Success

Scroll Forward In Your Palm Pilots…

11/25/2017 by Kat 66 Comments

2018 Update: This article was originally published on Nov. 25, 2013. If you originally commented, please update below your original comment where you are NOW vs where you wanted to be!

Where do you think you’ll be in five years? TEN years? How do you think gender issues will affect your journey?

The NYT recently looked up some of the women profiled in a 2001 article, “Great Expectations” — in the original article, it interviewed new female associates at BigLaw firm Debevoise & Plimpton and asked,

Do the new female associates expect to see themselves making partner in greater numbers than their predecessors? Here, 17 of them scroll forward on their Palm Pilots and try to predict, while 4 veterans look back on what it took and speculate about the former colleagues who followed a different path.

The more recent article/documentary, “Great Expectations for Female Lawyers,” looked up several of the women profiled and found that many had not accomplished their original goals, many pondering whether the gender gap had an impact on them.

So I’m going to do something fairly ambitious today: I’m going to ask you guys to scroll forward in YOUR Palm Pilots (tee hee) and tell me: where do you want/think you’ll be in five years — and in ten years? What do you think the major challenges are that you’ll encounter? How much do you think gender issues will play into your success or failure? I’d love to ask that everyone comment with an email address in the address field — I’ll keep your emails private but I’d love to be able to come back to this post in five years (or ten years, God willing) and email a few of you to see where you are, how it shook out. (This is the ambitious part!) (Of course all email addresses will be held in confidence, in keeping with The Corporette® Privacy Policy.)

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Filed Under: Career, Family Planning, Happiness, Lifestyle, Success

How to Deal with Not Making Partner: Reader Advice

10/26/2017 by Kate Antoniades 16 Comments

Readers who have been there: What’s your advice to other attorneys on how to deal with not making partner? Reader E recently asked:

I was wondering if you could do a post on not making partner. I’m a sixth year at a large firm, and while I’m not being pushed out the door, my understanding is that partnership is not in the cards, either. On the one hand, this is okay. I never really wanted to make partner, and I can’t say I’m passionate about my job. On the other, ouch! I’ve seen posts about this in the comments, and I thought it might be nice to round them up in one place.

Great idea, Reader E. We haven’t devoted a post to the situation of not making partner, so let’s talk about it today. Here’s one way to look at a situation like this: When this happens to you, you may feel like you’re hanging by a thread — without anyone out there ready to catch you — but really, it can be the beginning of a great new adventure (and in fact it’s part of the adventure … just not the one you had anticipated or hoped for). As one Corporette reader once wrote in response to a young attorney who was worried about her low hours, “The firm that didn’t like me just wasn’t a good personality fit for me. At the time it was really demoralizing, but being pushed out of that firm was the best thing for my career because I found my wheelhouse at the next place.”

We’ve searched our comment threads and have found a good number of discussions about not making partner, deciding whether you even want to be partner, feeling like you’re getting pushed out at your firm, and regretting related career decisions you’ve made (or currently making decisions that may affect your chances to make partner). Do you remember, or have you bookmarked, other helpful comment threads along these lines? If this has happened to you, what advice did you receive from friends and colleagues on how to deal with not making partner?

Here are some of the best reader discussions and advice:

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Filed Under: Career, Success, Transitions Tagged With: posts

Resolutions for 2017 – What Are Yours?

01/03/2017 by Kat 79 Comments

Resolutions: Do you do ’em? We talked last year about how some people have a resolution theme instead of a list (I had to read my post to remember that “hungry” was my resolution — sad!), but I think this year I’m back to a simple list of things, all aimed at finally losing the baby weight and trying to grow my business.

Like I did last year, I thought I’d round up some of our posts that might help you with popular resolutions, like looking more polished, moving more, growing your career, and more. Ladies, what are your resolutions for 2017? How did you do on your resolutions from 2016? Did anyone have any breakthroughs that you’d care to share?

Look More Polished

Appreciate More, Stress Less

Executive Presence for Women Leaders

11/03/2016 by Kate Antoniades 19 Comments

How would you define “executive presence,” particularly for women? Have you worked to build your executive presence? What are your best executive presence tips? Here are some qualities of women with executive presence that Corporette readers have mentioned during conversations that have taken place in the comments:

having a “cool, calm, and commanding” presence
being a skilled public speaker
appearing put-together (clothes fit well, hair is neatly styled, etc.)
seeming “knowledgeable but not a know-it-all”
staying cool in a crisis
showing confidence
having an attitude of “the buck stops with me”

Earlier this year, we discussed new research that showed that looking “put-together” and exhibiting “good grooming” can boost women’s salaries (even more so than being considered attractive), and a couple of years ago we talked about a study that stated wearing more makeup makes women look more competent. Today we’ll go beyond that to take a closer look at executive presence and what it means for women leaders at work. (In the past, we’ve shared posts on imposter syndrome, the difference between confidence and arrogance, being taken seriously when you look young, and books and resources to help you become a leader and a better manager. We’ve also discussed the book The Confidence Code.)

