Navigating a career can be daunting.
Women graduate from college with a degree, a base of knowledge, a set of skills and a willingness to learn. And for the first job—maybe the first two or three jobs—that’s enough. But at some point, it becomes clear that a broader set of skills is needed for advancement—to climb the first rung of the management ladder.
That sometimes can come as a surprise because many of our educational and early career experiences are about subject matter expertise and applied knowledge. But to become an effective manager, as the Harvard Business Review puts it, you need to uncover what you don’t know yet.
What you don’t know likely will include specific knowledge about managing relationships and yourself, understanding corporate culture, and understanding yourself and your path to becoming an effective and valued leader.
Needed skills include:
- Cultivating the key components of leadership presence to confidently project authority and influence.
- Mastering the elements of executive presence to stand out and be recognized in your organization.
- Learning how to assert yourself, make your presence felt and express disagreements effectively in the workplace.
- Learning the importance of allies and taking strategic risks to advance your career.
- Equipping yourself with strategies to effectively deal with microaggressions.
- Reflecting on your influence style and understand the dynamics of power in the workplace.
- Building effective relationships with senior leaders and managing expectations strategically.
- Appreciating and leveraging diverse perspectives to enhance team performance.
- Recognizing and addressing unconscious biases that may impact career progression and workplace culture.
According to the latest McKinsey-Lean In Women in the Workplace report released in September, women represent 47% of entry-level corporate hires, yet they represent only 40% of managers. These numbers have not moved significantly in recent years—47% of entry-level hires in 2020, 38% of managers; 45% and 37% in 2015.
These statistics may seem intimidating, but you have the ability to put yourself in a position to advance and succeed at an advanced level.
At Inforum, we have been helping women lead and succeed in the workplace for more than 60 years and have been providing research-based, formalized training for more than two decades. Our newest offering, “Ignite Your Momentum,” was created after collecting extensive feedback from women and men in a wide range of job levels, career experience and disciplines. It is designed to bolster you in your current role and help you accelerate your career progression. Through this program, you can learn to leverage your strengths, understand and manage difficulty dynamics, build relationships, avoid potential career derailers and improve team performance.
If you’d like to know more about “Ignite Your Momentum” or our other leadership development classes—including custom programming—please contact me at [email protected].
Kristen Mercer is Vice President of Talent Development for Inforum, a nonprofit founded in 1962 to help accelerate careers for women and be a catalyst for removing barriers and increasing opportunities. See what’s possible. Get there faster.
Courtesy of Inforum.
