Career Hack

Can shipping’s choppy seas offer calm waters to women?

1st October 2019 By projectdiamond

We have the skills; we have the degrees; we have the experience. So why aren’t more of us in leadership positions?

More and more women graduate from universities and according to the UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency, 69% of students studying medical technology-related degrees are women.

We can see many female employees occupying entry-level positions, even in male-dominated industries, but the higher we go in hierarchy, the less women we see.

Following the first ever “Women in Shipping Summit”, that took place during the London International Shipping Week this September, Kate Bollanou, Executive & Leadership Coach, came to this conclusion:

We have everything it takes to succeed! But do we have self-belief?

Speakers and delegates shared their knowledge and experience. Our goal was, first, to raise awareness of the issues women face in the workplace and, secondly, to find solutions to them.

It’s not enough to discuss about them and not take action.

In the same way, it’s not enough to study hard and excel as students if we don’t put our knowledge into action.

I’ve met so many ambitious women wanting to succeed in their field. But no matter how successful they seem to others, the majority of them doubt their abilities.

They feel that they’re not enough. Not old enough; not young enough; not smart enough; not experienced enough and the lists goes on.

Because of this belief, they end up holding themselves back. They are reluctant to put themselves forward and to take risks. They’re afraid that they’ll fail and if they do, they will be ridiculed.

Let me ask you this question: what would you do if you were more confident? Would you apply for that promotion? Would you be able to voice your opinion?

One thing we realised after at the Women in Shipping Summit was that confidence comes with action. The more you push yourself out of your comfort zone, the more confident you’ll feel about yourself.

If you’re applying for a different or a more senior position, one thing is sure: you won’t know how to do everything on the job description. If you knew, you’d already be in that position and there’d be no challenge!

The key to unlock your success is to adopt a Growth Mindset and to believe that you have the ability to figure things out, as long as you try and practice until you succeed.

Failure’s a part of our journey and you have everything it takes to succeed! All you have to do now is believe in yourself and have the courage to take the next step.

Author: Kate Bollanou

Executive &; Leadership Coach, WomanSpeak Circle Leader, National Business Award Winner 2019, Young Gender Balanced Leader Finalist 2019

Managers: do you recognise the signs of burnout?

28th June 2019 By projectdiamond

Careers expert Zena Everett is an executive coach, author and an in-demand speaker on career management and productivity. Here she talks about how to spot and stop burnout in your teams – and yourself.

Don’t wait for a sickness note or resignation for proof of burnout in your teams. Here are some warning signs to look out for and some prevention strategies.

Burnout is defined as a ‘state of vital exhaustion’. How do you know if you are genuinely exhausted with work rather than depressed? A depressed person will take their black dog with them wherever they go. Burnout, on the other hand, is confined to work. Get away from your desk (and your boss) and up a mountain, on a beach, or wherever you go to decompress, and your energy and mood will be restored.
To state the obvious, people should NOT burn out, take a break, return to work and repeat the pattern (although I know some who do). That’s bonkers from any angle: career, psychological, physical or family.

Your job as a manager is to ensure that your team members are happy, engaged and productive (all three feed into the other). Burned-out colleagues are none of these. What are the warning behaviours? Here’s two canaries in the coalmine I look for when coaching:

Burnout Sign #1: Reduced productivity.

Your high performing, perfectionist, people-pleasing, nothing-is-ever-good-enough-for-me, piece of expensive Talent ceases to deliver. They work even longer hours but the standard of their tasks tails off. Talk to them about it. Say that you have noticed the changes and ask what they think is going on. It could be that they are just bored and need more responsibilities. Or they could be overwhelmed by their workload and their own relentless drive to excel. Those are predictors of burnout. Coach them to manage the demands of their role and the pressure they put on themselves.

Burnout Sign #2: Cynicism.

