Developing Your Leadership Potential as a Woman
female leadership
In my article “Female leadership in Panama” I briefly describe the conclusions of a study developed in Panama on “Women in business management: gaining momentum in Panama.”
Among the measures aimed at overcoming the dilemmas and internal contradictions that women face when reaching positions of responsibility, the study identifies mentoring programmes, coaching and career development plans.
Coaching helps identify beliefs that may limit a woman’s professional and leadership growth, and break habits that hold back progress in her professional career, such as a promotion, a successful salary negotiation, or a career change.
The 12 habits that stop you…
In my coaching processes I use, among other tools, the 12 habits identified in the book “How Women Rise” by Sally Helgensen and Marshall Goldsmith:
- Reluctance to claim achievements
- Expect others to spontaneously notice and reward your contributions
- Overvaluation of experience
- Just build instead of building and leveraging relationships
- Do not enlist allies from day one (allies, mentors and sponsors).
- Put your work before your career
- The perfection trap
- The desire to please
- Minimization
- Too much
- Rumiando
- Let your radar distract you
These habits often appear together. For example, the habit (1) Reluctance to claim achievements often appears accompanied by the habit (2) Expecting others to spontaneously notice or praise and reward your contributions.
Others that can be found together are the habits (3) Overvaluing experience and (6) Putting your work before your career and the habit (7) The perfection trap.
Plan of action
If you detect some of these behaviours or habits in yourself, the suggestion is that you establish a strategic plan to implement changes.
Align your objectives with your purpose, start with one, maximum two habits, which you fragment into small habits or routines, be specific and concise in your actions and define a time limit to implement them.
Recruit professional help such as a coach or someone committed to your development and who also wants to implement changes and establish “peer coaching”, promote your objectives, ask for feedback, listen, thank and implement changes during the course of your action plan.
In a coaching process, purpose, objectives, objective and subjective reality, visions and options are worked on in an integrated manner and an action plan is implemented. The action plan encourages the implementation of actions, accompanied by the development of relationships and feedback, which allows the desired changes to be implemented by measuring their effectiveness.
Our beliefs shape our resistance to change, our responses help shape our circumstances, and our behaviours shape how others respond to us.
Organisations can implement coaching processes that support the development of female leadership, or professional women can choose to individually contract a process that contributes to their professional development.
References: Book “How Women Rise”, break the 12 habits holding you back from your next raise, promotion or job, Sally Helgesen y Marshall Goldsmith.
