Be Business Savvy - Create a Career that Soars! – Details, episodes & analysis

We are highlighting 3 common career frustrations that women face:

1. Overcoming career stagnation,
2. Standing out in job searches and
3. Reducing work-related overwhelm

And providing actionable tips for conquering them including prioritizing tasks based on business impact and aligning work with strategic outcomes.

⭐ Business Savvy YOU! delivers the business, financial and strategic acumen you need to succeed: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/overview-business-savvy-you

⭐ Discover The Most Important Thing You Need to Succeed FREE email course: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/newsletter-opt-in-1

⭐ Receive unique and transformative career advice: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/BusinessSavvyNewsletterOpt-In

⭐ Turn Career Advice from Flawed to Fantastic!: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/lead-magnet-7-career-tips-keeping-1 

*Megan creates a listenable pod from a truly imperfectly created original containing my walking huffs & puffs, footfalls, background noises - birds, waves, cars, dogs, roosters and more. Thank heavens for Megan!

In Part 1 of a series of podcasts based on my conversation with Helen Jonsen we discuss the crucial differences between "Girl Talk" and "Woman Talk" in professional settings. She shares three key strategies for women to command respect and authority: eliminating unnecessary apologies, owning the room through strong introductions, and always using your full name. These simple yet powerful communication shifts can significantly impact how women are perceived and treated in the workplace.

Helen has built a kaleidoscope career based on decades of experience from newsrooms to corporate boardrooms really interesting Variants there from startups to established publishers from nonprofits to government agency.

She's been an entrepreneur and an executive at the confluence of digital media and business disruption. Storytelling's in Helen's DNA and at the heart of everything she creates. She speaks on the craft of communication, strengthening advocacy, resiliency in the face of life's challenges, life/work balance, leadership, and the advancement of women.

⭐ Learn about Helen Jonsen's Kaleidoscope Career here: https://helenjonsen.com/helen-s-story

⭐ Business Savvy YOU! delivers the business, financial and strategic acumen you need to succeed: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/overview-business-savvy-you

⭐ Discover The Most Important Thing You Need to Succeed FREE email course: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/newsletter-opt-in-1

⭐ Receive unique and transformative career advice: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/BusinessSavvyNewsletterOpt-In

⭐ Turn Career Advice from Flawed to Fantastic!: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/lead-magnet-7-career-tips-keeping-1 

*Megan creates a listenable pod from a truly imperfectly created original containing my walking huffs & puffs, footfalls, background noises - birds, waves, cars, dogs, roosters and more. Thank heavens for Megan!

TLDR: Having financial acumen and speaking the language of business will ensure that you aren't locked out of career opportunities.

You might have noticed in a past podcast that I recorded several  in the town of El Rompido in Spain, where I had  quite an adventure.

I was in an Airbnb and when I checked in, the caretaker said, "If the winds pick up, please close the awnings." 

About three days into my stay, I was sitting in the living room in a sundress and bare feet, when the wind started blowing quite intensely.

So I got up, opened the living room door, went out to the patio to close the awning and a gust of wind blew the door shut.

Now, this was one of those European style doors that are always locked.

Needless to say, I flew into a mild panic, but I remembered having seen a police station on my walk around town. So here I am in a sundress blowing hither and yon by the wind gusts, bare feet walking down the main road toward the police station. 

I also remembered  that small town police stations often are closed. So I had in the back of my mind that I might not be able to find a police officer to help with my situation.

At the first corner, I found a woman standing outside of a lovely shop and I explained what had happened in my wildly deficient Spanish. And I asked if I could use her computer to maybe find the Airbnb host and get in touch with her that way, because of course I had left my phone in the living room. 

Long story short. I couldn't reach the host. The police station was indeed closed. She had to call police from the next town over, who saved the day by borrowing a ladder from the restaurant across the street, going in through the master bedroom slider, which luckily I had left open, and letting me back in to the house.

Why am I telling you this story as I walk this morning on the shores of Rincon? It's because I've been thinking about the importance of financial acumen And the tendency of so many women I've met to dismiss it as unimportant. When in fact, it is the language of business.

I don't know what would have happened to me or how long it might have taken to resolve my situation if I didn't speak Spanish albeit imperfectly. I had the confidence that I would be able to resolve my situation because I did speak Spanish. I was able to speak up and ask for help because I did speak Spanish.

There's a very real danger in dismissing the importance of financial acumen when it comes to all of the career enablers that help women have rewarding, fulfilling careers.

Speaking the language of business:

• Enhances your ability to self promote.
• Will enhance your confidence.
• Adds  to your leadership brand.
• Assures that when it comes to delivering business savvy messages, you are able to demonstrate executive presence.
• Makes it easier to figure out  who to connect with inside and outside the organization to solve organizational challenges, thereby strengthening your network.

