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Fast-Tracking Your Way to the Top

November 23, 2016 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Do You Need a Mentor, Sponsor, or Coach?

You know you have what it takes to succeed, but you’d like to move a little faster to get to the top.

Getting help is the smart thing to do – but what kind of help do you need to get there?

Liz was in middle management, but she was bored with her area of responsibility and wanted more out of her career. She knew she was talented, but, although others always complimented her on her work, they didn’t seem to recognize she had more in her – at least, they didn’t say so. However, she was convinced she could contribute at higher levels, if just given the right opportunity. She also knew she could go a couple of directions in the company with her professional background and experience, and wondered which path was right for her.

One day, Liz shared all this with a couple of close colleagues.

“I’m ready for more – but no one has called me into the executive suite to say I’ve won the prize promotion. I know I can do this. How do I get the help I need to get there?”

“Get a mentor,” said Jackie. “Mentors are supposed to give you direction to help you get there, aren’t they? They can give you pointers on specific technical skills – I had one once that taught me how to better analyze financials, and that really helped the way I was able to strategize. Mentors can also put you in touch with other people in the industry to widen your networks and such. So they are a kind of career guide and connector. That has to be good for your career.”

“No, wait,” said John. “I’ve been reading about sponsors – some people call them champions. They are supposed to be better than mentors, aren’t they? If they decide you have more in you, they commit to positioning you with others in high places, and go around talking positively about you. They influence others to take a look at you, and they can volunteer you for projects that will show off what you can do. It’s kind of like the ultimate PR agent with clout.”

“Hey, I’m not sure either of you are right,” piped up Sandy. “My boss hired an executive coach who got her straight into the C-suite. They worked on the way she communicated so that she showed more confidence, instilled more trust – even sharpened her influence skills. And they worked on her decision-making, and how she led her team so that it went from mediocre- to high-performing. It really showcased her abilities.”

“Hmmm…,” said Liz. “It may be that I need all three. Let me reflect on this – stay tuned for an update, people!”

After careful thought, Liz sought out a well-known leader in the industry who happened to live in the area. She explained what she was doing, and that she needed some advice on her career path. This leader met with her, helped her to look at trends within her industry, and offered to connect her with people who could talk about career possibilities within her focus.

Liz then thought about seeking a sponsor. However, the sponsor relationship is usually initiated by the sponsor, and Liz knew she had to stand out before she asked for someone of influence to go to bat for her in the organization.

So she hired a coach. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” she thought. Her executive coach reviewed her career goals with her, and then suggested assessing how she led herself, others, and the enterprise (her area of responsibility). Together, they pinpointed some critical areas for improvement – ways of being, relating, and doing that would help her to showcase to others the exceptional talent she was. Liz and her coach worked over the next several months, and it paid off – someone higher up in the organization reached out to ask about her career goals, and to share they would like to help her get there.

Who’s in your court? And who needs to be?

For a free informational guide to help you determine your best resource for help based on where you are right now in your career, click here.

Patti Cotton helps women executives optimize their effectiveness in leading self, others, and enterprises. Her areas of focus include confidence, leadership style, executive presence, effective communication, and masterful execution. With over 25 years of leadership experience, both stateside and abroad, Patti works with individuals, teams, and organizations across industries, providing executive coaching, women’s leadership development, change, and conflict management. She is also a Fortune 500 speaker. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Why You Need Your Emotions for Rational Decision-Making

November 16, 2016 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

We spend a lot of our lives learning to master emotions. Sometimes they overcome us, and we goof things up. So we try to discount them or put them aside in an effort to be more rational in our decisions and actions.

But discounting or ignoring emotions isn’t really mastering them. You need your emotions in order to make your best decisions. Sound counter-intuitive?

In my work with high-potential female executives, I find quite often that these women have shut off their emotions, feeling these get in their way. Often, they have been told they were being too emotional in a certain situation, or they have found themselves overwhelmed with feelings when confronting a critical scenario, and it kept them from moving forward. Somehow, these women decided to shut off the “feeling part” of themselves in order to execute and get ahead.

Bad move.

Emotions are meant to trigger or alert you to something. When you ignore these, negative consequences are in store, not only for yourself, but for the way you are able to work with others, and ultimately succeed.

So how do you manage your emotions so that they actually help you get ahead?

There are three steps to managing and bridging your feelings so you can support your best thinking and actions:

1. Recognize the emotion you are feeling in a situation.

This may sound easier than it is. I once coached Sandy, a member of her company’s C-Suite, who could only name two emotions that she felt – anger and fear. Because of this, she continuously operated from the “fight or flight” part of her brain – high stress, and low reasoning. As a result, her decision-making suffered. We spent a couple of months helping her to identify and expand her lexicon of emotions as I coached her on how to handle specific situations. Why? Emotions are “gut triggers.” It means, “Hey, something is up, here! Pay attention!” This allowed her to move from a “fight or flight” mode to the reasoning part of her brain.

