By now you’re probably familiar with Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer. In it, Sandberg argues that if you believe in yourself and give it your all—if you’ve “leaned in”—then you don’t have to sacrifice work for family or vice versa. Since its publication there’s been a variety of critiques, and we’re left wondering: Where do we go next? What’s the future of female leadership?
What Lean In gets right is the idea that women:
- Should advocate for themselves at work and at home,
- Should negotiate unapologetically for better salaries and benefits, and
- Champion their own projects and ideas.
But what’s missing is pretty glaring, and largely due to systemic and structural issues that are not easily addressed through individual empowerment: The gender pay gap, systemic racism (black women are paid 61 cents for every $1 their white male counterparts earn), the burden of domestic responsibilities, the #MeToo movement, and more.
We see the future as the intersection of individual empowerment and community engagement, advocating for oneself and amplifying the community. We won’t move the needle without both, and what we need most is women working together to change policies on behalf of everyone; this way, no woman is left behind. One of the best ways to do this is by creating strong networks amongst ourselves.
Leadership Advice & What’s Missing
We’ve all heard the common clichés like “You’ve got this,” “Go it alone,” and “You go, girl.”
While our first response to such sentiments may be that they are indeed empowering, the more we evaluate them, the more we see they only go so far.
Yes, we can do a lot of the work on our own, but hard work only gets us so far. In order to reach truly great heights, we need a strong network of people around us.
In other words, we should be swapping “You’ve got this” for “It takes a village.”
According to Harvard Business Review (HBR), while men benefit not so much from the size of their network but from being central in it or connected to multiple “hubs” (people who have a lot of contacts across different groups), women—in addition to being central in their networks—need to have an inner circle of close female contacts. Why?
“Because women seeking positions of executive leadership often face cultural and political hurdles that men typically do not, they benefit from an inner circle of close female contacts that can share private information about things like an organization’s attitudes toward female leaders, which helps strengthen women’s job search, interviewing, and negotiation strategies.”
Most career advice women receive can be summarized by “work really, really hard in order to get ahead” while putting off focusing on family or having children. However, the reality is that true success takes a strong network—one that includes best friends, mentors, colleagues, sponsors, and coaches alike.
HBR found that women can benefit from taking a strategic approach—seeking quality over quantity—when it comes to networking by:
- Embracing randomness in order to diversify your network,
- Identifying and connecting with people with connections to multiple networks, and
- Avoiding a closed, overly-interconnected inner circle.
How Coaching Can Help
One surefire way to improve the quality of your network is to seek out coaching; this can be individually or in groups—and shouldn’t just be career coaching.
However, whether it’s professional, executive, or life coaching, working with a coach and making that coach a part of your network can help you get ahead—in both work and life. That’s because we can apply the skills we learn from coaches for professional contexts to personal situations, and vice versa.
For example, in their article “Gender and Career Success” for Organizational Dynamics, authors Pamela Perrewe and Debra Nelson explain that:
“The focus of executive coaching is usually on skills such as political savvy and strategic vision…[and] increases psychological and social awareness and understanding, as well as the ability to develop and maintain effective interpersonal relationships.”
…all of which we can apply more broadly to other aspects of our lives.
All-in-all, coaching can help in numerous areas of life, including:
- Increasing self-awareness,
- Managing and working through challenging relationships,
- Strengthening leadership skills,
- Moving out of our comfort zones,
- Thinking strategically,
- Skillfully managing politics,
- Creating plans for increased influence and visibility, and
- Overcoming self-doubt and other limiting beliefs.
What’s more, the right coach can be an excellent resource for your own network and inner circle, connecting you to the right people and creating pathways where before there were none.