How Women Rise

Sally Helgesen: I really want men to keep listening because understanding these behaviors can very much help men to support women, whether as colleagues or peers or bosses, employees, mentors, allies, or coaches. But you know, Rachel, I'm also hearing from many men that they identify with some of these behaviors in the book. So these are not necessarily women's behaviors, they are human behaviors. But they are the behaviors that we find most likely to get in the way of women as they seek to rise.

Rachel Salaman: And how much is that down to the different expectations of men and women in the workplace and the different ways that they're treated?

Sally Helgesen: I think it's down to both. I'm not a scientist so I don't have anything to say about inherent differences in men and women but I do know that men and women often have different experiences, certainly in the workplace, and that these experiences shape and inform everything from their confidence level, to how they build relationships, to how they communicate, to how they negotiate. These experiences also will shape their expectations.

For example, women in male-dominated fields often do encounter skepticism about whether they can do the job and this can cause them to be overly invested in constantly proving that they can do the job: going the extra mile. It can, in turn, result in some of the behaviors we describe in this book, such as perfectionism, over-valuing expertise, and putting your job before your career – these come directly as a response to experiences many women have.

Rachel Salaman: Well, let's talk about them in a little bit more detail now, starting with the first two, which are linked as they are both about getting your achievements noticed. Could you tell us about these?

Sally Helgesen: Yes, the first is a reluctance to claim your achievements; that is, to really claim that you did something that you did. Women will often have a habit of immediately deflecting credit that they get to their boss, to their team, to the support they had. While this is helpful and generous, and while it's important for people to share credit, particularly with their team, it doesn't help to do so at the expense of stepping up and acknowledging the work that you did.

The second one, however – I think expecting others to spontaneously notice and value your contributions, while linked to that reluctance, is a kind of stand-alone that I am finding is the behavior that gets the most resonance. It's very common as a career impediment for women. I became aware of it… If I can give a little bit of background: I was doing a partnership study some years ago in which I was interviewing women partners in law, investment banking, accounting, and consulting firms and one of the questions that I asked them was, "What are the younger women, the women who are coming in, the women who have the potential, might have the potential to make partner," I asked them what are their greatest strengths and what are their greatest weaknesses.

What I heard was pretty consistent. They'd say their greatest strength is the quality of the work they do. They do extraordinary, A+ work, crossing all the Ts, dotting all the Is.

Their greatest weakness is inability to get that work noticed, especially at highest levels. So I began asking women in the programs that I deliver, "How many of you feel that you are good at this?" And I would usually get about 10 percent of the women who would say they were no good at it at all, and when I asked them why they were not good at it I usually got one of two responses.

Either, "If I have to act like the jerk down the hall in order to get noticed around here, I'd rather not," which betrays a kind of either/or thinking that can really get in your way – either I act like the worst example of somebody who's obnoxious and self-serving or I just sit back and wait.

Or, I would hear this, commonly: "I believe that if I do great work people should notice," and you know, maybe they should, but that's in a perfect world and it's not the world we live in now and not the very, very busy and demanding world we live in where people are just trying to get through their own mound of work every day and often not noticing what others are contributing.

Rachel Salaman: That feeling, that you're boasting, is very strong for a lot of women. Do you have any tips for overcoming that feeling so that we are able to articulate our contribution better?

Sally Helgesen: Definitely. The first is, get rid of the language of boasting. Think through what it is you'd like to share and then frame it (if you can) as information. Let me give you an example. I worked with a young woman who was an engineer out in Silicon Valley. We were talking about this, bringing notice to what you have achieved. She said, "I have a great example of that."

She said, "I'm an engineer but I'm more extroverted than a lot of my peers and I've always felt that part of the value that I really brought was being able to connect people. I've got a good network of people here at the company and out of the company," she said, "and I do a lot of connecting. I'm kind of a go-to person here."