This varies from an increasingly apathetic approach to the job, when people fall prey to office and digital distractions, to downright pessimism about the impact of their work. You’ll hear previously positive people make snidey comments about the customers, other team members, other departments, or senior management. ‘What’s the point anyway, nothing changes around here,’ ‘I don’t mind teaching, it’s just the parents and the children that spoil it’, ‘not him again, what does he want this time?’ etc. It’s sort of funny in the moment, but it’s not actually. Negativity and disengagement will drive more motivated team members away. It’s certainly not enabling a collaborative culture that screams service, success and energy.

What can you do to prevent burnout happening and restore resilience? Step up to the plate and actively help your people to do their best work in a healthier way.
Prevention Strategies

Restore the boundaries.

Employees are happiest and most motivated when they make daily, incremental progress towards their goals.* That’s all it takes! Allow them to get their meaningful work done – with clear role descriptions, targets, performance metrics, deadlines, training and all the resources they need.

Then get out of their way.

When I meet stressed-out people they are often overloaded with pointless projects, routine administration, complicated reporting systems, badly-thought out management initiatives and lengthy meeting schedules. All of these are obstacles to real work. Be brave. Re-evaluate the output you expect from people and clarify how they can achieve it. Then cut out everything else that takes up their time. They’ll thank you for asking some hard questions and challenging fatty work cultures that inhibit productivity. ‘Why are we doing this? Is there a better, more efficient way of achieving the same result?’

Walk the talk.

You are a role model for high and healthy performance. If you are rushing from one meeting to another, snapping at people, over-promising and under-delivering and working stupid hours, then you’ve no time to step back, listen, think strategically and nip problems in the bud before they escalate.

Delegate, manage upwards, push back, re-negotiate and say No.

All of these are crucial yet basic leadership skills. Don’t send out of hours emails (save them in your draft folder or use the timed sending facility if you really must write them), or finesse tasks that don’t need finessing (that power-point deck is just fine). I hear of so many managers who CREATE stress.

Get proper training on the granular details of managing work-flow.
Only hold meetings that are absolutely necessary, keep to an agenda and don’t let anyone waffle.
Be on time.
Look like you can cope with more responsibility, not that you are about to combust.

Disconnect and build real connections.

No one can be ON all the time. Do less but think more: you’ll be more valuable that way. You rarely get your best ideas in the office.

Encourage your people to take their holidays.
Exercise. Breathe.
Find a hobby or a challenge outside work that nourishes you.
Take a real lunch break and eat with your team.
Talk, don’t email.

Someone said at one of my recent Crazy Busy™ sessions that the only creative thing their Creative Director did was create email chains.

Reward results, not presenteeism.

Flexible working is a no-brainer. Trust people with the freedom to do their work in the most appropriate place and don’t be petty about checking up on them. There is no correlation between long hours cultures and productivity, quite the opposite. A sense of control over where and how we do our best work is a crucial aspect to motivation.

Build co-worker support systems.

Eating together, talking about how to improve processes, doing pre- and post-mortems, building in planning time, asking for support and advice. I’m not sure that hackneyed team-bonding initiatives like away days are as effective as regular, shorter team pow-wows when you can really communicate, allow everyone’s voice to be heard and get solutions from the people at the front line. Problems don’t get solved by paint-balling.

*Conclusion of a reassuring three-year study by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School on how to create forward momentum with clear goals, autonomy and a genuinely respectful culture. It confirms what your management instincts have been trying to tell you: HR interventions that work are lean, honest and relatively obvious. Read her book with Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using small wins to ignite job, engagement and creativity at work.

Next Steps

I hope that’s helpful and I’d love your feedback and experiences. As ever, please feel free to share with anyone you think would benefit.

Pick up the phone if I can help build resilience and coping strategies with my executive coaching or if you need a lively, practical speaker on career management or productivity topics at your next conference.

ZENA EVERETT
Phone: +44 20 3287 9505 | Mobile: +44 (0) 7968 424650
Email: zena@zenaeverett.com

Your session was great – informative, interactive, fun and engaging, can’t ask for more! ICAEW SME Conference Organiser

Here’s my short animation on how to stop our brains getting so frazzled

Click HERE for details of sessions I can run in your business

(This is a WiC promotion on behalf of Zena Everett)

9 in 10 women Face Problems Returning to Work After Having Children

13th March 2019 By projectdiamond

One-third of mothers struggle to cover the cost of childcare

A recent survey of 1,000 UK mothers has revealed a continuing lack of support from businesses when it comes to balancing family and work.

