Women’s day came and went on the 8th of March with promises of change and cracking that ambiguous glass ceiling and yet we keep wondering what visible and impactful changes will occur in our workplaces for the rest of the year.

Pondering this question, I thought it would be a good idea to share my own thoughts on a topic that we often talk about – female leadership.

There is so much attention on why women at the top of the ladder at lead corporates, politics, or other organisations are so few and far between.  In the year 2020-21 less than 20% of CEOs in Australia were women though the workforce comprises a 50-50 split between men and women (Australia’s Gender Equality Scorecard | WGEA, n.d.). This is when research shows that between the ages of 25 to 34, 46% of women have obtained bachelor’s degrees while only 36% of men have done the same(Parker, 2021).​

Clearly there is glaring disparity between the workforce composition and the same for high-level positions. Does this mean that women leave the workforce early, or do they simply get stagnated in lower and mid-levels while their male counterparts rise faster and more consistently?

As a woman who has both been in a corporate and an academic career, and then started my own professional practice, I have worked with a diverse group of people both male and female. Over the years I have been lucky enough to learn some standout lessons that has helped me and inspired me to reach further than I thought, and I want to share some with you.

“The road to becoming a leader is long… it’s best to prepare a backpack.”

Here are three key elements I would add to your backpack when you get prepared to be a female leader

1. Purposeful, direction and strategy may matter more than the speed

The old saying “leaders are born not made,” has waxed and waned over the years but I cannot deny that having a strategy to guide yourself along the advancement ladder gives a competitive edge.

When I was a fresh graduate from university, I was fortunate enough to be mentored by a few corporate leaders, who shared their lessons in advancement and helped me map out a mental blueprint for my development. Through our conversations, I saw the possibilities in front of me, and one grain of wisdom was the way they thought about success and advancement.

To my surprise, they did not look at success or advancement in a career ladder taking a sequential, linear approach. They approached it like a game with an intense level of result orientation and purposeful action towards reaching a goal.

A lot of us (women) may argue that a career is not a competition and contributing to the community and enjoying what we are doing matters a lot more to us than the constant and intense pursuit of a goal. One thing we need to be aware of though is that our biological making does not help us much there. Men as hunter-gatherers were biologically made for releasing adrenaline and pursuing targets strategically, whereas women typically nurtured offspring and collectively enjoyed the community and protected the base as carer/collectors. There is beauty in both ways and cultivating and sharing a few treats among the sexes will help us reach our full potential.

When we struggle to balance life and work as carers and givers and then add advancement to this precariously balanced portfolio, we need to be aware that we are in a working environment with strategic, result-oriented counterparts who purposefully work towards advancement. We may not be able to “do it all now” or “have it all” with other demands of life but having a clear map and directions of how to get there mapped in our heads, constantly motivating ourselves and reviewing avenues and alternatives consistently to explore them would definitely help.

2. To get the trophy, you first need to join the competition…

A reason that often comes up when explaining why it takes women longer to advance in the workplace is that many do not believe they are ready. It is common to say that “Women put their hand up for advancement when they are 100% (or more) ready, whereas men do that when they are 50%.”

Some research suggests that extreme prudence, combined with humility and integrity, which leads us to downplay our own position and to communicate conservatively does not work well for our advancement and hence rises to leadership (Gourguechon, n.d.).

Whether the barrier is fear of rejection or failure or expectation of perfectionism, what I now tell myself is that “the first pre-requisite to qualifying is to enter the playground” – so submitting to leadership believing that you are enough and as many, you could figure out the rest along the way is so important.

3. You only get what you ask for

Negotiation – is not something I was comfortable with in the early parts of my career. As a loyal employee, I hated when I had to ask for something explicitly after visibly accomplishing something for the organization, and even more when I had to justify that.

On the contrary, I was truly amazed by how my husband managed a workplace negotiation when he received a competitive job offer. It was a straightforward conversation to talk about his value in the market and the cost for the organization if they lost him and ask their position about increasing his offer. Research also suggests that men are four times more likely than women to ask for a raise—and when women do ask, we typically request 30% less than men do (Women Are Still Not Asking for Pay Rises. Here’s Why, 2018).

