Lawyer Monthly - Women In Law Special Edition

WOMEN IN LAW EDITION LAWYER MONTHLY 77 owerful people take up more space. Sometimes we play small and don’t take up the space that is rightfully ours. From creating clear goals and developing resilience to having the confidence to speak up and speak out, these are the skills that help women thrive whilst creating better workplaces for all. Men and women are working together but they’re not speaking the same language or having the same expectations. Assumption, miscommunication and unconscious bias holds women back. As a result, too many talented women are not progressing as fast or effectively as they should be. And too many senior women are dropping out of the workplace altogether. What a waste. In 2008, Google noticed that women were being promoted at a lower rate than men in engineering. They realised that it came down to a very simple reason: the default way in which promotions happen. At Google during that time, to get promoted you raised your head and said, ‘I’m ready to get promoted.’ Women were nominating themselves at a lower rate than men (a gender trait that’s often seen from the earliest years of education, where boys will raise their hands more in class). The People team partnered with the head of engineering who sent a communication to the company to highlight this issue, transparently sharing data and explaining what was happening and urging the women to ‘raise their hands’. They did. The results were great – for a while. After about a six-month cycle, the issue happened again; no one had sent another email and people had forgotten or just reverted to their old behaviour. Remember this when you are trying to create change in your organisation or trying to get investment and commitment from shareholders or outside partners: when you are communicating your message, once is never enough. You need to repeat your message – and you need other people to repeat it. If you can edit it so it is powerful, simple and memorable, that is a start. You will then need to accept that you need to repeat it over and over again in order to create the change or belief needed. Information is not transformation – you can’t just share an opinion or an idea and expect things to happen. Karen Blackett was lauded as ‘the most admired chief in UK ad land’, according to research that Campaign magazine did into the chief executives of British agencies. One of the things that has helped her, the self-described ‘exhausted mum’, get to the top of her game has been thinking about her own personal brand. Authenticity may be a phrase that people are tired of in the marketing world but it’s tremendously important to her. She says: ‘People understanding their own personal brand and how that helps the company is what’s important. In any business that’s moving, and especially in this industry when it’s so dynamic and fast-paced, your role isn’t to wait for HR to tell you what your job should be, your role should be to tell your managers how you can contribute and what your job is, so people understanding their own personal brand is important. I think the more senior you become, the easier that becomes. There will be those who react cynically to the idea of a personal brand, but if you think about how brands work, it’s just about creating a short cut for people to understand you, a way to make it clear what type of person you are from the start.’ P More than half of men (53%) stated they have experienced a pay rise or bonus which is not connected to a promotion, whereas only 40% of women say the same.