2. Decide how you want to manage the emotion.

Recognizing what emotion you are experiencing in a certain situation allows you to ask yourself how you would like to handle it. Just because someone has angered you doesn’t mean you need to express your anger. It means, instead, that you can ask yourself why you are experiencing this, whether it comes from a bias or is relevant and appropriate to the situation, and what you want to do behaviorally because of your reflection. This process puts you in charge. Once Sandy could identify the emotion she was feeling in a certain situation, she was able to reason more effectively, asking herself what this emotion was telling her, and whether this was viably related to the decision or situation at hand.

3. Allow your emotional self to collaborate with your rational self.

When you have checked in with yourself as to why you are feeling a certain emotion, where it comes from, and how you want to handle the emotion, you have made space for your rational self to join at the table. Having recognized how you are feeling, what the emotion is telling you, and deciding how you want to handle the emotion, you can now ask yourself to identify the real issue at hand so that you can resolve it most effectively. Sandy discovered that a colleague had undermined her to her staff. When she stopped to recognize how she felt about this, how she wanted to manage it, she then felt much more in control of how she dealt with the situation. Instead of operating from her “hot buttons” as she would have done in the past, she was able to discuss the issue calmly with him, and worked to resolve things.

How do emotions affect the way you work? Join us for our LinkedIn discussion and share!

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Three Ways to Make It Easier to Succeed in 2017

November 9, 2016 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Are you going to succeed in reaching all of your goals this year?

Most of you are reviewing your 2016 goals, and wondering how you can make a mad dash to the finish line. And you are probably asking yourself two questions:

1. Can you do it and keep your sanity, and

2. How can you make 2017 easier?

I know this, because many of you are e-mailing and calling me.

Whether you will reach your goals this year or not, it still feels like a big push to December 31st. And you are tired of feeling pressured to do more at the busiest time of year.

Are you ready to make things easier in 2017? It’s not too early to begin shifting your planning and thinking – if you want to feel more ease and spaciousness the next time around.

Here are three ways many fine executives and other professionals unwittingly make it harder for themselves to achieve their goals – and how you can do differently.

1. You recycle this year’s plan by simply putting next year’s date on it.

The obvious question here, is, did the plan work well for you? If it didn’t, why not? What needs to change or shift? Are you blaming external causes? Using poor strategies? Or are you unable to stay on track due to other factors? If you haven’t met all of your goals, don’t make the mistake of just changing the date on the document to 2017 and try, again. Instead, reset goals according to where you are now, what you have learned, and best strategies that work for you. Then ask yourself what got in the way this year, and decide how you will handle this. Because things won’t change if you don’t change them.

2. You haven’t cut the energy-wasters and other riff-raff out of your life.

You know what I mean – all the stuff that is getting in your way. Some of what you are consumed with is outside your control, and you are still allowing it to take headspace. This will keep you from your best performance. Other things you may have allowed to get in the way of meeting your goals are commitments you have made to projects or relationships that aren’t really positive or fruitful. Do a quick analysis of what has been getting in your way – and make some hard decisions.

3. You aren’t investing in yourself.

This is something I see in more women than men. Why? Women are prone to investing in ourselves last – putting the company, causes, and our families before taking care of the instrument that generates income. Yet, best-kept secret – in various studies, up to 80% of successful male executives have an executive coach to help them get to that next level. Here are two main reasons you haven’t invested in yourself:

You secretly don’t think you are worth the investment. I have a “Judge Judy” response to this: either stop wasting your time setting goals that are impossible for you with this present mindset – or get some help to bring your self-worth up to a healthy state so that you can get what you want and enjoy it. Don’t let failure and “wish I had” become main threads of your story.
You feel you can succeed by yourself, and do it very well. You don’t invest in yourself because you don’t think you need any help. I have one question: how has this approach been working for you? Are you where you want to be? Or is it costing you too much to get there, in emotional energy, relationships, family? What would it be like to succeed and enjoy the ride?

Successful executives and other professionals invest in themselves because they want to step up into that next level of success, and do it with ease and joy. They are ready to make the journey worth the effort.

Are you excited about 2017? What will you do differently to enjoy the ride and succeed? Join us on LinkedIn to share, and for more discussion.

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Mid-Career Conflict

November 2, 2016 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

When It’s Not Worth Earning Millions Yearly

Last week, it was my privilege to be in Chicago to address some of the top female producers in the financial services industry. Imagine sitting in a room full of women who earn an annual income of up to and beyond a million dollars!

During our time together, we discussed some of the things these women have had to face in order to generate this kind of income. And we touched on mid-career conflict – something they encounter far more than women in other industries.

In fact, when I mentioned knowing that some of the women in the room were currently weighing their options outside the industry because of the cost of doing business, many heads began to nod, letting me know I hit a sensitive point.

What makes it so that earning more than a million dollars yearly isn’t worth it? Why do so many women leave the industry and give up this kind of money?

At a certain point, these women are feeling the costs of their career. These costs are not related to keeping their business or career afloat; these are personal costs to these professionals. And these personal costs seem too great in relation to the uncertain benefits they might receive in future.

What did they cite as chief costs?