And I could go on.

It's funny, so many years after starting my career, that I'm here talking about the importance of financial acumen because, as with so many of the women I meet, I always thought:

• I was a people-person, not a numbers-person.
• That leadership success was about human interaction - never thought it had to do with business savvy.
• Financial reports were indecipherable, and
• That all hands meetings talking about the performance of the business were just so much blah, blah, blah.

When in fact, I would have been so well served if someone had said to me then, as I am saying to you now, the language of business is the language of outcomes.

Financial reporting is one of the most important ways that your executives and the board,  analysts and shareholders understand how well your organization is doing. That's not to say that there aren't other non financial metrics that matter. And I do talk about those  in the Business Savvy You! course.

There I pair financial acumen, with the course on strategic acumen because you cannot build strategic acumen or demonstrate strategic acumen without a grounding in business acumen that gives you your grounding in financial acumen. 

No actionable tips in this podcast. Instead, I want to leave you with this important final message, 

If you want to thrive inside an organization (whether for profit or nonprofit) you must enhance your financial acumen so that you are speaking the language of business and so you don't stay locked out of career opportunities in the way that I could have stayed locked out of my rental house.

Catch you next time,
Susan

⭐ Business Savvy YOU! delivers the business, financial and strategic acumen you need to succeed: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/overview-business-savvy-you

⭐ Discover The Most Important Thing You Need to Succeed FREE email course: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/newsletter-opt-in-1

⭐ Receive unique and transformative career advice: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/BusinessSavvyNewsletterOpt-In

⭐ Turn Career Advice from Flawed to Fantastic!: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/lead-magnet-7-career-tips-keeping-1 

*Megan creates a listenable pod from a truly imperfectly created original containing my walking huffs & puffs, footfalls, background noises - birds, waves, cars, dogs, roosters and more. Thank heavens for Megan!

TLDR: This is already a very short summary of key info about strategic acumen. Please Read ON!

Strategic acumen is perhaps my favorite of the three elements of Business Savvy, because I had to unlearn everything that I thought I knew about strategic acumen, and perhaps you will too. 

I grew up in organizations being told that strategy was comprised of mission, vision, and values. I'm here to tell you that while they might be important elements of an organization's identity and they might shape strategy, they are not strategy and understanding them and being able to create them for your own teams or team does not demonstrate strategic acumen.

So what is strategy?

A strategy is designed to achieve three goals.

1. Win the customer's preference
2. Create a sustainable competitive advantage
3. Leave enough money on the table for shareholders that is in for-profit companies or for re-investment for nonprofits.

The core of strategy work is always the same, "discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors."

These definitions and my understanding draw heavily on the work of Ram Charan and Richard Rumelt. Through their work, I've learned that there are three key, interdependent elements that are examined when setting strategy. And there's one skill that rests at the center of these three elements through which strategy is derived.

The three elements have to do with:

1. External forces and trends
2. Financial targets
3. Internal capabilities

External forces and trends are wide ranging and in our Business Savvy YOU! course, we help you narrow them down as to those most important for you to be attending to.

They could include anything from legislative actions to consumer purchasing trends to demographic shifts,to the price of raw materials. etc.

Financial targets have to do with and touch on your financial acumen. They are key metrics that have to be attained or exceeded in order to avoid the red zone of failure, in order to lift your organization above its competitors and to draw customers and or investors.

Internal capabilities have to do with the people, their skills, the systems smallest, so those can be processes and  or automated systems and other processes.

The skill in the middle is what Richard Rumelt calls The Crux. It involves the ability to disentangle the complex findings as you analyze external forces and trends, financial targets and internal capabilities to clearly identify a path forward that will address the external trends and forces that will allow the achievement or surpassing of financial targets through changes in the internal capabilities.

I always say, "Leadership is about change all the time," and this is one of the reasons. It is impossible for an organization to perform at a higher level, unless it changes "the way we do things around here."

 So what does strategic acumen look like at varying levels?

At the individual contributor level, it is working to understand why "the way you do things" is changing

At the manager level, regardless of whether you're a team leader or a middle manager, it has to do with understanding the strategic initiatives that are yours to further and effectively communicating them and changing processes. Also changing team metrics in a way that helps align your direct reports to the strategy.

And at senior manager levels, you're expected to be spending about 80% of your time thinking strategically and proposing strategic initiatives up to the top.  

At executive levels, you're responsible for setting strategy and ensuring its execution. Or as Cynthia Montgomery writes in The Strategist, "A strategist's primary job is setting an agenda and putting in place the organization to carry it out."

Because ultimately, a strategy is a promise to shareholders that your organization will continue to return value to them. If you're a non profit, it's a promise to the community that you will continue to add value to the community.

