Leadership, going forward, is only going to be great
if women are at 50%.
Hi, I'm Sally Helgeson.
I'm an author, speaker
and leadership development consultant
and I work all over the world.
Here I'm going to talk about five of those behaviours
that most commonly get in women's ways.
The first behaviour is a reluctance to claim your achievements.
Expecting others to spontaneously notice
and reward your contributions and your hard work.
When I do workshops now I often ask,
"How good are you at bringing attention to your work?"
And what I often hear is, "I'm not good at that at all."
And when I ask them, "Why aren't you good?"
I hear one of two responses.
The first is, "I would think that if I do good work
people should notice."
They probably should but I don't think it's gonna happen
in today's workplace.
The other thing I hear is,
"If I have to act like that obnoxious jerk down the hall to get noticed,
I'd rather not get noticed."
And that's problematic because it behaves an either/or way of thinking
that is going to get in your way.
If you set yourself up either you're obnoxious
and constantly talking about yourself,
or you just hang back and hope others notice.
You've got a kind of no win place to be.
For example, you might identify,
"You know, I think that my boss doesn't really understand
how well connected I am in this organisation.
So I think what I'm going to do
is once a week I'm going to shoot him a quick email
that just summarises
the main people that I've managed to talk to that week."
I have seen this be remarkably successful for women.
The second behaviour is the disease to please.
That is hoping and wanting everyone to think
you are a wonderful and always nice person.
Now this is a typical behaviour
that can be very helpful early in your career
but can really get in your way as you seek to rise.
Why is that true?
First of all, if you're always seeking to please
you're going to have a hard time holding other people accountable
for showing up for what they've promised
because you're going to be afraid that maybe they won't like you.
You're going to have a hard time saying no to things
and end up saying yes too often
and you're going to let people who will take advantage,
violate your own boundaries and waste a lot of time.
I'm not saying here that you don't want to be a wonderful person
but being invested in everyone thinking you're wonderful and nice
is, if you seek to rise, going to get in your way.
If you can start small
again by asserting boundaries in one way
say to yourself, "Right now I'm over committed
so that in the next month
when people ask me to join a new taskforce or something else
I'm going to think about it very deliberately before I say yes.
And I'm not only going to think about how would it please them,
but I'm going to think about, "How might it serve me?
Is this really in my best interests?"
A third behaviour that often gets in women's way is perfectionism.
Trying to put so much energy into doing everything right
that you can't see the forest for the trees
and you waste a lot of time trying to make improvements at the margins
that aren't going to necessarily position you to move higher.
One big problem with being a perfectionist
is that you'll have trouble delegating work to other people
because you're so invested in it being perfect
you're going to be afraid that they'll make mistakes.
So you'll end up doing, often,
a lot of work of other people's, yourself.
And I often hear perfectionists say
"Oh it's just easier to do everything myself."
Now again, you want to start small here.
You might just want to identify one person
who you're going to decide to delegate to,
give them an opportunity, offer them feedback
but don't stay on top of it and take that risk.
One of the things that's really interesting
is that studies show that
women in organisations tend to be more rewarded
for being precise and correct,
whereas men in organisations tend to be rewarded
more for risk-taking and boldness.
So as you seek to rise
you want to learn to take risks
and move away from being overly precise and perfectionistic.
The fourth behaviour is ruminating over the mistakes you've made.
This can really keep you stuck,
and it's much more common in women than men.
Research has shown that rumination
is much more likely to be a behavioural impediment for women.
It's a form of beating yourself up.
Rather than letting mistakes go and figuring you're a human being
and you will make mistakes like everyone else.
Finally, minimising.
Either in terms of speech or minimising in terms of
how you hold your physical self in the world.
Women can be reluctant to hold their space.
That is, shrinking their body at times or not really standing up
with authority as if they belong where they are
especially when they're at higher echelons
or trying to position themselves as a leader.
Women often will also use minimising phrases
in their speech - "Oh, do you just have one minute?"
"Can I only make one point?"
And of course, our old favourite,
apologising is a form of minimising yourself.
So what you want to do
if you're trying to position yourself as a leader
is to hold your space
and show up as if you know that you are worthy, whole and complete.
But I want to point out
that I've been doing a lot of interviews and a lot of events
and I can't tell you how many times people have said
- men have said to me -
"I really identify with some of these behaviours."
And that speaks to, I think, a greater commonality
between women and men that is one of the real forces
that is driving and changing the workplace.
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