If you are a woman and you want to overcome career obstacles and stereotypes and get ahead in business, you need to develop solid leadership skills. Here are 10 of the most important ones.
Be people-focused in a high-tech world. Today's leaders must rely on their intuitive insights, knowledge of trends, and skills at scanning, visioning, and motivating people. This means your natural woman's ways of leading can boost your chances of career success. It also means that you, as a woman, have wide-open career opportunities--as never before. Companies are looking for the right combination of people skills and high-tech skills. If you have the marketplace skills to produce needed results--and you're willing to use them--you can be wildly successful in today's workplace.
Learn how to gain credibility and power. Credibility is power plus competence, the known ability to get results. Ways of gaining it include learning how to:
- Get needed resources and information. Learn how to get what you and your team need in order to be successful, and insist on getting it
- Empower people to become more independent.
- Get on the inside track. Become someone who's moving onward and upward.
- Handle crises and changes effectively. This will demonstrate your leadership capabilities and make you more visible, especially when you incorporate a problem-solving innovation.
- Take calculated risks.
- Build a power base -- a support network that includes employees, colleagues, mentors, and people outside the company.
- Work for a supportive manager. Find someone who will serve as a good role model, encourage your growth, and help you achieve your career goals.
- Act as if you have credibility and power. Acting as if you have power is frequently half the battle!
Network across the gender gap. As a woman, you probably have an advantage over your male peers when it comes to listening and speaking effectively. This is a strength you can capitalize on. What you probably need to focus on is how well you're bridging the gap between male and female world-views and communication styles. Instrumental to this is bridging the ability to translate your verbal skills into business talk that men understand.
Create your own success. Deciding what you really want, clarifying those goals, setting your priorities, and making life plans and career plans is probably the most important work you'll ever do. Goal-setting skills are the basis for many leadership skills, from personal time management to organizational strategic planning. Gaining such skills marks you as the promotable woman businesses are looking for--someone who knows what she wants and where she's going, who can develop goals and action plans--and who can balance conflicts between work demands, family responsibilities, and personal development needs.
Negotiate win-win results. To become a masterful negotiator, you must learn to take a broad view of the entire situation, determine what you want, estimate what the other party wants, and assess your chances of reaching a win-win agreement. Then you must figure out your best alternative to making a deal and the other person's best alternative.
Manage multiple priorities. Know what's important -- focus on your top-priority goals, activities, and time targets. You must know yourself and tailor your time management style to fit your personal patterns. You must know your people and cooperate with them in managing multiple priorities. You must manage overwhelming projects, often sneaking up on them to overcome procrastination. Finally, you must harness technology in ways that boost your productivity.
Manage stress. The most effective leaders know how to channel their energy toward their goals -- including stress-related and emotional energy. Some of the leaders who fall by the wayside simply don't have the stamina or resources to stay in the running. They use up too much emotional energy struggling with stress. Others keep running at high speed until they literally drop dead.
Channel your emotional power. It's true that you're probably more in touch with your emotions than your male peers. This can be a curse or a blessing depending on how you channel that emotional energy. To channel your emotional power in the direction you want, you must recognize women's typical emotional patterns and your own emotional profile. You must allow yourself to fully feel your feelings, process and channel stressful feelings, and take conscious control of your actions by assessing your options and choosing wisely.
Communicate assertively. Assertion is based on respect for yourself and respect for the other person. You express your preferences and defend your rights in a way that also respects other people's needs and rights. The goal of assertion is to get and give respect; to be fair and ask for fairness; to create a win-win situation; and to leave space for compromise when your needs and rights conflict with another person's. Such compromises respect the basic integrity of both people, and both get some of their wishes satisfied. This approach to assertion helps you avoid the temptation of using assertion to manipulate others in order to get what you want.
Manage difficult people situations. People are fascinating and fun most of the time. They're also perplexing and frustrating to deal with sometimes - an eternal mystery in their complexity. One way to sort out the maze of difficult people situations you encounter is to recognize that most problems stem from people's inability or unwillingness to act assertively. When you recognize the types of situations that stem from aggressive, passive aggressive, and passive modes of behavior, you've taken the first step in resolving difficult people situations. Maintaining good mind is the key to maintaining your balance in difficult people situations. You need to recognize the difficulty and deal with it but not pulled into negative viewpoints or contracting emotions.
Excerpted from "The Promotable Woman: 10 Essential Skills for the New Millennium" by Norma Carr-Rufino, Ph.D. Copyright 1997 by the author. Published by Career Press, Franklin Lakes, NJ 07417. All rights reserved
The Promotable Woman
