When men and women go into the same trade, vocation or profession they take very different career paths. Men tend to take the path that leads to the higher paying jobs and advancement while women take the path to lower paying government, secondary and support jobs that don’t offer as much advancement. This is a significant underlying cause of the pay gap and why women aren’t advancing in society and the workplace.
As women we need to ask ourselves:
“Why aren’t we getting on the same paths as men?”
After all, that was a point of equality – to give women the same opportunities to achieve as men.
One major problem is we still believe a lot of the misrepresentations and false narratives that tell us that we aren’t suited for these paths. However, s a woman who followed men and took their most aggressive career paths, let me just say:
“Ladies, we should be all over these paths. We are definitely well-suited for them and in many cases, better suited.”
To correct our misguided perceptions, let’s first understand that all of our employers see us as Doers and that we are in a transactional relationship with our employer. (We do work and they pay us for that work.) Our employers then divide us into two Doer groups:
- The Active Doers work directly with producing our workplace’s product and service and therefore have a direct impact on performance, profitability and viability.
- The Support Doers work in the background helping the Active Doer be successful.
Secondly, we know that all of our workplaces have goals and objectives they have to meet such as:
- Sell more product and increase revenue by $X or X%
- Win that big contract
- Finish the project by this Date with a margin of $X
- Deliver a new product by this Date
- Improve efficiency and deliver $X to the bottom line
To meet these goals, our workplaces turn to the Active Doers to “make it happen” and “git’er done.” There is pressure, often intense pressure on the Active Doers to meet these goals. The Active Doers who meet them, whether they are in management or part of the workforce, are then elevated to a small and elite group of Achievers.
In return for their effort and their direct impact on workplace performance, Achievers demand promotions, higher pay and bigger bonuses.
Many of us have a very stereotypical perception of Achievers. They are bulls in the china shop – aggressive, brash, very confident, risk-takers and driven. To reach their objective they bulldoze through people and obstacles creating a rampage chaos in their wake.
But, no one cares because they got the job done!
As women, in our Support Doer roles, we see the mess the Achievers leave behind, and our job is to clean it up. Our job isn’t easy however, we get a sense of satisfaction from it, knowing that the Achievers aren’t so perfect.
If we’re lucky, we’re rewarded with a “thank-you” but no big paycheck or bonus.
This is the scenario most workplaces are stuck in, but it is so 20th century. In the 21st century this is NOT how you become an Achiever, individually or as a workplace.
Super Bowl LII gave us a great example of how to be 21st century Achievers.
It was 4th down and the Eagles were on the 1 yard line. They decided to go for the touchdown instead of the field goal. Everyone saw it as a gusty, risky move and they assumed the Eagles would rely on brute force to bulldoze their way through the Patriot’s line to reach their objective.
But they didn’t.
In a very creative play, Nick Foles who was the quarterback, didn’t receive the snap. Instead, he ran to the side and into the endzone to be the receiver who caught the ball and scored the touchdown. Consequently, he was credited for the touchdown and awarded the game MVP.
Singling out and elevating one person ignores everyone and everything else that went into making the touchdown. The touchdown and the game weren’t won just because of one person’s superior performance.
It was all possible because there was a Team of Achievers.
As a woman who took the Achiever career path, I used the Team of Achievers approach and I always out-performed my male colleague Achievers.
I learned to use it when I was just 23 years old. My task was to coach and train a team for a competition. My team was comprised of a very young man and woman who had less than 1 year of experience. Our competitors were all men who had 15 – 30 years more experience.
Using the conventional male-dominated workplace wisdom of the time, my team and I were a joke. We were mocked, openly laughed at and called the “Kindergartners” because of our youth and inexperience.
However, we WON in our category.
We also achieved the highest score among all the teams in all of the categories in the competition. We earned the title Best of the Best.
Most importantly, we blew up all of the conventional male wisdom of what it takes to be a Top Achiever.
For years I carried in my wallet a picture of my team accepting their trophy to remind me not to listen to all the nay-sayers who said I couldn’t achieve, or all the Achiever-Wannabes who tried to stop me because they didn’t want a woman showing them up.
That picture was my reminder to using the Team of Achievers approach to succeed far beyond expectations.
As I kept succeeding, I reinforced over and over and over again that as a woman, I brought a unique value to the team that my men cannot. When women are part of the team and our traits are blended with men’s traits, together, we create unprecedented achievement. And that feels really good.
It feels really, really good to achieve. It is a feeling of euphoria that you want others to experience. However, many people are afraid to do what it takes to experience it.
Many women are afraid to achieve because we believe too many false narratives about hierarchies. From our feminine perspective we believe that if we raise ourselves up, we automatically diminish someone else. Using a male perspective, we believe that male-dominated career paths are all about competition and quests for power. We believe that if we achieve then we will be attacked and we don’t want that confrontation.
But the truth is that Achievers appreciate other Achievers.
Achievers don’t care about gender, race, education, religion, ethnicity or any of that stuff because the feeling of Achievement diminishes all that other garbage. Achievers want to be surrounded with other Achievers because they know that together they can achieve more.
A lot of women get discouraged in our careers, because we choose career paths that are too low for us and run into Achiever Wannabes. When we out-perform the Wannabes, we reveal that they are just a Wannabe and not the Achiever they espouse to be. The Wannabes then work to discourage and even sabotage us to protect their imaginary status. And all too often, we let them.
When we run into Wannabes who attack us, we don’t stay and fight them. Instead we move our career path up and leave them behind. We seek out people who perform at our level and want us to be part of their Team of Achievers.
Many men don’t want the responsibility and more importantly the accountability that goes along with being an Achiever. They are still believe achievers are MVP’s who work alone and act like the bull in the china shop. They don’t understand the Team of Achievers approach.
This is where women come in.
Watch an office of full women who work in secondary and support roles. They talk, collaborate and help each other out. As women we inherently understand teamwork, shared responsibility and shared accountability.
This is why we gravitate to secondary and support roles and stay there. We believe our collaborative nature is a detriment in what we believe is a cut-throat, achievement-oriented environment.
But we are wrong.
Our desire to help people, support people and make them feel good about themselves is exactly why we should step into team leadership positions.
As a woman Achiever working with men Achievers, I found that my best opportunity wasn’t being the team quarterback or wide receiver. There were a lot of men who wanted those positions for the stereotypical personal glory that comes with it. Even though I was a good quarterback, I saw my greater opportunity was in being the team coach. Not only was it a great fit for a woman Achiever, none of the guys wanted to be the coach.
As the coach my job was to create teamwork, develop each team member and design the plays that made us a Team of Achievers. I had to bring together the Active Doers and the Support Doers together into a cohesive and synchronized team. I didn’t fill my teams with A players, just with people who wanted the opportunity to experience being an Achiever and the great feeling that comes with it. Together we racked up a long list of Achievements.
All of our workplaces need to transition to operating through Teams of Achievers but to do that they need women to leave the Support Doer career paths for that of an Achiever. There is a goldmine of opportunity for women in the higher paying career paths of all professions and especially the male-dominated professions that women avoid. We don’t need to compete with the men who all want to be the star quarterback or wide receiver because the coaching positions are wide open. As the coach we then take on the role of the Leader of Achievers and we make a real difference by delivering the feelings pride and self-worth we hoped we could deliver in our low paying support positions.
Empowered Women Lead Others to Achievement
To learn more, watch this YouTube video: