If I had to rate the various skills I have what would I consider the most important excluding domain knowledge. I think one skill that would come close to the top is being character acting. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I have sat in my office awaiting a tough meeting thinking how would Meryl do this. Now truth is I don’t know if it ever made a difference in how others saw me, but it did make a difference in how I entered various work situations, from giving presentations to interviewing to dealing with difficult negotiations. So yes, Meryl is my go to role-model for when I’m figuring out how to get through a tough situation. I thought it was my little game to help me prepare and get through the situations but I’m now delighted to know there may be a scientific justification to my behavior. According to Amy Cuddy, spending 2 minutes holding a power pose can make a big difference on an outcome such as a job interview as it increases the right type of hormones for the situation (testosterone) and decreases the wrong one (cortisol). She had this hunch when she experienced public speaking fear. She has since completed research on the topic and the results actually support the ‘fake it till you make it’ saying. She is the lady who now has research rights to ‘ it’s not fake it till you make it, it’s fake it till you become it’. 

So today when you’re not busy I suggest you play the game below and aim for a 'She Can Oscar' nomination. 

Often we get so busy with the details of doing a fantastic job on a particular work assignment we forget to step back and see the business landscape. It’s so much easier to work diligently on what we’ve been assigned where we feel comfortable with structure, boundaries, known deliverables, and agreed upon approach to get the work done. However leaders and influential decision-makers around us are constantly putting together the business picture of today and the future. They operate in both places simultaneously. To take your area of expertise (you do have one, that’s why you were hired) and blend it with a business understanding can increase your value significantly but only when you share your views. 

I think we should all understand something about the future strategy of the business we’re in but I’ve also had the experience of wanting to figure it out but overwhelmed by how much I could know, and not ever knowing enough to be able to talk knowledgably on the topic. What I realized as I worked in different businesses however was I didn’t need to know everything on the business strategy but enough to use a test and learn approach to trying out  what I did know. You can increase your value to the company by taking a few steps to provide your perspective on the landscape – don’t consider it a project but just part of daily habits. 

You don’t need an MBA to have a position on the business strategy nor the competition, but what you do need is to have is curiosity to stay informed, and courage to test your positions. The second step is vital
because without testing your positions with others no action can be taken with them and no one will ever give you credit for knowing things.  

Here are a few steps that you should consider in shaping the landscape.

Do you have the confidence to assert a position on the business strategy with key influential in your world? 
Women will sit on their business opinions because they lack confidence in having all the information before creating a formal perspective. Business moves fast. You should always have a position on where the business is going even if you’re the new kid on the project. If you’re part of a big company don’t just stay focused on your area make sure you you’re glancing at related areas – big companies have lots of information sources, pick one or two and make sure you glance at them daily. External web sources are also useful and often provide summaries weekly on companies. 

If you learn something that is interesting but you don’t know what it means then ask others for their thoughts on it, or if they know more. Once you start piecing together a perspective, you don’t have to make a big deal positioning your ideas with others but you should practice verbalizing them with people you work with. Something like: 
“From what I’ve heard so far sounds like if we keep doing X, Y could happen because of A and B. What do you think of that?”
 Listen to what others say in response. You can adjust your position as you go. That’s what everyone is doing – test, learn, adjust, test, learn adjust. As you get more confident in the position you can try it with more
influential people.  

Are you confident enough to assert a position on the direction of the competition? 
It’s quite amazing how often we don’t take the time to understand the competition to our business because it’s someone else’s job. It’s pretty easy these days to pay attention get intelligence on the competition by using alerts or news updates. Take the time to be interested in the companies. Be someone who can inform your colleagues on what competitors are up to, and again try your understanding of the competition with your co-workers or boss. 

Do you have confidence for a spontaneous voice?
I bet in meetings today you may be sitting on your point of view as you want just a bit more information to solidify your view, or you know someone will say what you’re thinking soon. Sound familiar? Even without the preparation you should blurt it out – as you have as much insight and knowledge as majority of people in the room may be more (just guessing, but I think it’s true). However if you’ve been practicing speaking about a business strategy and understand the competition you’re going to be in a better position to go ahead and blurt out your idea. 

It takes confidence and courage to make statements about business strategy, and the way to build those is to practice, and practice and practice. You can do it, and believe me, to do it well you don’t need an MBA.

