Be Business Savvy - Create a Career that Soars‪!‬ Susan Colantuono

 

TLDR: Use preparatory language to increase your chances of being heard and gaining the respect you deserve. Preparatory language is a comment made before the important comment. It is designed to draw attention to you so that you have gained attention before making your important point.

"I am unheard in meetings. The men especially talk over me, interrupt or restate - minutes later - the very point I made."
This is one of the most common complaints that I hear from women - especially those who work on predominantly male teams. And while this podcast won't solve the problem, I am going to give you tips for how to deal with it.

The Problem
There are two reasons why the podcast won't solve the problem.


The first is that the mindsets of men  make it less likely for them to listen to us can't be addressed by us at all. They have to be dealt with by the men themselves.
The second is, if you historically haven't had anything of value to share, or don't in the moment have anything of value to share, even these tips will make it difficult for you to be heard, which is why of course I make a pitch for you to develop your business financial and strategic acumen.

So let's assume that your suggestions and ideas in the past and in the present are worthy of attention.A most valuable tip that I can share with you about increasing your chances of being heard, is to use what a mentor of mine called preparatory language. And here's why.

The Value of Preparatory Language
A husband and wife research team at the University of Pennsylvania, discovered that when men are in boring meetings, their minds turn much more frequently (than do women's) to what I call the battlefield or the bedroom. Men are having thoughts about aggression or sex, which means that they aren't even listening when we pop into a conversation, especially one that hasn't grabbed their rapt attention, and spill our brilliant comment right away. instead, we need to use preparatory language to grab their attention before we add our brilliance to the conversation.

Men are pretty skilled at doing this. You'll hear them make comments like,


"As we all know."
"As I've said in prior meetings."
"People generally agree."

These are examples of preparatory language. They say nothing, but they grab attention to the speaker.So preparatory language is a comment made before the important comment. It is designed to draw attention to you before you make your comment.

One of the most brilliant practitioners of this that I've ever known, not only uses preparatory language, but she personalizes them. Here are some examples that you can try out yourself.

Preparatory Language in Action
Let's say your colleague Rakesh made an important point a few minutes ago, and you want to amplify it and add to it. So you could say something like,

"I think the comment that Rakesh made a few minutes ago was important to our discussion. I want to add to what he said, and this is especially of interest to you, Jack."

You've not only taken the floor and drawn attention to you, but you have positively engaged, both Rakesh and Jack.Let's say you have a different viewpoint from Lars. You might use preparatory language like this.

"Speaking of the impact on our expense goals for this quarter, I have a slightly different take from what Lars said. So let me explain how my broader idea about how to meet our expense targets.

If you're uncomfortable calling out the fact that you have a different point of view than Lars, you could say to the meeting leader - let's assume his name is Salvi.

"Salvi, I would like to cycle back to an earlier point about hitting our expense targets for the quarter. I have three suggestions that haven't been made yet." And then you lay out the three.

In each case, the point is to draw attention to you and to do that by making a connection with at least one other person in the conversation.

Let's Recap

Women are less likely to be heard in meetings for a host of reasons. One of th

TLDR: Scroll down to the Recap to read the summarized career advice from a woman who was a pioneer in engineering and IT.

Susan: Good morning from beautiful Epona Dressage Center outside of Carmona, Spain, where I have spent the week with some amazing women.

This morning I'm speaking with Wendy McLeod. I was struck by Wendy's career history because she was in the forefront and cutting edge of women in engineering and in IT. So how did you move into IT? First, let me say one thing about that. Data indicates that, unlike today, there were many women who got into IT in the seventies and eighties. How did you make that transition and what was that like?

Wendy: It was in the late eighties and I graduated from university in 1981. Then I went to work in engineering - you have to apprentice for two years and then you become a professional engineer in Canada.

I apprenticed for two years, and then I was a civil engineer out in Alberta and after three or four years I was starting to get antsy and I didn't really know why.

Then in the 80s they brought out a new wood code. I looked at the old wood code, which was from 1918.  And I thought, "It took them 70 years to figure out that wood is actually as strong as we've been using!?" Then I looked around and I thought, what innovations have there been in the last five years?  Oh, there was a new concrete additive that made the concrete set faster. And I realized, there's not enough change for me. There's not enough change.

They had just brought out desktop computers like the IBM PC personal desktop computer that really caught on and I thought, well, that's kind of neat. So I started to program that and I got into it more and more. And I was able to actually turn it into an IT job because when I was at university I would take computer subjects to bring my marks up.  