The survey, undertaken by HR training providers DPG, revealed that 9 in 10 mothers (87%) faced issues when returning to work after maternity leave. The most common problems mothers faced were:

Over half (54%) struggle to balance time between childcare and work
52% feel guilty about leaving their child
One-third (33%) struggle financially with the cost of childcare
17% feel marginalised or excluded by colleagues
14% said their colleagues are unsupportive and inflexible
Over one in ten (14%) miss out on promotions because of maternity leave

The research also revealed the extent to which women are still bearing the burden of childcare when it comes to newborns and young children. On average, mothers take 12.5 months parental leave after the birth of a child. In comparison, two-thirds of men (67%) took just two weeks or less leave, and one in five (22%) took no leave at all. This means that women are taking an average of 24 times more parental leave than men.

Only half (51%) of mothers were satisfied with the support they received from their workplace when returning from parental leave. Survey respondents gave indications of what companies could be doing to help the transition back to work easier:

Almost half (46%) want more flexible working hours
Nearly one-third (30%) want more paid maternity leave
Over one-quarter (26%) would like to work from home
One in five (21%) want their employer to provide an onsite crèche
17% want more childcare vouchers

Companies that don’t do more to support mothers returning to work risk losing substantial portions of their workforce. Currently, two-thirds of women (68%) are unable to return to work full time after maternity leave, and one in five (19%) finds it necessary to leave their position altogether.

Sarah Aubrey, CEO at DPG says about the research:

“It’s important to recognise how far we have come and how far we still have to go when it comes to gender equality. Our research highlights important issues around the 2019 theme #Balanceforbetter, by indicating that although women are still bearing most of the childcare responsibility for newborns and young children, their extra work is not being met with adequate support to help them transition back into the workplace.

Courage and better processes are keys to senior level roles

31st January 2019 By projectdiamond

[Author: Gwen Rhys]

My 25-yr old godson recently attended a corporate away-day: “Did you know research shows that women only apply for jobs when they met 100% of the qualifications listed, as opposed to men, who apply if they met 60%?” he asked me.

I replied that well, yes, I had heard this (yawn!).

I also pointed out that this much-cited “research” purportedly came from an internal Hewlett Packard (HP) report from which HP had deduced that the lack of women in upper management in its organisation was due to a lack of confidence among women. Quite why it never occurred to HP that it might be overconfidence in men, I’m not sure, but this one piece of “research” has influenced the entire narrative of why women don’t progress to senior roles.

Research validity

In 2014, Norwegian academic Curt Rice who leads Norway’s Committee on Gender Balance and Diversity in Research set out to find this “research” and concluded that

There is no legitimate, evidence-based foundation for the claim that men apply for jobs when they feel 60 percent qualified while women have to be 100 percent certain. None. Nothing that can be examined, reproduced, reviewed or cited.

Further research

In the same year, Tara Mohr, an expert on women’s leadership, surveyed over a thousand men and women, predominantly American professionals, and asked them, “If you decided not to apply for a job because you didn’t meet all the qualifications, why didn’t you apply?”

According to the self-report of the respondents, the barrier to applying was not lack of confidence. In fact, for both men and women, “I didn’t think I could do the job well” was the least common of all the responses. Only about 10% of women and 12% of men indicated that this was their top reason for not applying.

So what were their reasons for not applying?

Didn’t want to waste time and energy

Men and women gave the same most common reason for not applying. 41% of women and 46% of men indicating their top reason as: “I didn’t think they would hire me since I didn’t meet the qualifications, and I didn’t want to waste my time and energy.”

Fear of failure

22% of women indicated their top reason was that they didn’t want to put themselves out there if they were going to fail – the consequences would be too great – and Stanford research has indicated that women’s failures are remembered longer than men’s.

