Jul 21, 2016 | critical thinking, gender roles in business, women
Not long ago I spoke with the leader of a small professional firm about diversity and inclusion concerns within her organization. She — like many of her peers — are baffled at why their firm appears largely unchanged after implementing countless diversity programs and affinity groups, including one for women, another for the LBGT employees, another for African American employees and more. All well-intentioned efforts, but making little difference. Here’s why affinity groups aren’t working As the firm’s principal continued to lay out their affinity groups — connecting African American employees with other African American employees, connecting women with other women, and connecting LBGT employees with others like them — I thought of SeedsOfPeace.com. This is a program that sends teenagers from communities in conflict (i.e. Israeli teenagers and Palestinian teenagers) to camp together to build respect, relationships and leadership skills. Rather than continue in the silo-ed thinking so pervasive in corporate America today — and represented by these affinity groups that are entirely lacking diversity within— organizations would do well to follow the example of Seeds of Peace. It is always the cross-polination of ideas and respect — only born from relationship and interaction— that begins to erode the real enemy to corporate diversity and inclusion: unconscious bias. Affinity groups do the opposite, actually encouraging people to flock together in a group designed to eliminate diversity. Working further against true inclusion, these groups define members by their “qualifier:” woman, gay, black, instead of by their skills, interests, achievements or even corporate role. While strong relationships and unity are built within each affinity group, the divides between these groups...
Aug 13, 2015 | critical thinking, gender roles in business, personal development, women
Last month, Good Morning America did a story on The Surprising Reason Girls Aren’t Learning to be Leaders. (See the clip here). In it, the experts weighed in on the biases girls still face — from many sources including parents, teen boys and even from each other. The clip and accompanying article offered some solid tips, including checking our own biases as parents, assigning chores in less traditional ways, and watching the words we use toward our children — and others. In doing so, they touched on something great when they mentioned “changing things up at home” and assigning boys some caregiving chores versus the more traditional “mow the lawn” assignments. I wish they’d gone further into this critical component to changing the insidious biases so deep rooted in the world — how we raise our sons. Here’s my comment on their post, reprinted for you: “While there’s plenty of responsibility for women to shoulder in the march toward assuming leadership positions, legislating the suspension of bias is useful only in the most superficial way. The fact is that the worst biases are insidious, so deep rooted that they start at birth. So, yes we should check our biases about girls — and those are only the ones we see — BUT nothing will change significantly until we change the way we raise our sons. This equation now has multiple variables (our understanding of gender and sexuality is changing as we speak so it’s no longer about a dyad) and ultimately this mandates an #allgendersolution” I’d love to know your thoughts, so please post in the comment section...
Jun 7, 2015 | critical thinking, gender roles in business, leadership, personal development, women
So far in this article series, we’ve discussed: why the current efforts thrown at increasing the number of women leaders aren’t working the three problems women professionals encounter when moving up the ladder how women can better make themselves heard Now, it’s time to create a real world solution so women (professional women) will not just be heard but heeded in the boardroom heeded in the boardroom. The not-so-obvious solution: building a powerful sphere of influence. Don’t reduce this article to something that is simply about “networking.” Building a sphere of influence is not the same thing as garden-variety networking at all. Largely indiscriminate, typical networking encourages us to cast our net a mile wide but an inch deep. When we do that, we don’t get the prime catch, we get other random stuff in the mix— smaller fish, a boot, used tires, etc. There’s nothing random about building a professional sphere. Building a professional sphere is serious and deliberate work that has as its objective fewer but deeper relationships which you continue to nourish and cultivate throughout your career. It is never too early to start this lifelong career strategy. Start with where you are by answering this question: If I were to be most deliberate in building a professional sphere, which 2 people would I begin to pursue and which 2 people will I stop pursuing or investing...