Susan: Let's fast forward to the end of your career because it's fascinating to me.  You progressed dynamically at HSBC and had a tremendous scope of responsibility HSBC.

Wendy: HSBC is very proud of their talent and they work very hard to to promote their talent. At least they did when, when I was there. I actually was in charge of operations, which is the operational work, not the computing work. I was responsible for South America, Central America, and North America.I was definitely stepping outside my comfort zone to do that.

Of course I wanted to automate everything.

Susan:  Did you get a chance to automate?

Wendy:  Yes, I did, but you kind of have to clean up the processes first.  And that is a huge job in South America, because those banks were acquired more recently and processes were not standardized at all, so it would be pointless trying to computerize. It was quite a contrast from North America.

Susan: And you had how many people?

Wendy: I had 5,000 who rolled up to me, but in HSBC you also had two bosses. So you had an in country boss and you had a regional or a global boss who was trying to promote consistency. Which is hard for newly acquired countries.

I found Brazil particularly fascinating because they had been sort of isolated for so many years with their dictatorships and had invented everything themselves within their own country. They had their own satellite system and they really hadn't been exposed that much, even though it was 15, 20 years on, to connecting with the world, but they're very connecty type people.They like to, they like to connect.  And I found it fascinating that they had, they were so close to having that isolated setup where you have to just rely on yourselves.  Something to be said about that, but yeah, not functional in a global, global institution.  Yeah.

Susan: So you made a comment to me when I first met you that gave me pause in a very positive way. Can you remember and restate it?

Wendy: Yeah, Susan was asking me what I missed most about that job.

Susan: Because you've, you retired right at COVID.

Wendy: I retired right at COVID. What I enjoyed most ab

Leadership Differs by Levels - Get the Table: https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/download-leadership-differs-by-levels

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

TL;DL: As you move into new opportunities there are things you leave behind, there are things you take with you and things you have to add. By "things" I mean: skill sets, perspectives, identity.  You leave "things" behind to create bandwidth for adding what you need to succeed in the new position.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As some of you know, I spend part of my year in Puerto Rico and part of my year on the mainland. Tomorrow I'm headed back to the mainland.That means I'm in the midst of my leaving and going decisions.What do I leave behind?And what do I take when I go?

What?
You might be wondering, what the heck does this have to do with women's career advancement?

Well, it specifically ties to career progression, whether you're moving up the ladder or whether you're moving laterally. Whenever you move, there are things that are important to leave behind and things that are important to take with you.So let's talk about  leaving  and going. The implications for career moves are most easily understood in the context of advancement.  But they will also translate into lateral opportunities that require you to expand your skill set in order to be successful.

From Individual Contributor to Supervisor
When you make the transition from individual contributor to supervisor, what you leave behind is the doing. Because as a supervisor, your main responsibility is to equip, empower and enable a collection of individual contributors who are doing the doing.

To leave behind the doing is very hard because it's comfortable and it's what you're known for, but you must because leave it. It's the only way to meet the requirement that you add to your skill set of doing, the skill sets for equipping and empowering the individual contributors who report to you to be as successful or even more successful than you were.

This involves interpersonal and team skills that you didn't have to demonstrate or utilize as an individual contributor. For example, you add the capabilities of coaching, training, giving feedback, aligning the team to key outcomes, delivering progress measures and you might be adding project management, et cetera.

In order to create the bandwidth for adding those new skills, you're leaving behind the doing.  As you go into your new position, you are taking with you the knowledge about the doing in order that you can equip and enable and empower your reporting team members.

From Supervisor to Manager
When you make the transition from supervisor to manager, it most often means that you have a team of supervisors reporting to you.  So what do you leave behind?  You leave behind the  equipping, enabling and empowering of individual contributors in order to equip, empower and enable the success of your reporting supervisors.This is different than doing your supervisory work with individual contributors, because you are no longer interacting with individual contributors.  You are Interacting with supervisors whose leadership skills need to be developed. 


You need to make sure that they have the interpersonal and team skills required to motivate their teams.
You need to make sure they have the business savvy required to align their teams to the organization.
The metrics by which their performance is measured will be different than the metrics by which individual contributors performance is measured. 

You're adding layers of capability. Now you're beginning to equip, empower and enable leadership skills, not the doing.You do that by leaving behind time spent working with individual contributors. Again, it's hard to do.  You grew comfortable and you were successful supervising individual contributors. If not, you wouldn't have earned this new opportunity.And On...

