Did Walking the Tightrope Just Get Even Trickier?

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In 2003, a CV was handed to students at Columbia Business School. Half the class received the CV of Heidi. The other half the CV of Howard. Both Heidi and Howard were successful venture capitalists, driven, results-oriented, with outgoing personalities and a powerful network. Students in each group were asked if they would want to work for Heidi and Howard.

Though both sets of students recognized the achievements of the leaders, only those who received Howard’s CV said they would be ready to work for him. Those with Heidi’s CV decided explained she seemed too aggressive, so they wouldn’t want to work for her.

There was one catch. The CVs were exactly the same - just the names were different.

The upshot of this research?

Balance Warmth and Competence

It seems that women walk a fine line between being so nice that they are considered a pushover - and being so competent that they are perceived as unlikeable.

I frequently share the Heidi and Howard ‘test’ among women I work with. Many say they still feel this challenge. They need to show up as warm, friendly and helpful, whilst also showcasing their competence and capabilities in a way that isn’t intimidating. It’s akin to walking a tightrope. Too nice or too competent, and you may fall.

I recently read research that adds another layer to this ‘tightrope’ challenge.

Not So Nice?

Jennifer Chatman, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, noticed that as she grew older and was excelling in her field, she was being rated more harshly by students than her male counterparts. She was seen as less warm than male professors. And after further investigation, she found other seasoned female colleagues shared the same experience.

Probing further, Chatman and co-researchers found that both men and women are seen as growing in competence as they age, but women, not men, are perceived to be less warm as they grow older.

In a similar study to that of Heidi and Howard, researchers provided participants with two profiles – this time, Sue and Steve. The profiles contained the same information. Participants rated both Steve and Sue as high on agency, but Sue was judged to be lower on warmth-related characteristics.

Not only are women walking the tightrope of balancing competence and warmth, it seems they need to up the warmth quotient as they get older. Maybe this is related to the tightrope act. If women are gaining in competence, then to maintain a balance, they need to inject a larger dose of warmth into the behaviour mix!

What To Do?

There is no one simple answer. Chatman herself is concerned that women may take away the message that they need to change to suit others’ expectations.

Are you able to read the room and balance diverse expectations with the greater need of the situation – all the while managing your own emotions and response so that you are effective?

If yes, you’re doing a great job of exercising emotional intelligence.

Observing others behaviour may provide clues to their perceptions, but that doesn’t mean you need to pander to expectations that don’t align with your values. Again, it’s a balancing act – perhaps a helpful guiding question is: what will be most effective in this moment?

Looking more broadly, and with a view to achieving deeper systemtic change, are you in a position to raise awareness of the warmth/competence bias – and ensure implementation of processes and policies that reduce the scope for bias? And can you engage organizational stakeholders to monitor and review progress?

The key message from these studies: When it comes to equity, there is still work to be done.

References:

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_nice_bias_that_middle_aged_women_face_at_work

https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/how-negative-stereotypes-about-middle-aged-women-hold-them-back-at-work/

From the research by Jennifer Chatman and Laura Kray published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597822000796

 

 

© Andrea Stone, Stone Leadership

If you Want Outer Success, do the Inner Work: Five Practices for your Inner Workout

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If you Want Outer Success, do the Inner Work: Five Practices for your Inner Workout

A participant in a recent webinar said that he was not going ‘within’ enough, so his output was not great. That statement struck a chord. Outer work without inner work renders us automaton-like. The outer us is a reflection of the inner us. To shine on the outside, it helps to shine on the inside.

Yes, there is a target, a goal and yes, it’s possible to move towards that target with focus and determination and achieve it.  The mindset might be: ‘’That’s the goal, I’m going to achieve it.’’

And that works in the short term, even medium term, but our inner striving for meaning will typically slow us down in the long term.

Without the inner work it’s difficult to sustain long-term drive. Here are five practices for your inner workout – and they come with the added benefit of not causing you to breakout into a sweat.

1. Reflection

‘’Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.’’ Margaret Wheatley.

Have you ever taken the time to evaluate how you were, what you achieved, what went well, what didn’t go so well at the close of the day? And after that, think about what you might do differently in future?

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Connection Speaks Louder than Words

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Connection Speaks Louder than Words

Connection is a basic human need. There is ample evidence that people live longer when they have strong close relationships - as well as when they have a broader network of acquaintances, family and friends to reach out to.

If you look at your own working environment, you will notice that you have stronger relationships where you feel more trust and a stronger connection with certain people.

Connection is an emotional intelligence talent. It is learnable and it is important for success in life – not just because you live longer, but because you are more effective when you are able to connect with others. With connection comes empathy - and much research points to the positive impact of empathetic leadership.

Both the Fast Company and Forbes have featured research on the effectiveness of leaders who connect and display empathy – and those who don’t.

We know when we are being ‘talked at’ as opposed to being ‘engaged with’. Often, the ability to connect matters more than the actual words you say.

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Conflict Situation or Lively Debate

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Conflict Situation or Lively Debate

Is this a conflict situation or a lively debate? How you experience the same situation depends on who you are.

