Welcome to the Stop Sabotaging Your Success podcast, episode twenty-one. I’m your host, Cindy Esliger. This is the podcast focusing on what we can do to take control of our careers and overcome the inevitable barriers to success that we encounter along the way. 

We’ve been conditioned to believe that success is getting a seat at the table. I believed it. It was my goal for many years. In securing my place at this mythical table, I was going to change the industry and make my mark. But it wasn’t until I was seated at that table that I realized that there was much more to this. 

In this episode, we’ll get into the touchy subject of gender equality. Now this is about much more than just the workplace. This is bigger than what we can tackle on our own. Getting a seat at the table isn’t the end goal, it’s just the beginning. 

There are four things that we can do once we get a seat at the table to help everyone be encouraged and empowered, to do more great work. But first we need to understand that hard work is not enough. Don’t get me wrong. Hard work is necessary, but it has a limit on its return on investment.

You have to be strategic about your time and your energy, and you have to be clear about the direction you want to go and what will help you get there. Advancement is not guaranteed, nor is it based on demonstrated achievement. There was so much more subjectivity in the career game. 

The time for hard work is especially important early in your career, perhaps in the first three to five years after university, when you’re establishing yourself and building your professional brand. But once you’ve established yourself as a professional, you need to reevaluate your career plan and start being more deliberate and start using many other tactics to ensure your success. 

For those of us who have been around a while, we might’ve been able to navigate those early years with ease. Because at this stage you are a worker bee and your hard work will separate you from the pack and allow you to progress quickly.

Where we start to lose traction is when we start hitting the managerial level, when you become a supervisor, because this is the first place where hard work alone is no longer the only requirement or even a major determining factor for promotion. Your responsibilities shift from being responsible for just yourself and the quality of the work that you do, to being responsible for getting much more work done with the help of a team. No one tells us this piece of pivotal information in advance. 

When we get past the early career stage, most of us have no idea what to do next, or that you need a completely different skillset in order to effectively manage people. We get to the end of our checklist. We’ve gone to school, we got a good job and we’ve worked hard. And it’s like,

now what? We don’t know what we want to do next. We want to progress, but we don’t know where. So it’s harder to make the right moves in order to get where we want to go. 

Our parents were not in a place to help us with these experiences. It was a different world when you were hired into a company and shepherded through the ranks, because you were signing on to be there for your entire career. Now you’re lucky if anyone takes you under their wing to groom you for what might come next. 

When you hit this point in your career, it’s time to develop your own strategic career plan. And I can help you with that, if you’re interested. 

Getting a seat at the table isn’t enough. But getting that seat at the table does matter. Diversity of thought has never been more relevant. Being able to share your ideas is both important for your success and important for the company. As a whole, being in the room provides you with much needed exposure, both you being part of the action, as well as the visibility of them seeing you. 

But being in the room doesn’t guarantee people will appreciate your perspective, or even really listen to anything that you have to say. For most of us, we’ve done the work and we’ve earned our place at the table. And it’s no secret that we’ve had to work harder than our male counterparts to demonstrate our capability in order to have the same opportunities. Also, we have to expend considerable energy just to prove that we are simply worthy of doing the job. 

But you may be surprised to learn that women have everything they need to succeed at work, and then some. Women make outstanding leaders. We create community. We have a democratic style. We’re innovative, collaborative, and supportive. We’re skilled, and we’re talented. 

It’s sometimes easier to ignore the fact that in many ways, our workplaces are broken. So many of us buy into the idea that we need fixing, and this can be reinforced every time we walk into our offices.

But women are not the problem. Workplaces do tend to devalue women and their contributions, which helps reinforce the message we’ve internalized, that we’re not good enough. It’s true that sometimes we have to continually prove ourselves just to be respected by our coworkers. Workplaces don’t work for women the way that it does for men. 

I was on a mission to prove myself. I just wanted to feel like I was enough. I wanted to be treated equally and given access to the same opportunities so I could earn them. I know I’m not alone in this mission. 

To me, success was getting a seat at that table and I wanted it. So my goal was clear, get a seat at this coveted table, by any means necessary. I have to admit that was a driving force for much of my career. 

