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Making Risk a Winning Strategy – Act like a Weight lifter - Follow-up blog

Recently, I started lifted weights again as I approach middle age. After being a tennis player with shoulder problems for over 25 years, I thought it is time to get strong! But as I am walking around with arnica rubbed all over my mildly aching muscles, I realize that this is just like learning how to make risk a winning strategy.

The first question after the Forte Webinar on December 5th was “Is risk inborn or can it be learned?” This is the same age old question that has been asked for generations – “Are leaders born or made?” The answer to both questions is the same - learning how to take smart risks can be learned. Yes some people like to take more risk than others but the key is to NOT focus on that aspect rather to focus on how you can get comfortable taking risks from wherever you are right now. It is like weight lifting – you have to start small and gradually increase the degree of challenge over time to avoid injury or being overly sore. Obviously, you can see that I still have something to learn.

My book Collaborative Competition™: A Woman’s Guide to Succeeding by Competing is based on the premise that one of women’s greatest competitive advantages is their ability to build collaborative relationships. Increasing your comfort with smart risk taking is a two step process:
1. Begin where you are – understand yourself regarding risk taking
2. Learn how to expand and use this valuable resource: building collaborative relationships

Steps 1 – What type of risk taker are you? A simple way of looking at risk was taught to me by a ski instructor named Meredith Blakeslee who wrote the book: The Yikes Zone. She described that there are two types of skiers: Robert and Jane. Robert is like the high challenge person that I described in the webinar – jumps right in, needs constant challenges, focuses on potential, and can be very hard on herself. In contrast, Jane is like the low challenge person I described as she will take risks that are within in her core abilities and will gradually extend her skills. Jane wants to present a positive face to the world and doesn’t want to fail or look bad. Depending on where you are on the Jane to Robert spectrum, you need to gauge your risk taking accordingly. The goal is NOT for Jane to become Roberts or vice versa. Rather the goal is to learn how to stretch within your own style. If you are wondering what I am? Yes I am a Jane. If you look at my approach to weight lifting, I have mildly aching muscles whereas Robert would be on Advil and walking with a slight limp.

Step 2 – Find people to encourage you to take smart risks. One woman asked the question, “How do you know when it is ok to ask for help or advice?” I discussed the pacing partner concept which is about expanding your capacity to form emotionally supportive and comfortable relationships. The idea is to take your comfortable female/male relationships to a broader approach, where it is possible to support others and to form strategic alliances around business issues. This enables us to compete, strive, challenge, and have fun, bringing out the best in ourselves and others. When I think about asking someone for help, I ask myself is this someone that I want to learn from? And, if I respect the person’s skills or talents, even if I don’t know them well, I would ask them for help on something specific. This is where women tend to not want to be vulnerable and yet part of being a successful leader is learning how to strategically ask for help and advice from the right people.

For example, I recently heard Ann Mulcahy, the former CEO of XEROX, speak about the XEROX turnaround and she stated that when she took over the company was owned by the banks and she had to convince the banks to refinance the loans and give the company more time to repay. And, she had won over all but two and was desperate to get the others on board. She needed help from someone powerful. She went to Sandy Weill who was then head of Citigroup and explained the situation and within the hour the CFO from XEROX called her and said that the other two banks were on board! The key lesson is she reached out to a crucial person to ask for help and had a smart well organized request.

How to get started…I would encourage all of you to start playing with expanding your risk taking ability.

1. If you are a Jane-type of risk taker, smart small and engage in activities that you feel are safe from the point of view that they won’t hurt your career. Weightlifting is a good example. These activities could range from taking up a hobby you have always wanted to try, joining Toastmasters to get comfortable being a public speaker, or any other activities that seem a little bit uncomfortable and yet might be enjoyable. For example, I ran into one of my former coaching clients who said she was taking up golf and even though she was terrible at it, she was enjoying it and didn’t care if she wasn’t skilled.
2. If you are a Robert, ask a friend who is more like Jane to help you focus on what type of risks might help you get where you want to go. For example, one of my coaching clients decided to let go of pursuing her three outside hobbies and to just focus on getting her MBA as that was challenging and enjoyable to her and would help advance her career.
3. Identify a few key people in your organization/environment from which you would like to learn from and reach out and ask them for an informal meeting such as lunch or coffee. Ask them to teach you something, ask for advice…..then notice what happens to the relationship. View it like weight lifting – you need to gradually up the weight – first watch for a response – if it is positive - continue, if it is not – then you can try again (usually practice the rule of three) but you may want to move on to someone else who is energized by your requests and desire to form a collaborative competitive partnership!

