do so, you congratulate yourself for being a
wonderful human being who doesn’t need to toot her own horn. And then you try
to take solace in that when you’re passed over for the next promotion.
Reluctance to claim achievements is common among women in every
sector and at every level. But the costs will be highest when you’re trying to
move to the next level or seeking a new job. Speaking up about what you
contribute and detailing why you’re qualified does not make you self-centered
or self-serving. It sends a signal that you’re ready to rise. Yet search firms
confirm that women applying for jobs are often less assertive than men when it comes
to declaring their qualifications.
If you want to reach your highest potential, making your
achievements visible, especially to those at senior levels, is as important as
the actual tasks spelled out in your job description. If you don’t find a way
to speak about the value of what you’re doing, you send a message that you
don’t put much value on it. And if you don’t value it, why should anyone else?
You also communicate that you may be ambivalent about getting ahead. And if
you’re ambivalent, why should anyone stick his or her neck out to support you?
If you’re considering how you might promote yourself, it helps to
bear in mind that you are your own primary product. As you talk about what you
have achieved, you are always selling you — not just the details but the
overall package. People buy what you’re selling because they like and trust
you, and because they believe that what you offer may have value for them. Why
do they believe this? Because you so obviously do. Mesmerizing belief in the
product is the secret of every great salesperson.
If claiming your achievements feels like a new behavior for you,
you might want to try enlisting a colleague to help you. For example, you might
start by simply asking a peer who worked with you on a successful venture to
speak a bit on your behalf the next time you’re in a meeting. It might not be
boldly taking the initiative yourself, but it will be a step.
A Clear Vision of the Future
The flip side of being reluctant to claim your accomplishments is
expecting others to notice your contributions without your having to draw
attention to them yourself. These two behaviors work together. They have
similar roots but different effects.
The belief that “great work should speak for itself” or “if I do
an outstanding job, people should notice” can serve as a convenient excuse for
refusing to claim your achievements, letting you off the hook (in your own
mind, at least) if advocating for yourself makes you feel awkward. This is what
happened to Ellen, who was devastated when her boss failed to notice the
connections she had built in the company, even though he had no way of knowing
how many people she routinely reached out to.
Expecting others to notice and reward your contributions, or
believing that they should, not only is a good way to keep yourself stuck, but
also can diminish the satisfaction you feel in a job you would otherwise enjoy.
You may start to resent not just the higher-ups who seem unaware of all the
hard work you do, but also colleagues who are skilled at getting noticed. You
may then decide they’re just showboats and congratulate yourself on being less
self-centered, even as you stay in the shadows. If you get entrenched in this
kind of negative thinking, you may start believing you don’t really belong in
your job. After all, if the people around you are incapable of noticing your
efforts, maybe you’d be better off somewhere else. This is how a job that
seemed like a perfect fit when you started it begins to lose its attraction.
How do you begin taking
responsibility for ensuring your work gets noticed? How do you draw attention
to what you contribute without feeling like a jerk? You might start by
articulating a vision of where you would like your job to take you so you can
give people a context for what you want in your future. Renowned management
writer Peter Drucker said
you should be able to fit your mission statement on a T-shirt. Creating a
so-called elevator speech that explains how you view your career path can pay
many dividends. It can help you think more clearly about your future. It can
make you feel more confident and prepared. It can mark you as serious, a
potential player, someone to watch. And it’s perfect for moving beyond the
passive trap of hoping to be noticed.
A crystal-clear sense of
what you’re trying to do and why you are motivated to do it enables you to
speak your truth powerfully and concisely. Further, it helps you clarify which
opportunities you want to embrace and which you should let go of. You simply
ask yourself, Would doing this help me reach my larger goal? If
so, you might want to say yes. If not, you have a solid reason for saying no.
The Limits of Expertise
Trying to master every detail of your job in order to become an
expert is a great strategy for keeping the job you have. But if your goal is to
move to a higher level, your expertise is probably not going to get you there.
In fact, such mastery often serves to trap you in your current role.
If you find that statement shocking, it may be because, like many
other women, you’ve assumed expertise is the surest route to success. And so
you put enormous effort into learning every aspect of your job and ensuring
that your work is letter-perfect. This feels proactive, but it can set you up
to remain on an endless treadmill, constantly setting a higher bar for yourself
as you seek to always go the extra mile.
Meanwhile, most of your male colleagues are taking a different
route, trying to do the job well enough while focusing their time on building
the relationships and visibility that will get them to the next level. Of
course, we’re not advocating sloppy performance. And we know that skill and
knowledge are required for success. But if you want to rise in your field or
your organization, expertise will take you only so far. That’s because the top
jobs always require managing and leading people who have expertise, not
providing expertise yourself.