At my job, very few women had technical roles, so I taught myself everything I needed to know to fit in, in this unfamiliar and sometimes hostile environment. I worked really hard. I finally got the hang of it and I found success. I felt like I had done what many are still hoping they could do. 

I felt like a superhero at times, somewhat invincible, but it was all a facade, an alter ego I had built in order to cope. It was a persona I adopted to be able to survive in my workplace. I was able to challenge some of the entrenched gender beliefs, and I was able to change a few points of view. I finally got that seat at the table that I was looking for, alongside the men in my industry.

I became more confident and it was my chance to gain more influence. I decided to chime in with my opinions and ideas, and that made some people uncomfortable. Some wanted to hold fast to the status quo and I was disrupting that. While I had supposedly earned a seat at that table, I didn’t fully understand how things were done. Apparently having a seat didn’t necessarily mean I should expect that anything I had to say would be valued, or even heard.

What I didn’t understand at first is that most major decisions are decided before we even entered the room. A wise leader doesn’t hope things are going to go their way, they do the advanced work to ensure that it does. 

Since the decision was essentially already made, asking questions or pointing out any shortcomings made me appear to be adversarial, and definitely not part of the in-crowd. I was unknowingly making myself a target. I was being perceived as a threat or an enemy to their agenda. I was showing my lack of understanding of how things really worked in my organization. 

I mistakenly thought that having a seat at the table would mean that they were open to a different perspective or to hear a different take on things. I thought maybe things would be different. After all, I’d been invited to the big table and I’m able to take my seat. 

I soon learned that it was exhausting and emotionally challenging to take that seat. It felt like my chair didn’t really fit at this table. On one hand, I was being told to speak up more and be more assertive. And then I was told not to be so aggressive or pessimistic. And then I was told I should smile more. 

Everyone else at the table had been sitting there for years. People were used to them. My presence was a little off-putting and a little jarring for some. I took it all in and I went into overdrive because I was feeling the pressure to make the most of this opportunity. 

I wanted to make a difference, but I was drowned out with the same old voices and the same old perspectives. Nothing changed. Again, I felt like I was trying to pull my chair up to the table and adjusting my seat to just the right height. I kept trying to join the conversation. I was trying to find a more supportive crowd who were willing to hear my ideas and my perspectives.

And then I was told I should just be grateful to have a seat at the table in the first place. I was just a token representative. I took that to mean that there was pressure on me to represent not only my ideas, but my gender as a whole. 

But what they really meant was that I was there because someone thought it would be a good idea. They didn’t really want my take on things. My ideas were almost never included. I felt so much pressure just to keep my seat at the table, that I never felt comfortable bringing my full self to the discussion. I was intimidated by the old boys’ club. 

I soon learned that I had been conditioned to believe that success was getting the seat at the table. But when the chair doesn’t reach the table, we don’t have the luxury of just finding another one. They’ve obviously done their part. They’ve extended the invitation. I was in the room. The rest was up to me. 

Then it felt like I had to shoulder the burden and take on the responsibility to fix things, to fix everything. It’s a lot to ask, to create a monumental shift in perspectives, well beyond what one individual can do. 

But I have a few suggestions to start making some changes:

1. it’s more than just optics
2. we’re not broken
3. take up space
4. upgrade the stories we’re telling ourselves and each other

So back to number one, it’s more than just optics. Apparently we’re supposed to be grateful for the chance to be in the room. Like they’re doing us a favor. It seems more like they’re fulfilling an obligation or filling a quota by including us, but they seem to weaponize gratitude and use it against us. Unfortunately, gratitude doesn’t translate into opportunities or a boost in your paycheck. 

And it’s not news to anyone in this industry that women are assigned more work and spend more time doing unrecognized, unrewarded, and non promotable tasks. It’s all the things the men don’t want to do that tend to be handed to women, just because. It’s not about gratitude. 

Being invited to the table should not be seen as doing us a favor. We shouldn’t have to be grateful to be given the opportunity to just sit at that table, and yet that’s what it feels like. We should be paid to sit at the table. We should be recognized for what we bring to that table. If we deserve to be there, then we have a right to be there. We earned our place at the table, just like everyone else. They shouldn’t be able to hold that seat at the table over our heads, threatening to take it away if we aren’t grateful enough. 

