The Satisfaction Factor - Sally Helgesen

Chatham, NY September 2008

Three years ago, I teamed up with Julie Johnson, one of America’s most successful executive coaches, to create a project aimed at looking at differences and similarities in how men and women perceived, defined and pursued satisfaction in their work.

The project was inspired by the fact that Julie and I kept hearing the same thing from an unsettling number of very successful women who were either leaving high profile jobs or deciding to assume positions as individual contributors in their organizations—jobs that often required great skills and hard work, but did not put them on track for senior management.

What was it we kept hearing?
“It’s not worth it.”
What did this mean?

The women we talked to were in essence telling us that the tradeoffs their companies were asking them to make—in terms of time, stress, lifestyle, whatever—were simply not worth the rewards their organizations offered.

Notice: the women were not saying they were unwilling to sacrifice their time or life with the adrenaline rush we all experience when we’re over-extended (or thrillingly involved).

Podcast Episode Three: Implementing Change

“The corporate ladder is very rigid. It has two modes, right, you are either on or your off, you are either up or your out and it is very linear. And our world is not that way.” -- Anne Weisberg, Deloitte

In the third episode of our CBPS podcast series, we talk to Anne Weisberg of Deloitte about their ground-breaking work on mass career customization. We also talk to Allyson Moore of Yale University and author Lindsey Pollack about career opportunities for Generation Y and the changing demographics of the workplace. You can click to listen right here, or subscribe to download the podcast via iTunes.

Putting the “I” in Leader

At the Forté Corporate Best Practices Summit, Sally Helgesen heralded the “age of women’s leadership” as companies become less hierarchical and more collaborative. The idea is that this emerging business environment will play to women’s strengths, and that (at least progressive) companies will recognize this by giving women more authority and leadership opportunities.
But companies have been operating in this new mode for a while, and the number of women in leadership has stalled – even at some of the most progressive companies. So, how to explain this apparent contradiction?

I think it has a lot to do with how women take credit. Yes, more and more work is done by teams, and women lead teams well. But are these women getting credit when their teams deliver outstanding results? Yes, more and more business is done through partnerships and relationships, and women are good at building partnerships and fostering relationships. But, are women getting credit for doing so? I suspect that many women are not getting the credit, and therefore the leadership roles, they deserve in part because they don’t know how to ask for it. As the authors of The Labyrinth of Leadership painstakingly document, women must navigate between the “unwritten rule” in the workplace that leaders will self-promote (a leader is decisive and assertive), in order to be seen as a leader, and the implicit bias about women that they must not be perceived as too “aggressive” and “ambitious.”

The trick then is to put the “I” in leader – to take credit for your accomplishments without coming across as only interested in getting ahead. One suggestion is to let others do the bragging for you. In the self- assessment I wrote for my performance review this year, I included feedback from clients who raved about me. It was more comfortable than raving about myself, and it had more credibility coming from a third party! This tip, and many others, can be found in Peggy Klaus’ book, Brag: The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It.

Do you have any other tips for putting the “I” in leader? Share your story, so that we can all advance the cause of women’s leadership. If you believe Sally, and I do, our organizations’ future depends on it.

Podcast Episode Two: The Satisfaction Factor

In the second of our three-part Corporate Best Practices series, author Sally Helgesen talks about the changing definition of career satisfaction, and how employee satisfaction impacts the bottom line. She is joined by Heather Lowe of Abbott, who comments on flexibility and career sustainability. You can click to listen right here, or subscribe to download the podcast via iTunes.

Striking Balance

Forté does a great job of making their events as interactive as possible, so at the Corporate Best Practices Summit, our table had an assignment: come up with tips on work/life balance. In 20 minutes, while we’re eating lunch. Impossible, you say? Well, actually, we tackled our assignment with great fervor and came up with what I at least felt was brilliant advice: eliminate the term. Strike “work/life balance” from our vocabulary.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should say right off the bat that I have been advocating the elimination of “balance” since co-authoring Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace with Today’s Nontraditional Workforce. In the book, my co-author Cathy Benko and I argue that work/life balance – with its implication that work and life are opposing forces that can somehow be balanced in a perfect, static pose – is a mirage. Work is a part of life, not separate from it, so we need language that reflects this. We propose work/life integration or work/life fit.

In speaking around the country about mass career customization, I have been amazed at the reaction to the call to strike “balance” from our vocabulary. One woman came up to me afterwards almost in tears to say “that was one of the most liberating things I have ever heard. Thank you.” I get that kind of response a lot. I think many women (in particular, although men feel it too) think they are supposed to have this magical thing called “work/life balance” and so feel like failures when they don’t.

There is no need to put this kind of pressure on ourselves. Rather, we should start a campaign to eliminate balance from our vocabulary and our expectations. So that we can all get on with our lives – including how we fit our work into our lives and our lives into our work. What do you think? Will you join the campaign?

Podcast One: Recruiting and Retaining Talent

In conjunction with our CBPS event in New York, Forté produced a three-part podcast program exploring issues related to recruitment and retention of women business leaders. Hear Sharon Hall, Claudia Tattanelli, Sally Helgesen, Heather Lowe, Anne Weisberg and Allyson Moore discuss what companies are doing to find and keep their most talented women. This is a conversation in three parts - watch for upcoming installments over the next several weeks. You can click to listen right here, or subscribe to download the podcast via iTunes.

What do you do?

No matter how long it has been since you graduated from college (or graduate school, or post graduate school), people are going to come up to you and ask “What do you do?” Whenever I get that question, I stumble trying to find the right “box” to fit myself into. I am a lawyer by training, but I don’t practice. I work in Talent, but I am not a human resources practitioner. My kids call me a professional feminist, but that’s more like an inside joke than a job description! See why I struggle?

But actually, the reason I struggle is that I’ve been trying to answer the wrong question. This realization came to me listening to Peter Fiske, who wrote Put Your Science to Work: The Take-Charge Career Guide for Scientists (and also have a monthly on-line entrepreneurship column “Opportunities,” published at http://www.sciencecareers.org/.). Peter was a fellow panelist at the 8th Annual Princeton University Reunions Career Colloquium (which is pretty cool, just by itself). The panel was titled “Career Mapping: Navigating Choices & Circumstances in a Plan for Life” and Peter talked about how he made the transition from academic science to business. He said the first step was to reframe what he did – from “I am a chemist” to “I conduct large scale research to solve complex problems.”

The trick is to stop thinking about what you “do” from the point of view of your function or, your training, and start thinking about it from the vantage point of what value you bring, or what purpose you serve. This reframing needs to happen at both the individual and at the organizational level. One of the things we learned at the Forte 2008 Corporate Best Practices Summit is that people, particularly women, want to work for companies that have a strong sense of purpose. But most companies do a terrible job explaining what their mission is. One exception is Avon. Ask Avon’s CEO, Andrea Jung, “what does Avon do?” and she won’t say “We’re a cosmetics company.” Instead, she will tell you that Avon is the largest microfinance lender to women in the world. Because that is, actually, what Avon does – it extends credit to women so they can buy Avon products and then sell them at a profit.

So, the next time you’re at a networking event, or talking to a recruiter about your company, and wondering how to answer that age-old question, try reframing the question. Try answering “what purpose do you serve?” The answer to that will come more easily. Because it turns out we all want to answer that question. And, please, let us know, “what do you do?”