She said, "I have a new boss, and about three months into him being my boss, we went away on a retreat for a performance review. And his comment was, his chief comment was, "You do excellent work, but you are not connected enough in the organization, people don't know who you are." And she said, "I felt like I had been punched in the stomach, because the very thing I felt I was great at, he had no idea about."

So, she said, "I just felt like maybe I don't belong here, maybe I should leave, certainly I should find another boss." She said, "It took me about two or three weeks before I realized he had no way of knowing because I had never told him. He didn't monitor my emails, he didn't sit outside my office, how would he know? I just began a weekly practice on Friday of just sending him a two- or three-line email saying here are the people I talked to this week."

She said, "And I felt like an idiot doing it, I felt like he was going to think I was self-centered, I was boasting, I was bragging, why was I using up his valuable time – but, in fact, a couple of weeks after I began this, maybe a month, he came up to me and said, 'I am so glad you are sharing this with me, this is valuable information, this is information that I need to know.'"

I've worked with dozens of women in workshop or coaching situations where I tried to work with them, reframe it as information that somebody needs, rather than thinking that it is either for someone else to figure out and find out, or if I bring it to their attention I'm boasting. I think that's a very, very helpful way to do it but I also think that we need to be not quite so frightened of the accusation that we might be boasting.

Often I'll hear from a woman, "I don't want him to think I'm boasting" and then I meet the boss she's talking about and he clearly got where he did by representing his achievements and bringing them to attention, the attention of people who are at a higher level. Hence, it's going to be less likely to be in his mind that anybody talking about themselves is boasting because it's something he may be very comfortable with. I think we can almost be manipulated by our own fear of seeming to be boasting.

Rachel Salaman: Can you talk us through habit number three now, which is over-valuing expertise? How can we know where to draw the line when developing our own expertise?

Sally Helgesen: Over-valuing expertise really happens, and I think this is how you know where you draw the line, when you invest so much time in mastering the details and the specifics of your job that you do not leave yourself time to build the relationships, the alliances, and the visibility that will help you move on.

In my observation, the most successful people come into a new position and the first thing they ask is, "Who do I need to connect with to make sure I make this a success?" That's the question. Now first I learn it thoroughly and then I start connecting, because people who don't do that really do deprive themselves of support.

There are two other points on this that I think are important, that we often don't think through – doing the job that you have perfectly only proves that you are perfectly suited for the job you have. It doesn't indicate anything about the next job. So, often when you're in a situation where you feel like you are delivering 110 percent and another person at your level may be delivering about 85 percent, and he or she actually gets that next job, it's usually because they've done that work of building the alliances and visibility, rather than concentrating on that last 10 percent or so.

The other thing is that you can make yourself indispensable to your boss by doing a perfect job all the time, and then that in turn can help keep you stuck.

Rachel Salaman: And this relates to another habit from your book, which is the perfection trap, and you've talked a little bit about how women are particularly prone to seeking perfection. Why is that do you think?

Sally Helgesen: I think it's primarily the experience women often have in the workplace, where they may have been viewed skeptically early in their career so they are trying to constantly prove that they're up to the task. And one of the ways that you prove you are up to the task is always trying to be perfect in any situation, so you can avoid any potential grounds for criticism. So there's a kind of a fear of criticism in here.

We also have a very interesting piece of research in the book that shows that women in organizations tend to be rewarded for precision and correctness, whereas men tend to be rewarded for boldness and risk taking, and the problem here is that boldness and risk taking tend to be most highly valued at the highest levels. So, ironically, the more you're trying to be precise and perfect – which is what women tend to be rewarded for – the more you can undermine yourself in terms of positioning yourself for top jobs because you are going to be perceived often as risk averse.

There's another thing that's terrible about perfectionism. Really, it's a trap, because you are always going to be dissatisfied. Human beings inherently are not perfect and there are too many factors that are variables to assure that you can just do anything perfectly, but also in that effort you create enormous stress.

