Positive Steps Toward Career Goals
Posted on Fri, Oct 21, 2011 @ 07:24 PM
Women make extremely effective leaders. The traits that we have are a natural fit for a leadership model that promotes empathy and consensus building. But moving through the mid-level ranks and into corporate boardrooms is still going to present a greater challenge to us. Figuring out how to maneuver smoothly and successfully toward leadership positions requires a strategy.
Education
Women have been graduating high school and receiving undergraduate degrees in greater percentages than men, and that trend looks like it's growing. But we need to encourage more of us toward MBA's and JD's to capitalize on our educational advantage and sharpen our competitive edge. We also need to encourage more business-track Ph.D.'s in areas that aren't strictly academic. Any gains in education among women are an intrinsically positive step for advancing in the workforce. But exploiting our educational advantage will require more advanced degrees in business, marketing and law.
Networking
Finding advancement opportunities is always the unspoken but hoped for outcome of networking. That doesn't mean you're shamelessly opportunistic. It's just common sense pragmatism. Given that the best-case scenario in networking is leveraging a contact into a better job, it makes sense to pursue a strategy of increasing your current contacts to include individuals that exercise power. It's not always possible to have frequent lunches with the CEO—though you might be surprised at how often that could happen if you pursued it—but a lot of networking opportunities go unrealized just because people never think to ask. Going out for lunch or drinks after work can be an extremely effective way to get to know people in your organization whom you rarely socialize with in the workplace. This can be a far more effective tactic than you might think. It just requires the willingness to step out of your immediate comfort zone.
Mentoring
It's hard to overstate the importance of mentoring in the work place, and it's especially important for women. In many corporate environments, the good old boy environment of informal mentoring among men has existed since time immemorial. But women in leadership need to make a special effort to reach out and mentor younger women. If formal mentoring programs exist in your organization, use them to groom younger women with leadership potential. And if you don't have formal mentoring programs, make the extra effort to introduce informal mentoring.
Reach Out
If you're in a leadership position, take the time to interact with younger women in a sort of inverted power dynamic networking fashion. Rather than reaching upward as one tends to do with traditional networking, approaching informal mentoring in the opposite fashion means that you reach down through the ranks and give women the tools they need to move up into leadership ranks. Nobody is going to step aside and just give us a seat at the table in the corporate boardroom. We have to make sure that we make a conscious effort to use all the tools at our disposal to make it happen.
Jesse Langley lives near Chicago. She divides her time among work, blogging and family life. She advocates for online mba programs and has a keen interest in women's leadership roles in contemporary society. She also writes for www.professionalintern.com.