Strategic acumen means knowing that strategy is not mission, vision, and values. It means understanding strategy and how it set. It means Making strategic recommendations appropriate to your level. And it means understanding it is a complex interdependent and iterative process involving the forces outside the organization, it's financial targets and it's internal capabilities in order to determine the crux of the path forward for a viable and vital future.

1. Let go of your belief that strategy is mission, vision, and values. 
2. Level up your financial acumen because companies generally, aren't very good at telling employees what the strategy is. And if yours is one of those companies, you can discern the strategy by making connections between what's going on inside the company and the financial targets that are being publicized outside.
3. Pay attention to what's happening in the external marketplace - what trends and forces your executives are attuned to, the trends and forces that analysts (if you're a publicly traded company) are attuned to. 
4. Pay attention to the strategic importance of the changes that are going on inside the organization, especially those that impact you or for which you're responsible.
5. Demonstrate all of you understanding and insights in ways that are appropriate to your level. 

We explore all of this more deeply in Business Savvy YOU! I hope to see you there.   

Catch you next time,

Susan

PS Putting time into setting mission, vision, and values could demonstrate strategic acumen to the extent that you are using them to realign your organization toward a new strategy.

But aside from that, mission, vision, and values are not strategy and putting effort into defining them is time and effort that would be better spent on other actions that align your team or teams to the organization's new strategy. Because after all, if you're working on the strategy for your team or function or division, one of your external factors, is the overall organizational strategy and aligning to that should be the primary goal of the strategy that you are developing.

⭐ Business Savvy YOU! delivers the business, financial and strategic acumen you need to succeed: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/open-business-savvy-you

⭐ Discover The Most Important Thing You Need to Succeed FREE email course: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/newsletter-opt-in-1

⭐ Receive unique and transformative career advice: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/BusinessSavvyNewsletterOpt-In

⭐ Turn Career Advice from Flawed to Fantastic!: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/lead-magnet-7-career-tips-keeping-1 

*Megan creates a listenable pod from a truly imperfectly created original containing my walking huffs & puffs, footfalls, background noises - birds, waves, cars, dogs, roosters and more. Thank heavens for Megan!

Good morning from beautiful South County, Rhode Island, where I am enjoying  the second day of sunshine for my morning walk.  It has been kind of a brutal spring.

 As a regular listener to the Be Business Savvy podcast, You've heard me talk about  the many ways that being more business savvy enables you to have a more successful career and a less stressful work life.

 For example,  Business Savvy enables you to be seen as a contender for opportunities because it enriches your leadership brand  and elevates your executive presence. It makes your work life easier  because  you are more likely to have confidence, to speak up with authority, and to make the most of mentoring opportunities that come your way.

If becoming more business savvy is on your to do list for 2024  and you haven't found an effective way to get started. I'm delighted to announce that the full  Business Savvy YOU! course is launching next month. There's been an inaugural cohort that's gone through the program and back in the office, I'm going to  record some of their comments.

Participants Say

Johanna, who is an employee representative on the board of her European company. wrote. "Did some calculations for the company alongside the exercises in the lesson. This is fantastic. It's so much more than the course I took.  Now I can read the story behind the financials."

And I want to note that Johanna attended a three day course on financial acumen for board members.

 Amy says,

"Developing business savvy was instrumental in accelerating my career. Focusing on business results was exactly what I needed. It's the advice I now give everyone I mentor seems intuitive, but it isn't."

"I started to implement the learnings. In different situations at work, I started small in a safe space and then extended the playground. With the result, being that my boss accelerated my promotion.  That was initially scheduled for next year."  is what Samantha had to say about the course.

This morning I want to tell you a bit about what makes the program different.

In all my years of learning and researching. I have yet to find a program  that addresses business, financial, and strategic acumen for the discrete competencies they represent while also  moving participants to The Business Savvy Center in the Venn diagram where all three of them overlap. This is what the Business Savvy YOU! program does in such an effective way.

Designed with YOU in Mind

And I've designed Business Savvy YOU! with you in mind.

1. Short Lessons As a career woman myself, and one who was a parent and a single parent, I know how precious time is. So the program is delivered  in small bites. Most of the lessons can be done in 10 minutes.  Some take longer because they're designed to move you into that business savvy center. So you have to do work to bring the content into your world.

2. Focus on Need-to-Know You can, easily separate the need-to-know from the nice-to-know.The nice-to-know information, is available to you through bonuses.Everything else  you can trust is need to know.

3. Integrated Content One of the features that's important for your learning is that the content builds upon itself. This doesn't happen in any other content that I have found. Build Business Acumen lays the foundation for financial acumen. Financial acumen - because  it's a crucial component of strategic acumen - enables you to strengthen your strategic acumen.

So, three important  features. The content  is delivered In easily digestible short bites, you can choose only the need to know content or supplement it with nice to know bonuses. And  the course content is integrated  interdependent and supports your ongoing development.

