Getting ahead on your own terms - and skipping the laundry

September 10, 2013

This morning I attended a panel put on by New York Women in Communications on women in the workplace called ‘Getting Ahead on your Own Terms’. It was moderated by personal finance columnist and Today Show financial editor Jean Chatzky. The panelists (all but one wearing killer heels) were:

Cathie Black, former chairman and president of Hearst Magazines, who oversaw a slew of titles including Cosmopolitan, Jeanine Shao Collins, chief innovation officer at digital publisher Meredith 360, Dustee Tucker Jenkins, wo runs global public relations for Target, and Debra Shriver, chief communications officer at Hearst.

L to R, Deb Shriver, Dustee Tucker Jenkins, Elaine Shao Collins, Cathie Black, Jean Chatzky, NYWICI president Liz Kaplow

The panel was preceded by a quick introduction from a (female) lawyer whose name I missed, but whose firm, Davis and Gilbert, sponsored the event. Her advice? Put in the hours to succeed, network to build your career - and just accept the fact it’s exhausting - and most important, “don’t sit back and wait for your career to happen”. It won’t. That’s a mistake I made for years.

Some highlights from the panel:

Early on, the panel discussed the importance of being direct at work, something my guest and I will be talking about in the next episode of the show. They didn’t mention the fact that being direct doesn’t always go well for women, since we’re often judged on how ‘nice’ we are. I’ll get back to niceness in a minute.

Dustee Tucker Jenkins of Target mentioned the importance of encouragement. “I’ve always had people in my life who thought I could do more than I could,” she said. This is key for women, because most of us are under-confident. It’s something I wish I’d had more of myself.

Jenkins also talked about her approach when she moved from working for government to working for a huge brand, Target. She took time to learn the organization and adapt her style to theirs. She took a lot of notes during the early months because she knew she wouldn’t see the organization with ‘fresh eyes’ for that long. She said it was incredibly helpful to go back to those notes many months down the line, when she was ready to implement some changes (and not implement others she might have made at the start had she not given herself time to let everything sink in).

Cathie Black and Debra Shriver talked about how polite women tend to be and how women must make themselves heard. Black talked about how Shriver had burst into her office at Hearst one day, mad because she hadn’t been invited to a certain meeting. Black said she’d probably been left off the invite by accident and told her to go anyway. Shriver did, and, she said, ended up running the meeting. “Go where you think you should be and make a contribution,” said Black. She said too many woman sat on the corner of the table at meetings (“the dead zone”, as she put it) and didn’t say a word throughout.

“You’re not in that job to find your new best friends” became a brief topic of conversation as these senior women discussed how much pressure women are under to be nice, and how much they want to be nice at work. Chatzky admitted she suffers from this, while Cathie Black, who, after all, has run a huge company, was more pragmatic. “It’s lonely at the top,” Black said. “It’s about being respected,” rather than being loved.

“Saying no is just as important as saying yes”: this was another subject that got quite a bit of air time. As I’ve written about elsewhere, it’s something many women have a problem doing (mainly because we want to be nice), including at least one of the panelists. Jeannine Shao Collins said she’d just recently said yes to being involved in two of her kids’ schools, which, she indicated, was a crazy decision given her schedule. Again, this is something one of my next guests, Financial Times columnist Mrs. Moneypenny, will discuss on the next podcast – she’s excellent at saying no herself.

In a similar vein, Jean Chatzky said she'd recently hired a car service to shuttle her daughter around town, because trying to do that herself on top of her own work was just too time consuming. She said she’d struggled with the idea for a while before making the decision, but she doesn’t feel guilty. She feels relieved that her daughter is getting where she needs to be and she can concentrate on what she needs to get done herself.

Of course this option isn’t available to all of us, but it’s just one example of deciding when it makes financial and practical sense to outsource something you’d otherwise do yourself. Jeannine Shao Collins has three kids and a fulltime job and said she hasn’t done a load of laundry in 16 years.

Amen to that.

Ditching The Feminine Filter

September 5, 2013

"Our conclusion really was that this is why women aren’t in positions of power – they’re trying to be the ideal woman, and they’re not thinking about what they really want." - Jodi Detjen, co-author, The Orange Line

Ah, the ideal woman: she does everything perfectly at work and at home, she's a wonderful mother, she looks great, and (naturally) she's very nice. And Jodi Detjen says she's largely the reason women aren't further ahead in their careers. Detjen is co-author, along with Michelle Waters and Kelly Watson, of The Orange Line: A Woman's Guide to Integrating Career, Family and Life. I interviewed her recently for the latest episode of The Broad Experience, which will be out on Monday. The authors contend that women unwittingly hold oursevles back from achieving more at work because we're wedded (pun intended) to age-old assumptions of what we should be as women - assumptions the authors say underlie many of our waking thoughts. They call this set of assumptions The Feminine Filter, a filter through which women tend to view the world, falling back on thoughts like, 'It's my job to take primary care of the house and children' and 'I'm never good enough.'