If we take the emotion out of the conversation, it finally ends up with the fact that we have a situation, where our manager or the organization is not our opponent, but the counterpart. On one hand, we seek advancement, knowing that we are worthy of it. On the other, the organization likes to have us engaged and motivated. The situation is what we both want to be resolved amicably and gainfully.

Being explicit about what we want and reaching the table of negotiation often (directly or indirectly) and with the correct mindset is definitely an attribute that I would recommend that we put into our backpacks. Leaving the table with more information but nothing else is never a worse outcome than not arriving there at all!

Support along the way matters too.

While more workplaces need to believe in and be ready to welcome female leaders, a lot of us working women have a role to play in saturating the top layers with more of us. While the backpack may need more and more things the higher you go up, the support, rest and accommodation received along the way with an open heart definitely will encourage more and more to take the journey to leadership!

The post 3 Things That Come Handy in Our Backpacks When We (Women) Prepare for Leadership appeared first on Dr Mayuri Wijayasundara.

Today’s consumers are increasingly demanding sustainably produced products — and they’re willing to pay more for such products. Members of Generation Z, in particular, choose brands that are both people- and planet-friendly. Of the consumers from 28 countries surveyed by US-based National Retail Federation last year, 57% were willing to change their purchasing habits to reduce the negative impact on the environment.

Apart from such demand from consumers, organizations have internal reasons to set sustainability goals. The main reasons come down to achieving excellence in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance as a means to increase investor confidence, manage business risks and fulfill an obligation to contribute to the global environmental agenda. Organizations are inclined to set sustainability goals, alongside business goals, to support causes such as mitigating climate change.

But achieving sustainability goals through a set of sustainability professionals is old-school thinking. The new paradigm is to think and do “sustainability” in everything. How organizations can make that happen so that the business is sustainable, consistently and reliably, is something that must be explored.

Critical Questions to ask

First, we need to question the fundamentals of the business, some of which relate to the organization’s purpose and how the purpose is achieved:

1. Does the organization’s purpose fundamentally drill down to shareholder value and wealth creation, or is the purpose bigger and broader?
2. Are the organization’s business KPIs separate from other sustainability performance targets, or are they integrated towards a common goal?
3. Do sustainability professionals operate in a separate business function to drive sustainability goals, or do business and operations drive sustainability-integrated business KPIs?

If the answers to these questions appear to find fault with your organisation’s current approach, it is an indication that the integration of sustainability into your organisation’s functions needs further work.

Who are sustainability leaders?

The US-based Sustainability Leadership Institute defines sustainability leaders as “individuals who are compelled to make a difference by deepening their awareness of themselves in relation to the world around them. In doing so, they adopt new ways of seeing, thinking, and interacting that result in innovative, sustainable solutions.”

In other words, they are employees who are capable of envisioning long-range sustainability outcomes and are able to strategise and deliver them. They operate with the traits of a business leader, yet they look at the world through an added sustainability lens and drive action towards achieving those goals.

The key strategies explained

Here are five factors to explore in order to harness sustainability leadership in organisations and make sure that capability is sourced, developed, enhanced, and retained.

1. Recruitment

The initial step of acquiring organisational talent can be pivotal to assuring that the key ingredients of sustainability leadership are given due attention during hiring.

Looking for attributes of sustainability leadership during candidate assessment could increase the likelihood of recruiting the right leaders to drive the business agenda and to ensure that nurturing sustainability skills is a possibility.

What are some of the basic aspects to look for in a sustainability leader? Russell Reynolds Associates, a recruitment firm, suggests a few aspects that can be assessed through open-ended questions and situational responses in candidate screening.

• Sustainability mindset, which is about the candidate’s ability to think with a broader purpose and maintain a continuous drive related to the purpose.
• Systems thinking, which is the intellectual ability to see the bigger picture.
• Relationship building, which is about the understanding of and the ability to relate to a diverse environment.

The human resources function could also incorporate the organisation’s specific sustainability awareness, as well as the organisation’s values, practices, and expectations, into the onboarding process once a candidate is hired.