How many fears do we have to overcome to be seen? We have to show up, be visible, interrupt, toot our own horn, ask for responsibilities,and negotiate. If life resembled our dreams of how work-life could be it would probably go something like this… 
 
Our talents are recognized in the organization, so much so, that in a meeting somewhere among the executives they remember how marvelous we are and invite us to the next meeting to hear our opinions. The meeting is scheduled at a vacant time slot on our calendars later in the week. We arrive at the meeting a few minutes early to which a few people are already present and welcome us into the room with smiles, offer to get us a coffee (okay that’s a real dream), ask about how our project is going and have we progressed against an earlier challenge for which they had provided some thoughtful advice. We take a comfortable empty seat at the table, are able to contribute to some of the small talk about the latest strategies for the business as we were cc’d on an earlier mail thread. The meeting starts by the director in the room providing a brief overview of the topic to be discussed and then we all have an opportunity to contribute our thoughts and ideas, and ask inquiring questions in a friendly supportive manner. The execs decide they’d like me to to own the project, and offer support with their people and resources to get it done, and to not hesitate to call them if we have a question. 
 
Oh, dream on! Like that’s going to happen. Though don’t forget the dream as when you are a successful
leader you can work to encourage your organization to provide a supportive environment like this, but in the meantime here are the potential challenges you’re going to face and some suggestions for how to handle
them.

Can you negotiate the meeting time? 
How many times have you had something else planned and someone schedules a meeting over your time, or puts it in late or too early in the day? Now think how many times did you ask if it was possible to change the meeting time? Negotiation is something women don’t do well, and this task is a negotiation.  It’s always worth asking if there’s another potential time slot. While you can ask the execs when they might be free, its also useful to work with administrators to get times moved around. 
 
Do you have the right information to be prepared for the meeting? 
May be its okay not to prepare because you know it all, though this isn't generally known to be a female position, however pro-actively asking if there’s anything you should be familiar with or take a look at ahead of time can be helpful. Perhaps there are some mail threads or presentations they’re going to assume you’ve seen that you should see ahead of time - ask for this information ahead of time.

Do you enter the room with the attitude of belonging there? 
This may sound like an unimportant behavior but it can make a difference and is within your control. When you go to the meeting, walk in with confidence and be ready to engage. There are some actors who say they create their characters from the floor up – they put on the right shoes and figure out how a character would walk and take it from there. So how would a confident trust worthy leader enter a room? Don’t hesitate on the way in or laden yourself down with bags, or laptops. Walk confidently into the room like you belong there –because you DO belong there. 

Are you ready for the ‘How’s it going?’question? 
While we’d love to think our managers know how to talk to us and show an interest in our work, it doesn’t always happen and they'll often throw us the ‘how’s it going?’ bone question. We should always be prepared to answer that question. You can have responses that range from your thoughts on the company strategy, asking them for their perspective on future based on something you’ve considered, or update on your project. The key is to provide a response that will encourage them to ask another question, or allow you to ask questions about the business. Stop right now - if an senior exec asked you, 'How's it going?' what would you say? Get something prepared now, and be prepared to use it.
 
Do you take a seat at the table?
If there is a seat at the table, take it and be near where the action is happening. If you don’t it will limit your ability to participate in the conversation – women have enough challenges in getting heard in meetings so if you choose to sit away from the action you’re going to make it harder for you to participate. These are the ways we can painfully hold ourselves back on a daily basis. 

Do you speak clearly and directly? 
Many women tone down their language to be inclusive, non-judgmental and offer up opinions in the forms of
questions and litter dialog with qualifiers. "I was thinking may be, perhaps we should go forward with the plan Tom was suggesting if we think it's a good idea? unless others have other ideas?" We need to work on speaking in direct sentences and communicating what we mean, and getting it right first time. It takes practice. 
 
