Six Ways to Get That Next Leadership Position

Today’s Insight is that the earth is shifting and a new age is being born with all the pains and the feeling of euphoria of birth.

From Egypt where women now earn 82% of what men earn, to Rwanda where 45 of the 80 seats in parliament are women, to the recent shifts to female leadership at notable Fortune 500 companies, women are taking their place in world leadership.

The wave of change stalls in one country only to move ahead in another. Encouragingly it is not happening so much because of a worldwide sense of fairness but instead as a result of four things;

1. The democratization of education where more and more women are being educated and here in North America where more women are attending and graduating from university than men. Women are learning more, faster, and bringing it to bear on more issues and opportunities.
2. Technologies are making jobs gender agnostic. With the help of technology women can enter any field from engineering to welding and pipefitting and can keep up with male physical strength.
3. The tight economic conditions are forcing organizations to get the most possible out of every employee.
4. More companies are recognizing the value of diverse experience, insight, and opinion and strength of women’s leadership style.

Isobel Coleman is senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of CFR’s Civil Society, Markets and Democracy Initiative. She has gone on record repeatedly stating “Countries that oppress their women are doomed to be failed states.”

Sima Samar, chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission says it much more poetically when she says: “Together men and women are the two wings of a bird–both wings have to be not wounded, not broken, in order to push the bird forward.”

However it is a long journey of one step at a time and the issue that could be facing you is; how do you get that next leadership position? How do you get the opportunity to stretch and grow?

Here at Women of Influence we are giving a lot of thought these days to this question. We are not trying to find the answer all by ourselves either. Over the last six months a broad range of Canada’s top women of influence have given us hours and hours of their time to give us their collective wisdom and insights so we could pass them on to you. They have learned some extraordinary lessons on their journey —some of them at great expense. They have also learned from the best and the brightest minds that have mentored and counselled them along the way. We are forever grateful for the lessons they have passed on for you to achieve your goals and dreams.

Here are their six ways to get that next promotion:

1.    Don’t be afraid stretch yourself and step up to the next challenge

Carol Stephenson, the Dean of the Ivey School of Business got one of her greatest opportunities simply by stepping up to it even though her new supervisor did not feel the job was appropriate for a woman. She challenged him to give it to her and he eventually became one of her most loyal champions. Her insight is “We need to not be afraid. We are a lot more capable than we think we are”.

2.    Lean in and take ownership of your career and your next opportunity

Sheryl Sandberg, the C.O.O. of Facebook is particularly succinct in her advice that to succeed equally with men we need to lean in and take ownership of our successes and our careers. It isn’t enough to do a good job we need to attribute this to our core skills not luck, circumstance or the contributions of others. She is not saying we shouldn’t attribute success to those that contributed most. She is saying “When we are responsible for success we need to own it”. In planning our future we also need to own it and take responsibility for getting the skills and credentials we need; to master success and be our own architect of success.

3.    Believe in your team and you will get more engagement and support from them

Beverly Wybrow, the President and CEO of the Canadian Women’s Foundation was particularly helpful in enunciating the importance of believing in people and letting them know it. Her organization does a lot of work with disadvantaged women and she was constantly surprised at just how big an impact it made when their mentors and coaches believed in them. She quickly realized that this same lesson also applied to the highly successful women on her team. Her insight is “ When your team knows you believe in them collectively and individually you create more time, energy and time to tackle the next big challenge and demonstrate your ability to achieve”

4.    Whether you think you can, or think you can’t you are probably right

Mandy Shapansky, CEO of XEROX emphasized in her interview with the course developers working on our new program Mastering Success that she believes her most critical role is in giving her team well founded confidence in the company, its products, and themselves. You will achieve what you think you can and will fail at what you think you can’t. Confidence gives you permission to be aggressive in finding the answers you are missing.

5.    Practice distributed leadership

Rosemary McCarney, President and CEO of Plan Canada shared with us the challenges she has faced in building Plan Canada to a $150 million dollar organization and her solution – “Aggressively, forcefully and quickly push project leadership to others”. Through distributed leadership and carefully orchestrated town hall meetings that elicit energized transparent communication she keeps her employees, challenged, engaged and fully on board. These meetings are designed carefully to get everyones input and feedback as well as sharing the organization’s plans.

6.    Learn, stretch, learn

Camille Orridge, the CEO of The Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network taught us there is no roadblock that can’t be overcome. Camille rose from a ward maid and single mom emigrating from Jamaica to become a visionary for our health system. She is currently responsible for a $4 Billion Dollar Budget and mapping the future of Health Care in Ontario. Her formula was learn from those around you, stock up on knowledge and techniques by returning to school even when you can’t afford the time or money, and keep expanding your knowledge base by really listening to the client and trying new things to meet their needs. Healthcare of the future will be increasingly outside the walls of hospitals and in the hands of the recipient as we take on more responsibility for our own long term health.

Sally Armstrong in her book The Ascent of Women reminds us the journey to get to this place has been a perilous one for women through thousands of years of oppression and trickery. Women were burned alive at the stake for daring to have opinions. They were beheaded for failing to produce a male heir. They suffered foot binding to create dainty, useless feet to please their men. They have been subjected to female genital mutilation.

What we have to overcome is nothing compared to what they have faced. We need to simply;

• lean in and take responsibility for our learning and growth
• use our teams to their fullest by using distributed leadership
• give ourselves and others the confidence to succeed and the opportunity to grow.