No one today has everything they need within themselves to grow and become successful. The most successful people in the world – whether they be CEOs, elite sportspeople, doctors, entrepreneurs, experts of every kind or leaders in their chosen fields – will acknowledge that they didn't get there on their own. Other people helped them, inspired them, mentored or coached them.
As women moving up the ladder we tend to believe that we advance our careers and attain leadership by working hard. We make a 150% commitment. We give loyalty. We strive to excel by gaining additional qualifications. Behind the scenes we get a coach or mentor to improve our performance. Then we realise, after nothing happens, that it doesn't work that way.
Men, on the other hand, believe that their career is advanced by who they are close to, by knowing the right people. They devote significant amounts of time to developing these relationships. They get the right introductions. They belong to the right organisations. They take leadership positions on the right committees. They build their profile in their industry or professional group. They also make sure they are known and recognised as someone who wants to go somewhere, someone with leadership potential.
Most women have reservations about doing that. If they by chance meet the "right people" that is O.K., but it not O.K. to go out and consciously and deliberately look for the right people who will advance their careers and endeavour to build relationships with them for that purpose.
It's certainly not part of their nature to get someone who knows someone to set up introductions for them. They don't give conscious and deliberate thought to which organisations it is important to belong to for the growth of their careers. They don't either carefully plan how to make space in their lives so that they have the time to make a commitment to them by taking a leadership position on their committee or board. They feel very uneasy about putting themselves out there, where everyone knows they are on a journey to the top. They do, however, talk about wanting to make a difference, but they don't openly and deliberately focus on getting to the top. They often take a quieter, back road and hope they arrive.
Today millions of women in Australia will go to work and be paid 17 cents less per hour than their male colleague doing the same work in the office beside them.
They will earn $237.50 less this week than that same male colleague.
They would have to work an extra 63 days in 2011 to end up with the same pay as that colleague at the end of the year.
In 2011, it hardly seems comprehensible that this situation could continue to exist.
It is now more than 30 years since the equal pay for equal work legislation was passed in Australia. Some progress has been made, but there is still a long way to go when the conditions above still exist.
I wrote about this last year on Equal Pay Day. Not wanting to repeat myself I went back to check what I wrote last year. To my surprise nothing has changed. I could have produced the same article.
Many women, when they find out that their employers are paying them less than their male colleagues, just feel so betrayed and cheated that they don't want to work for that organisation anymore and begin looking for another job.
Others, will try to correct the situation by going through all the appropriate channels - talking with their manager and HR. If that fails they also will look for work elsewhere.
Is this the glass ceiling? Some women will want to debate whether there is a glass ceiling that prevents women from attaining positions of senior leadership. These are the women who have made it. They are also the women who we want to openly and honestly share their experience of how they did it because many women are not making it. The question is, however, whether it is a glass ceiling presenting an impermeable boundary to women as they climb the leadership ladder that stops them going further, or whether as women get to the top of the ladder – or even near it – they do not like what they see and experience and choose not to stay, or even go there.
What are some of the challenges women experience as they aspire to leadership and management positions in companies and organisations.
Some corporate cultures are foreign territory for women. They operate in ways that conflict with their value systems and challenge their sense of who they are and want to be. It becomes difficult therefore for women to find places to grow and develop in these cultures.
Many women don’t like the way some men “do” leadership. They don’t like the way these men put themselves so out there. They see them as very ego-driven. Their leadership style is very much about them. They go after what they want very directly and specifically. This doesn’t sit well with women’s socialization and upbringing. Nor does it sit well with the way they want to create their relationships and connections.
Whenever I begin talking with managers about using a coaching process to motivate and inspire higher levels of performance in their people, there's always a hesitancy.
They know they need to give feedback and do performance appraisals whether they like it or not but they see coaching as optional and discretionary. More importantly they don't feel they could do it.
This feeling of inadequacy is more about them misunderstanding what coaching is, than it is about any real inadequacy on their part.
In 2008, Blessing White did a very interesting global study on coaching - The Coaching Conundrum. One of the important results in this study is very relevant to what we are talking about here.
They asked survey respondents to think of their "best coach" and then think of the one coaching action by that manager which they most valued. These were the answers:
20% - Stretched me beyond what I thought I could do.
18% - Asked questions to help me think through and solve work challenges on my own.
13% - Guided me by sharing personal insights, learnings and experiences.
10% - Treated me as an individual, understanding my unique needs.
10% - Recognized my talents and accomplishments.
9% - Provided useful feedback to help me achieve my career goals.
8% - Was candid; told me what others would not.
8% - Helped me understand where I could make a difference in the organisation.
4% - Established clear performance goals for me.
None of the respondents expected their coaches to have all the answers. What they wanted was something quite different.
Managers can take each of these points above and use as a guide to best ways to work with their people because a sizeable group of people have found these to be helpful.
One of the major obstacles for women who want to break through the glass ceiling is the lack of opportunity to gain wisdom and understanding from those who have already done it. They are out there, though not in the numbers at the top that we would like to see.
That road for women is not travelled easily. In fact women have to be twice as good as men to get there. Many more obstacles are put in their way.
