Joelle K. Jay

leadership development

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How To Define Your Metrics For Success In 3 Questions

What is the single biggest driver for career advancement? In my view, it’s your performance. Or, at least performance is the one over which you have the most control. If you excel at your job and get stellar results, you’ll know you’re positioning yourself to be noticed.

 

There are three questions you can ask yourself to assess the impact of performance on your career:

First, is performance emphasized where you work?

Second, which performance measures will you use?

And finally, how will you claim your results?

If you can get crystal clear in all three areas, you will be doing everything possible to make your good work count.

 

Begin by assessing your company, and what it values when promoting. Does your company place a high emphasis in performance, or does it take in to account other aspects which are more important to them? If your company does place a high emphasis on performance, then you have to decide which performance measures will best highlight your hard work. There are tons of performance measures to choose from, some of which your company might track themselves, and others that you will have to do on your own. Either way, tracking your performance so that they numbers can talk for themselves is very important.

Finally, you have to be willing to claim your results and let people know that you played a vital role in achieving them.

In short, the strategy is this: focus on performance, get the results, and make an effort to point out those results so you can get the credit (and opportunities) you have earned.

 

Performance is one of the key advantages for leaders who want to advance their careers. To learn all nine advantages, check out The New Advantage: How Women in Leadership Can Create Win-Wins for Their Companies and Themselves and take your free self-assessment!

This article was originally published on Inc.com.

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The 3 Essential Ingredients for Advancing Women Leaders

 

Women leaders: There is much you can do to empower yourself to achieve in your career and take leadership in your own life.

We can’t always change others’ ways of thinking, but we can play a part in inspiring change. The culture is quickly changing, becoming more gender-balanced, generationally rich and culturally diverse.

 

If you are a corporate leader seeking to balance your leadership team, here are three top recommendations for advancing women in leadership. If you are a woman who wants to elevate yourself, work with your organization to discover what resources are available, or take leadership to create these opportunities for yourself.

 

Find the right tools.  The new advantage for women in leadership is knowing you can empower yourself to achieve in your career and take leadership in your own life – and a large part of that is finding the right tools to help you continue to learn, grow and succeed.

Whether it’s the right mentor, the right coach, the right reading materials, or the right class or networking capabilities, be open to using the tools at your disposal.

 

Encourage executive coaching. Because the dilemmas are still not always safe topics for conversation, the confidentiality of executive coaching and its deeply personal, entirely individualized nature makes it an ideal environment for working through the challenges that inevitably accompany leadership development and taking advantage of the opportunities ahead.

Of course, as executive coaches we’re biased here. More than enough evidence suggests executive coaching is an invaluable tool to increasing the presence of women at the corporate executive level.

In our own research at the Leadership Research Institute, we have found executive coaching for executive women has resulted directly in promotions. In one study, over 85% of the female senior-level leaders we have coached were promoted with the first six months of beginning their coaching, and almost all of them advanced within the year.

 

Offer leadership development programs for women in leadership. Programs that teach the skills and strategies of leadership provide the opportunity for learning and discussion about the challenges facing women and men in the workplace. The challenges are critical for all aspiring leaders to understand – not just for women.

Leadership development programs can be part of a comprehensive strategy that companies adopt to integrate the development of talented leaders with the goals of their companies to promote their advancement.

 

Corporate Leaders: When you include all three elements mentioned above in your wheelhouse for advancing talent, and when you commit to balancing your leadership teams with both women and men who are the best, strongest, most talented, most committed leaders, you’ll see remarkable results.

Women in Leadership: As you now continue to advance your career, use the above methods to gain knowledge and strategies for supporting women in leadership – starting with yourself.

 

Are you ready to get your new advantage? Get your free Executive Summary of The New Advantage here!

The previous article appeared on Inc.com as a part of my column, “Behind The Desk.” Look out for new columns every week!

