Women in the Workplace: Internalizing Leadership in an Improving Yet Imperfect Landscape
By Marina Mainescu, Wendy R. Weidenbaum, and Lois Hines
Much has been written about the challenges that women face at work, and in male-dominated work environments specifically. Reading through the many articles on this topic, one finds largely the same set of challenges cited over and over – a lack of role models, self-doubt, unhelpful stereotypes. While women certainly do still experience many of these challenges in the workplace, especially when compared to some of their male colleagues, the situation is getting better.[1]
Today, there are more women at work,[2] and more examples of women in leadership roles,[3] than ever before. And for the challenges that persist, there are paths to solutions, or at least to improvements. A woman may still be the first to reach a leadership role within her team or function; however, as the number of women in leadership roles continues to grow, a woman is less and less likely to be the first one to advance to higher levels at her company, in her industry, or within her peer group across industries. This means that, in most cases, there are women who have done it before – even if they are not in the immediate field of vision. And, at most companies, there is growing support for the advancement of women, even if it remains imperfect.
The key challenge for women today is thus navigating this improving and yet imperfect landscape. Companies are aware of the barriers facing their female employees, and most are trying, in earnest, to dismantle them. At most companies, examples, resources, and support now exist, though they sometimes need to be sought.
The question then becomes: as the landscape continues to improve, what can women do to capitalize on the improvements and catalyze further changes – both for themselves and for other women? What still prevents some women from seeking the examples, resources, and support they need in order to help accelerate their advancement into leadership?
Internalizing a Leadership Identity
The Harvard Business Review article “Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers” identifies the concept of internalizing a leadership identity. It implies that “internalizing a sense of oneself as a leader” is in some ways primary to, and ultimately goes hand in hand with, taking the “purposeful action” that defines leadership. You need to imagine that you are a leader, or at least could one day become a leader, to take leadership action. Furthermore, internalizing a leadership identity is an “iterative process.” You need to see yourself take leadership action, and see that this action is effective, in order to begin to imagine that you are a leader.[4]
While Harvard Business Review doesn’t characterize it as such, this is in some ways a chicken-and-egg problem. To be a leader, you have to believe that you are one. To believe that you are one, you have to have acted in a leadership capacity successfully.
To complicate matters, other workplace conditions can also contribute to whether women are able to view themselves as leaders. Harvard Business Review hints at a few: the presence of role models, sponsorship by senior managers, the opportunity to take on stretch assignments.
These are in fact the conditions frequently cited as hurdles to the advancement of women in the workplace, yet as we’ve already observed, workplace conditions are becoming more supportive to women. There are more role models, sponsors, and stretch assignments for women than ever before. Such opportunities may not be immediately obvious in every workplace; however, they are increasingly available for those who are seeking them.
Seeking the Opportunities
This, in a way, brings us back to our earlier questions: what can women do to capitalize on the changes already taking place in the workforce and catalyze further changes? What still prevents (some) women from seeking the opportunities they need in order to develop into leaders?
To this second question, we now have an answer. Many women struggle to internalize a leadership identity – to grow their leadership identity from a “tentative, peripheral aspect of self” into an identity they feel comfortable wearing and even wielding.
Proactively seeking opportunities that are not made immediately available to them – be it role models, sponsors, stretch assignments, or other forms of visibility – requires that women inhabit an idea of themselves as leaders. If you can’t conceive of yourself as a leader, if you find the thought ridiculous or are plagued by self-doubt, you are certainly not going to raise your hand for stretch assignments or ask for a sponsor’s time.
More simply put, to seek the resources and opportunities they need, women often need to first recognize their own leadership potential and incorporate this into their self-narratives around leadership and belonging. In that same vein, women can also incorporate the reality of an increasingly supportive work environment into these narratives and use the knowledge that things are gradually getting better for women to buoy them as they begin to step into their leadership identities.
Yet for many women, a robust leadership identity can only develop in lockstep with the number of opportunities they are afforded – or that they themselves seize. Chicken and egg. So where can women start? Below, we offer a few suggestions.
1. Define your unique leadership style and visualize yourself as a leader
There are many different and effective styles of leadership. If only a few of these leadership styles are modeled by your company or managers, you may sometimes feel like you need to fundamentally change the way you operate in order to become a leader, or that there is no place for someone like you among the leadership ranks. Yet, very likely, this is not true.
