Women leaders bring many benefits to the workplace – including a collaborative leadership style, effective communication skills, and a commitment to social impact. When companies have gender-diverse leadership teams, they typically have stronger bottom lines.
Women leaders also face a range of challenges at work.
I was facilitating a group coaching session with women leaders recently, and at the end one of them shared, “When I’m with other women leaders in spaces like this, it has given me the gift of knowing that the problems I face as a woman – well, it’s not me. It’s not in my head. It’s real and it’s happening to many, many women.”
To be successful professionally and personally, which is my goal for myself and my clients, it’s helpful to name common challenges that we face. Knowing that we’re not alone, and that these difficulties are shared by many women helps us to overcome what gets in our way and feel more at peace, empowered, and confident.
Here are 5 tips for women leaders, and one for our male allies, to help women succeed across the board.
1. Know that “it’s not just you” – it’s sexism
We live in a society where some groups of people are given more power and privilege than others. Many of us are familiar with the fact the certain groups of people face less challenges due to aspects of their identity, such as being white, male, heterosexual, or able-bodied, to name just a few.
Women are harmed by living a world shaped by sexism. This is not only in the ethos around us – sexism includes a set of messages that we internalize.
These messages may sound like:
“Don’t talk too much or take up too much space.”
“Thinking about your own needs is selfish.”
“If you’re not perfect, you don’t deserve to be taken seriously.”
“Look good. But not too good. But really, it’s important you look good.”
Consciously we may disagree with these messages, yet on an unconscious level we often have absorbed these messages and on a deeper level, internalized them as true.
Compounding this problem is the fact that society doesn’t consistently name a dynamic like sexism openly, or talk about it in a way that identifies what it is, what it looks like in a variety of contexts, and how we can manage it as individual women.
Instead, often these dynamics that surround us, like sexism or racism or homophobia, are thought of as someone’s “personal problem.”
As in, “It’s me – I just have a problem with perfectionism,” or, “I have a problem being timid about speaking up in meetings.”
Tip #1 is to remember that it’s NOT “just you”. It’s internalized sexism. You didn’t create sexism, but YOU CAN decrease its impact on your life by identifying it and working to unlearn the harmful thinking you’ve internalized.
2. Rewire your internalized sexism
When you get better at identifying internalized sexism, you can begin the process of unlearning what is harmful, and replace that thinking with healthy, empowering, and accurate messages.
But unlearning takes time.
It may begin with simply noticing and naming what you’ve internalized. I’ve heard it sound like:
“I don’t want to ask for too much money.”
“I really can’t make a mistake.”
“I can’t make time for myself – I’m too busy with work and family.”
When we begin to see these thoughts as internalized sexism – messages that tell that us that asking for what we’re worth, messing up (AKA being a human), or taking care of ourselves is not OK – we can question them and tell these inner thoughts to be quiet. Thoughts like these do not help us to grow or to become our best selves. We can become better and better at poking holes through them, and instead replacing them with thoughts that help us to grow such as:
“I’m going to ask for what I’m worth.”
“Everyone makes mistakes. It sucks in the moment, but we all do it, including me! Anyone who doesn’t understand that is being unreasonable, and I don’t have to accept that.”
“Taking care of myself is what allows me to show up calm, clear-headed and patient at work and at home.”
Rewiring takes time, so be patient with yourself. After all, you didn’t internalize sexism in a week or a month, and so you won’t be able to undo its impact on your mind quickly either.
But poking holes through unhealthy thoughts, and rewiring your brain with messages that help you to be your best self, is daily work that is always a worthwhile investment in your own wellbeing.
3. Summon your courage, and let your fears guide you to success
I often think that the way we talk about courage is strange. We only focus on the positives. We talk about courage being admirable, and look at all of the wonderful changes it can make in our lives and in their lives of others.
And that is true.
But when we talk about courage in this way, we’re focused on OUTCOMES.
The PROCESS of being courageous, can often feel quite terrible. It can feel like anxiety, or fear. It can feel like a pit in our stomachs.
My definition of courage is feeling fear and anxiety, knowing that we can withstand this experience, and taking action anyways. Courage is taking action THROUGH these feelings, rather than seeing them as danger signals that should stop us in our tracks.
When we do take courageous action, and move through these feelings, many times the results we see in our lives are incredible. And when we don’t see outcomes right away, we still gain increased motivation to keep being courageous, which will lead us to future wins.
The more we behave courageously, the easier it gets to withstand these difficult feelings. It never becomes EASY. But it gets easier.
It’s counterintuitive, but often if we take action and consistently move forward towards our fears, it can guide us to great success.
For example, a client I worked with for many years went through the following cycle: She would be afraid of something, go for it anyway, and it would lead her to her next victory. At the start of our work together, she was nervous about an upcoming job interview. This new role would require her to manage 30 people, and in the past she had only managed a team of seven. However, I reminded her that “she had not managed seven people BEFORE she managed seven people.” Meaning – there was no way to manage 30 people as the strategy to prepare for or become qualified to manage 30 people. To manage seven people, she had to use her existing skills, harness some courage and try something new, grow, and then – voila!— she had managed seven people.
