Twenty-five years of working with successful women across industries has taught me one thing: the women who advance don’t do it through talent alone. They do it by making their names as visible as the high quality of their work.
It sounds simple enough, but visibility involves a specific set of skills that women are consistently undertaught, and which most professional development programs are not built to address.
I founded the Women Leaders Series workshop to fix that. Here’s what I’ve learned.
The women who walk through my door
The women who enroll in programs like mine are not lacking in drive. They are usually high performers, often the ones who deliver most reliably, and produce consistent results without much fanfare. Their quality of work is rarely in question, but they often experience frustration trying to get the right people to acknowledge and reward it.
That gap between the work being done and the work being seen is what holds more talented women back than anything else. This isn’t a pipeline problem or a culture issue. It’s a simple skills problem.
Good news, skills can be taught.
Skill #1: Selling you
The idea of “selling yourself” makes many women uncomfortable. I get it. Many women believe that good work should speak for itself and are not comfortable being openly ambitious.
The problem is that getting in front of your work is a vital part of getting ahead in any field. I’ve watched hesitation do more damage to women’s careers than anything else.
In most workplaces, good work is just not enough. A woman has to be visible, and visibility requires self-advocacy. Women who believe results speak for themselves are functionally operating at a disadvantage compared to their colleagues (usually men), who have no problem standing on top of their achievements and making sure everyone knows about it.
In the Women Leaders Series workshop, one of the first things participants do is build a thirty-second pitch: a clear, confident introduction that covers who they are, what they’ve accomplished and what they’re looking for. It’s a simple exercise, but it forces women to acknowledge and communicate their achievements and goals.
Women consistently underestimate their contributions because they don’t see their accomplishments as extraordinary (even when all the evidence points to the contrary). Learning to claim credit and communicate contributions proactively are professional skills that benefit women across the country and around the globe.
Skill #2: Widening the circle
People don’t like the word networking. It makes them think of unread business cards and uninspired conversations. But underneath the bad branding is a basic truth: nobody gets ahead without a wide, cross-sector network composed of all types of people.
A broad network is one of the strongest predictors of career advancement, and while women tend to be more social than men, they also tend to struggle with merging their social world with their business one. Additionally, women who have focused on performance at the expense of relationship-building can find, at a certain career stage, that they’re well-regarded within a narrow circle and unknown beyond it.
Real opportunity only moves through people, which begets its brilliant networking twin: information — through introductions, through sponsorship and through the sort of information you can only get when you’re sitting across the table with a trusted friend. What I’ve found in my work is that network-building is fundamentally an organizing skill. It’s about identifying the right people, bringing them together and following through. Those are the same competencies required to manage a team, run a project or build a coalition.
I tell the women in my program: throw a party. Invite people from different corners of your professional life. The skills involved in planning and hosting an event are the same ones a woman needs to build real influence.
Skill #3: Going now
Decisiveness is where I see the widest gap between capability and outcome. The women I work with are, almost without exception, rigorous. They gather information carefully, weigh their options and hold themselves to a high standard before making a call. Those can be great strengths, but when taken too far, a woman’s perfectionism can create missed opportunities. This pattern is full of “Dream Slashers.” No worries, you shouldn’t already be familiar with it. I made it up. But the concept is very familiar to women. Here are a few: I’ll do that when my kids are older; when my mom’s not sick; or once I get the big promotion or secure all the initial seed money for that new business.
The window for a decision rarely waits for certainty. Opportunities move. The person who was less prepared but more willing to take a risk gets the project, the visibility and the next conversation.
Obviously, you can’t replace perfectionism with recklessness, so I teach women techniques to help identify where their talents are best focused at a given moment. I use a framework called the 200/20/2 Rule: if 200 people will notice, invest fully; if 20 will notice, proceed but don’t overinvest; if 2 will notice, let it go. It’s a prioritization tool as much as a
decision-making one, and if applied correctly, it can save women from some major headaches.
Additionally, I don’t call “mistakes” mistakes. I call them “Now I Knows.” If I physically face-planted every time I made a mistake, I would have no teeth. But gosh, is my business acumen sharp because of all those “Now I Knows.”
What organizations stand to gain
This isn’t only a conversation about individual development. There’s a strong organizational case here that rarely gets made to CEOs and other C-suite members.
Women who develop strong leadership skills tend to improve organizations in specific, measurable ways, because female leaders bring unique advantages. (Men’s and women’s brains are wired differently. That’s science.) Once equipped with the right skills, women build broader networks, develop stronger team cohesion and pay closer attention to developing those behind them. Those are not soft outcomes. They compound over time and show up in the metrics that matter to any organization serious about competing.
Additionally, turnover is one of the most expensive and preventable costs any organization incurs — replacement can run between 50% and 75% of an employee’s annual salary, once you factor in recruiting, onboarding and the productivity gap while a role sits empty. Leadership development that gives employees a clear path forward is one of the most reliable ways to reduce that number.
Teaching women skills that advance their personal development can save a company money and position it with a strong class of decision-makers whose specific strengths may previously have been underrepresented.
The women who walk out my door
The women I train are already leaders when they walk in the door. When they walk out, they know it. They return to their careers with a renewed sense of purpose and ambition that translates into both a higher level of personal satisfaction and greater benefit to the businesses and organizations they support.
Women’s advancement benefits everyone. Making that advancement a reality is as simple as teaching women the real, step-by-step, actionable skills that they are already hungry to learn.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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