Start the new year out with a bang! Purchase my book Collaborative Competition™: A Woman’s Guide to Succeeding by Competing at Amazon.com and go to chapter two on career risk taking and chapter three on the pacing partners... And try out the exercises, get a friend to join, and enjoy!

Collaborative Competition™: The New Approach for Making Risk a Winning Strategy

By Kathryn Mayer

Given today’s challenging economy, why would anyone want to be taking risks at work? According to Joel Deluca’s book Political Savvy, the top 5% of leaders in large multinational organizations do two things differently than everyone else: they constantly take smart risks and have three times the network. They are not smarter, more outgoing or charismatic. It is what you thought all along – success comes from knowing the right people and being smart about what projects you take on versus actually doing a great job.

The challenge with this view is that many women I have seen in my executive coaching practice believe that they are hired to deliver the best possible results and to accomplish this they tend to enthusiastically and aggressively seek perfection. And, what can happen is that they push their agenda directly onto a high executive with whom they haven’t formed a strong alliance, and this executive tends to be less likely to support their initiative even if it is a good idea. The fact is that those who act boldly or seek perfection before they've built the necessary support structure are likely to tumble. Why? The wider the network, the less likely people will make false negative judgments about you. This is especially true for women who are minorities at the management level and above. In fact, women who are seen as closely identified with traditionally masculine leadership traits (directive, authoritative, and aggressive) and don’t use their traditional feminine leadership traits (collaborative, approachable, emotionally expressive) were found to be the weakest of 45 women executives in a recent study by the Hay Group.

What’s a girl to do?

To succeed, you must come across as competent both task-wise and in building relationships with other team members—able to delegate, willing to engage emotionally, capable of going beyond your comfort zone—and laying firm groundwork for your own success while the rest of your team still feels valued and appreciated.

These two seemingly conflicting needs—to build supportive relationships AND to achieve perfection—have to be balanced. If the balance swings too far either in the direction of accommodating or aggressive, you lower your chances for success.

Becoming a Collaborative Competitor means that you are aiming to stretch yourself and strive for excellence which could look like:

• Striving to distinguish yourself in your chosen field


• Building a supportive and strategic network


• Enjoying the challenge of learning from mistakes

I interviewed about 40 women in highly competitive professions in the USA and Canada for my new book: Collaborative Competition™: A Woman’s Guide to Succeeding by Competing. According to my research, women who rate themselves as happy and successful are skilled in Collaborative Competition.™ They understand that striving for perfection or doing “whatever it takes” might not be the best approach. They focus on figuring out the best way to get the tasks done. And the key is that all these women enjoyed the challenges.

With Collaborative Competition™, women can develop the mindset to thrive in and enjoy a competitive environment, to become self-challengers instead of perfectionists, and to work strategically to help build the relationships we need to succeed.

If you want to learn more about how to create an environment that will allow you to take more smart risks, enjoy yourself, and advance your career - sign up for the webinar on December: “Making Risk a Winning Strategy” and/or go to Kathryn Mayer’s website http://www.kcmayer.com/ to learn more about her and to purchase her new book: Collaborative Competition™: A Woman’s Guide to Succeeding by Competing which is available on Amazon.com.

A Follow-up From Last Year's Summit -- Register Today for This Important Online Webinar!

Fast Forwarding the Female Advantage:
What Organizations Need to Learn from Women Now
Thursday, April 2 - 12:00 - 1:00 pm eastern

In this webinar, Author, Sally Helgesen and Julie Johnson, Founder of The Reid Group will share topline conclusions from their groundbreaking research on gender differences in satisfaction and motivation in the workplace. They will put what they’ve learned in the context of the global economic crisis we are facing. And they will show how organizations can better address the crisis by learning from what women have to offer.

Click here to register today!

The Satisfaction Factor, Post 2

Following the financial meltdown, I’ve had many occasions to reflect on the research Julie Johnson and I have been doing on differences in how men and women perceive, define and pursue satisfaction in their work, how they are motivated and where they find meaning. Both our interviews and our quantitative research suggest that insights gained from our study can help us understand what has happened and help lead us out of the present mess.

I was reminded of this yesterday when, following the uproar over the bonuses paid out at Merrill Lynch in the waning days of 2008, I read a piece in the New York Times written by a former Merrill banker about the culture of the bonus on Wall Street. One of his observations caught my attention: that the people he worked with felt gigantic bonuses were required because they “justified the days on end of working into the wee hours, the months on end without a single day off, the never-ending ‘fire drills’ — when a client wanted something and wanted it now, whether it was 7 p.m. or 7 a.m. — that kept the stress and adrenaline levels high.” The writer also noted that, no matter how outsized the bonus, it was perceived as satisfying only if it was bigger than what was being handed out to everyone else.