Many people prefer to avoid conflict. A conflict-avoider seeks harmony in group settings, working to build consensus and to ensure all voices are heard and respected. They feel distinctly uncomfortable when discussions become heated or when colleagues, and their perspectives and ideas, are challenged directly and forcefully. Do you recognize yourself as a conflict avoider?

At the same time, there are people who thrive on lively debate, sharing strong, diverse opinions and exchanging perspectives, often at a rapid, high-voltage rate - and analyzing (critiquing) ideas equally rapidly and forcefully before deciding whether to adopt or dismiss others’ inputs. Do you see yourself as more of a lively debater?

In situations where there are conflict-avoiders and lively debaters sitting at the table, the conflict-avoiders tend to hold back – they tend not to share opinions or critique others’ input because that’s not their style. The lively debaters, being more focused on the sharing and assessment of ideas and perspectives, tend to continue apace. They don’t see the forthright expression of opinions as conflict, rather as essential debate and assessment that supports good decision making.

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Connect for Respect

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Connect for Respect

For you to respect someone or something, do you first have to feel a connection to that person or thing?

I’ve been mulling this over for a while. Specifically, is connection a prerequisite to respect, to trust, to influence? What does connection actually mean - and how do we experience connection?

In terms of how we connect as humans, this often relates to shared values, a common vision and the behaviour we observe in the people around us.

Connection through Core Values

I was working with one group of people from an organization that was new to me. Even though the organizational and indeed country culture was one I was not familiar with, I felt a connection to the people in the team. Why? Possibly because they were open, genuine (they were even genuine in expressing what they didn’t want to be exposed to during our work) and clearly interested in forming stronger relationships with each other and me. I also appreciated their openness to making mistakes and not taking themselves too seriously. Their values – apparent from their behaviour – gelled closely with my own values, and even when it didn’t, I respected the honesty and openness.

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What is Your Relationship to Expectations?

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What is Your Relationship to Expectations?

iscussing attitudes with a colleague recently, he shared how as a child he had difficulty with speech – he had problems forming some sounds. Everyone around him accepted that this would be something he would simply have to live with. He refused to believe this and worked to overcome these challenges, learning to form the correct sounds through observation and practice.

This made me reflect on my experience of the times when people had set low expectations of me, along the lines of, ‘She’s never going to stick with this’ or ‘She’ll never do this’.

Why do we at times defy others’ low expectations of us and at other times, succumb to them? And why at times do we fail to meet others positive, high and wholly achievable expectations of ourselves, and at other times meet them?

Defying Low Expectations

Early on, I had a colleague, slightly senior to me, who would regularly intimate that they didn’t believe I would be able to successfully accomplish a particular task or project. I always delighted in proving that person wrong.

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Do Your Assumptions Mess Up Your Stakeholder Relationships?

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Do Your Assumptions Mess Up Your Stakeholder Relationships?

Whilst we are hard-wired to make assumptions and take short cuts, at times our assumptions about ourselves and others may stunt the growth of positive relationships.

What are your assumption patterns? Do you tend to make positive assumptions or negative assessments of yourself and others? And do these vary according to your stakeholders – would your assumption patterns be different for a boss, peers, team members, customers and business partners?

We make assumptions at all stages of a relationship: before we meet someone, based on first impressions and even in established relationships – and not always for the best.

Here are three ways we do that.

1. Self-Assumptions

Who you see in the mirror, is rarely who others see. This can have its upsides. Recently, a client shared how they were stunned when in the course of one week, two colleagues described him as compassionate. He had himself down as a logical, straight-talking, results-oriented task-master. I describe this as an upside. I’m not so sure he saw it that way.

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Selful: My new everyday word

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Selful: My new everyday word

The sense that I know what I’m about, I’m ready for what lies ahead and I am tuned into possibility. It combines being purposeful, consciously confident, compassionate, respectful and present. Being self-aware and able to self-manage.

Sometimes we are running on empty. Being selful is the opposite. It’s running on fully-charged batteries, without needing to rev the engine. It’s when you appreciate that your cup is full and you are truly grateful.

Being selful feels good. It sets you up for the day, the project, the week, the meeting - for whatever lies ahead.

How to be selful

Here are some practices:

Replenish your confidence levels: Fill the cookie jar with memories of all the occasions you’ve taken on a challenge and succeeded. Know your strengths – those that others appreciate in you and those that have lain dormant.

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Ten Things to Do to Raise Your EQ

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Ten Things to Do to Raise Your EQ

If you’ve ever patiently waited for someone to finish making their point in a meeting, only to become increasingly annoyed before finally interrupting them in an angry fashion, you’ll know that EQ is easier to understand than to practice.

Emotional Intelligence is making your feelings work for you. It’s using your thinking and feeling skills to make smarter decisions. And it counts more than IQ for success in life. Thankfully, it’s learnable.

Here are ten steps you can take to make your emotions work for you and raise your EQ.

