responsibility

Are You a Bull in a China Shop?

January 4, 2017 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

5 Ways to Approach a Problem

My friend Dana (not her real name) prides herself on confronting problems head on.

“I used to be a pushover,” she says. “People trod all over me, and I just rolled over and allowed it. Not anymore!”

Unfortunately, people now describe Dana as a “bull in a china shop.” She has developed quite an overtly aggressive stance that is now costing her relationships and opportunities.

When do you confront? And if you don’t, do you simply have to roll over and allow others to take advantage of you?

Knowing how to resolve a problem effectively requires some discernment. Where do you start?

Before jumping to a quick conclusion, ask yourself the following:

Is the issue symptomatic of a larger root cause, or do you need to gather more information in order to make a best decision?

Your best approach is to avoid the problem until you have the information you need in order to correct it appropriately.

Are you outmatched or losing ground on the issue? Or do you need to build goodwill by acceding to others, since the issue is more important to them than to you?

Your best approach is to accommodate others by allowing them to decide, even if what they choose is not your first choice.

Do you need to reach long-range solutions?

Do you need to find an integrative solution so that all sides can come together to work more effectively? You will want to take a collaborative stance in problem-solving.

Sometimes compromise is your best option.

When you need to settle complex issues temporarily or to reach quick solutions when you are under time pressure, compromise can be greatly beneficial.

An aggressive stance can be necessary under certain circumstances.

I wish Dana had learned when to use this, rather than to adopt it as her default mode. But aggression is absolutely necessary in an emergency, or when issues are critical and you are absolutely sure you are right.

Knowing you have options in problem-solving approaches and learning to exercise these strengthens your ability to lead and influence others.

What problem are you currently confronting? Which approach do you feel will work best? Join us (LinkedIn)

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 Women Leaders Are Losing Their Jobs

December 21, 2016 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

3 Ways You Can Avoid This

Fortune Magazine’s December 13, 2016 blog, “The World’s Most Powerful Women,” reports that women business leaders around the world are losing ground.

“This year has been a doozy for supporters of gender equality and women’s advancement, even beyond Hillary Clinton’s defeat and Donald Trump’s victory.

Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, was ousted from power, and
South Korea’s first female president, Park Geun-hye, now seems poised to meet that same fate.
The IMF’s first female chief, Christine Lagarde, is currently engulfed in a trial that could jeopardize her future.
The number of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 sank from 24 to 21.
And some bright, still rising business stars – Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer – have plummeted like fireballs back to earth.”

The unfortunate consequence of these disappointing events is that because this is occurring on a larger, public scale, your brain is subconsciously telling the following story:

“Hey, You, women just can’t hack it. See what happens when a woman is placed in a position of leadership? Don’t try it. It doesn’t work. Be safe. Be warm. Stay where you are. Don’t try to reach higher goals. Don’t speak up. Don’t speak out.”

In fact, most all of these situations Forbes describes were avoidable – and that’s what your brain doesn’t stop to examine. The women mentioned in the Forbes blog have lost their positions for many reasons, and some are as follows:

poor decision-making, difficulties in taking action
not asking for help or an inability to listen
surrounding themselves with the wrong people
difficulty in building the influence they need to get support and get things done
staying too long in the same position when they should have made that next move or change

Of course, politics can sometimes derail. And, in at least one disappointing case, compromised ethics were at issue.

But for the most part, the plummets these female business leaders have taken were avoidable. And that’s just plain disappointing after all we’ve worked on to move forward.

So, how can you avoid the same kind of ending?

These recent events with other women of high visibility can hurt you and your future, if you are aspiring to greater leadership and larger opportunities.

The simple answer is to get the right kind of help to check you on your ability to lead and do it well. This involves a few things.

1. Be willing to examine your own leadership.

How well do you lead yourself – your emotions and the way you manage these, as well as your decision-making, action-taking, and more. Take an assessment, and review whether you are meeting goals effectively, if you have rock-solid confidence, and if your business or company recognizes your value.

2. Be willing to ask a few trusted colleagues and mentors where you need to grow.

How well are you leading others? How do you relate, build influence, and get things done with others? Take the basal temperature by getting sound feedback so you know what to work on. If you are great talent, but you can’t communicate this to others and influence them to take action, your leadership will stall here.

3. Get the right kind of help to grow your leadership in the right places, and through the right way.

Don’t be shy, and don’t short-change yourself. This is what kills most women leaders “in the making” – not asking for help, and not investing in the right kind. You must make the investment in yourself to course-correct and camp on your abilities so that these work for you, and work extremely well. For more on this, see my special report “Coaches, Mentors, and Sponsors: The Differences and the Benefits.”

In thinking about your own leadership aspirations, where, in your own leadership, might you need to grow? 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.

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

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.