Secret Ways to Accelerate Your Career As A Female Leader
Beyond doing your role well and making it known, what are some additional ways to get ahead faster at work, particularly for women and minorities?
(Summer Chilling, Teddy the Corgi, Berkeley, California)
Author’s note: As you may know, my personal mission is to help aspiring executives reach the C-suite, particularly women and minorities. This week, I am writing an article focused on how promotions are different for women and minorities. It’s a difficult topic to write about, so I welcome any and all feedback as I find the best way to share this knowledge. Thank you.
Let’s start with the basics. At the foundation of getting promoted is building a reputation of being a high performer at work. This means you are nailing it in your job consistently with minimal guidance. With this reputation for performance comes credibility and influence. “Oh wow, John’s team nailed this project. Let me see if he has best practices for X.” For some, particularly white men, this is sufficient to get noticed and kick start a virtuous cycle of increased credibility leading to growth opportunities.
Most women and minorities face additional challenges and biases in the workplace. Additional areas of investment are required to kickstart and reinforce the credibility <> growth opportunity cycle. I call this the “C.A.L.” framework, which stands for “Coach, Amplify, Lift”:
Be Coachable: Are you a magnet for feedback? Do you go out of your way to get feedback from others? Women and minorities are often expected to be more open to feedback, even if they’re performing well — to assimilate into the “white male” culture. So, in addition to nailing it at your job, you also need to be perceived as someone who actively invests in gathering feedback from others and #alwaysimproving.
Find Amplifiers: White men who make up >80% of executive roles have more opportunities to find sponsors and mentors in people who look like them. Women and minorities need to make an additional effort to find their amplifiers in adjacent groups. It is particularly important to invest in relationships and connections with adjacent teams, functions, and organizations so that they can make their work known to a lot of people. One of the unnatural acts of promotion — seeking a “shiny object” project — is partly based on this need for additional amplification.
Lift Up Others: For women and minorities, how you are “nailing it” matters. Are you supporting and uplifting others? Are you sharing the credit with your team? Women, for example, are expected to be team players and nurturing more so than men. Therefore, a higher emphasis is placed on whether they’re calling out others and bringing them along while they achieve their goals.
So, while white men can often focus mainly on delivering high performance in their roles to get noticed, women and minorities need to care more about the “How” in addition to the “What” as they move up the career ladder.
Two “No-Regrets” Career Accelerators
There are two scenarios that I find are unnatural accelerators for career growth. These accelerators work for white men but are even more powerful for women and minorities. This is because these two scenarios over-index on combating the biases and building the skills that women and minorities need to be perceived as high-potential leaders and executives.
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Great people like to work with great people. Smart people do not like being the smartest person in the room. They constantly seek out teams where they will be challenged and grow. When you are at a company with many high performers, the people you work with today will likely move up quickly in their careers. They may be early in their careers now (perhaps earlier than you), but in five or ten years, they will be successful leaders at top companies and can likely refer you to your next role.
For women and minorities, it can be difficult to build those relationships with senior executives outright. Those senior leaders were entry-level employees at one point, likely at top-tier companies. To build a strong network, invest the time and effort to get into a “tier I” company in your industry. Across functions and teams, get to know the rising stars and make them aware of your work. Have them pull you into conversations with people you don’t yet know. Find ways to help others — this goodwill carries forward into future career opportunities.
I often have people ask me if it’s worthwhile to get an MBA or to move to a Tier I company but take a step down. One aspect to consider is the strength of their current networks — do they already work with A players? Do they have a network from undergrad or volunteer work of high performers? If not, a top MBA program or Tier I company can provide that important missing link.
And it’s never too late to start. Even if you are at the Director level now, the relationships you build today will pay off in 5 to 8 years. Compared with a career of 40 years, it’s a drop in the bucket.
Go for the "Shiny Object”
This tactic of chasing The Shiny Object in a company has been called many names: “running towards the fire”, and “Peak vs Path” for example. The idea is that in every organization, there are a few projects that are “on fire”. They are the most important, high visibility, high scrutiny, high-risk projects. If you succeed at one of these projects, you will grow 10 times more and gain 20X more visibility than if you succeed at an average project. Your success will be on the front page and everyone will finally recognize your name. This is important to anyone’s career, but for women and minorities, it is one of the best ways to eliminate the affinity bias and break the glass ceiling.
These projects are step functions in a career, and almost every minority leader can point to 1 or 2 of these types of projects they’ve run towards that have accelerated their careers. For me, it was leading an entire revamp of how Thumbtack worked and then running towards a SWAT team effort during COVID-19 at Meta. I built 70% of my relationships, influence, and credibility on those projects.
The trick for many minority leaders figuring out which Shiny Object to chase. These projects come with many benefits but they are also very stressful, time-consuming, and have a high risk of failure. My recommendation is to look for a few factors that will increase your probability of success:
Subject Matter Expertise: Is this an area that you are particularly strong in? Is it similar to something you have done before?
The people: Who else is involved? Are they strong leaders and executors?
The setup: How will the project be set up? Does it have the support of the right people and leaders in the organization? Does it have the right resources? Are the timeframes not TOO crazy?
Personal timing: Is this a good time in your personal life to invest in your career? Are you ready for 60 to 80-hour weeks? Do you have a clear sense of what the next career step would be for you after this project?
By being successful at a Shiny Object, you will build a natural bridge for your next career step. And from what I’ve seen, life does give multiple chances. So if you fail once, learn from your mistakes, regroup, and try again.
As women and minorities, we know that we have to invest more and do more to get to the same place as white males. We know the playing field is unfair and full of bias. I find with myself and my clients that it’s not that we’re not willing to put in the work — we are — it’s that sometimes it’s unclear where and how to put in the work to achieve what we want because we’re often “the only” or “the few”. I hope this post sheds some light on potential paths and options.