Women are hired in large numbers in the financial services industry, but they are most often in support roles and fewer in managerial positions; less or none on the executive committee (C-Suite). Promotions and bonuses are made behind closed doors, and these are made subjectively. One woman cited that she had outperformed her male counterpart, and her counterpart received a large bonus for performance – when she did not. She had to go in to fight for hers, proving her numbers. “I never should have had to fight for something to which we are told we are entitled,” she said. And I agree.
There may be a few women at the top, but they are on the board, and not on the executive committee. This means that company operating decisions and voice most often do not receive the benefit of diversified perspective and brain trust. Flex time and family leave programs exist, but those women considering them feel others might see them as “non-viable” upon their return.
Women are implicitly held to a higher standard than their male colleagues, as recent studies show. First, the financial services industry expects its top people to reflect typical male traits, being aggressive, dominating, and transactional. Women wind up attempting to masculinize their own traits to meet this. The results are inauthentic and awkward, and women face the double-bind that when they do reflect masculine traits, they are criticized for this, too. Of course, this is discouraging – and women lose confidence that they will succeed. They lose their ambition and many quit.

Now, this is not a man-bashing article. We need both genders, and diversity within those genders, to provide the rich perspective and brain trust that variety can bring. But what we are doing currently is not enough. And I’ll be writing about some solutions to this that we in human development are finding effective in the coming weeks.

But I’m curious: Where would you start to turn this around? Join us for our LinkedIn discussion and share!

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Why Aren’t Your Strengths Working For You?

October 12, 2016 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Mastering Your Inner Leader, Part III

Why aren’t your strengths working for you?

You’ve read the book. You went to the company training. You’ve taken the assessment that told you what your top strengths are. It was kind of an interesting exercise.

But knowing what your strengths are hasn’t changed a thing for you.

Unfortunately, strengths become hungry when they aren’t used. In fact, your strengths might just do you in, rather than help you out.

What do you do?

You must address the issue because, without mastering your strengths, you won’t be able to master your leadership.

In the last two weeks, we’ve talked about the importance of mastering your inner leader, or your “leadership DNA,” in order to powerfully engage with others and execute your best work (if you missed the first two steps, click here for Part I and Part II of this series).

As a reminder, your leadership DNA is the unique combination of values, themes, and strengths that you bring to the table to powerfully engage and execute your work effectively. The third step in identifying yours is to discover and integrate your unique strengths.

Why is this important? You’ve been getting your work done – and getting it done well – without paying much attention to strengths. What will being intentional about integrating yours do for you?

Here are 3 reasons why you want to pay attention to your strengths:

Quality of work. Your strengths are what allow you to do your best work. Have you ever heard of the term “being in flow”? Flow is the mental state of being completely immersed in an activity. You are so into what you are doing, so energized, that you don’t realize the amount of time that has passed. This is what utilizing your top strengths can do for you. Since your strengths are the natural wiring you possess for getting your best work done, they get excited and invigorated when you use them, supporting you in energy, focus, and creativity.
Positive self-identity. Your strengths are natural gifts that support your best self. How you feel about the contribution you are making to the world is very important to your self-worth and well-being. Using your strengths on a consistent basis reinforces who you are at your best and the value you bring. It’s a natural motivator to continue moving forward with purpose, because you experience feeling grounded and aligned as you show up in the world when you operate from your natural strengths.
Health and well-being. Your strengths are hungry. If you don’t feed them, they get cranky. It actually takes more effort for you to work without coming from your top strengths. There are many of you reading this who operate consistently with your “non-strengths.” When you do this, you spend a dollar in personal energy to get a penny of outcome in return. Doing so can cause stress, low energy, difficulty in focusing – and over time, burnout. Meanwhile, while you are neglecting your top strengths, they grow frustrated. They beg to be used, and this plea can come disguised as irritability and overwhelm as you go about your work. Who needs that?!

So how do you identify and integrate your own strengths?

First, to identify them… There are some respected assessments in discovering your strengths, and I have used them in my work. Whatever the assessment you choose, be sure it is reputable and tested for validity (how accurate is it in the research world?). One excellent free resource I use with clients is the VIA Strengths Survey, which allows you to discover top character strengths – strengths that are valid not only for your work, but also for the rest of your life. Character strengths mesh well with your life themes (last week’s focus) to shape how you fuel your work when you are at your best.

And now, to put your top strengths to work. Being intentional means to flex and practice, and there are several ways to do this. Here is one approach that works extremely well for the beginning stages of integration. I’d advise running through your top five strengths twice with this method to firmly increase awareness and begin to firm up your strengths approach:

Selecting one strength weekly, journal who you are as leader, at your best, when you exercise this strength.
Then, review your calendar’s upcoming meetings, projects, and conversations, and ask yourself how you will use this strength in the interface.
Debrief each evening, and ask yourself how you did, congratulate yourself on being more intentional, ask yourself what learning you gleaned, and how you will approach the same next time.

What is your biggest question about your own strengths? Join us in the LinkedIn discussion here.

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.