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3 Steps To Create A High-functioning Team

Every leader wants a high-functioning team. On a high-functioning team, the members are highly engaged. They distribute tasks to build on each other’s strengths, generate ideas and find creative solutions in a spirit of collaboration, synergy, and a conviction that ‘‘all of us is better than one of us.’’ Together, they achieve the common goal.

The belief is that a team that makes the most of the talent around the table creates better results.

It’s energizing, it’s inspiring, and it’s efficient. It’s also good for business. Good teamwork is credited for a host of positive outcomes, among them productivity, performance, client satisfaction, and strategic alignment.

But how does one get such a team?

If you look around your own team and see a loose collection of individuals, heads down in their offices, focused on their personal agendas, you’re not alone. A high-functioning team is not easy to build. But it can be done – and the following three steps are a great start.

 

Ask the right questions. Have each member of your team answer three questions:

  1. What are the strengths you can build on to improve your leadership?
  2. Where are your opportunities for improvement?
  3. What goal do you want to set now?

Have everyone take the time, individually, to provide thoughtful answers.

 

Build an action plan. The resulting action plan from the data above will give each leader a focus for ongoing support to drive the team toward growth in the areas that matters most to them and their team, and where the payoff for improvement would affect them personally and contribute to the success of the organization.

Sample action plans include:

  • Being more strategic and less tactical in day-to-day work,
  • improving employee engagement,
  • changing up management styles, or
  • delegating more effectively to focus on strategic priorities.

Each team member’s action plan will be unique and tailored to his or her specific goals.

 

Make time for group leadership development. Group leadership development meetings can occur one-on-one or in a group, perhaps once a month. In your first meeting, put together four to six topics in the areas of leadership and management that could shore up the team’s capacity as individuals and more importantly, that would strengthen their leadership capacity as a group. Then spend the coming months tackling those topics together in the service of your goals.

 

To be truly effective, a high-functioning team should have clear, agreed-upon goals. The ultimate goal of these meetings is for the team to designed their future. Fresh ideas will emerge, each member will contribute, and, more importantly, the team will be able to achieve all of this on their own – which, after all, may be the hallmark of a true, high-functioning team.

 

To learn more about how SBL can help you get results for your team and organization, as well as yourself on an individual level, see my guide.

The previous article appeared on Inc.com as a part of my column, “Behind The Desk.” Look out for new columns every week!

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Why You Need To Adopt A Strength-Based Leadership Strategy This Year

A focus on weakness is ingrained in our culture, and, during these changing times in leadership, it’s time for a paradigm shift in that thinking. A new movement in the business world could fundamentally change the way we think about improvement, especially for business leaders who truly want to be their best and to bring out the best in their people.

This revolution capitalizes on the unique contributions of each individual, leveraging their unmatched, powerful ways of being and doing. It results in increased efficiency, improved effectiveness and a happier way of life.

The approach is Strengths-Based Leadership (SBL).

SBL is a philosophy of leadership based on the belief that we are all born with unique strengths and talents, and that when we act in alignment with those strengths, we are at our best. We can understand it by studying its history, or context, and its key concepts. SBL is part mindset, part skills and practice.

 

Two key concepts explain this approach, the understanding of which allow individuals to leverage the philosophy and play to their strengths:

 

Our strengths are enduring and unique. Our strengths are enduring, because we are born with them. Strengths are things we do naturally. They’re easy for us, and we usually enjoy doing them. They’re unique, because no one else in the world has the same combination of strengths, expressed the same way, as anyone else.

 

Our greatest room for growth is in the direction of our strength. For many people, this is a switch. Typically what people do is put all of their attention and energy into their weaknesses and take their strengths for granted.

 

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve; it’s the obsession with weaknesses as the place to improve that’s counterproductive. It’s much more powerful to build on our strengths. Importantly, the message should not be that we ignore our shortcomings. In many instances, we must attend to them. We manage our weaknesses so we can build on our strengths.