We’re here to do a job. We’re being paid to do that job. And we deserve opportunities and promotions based on how well we do that job. But that isn’t how it works. They should want what we bring to the table because new perspectives and new ideas make things better, so the research shows. 

They may think that they’ve done us a favor, and that’s okay. They have opened the door, just a crack, so put your foot in that doorway and wedge it open more. Use this opportunity to your advantage. It takes more effort than just showing up to the meeting you’ve been invited to. Do the work to prepare for each opportunity, like your career depends on it. You have an opportunity in front of you, and you don’t know when they may change their minds, so make the most of each chance. 

But don’t wait to only offer your opinions in the room. Understand that preparation goes into getting support for your ideas in advance. Show that you understand how things are done, by learning to play the game and building your support network, and handling objections ahead of time, to increase the likelihood that your ideas will be heard. 

Number two, we’re not broken. From the moment we start our careers, up until our last working day, we have to navigate invisible barriers. There are challenges inherent in workplaces that prevent women from thriving at work. Sometimes we don’t see them because we’ve bought into the idea that fixing ourselves is easier than fixing a corporation. There’s some truth in that, but that shouldn’t discourage you from doing what you can to improve your experience in your workplace. 

The game changer will be identifying the invisible barriers you face and preparing for them. Knowing that they’re coming is half the battle. And you have to know that it happens throughout our careers. It happens at the beginning, when we’re just entering the workforce. It happens in the middle years, when we’re balancing the dual roles of manager and running a household, and possibly being a caregiver. And finally, when we’re navigating a high level leadership position. 

We have to really examine the narrative highlighting the so-called shortcomings of women. While the true cause of gender inequality is the system itself. Yet, somehow women are held accountable for fixing it. 

At the same time, there are things that we can do to improve our experience, without trying to fix the dysfunctional system all on our own. Awareness is power. We need to become aware of the challenges we face at work, so we’re not blindsided into thinking that it’s personal. 

We need to learn to invest in our potential. We’re empowering something different, a new voice. We can’t always be waiting for someone to give us the support we actually need. We need to create that support for ourselves. Build your internal and external networks, and find those mentors, and create those advocates you need. 

Workplace cultural change takes time and money. They are not going to suddenly see that we’re worthy of more overnight. It takes time. They need to hear it from others. No one wants to stick their neck out for an unproven commodity. It’s just too risky. They have to look out for themselves as well. They don’t want any blowback and they don’t want to have egg on their face. 

So we have to figure out how we can get around the gatekeepers. We constantly have to prove ourselves while others get by on just their potential. Don’t wait to be given a role that you can thrive in. Do the job you’ve been hired to do, but find ways to make it work for you. Find ways that allow you to contribute in meaningful ways that can produce that evidence of your capabilities that are visible to the people who can make more of that happen. We can volunteer for opportunities to develop that proof, so that you have something to point to. 

True investment values potential over proof, but not for women, because often that proof doesn’t exist for women. We aren’t being given the same chances, then we’re excluded because we haven’t proven ourselves. Sometimes it feels like we’re just given a crappy seat until we can prove we deserve a better one.

Know the rules of the game. Understand what is rewarded and what is viewed as successful. It’s called organizational awareness and it involves expanding your leadership style and your communication style to include other styles. You have to be adaptable. We have to know the gender norms in operation in your workplace. Otherwise our skills and talents and abilities will be lost in translation.

It’s definitely different from university where your ideas were heard and your value was visible. It’s a completely different environment. Somewhere between the classroom and the cubicle, the rules changed. So learn what is important now to get the recognition that you need to advance. 

And expand your skillset. On average, women are already good negotiators, better than some men. Don’t invest your time in something that isn’t broken. Assess your strengths and be honest about where you could really use some improvement. But use your strengths, do more of what you’re good at, and what’s working for you. 

Don’t internalize the messages that will bring you down. Recognize that, in most cases, it’s not you, it’s your workplace. Try to change your perspective from one of a victim, to one of strength. Try to see things for what they are. Realize that it may not have anything to do with you or your abilities. 