And so it goes as you progress up the organization.The leaving and the going. What you leave beh

TLDL: Instead of covering over your flame of confidence, try these 5 ways to give it oxygen! (scan the headings for the 5 tips).

This morning I answered a LinkedIn message from a woman who wanted to know how to deal with "learned" lack of confidence due to the toxic work culture she lived in. She said this was important because she had to deal, and even sometimes partner, with one of the people who created that toxic culture.Her question gave me pause because I thought about that word learned, especially because she had mentioned that she had a flame of confidence still burning in her.

And I had this insight. Most of us have a flame of confidence that is either tamped down or brightly shining depending on the layers of protection that we place upon or around it.

 

1. Ask This Question
And it made me think of this question that my dear friend and colleague, Wendy Hanson, asked me. She asked,

"What would you do if you were brave?"Which I think is a really good question to ask in a situation where you want to reclaim your confidence and use it to empower an action or a statement.But there were two other questions that came to mind about her question.


What's the nature of the toxicity? Being ignored is different than being assaulted and I would offer different advice in each situation.
The second made me think of a situation I encountered early in my career. A colleague instigated  a change in the structure of our department that ended up with me reporting to him. If I had known then what I know now, I would have realized that he had  greater strategic acumen than I. But at the time I had absolutely no framework to understand that it was his strategic acumen that got him to get our boss to agree to the change. At the time I believed he was acting out of malice.

Which leads me to the second tip.

2. Learn What You Can
One of the pieces of advice that I gave this woman was to look and see what she could learn from this man who she described as socially adept, charismatic and also very good at managing up.

Being socially adept and managing up well are skills that can be learned. Not the charismatic thing because charisma is in the eyes of the beholders.

Of course, I wouldn't want her to emulate the things that caused her to feel put down and shut down, but the other two attributes, she could learn from him and then deploy in order to be more successful at putting her ideas forth and take off some of those layers of protection.

There were three other tips that I wanted to give her, but needed more feedback on.


Confront bias in an educational way.
Use her business savvy.
Use assertiveness skills, e.g. broken record.

Here is a generic example of each of them.

 

3. Confront Bias in an Educational Way
Let's say she wants to present an idea or make a recommendation that a process be modified. While in the middle of making her pitch, she gets talked over, or what some of my colleagues call "manterrupted."

If she wanted to call out bias in an educated way, she could say,

"Hey, Bob, thanks for  agreeing with or building on my suggestion. It happens quite frequently to women that  the ideas that they begin talking about are never finished  because someone jumps in. So I'd like to build on what you just said, or add to what you just said, or put a different spin on what you just said, so I can finish my thought"

Not terribly confrontational and it could be done in private.

 

4. Use Business Savvy
When it comes to using Business Savvy, it could be instead of starting out saying, "Oh, I'd like to change this process in this way. 

Try saying, "Hey! Chris and the rest of the team, I know that our goal is to increase margin for this  product. And one way that we can do that is..." Then put forward the process change.

5. Use Assertiveness Techniques
To use assertiveness, specifically the "broken record" technique, it would look like this:She puts forth her idea for the process change. She gets interrupted.  She s

Good morning from the sleepy little village of El Rompido in Andalusia, Spain. About as close to the Portuguese border as I could be. 

This morning I'm musing on the consciousness of successful women about having developed business, financial and strategic acumen.

They Just Don't See It
I have interviewed dozens of women CEOs, some from Fortune 500 companies, And even more women who hold senior positions - mostly in  Fortune 500 or Global 1000 companies.

When I've asked them, "What did you do? Or how did it happen? Or what did it take for you to develop Business Savvy (meaning business  financial and strategic acumen)? it has consistently surprised me that they have difficulty answering that question. Because it's totally outside their frame of reference about what it takes to succeed in business.They will often fall back to answers like, "Well, I achieved my success because I developed an extensive network," or  "Because I relied on my strong team members." Occasionally, they will talk about having developed an in depth understanding of a function - for example, sales.

Rarely do they talk about having received mentorship, or coaching, or education or experiences that help them gain a deeper understanding of the business, where it was headed and their role in taking it there, or a deeper understanding of the financials beyond the budget they managed.  Some will occasionally talk about gaining experience managing a budget. And virtually none of them talk about any concrete experiences or exposure that help them develop strategic acumen.

Clearly in the case of the Fortune 500 women CEOs I've interviewed and whose books I've read, they have all three. They could not have gotten to the top without being known for having business, financial, and strategic acumen.I'm having a hard time understanding why they can't easily my question. The only explanation I can attach to this is the fact that they have bought into the incomplete conventional wisdom about what it takes to be a leader, which is, you have to be a wonderful person with excellent interpersonal and team skills, and you have to have a network of people inside and outside of the organization.