1. Give your emotions a name

To build our EQ we need to know what we’re feeling. Emotions can be pretty simple to identify. ‘’I let slip our negotiating position. I’m mortified.’’ Or they can be incredibly complex. ‘’My boss snapped at me out of the blue when I shared our excellent sales performance for the quarter. I feel humiliated, undermined, furious, disappointed, inferior, confused.’’

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Is There Room for Anger in Management?

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Is There Room for Anger in Management?

From the responses I get to the question, “What is the least effective emotion you experience most frequently?”, it seems that anger impedes our effective functioning most often.

Broadly speaking, in the workplace, it seems that we experience anger in a few scenarios:

1. Anger directed against another - due to my error. 

This is the scenario where I hurriedly issue instructions, without clarifying expectations, ensuring understanding or offering support - and then am angry with the outcome. A colleague hasn’t delivered the customer presentation with the relevant messages or level of detail. The sales person hasn’t arranged the meeting with all of the key decision makers. I’m angry, but it’s my fault.

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What's Your Tough Message?

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What's Your Tough Message?

 ‘’One of my strengths is being able to deliver a tough message.”

So said a client a few years ago. It has always stuck in my mind. Especially so, as over the years, I have learnt that what constitutes a tough message for one person, doesn’t for another.

To many people, a tough message is something they believe is bad news for the recipient: the loss of a job, the fact that their performance is not up to expectations, or the damning news that the client doesn’t want them on the team.

But some people don’t look at this type of message as being tough to deliver. A colleague once shared that he was looking forward to having to make a group of people redundant. He had never done this before and it would be a learning for him. He felt confident of his ability to handle this with skill and sensitivity. He also knew that support mechanisms were in place to help the people affected by the decision.

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Judge a Man by His Questions, Not His Answers

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“Judge a man by his questions, not his answers”

Voltaire continues to be an inspiration, across the centuries, as I was reminded recently by a colleague.

Sometimes leaders feel a pressure to always have to know the answer. They may fear a loss of face if they are unable to respond with complete authority to a question posed by a colleague, investor or customer. Even whilst recognizing that it is impossible for everyone to have all the answers, a leader may cave into the pressure to display their omniscience.

Posing questions might offer a more effective approach.

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Do Numbers Inspire You?

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“Our vision is to deliver Y, to X people, across X markets, in the next X year(s).’’

With such a vision, we know where we are now, and we can clearly appreciate the magnitude of the path ahead.

Indeed, we all have targets – time to deliver, revenue to generate, calls to complete, markets to penetrate.

Some of us are inspired by these numbers. We see our targets in terms of numbers, and these numbers excite us. We calculate how we are going to get there. We might even take joy in the patterns we see in the numbers. In short, numbers help us manage our work and put things in perspective.

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What's Your Tough Message?

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‘’One of my strengths is being able to deliver a tough message.”

So said a client a few years ago. It has always stuck in my mind. Especially so, as over the years, I have learnt that what constitutes a tough message for one person, doesn’t for another.

To many people, a tough message is something they believe is bad news for the recipient: the loss of a job, the fact that their performance is not up to expectations, or the damning news that the client doesn’t want them on the team.

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The Urge to Please

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I was reminded of a conversation I had a few years back recently when working with a group of leaders on their personal and professional vision. When considering what provided real satisfaction, one participant shared that she found it hard to think of anything that she had ever undertaken of her own free will that gave her true joy. She had always been operating under ‘’orders’’ from others – often parents or family members - and as a result, she had become accustomed to following their advice, without contemplating where her wishes fit into the picture.

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Il Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin

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This is the final line from Voltaire’s Candide – one of my favourite books – where Candide goes in search of his love Cunegonde, together with the ever optimistic Pangloss (‘’all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’’) and a changing band of companions. The group travels across continents, witnesses horrors, loses riches and ends up much worse for wear, but with a small home and garden.

In its simplest form, the final line means:

We must cultivate our garden i.e. we must grow and create something beautiful, without recourse to others or their resources.

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The Power of the Just

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“I just understood what they wanted and designed the product accordingly”

“I was just able to make it work’’

“I just took a few ideas and built the program around that”

 ‘’I just got them together and helped them sort out their problems’’

Just is a word I hear a lot. Said with a specific purpose in mind, that’s fine. If we are aiming for self-deprecation and intentionally deflecting excessive attention, then all well and good.

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Saying Yes

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Just as sometimes we have difficulty saying no to something we don’t want to do, we also at times hold back from saying yes to something we want. This, according to research, is more prevalent among women than men – especially when it comes to promotions. I was reminded of this a few weeks back when a woman leader in an organization approached me following a workshop. She wanted to know whether she had made the right decision to say yes to a new role and a promotion.   

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Saying No

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The topic of a workshop came to mind recently, when I was coaching a young VP who was having second thoughts about a decision he had made to say no to a customer.

When I had been preparing for the workshop I had been questioning whether there would be enough material and discussion to fit the time. After all, saying no is in theory a very simple thing to do. I needn’t have worried. There was a great deal of sharing – the emotions that arise for us when asked to do something and the emotions that arise for u when we want to say no.

One of the interesting learnings from the workshop was that sometimes we fear the consequences of a saying no so much that we don’t actually say no.

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