So try to recognize how truly capable you are, because confidence is an inside job. Understand that you can do everything just right, get the good grades, get the degree, get the impressive performance scores, get everything just right and still not succeed.

Once you’re aware of these barriers, you can more easily get through them, by not internalizing them. That’s the number one thing. It took me a long time to do that, to develop that confidence in my own capabilities. It’s harder than it sounds because of the almost imperceptible erosion of self-confidence that happens over time in unsupportive environments. 

Try to truly see yourself and develop yourself from a place of strength. Everything we need to succeed is already inside us. 

Number three, take up space. It sounds like common sense that if we’ve been invited, people should make space for us. But in my experience, you’ll be waiting a while, if not forever. While they may have invited you to the table, they may not welcome you at that table. 

But it’s your job to make space for yourself and occupy that space. It’s not about cowering and making yourself smaller, or better yet invisible. You have to show up and you have to own it. Learn to be comfortable in your own skin. 

When you’re confident, you carry yourself completely differently. You’re less of a target and you’re more of a force to be reckoned with. And people are less likely to mess with you. 

Way back in elementary school, I remember being encouraged to raise my hand in class and being asked by my mom when I came home from school each day. It took confidence to raise my hand and contribute, even though I almost always had the right answer. It still felt risky. 

It took me years to realize that I had plenty to contribute in the workplace. There were times when I actually surprised myself with the insight and knowledge that I had gained over the years.

But school didn’t teach us to play confidently in the assertive, competitive world of the workplace. Men, more naturally embraced competition. And from childhood, they have learned to turn everything into a competition. 

Men are also naturally more resilient. They’re more apt to discount other people’s views with ease. Whereas women tend to seek out praise and run from criticism. The working world doesn’t reward us for doing everything perfectly with exquisite manners.Being prepared and hardworking isn’t the same as being visible, assertive, and energetically, engaging. 

Professional success demands political savvy, a certain amount of scheming and jockeying, and a flare for self promotion, and not letting a no stop you. Most women aren’t comfortable with those tactics, but we can learn. We may not have mastered those skills yet, and that’s a contributing factor to what’s holding us back.

Number four, upgrade the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Half the world is female and yet, women make up only a small percentage of applicants, and an even smaller percentage of successful candidates. I’ve been told you can’t get blood from a stone. If women aren’t there in the selection process, how can we be expected to improve the ratio of women to men in the workplace?

There’s some truth in that, and it does start way before we’re entering the workforce. Progress is being made and encouraging more women to get the education needed and develop the necessary skills to qualify for the positions we want them to fill, but we need to be rewriting the stories we tell ourselves and each other. 

We need to have more examples of women succeeding to show the next generation. Even the few who do make it these days, tend to feel isolated and alone and rarely stick it out. Tell yourself that you belong. You’ve earned your place and no one is doing you any favors. Stories are how we understand ourselves, how we understand others, and the world. 

Inviting everyone to contribute at that table isn’t just a nice gesture. Research shows that it makes for better and more productive, smarter conversations, with more than one point of view. That’s how we’re going to get better. 

As women, we’ve been taught to be self-deprecating and that just opens the door for others to judge us similarly. If we don’t think we can do it, why should they? Somehow, we believe that we should wait until we’re absolutely sure that we’re ready for something, before we ask for it. But I want you to see what is possible for you, and be an example of what is possible for others. 

All this sounds like a lot of work, but it’s necessary and it’s worth it. It’s about so much more than women in the workplace. It’s about creating a world where half the population can thrive rather than just survive. 

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could create a world where future generations can have equitable access and opportunity? It will take everyone’s help to create this future, but we don’t have to wait for someone else to make it happen. There is so much we can do right now to improve our own experience at work.

And that’s it for this episode of Stop Sabotaging Your Success. Remember to download your Guide to Making the Most of Your Seat at the Table at cindyesliger.com/podcast, episode twenty-one.

Thank you to our producer, Alex Hochhausen and everyone at Astronomic Audio. Get in touch. I’m on Instagram @cindyesliger and my email address is info@cindyesliger.com. And if you liked the show, please tell a friend, subscribe, rate, and review. 

Until next week, I’m Cindy Esliger. Thank you for joining me.