Why You Must See It
It continues to be my mission in life to expand your understanding of what it takes to be successful inside of organizations, to build far beyond the personal greatness aspects and the engaging others aspects  and to hone in on the kinds of knowledge and experiences you also need to be recognized as a partner in the business and to be seen as a viable candidate for advancement.So, here's the foundation. 


First of all, you have to get your results. If you don't get results, you aren't even on the table as a prospect or as a candidate.
You have to show that you have business, financial and strategic acumen appropriate to your level. All of that looks different as you move up inside the organization. And in a field of candidates where everyone is there because they've achieved results, the first disqualifier would be if you aren't seen as having business, financial, and strategic acumen,  then you're off the table.
If you are known for Business Savvy, then your team and interpersonal skills and your personal attributes will become the differentiators as to whether you move ahead.

The implications of this are inside your organization when you're being considered for promotion is that you have to consistently develop your leadership brand. If you've taken Build Business Acumen, you know that I have very strong and specific clarity about what a leadership brand is and isn't.

What this means if you're applying for positions outside of your organization is you have to put your business impact - concrete and measurable - and demonstrations of your business, financial, and strategic acumen, top of mind in your resume, cover letter, and well augmented by proven examples of your interpersonal and team skills.

Let's Recap
There are four things that will repr

Stop Accepting the Blame
Good morning from the sleepy little village of El Rompido in Andalusia, Spain. This morning (Oct '23), for the first time in about 10 days, I scrolled through my homepage on LinkedIn and there were two bits of research that caught my eye.

One was the latest McKinsey and Lean In study. The other was a study about the rates at which United States Supreme Court justices interrupt women versus men attorneys who are presenting oral arguments.What struck me about the McKinsey and Lean In Study was that it was just more and more of the same thing - research that I've been reading for over 50 years.And I noticed again, with increasing anger on my part, how the research is framed as a woman's problem. This was brought into stark relief in comparison to the study about Supreme Court justices interrupting women attorneys (as opposed to the problem with women arguing at the Supreme Court). 

So, many, many studies frame problems with a focus on us.


Women are underpaid.
Women are represented in fewer numbers as you go up the corporate ladder.
Women experience microaggressions. And don't get me started on that.

None of these problems is new. Progress has changed only the slightest bit in 50 years. And part of the reason for that is this framing.While, yes, there may be women who aren't ambitious and lack confidence, the real cause of these problems is the actions that managers take.  And the higher you go in organizations, more accurately, the actions that male managers take. 


Women don't experience microaggression. Managers cause aggressions, micro and macro, through their sexist, misogynistic and entitled mindsets.
There isn't a broken rung for women. Managers break the rung through their mindsets about women

Which is why, even though it was depressing, and certainly predictable, the study about Supreme Court justices was incredibly refreshing.We need more studies that focus on the patterns of behaviors of managers. Especially those behaviors that end up keeping women underpaid in relation to their male counterparts  and  further down the career ladders. For example,


Studies that tell us what percentage of times male managers advocate for equal pay for their reporting women. 
We need to know the numbers of times that  managers give jobs to men because they think a mother wouldn't want to travel or relocate. Even today as it's becoming less and less  necessary for extensive travel or relocation.
We need to know and put responsibility on managers for making decisions like these instead of focusing on women as being defective or the problem.

And yes, it's very difficult to gather this kind of information. So in lieu of that, studies that present data on the wage inequities that exist or on the uneven career paths for women and men need to put responsibility for solving the problems front and center - where it actually resides -  in the decisions made by managers.

What's a Woman to Do?
I don't know exactly how to derive guidance for you. from this mini rant this morning except to say this: everything in the literature wants you to believe that:


You are the problem,
You aren't confident enough. (Maybe even in my case that you don't sufficiently demonstrate  your business, financial and strategic acumen.)
Being a mother is a career barrier.

And I want to say to you, no, that is not true.

(Although if you don't have business, financial and strategic acumen, your career will definitely stall.)

Anyway, the fact of the matter is, if you aren't advancing at the rate that you believe is appropriate, it's due to the decisions of managers around you and above you.And you may actually, as so many women have, get a better break if you move to another organization.

Let's Recap

Career research on women's status in organizations tends to focus on the problems with women, when the focus would be better placed on the actions of managers. 
And if you feel like you aren't progressing, that you've taken ev