Learn more about different styles of leadership by listening to podcasts, watching Ted Talks, or otherwise observing leaders who you or others admire. Try to determine which style resonates the most with you. You may be surprised at how easily some leadership styles align with your natural personality and strengths.
Identify qualities that your company’s leaders possess, as well as qualities that you perceive they lack. Consider whether there are any qualities that you possess that would be additive to your company’s leadership. Make sure to include qualities that may not come to mind immediately when you think about leadership – things like empathy, humility, thoughtfulness, attention to detail.
Through this exercise, define your unique leadership style. Think about how you can unite your personal strengths into an effective style of leadership. Imagine yourself exercising these strengths in a leadership position. What does it look like? What would you do differently from your company’s leaders?
Begin to visualize the type of leadership that is meaningful to you, and how you would function if you were a leader at your company. Identify small steps that you can take to act in alignment with this vision.
To help with this work, consider hiring a coach. Career or executive coaches can draw upon their diverse experiences working with different types of leaders to assist you in identifying your own leadership identity and the situations where you can begin to assert it.
2. Look broadly for mentors, role models, and sponsors
If there are few female mentors, role models, or sponsors in your immediate field of vision, look more broadly. As we stated above, in the present day, there will almost always be women who have been through it before. You simply have to find them.
Consider women who work outside of your team or function. This is helpful first because it presents a bigger pool of women and second because it can be easier to open up to someone who does not oversee your work or have a say in your reviews. Beyond that, it also allows them to speak more freely with you about the challenges you are facing at work.
You may even want to consider women who work outside your company or industry entirely. Consider joining online communities for female business leaders (like Chief) or other affinity groups that will allow you to connect with female professionals outside of your immediate circle.
If all else fails, identify female leaders whom you are not connected to yet who inspire you anyway (such as the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg). Research their lives and career paths, and take note of the challenges that they have faced and how they were able to overcome them. Use their example to help you visualize your own path forward.
3. Identify your differentiated skills and experiences – and lead with those
Even if you feel that you have opportunities for development as a leader, there will always be certain skills or experiences that you already possess that differentiate you from others in your workplace. Instead of focusing on the abilities you lack, focus on those that you have, and how you can use them to benefit your teams and managers. When you focus too much on your opportunities for development, you forget to appreciate the things that you already do well – which makes you feel unempowered and makes it harder for you to take on growth experiences.
Instead, identify the two or three skills that represent your “comparative advantage.” These can be simple things that do not necessarily define “leadership” in your mind, and yet are still essential to your team’s work, like mastery of a specific type of analysis or writing ability or even just a thorough checking of work before it goes to a client or customer. Make sure to always perform well across these skills – and offer them to your team and manager whenever possible.
In general, do the aspects of your job that you are most comfortable with well. Then, when you get positive feedback for your work, internalize it. Imagine yourself as someone with a set of skills that are truly valuable to your team and use this view of yourself as a valued contributor to push towards stretch opportunities. Be humble when it comes to your areas for growth, yet confident about your existing strengths.
4. Identify the conditions you need in order to feel comfortable practicing leadership – and pursue them
You do not need to fire on all cylinders all the time, especially at the beginning. Figure out the conditions you need in order to make practicing leadership feel more comfortable, and then use those conditions as a “test market” for new leadership behaviors. Practice makes permanence and leads to greater comfort with leadership.
For example, if you have a special interest in something that is relevant to your team’s work, focus on that. Identify any topic areas where you feel you know more than others on your team and practice leadership within those areas. As Wharton’s Adam Grant once said to his first-year MBA students, it’s easier to push yourself outside your comfort zone when you are immersed in a topic that you find truly interesting and meaningful.
If you struggle to speak up in larger group settings because of the perceived stakes, arrive to meetings early in order to participate with a smaller subset of the group before everyone arrives. Set a goal for the number of times you’d like to speak up in a given meeting, and make sure to get the agenda ahead of time, so that you feel as prepared as possible in trying to meet this goal.