So when it comes to putting SBL to work, you must first identify your strengths, then commit to doing more of the activities that strengthen you while doing less of the activities that weaken you. What are your strengths? How can you minimize your weaknesses? How can your weaknesses work for you? Ask yourself, your mentor and trusted friends these questions to capitalize on how SBL can radicalize your leadership strategy.

 

To learn more about how SBL can help you get results for your team and organization, as well as yourself on an individual level, see my guide.

The previous article appeared on Inc.com as a part of my column, “Behind The Desk.” Look out for new columns every week!

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Leaders: This Is The Secret To Preserving Top Talent

If company leaders hope to keep top talent, they are going to have to preserve their most talented employees.

If talented employees hope to fulfill their potential, they are going to have to learn to think differently.

For both company leaders and their talented workers, the kind of thinking and working required in the complex work environments that have come to characterize today’s business settings are more intense than they were in the past. To succeed, employees must learn to be more strategic.

More thoughtful.

More aligned.

Leaders at every level must be approach their work with all of the talent they have, for the benefit of the company and for the sustainability of their results.

Imagine what a difference that could make. Leaders who take time for the proactive, good strategic thinking feel clearer and more settled. They are able to discern the priorities and stay focused on them, and the rest of the busyness just fades into the background. They are more focused on results. They are better team players. They are aligned to their company vision, their managers’ needs and their partners.

Best of all, they have time for themselves to rest and renew their energy. Overall, they experience a more committed, results-based approach to work and life that leads to loyalty in a company, better retention, and a better quality of life.

How does one create such an environment? The secret is personal leadership.

Just as corporate leaders must apply the practices and principles of strong leadership to make their company succeed, so must individual employees apply the practices and principles of strong leadership to succeed for themselves. Personal leadership is at the heart of a high quality way to work.

Bringing a personal leadership approach to an organization – or even to your own work – requires three steps.

First, identify talented individuals in whom to invest. If you’re a leader who wants to be successful in your own career, that “talented individual” may be you.

Next, empower them to take a leadership mindset, and teach them to focus on their top priorities.

Last, do so in a way that would be efficient in terms of both cost and time so they develop themselves as leaders while keeping up with the pace of their business.

One company I worked with build a program around these three steps, with impressive results. They nominated their top talent to participate in a leadership program focusing on personal leadership. They helped participants to see themselves as leaders who added value to the company. And they integrated their leadership development with big goals for the company. As a result, the program participants not only felt stronger as leaders, they improved their impact to the company, to the tune of millions of dollars added to the bottom line.

Learn more about how personal leadership can help get results for your company – or for you personally. Download a free Executive Summary of personal leadership and get started learning how you can be a better leader… and lead a better life.

 

The previous article appeared on Inc.com as a part of my column, “Behind The Desk.” Look out for new columns every week!

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5 Things You Can Do Right Now To Get Recognized At Work

Do you feel overlooked? Unappreciated? Undervalued?

 

Even the most promising leaders may not get the recognition they’re hoping for. One 2006 Gallup study revealed that 61% of employees feel unappreciated at work. That can be demotivating and affect your sense of self-confidence, as well as the sense of joy you get for your work.

If you’re a high performer, you want to know you’re important and make a difference. And you are – but you may have to be the one to help others see it.

 

Here are five things you can do today to make sure you’re being recognized.

 

  1. Raise your hand. Recognition is about raising your hand, claiming credit for your work, volunteering yourself, and speaking up, so that others value your contributions and you create opportunities for yourself.
  1. Speak up. Results don’t always speak for themselves. Sometimes we have to speak for them. This means getting real about the numbers – pull metrics to show how much capital you’ve raised for your company, how many hours you’ve put into projects, or how many team members you’ve mentored. Quantifying your results will bolster your credibility, and help get you the recognition you deserve.
  1. Advocate for yourself. You can be yourself and still get yourself noticed. You may feel self-conscious shining a light on your accomplishments, but you don’t have to be a braggart to be appropriately self-advocating.
  1. Know your own value. In order for others to value you, you have to first value yourself. Your ability shine a spotlight on your good work serves your own career, of course, but it also serves your company, your clients and your team.
  1. Celebrate your wins! Recognition comes when you achieve what’s important to the people around you and highlight the wins. Whether this is in a presentation, a paper, or even a company-wide email, highlighting the wins and shouting out about a recent success is one way to earn the high-visibility you’ve earned.