2. Training

It is important to understand that sustainability leadership is an attribute that needs to be present in all organisational and business leaders, not just those in sustainability functions. A continual process of cross-skilling, upskilling, and re-skilling is needed to get everyone thinking and working toward the sustainability goals. This is an investment organisations need to be willing to make to keep the skill levels up to date and ready to be applied in practice.

Ensuring that individual learning and development plans capture the skills gaps is a formal way to ensure that skills development can be organised through training, exchanges, secondments, or continuing professional development (CPD) schemes. While plans could be put in place to acquire those skills, assessing the effectiveness of these trainings is also crucial. This can be done as a part of annual performance reviews of employees.

3. Integration

Integrating sustainability into daily business practice is the true value of sustainability leadership, but this is also the biggest challenge.

Business functions will need to modify their business as usual to include a sustainability aspect, and this has to begin with strategy. Setting long-term plans, goals, and targets to achieve improved business performance, while moving to another level with sustainability performance, is not only necessary but also crucial. One of the common examples among businesses is to have a set of operational improvements or projects to reduce carbon emissions. Other sustainability practices are substituting raw materials, factoring inputs for production with ethically sourced material, and replacing traditional raw material with recycled or recovered content while assuring product quality standards and adopting product packaging designed to be regenerative after use.

Developing expertise to carry out these strategic changes could be daunting for businesses. This specialized expertise can be sourced externally at first, but the long-term goal should be to build knowledge and a skill base within the organization. This is achieved through making domain/functional expertise and specialized sustainability skills transferrable across business units and projects. Setting new career paths and professional development goals that encourage multi-skilling and cross-skilling is a critical aspect to consider in pursuing this.

4. Appraisal

The motivation for action of the general workforce is closely linked to what a performance management system says in a typical organization.

Having a clear statement on what performance means by elaborating requirements that capture sustainability elements would spotlight its importance to the organization. This means stating what actions are preferred and what behaviors are encouraged, and clearly communicating these expectations. As an example, a procurement professional should still be rewarded during his or her performance review for choosing an ethically sourced product, even though procurement cost could be affected, and a construction project manager who chooses to use recycled material and reduces material cost could be rewarded for initiation, innovation, and cost reduction.

The performance criteria could be action-driven, outcome-driven, or impact-driven, based on the seniority of positions. Performing the right actions could make a difference for frontline staff in their performance review, while the strategic-level managers can claim rewards for the visible impact they created.

Conversations about career progression need to involve discussion of how leadership attributes should involve different levels of responsibility to drive sustainability principles.

5. Incentives

The integration will not be complete without appraising those who do well in their specific decisions, actions, and behaviours that promote the sustainability agenda of the organisation.

Organizations can reward employees who attempt to incorporate sustainability into business decisions. An example of this is a procurement approach referred to as “procurement for innovation”, where the organisational objective to encourage innovation is incentivized through suppliers, by having sustainability thinking incorporated in the supplier selection criteria. This approach is practised widely in the UK for encouraging sustainable procurement by public organizations.

Welcoming initiatives and projects towards sustainability and rewarding and incentivizing them through career advancement, recognition, or monetary rewards would be another desirable aspect. Encouraging employee-initiated innovation, especially from non-sustainability-oriented functions, and rewarding such innovative ideas would be a great way to go.

How to know whether you are there yet

During this progressive path to integrate sustainability aspects, the idea is to embed sustainability into the business in a way that no one feels they are doing something out of their job scope. In such an organization, an innovation that achieves sustainability outcomes is encouraged, appreciated, and rewarded. This is an intermediate landing that organizations should aim to achieve.

A mark of success is to have a highly skilled and enterprising set of organizational professionals who are able to envision sustainability outcomes. This can only be achieved by building employees’ capacity and empowering them to act as leaders to drive sustainability in the long run.

The post 5 Key Strategies To Embed Sustainability Leadership appeared first on Dr Mayuri Wijayasundara.

Photo by John Fornander on Unsplash

Novak Djokovic, the Grand Slam champion holding No. 1 position in tennis globally, recently had the most unexpected encounter in the US Open. Accidentally hitting a line judge with a ball, he was disqualified from the tournament, leaving an empty spot for a new champion to emerge.