Or, identify other small group settings where you would feel more comfortable taking a leadership role – like affinity groups or groups comprised entirely of peers. Consider non-work settings – like sports teams or non-profit boards and other volunteer opportunities – as well, as these settings may feel more immediately comfortable to you.
In fact, a really great way to practice leadership on a smaller scale is by serving as a mentor. Mentorship relationships, by design, put you in a leadership position relative to your mentee, and yet are likely to still feel comfortable to you, as helping others can often be motivating and even empowering. Serving as a mentor can also help to remind you of your own success by showing you how far you’ve come and how valuable your advice can be to someone following in your footsteps. Beyond allowing you to practice leadership, however, serving as a mentor is a way to give back to the new crop of leaders (and in particular, to help bring other women along). It’s simply the right thing to do – so jump at the opportunity!
If, in group settings, you find it challenging to enter the conversation with an original comment, participate by asking a question or offering a takeaway instead. Identify your lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to participation and push yourself to reach for those. Eventually, repetition will make speaking up feel more natural.
If you deal with imposter syndrome, which has been defined as “chronic self-doubt and a sense of intellectual fraudulence” despite evident success,[5] you may fear that you would expose yourself to your team if you took on a leadership role. Consider whether your manager is open to discussing these concerns with you – not all managers will be, so be sure to assess this carefully. If yours is, preempt your fears by telling him or her directly that you struggle with these feelings and are trying to work through them. Set expectations with your team in order to bring down the perceived stakes.
In other words, prioritize your growth efforts. If you are pushing yourself to practice new leadership behaviors, first try to control as many of the conditions as possible so that you don’t feel entirely unmoored as you step outside your comfort zone. Make it as comfortable for yourself as you can, so that you can give most of your attention and effort to the specific leadership task at hand. Of course, with time, you will have to function as a leader outside of your “test markets.” However, by that time, you will have also made your leadership identity a bit stronger.
5. Raise your hand for stretch opportunities that feel safe – and then push yourself out of your comfort zone
In the same vein, while you will need to raise your hand for certain stretch opportunities, do not raise your hand for all of them. Again, identify the opportunities that feel in some ways comfortable to you – so that you are not diving headfirst into stretch assignments with no flotation device.
Instead, set yourself up for success with lower-risk projects that will give you something to hold onto. Volunteer for stretch opportunities with managers with whom you already have a good rapport – or if not, at least feel some connection to. Say yes to projects that allow you to work with managers who are known to be good teachers or people developers. Raise your hand for assignments where you know you already have something of value to add, even if you will also need to learn something new.
And, along the way, ask for feedback. A benefit to taking on “safe” stretch opportunities is that such opportunities will also make you feel more comfortable asking your managers for feedback and applying the feedback they give. As such, “safe” stretch opportunities are important not only because they are more likely to set you up for success – they also make for better growth experiences. They both make it easier for you to request feedback and also present a lower psychological burden when it comes to processing and implementing any feedback you receive.
Closing Thoughts
While things are improving for women in the workplace, we are certainly not there yet. As we wait for further improvements to take hold – improvements that will put women on a truly equal footing with their male colleagues – it merits asking what women can also do – both internally, within themselves, and externally, in their work environment – to help accelerate their own advancement as well as that of other women.
To that point, we have tried to identify a few ways that women can begin to proactively seek the leadership resources and opportunities that will help them build a more robust leadership identity – which will then embolden them to seize additional leadership opportunities.
Of course, at times, even these relatively incremental actions will feel challenging. As we’ve already stated, any purposeful action towards leadership requires some conception of the self as a leader, or at least, a leader-in-the-making.
The point of these suggestions is thus to first help women find the still peripheral, tentative leader inside them and to then identify the circumstances under which they can put her on the center stage of their work identity without fear or embarrassment. Along the way, keep in mind that internalizing a leadership identity is an iterative process – simply executing the repetitions is perhaps just as important as the magnitude of the successes.
Sources:
[1] https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-management/
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/women-overtake-men-as-majority-of-u-s-workforce-11578670615
[3] https://fortune.com/2019/05/16/fortune-500-female-ceos/
[4] https://hbr.org/2013/09/women-rising-the-unseen-barriers
[5] https://hbr.org/2008/05/overcoming-imposter-syndrome