10 Success Tips for Women at Work
These success tips for women at work will help you achieve your career goals, improve your job performance, and boost your self-confidence!
Before the tips, a quip:
“Be different, stand out, and work your butt off,” said Reba McEntire.
That’s success tip number one! For more info on achieving your professional goals, click on Lois Frankel’s Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers. And, read on for Frankel’s success tips for women at work…
10 Success Tips for Women at Work
1. Give yourself permission to move from girlhood to womanhood. Do you sometimes feel like a girl even though you’re a grown woman? Frankel says, “Tell yourself that you are not only allowed, but entitled to act in ways that move you toward goal attainment.” Free yourself to achieve your goals! Take control of your education, professional development, and career choices.
2. Ask for feedback. If you’re concerned about your job performance, ask a trusted colleague for feedback. In Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, Frankel suggests asking an open-ended question, such as: “Tell me what I did in that meeting that helped me or hindered me from achieving my goals.” A success tip for career women is not being afraid of feedback!
3. Know the rules of the game at your workplace. An effective tip for women at work is to know what the spoken and unspoken rules are. For instance, is it taboo to go home before 4 pm? Can budgets be flexed, or must they be strictly adhered to? The more you know which rules can be bent, the more successful you’ll be.
4. Don’t take it personally. If you’re taken to task because of a mistake at work (real or perceived), don’t take it personally. Imagine you’re protected by a Plexiglass shield; you can see out, but negativity and criticism can’t touch you. This success tip for women at work will help you get ahead by encouraging you not to retreat after making a mistake.
5. Build relationships. “If you’re not spending 5% of your day building relationships, you’re doing something wrong,” says Frankel. This is an easy way to be successful at work for women; we’re generally very good at building relationships!
6. Speak up when people delegate inappropriately to you. Learn how to say no and recognize inappropriate delegation at work. Frankel says, ”Practice saying unapologetically, ‘You know, I’d love to help you out with this but I’m just swamped.’ Then stop talking.” For more info, read Tips for Delegating Successfully at Work.
7. Prepare requests in advance. To achieve your career goals, rehearse your requests for new projects, promotions, raises, etc.. “When asking, be direct, straightforward, and accompany each request with two or three legitimate reasons why you should be given it,” writes Frankel.
8. Embrace – don’t avoid – office politics. Office politics, according to Frankel, is simply about going out of your way to help someone and give them what they need. In return, they’ll do the same. Frankel’s success tip for women at work focuses on understanding the quid pro quo of communication and professional relationships.
9. Ask for introductions. Another effective success tip for women at work is to speak up when you want to meet a potential or current client, the president of the company, or the boss’s wife. This involves getting comfortable with asking for referrals, phone numbers, and sources.
10. Don’t be swayed by anger or annoyance. “When people get annoyed or angry with us, it’s often for the purpose of getting us to do what they want. Don’t fall for the ploy,” writes Frankel. To succceed at work, let go of your need to be liked and your fear of confrontation. Let people be annoyed with you!
If you have any thoughts, questions, or success tips for women at work, please comment below!
Comment by Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen on 16 August 2009:
A recent research study shows that career women in leadership positions are more likely to be harrassed than men in leadership positions.
Here’s a bit of the press release, called: “Female Supervisors More Susceptible to Workplace Sexual Harrassment”, from ScienceDaily:
Women who hold supervisory positions are more likely to be sexually harassed at work, according to the first-ever, large-scale longitudinal study to examine workplace power, gender and harassment.
The study, which will be presented at the 104th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, reveals that nearly fifty percent of women supervisors, but only one-third of women who do not supervise others, reported harassment in the workplace. In more conservative models with stringent statistical controls, women supervisors were 137 percent more likely to be harassed than women who did not hold managerial roles. While supervisory status increased the likelihood of harassment among women, it did not significantly impact the likelihood for men.
“This study provides the strongest evidence to date supporting the theory that sexual harassment is less about desire than about control and domination,” said Heather McLaughlin, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota and the study’s primary investigator. “Male co-workers, clients and supervisors seem to be using harassment as an equalizer against women in power.”
If you’re a working woman who wants to move your career forward, a success tip is to be prepared for harrassment. It seems inevitable!