There's a lot more I can say, but I do want to talk about what you will find in Business Savvy YOU!

The course has 4 major sections:

1. The first is on developing and demonstrating business acumen.  

2. The second is focusing on  financial acumen, both acquiring and demonstrating it.

3. The third is on strengthening strategic acumen. 

4. The fourth It brings it all together with activities to enable you to showcase your  business savvy

Within each section are those short, easily digestible lessons, in addition to the complementary bonus materials

There are empowering tools to secure what you're learning and enable you to take those learnings into your world of work.

There are six live meet-ups during which you have the opportunity to workshop your learnings, get input from me and others going through the course and ask questions about anything that has been unclear to you.

In addition to the worksheets, there are other interactive tools that will  help you ground your learnings and elevate your capabilities for demonstrating your business savvy.

There's a chat function where if you have an immediate need to know question, you can plop it in the chat and anyone, including me, has the opportunity to respond on a timely basis.

Women who've been exposed to  earlier versions of this content  contact me on a regular basis thanking me for delivering the tools they need to accelerate their careers...and to do so with more ease and less stress.

I hope you will take advantage of the next offering to get yourself moving in the same path.

As always, feel free to  contact me.  You can use the Contact Us page on the site or find me on LinkedIn.

Wishing you great career success Hope to see you in business savvy you there's a link in the show notes. 

Catch you next time,
Susan

⭐ Business Savvy YOU! delivers the business, financial and strategic acumen you need to succeed: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/open-business-savvy-you

⭐ Discover The Most Important Thing You Need to Succeed FREE email course: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/newsletter-opt-in-1

⭐ Receive unique and transformative career advice: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/BusinessSavvyNewsletterOpt-In

⭐ Turn Career Advice from Flawed to Fantastic!: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/lead-magnet-7-career-tips-keeping-1 

I recently delivered a webinar on how to Make the Most of Mentoring. During the Q& A one of the attendees asked:

if I were to go simply by my Myers-Briggs preferences, I would say,

"You will know because you feel ready for a promotion."

And while part of that's true, it's not the whole truth.

So, let me explain 5 indicators that you're ready for a promotion.

1. Feeling Ready. The first, of course, is that you feel ready, but in this sense - you're bored with what you're doing. It's not challenging you. You're feeling compelled to ask yourself, what more could I be doing? Your job has become relatively easy.

That's the first indicator.

2. Successor in Place. The second indicator, if you are a supervisor or manager, is that you have developed a successor.  There's someone on your team, who has the skills and knowledge and experience to take over for you when you move out.

3. High Performance. A third indicator, is that you're performing at a very high level in your current job and - barring any strange dynamic with your current manager - you will have his or her support for moving on.

Those 3 are commonly discussed as indicators that you're ready for a promotion.

Here's one that's not so readily discussed in general, although I have touched on it in other editions of the Be Business Savvy podcast or blog.

4. Ready to Step Up to Higher Expectations. That is understanding what it means to perform at the next higher level, what the expectations are, and to have a sense that you are willing to step up and contribute to the organization using the new skills and identity you will be required to add in order to succeed at that level. I have touched on this before:

This is for sure not to say that you have to Have 100 percent of the skills required to succeed at the next level, but it is important to believe that through disciplined practice you can add those skills and that you understand why they're important.  One of the added benefits of doing this work is equipping yourself for the most excellent answers during your interview for the position.

As always, I make a pitch for you to think about your business, financial, and strategic acumen. The expectations in these three arenas are always elevated by a promotion.

And if you find that you aren't ready to contribute to the organization at the next higher level, Do look around for opportunities to build out the lattice career rather than the ladder career at this stage - which leads me to the 5th indicator.

5. Do You Really Want a Promotion? The fifth indicator that I want to discuss is that you're clear on understanding why a promotion is going to be the right answer for you. Sometimes we think of a promotion as a reward for our good past performance, instead of seeing it as a demand for elevated future performance. And while we may feel itchy and ready to go on to something new, it might be a lateral move. to gather a broader perspective on the organization rather than a move up, which might require us to shift our identity and acquire new skills that we aren't necessarily captivated by.

I think about the many individual contributors - oftentimes men in my experience - who have been promoted on the basis of their technical skills, but have no interest in or even aptitude for engaging the greatness in the team members that now report to them. Avoid this situation!

Today I've talked about five indicators that you are ready for a promotion.

1. One is that you feel ready.
2. Another is that you're itchy.
3. Another is that you are ready. are  high performing in your current job.
4. Fourth is that you understand what it means to step up to a higher level. 
5. And the fifth is that you want it for the right reasons.

If you satisfy conditions 1, 2, and 3, be sure to examine your motivations. That addresses number 5.