Some readers will object to Detjen and her fellow authors' advice because, like Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, their book concentrates on what women themselves are doing to hold themselves back (and how to change that), not on what companies are and are not doing to implement more of an even playing field. I don't mind, though, because I've made a lot of work-related mistakes due to beliefs I've held that are exactly the ones the authors outline in the book. The female assumption Detjen mentioned that resonates most with me? 'If we follow the rules, good things will happen.' I thought that for years, and millions of women, and probably quite a few men, still do. But it's nonsense. Following the rules may help you receive a few positive reviews, a metaphorical pat on the head, but it won't help you get what you really want at work. For that, you need to take risks and get out of your comfort zone. But most women aren't told this early on, and it doesn't occur to them, because rule-following has always served them well at school. Yet work is an entirely different animal.

This book is nuanced, much more so than Lean In, and unlike Lean In, which focuses solely on how women can excel at work (but not in the rest of life), The Orange Line's authors all have experience of having either put work before life, and suffered, or the rest of life before work, with similar results. Detjen and co. want women to be able to flourish both at work and at home, whether that home has a spouse and/or children in it or not. 

You can read Broad Experience guest Stacy-Marie Ishmael's review of The Orange Line on Medium - she introduced me to Jodi Detjen in the first place. The new show will be posted here early on Monday afternoon.

Investing in women

July 17, 2013

This morning I attended a breakfast talk given by the Pipeline Fellowship and featuring guest speaker and serial entrepreneur (and she's not even 30) Lauren Maillian Bias. She started in modeling and then became a successful winery owner, as well as taking on many other roles, including that of investor in other people's companies. Which brings us to Pipeline. 

Natalia Oberti Noguera (l) and Lauren Maillian Bias (r)

Pipeline was founded by the equally young and dynamic Natalia Oberti Noguera (see #21), to train women who have some money - they're usually already philanthropists - to become angel investors. Only 16% of women-owned firms seek angel funding (25% of those get it). Currently, 21% of angel investors are women - a big leap from last year, one Pipeline has contributed to and wants to continue to fuel. The idea is that if more angel investors are women, more female-owned companies are likely to receive funding. Here are a few takeaways from today's event, mostly tips for entrepreneurs:

• Bias said one major turnoff for an investor is an entrepreneur who is not prepared. Potential investors will have many questions and she says when she asks a fairly simple question of an entrepreneur, such as, 'What would you do if you and your business partner parted ways?' and they can't answer, it's a major warning sign. That, and not having thought through a whole slew of potential money questions.

• If you email an investor and he/she hasn't got back to you in 24 hours, do not take to Twitter to chase them down. This has happened to Bias and she called it 'obnoxious' behavior. By all means follow up, but give it a while, and think about the way you're coming across (this seems obvious but apparently it escapes a lot of people).

• As nearly always happens at these kinds of events, Bias, a single parent of two young children, was asked how she managed work and family. She was refreshingly open about this: it wasn't a problem. Her kids are part of her life, her work is part of her life, and that's that. There is no conflict. She said her kids boast about speeches she has given and like to play 'conference calls' and meeting planning with friends when they came over to their house. They think she's cool. She didn't seem remotely stressed about this. Part of me wonders if this is an entrepreneur thing, the other part reflects that Bias was only in her early twenties when she had her first child, and perhaps it's easier to integrate everything when you haven't had that much time to think about it. Again, though, this comes back to entrepreneurship - Bias has never had a traditional job, so she hasn't had to worry about maternity leave or re-integrating into a job and how that company will treat her once she's back. A lot of women in corporate life report their career problems began after they had kids. It was good to hear from someone for whom the oft-cited 'juggle' isn't a big deal (yes, she has a nanny, and she is not struggling financially, which makes all this a lot easier).

• Natalia Oberti Noguera made a couple of points that came out of a recent conference she attended. First, she said another conference attendee had announced that as far as women and people of color go, you can't do a Mark Zuckerberg and drop out of college to become an entrepreneur - 'they need a brand', she said. What works for young white guys doesn't work for everyone. We are seen differently by investors (who are mostly white males) depending on our traditional place in the culture. Talking of women of color, I found out about the group Michelle O Brunch, which caters to 'ambitious African-American' women from 25-44, according to its founder, who was at today's event. 