When you’re routinely under-recognized, expertise can become a
defense, your way of asserting your value regardless of what others perceive or
think. Being intrinsic, mastery is one source of satisfaction that lies within
your control. This is a good thing, and can be deeply rewarding. But learning
every detail to perfection uses up a lot of bandwidth, leaving you little time
to develop the relationships you need to move ahead. Moreover, your efforts to
do everything perfectly usually have the effect of demonstrating that you’re
perfect for the job you already have. And the expertise you develop may make
you indispensable to your boss, who will quite logically want to keep you where
you are.
According to engineer Ted Jenkins, one of Intel’s earliest hires,
there are four kinds of power in organizations. The first is the power of
expertise. Because expertise is required for success, demonstrating it can
become a competitive sport. But cultivating expertise at the expense of other
kinds of power will not position you as a leader.
The second kind of power is the power of connections. Connections
are usually built as you move around in the company, hold different jobs, find
allies, and stay in touch. Getting to know people in your industry or sector as
well as key clients and movers in your community is also important. Connections
serve as a kind of currency you can use to get resources moving and ensure that
your contributions get noticed.
The third kind of power is the power of personal authority or
charisma, which is rooted in the confidence you inspire in others. You rarely
start your career with much personal authority; it builds as your reputation
develops over time. Personal authority is what sets the most successful leaders
apart.
The fourth kind of power is the power of position, or where you
stand in the organization. The person who holds positional power gets to make
the key decisions. This reality often infuriates experts, who believe their
insights should count for more when it comes to making decisions. Perhaps they
should, but they rarely do. Positional power is most effective when supported
by the power of personal authority. Without it, others may not trust their
leader’s decisions.
Jenkins’s template can be helpful if you have a history of
overvaluing expertise. Expertise, connections, and personal authority are all
non-positional kinds of power you can nurture and practice throughout your
career. The more you develop these complementary powers, the more prepared
you’ll be to assume positional power.
Avoiding the Perfection Trap
In our experience, women are especially vulnerable to the
perfection trap, the belief that they will succeed if they do their job
perfectly and never mess anything up. Although women in general tend to be seen
as better leaders than men, they are often undermined by their tendency to give
themselves a hard time, a habit rooted in the desire to be perfect. The result
is that even high-achieving women tend to take failures deeply to heart, get
tangled up in self-blame, and stew over mistakes instead of moving on.
The fear of making mistakes is compounded by the fact that women’s
mistakes are often viewed more critically in male-dominated organizational
cultures. Your errors may be seized on as proof that women in general can’t
make the grade, which can affect how other women in the company are viewed.
This compounds the guilt you feel over having made a mistake — and over not
being perfect.
The process is intensified if you’re a member of a minority. In
the United States, African-American women often feel the burden of carrying the
expectations of their entire community on their shoulders, as do immigrants
from many cultures in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. If you’re in one of
these situations, learning to let go of the desire to be perfect assumes a
special urgency.
Perfectionists usually struggle with delegation. If you have
super-exacting standards, it stands to reason that you would have difficulty
letting others do their job. And because monitoring people’s efforts is
time-consuming and often fraught, you just may decide that it’s easier and
quicker to do the job yourself.
The upshot is that you end up loading extra tasks onto your
already-too-full plate. Yet willingness to delegate will become ever more
important as you move to higher levels. You have more people to manage, more of
whom have specialized skills and knowledge. If you try to do their job for
them, you’ll be eaten alive. So if “it’s easier to do it myself” is your
automatic response, you might want to consider that you are undermining your
potential as a leader, as well as taking on a lot of extra work.
In order to rise, you have to lay your burden down. Risk taking
requires being open to failure. Although risk must be thoughtfully assessed,
the outcome is never assured or entirely within your control. The desire to be
perfect, by contrast, keeps you focused on what you can control. This narrows
your horizons and demonstrates insecurity instead of the confidence in the
future that’s needed if you are to be an effective leader.
If you have perfectionist tendencies, you can best serve your
long-term interests by learning to delegate, prioritize, and be comfortable
taking measured risks. This will create a less stressful environment — for you
and for others — and demonstrate your readiness to move forward.
The Power to Change
Once Ellen, the Silicon Valley engineer, got over her hurt and
realized that her boss did not see her as a connector because she had failed to
let him know what she was doing, she was able to swing into action. She spent
exactly zero time wondering why her boss hadn’t noticed her. She worked in a
unit of several thousand people, and she didn’t really see him all that much.