Your ability to call attention to your achievements and ask for what you need will serve your career. You don’t have to overdo it. Just make sure you don’t avoid doing it at all.

As you’re articulating your accomplishments, ask yourself:

  • What do you want to be recognized for, and why?
  • Who do you want to recognize what you’ve done, and what’s important to that person to know, see and hear?
  • What changes in your own behavior might you need to make to effectively get recognition?
  • Have your results been noticed so far, and what has been the result?

Companies with a “recognition-rich culture” have a 31% lower turnover rate – which is important for women, who reportedly value “appreciation by their manager” 15% over men as an important reward for their work.

You can get yourself noticed at work. When you do, you’ll gain the benefits and opportunities that come to you when you clearly convey your true worth.

 

For more on how to be recognized at work, see my resources.

The previous article appeared on Inc.com as a part of my column, “Behind The Desk.” Look out for new columns every week!

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3 Challenges To Personal Mastery Every Successful CEO Must Conquer

Leadership is the ability to define an inspiring vision of the future and then compel people to achieve it. Personal leadership is the ability to do that for yourself – identifying “what do I need to do,” “why am I doing it,” “how do I do it,” “who can help” and “how do I leverage my strength.” If you do that in a way that is structured and disciplined, you can gain personal mastery.

Several months ago I spoke with fellow coach, Dawn Grossart, on the subject of personal mastery, and we came to the same conclusion: Personal mastery is that pot at the end of the rainbow that most people are trying to achieve, whether they’re first starting out in their careers or if they’re successful entrepreneurs or CEOs.

When done right, personal mastery becomes self-initiative growth and drive to success on your own. When you can do that, then you’ll have clarity and confidence, and you can achieve what you want to achieve and live the life you want to live.

The greatest challenges entrepreneurs face when it comes to self-mastery are the usual suspects: Procrastination, fear of visibility, running out of steam or giving up before you see the results you’re looking for. It gets hard. What I like to coach leaders to do is to identify those challenges, and then identify the polar opposite – the matching solution.

So, for example, if procrastination is the challenge, then personal mastery for you might be about developing discipline. Or, if you’re challenge is fear of visibility, then maybe the solution has to do with finding your way and your comfort zone. So, maybe you’re not ever going to be on The Today Show, maybe that’s not your kind of visibility, but maybe a local audience on your local station’s public morning show is where your true customer base lies.

Last, when it comes to giving up or running out of steam, sometimes leaders forget to identify the matrix and measure themselves against those matrixes so they can see the progress they’re making and let that become their motivation to keep going. They may actually be, in fact, moving forward, and they need to be able to see it on paper to get the feeling that they’re actually moving ahead getting where they want to go.

Here is something I’ve learned as a leadership coach: The coaches’ job is to help people find their own answers. But people can only find their own answers if the answers are already within them. Sometimes just a little bit of information from the outside can change everything, so in addition to finding your own framework, successful leaders must go out and search: What is the framework you need to accomplish your goals, what are you trying to achieve, and who can help you do that? Now, take your framework and tweak it until you find the one that’s right for you and get to the results you want: personal mastery.

 

The previous article appeared on Inc.com as a part of my column, “Behind The Desk.” Look out for new columns every week!

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How Women Leaders Can Define Their Own Metric For Success

You can make great strides in your career by understanding the advantages of exceptional performance, and how to make that performance count. Performance is the degree to which you do your job well. Your performance is measured by your results, using whatever outcomes matter most in your organization and your role in the organization.

