by Dot Callihan | May 14, 2013 | Acting As Empowered Women
The Woman In The Room is one year old!! For me this is a milestone and cause to celebrate!
At work, how do you celebrate milestones and achievements? Are they subdued? Do you talk about doing something and then nothing really materializes? Who is responsible for or takes the lead in planning the celebration?
Thinking back over my career, I’ve had one manager who made sure we celebrated achievements and one who did a pretty good job. With the rest, ideas withered and died. Men seem to be generally uncomfortable driving these celebrations. Historically they have passed the planning to the admin staff.
I’ve always enjoyed putting together something big and fun. Sometimes women are reluctant to put together these events fearing they will fall into a stereotype and deep into the Pink Zone. To prevent yourself from becoming the office party planner, pick and choose what you want to celebrate. Knowing everyone in the office’s birthday and bringing in cake is different from finding the milestones that employees should have pride in achieving. Instilling pride and recognizing hard work is what a leader does. And you don’t have to be the manager to lead the celebration.
Here are a couple of things I have done in the past and after 12 years I will finally admit that it was me who pulled off one surprise event. Think big, think outside the box and use the event to energize!
by Dot Callihan | May 5, 2013 | Acting As Empowered Women
In my last article, The Woman In the Arena, I quoted an excerpt from Teddy Roosevelt’s “Citizenship In A Republic” speech that he deliver in 1910. When I wrote the article I looked up the entire speech and found another excerpt that has tremendous meaning for where...
by Dot Callihan | Apr 29, 2013 | Acting As Empowered Women
I like to express myself at work. If I had my druthers, I would start every day blaring a song that fit the mood of the day. But I was never quite able to put together a large enough sound system. So I found another method.
I started digging up quotes to fit the mood and plastering them all over. While I found many, my safety manager brought me this one from Teddy Roosevelt. It immediately became my favorite because it expressed what the project team and was soon posted in every office.
by Dot Callihan | Apr 23, 2013 | Acting As Empowered Women
One of the traits women are most credited with is improving collaboration. We get more people to open up and participate in conversations and problem solving. The result is a more complete solution to a problem.
Sounds great – in theory!
The issue many women face is that collaboration isn’t valued. Collaboration goes against the company’s driving, hard charging, make it happen culture – it is sissy stuff. In these environments the merit of an idea is based upon how hard the promoter is willing to fight for and drive his solution through. If you are not willing to fight hard for your idea, then it couldn’t have been a very good one.
Even in an environment where men are less contentious, they may already have their minds made up as to who they aren’t going to listen to, whose ideas are going to be shot down even before they are voiced. They know who is going to be shut down and shut out of all discussion. They are very good at enforcing the shut out.
For women getting their ideas heard in these environments is hard enough, let alone getting men to listen to each other and discuss all ideas.
So what’s a woman to do – how can she make a room full of men collaborate?
by Dot Callihan | Apr 8, 2013 | Acting As Empowered Women, Thinking Like Empowered Women
Have you ever been called infuriating? I have – many times – “You are the most infuriating woman I’ve ever known!” Even though it was meant to belittle me, I take it as a compliment. My reply is simply “Thank you.” The scenarios in which I’ve been called...
by Dot Callihan | Mar 13, 2013 | Acting As Empowered Women
A few weeks after I got to my large construction project in the-middle-of-nowhere New Mexico, I walked into the superintendent’s area and found most of my staff deep in discussion about a process. A functional manager within the company distributed the process dictating – It must be followed! No one on my staff agreed with the process. It was clear that the process was written from the perspective of the functional manager and the perspectives from other functional areas wasn’t considered.
I initiated an impromptu meeting to come up with our version of the process. The men who reported to the functional manager were concerned about not following the dictated process but I told them not to worry about it – my job was to sell our process to the larger group of senior managers and explain why it is better.
I then asked what other processes we needed to look at and boy, did I open a can of worms! I decided to formalize my Process meeting.