This struck me for two reasons. First, our research suggests that the high adrenaline levels he referred to have a different impact on women than on men. Neuroscientists find that women are more likely to experience excessive adrenal stimulation as highly stressful rather than motivating. Men are more difficult to motivate—their motivation point is set lower and they are more prone to distraction—so a flood of cortisol really gets them going. Women are more easily motivated, less in need to adrenal stimulation, and more likely to be pushed by cortisol into overload.

Neuroscientists also find that women’s neural networks receive more positive stimulation from social interaction than from the prospect of monetary rewards. This data is supported by our own study, which indicates that women place a high value on affiliation and connection in the workplace and a lower value on material rewards than men in similar sectors and at similar levels. Women in our study reported that achievement was important to them, but were less likely to see it in the context of competition, whereas men associate status with winning out over others.

What does all this have to do with the meltdown on Wall Street or culture of bonuses? I would suggest quite a lot. The distinguishing aspects of pre-bust Wall Street have been a habitual reliance on adrenal stimulation to motivate people; an assumption that extremely high financial rewards can compensate the most talented individuals for a daily existence based on unremitting stress; and a belief that compensation had to be based on competitive measures. Julie had in fact seen evidence of this last characteristic in her work with financial services executives. One company she observed used to hand out bonuses of, say, $1,000,001—the $1 being the signifier that that confirmed the superior status of whomever received over coworkers who received a mere $1 million.

Our research suggests that the Wall Street culture that led us into the meltdown was in part the result of male values and measures of satisfaction run wild. It’s no wonder that women Julie and I interviewed who had left Wall Street before the debacle said they had done so because “it wasn’t worth it.” They didn’t need the adrenaline and didn’t find the money an adequate compensation for the stress.

The giant bonus culture today lies in ruins, which means that Wall Street is going to have to find new ways of motivating their people. Simply throwing enormous sums of money at employees—an outmoded tactic in the age of bailouts—will no longer work. As a result, companies will be less able to “justify” the kind of inhuman work hours to which the former banker writing in the Times referred. The nature of the people who work there will begin to change as the implicit terms of their employment contract adjust to meet the demands of a different world. The notion of working 80 hour weeks (and what, in the end, did those 80 hour weeks achieve?) will no longer considered acceptable. In reforming the out-of-whack culture that led to wildly exaggerated results, what remains of Wall Street would do well to look to women, and to the values they bring to the world of work.

Cautiously Optimistic

I am an eternal optimist, and this attribute has served me well. I have had a career path with many twists and turns, starting with practicing environmental law at a small firm, then doing research at a nonprofit, and finally being in my current role in Talent at Deloitte. Even though the path was not always clear, I have taken advantage of every opportunity to grow and develop. Invariably, this has led to new opportunities.

I know that these are trying times – many of us are experiencing changes in our lives that we have not initiated, and the future seems uncertain. This level of instability can be unsettling. But it can also be inspiring. There is no better role model for this lesson than JK Rowling. This summer, she spoke at my daughter’s college graduation. She described a point in her life when she was recovering from a disastrous marriage, with a young child and no job. She was literally on the brink of poverty and felt a failure. It was only then that she focused on what was truly important to her – her writing. As she said (and I’m paraphrasing): “Out of rock bottom, I built the foundation for the rest of my life.”

I believe we are all capable of this renewal, both as individuals and as a society. And I am cautiously optimistic that out of the current conditions will arise many new opportunities to rethink how we approach many things – including women and leadership, including work/life integration -- and come out the stronger for it. That is my New Year wish for all of us – myself included.

Universum’s 2008 IDEAL Employer Survey - Bringing Students and Employers Together

Don’t worry! If you missed Forté Foundation’s webinar : Universum’s 2008 IDEAL Employer Survey – Bringing Students and Employers Together – you can still access the session.

Claudia Tattanelli, Universum’s CEO addressed the challenges of bringing students together with employers through insightful findings. Some highlights include:

- What potential female employees are most passionate about
- What company value propositions are most wanted and sought out
- What makes for a good company recruitment event and what works best
- What are the best communication sources to reach students
- What do students like best in recruiting practices

Click here to hear a recorded version of the webinar or click here to see the slide presentation.