Apr 16, 2015 | critical thinking, gender roles in business, leadership, women
The core take-aways covered in my “Picking Up” program are designed to provide structured foundational skills to exactly track along the lines of the problems women face when moving up the ladder. The first problem is that women feel they’re not heard. The solution? An age-old, somewhat tired term with often over-simplified explanations: Effective Communication. Before you yawn and say you’ve heard this before, I promise you’ve never heard it this way. While others bemoan how things should be, I’m in the reality business. I start from the point of where things are, no matter how inconvenient, uncomfortable or unpopular. And the current reality is that the language of business is male. We don’t have to like it. But we do have to use it as our point of departure. This is important to accept because men and women have very different communication styles — our brains are wired differently. In my work, I help women become better able to decode the differences. Only then, will they be able to leverage the different styles for competitive advantage. You can probably bet your bottom dollar that men aren’t trying as hard to understand the language of women. And in fact, men often find our style — our mode — uncomfortable, inscrutable and basically just too probing. There, of course, lies the rub. Especially when 83% of those “at the helm” — making advancement decisions — are men. So, women professionals, here’s my challenge: Make it your mission to become aware of verbal and non-verbal communications. Study the really profound differences in how men and women communicate. And then, create a plan...
Apr 3, 2015 | critical thinking, gender roles in business, personal development, women
Last week, I rained on the media parade’s giving lip service to women leaders, and exposed that the raw data demonstrates that — despite all of the attention paid to women in leadership — the actual numbers of women at the helm haven’t changed. How can this be? I won’t bore you with science behind my work — which is always rooted in adult learning theory, brain science, and sport psychology — but what’s been proposed as solutions to this “issue” of women’s being practically non-existent in upper levels of management simply isn’t working. This is largely because the solutions themselves have been crisis responsive instead of truly thoughtful, proactive and integrated. What’s more is that every solution thrown in the ring of women’s professional development has been based largely on providing templates for the masses that have been homogenized, generalized and diluted down to a one size fits all proposition. Of course, this will never get the job done. Women are individuals operating in a complex, always changing and 3D world. 2D solutions — while simple to explain in a 2 minute air segment or 500 word article — will always fall short of creating results. So, something different — something more organic, something with flex — something whole-istic is necessary. To fully equip women to rise into the ranks of leadership in their industry, we must provide practical and powerful solutions to the problems too many women face when moving up the ladder: Women need to be heard. Women need to be respected. Women need to be heeded. These 3 professional needs are mission critical to the...
Mar 23, 2015 | critical thinking, gender roles in business, leadership, personal development, women
For more than a decade, my consulting firm has worked with organizations and individuals to identify the gaps, see the patterns and challenge the assumptions that are keeping them from optimal performance and profit. I work with leaders, and there are times I have to point out the obvious: Their emperor has no clothes. The women’s professional development space is no different. Gaps, patterns, assumptions… and lots of “solutions” parading around with no clothes. But let’s start with the positive: The women’s professional development space has enjoyed overwhelming research proving that “women are good for business” and near constant media attention. The benefit of having women on boards is now widely accepted as truth. Numerous solutions have been thrown at the problem of having too few women at the top. And what a stubborn problem it is. Ten years ago, when I personally began tracking this number, the percentage of women in high level leadership positions was at a paltry 17%. Would you like to guess what that number is today? Ten years, numerous books, well-meaning corporate initiatives and countless media interviews later? 17%. That’s across industries and across the board. We’re talking law, accounting, financial services, government, even at one time, the NBA! Despite these various (and frequent) attempts to get women to: follow the leader… find a mentor… be a mentor … get a sponsor… lean in… lean back.. jump up… turnaround and…well, you fill in the blank, the real data for women in leadership remains unchanged. This emperor — flattered by tv talk shows, heralded in the news, and making appearances at fancy banquets — has...
Dani Ticktin Koplik —
Leadership consultant, executive coach, change agent and passionate professional development expert and speaker. You can learn more about Dani and her clients by visiting dtkBio page. 