Why Novak Djokovic is being cited as an example is not because of how he faced this rare occurrence, but because of an attribute he is famous for in playing long and hard games of tennis to win 17 Grand Slam champions to be #1 in the world.

He is known as a person who plays extremely well in defence.

He is steadfast, patient and conscious in the game even when his opponent in is in the lead, and is indifferent to who has the lead when it comes down to it.

Well is that something difficult to do and is it a match-winning attribute?

As someone who’s been in the area, I’d have to wholeheartedly agree.

When loss is staring you in the face, and as the gap starts widening at a critical part of the game, it is extremely hard to not to shift to the mindset of a ‘loser’. Loosing causes us to panic, to be aggressive and at times to be irrational. These are non-other than responses to realising defeat and preparing to fight for survival, and this is what our million-year old brain gets us to do as humans.

Yet, don’t we have times when we actually look back that we realise the reason why we lost was not that very moment we had lost, but getting to that mindset of losing, which led to subsequent actions?

So how do we keep a winning mindset when we come across temporary failure?

Here are some tips, that I would suggest, but these are not for winning a game or a project, which has a definite start and an end, but to win your own game of life (I agree with Simon Sinek, who says that sports analogies are not the best for general leadership examples, where you intend to influence as a leader is a much longer time horizon).

1. Prepare for winning (and for loosing temporarily)

Visualisation with vivid mental pictures of what you want to have or where you want to be at is a known technique to prepare yourself to win. You create a mental blueprint of whatever you achieve in reality before you actually have it. If you have a mental blueprint of your winning, do acknowledge the small detailed moments where you are on the losing side. Pass that moment with grace and the confidence with a vision to win. When you actually face it, it would help you remind yourself that this loss is only a part of a winning game.

2. Acknowledge it as a moment (and embrace it)

“Yesterday was history, tomorrow’s a mystery and today is a gift” is a famous saying we have heard. The fundamental truth behind this phrase is that NOW is the only moment we have control of. When failure hits us, we get to that uncomfortable moment, a moment that we like to pass sooner than later. We dread to be in there and seek to get out of it. Yet the attitude to face it boldly does not come from rejecting it but rather accepting it and being indifferent to it. In Buddhism the way to acknowledge it, is by admitting ‘this too shall pass’, a moment of discomfort, that we do not need to fight against, but work through to pass. Detaching yourself from the moment of failure and seeing it as a moment of action, rather than a moment of judgement is what would make a difference.

The more we are able to not to be emotional about it, the better we will be in managing the typical animal response of panic, which causes a flow of adrenaline and vice versa. Adrenaline provides an impactful and quick survival response of fight or flight, when what we actually want is a rational response of strategy and action.

3. Push back the protective response and instincts (and keep the focus)

The moment you get to the loosing mentality, you start to make visual pictures of excuses, blaming, lamenting and mourning. None of these are useful, though they keep coming up as survival responses.

Instead, keep visualising about how you speak about this moment as a winner, to a colleague to a family member or to your grandchildren. How grave and critical it was, but how you turned it around, how things changed from this point onwards and what you remember when you look back.

4. Accept that you are enough without it (and do that with grace)

We do not need every victory that comes across our way. There are times that we are better off, when we let something go to have a bigger victory. If there is a feeling of abundance and sufficiency that gives the sense of being enough with or without a temporary victory, that gives us the confidence to know that passing this point unharmed (or with least damage) is good enough to have success elsewhere.

Being grateful to what we are, and what we have, with or without the victory you are trying to achieve, provides that fulfilment, in order to not get emotionally overwhelmed with failure. It is not telling that ‘failure is ok, so you do not need to strive to achieve’. Rather, it’s telling that ‘failing this one does not make myself a failure, as there are many wins without it, which makes me a winner anyway’.

One’s mind is such a delicate and critical thing to keep intact and we find that it is not the circumstances who create winners and leaders, but rather how one handles those moments – moments of truth and moments of failure. That’s what differentiates those who win – especially long and hard games in life.

The post How do you play well when you are losing? appeared first on Dr Mayuri Wijayasundara.