And do your due diligence in relation to what's required to be successful at the next higher level. Satisfy number 4.

Signing off from beautiful South County, Rhode Island. Here's to your great career success.

Catch you next time.

Blogs With Further Information

• The Most Important Thing to Know When Seeking a Promotion
• New Level? New Mindset!
• 5 Career Tips Not Related to Business Savvy

Business Savvy You! course and info: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/overview-business-savvy-you

Take our FREE Email Course - a powerful 12 day email sequence that will help you move from feeling restless, stagnant or overwhelmed to feeling empowered, inspired and equipped to:

1. Self-Promote
2. Earn Sponsorship

3. Hone Your Leadership Brand

4. Network Strategically
5. Enhance Your Executive Presence

Receive unique and transformative career advice: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/BusinessSavvyNewsletterOpt-In

Turn Career Advice from Flawed to Fantastic!: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/lead-magnet-7-career-tips-keeping-1   

These are five reasons,  and there are many more, that even if you don't self identify as ambitious,  developing and demonstrating business savvy will serve you well.

Hi, this is Susan Colantuono  coming from beautiful South County, Rhode Island.

Not long ago, a woman said this to me, "Susan, I don't think of myself as ambitious. Why should I care about developing Business Savvy? "

Well, I can think of 15 reasons, but I am going to share  just a few of them here.

1. For me, the most important answer to this question is comfort. This is especially true for women  who work in predominantly male environments where it's very difficult to be seen, to be heard, to be valued and respected.

And one of the paths to that is to be seen as a partner in the business, to be seen as someone who's interested in the business, who's learning about the business, and who is taking action and making decisions that advance the business.  Of course, it's no guarantee that you will be treated differently, but  it does increase your chances significantly of being more seen, more heard, more valued.

So that's an external reason.

2. Let's talk about an internal reason to develop Business Savvy, even if you don't identify as ambitious, feeling more confident.

This is huge.

I have said for years that confidence rests on a platform of competence. And this doesn't just mean technical or professional competence.  It means competence as a business woman.  When you work on better understanding business financials and strategy, it brings your competence to an entirely new level. You add to your identity as a technical pro or as a professional, the identity of a businesswoman.

And if you are in a leadership role, it strengthens your identity as a leader. Because after all, we know  that business, financial, and strategic acumen enable stronger leadership because you're better able to "use the greatness in you to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others."

3. Here's another reason. Even if you don't think of yourself as ambitious, you know that self promotion matters. You might not be striving for a promotion, but  making others aware of your positive impact on the business helps ensure that you are respected for your contributions and that you get the compensation and/or other rewards that you are due.

As I've talked about in many other places, and you can read about  inside of the Be Business Savvy blog. The key to self promotion  isn't to tell people how great you are, it is to make known to others your positive impact on the business. And the way to do that is to have worked on your Business Savvy - enhanced your business, financial and strategic acumen.

4. Going along with feeling more internally confident, Business Savvy gives you a foundation  for speaking up in meetings or in one-on-ones.

I often talk about my experience of bragging on a project about what a great job I did putting a team together and how great our first meeting was - which created a snooze fest for the project lead.

I finally figured out that what he was interested in hearing about was how the work of my team was going to have a positive impact on revenue, not adversely impact expenses. When I began speaking up about our work toward those goals, all of a sudden  he sat up and paid attention.  

This is an example of how my then increasing Business Savvy enabled me to speak up  more competently, therefore more confidently and more professionally.

5. Another one of the reasons is that when you've been developing and demonstrating Business Savvy people above you are more likely to have conversations with you about the business. And this creates a virtuous cycle where their conversations with you about the business put you in the know.

And you're even more equipped to make recommendations, make comments, get interesting project assignments that relate to moving the business forward.

These are five reasons, and there are many more, that even if you don't self identify as ambitious,  developing and demonstrating business savvy will serve you well. 

1. You will feel more confident you will speak up with more authority on a foundation of competence,
2. You'll be able to self-promote to earn the respect and rewards that you are due,
3. You will feel more comfortable at work -especially if you work in a mostly male environment, and
4. You will kick off a virtuous cycle where, by showing that you're focused on the business, you're likely to hear more information from people above you that puts you in the know that better equips you to demonstrate your focus on the business, thereby supporting all of the others that I've talked about.
5. In other words,  even.  If at this point in your career or this stage of your life, you don't think of yourself as ambitious, Business Savvy helps you navigate the business world with more strength. Ease and less stress.

So, what's a woman to do? Well, shift your mindset.  You don't have to be ambitious. Or think of yourself as This powerful career woman in order to benefit from business savvy No matter your level or your degree of aspirations Enhanced business, financial and strategic acumen will help your  daily work life in the future. In immeasurable ways, five of which I've shared with you,  all of which bring more ease  and less overwhelm and stress into your life. And this is what I wish for you.