Following the rules

15% of women indicated the top reason they didn’t apply was because they were following the guidelines about who should apply.

It’s the process not the people

Mohr concluded that women don’t need to try and find that elusive quality, “confidence,” but rather hiring and promotional processes need to be more transparent and equality based.

This view is also held by Carolyn Tastad, group president of North America at Procter & Gamble. At the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on a panel called Female Leadership at a Tipping Point, she highlighted the flawed belief of women lacking confidence by saying:

There is a false narrative and there are false bias assumptions we are using as justification for the lack of progress. There are a number of things we have to do differently.

We’ve got to get rid of this notion that women have to behave differently. We’ve got to be very intentional in our talent planning — reverse engineer it. If you narrow it down to specifics and maths, it can be done.

We need equality based policies. We need to find ways for men and women to be equal partners at home to enable quality in the workplace.

Why change the process?

Women take written job qualifications more seriously than men, for several reasons:

A McKinsey report found that men are often hired or promoted based on their potential, women for their experience and track record. If women have watched that occur in their workplaces, it makes perfect sense they’d be less likely to apply for a job for which they didn’t meet the qualifications.
Girls are strongly socialized to follow the rules and in school are rewarded, again and again, for doing so. In part, girls’ greater success in school (relative to boys) can be attributed to their better rule following. Then in their careers, that rule-following habit has real costs, including when it comes to adhering to the guidelines about “who should apply.”
Certifications and degrees have historically played a different role for women than for men. The 20th century saw women break into professional life – but only if they had the right training, the right accreditations. These qualifications were women’s ticket in, a way of proving they could do the job. Women weren’t part of an old boys club in which they’d get the benefit of the doubt. That history can lead women to see the workplace as more orderly and meritocratic than it really is. As a result women mayoverestimate the importance of their formal training and qualifications, and underutilize advocacy and networking.

Mohr concluded:

It took me a while to understand that the habits of diligent preparation and doing quality work that I’d learned in school were not the only—or even primary—ingredients I needed to become visible and successful within my organization.

When it comes to applying for jobs, women need to do the same. Of course, it can’t hurt to believe more in ourselves. But in this case, it’s more important that we believe less in what appear to be the rules.

Have courage, take on challenging goals

I meet many high qualified, capable women. Many tell me they “lack confidence”. I’m not certain they do. I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy that the HP “research” has encouraged. However, I do sense they often lack courage – the courage to “have a go”, to put themselves out there certain in the knowledge that they will bounce back to fight another day.

Individuals, boys and men in particular, are often described as being over-confident (cocky) but I’ve never heard anyone being described as over-courageous. So I urge women to stop talking about their “lack of confidence”. Be courageous and confidence will follow.

As Adam Grant, Organizational psychologist at Wharton Business School, US has said:

You don’t need to build confidence to achieve challenging goals. You build confidence through achieving challenging goals.

Value your differences, and include generously.

16th January 2019 By projectdiamond

Ma’am, are you lost? A first-hand account of bias in tech, and some practical suggestions for those who want to fix it.

In this blog, first published in Medium in early December 2018, Ramona Liberoff, Founder Link Mission 2, StartupFounder, StoriesAngel, InvestorsEuropeVC discusses her experience in tech.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work in and around tech for the last 20+ years, since the dawn of the first Internet service providers and companies, through the digital disruption that has come to most industries and companies, into the leapfrog and impact areas of tech in emerging markets, as a corporate VC investing in the future of energy.

I’m currently a co-founder of a brand new start-up business looking to broaden the market for autonomous vehicles for shrinking cities and global peri-urban areas, to connect people with opportunities, on mission 2 of Zinc VC’.

I’m also a 48 year old woman born in the US and living in Europe since 1994, currently in Berlin. I’m often the only person over 30 and (usually) the only or a small minority of women in any given room, conference, meeting, pitch, hackathon or meetup.

