Last year, I created a virtual “women in leadership training” trash bin. The dismal statistics across all business sectors were irrefutable. The women in leadership dialogues I had embraced (or been subjected to) for my entire professional career were clearly not working.
Statistics on women in leadership across all business sectors continue to lag at unjustifiable rates, and not just at the C-Suite and Board level, but also at the Senior Manager and Director levels as well. Given the facts, I could not in good faith be a true advocate for professional women if I was doing nothing but recycling strategies that had repeatedly proven themselves to be ineffective.
Bin the baggage
So, I created my trash bin. Dumping my own training baggage seemed like a reasonable (and maybe necessary) place to start. I began with the easy targets. Topics like Confidence, Balance and Guilt were the first to go. Be More Assertive and Be Less Aggressive were two topics that quickly followed.
Feeling energized, I began to talk to other professional women, inviting them to join in my soul-freeing exercise. As a result of these discussions, my trash bin not only filled-up, but virtually overflowed with tired topics. Delegation. Networking. Dressing for Success. Learning to Golf. And even with a few misgivings, in went Mentoring, Sponsorship and Bias. No matter how much I liked those topics, they were not yielding results either. And, my absolute favorite topic to toss in the bin? Learning How to Overcome the Obstacles. Really? If we can identify the obstacles, shouldn’t we just be removingthem?
Lift the barriers
And this is when the epiphany struck. Literally years of effort has been wasted on training that was designed to support women’s success in a traditional business environment that is riddled with obstacles. Unburdened by all the prior training noise in my head, the path forward was suddenly very clear to me. It was time to seek (and maybe even demand) changes to the traditional working environment, which honestly is not particularly friendly to anyone. Moreover, I believe the timing to seek these changes is ripe for three primary reasons, all of which have shifted the business motivations for this change.
By Rosalie Harrison
There’s been a lot of buzz about a 4-day workweek. But it will be the ‘4 + 1’ workweek that ultimately wins out: 4 days of “work” and 1 day of “learning.” Several forces are converging in a way that point toward the inevitability of this workplace future.
How can leaders help their teams combat change exhaustion — or step out of its clutches? Too often, organizations simply encourage their employees to be resilient, placing the burden of finding ways to feel better solely on individuals. Leaders need to recognize that change exhaustion is not an individual issue, but a collective one that needs to be addressed at the team or organization level.
In this article, the author describes how a concept called tangential immersion can help anyone persevere in a boring task: Through a series of studies with more than 2,000 participants, she and her coauthors found that people often quit boring tasks prematurely because they don’t take up enough of their attention to keep them engaged.