Can you handle interruptions and re-track derailments? 
There’s always someone in the room who wants to share their opinion, shoot holes in your opinion, or decides any time is an opportunity to show how clever they are. Women are frequently talked over, or when they speak up are not heard, ignored or not responded to, only to have a man say the same thing a minute later and have others engage in dialog. Some techniques for managing this were given in a previous article. It’s important to have a strategy or plan for how to manage it when it happens. Don't be afraid of trying different approaches.
For ideas: You can't be heard if you're not making a noise

Will you step up and take on the new project?
If you want to take on the new project then ask for it, if they ask you say ‘Yes!’ You are not to make suggestions of other people who could do it, or maybe you could do some of it, or you need to review other work items before saying yes. If this is an interesting project that is something you want to do and have career progress potential then seize the day. Women are their own worst enemies in not saying yes to opportunities because they want to be certain they’re good enough, doubt themselves and think someone is better, or don’t want to appear eager. Take a risk, have confidence – DO IT!
For example: Hear Ginny Romerty experience doubting herself, and she's now President and CEO of IBM!

Do you know how to ask for support to get the work done? 
Once you have the opportunity to lead the project, we’re not done yet in terms of overcoming challenges. Just because you’ve said yes to the work, doesn’t mean you can’t ask for support to get the work done – do you need people, budget, equipment? What will it take to get the project complete? Start setting the expectations that an ask will be made soon once you’ve thought through the work. Again this is negotiation, women don’t do this well, so if it feels uncomfortable you’re not alone – ask and worst that will happen will be ‘no’. 

Have you identified someone who could give you occasional pointers? 
If this is a project that you’d benefit from strategizing with someone, ask for help, someone to bounce ideas off. It could be a formal arrangement, or you could informally ask someone to give you some pointers. You don’t have to go it alone and have all the right answers –this is when you strategically move to finding and using mentors, and perhaps even the person who gave you the opportunity could spare a few minutes. 
For ideas: Getting what you need - a valuable lesson in using contacts 
 
Will something need to be prioritized to give you time for this?
Cool you’ve landed a new project but what happens to your already full plate? Think of ways to prioritize, delegate, or lower the expectations on the delivery. The last two options here are again ones women struggle with but are essential strategies to use in order to move ahead. You are not letting people done in using any of
these techniques you’re making trade-offs to give the business what it needs AND you’re helping the business take advantage of your talents in new and progressive ways. 
 
It’s no wonder when reviewing this list that our dreams of engaging in a meeting can sometimes turn into a stressful nightmare. However, I hope you realize that every one of the steps above is yours to practice and improve – you have the power to master these skills that can make a difference in how you’re perceived and the opportunities that come your way. So now you’ve been provided with the anatomy of a meeting and where gender comes into play you can roll up your sleeves and start to make progress by picking ONE of these areas to work at. A career is not a sprint but a marathon so you have time to master skills as you move forward. We’ll keep providing ideas on how to master these skills here in future posts.

Working hard and producing great results provides value to the company but unless you have an amazing manager it probably isn’t going to get you the career results you deserve. The trick in the workplace is it’s not just the final deliverable you need to care about but how others, such as senior managers see you get to the final deliverable. You need to be aware that your target customer (management) has limited bandwidth to pay attention to how you’re getting work done as they’re busy getting results and juggling the next set of problems, however the more they become aware of your skills and talents the easier it becomes for you to come to mind when new projects and opportunities are being assigned.

So how do you expose them to the skills you used to get the results they’re impressed with without boring them with the details. Tricky?

Exposing management to how you get to a result helps in you not getting pigeon-holed into one type of project or deliverable. If I see you produce a customer report, I know you can do it, so I may give you another one, but if I’ve had some exposure to what skills it took to get the customer report, and I have a project that requires dealing with complex scheduling and tricky people you may be a candidate for that project if I know your skill set.

As you’re working on the project take the time to explicitly list some of the challenges you’re facing in the project and the talents that you’re using such as:

- Skills to make it happen and getting favors/input from others

- Ability to make trade-offs and handle change

- Knowledge of the business and finding answers

- Ability to juggle priorities

Now if you were a product these would be all the cool features the product would have. However we know management isn’t going to want to hear a feature list. So your goal isn’t to explicitly list these things but to reference them in context. Your task is to look at the list you’ve created and come up with lead in sentences when discussing your project that highlight the talent or challenge but doesn’t get in the way of the business point.

- “We were going to go with person X, but when I heard about the new feature set we went with person Y”

- “We needed someone who had triple horn server experience to validate the approach. Frank was out so I had Joe review it from Team X”

- “We could have gone with X but considering schedule and compatibility with the chip now wasn’t the time so that’s why I went with Y”

This may feel awkward while you’re preparing it. But guess what? Going through the exercise figuring out what skills you’ve used and challenges faced, and actively turning them into statements like this raises your awareness of what needs to be communicated.