So when they finally arrive and can sit on the same "stage" with their male colleague CEOs, are they going to want to talk about the struggle they had to get there. Of course not! They would be treated with derision.
It's only when these women leaders are given the opportunity to talk on a platform that is created by other women that they dare to share part of their story of struggle.
I heard Janet Dore, CEO of the Traffic Accident Commission in Victoria, and a woman who has broken through many glass ceilings in her professional life, say recently that she had to meticulously watch everything she did in her work and be excellent at it. This was from the way she acted and responded to the way she dressed because she was scrutinised in a way that her male colleagues weren't.
If you’ve ever been working out with a personal trainer, you’ll know what it is like to be stretched to the limit? They always want us to go that bit further than we think we are capable of. They stand beside us and coach us to keep going. “But I can’t”, we say. “Yes, you can. Don’t stop. Stay with it. You can do it. I know you can.”
What happens? We do stay with it. Yes, we can do it, but we didn’t think we could. We wouldn’t have done it either unless we had someone beside us who believed in us more than we believed in ourselves and coached us.
A colleague over a 15-20 year period has therefore been around my workplace quite a bit over the years in a number of capacities. The other day she asked me a question that I actually hadn't thought about for many years.
Why don't you ever have photos of your family around your offices?
She went on to say that in all the years she's known me and been in and out of my office many times, she's never seen a sign of photos of my family.
As a consultant also, she reminded me that she is in and out of many offices with her work and like me, sees many family photos prominently displayed around men's offices.
It was a very deliberate action on my part, many years ago when I set up my own business, not to have family photos around my work. I'm not sure that much has changed 20 years later, but certainly back in 1989 there was the attitude that women with children were a questionable item in some ways. It was not voiced publicly. That would have been politically incorrect even back then.
It was assumed that we would put our family first before our work. That would then demonstrate that we were not committed, did not have the drive and commitment to succeed. That would then demonstrate that we probably couldn't make the hard decisions that needed to be made in business. In fact, there were a whole range of assumptions that followed on from all of that.
Assumptions have a unique ability to become beliefs and beliefs to become facts. These "facts" then shaped women's potential to advance their careers.
Today is the 100 year anniversary of International Women’s Day (IWD), a public holiday in many countries -even if not in Australia yet!
It was 1908 that the “first” International Women’s Day saw 15,000 women march through the streets of New York, protesting working conditions and better pay, as well as the right to vote. It was 1910 at an International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen that IWD was enshrined as an annual event.
It has always been understood that women have much more highly developed Soft Skills than men. This is a sterotyped position, but it is probably true that up until recent times, society has been much more accepting of women leaders openly demonstrating their Soft Skills than it has been about male leaders doing the same thing. In other words, it’s been a strength for women, but a weakness in men. It can, however, work against women and if we are not very conscious of the “games” that are played in the workplace, those skills we value and espouse as women leaders can actually work against us.
Every now and then someone says something very simple that we actually know but it hasn't really registered for us. Have you ever had that experience? I have many times.
Yesterday was one of those occasions when I read an article in The Sunday Age Magazine by personal trainer, Michelle Bridges. She constantly gets asked questions about exercise, health and well-being. One that makes her "want to tear my hair out", she says is: "So tell me Michelle, how do you stay motivated?"
She says that achieving what you want for your life is not about motivation. It is about consistency.
She reminds us that motivation is about feeling - whether we feel like doing something or not. Motivating ourselves is about keeping the positive feelings about that in top gear so that we maintain the momentum and don't go back to where we were. Feelings don't last, she reminds us and they are fickle and unpredictable. There one day and not there the next.
I've been cleaning out my filing cabinet at the week-end - don't get time to do those things during a working week! My file on "Engagement" is so full that the metal across the top has broken off and it is falling apart. This hasn't happened to any other file in the cabinet.I was thinking about it. Why is this file so chockers?
It's partly because I believe employee engagement is very core to organisational success and to retaining our best employees and I avidly collect everything I can about it. It's also because it's everywhere, in so many magazines I open, in so many online newsletters I read. Everyone seems to be talking about employee engagement.
I've just been going through the 63 Christmas cards we received this year. I love getting Christmas cards, or any cards for that matter and I let people know that it is well worthwhile sending me a card. I don't just put them in a pile. I put them on display on the mantlepiece or on the bookshelves and keep them there for sometime. I look at them and remember the people who sent them. I sometimes even pick them up and re-read what the people said on the card. That is, if people write anything much on the card!
As I re-read the Christmas cards about half the people just wrote "To Maree and Maurie, have a great Christmas, Love Bec and Tony." It's good to hear from Bec and Tony, but we haven't seen them for so long and we'd love to know what is happening for them - even if was only two sentences.
I always write a few lines about what we are doing. It only takes a minute. In the last ten years I have written a 2 page typed Christmas letter about what we are doing and put it in with each Christmas card. I then write a few personal lines to each person.
Maree Harris is a facilitator of professional development and training and is a coach and mentor. Her expertise is in the area of soft skills - those all important interpersonal, communication and people skills. While generally she works with both men and women, she has always had a passion for the issues that affect the lives of women. Her own life story, both personally and professionally, has been an engagement with those issues by way of enriching her own life and that of the women who journey with her.
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