Catch you next time.

Susan

• Build Business Acumen course and info: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/build-business-acumen
• Take our FREE Email Course - a powerful 12 day email sequence that will help you move from feeling restless, stagnant or overwhelmed to feeling empowered, inspired and equipped to:
  1. Self-Promote
  2. Earn Sponsorship
  3. Hone Your Leadership Brand
  4. Network Strategically
  5. Enhance Your Executive Presence
• Receive unique and transformative career advice: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/BusinessSavvyNewsletterOpt-In
• Turn Career Advice from Flawed to Fantastic!: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/lead-magnet-7-career-tips-keeping-1   

TLDR: Use preparatory language to increase your chances of being heard and gaining the respect you deserve. Preparatory language is a comment made before the important comment. It is designed to draw attention to you so that you have gained attention before making your important point.

This is one of the most common complaints that I hear from women - especially those who work on predominantly male teams. And while this podcast won't solve the problem, I am going to give you tips for how to deal with it.

There are two reasons why the podcast won't solve the problem.

1. The first is that the mindsets of men  make it less likely for them to listen to us can't be addressed by us at all. They have to be dealt with by the men themselves.
2. The second is, if you historically haven't had anything of value to share, or don't in the moment have anything of value to share, even these tips will make it difficult for you to be heard, which is why of course I make a pitch for you to develop your business financial and strategic acumen.

So let's assume that your suggestions and ideas in the past and in the present are worthy of attention.

A most valuable tip that I can share with you about increasing your chances of being heard, is to use what a mentor of mine called preparatory language. And here's why.

A husband and wife research team at the University of Pennsylvania, discovered that when men are in boring meetings, their minds turn much more frequently (than do women's) to what I call the battlefield or the bedroom. Men are having thoughts about aggression or sex, which means that they aren't even listening when we pop into a conversation, especially one that hasn't grabbed their rapt attention, and spill our brilliant comment right away.

instead, we need to use preparatory language to grab their attention before we add our brilliance to the conversation.

Men are pretty skilled at doing this. You'll hear them make comments like,

• "As we all know."
• "As I've said in prior meetings."
• "People generally agree."

These are examples of preparatory language. They say nothing, but they grab attention to the speaker.

So preparatory language is a comment made before the important comment. It is designed to draw attention to you before you make your comment.

One of the most brilliant practitioners of this that I've ever known, not only uses preparatory language, but she personalizes them. Here are some examples that you can try out yourself.

Let's say your colleague Rakesh made an important point a few minutes ago, and you want to amplify it and add to it. So you could say something like,

"I think the comment that Rakesh made a few minutes ago was important to our discussion. I want to add to what he said, and this is especially of interest to you, Jack."

You've not only taken the floor and drawn attention to you, but you have positively engaged, both Rakesh and Jack.

Let's say you have a different viewpoint from Lars. You might use preparatory language like this.

"Speaking of the impact on our expense goals for this quarter, I have a slightly different take from what Lars said. So let me explain how my broader idea about how to meet our expense targets.

If you're uncomfortable calling out the fact that you have a different point of view than Lars, you could say to the meeting leader - let's assume his name is Salvi.

"Salvi, I would like to cycle back to an earlier point about hitting our expense targets for the quarter. I have three suggestions that haven't been made yet." And then you lay out the three.

In each case, the point is to draw attention to you and to do that by making a connection with at least one other person in the conversation.

1. Women are less likely to be heard in meetings for a host of reasons. One of them might be because we haven't had much value to add in the past due to our lack of business savvy. Another is that the mindsets of men make them less inclined to think we have anything to say and less inclined to listen for what value we might add.
2. A way to overcome this is to use preparatory language to draw attention to you before you contribute your brilliance to the discussion. And to do that by making personal connections with people who are in the conversation.

One thing I would suggest before you go out and give this a try is to pay attention to how some of the other people in meetings with you use preparatory language. You're looking for comments such as the ones I've already mentioned and others like:

• "As you already know."
• "As people generally agree."
• "As I've said in past meetings."
• "It's common knowledge that..."
• "Experts would say."
• Etc.

Once you see that it's part of the culture to use preparatory language (and generally it is) then go ahead and try it yourself. Make sure that you are comfortable drawing attention to the point you're about to make, and that you have something of value to add to the conversation.

This is Susan Colantuono coming to you from beautiful South County RI. Catch you next time.

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TLDR: Scroll down to the Recap to read the summarized career advice from a woman who was a pioneer in engineering and IT.

Susan: Good morning from beautiful Epona Dressage Center outside of Carmona, Spain, where I have spent the week with some amazing women.

This morning I'm speaking with Wendy McLeod. I was struck by Wendy's career history because she was in the forefront and cutting edge of women in engineering and in IT.