And I’d like that to change: not just for my sake, but for the sake of European technology and investing. I want Europe to be the best region in the world for founders and investors, and lead technology businesses that make a better place and return risk capital at a very good premium.
First, let me share my own experiences, and second let suggest how everyone who cares about this issue in theory to do something to change it, every day.

In the last six months, I’ve been an investor (as a day job, and I’ve been an angel with several exits since 2008).

The events below aren’t unusual for me or my peer group.

(a) When I meet a technology founder he* will take the first 5–10 minutes to explain trends and technology to me. I often assert during these conversations that I understand a given market space, demonstrate that knowledge, and even then that doesn’t halt the explanatory narrative. This happens whether I’m positioned as a tech founder or as an investor. (*I’ve never had this experience with female founders, even of deeptech or cybersec companies where there actually would be a specialist gap in my knowledge where I’m always happy to learn more).

As an angel investor with more than 20 deals under my belt and 4 exits, I consistently hear ‘he’ when angels are referenced. One start-up founder I know who happens to be married to another start-up founder I have invested in through several rounds, said she was going to dinner with her husband’s investor. Her colleague replied: “Are you (female founder) the eye candy for him (investor?)”
I have been going to various transport events recently where everyone on earth is a consumer. At a recent event on data in transport, one of the organisers approached me and asked, “Ma’am, are you lost? The community volunteer event is in the other room.” I informed him that I was definitely in the right place.
I was describing to an investor that we were building a radically inclusive transport for autonomous vehicles. His question to me: “So who on your team understands the technology? It’s very complicated.” I heard him speak to an MBA student prior to me about AVs and he didn’t express that opinion to him.

I don’t believe these things would have happened to me if I were a 30 year old man.

The reason why they are important is not about me: I can find the energy and stubbornness to carry on and for the most part, laugh it off: my track record is good proof and I have an excellent network. It does mean that if you don’t look like a stereotypical founder or investor, you start every interaction at a significant disadvantage. In tech and venture where decisions are made fast (and people pride themselves on this), bias runs the risk of shutting down options even at the expense of the facts and evidence.

This needs to change. I’m delighted to see the official shift at this week’s Slush conference in Helsinki. There was a great discussion on the main stage on diversity and inclusion as a key plank of start-up teams or investment decision and potential differentiation for Europe’s new fast growth companies. Lots of credit to Atomico and Diversity VC and all of those who worked on the recent toolkit on www.inclusionintech.com. It’s a big opportunity for Europe, for the world, and for the future.

However, there’s a lot that individuals can do in everyday interactions. If you’re a 20 or 30 something working in tech, and you care about this issue in theory, I’d ask you to d a few things routinely.

Practice saying him or her when you refer to founders. Anyone can be a founder. And far more people should be.

Look hard at your mentor and investor base: and find someone who is different to give you perspective. Doesn’t matter what kind of different.

If you’re at an event and you see someone who is on their own, especially if they look different from you, make it a point to say hi and find out about them.

Never, ever say the following:

My mother doesn’t understand what I do, my girlfriend isn’t tech-y, even my grandmother gets it.

The women in your life aren’t less intelligent than you are and you can include them to make your work and world more familiar. Some of the best founders I know, encourage the women in their lives to become founders too and they make sure that everyone they know can relate to what they do.

If you’re over 40, never apologise.

Instead, think about how more time has helped you recognise patterns and learn from your experience, and share that with others.

If you’re a woman, don’t you dare say “I don’t understand tech.”

I’ll hunt you down and force you to come with me to blockchain meet-ups. You’ll understand it pretty quickly, then. It’s like saying “I don’t understand the world.” Only anchorites have that option.

I may have made it sound difficult to be different. It is. But it’s also valuable, as it gives me a lot of empathy with users, with those who are different, helps me communicate more clearly, helps me challenge my own assumptions, and helps me pick my investments more wisely. Right now, my investment record is 2.5 times better than the average angel or early stage VC, and I’m proud of that.
It also means that I have seed capital to put into my own start-up and to help my founding team develop evidence and market fit before seeking external capital, at better terms than if we had to do so at first.

So value your differences, and include generously.

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