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...
Mar 19, 2015 | coaching, critical thinking, gender roles in business, leadership, personal development, women
Earlier this month, I read an article entitled, “Breaking the Glass Ceiling by Ignoring It.” It was a fabulous title and a decent article, but it left a lot still left unsaid. You can read it for yourself here Following are my comments on the topic of “Ignoring The Glass Ceiling”: The numbers are clear about the dearth of women in top leadership spots and the discussion on this can get quite complex from a policy point of view (e.g. to quota or not to quota) but what’s also clear is that there’s much women can do ON THEIR OWN to improve career progression and management. The problem with interviewing women who have ‘made it’ is that they’ve often been impervious to the metaphoric slings and arrows that side-track many many more women who don’t have the same innate resilience. (I prefer resilience to toughness, as resilience allows women to endure without impact while also retaining the ‘soft’ skills that make us so perfect for leadership in a complex global 21st Century marketplace.) So, for the majority of women, it’s true we don’t ask, have difficulty being heard, struggle with being recognized and in the end, haven’t deliberately gone about the essential practice of building influence. In response, I’ve created a program called “Picking Up Where ‘Lean In’ Leaves Off,” designed to help the atrophying pipeline of women to equip themselves for ANY obstacle, glass ceiling, sticky floor, whatever. I do this by focusing on 3 tentpole skills essential for career success: 1. Effective communication (replete with how to avoid ‘girl traps’ that make us less than effective – or respected – communicators) 2. Developing...
Jan 28, 2015 | coaching, confidence, critical thinking, gender roles in business, leadership, personal development, women
Recently, I received a thank you note from an executive in response to the professional development series she invited me to deliver to women in her industry. The note excitedly championed the “dtkMindset” I imparted to the group — a dtkSignature and a perfect term which I thank her for coining. What did she mean by the “dtkMindSet,” especially as it pertains to professional women? In a nutshell, it’s decidedly NOT a palliative fix, road map, template or formula — there are plenty of those around for the undiscriminating consumer — but rather it’s a way of thinking that deploys the power of and desirability of women’s innate brain wiring. ‘Getting’ the MindSet was already exciting but what was exciting to me was witnessing participants’ making the leap from MindSet to MindShift. And it’s that shift in women’s thinking that is so critical to improving women’s professional experience as well as their progress. The fact is the number of women in leadership positions — 17% — is dismal and the needle has been stuck there since I started tracking this in 2005. Between 2005 and 2015, smart people have tried to crack this but the problem is that sadly, their institutional or male-reliant remedies only address the externalities. Instead, it’s the shifting to a dtkMindset that’s critical especially for professional women interested in advancing through the ranks and into leadership positions. In addition to women’s more actively managing their own careers, the dtkMindset shows women that it’s the inside-out work that will ultimately make the difference. Women and confidence Confidence is a recurrent theme with women and with those...
Oct 20, 2014 | confidence, gender roles in business, leadership, women
In late June, the Boston Business Journal published an article titled, “There’s Light on the Horizon for Increasing Women on Boards“. The article highlighted a conference in Boston at which Mayor Marty Walsh and Gov. Deval Patrick were in attendance — along with 125 CEO’s, business people and other people of influence — all coming together to discuss how to get more women on corporate boards. Not a new initiative, of course. In fact, the article mentioned that The Boston Club had been “at this for 35-plus years.” I’ve been shouting the business case for increasing women on boards for years in my own practice. The good news is that people, men and women in varying levels of leadership, understand the business imperative for gender parity. Bottom line: Women leaders are good for business. If anyone’s still arguing that point, I trust they are only doing so in 1950 sitcom re-runs. However, understanding of and visibility for an initiative are just the first hurdles to jump. Implementation, follow through and action are what move the needle. The article mentions that “the momentum is shifting.” And, in the end, this meeting of the minds had created some resolutions and action plans that leave me hopeful. Those leading this conference impressed me with their willingness to expose the dynamic inherent in the challenge of legislating change. They noted that this would be a dual commitment between what leaders do individually and what they do in conjunction. What they left off, however is what women themselves must do in order for American companies to see what the author and I agree are “long overdue results.” It’s not just a top down enterprise, it’s also bottom up. There are, indeed, ‘binders full of qualified women’ but they need to be vocal and give us the full benefit of their wisdom...
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. 