According to research from Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the founder and CEO of the Center for Talent Innovation, executive presence is composed of “how you act (otherwise known as gravitas, the most important quality), how you communicate, and how you look.” A 2013 Business Insider article describes it with 7 Cs: composure, connection, charisma, confidence, credibility, clarity, and conciseness. Hewlett (whose book we link to below) says that executive presence “accounts for as much as 28 percent of a woman’s success” (!).

These definitions sound straightforward enough, but cultivating executive presence requires women to walk a very fine line, thanks to the maddening contradictory messages we receive about how to act at work. You know: If you don’t ask for a raise, you’re blamed for the gender wage gap, but if you ask for a raise, you’re viewed as “greedy, demanding or just not very nice.” If you act with confidence and strength, you’re “too aggressive” or “a bitch”; if you don’t appear assertive enough, your behavior is interpreted as weakness. (As social psychologist Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson puts it, the typical dichotomy for women is “competent and cold — that’s the bitch — or warm and incompetent — the doormat who no one takes seriously.”) Of course, this predicament extends to physical appearances, too; research shows that women with “unkempt nails” lose executive-presence points but that those with “overly done” nails are also viewed negatively. Faced with this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” minefield, some women are paying $2,000 to $5,000 to attend special workshops on executive presence.

Putting all of that aside for a moment, here are a few concrete tips on exhibiting executive presence at work:

Wear Makeup, Increase Your Salary?

05/26/2016 by Corporette Staff

“How a Little Lipstick Could Add Thousands To Your Paycheck” — that’s the title of a recent Fortune article reporting on a new study. Anyone else feeling a little stabby? We thought we’d take a closer look at the research and discuss it here. Some questions to consider at the outset: Do you agree that “good grooming” affects your salary and career success? Do you think there are other correlations at play (e.g., women who make more have more money to spend on grooming, or successful women are more organized to remember to schedule things like regular haircuts and drycleaning)?

So, the study: Last week, Fortune reported on some research about the effects of looking “put together” at work. Two sociologists found a new way of crunching data from a study that looked at how people’s ratings on attractiveness and grooming compared to their income levels. “Grooming” in this case meant how “put together” they looked, which included makeup for women. Their analysis revealed that for women, “grooming was actually more important than looks when it came to earnings.” Men’s grooming affected their salaries to a lesser extent, while men’s and women’s salaries got the same boost from being considered attractive. The sociologists found that “[A] well-groomed woman of average attractiveness makes about $6,000 more annually than an average-looking, averagely-groomed woman. She also makes about $4,000 more than her better-looking, but less put-together coworker.” Researchers saw this as a positive, concluding, “[t]he big takeaway here is that people can capture most of the attractiveness premium [through putting effort into their appearance]… It’s not just what you’re born with.”

Job Hopping: Yea or Nay?

05/19/2016 by Kate Antoniades

Ladies, let’s talk about job hopping: Do you view it as the only way to get ahead? Do you worry about being viewed negatively if you’ve had too many jobs in too short a time? What do you think is the minimum time to stay in one job?

In the recent past, job hopping was universally seen as negative. It was said to make employers question your commitment and reliability, and job hunters were often advised not to include short-term positions on their resumes and to stay a certain length of time at jobs they hated to avoid tarnishing their employment history.

The GenXers and Baby Boomers among us — especially those with parents who stayed at one company for their entire careers (can you imagine that today?) — may still have a negative impression of frequent job changers. In the last few years, though, the news has been full of headlines reflecting an evolution in how short-term jobs are viewed. Articles that wonder if job hopping is “losing its negative stigma” or “losing its bad rap” and those that give tips on how to change jobs “strategically” are just a few examples. While job hopping isn’t exactly welcomed by employers, surveys and studies have shown a change in attitudes, especially among Millennials, about switching jobs more frequently. Check out these representative stats:

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Filed Under: Career, Changing Careers, Interviewing, Job Hunting, Professionalism, Success, Transitions Tagged With: job hopping, posts