• Second, Oberti Noguera mentioned that the 'money' part of the conference took place on Sunday and that it was not very well attended. Which, obviously, is a shame if you're an entrepreneur or an investor hoping to make connections. This reflected something I noticed at a women's summit I went to last month. Saturday was the final day, and there was a half hour talk on managing your finances that took place around lunchtime. The speaker, Manisha Thakoor, was excellent and funny; I learned a lot. But the room really emptied out when her talk was announced. It's worth repeating in the hope we can recognize this and change things: many women are terrified of and/or bored by money. We hope to somehow avoid discussing it. Even female entrepreneurs do this. A successful business owner I interviewed last year told me many women she mentors say they don't want to grow their companies because they're afraid of their finances. They want to keep things small and 'manageable'. Oberti Noguera told me that some of Pipeline's female angel investors, after their training, have told her that training has helped them better manage their own finances. 

• Finally, a question I didn't get to ask at the event: did any of you read this piece by Gotham Gal Joanne Wilson? In it Wilson, an investor, says she wishes women entrepreneurs would lighten up a bit when they meet with her. The men have a breezy ease of interaction, she says, whereas often women come across as intense and serious. But as many women know, the way we come across to others, especially in a business context, is a truly fine line. One of my correspondents says bitter experience has taught her to err on the side of breezy/slightly ditzy, as she was previously accused at work of being overly serious. Commenters on the Wilson post say the opposite. I'd love to hear what people think. Post a comment below if you get a chance.

Sponsorship vs. mentorship, and the way women see work relationships

July 11, 2013

"I had assumed that people would know what I wanted to do [in my career]. But I needed to actually say it." - Gaenor Bagley, PwC, quoted in the FT

The first part of that quote is something a lot of women will probably nod their heads at. Many feel a) 'Surely it's obvious what I want, after all, here I am, beavering away for everyone to see' and b) 'It's inappropriate to articulate my desire for advancement - won't people look on me as too forward? Surely my work speaks for itself.' (It doesn't.)

The piece quoting Gaenor Bagley of consultancy PwC ran in the Financial Times this week, but as their pieces are behind a paywall, I'm writing about it here. The story is essentially about how having a sponsor, rather than a mentor, truly is the key to getting more women into leadership roles. A sponsor is someone who will advocate for you and put their own reputation on the line for you. In other words, a sponsor is someone who believes in you utterly, because otherwise they wouldn't risk their own reputation. A mentor is someone who is there to give advice and show you the ropes, but won't necessarily go to bat for you. Here's a revealing quote from the Financial Times piece - the bold highlighting is my own:

"PwC, frustrated at the lack of pro­gress made by women in reaching senior positions, decided to launch the Female Partner Sponsorship programme in 2010. The board identified 26 female partners – including Ms Bagley – who had “senior leadership potential”, in the words of Sarah Churchman, who oversees the firm’s diversity programme. They were matched with senior male executives who introduced them to their contacts and involved them in high-profile assignments. Three years later, the firm was surprised at the results: 60 per cent of the women had moved into a leadership role, such as joining the executive board, or were running a business unit; 90 per cent had been promoted." 

Clearly there aren't nearly enough senior women to act as sponsors to those lower down in an organization, so in most cases, if you want to sponsor, you'll be seeking out a man. The piece also quotes Sylvia Ann Hewlett of the Center for Talent Innovation. She has a book coming out in a couple of months with an unequivocal title - Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor. Hewlett brings up the way women view relationships and how that can hamper us at work. Women tend to see work relationships as friendships, not something to be 'used' for advancement. This applies with networking too - a lot of women express discomfort with or disdain for the idea of networking because it seems icky to them - too transactional, a bit dirty. Women are, in general, very 'relational' people, thanks to millennia of looking after others. Men don't see a problem with having a work friendship and also using it to help them succeed.

Obviously, more women need to a) articulate what they want from their career to someone higher up the food chain at work and b) start to see relationships at the office as something that can help us succeed, and not judge other women who are already playing that game.

Finally, this talk of sponsorship is all very well for people who work in organizations, but what if, like me, your work on your own? I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who's an entrepreneurial type or freelancer about how they have sought and found mentors or sponsors. Reply in the comments below or shoot me an email at ashley [at] thebroadexperience dot com.