You create stress for yourself and you create stress for people who work for you, and I've been doing this for 30 years and I've never heard anyone come up to me and say, "I work for a perfectionistic boss and I love it." No one loves it! So, it's something important to think about, that over-investment in perfection, it can really get in your way.

Rachel Salaman: Let's skip to habit six now, which is putting your job before your career. What do you mean by that and what's a better approach?

Sally Helgesen: Well, what I find, and Marshall too, is that women who put their jobs before their careers usually do this out of loyalty to their boss, to their team, or to their division. They feel as if they cannot necessarily consider moving on because it would be too much of a blow to their boss or to their team and it would prove that they were disloyal.

It's kind of a loyalty trap and we do know from research that women tend to stay in jobs longer than men, and report satisfaction in doing so, and it's often because they really are eager to demonstrate loyalty. But if you want to rise in your career you have to handle that with a little more subtlety, and you also have to recognize that people who are in more senior positions have been able to prove their loyalty when they're in a job but not make that a sticking point so that they can't really move on.

Rachel Salaman: Now, habit eight is a big one for most women: the disease to please. And you say in the book that this can be poisonous for our careers. Can you elaborate on that?

Sally Helgesen: Yes, you know it's one of the themes in this book, because we draw from Marshall's great book, "What Got You Here Won't Get You There." One of the themes in this book as well is that the same habits and behaviors that serve you well early in your career, can get in your way as you seek to move on, and the disease to please is a typical one here.

That desire, the motivating desire of the disease to please is really wanting everyone to think you're a wonderful person so that you meet their expectations and make life easier for them, and it can serve you very well earlier in your career because everybody wants somebody who is working for them in a position who is really trying to please them.

But, as you assume authority, that investment in the idea that everyone thinks you're a wonderful person can definitely hold you back, because you are going to have a very difficult time setting boundaries – for example, boundaries that protect your own time. And you are going to have a tough time holding other people accountable for doing their jobs because you are going to be so worried that they won't like you or will think your position has gone to your head and you've become too big for your britches, whatever it is.

It is interesting because one of the things that I certainly have noticed is that women who have difficulty creating those boundaries, or are overly invested in pleasing at work, also tend to exhibit that behavior at home, and so it's really important to be able to think about letting go of every single person being thrilled at every moment with everything you do, or you are going to really get yourself stuck.

Rachel Salaman: What are some ways you would suggest we think about to stop or ignore this urge to please, and how do we avoid becoming a selfish tyrant in the process?

Sally Helgesen: Well Rachel, I think you are exhibiting a little bit of either/or thinking right there yourself!

Rachel Salaman: Yes, I can hear it, I can hear it!

Sally Helgesen: You are either a selfish tyrant or you're someone who lets everybody else walk all over you. I think that understanding that other people are often helped by our getting out of the way can be very, very helpful to us and also it involves, if we have this behavior, really thinking about the boundaries we need to set for ourselves.

This is something I talk a lot about in the programs I do – the importance of almost being our own HR department in terms of setting our own policies and priorities around how we use our time and attention. But I think the more intentional we are about how we do that, the more we commit to a specific way of using our time and attention, the more likely we are to not get pulled into a trap of trying to please everyone, because we will have brought some of that intentionality to what we're doing and that certainly will not make us a selfish tyrant.

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Rachel Salaman: Now minimizing is interesting, and this is habit nine. Can you tell us a story that starts this chapter, about when you were at a board meeting of a national women's organization. What did you observe as people arrived late?

Sally Helgesen: This is fascinating. I was at a board meeting, really there as an observer, and I was going to make a few remarks. It was a very large organization, it was in New Orleans, and a lot of people were late because the weather was bad and the room was too small. It was a boardroom that was really too small for the number of people who were there.

So, what I began noticing is there were probably two-thirds women and one-third men there, and what I noticed was that every time a late arrival came in, the women would do everything they could to make themselves smaller, to exhibit, to manifest to that person there's plenty of room for you.

