In my last post, I shared three key topics that we cover in SHAMBAUGH’s Women in Leadership and Learning (WILL) Program and our eWILL coaching and development program—Managing Up, Managing Burnout, and Managing More Strategically.
Read on to learn more about four more critical areas that we coach on in WILL and eWILL, where we’ve engaged hundreds of women worldwide over the past two decades, investing in their leadership and providing tools, practices, and strategies to help them lean into their highest potential as leaders. Specifically, we’ve found that each of these areas are critical to being an effective leader who excels in the new normal of hybrid workplaces: knowing your value, leveraging relationship currency, negotiating effectively, and mastering your executive presence in a hybrid environment.
Over my next several blog posts, I’ll begin drilling down in more detail into each of these topics, providing you with actionable strategic advice that can get you started in each arena. For now, here’s a summary to whet your appetite for seeking better ways for women leaders to invest in themselves, reset their leadership, and create and champion a new path forward.
Knowing and Leveraging Your Value
This basic leadership principle is one that too many women don’t take the time to develop and master—an omission that can negatively affect their career. Without knowing your value and then leveraging that insight within your company, you may never achieve the level of leadership that you deserve, or be compensated as highly as you should be. Knowing your value begins with some research and stats—numbers talk, and accomplishments that can be quantified help benchmark and justify value in an organization. By looking back at your professional experience and identifying solid numbers and percentage increases that have occurred on your watch, you’ll be better positioned to justify promotions and pay raises. In a hybrid environment, where at least some of your work time might be spent at home rather than in an office, it’s even more important to be able to accurately pinpoint and document elements of your accomplishments that add to your value at the organizational level.
Leveraging Relationship Currency and Sponsorship
Though it may feel like what you know in your job is what matters the most, I strongly believe—and have seen ample evidence of this fact among women we coach at SHAMBAUGH—that who you know is just as important. In particular, women who build relationships not only with mentors but with sponsors (key high-level decision-makers who are able to go beyond mentoring to advocate on women’s behalf in relation to strategic opportunities and advancement) have an advantage when it comes to leading and thriving. In my book Make Room For Her, I reported that 83 percent of men understand that getting ahead is largely based on their relational capital, not just on job skills or competence. Career growth and advancement is about making connections with key decision-makers who can help facilitate your promotion, and then tapping on these relationships for sponsorship support. If you’re in a hybrid work arrangement, make the most of your time in the office to build relationships, and continue these efforts when working remotely by staying connected with sponsors and other key stakeholders online.
Effectively Negotiating on Your Terms
Many women feel uncomfortable negotiating, which can hurt their performance when it comes to asking for what they’ve determined they’re worth. In WILL, we coach women to prepare strategically for the “ask” conversation and to practice their techniques before negotiating. A collaborative approach works best—instead of just focusing on what you want, be sure to couch your request in terms that incorporate your boss’s and company’s concerns, with a goal of a win-win. Plus, even if you don’t get the answer you want to your original ask, you still might end up closer to your goal than you were before your negotiation—or at a minimum, you’ll have paved the way to revisit the question down the road. A collaborative negotiation strategy is equally powerful whether you’re negotiating in person or virtually.
Mastering Your Executive Presence in a Hybrid Environment
When WILL participants ask me about executive presence, I always emphasize that this concept is less about your performance than about the “signals” you send when you engage in your workplace interactions. Your presence involves multi-dimensional traits and attributes—from having a vision and staying calm under pressure, to bringing solutions to challenges and demystifying content for others using an executive voice—that reflect your leadership substance, character, and style. In WILL, we define executive presence as: “The combination of behaviors and attitudes that enable you to clearly and confidently express your ideas and influence others.” One element of this involves a strategy that I talked about in my last post: showing up strategic. Another element of executive presence is leveraging relationships strategically, as described above. In a hybrid environment, it’s important to ensure that your executive presence signals translate to a virtual format—for example, by having video calls from a dedicated office space in your house to avoid being too informal, which can negatively impact how you come across as a leader.
Stay tuned for my next post, where I’ll begin exploring more detailed strategies in seven critical areas—Managing Up, Managing Burnout, Managing More Strategically, Knowing Your Value, Leveraging Sponsorship, Effective Negotiation, and Mastering Executive Presence—that are important for leading and thriving in a hybrid work environment.
Contact me at info@shambaughleadership.com or link to SHAMBAUGH’s offerings to learn more about our Coaching and Development Programs for Women including our Women in Leadership and Learning (WILL) Program and our eWill Virtual Coaching and Development Program, Executive Coaching, and our distinctive Leadership Programs of Leading in a Hybrid Environment. I’d be happy to speak at your company on how women can champion their life/career and lean into their highest leadership.
Rebecca Shambaugh is President of SHAMBAUGH Leadership, and Founder of Women in Leadership and Learning. Rebecca is a contributing writer to Harvard Business Review, the HuffPost, and a TEDx speaker. Rebecca has been featured on CNBC, Forbes, Training Magazine, and US News and World Report. She is author of the best-selling books It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor and Make Room for Her: Why Companies Need an Integrated Leadership Model to Achieve Extraordinary Results.