So how did you move into IT? First, let me say one thing about that. Data indicates that, unlike today, there were many women who got into IT in the seventies and eighties. How did you make that transition and what was that like?

Wendy: It was in the late eighties and I graduated from university in 1981. Then I went to work in engineering - you have to apprentice for two years and then you become a professional engineer in Canada.

I apprenticed for two years, and then I was a civil engineer out in Alberta and after three or four years I was starting to get antsy and I didn't really know why.

Then in the 80s they brought out a new wood code. I looked at the old wood code, which was from 1918.  And I thought, "It took them 70 years to figure out that wood is actually as strong as we've been using!?"

Then I looked around and I thought, what innovations have there been in the last five years?  Oh, there was a new concrete additive that made the concrete set faster. And I realized, there's not enough change for me. There's not enough change.

They had just brought out desktop computers like the IBM PC personal desktop computer that really caught on and I thought, well, that's kind of neat. So I started to program that and I got into it more and more. And I was able to actually turn it into an IT job because when I was at university I would take computer subjects to bring my marks up.  

Susan: Let's fast forward to the end of your career because it's fascinating to me.  You progressed dynamically at HSBC and had a tremendous scope of responsibility HSBC.

Wendy: HSBC is very proud of their talent and they work very hard to to promote their talent. At least they did when, when I was there. I actually was in charge of operations, which is the operational work, not the computing work. I was responsible for South America, Central America, and North America.

I was definitely stepping outside my comfort zone to do that.

Of course I wanted to automate everything.

Susan:  Did you get a chance to automate?

Wendy:  Yes, I did, but you kind of have to clean up the processes first.  And that is a huge job in South America, because those banks were acquired more recently and processes were not standardized at all, so it would be pointless trying to computerize. It was quite a contrast from North America.

Susan: And you had how many people?

Wendy: I had 5,000 who rolled up to me, but in HSBC you also had two bosses. So you had an in country boss and you had a regional or a global boss who was trying to promote consistency. Which is hard for newly acquired countries.

I found Brazil particularly fascinating because they had been sort of isolated for so many years with their dictatorships and had invented everything themselves within their own country. They had their own satellite system and they really hadn't been exposed that much, even though it was 15, 20 years on, to connecting with the world, but they're very connecty type people.

They like to, they like to connect.  And I found it fascinating that they had, they were so close to having that isolated setup where you have to just rely on yourselves.  Something to be said about that, but yeah, not functional in a global, global institution.  Yeah.

Susan: So you made a comment to me when I first met you that gave me pause in a very positive way. Can you remember and restate it?

Wendy: Yeah, Susan was asking me what I missed most about that job.

Susan: Because you've, you retired right at COVID.

Wendy: I retired right at COVID. What I enjoyed most about that job, which gave me a global reach, is the fact that they identify talent in all their countries. I could change talented people's lives. I really enjoyed it because I was in charge of manual operations, and the world over, those are the people that were never able to afford university, but generally tend to be quite smart.

They're smart but their career is limited because they've never gone to university, they've never gotten a degree, so therefore they never qualified for work outside their country.

Susan: It's interesting that at the level that HSBC would move them around. How did you reach from your position down through your organization to create that talent development culture?

Wendy: Well, I happened to be in a very high performing team, which was the most high performing team I have ever dealt with and it was a global team. One of the things a high performing team does is identify talent and grow talent.

So the global team would meet four times a year and big on the agenda was always a review of the talent pool. You know that there's types of bosses that will try to hang on to talented people. Well, nobody on this team would do that. And they would be like, "Oh, she's ready to have an international assignment."
or "She's grown enough that she can't learn any more in China. And she needs to grow by going somewhere else and experiencing a different culture."

And like I said, most of these people had no university degree. And HSBC was enlightened enough to be able to say instead of coming in as a a trained so and so like a professional engineer or a skill that they needed, HSBC was large enough to back them and say, I would like to replace this person. So you would bring someone in from another country,  you would be able to bring people from India to Mexico City or China to Vancouver.

Susan: You said that your talent pool was mostly folks who hadn't gone to university. Were you able to export talent?

Wendy: Yes.

Susan: Okay, talk about that, because that must have been relying a lot on your credibility.

Wendy: As well as the bank's philosophy. If I hired someone talented, I would tell them, "Alright, you can work for me for two years, but what do you want to do after that? Let me know, because you're clearly capable of more."

So it was lovely to be on a team where everybody was like-minded - that doesn't happen often.

There were certainly a lot of very talented women in their forties who had never gone to university simply because their family couldn't afford it or it just was something that no one in their family had been to university. But they were very talented, they were extremely good at their jobs, and they understood transactions - letters of credit or loans or fancy types of banking transactions.

Susan: They knew the business of business, which is a big thing that I talk about being important.

