Dec 3, 2015 | leadership, Uncategorized
While being ahead of the curve can be a lonely place (so many are content to tolerate the status quo, even when it’s clearly stale) I’m used to it! My thinking, my perspective and my proprietary programs can be disruptive, challenging prevailing assumptions and up-ending convention. But happily, with time, some early adopters — those rare evolved leaders who understand that success involves both innovation and a resistance to conformity —catch on and help normalize the new. This is an exact sweet spot for dtkResources, as it’s here where we can create change and generate impact. x Take, for example, the ritual of annual performance reviews which are universally loathed (by the rater and the recipient!) and often feared. The current wisdom finally understands the negative impact and collateral damage this process can cause. And so, there’s (again – finally!), a movement afoot started by a growing number of Fortune 500’s to ditch the process, especially the part that has to do with numerical rankings. In contrast, affection is growing for the more qualitative aspects of the formal review but as long as the review remains ‘formal’ and annual (or even semi-annual), its impact and value will always be limited. x Over two years ago, when I first unveiled my answer to this huge problem with my proprietary “Dynamic Intel,” firms were still invested in the formal, quantitative review process. 360s were also on the scene but were most often deployed on a one-off basis and in response to a particular disconnect or dysfunction. It’s hard to uproot the status quo and at the time, Dynamic...
Oct 26, 2015 | Uncategorized
It was a busy and very rewarding September for dtkResources and we’re extremely gratified to have been able to deeply serve our niche markets. On September 17, we hosted a table of ten women — Table 44 — at the Crain’s 50 Most Powerful Women luncheon at Cipriano in New York City. Each woman at our table is powerful in her own right and, because of the diversity of professional and personal interests, we’ve formed the core of a powerful mastermind group. If each was individually powerful, you can only imagine what we can do together. On September 21, I taught a workshop on Effective Communication for the ‘NextGen’ affinity group at JPMorganChase in New York City. Effective communication is one of the three tentpole skills I feel must be mastered to perform and flourish in the current business environment. Working in this space is a passion of mine, as I created and hosted a series of conferences — see bubble2boardroom.com — dedicated to helping college grads navigate out of their ‘bubble’ to become contributing and successful professionals…almost from Day 1. Then on September 29, I ran a full day of professional development for Operation Reinvent, teaching women soldiers some of the critical skills they’ll need to succeed in the civilian workplace ( a niche for dtkResources since 2011 when vets were first invited to attend a bubble2boardroom conference). The event, which took place on the Fort Bragg, KY army base, was attended by 40 soon-to-be vets hungry for help not only in navigating their transition but also in demystifying the world of civilian work. The fascinating — and frankly, distinguishing — aspect of the...
Sep 11, 2015 | coaching, Gen Y, personal development
It was gratifying to see Forbes magazine publish an article last month redefining the highly stigmatized liberal arts degree. Nearly three years ago, I was asked to kick off a three day Career Lab event at Brown University. In true liberal arts fashion, I was given free reign on my presentation and so I created “Leveraging your Liberal Arts Degree…for Competitive Advantage,” a talk designed to instill in the students the confidence that their liberal arts skills are absolutely marketable in a business world that continues its shift from knowledge-based to conceptual. “Back then” — as now — employers were hiring but having a difficult time finding qualified candidates. I agree with Anders’ enthusiastic celebration of all that liberal arts candidates bring to potential employers, not only in the tech world, but beyond. As I stated in early 2013, a “liberal arts curriculum gives you more than ‘just’ a well rounded, integrated education. It develops your critical thinking skills, exactly what employers are looking for today.” It’s true that employers are looking for more than just know-how — they need employees who think critically and can apply what they know to constantly changing situations. Today’s fast-paced marketplace demands far more than technical skills and job-specific knowledge. As with Big Data, it’s less important what you know that what you do with the knowledge. The required (and desired) list of employee attributes I detailed for those 2013 graduates three years ago hasn’t changed…BUT THE NEED HAS GROWN. The only things that have changed since then are the demand for such attributes (it’s greater) and the increasing recognition of how liberal arts degrees...
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...
May 7, 2015 | confidence, gender roles in business, leadership, personal development, women
Women need to be respected at work. The most direct path to generating such respect, while rarely discussed, is all about creating a compelling personal brand. What’s the connection? Both put a premium on trust and consistency. Aside from your ability to communicate effectively, deliberately creating a brand that emanates from your core values will yield the sharpest tool in your toolbox. Become a truly effective communicator, and people may listen. You will be heard. But, to inspire people to follow, perform for and invest in you, you’ll need their respect. A professional’s brand is her word. So, what IS your professional brand? Have you given this any thought? If not, here’s a great place to start: Understand that a great brand stems from core values. Make a list of your most fundamental values and beliefs. These should be values that without which, you wouldn’t be who you are. They need to be rock solid, with all else stemming from there. Next, list your competencies, those for which you want to be known. Finally, create your own visual, your own schematic of what your brand looks like. As an example, I think of mine as a golf ball that encases… a hard super ball center but then has all those rubber band things wrapping around and around it. But that’s mine. What’s yours? Grab an accountability partner and do this exercise. It will change the way you show up at work. 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...
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...
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. 