In this interactive workshop, aimed specifically at senior and high potential women, Sally works with participants to identify and address the habits and behaviors most likely to hold them back from reaching their full potential.
Most of these behaviors are rooted in strengths that may have served participants early in their careers but can undermine them as they assume more responsibility and scope. Addressing these habits at the senior or high potential level is vital.
This program is designed to help participants:
- Identify how specific habits may hinder them as they move forward
- Initiate simple behavioral tweaks that can smooth their path
- Practice these tweaks in real time with peer coaching support
- Enlist allies who can hold them accountable for maximizing their leadership potential
- Become a more powerful resource for other women seeking to rise
- The content and exercises unfold in four highly interactive sections, following an introductory overview. The program concludes with a template for action that participants can use to make targeted positive behavioral changes as they move forward.
Section I: Clarify Your Intention
Section I focuses on specific behaviors and habits that result when women are insufficiently intentional about what they want to contribute. These include Reluctance to Claim Your Achievements, Expecting Others to Spontaneously Notice and Value Your Contributions and Putting Your Job Before Your Career.
After sharing real-life examples of these self-limiting habits in action, Sally leads participants in creating succinct intention statements that help clarify what they want their chief contribution to be in their jobs or their organizations. Participants work in peer pairs to refine these statements, making them more concise, specific and rooted in real language. Sally then coaches several volunteers in front of the group, fishbowl style, in order to further strengthen these statements. The goal is for participants to develop a blueprint they can use in order to take targeted action and to get comfortable sharing their intentions.
Section II: Don’t Do It Alone
Section II focuses on behaviors and habits that result from women trying to master every detail of their jobs before they start building networks, or building networks that lack strategic value. These include Overvaluing Expertise, Building Rather than Leveraging Relationships and Failing to Enlist Allies from Day One.
Sally shows why trying to do it alone holds women back and demonstrates a range of techniques for engaging allies from a range of levels. Participants work in peer pairs to identify individuals in their organization, sector or community who could help them achieve their articulated intentions and frame fresh ways to comfortably ask for support.
Section III: Undermining the Ability to Lead
Section III focuses on the “killer habits” most likely to prove toxic for women at senior levels: The Perfection Trap and The Disease to Please.
Sally shows how these derailers become more problematic for women as they move higher in their careers and examines their costs: difficulty delegating and setting boundaries; micro-managing; taking up slack for others; creating stress and chronic risk aversion. Participants engage in a Table Challenge to identify practices they and their teams can use to mitigate cultures that reward perfection and pleasing in women.
Section IV: Building Leadership Presence
Section IV focuses on the communication habits most likely to undermine a woman’s ability to project a strong yet engaging leadership presence: Minimizing, Too Much, Letting Your Radar Distract You and Ruminating.
Sally works with participants to become more concise, direct and clear while also keeping the channels for empathic notice open. She demonstrates the connection between leadership presence and the ability to be present and offers practices that support the kind of self-awareness that enables women to demonstrate their power.
Conclusion
At the close of the workshop, Sally shows how participants can use informal enlistment as a tool for building visibility and support while also leveraging colleagues and peers in their own development.
Format
This workshop can be delivered in half-day format or as a Master Class, usually in two sessions of 120 or 150 minutes each. A workbook is provided to each participant.