When you have time with your boss you should let him know how your talents were leveraged to achieve the project in more detail.

The bottom-line – if you hide what it took to produce results, they might not learn to associate you with certain skills and talents you have. They may learn over time, but that’s if you choose to believe the business world will reward you for hard work and output – and I would love that to be true but appropriate personal marketing can definitely help get the results you deserve sooner.


 

Boy, are we in trouble with diversity and hearing different perspectives. While we look at the statistics of female representation in meetings in different locations and decision making venues we know things look fairly gloomy, but once you dig into the behaviors driven by the statistics the negative impact of lack of diversity multiples. 

In part 1 of this piece I talked about the basic challenges that can lead to women holding back or being overlooked in meetings and discussions. However it’s not simply a matter of women conquering their fears to overcome participation, once they do this you’ll have more voices in the room, but if you think you’re about to benefit from diverse thinking, especially a female point of view, then think again as that doesn’t necessarily follow once they have their voice. Let me explain.  

Women really want to be an equal player in the workplace. They value equality and believe that hard work should be rewarded and recognized. If only we can be perceived as ‘one of the guys’ we can be heard and achieve equality right? Wrong. Achieving ‘one of the guys’ status does not provide any benefits related to gaining insight from feminine intuition. How so? 

What percentage of a group needs to be female before a female perspective is raised on issues? Higher than 40%. While businesses are trying to get excited about increases in the number of females in the workplace they are still falling woefully short of the critical number to have a women’s perspective heard. 

In a research study, they knew from a survey that on a certain topic women held different views than men, so in a follow up study they used a meeting forum to experiment with how many women in the room were required before the point of view expressed in the survey results became a view expressed in the 
meeting. It wasn’t until 60-80% women were in the meeting that the view showed up. 

I came across that research shortly after I had been interviewing people in software development. My motivation was to examine how unintended gender bias shows up in the decision making process of software development. I interviewed men and women from different disciplines and at different  levels of seniority on the topic. The only job discipline group that didn’t admit to using personal opinions at work was research type disciplines, where it was felt that representation of unbiased data was what provided them with credibility to do their job well. However most other disciplines interviewed did say that they did bring personal opinion to discussions and decision making. They would bring personal needs to bump up feature requests, decide on what to build based on what engineering challenges they wanted to take on or skill they wanted to develop. There was one type of opinion that women said they never or extremely rarely used - it was an opinion that would identify them as a woman. The women interviewed said they are very cautious in ever raising a point of view that explicitly supports a female perspective. The justifications for this behavior included not wanting to seem different from the others and being seen as a woman, why put forward an idea when it’s not going to have critical mass support for making it on the feature list (no one wants to suggest ideas that are going to be rejected), and also one woman realized it never dawned on her to have a woman’s point of view as she’s worked so long as a ‘guy’ that she only tackled problems with critical evaluation perspective and not from her personal female experience. While I don’t think in real world situations it will take 60-80% female representation before a female perspective is heard, let’s just say it is far above the 20% that is present in many business today. 

Women account for 51% of the population and are often touted as influencing 80% of the purchasing decisions. I think it’s worth making sure a female insight isn’t accidentally overlooked or ignored. 

Let’s start with some advice to increase the amount of heard female participation in the meetings:

1. Ask questions of individuals rather than leaving it for those with the loudest voices to hold air time. And don’t just launch in the first time you try it with, “Rebecca, what do you think?”, make sure there’s a warm up question or two so Rebecca can have a mental prep time. 

2. Watch for signals that Rebecca wants to contribute she will be giving cues of wanting to participate but the floor will not provide the opening. 

3. Ask questions to insure you’re getting a well-rounded perspective on your customer from a business perspective. “Although we know product X is for men and women, is there anything in particular we need to consider for women, given this team is mostly men designing it?”

4. Let everyone know that even though decisions are being made in the room if people have ideas to share after the meeting send mail or catch ‘me’ later. Better to get the feedback a little late than not at all. In the next  meeting thank people individually for their follow ups so they feel recognized.

5. And women who are more senior in the room – it’s your job too to enable other women as well. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with their contribution, but women can also not enable other women in the same way as men operate.