Almost all his direct reports were men, so he may have been uncomfortable with
women — she really had no way of knowing. But she didn’t focus on trying to
find out. Instead, she asked herself how her own behavior might be contributing
to his evaluation and what she could do to change it.
She decided to email him a
brief note every Friday morning for three months listing all the people she’d
talked to and noting how she had been able to help them. She didn’t tell him
what she was going to do or ask if she should do it. She just went ahead. She
says, “I felt pretty ridiculous at first. I kept thinking, He’s busy;
why should I keep bothering him to talk about myself? I felt
self-serving, sucking up a lot of airtime to continually make the point about
how connected I was. When I didn’t hear back from him — which was usually — I
wondered if he was [silently] sending me a message that this wasn’t useful. But
every once in a while, he’d shoot me an email saying ‘good work!’ And that kept
me going.”
At the end of the three months, Ellen and her boss had their
quarterly meeting. As she entered his office, he came forward to greet her
instead of remaining at his desk, as was his habit. “The first thing he said
was how happy he was that I was letting him know who I was keeping in touch
with. He said it was important; it was information he needed to know. He told
me my connections were strengthening our team — which meant I was strengthening
him. I’d never thought of it that way, but I realized it was true.” By
recognizing the role she was playing in her own circumstances and identifying
the specific behaviors that had undermined her, Ellen was able to get herself
unstuck and gain greater recognition for her work as well.
Ellen’s story illustrates people’s capacity for change. You might
be wondering how, if experience shapes behavior, you are supposed to let go of
habits and responses that have become ingrained over years or even decades in
the workplace. Isn’t there truth in the familiar adage that “you can’t teach an
old dog new tricks”? The good news is that we now know the old-dog adage
doesn’t apply to humans. It doesn’t even apply to dogs!
Until recently, brain
researchers believed that only children’s neural systems had the capacity to
change by growing the new circuits that new skills and new behaviors require.
But functional MRIs (fMRIs), which allow neuroscientists
to view the brain in operation, instead
confirm that the brain retains the capacity to build fresh neural pathways at
every stage of healthy adulthood. As a result, you can rewire your brain to
support new habits and thought patterns at any time during your life. The only
catch is that you must be willing to repeat these new behaviors until your
brain gets comfortable with them. That’s because behaviors and thoughts build
new pathways only when repeated over time. With practice, they become
established and begin to operate by default.
Even people who have suffered profound trauma can heal by
repeating habits and thoughts that counteract established responses. This
principle of neuroplasticity means that you have the ability to change how you
respond to situations. Past experiences may shape your behavior, but they need
not determine it. You have the power to become more precise, more intentional,
more present, more assertive, more autonomous, more at ease exercising
authority, more confident setting boundaries, and more effective at advocating
for yourself. All these riches lie within your capacity and scope. But the
process can’t start until you identify those habits that hold you back, and
start practicing new habits that better serve you.
Of course, it’s important to bear in mind that every limiting
behavior is also rooted in a strength. Your strengths are what got you where
you are, and you will benefit from maintaining a healthy respect for what you
have achieved. For example, a reluctance to claim your achievements is rooted
in genuine modesty and a generous willingness to acknowledge the achievements
of others, just as expecting others to spontaneously notice and reward your
contributions is rooted in the perception that because you notice what others
contribute, other people should too. Overvaluing expertise is rooted in a
healthy respect for all the skills your job requires and the willingness to
work hard to master them. And the perfection trap is rooted in the desire not
to disappoint others, along with a commitment to making the world a better
place.
You see the pattern here. Certain characteristics emerge:
diligence, conscientiousness, a concern for the feelings and contributions of
others, and a reluctance to join the “it’s all about me” competition that
characterizes life and politics in many organizations. These characteristics
are good. They are gifts you bring to the world, and they surely have
contributed to your success. You don’t want to leave these strengths behind as
you move higher and expand your scope.
Nevertheless, fulfilling your potential is bound to take you
beyond your comfort zone, and examining how your strengths may also undermine
you is one aspect of that. That’s why you’ll want to celebrate the skills,
talents, attitudes, and behaviors that have brought you to where you are, even
as you identify and work to surmount self-limiting behaviors that won’t get you
where you want to go.
by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith
https://www.strategy-business.com/article/How-Women-Can-Succeed-by-Rethinking-Old-Habits?gko=9c08c&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20180405&utm_campaign=resp
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