Wendy: During their 40s, their children had grown up and it was a time for them to have a chance to test themselves abroad so that they would know how good or how bad they were on an international scale.

And they deserved the chance. Some of them moved and never came back. They're like, "I've got my wings and now I can fly." And they did.

Susan: I talk about creating a career that soars. You really enabled that for them. Literally, they flew away and never came back.

A quick summary of career lessons from my interview with Wendy:

• Be curious and seek change
• Take risks
• Create opportunities. 
• Say yes to opportunities that come your way.
• Discover what's meaningful to you. For her, it was improving operations and developing people.
• Avoid age-ism. I loved Wendy's emphasis on the 40 year old women who soared.

Catch you next time.
Susan

• Epona Riding Center, Carmona Spain
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  5. Enhance Your Executive Presence
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Leadership Differs by Levels - Get the Table: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/download-leadership-differs-by-levels

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

TL;DL: As you move into new opportunities there are things you leave behind, there are things you take with you and things you have to add. By "things" I mean: skill sets, perspectives, identity.  You leave "things" behind to create bandwidth for adding what you need to succeed in the new position.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As some of you know, I spend part of my year in Puerto Rico and part of my year on the mainland. Tomorrow I'm headed back to the mainland.

That means I'm in the midst of my leaving and going decisions.

What do I leave behind?

And what do I take when I go?

You might be wondering, what the heck does this have to do with women's career advancement?

Well, it specifically ties to career progression, whether you're moving up the ladder or whether you're moving laterally. Whenever you move, there are things that are important to leave behind and things that are important to take with you.

So let's talk about  leaving  and going. The implications for career moves are most easily understood in the context of advancement.  But they will also translate into lateral opportunities that require you to expand your skill set in order to be successful.

When you make the transition from individual contributor to supervisor, what you leave behind is the doing. Because as a supervisor, your main responsibility is to equip, empower and enable a collection of individual contributors who are doing the doing.

To leave behind the doing is very hard because it's comfortable and it's what you're known for, but you must because leave it. It's the only way to meet the requirement that you add to your skill set of doing, the skill sets for equipping and empowering the individual contributors who report to you to be as successful or even more successful than you were.

This involves interpersonal and team skills that you didn't have to demonstrate or utilize as an individual contributor. For example, you add the capabilities of coaching, training, giving feedback, aligning the team to key outcomes, delivering progress measures and you might be adding project management, et cetera.

In order to create the bandwidth for adding those new skills, you're leaving behind the doing.  As you go into your new position, you are taking with you the knowledge about the doing in order that you can equip and enable and empower your reporting team members.

When you make the transition from supervisor to manager, it most often means that you have a team of supervisors reporting to you.  So what do you leave behind?  You leave behind the  equipping, enabling and empowering of individual contributors in order to equip, empower and enable the success of your reporting supervisors.

This is different than doing your supervisory work with individual contributors, because you are no longer interacting with individual contributors.  You are Interacting with supervisors whose leadership skills need to be developed. 

• You need to make sure that they have the interpersonal and team skills required to motivate their teams.
• You need to make sure they have the business savvy required to align their teams to the organization.
• The metrics by which their performance is measured will be different than the metrics by which individual contributors performance is measured. 

You're adding layers of capability. Now you're beginning to equip, empower and enable leadership skills, not the doing.

You do that by leaving behind time spent working with individual contributors. Again, it's hard to do.  You grew comfortable and you were successful supervising individual contributors. If not, you wouldn't have earned this new opportunity.

And On...

And so it goes as you progress up the organization.

The leaving and the going. What you leave behind in order to expand your capabilities.  And what you take with you.

Whenever you make a career transition, whether it's a lateral move across your latticework career or whether it's a vertical climb up the organizational ladder, give thought in your planning for how you will  spend your first three months to what will be important for you to:

• Leave behind,
• Take with you,
• And what it is that you will be adding to your skill set as you grow the lustrous pearl that is the ambitious woman that you are.

As I listened to this podcast, I realized this is a much bigger topic and I want to give you the full picture.  So, here again is the link to download an illustrative table of the ways leadership differs by level: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/download-leadership-differs-by-levels

Catch you next time,

Susan

• Build Business Acumen course and info: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/build-business-acumen
• Take our FREE Email Course - a powerful 12 day email sequence that will help you move from feeling restless, stagnant or overwhelmed to feeling empowered, inspired and equipped to:
  1. Self-Promote
  2. Earn Sponsorship
  3. Hone Your Leadership Brand
  4. Network Strategically
  5. Enhance Your Executive Presence
• Receive unique and transformative career advice: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/BusinessSavvyNewsletterOpt-In
• Turn Career Advice from Flawed to Fantastic!: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/lead-magnet-7-career-tips-keeping-1