Leaders strive to have meaningful results. They want to know their efforts will make a positive impact on their careers, whether that means building their reputation, getting new opportunities, or being rewarded for their good work. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee. Corporate life is more complex than that.

Many company leaders believe that their performance will count for everything; however, in complicated and changing organizations, it doesn’t. When it comes time for career advancement, you cannot always control what happens to you or believe that your performance will count for everything. But, you can take steps to ensure that good things do happen and allow your performance to be the foundation to that success.

Performance becomes a dilemma for women when it doesn’t seem to count the way it should–you do your best, get great feedback, and nothing happens. Research shows that women, much more than men, must have proven accomplishments before their talent is recognized.

The perfect performance environment would be a true meritocracy–a system in which people chosen to advance were selected on the basis of their ability. Performance is certainly not the metric from which people are evaluated, but it is the most important. Performance is a clear indicator of success and understanding when to deliver peak performance and showcasing it appropriately cornerstones a place for a successful career.

Leaders can lose sight of this when they forget to prioritize and advocate for their own good performance for several reasons. For instance, performance measures may not be clear in your organization, or maybe you’re the one who is not entirely clear on those measures. Clarifying those priorities can make identifying your performance more obvious and directed. You can also become focused on the wrong thing–the next job, office politics, or the fire drill of the moment, instead of your results. In addition, you can neglect to track changes in your performance measures overtime. Your performance measure changes as your jobs change throughout your career. Be sure you are staying current.

A final, and potential disastrous mistake is forgetting to identify, communicate, and improve your results. You don’t have to overdo it, but you do have to own your performance. No one else will do it for you.

You secure your performance by getting clear on the metrics that matter in your role–tracking the changes in those measures as your career progresses–and continuing to track your results.

By doing this, you can reap the benefits of a job well done. Typical benefits of good performance are pretty straightforward: salary, benefits and bonuses. Beyond that, additional and less concrete rewards become available such as confidence, marketability, promotability, career choice, and fulfillment.

If you show yourself to be a talented leader–and a future leader–of your company, you can start gathering the experiences now that you will need to succeed in the future. Then you won’t just be promotable, you will be prepared.

 

The previous article appeared on Inc.com as a part of my column, “Behind The Desk.” Look out for new columns every week!

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How To Take Command Of Your Executive Presence In 2017

Executive presence is a vital sign of your readiness to take on bigger leadership roles. Yet, many leaders don’t know what executive presence actually is, much less if they have it. That would be worrisome, except for the fact that you can change it. You can shape your presence to project an image consistent with who you want to be and the opportunities you want to have. Executive presence is the degree to which others perceive you to be a leader.

The trap many leaders fall into is being underestimated by others because of the way they present themselves. They may be perfectly capable, but if their presence doesn’t project the expected image of a leader, they may be seen as less powerful than they are. Women can easily become victim to this problem, being undervalued because of their perception from others. To eliminate this problem, they need to think deeply about acquiring executive presence, which can be complicated for women.

With historically few women holding high-level leadership positions, the image of what executive presence should be is often based on a man and, to further complicate things, “women are unfairly deemed to have the wrong leadership style needed to be successful.” Business women are trapped in a double bind of combining being an ideal manager, which means being masculine, with being an ideal woman, which means being feminine. To combat this contradiction, women must present themselves as leaders while maintaining their natural strength and style.

The second hurdle women face when tackling executive presence is the sensitivity of the topic. Women, in particular, have trouble getting feedback on their presence- especially when it comes to appearance. While appearance is only one small element of presence, it is an important one. Specific details of appearance, like unkempt attire and provocative clothing, can undercut presence up to 75 percent. Not to mention it is difficult to address.