It would be the same with this new challenge. She experienced several things like this, from giving a talk to a huge audience, to managing a budget bigger than she’d imagined, to taking over an even larger team. Each time, she felt fearful and self-doubting. But each time, she took action anyway and did the scary thing. Each nerve-racking challenge brought her success (with mistakes and growing pains too, of course), and following her fears day-by-day led her to land her dream job a few years later.
4. Support other Women by adopting an Abundance Mindset
I was listening to a client recently, who we’ll call Zoe. She was talking about a boss she had in the past who became abusive. As Zoe’s story unfolded, it became clear that her boss was threatened by her. When I asked her about this, Zoe shared, “it’s so hard for me to see it that way. All I wanted was to do a good job and excel in my role. My boss was also smart and great at her job. I thought together we could achieve great things. Why would she be threatened by me? I have no interest in taking anything away from her!”
The pie is big enough for all of us. When we believe that ONLY we can succeed, OR the other person can succeed, we are engaged in scarcity thinking. When we adopt an abundance mindset instead, and know that there is a role for each of us and enough success to go around, we can work together rather than compete or try to tear each other down.
Competition and fighting are not unique to women or to men. But for us as women, who already have extra challenges to overcome, we are stronger overall as a group when we support each other and help our peers achieve their own successes. When we celebrate others and help them climb towards their own victories, it is also a sign of our own internal strength and confidence. When we make a commitment to support other women, we can begin to pave the way for those who will come after us.
5. Get clear on what you want and ask for it.
I cannot say this one enough. One of the defining stages of adult development is getting clear on your own value system, and making decisions out of that value system, rather than making decisions because they align with institutions you are a part of, or relationships you’re in with others.
Knowing what we want requires continual reflection. Because what we want changes over time. It can change because of the circumstances in our lives, such as a new job opportunity. It can also evolve because our life chapter has changed.
For example, if we have young children and want greater flexibility, or our children have left home, and we want to take on a new challenge. Or we’re closer to retirement, and we’re thinking about our legacy and giving back. What we want changes because WE change. Perhaps your purpose has changed, or there are things at work that you’re no longer willing to tolerate, or a new interest has evolved that you’d like to explore.
The key to staying true to ourselves amidst all of this change is self-reflection. When we check in with ourselves regularly, and make time for reflection, we are positioned to make choices that are in line with our values, and to feel authentic, engaged, and that we are living meaningful lives.
A tip for our Male Allies
Men have an opportunity to make an impact on the lives of women, and their workplaces, by acting as allies to support women both in the workplace and also at home.
What is allyship?
I love the definition shared by the Center for Creative Leadership:
“When we talk about the meaning of allyship in the workplace, we’re referring to the actions, behaviors, and practices that leaders take to support, amplify, and advocate with others, most especially with individuals who don’t belong to the same social identities as themselves. (Note that we say “advocate with…” rather than “advocate for…” because advocacy should be done in partnership with those we intend to serve.)
At CCL, our approach to this work has been less about answering the question “What is allyship?” and more about reframing that question into “How can we act as allies?”
Allyship is complex. A few ways it can show up:
Ongoing actions and behaviors that make an impact on other people
An awareness of the different aspects of our identity, including areas in which we have power and privilege
Learning about and listening to the folks we are aiming to support (without asking them to educate us, because that is asking them to do the work that we should do ourselves)
A few examples of how men can act as allies to women in the workplace include:
1. Listen to the experiences that women share
Believe that these experiences are true and not exaggerated, even though in some cases they will be very different than your experiences.
2. Help interrupt bias towards women
A common way this plays out at work is men speaking over women in meetings. Another way it can occur is a woman states an idea in a meeting, the idea remains unacknowledged, and a few minutes later a man will say the same thing, with peers responding as though it wasn’t just said by his female colleague a few minutes before.
This is an opportunity to shift the dynamic in the room and give credit where it is due, by saying something like, “That’s a great point Eric. I appreciate what you added on to the idea that Sherise voiced earlier in our conversation.”
3. Know that when you help women, you are becoming a more inclusive leader yourself
Growing as a more inclusive leader is something that all of us will need to work on for our entire careers. Inclusion is complex, and there is always more learning to be done, whether that is about our own social identities, the dynamics between ourselves and folks with other social identities, or thinking about how to interrupt bias as it’s happening, which can be difficult.
To our male allies – when you invest the time in becoming even more effective allies, you certainly help the women with whom you work, but you also grow yourselves, becoming more effective leaders in the process.
In closing, I’d like to share a quote by Malala Yousafzi, a Pakistani education activist and the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate: “I think realizing that you’re not alone, that you are standing with millions of your sisters around the world is vital.”
Women leaders bring their myriad talents and lived experiences into the workplace, and also face a special set of challenges. By understanding yourselves as individuals, your working relationships, and the dynamics that shape your workplace and the world around you, you position yourself to move beyond self-doubt, fear, and barriers created by sexism, to reach even greater heights both yourself, and in partnership with other women.