They would move their chair over, they would stick their purse under their chair or under the table, they'd scooch over if they were on any kind of couch, they would just do whatever they could to make themselves as small as possible, and some of them would even get up and go to the back of the room.

I felt like some of them were going to leave the room entirely. Their focus was on telling everyone who came in there is enough room for you, even if I have to make myself uncomfortable to make that point. It was fascinating, because I looked around and every single one of the men there did not change their body language when anybody else entered the room. Some of them were sprawled out – this thing we call manspreading, but I don't think it's a very attractive term – or their stuff was spread out, or they were taking up, you know, they had their arm draped around a chair and they did not move.

So I thought, this is so interesting because on the one hand it's a lovely thing, what the women are doing is they are consciously saying to other peopl, "There's room for you and you are welcome here as well," whereas the men did not seem to be saying that.

On the other hand, there was something almost disruptive about the way in which the women were manifesting "I will do anything I can to make myself smaller so that you have the space." And I think of it really in terms of manifesting a leadership presence, because it's very difficult to develop or maintain any kind of leadership presence in a room when you are trying to minimize the room you take up and send a message that you're not holding your space.

I see this, this is a kind of minimizing behavior that exhibits in body language but I often hear it verbally as well, with women saying, "Well I only have one thing to say," or "This will just take one second," or something like that, there's a way of kind of minimizing, "This may be beside the point but I think…." Apologizing that we hear so much is also part of that.

So I think these are really just unconscious habits, they don't mean much, they're not that big a deal but I think they're important to have an awareness of because I do believe that when you're sending a message to others, "I'm not holding my space, I'm not firmly planted and inhabiting where I am," then other people pick up on that. It's not a good way of asserting your own presence.

Rachel Salaman: That's a good point and one that I recognize. You call habit 10, "Too Much." That's quite cryptic. What do you mean by that?

Sally Helgesen: This is almost the opposite of the minimizing, although they can actually go together. It means too much information, too much disclosure, too much background, too many words. We set research in the book which is fairly well-known, where women use an average of 20,000 words a day whereas men use an average of 7,000 words a day. And this is fine, this is how women traditionally bond with one another, how they create relationships, which women are very astute at doing, but in professional situations and cultures where being crisp and concise and authoritative is valued as a leadership style, using too many words and offering too much information is not an effective way of communicating and certainly not an effective way of positioning yourself as a leader.

So again, this is a habit. It's not something that's difficult to address but we wanted to raise awareness that this can get in the way – especially if you have got a very crisp male culture you're going to be penalized. If you come into a meeting and instead of saying, "OK, here are the three points you asked me to address, boom-boom-boom," you go, "Oh this was interesting, let me give you a little bit of background in terms of how I got to this."

You see, women do this all the time. I do it in situations, it just doesn't land very well, particularly when you have got male leaders who have got the attention span of a gnat, which is not that uncommon. One fellow I worked with had a sign on his desk – "Be brief, be brilliant, be gone" – and he had no idea that this would be intimidating to other people. He thought they'd think it was funny.

But there is often those unspoken expectations, so what we're doing here is just providing some information for how women can work on being a bit more concise if they do have an issue with this.

Rachel Salaman: Now, ruminating or dwelling on the past is one of the habits that is more recognizably female rather than male. How can we stop ourselves getting stuck that way?

Sally Helgesen: Well, this is really a big one and this is one place where there really is scientific support for the conclusion that women are far more prone to ruminating than men, and by ruminating we mean getting stuck in a kind of negative dialog about something that's happened – why did I say that, why was I such a jerk, why do I always do that, why aren't I past this point by now?

The great research was all done mostly at Yale by one woman who really developed rumination studies, if you will, but what she learned is that people who ruminate honestly believe that by going over and over their mistakes, this will help them prevent making the mistakes next time. However, the Catch-22 here is that going over your mistakes, ruminating, this sort of negative feedback loop, is actually paralyzing, so whereas you may figure out what you should do, you'll be incapable of doing it because you'll be so paralyzed by the time you get a chance at it.