Resolving this dilemma is more than a matter of managing perception and communicating to others that, “I have what it takes, and I’m ready to fill the role of a leader.” It is also about being confident in yourself. The more you can learn about the impressions you make on others, the more you can shape your image to fit their expectations, while also working on strengthen your own self-image.

Executive presence manifests in the silent judgements people make about you, rightly or wrongly. The more specifics you can get about how you are being measured, the better you can assess yourself. These attributes play important roles in determining executive presence: status and reputation, physical characteristics, demeanor, communication skills, interpersonal skills, interpersonal behavior patterns, values-in-action, intellect and expertise, work outcomes and power use. By understanding these different elements in yourself, you can shape your presence intentionally, to make a positive impact.

When you find your unique way of expressing executive presence, you will naturally develop a stronger sense of yourself as a leader, termed as “A Sense of Self” (another vitally important factor of executive presence). Understanding yourself as a leader will not only allow you to shape your executive presence, it will also make you feel powerful, and it will show.

 

The previous article appeared on Inc.com as a part of my column, “Behind The Desk.” Look out for new columns every week!

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Leadership Experts Weigh In: Why Women Leaders Need A Mentor And A Sponsor

Getting mentors and sponsors who can help you sustain the confidence and momentum its takes to succeed and who can pave the way for future success is more than beneficial, it is necessary. In order to build strong mentoring and sponsoring relationships, we need to distinguish clearly between the two.

A mentor is a guide who offers you advice, helps you solve problems, provides a sounding board, and shares his or her years of experience to help you learn and grow. A sponsor is a powerfully positioned champion who advocates for you, opens the door to new opportunities, introduces you to the right people, increases your visibility, and makes the case for your advancement.

To simplify, mentoring is taking an interest in you and sponsorship is taking action for you.

In her research, Sylvia Ann Hewlett reveals that leaders are advised to have a mentor, but they need a sponsor. Sponsorship turns out to be crucial to all leaders. The trouble is, it is less accessible to women. Only 13 percent of full-time, female employees at large companies have sponsors compared to 46 percent of men.

A number of obstacles can percent women from getting sponsorship. Some of these include: hesitancy to ask for help or showcase their talents, real or imagined boundaries across power relationships, the tendency to under-reach for promotions, and sometimes even fears about what others might think.

As a result, even women who do have a healthy network can end up over-mentored and under-sponsored. Do not let these obstacles stop you. Once you know you need a mentor and a sponsor, you can form those relationships and take advantage of all they have to offer. As an integral part of your network, your mentorships and sponsorships are deeper, more focused relationships that deserve special attention.

Mentorship gives you a distinct advantage. It shortens the learning curve, provides support in a challenging time, and offers a way to learn the nuances that lead to mastery in a skill- not to mention it can be the foundation for a lifelong relationship, often treasured on both sides. Women who take advantage of mentoring opportunities maintain their ambition and self-confidence in their careers.

In addition, people who are mentored “garner more promotions, higher salaries, and more career satisfaction and even report being less stressed than those who lack such guidance.” Mentorships are invaluable because you can learn and grow with little risk. However, if you want to advance, you need a sponsor.

The sponsorship advantage gives women the chance to stretch beyond their own boundaries into opportunities they may not have had otherwise. When women have a strong sponsor, the likelihood that they will seek other ways of advancing their career, such as a stretch assignment or a raise, goes up 8 percent– a small but significant impact. In addition, men and women with sponsors are most satisfied with their career advancement. In this regard, they obtain a “sponsor effect” from 19 to 23 percent.The benefits are even more impressive for mothers, at 27 percent, and minorities, up to 65 percent.

When leaders have strong mentors and sponsors in place, they feel supported and championed. Women in leadership must educate themselves about the benefits of mentors and sponsors, fill those roles, and cultivate and leverage the relationships. When you do, you will be surrounded by opportunities where you can add value and gain benefits in returns.

 

The previous article appeared on Inc.com as a part of my column, “Behind The Desk.” Look out for new columns every week!