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?

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”:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

1. Invest in your professional social network at the Best Companies.