So we have a really good example in the book where a friend of mine, a fellow executive coach, had lunch with a woman who had been her coach, who had had a huge career leap, and she said, "What was the most important thing I ever told you?" And the woman said, "The most important thing you ever said to me is men move on," she said, "because I'd be in these meetings with these top executives and they'd say something dumb and I could tell that 20 seconds later they weren't even thinking of it, they were on to the next point," she said, "and I realized I was beating myself up for every single dumb thing I'd ever said. They weren't wasting that time that I was, they weren't undermining their confidence in the way I was," she said, "so I just decided, I said that to myself every time I sat in a meeting – men move on."

Rachel Salaman: Now, a lot of people recognize themselves in what you've told us today. But that doesn't make it any easier to break the bad habits, does it? So where is a good place to start?

Sally Helgesen: Well, we lay out a sort of four-step process in this book that's based on a rigorous coaching model. The first step is choosing one behavior or even one part of a behavior. A lot of the women at the events I do are telling me that they identify with between five and nine of these behaviors, and say I can't even imagine where to start. You start with one thing and it doesn't matter that much where you start, you want to make it very manageable.

So, for example, in the "Too Much" behavior that we talked about earlier, you decide you want to try to become more concise. Don't try to change your whole communication style overnight. Instead, say, "OK, I've got a monthly meeting that is kind of high stakes and a couple of times I've gotten some feedback or else I've noticed I'm losing the attention when I make a presentation, when I say my piece. I am going to start doing some prep work beforehand so that I can be as concise and crisp as possible in that meeting."

So you're really starting, I'm going to cut any preamble, I'm going to edit what I say in advance, in a way that I haven't necessarily done before because I'm going to focus on being more concise in that one meeting rather than changing my communication style, letting go of perfectionism etc, etc, I'm going to start there.

So once you've made that decision on one part of one behavior that you are going to work on for the next month or the next six weeks or whatever that period of time is, the most important thing – and I think the message of "How Women Rise," the most important message here is this: do not try to do it alone.

Enlist help from other people. It's really important to engage others in the work of addressing your own behaviors and it's part of that enlisting allies, enlisting allies in your career and as you build your career, but you can enlist allies to help you practice behaviors that will serve you better.

Let's take that example again about, "I'm going to be more concise in this meeting." Before you go into that meeting, you could say to somebody, "Now look, I'm working hard to be more concise in how I present, could you watch and see how I do and then give me some feedback afterwards?"

Or you could go to someone else, and these are not mutually exclusive, the more the merrier here, you can go to somebody else and say, "I notice you are very crisp in how you present, what do you do? Do you have a method of preparation? I'm trying to get better at it myself, I thought you might have an idea of something I could change or something I could do better."

So when you're bringing in people, other people to help you, you're getting feedback, you're getting fresh insights, you're getting new ideas for how to change, you're building alliances and relationships with people based on positive action going forward but you're also, you're almost advertising the fact that you are changing, and this is really important.

In organizations we can get tagged or identified for behaviors that we actually have outgrown, because we exhibited them years ago. So by enlisting people you also advertise, and that's really, really effective – and Marshall had some wonderful research that he did with a colleague that shows that the number one predictor of people making positive behavioral change is their willingness to engage others in that process.

We all can't afford coaches, but we can bring in peer coaches who may be colleagues or even friends we trust, and get help with changing the behaviors we need to change. It's a really great approach and it takes some of the pressure off.

Rachel Salaman: Sally Helgesen, thanks very much for joining us today.

Sally Helgesen: My pleasure, Rachel, I've enjoyed being here.

The name of Sally's book again is "How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back From Your Next Raise, Promotion, or Job," and it's co-written with Marshall Goldsmith. You can find the Book Insight podcast on Marshall's bestseller, "What Got You Here Won't Get You There," on the Mind Tools site. I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.