Calling all women in the workplace!

In celebration of International Women's Day 2024, this episode of the Happier at Work podcast dives into the theme "Invest in Women, Accelerate Progress." I discuss five key areas where women often struggle in their careers and offer insightful solutions for each one.

Recognising these challenges is essential so we can take actionable steps to overcome them. I share my own personal anecdotes and experiences from my leadership program participants to provide relatable examples and practical advice for overcoming these challenges.

The main points throughout this podcast include:

• The five main areas where women experience challenges in the workplace and how to overcome them.
• Implement boundaries and non-negotiables to avoid people-pleasing and protect your time and well-being.
• Recognise the value of your accomplishments and those of your team. 
• Communicate your successes in alignment with your values.
• Focus on tasks that align with your personal and professional objectives, and contribute to the overall goals of your organisation. 

Do you have any feedback or thoughts on this discussion? If so, please connect with Aoife via the links below and let her know. Aoife would love to hear from you!

Connect with Happier at Work host Aoife O’Brien:

Website: https://happieratwork.ie 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aoifemobrien/ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/happieratwork.ie/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/happieratwork.ie

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HappierAtWorkHQ

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HappierAtWorkHQ 

Hello and happy International Women's Day to you. Welcome back to another episode of the Happier at Work podcast. I will be talking today about today's. This year's theme, should I say so? This year's un theme for International Women's Day is invest in women, accelerate progress. And it's a theme that's after my own heart. My program is called Accelerating Leadership. Excellent. I may shorten that to just accelerate, but I'm so pleased to be out and about today.

Busy with lots of clients delivering for international Women's Day. Hopefully not just another box ticking exercise in your organization, but actually something that we think about all of the time. So today's episode focuses on the five areas that I've noticed that women really struggle with when it comes to their careers. And this is something I've noticed over the last five years that I've been in business. Really hard to believe that I've been in business for five years, but it is five years this month. Congratulations to me. I'm so pleased that I've made it this far because not a lot of people do. So those five areas are, number one is people pleasing.

Number two is don't share your successes. Number three is doing additional unpaid work. Number four is not getting help. Number five is staying too long in the wrong environment. So we'll take each of those one by one. I'll expand, I'll share some examples, and I'll also share some insights on how you can address each one of those areas. And I'd love to know from you, have you experienced any or maybe all of these? I know for me, they're certainly all relatable at various different points in my career. And I will share some insights from my own personal experience, as well as anonymized experience from some of my clients as well.

So let's take number one, first of all. So that is all about people pleasing. So that's putting other people first. It's saying yes when you really mean no. And that could mean that you are saying yes. And you're putting on a smiling face when behind closed doors or to your friends or to your colleagues. You're complaining about the additional work that has come from a client or from your boss or whoever it might be. So it can manifest itself in lots and lots of different ways.

I know I've certainly seen this in myself and also in former colleagues as well, where you're just trying to please the client, you're trying to do anything that they say to keep them happy, essentially. But it's usually at the expense of your own time. It could be at the expense of your health. There's all of these ramifications that are associated with it as well. Now, one example from one of the ladies who's in my accelerating leadership excellence program is answering emails at all hours from clients. So they'd be emailing her out of hours, essentially, and over the weekend, and she would feel obliged to answer those emails. She would be afraid that she's coming across as unprofessional if she doesn't answer those emails straight away and be available. Now, the difficulty with this, and for boundaries in general is that once people start encroaching on those, that becomes the norm, that becomes their expectation of you.

So if you're the person who says yes and someone asks you to do something, then the next time they ask you to do something, the expectation will be that you say yes as well. And let's take this back to the email situation. If you're answering emails straight away, if you're answering emails out of hours, then that will become the expectation that someone can get a response. They know they can get a response from you. If they email you at a time that frankly is not convenient for you or it's encroaching onto your personal time, and this becomes really difficult. So the solution to this really is to be really clear on what your boundaries are, what are your non negotiables, what is really, really important to you that you get done. And I heard this great example, a really positive example from a man, actually, and he was saying, I have my date night on a Thursday night. Do not schedule any meetings after 430 on a Thursday.

And linking into that. If there are other things that you want to get done during the week, make sure that you make time for those things as well, and I will want to hear about them. So it just fosters a really great environment where people are free to be themselves and they can have those boundaries between work and life, especially. Now, the difficulty with boundaries is that we expect it to be one and done. We set a boundary and that's it. First of all, you have to get really clear on what you want those boundaries to be. Next, you need to communicate what those boundaries are. But once you communicate it, you have to really stick with it.

So if you communicate something and say, I'm not going to check emails after 06:00 p.m. So please don't email me, but then you still reply, check and reply to emails at 07:00 then people are going to know that, well, that wasn't really a boundary. They're going to continue to cross that. And I think from our own personal perspective, we think that we failed then, but usually it takes a while to build up those boundaries. So take it one at a time, set those boundaries one at a time. As I'm not checking emails after six today and then the next day, I'm not checking emails after six today, whatever it might be, until it becomes a habit. So you need to keep practicing and keep practicing and don't be too hard on yourself if you break those boundaries occasionally as well. Number two then is about not sharing successes or we're not sharing our own wins or our team's wins.

And oftentimes this is because we expect if we put our head down and we work really, really hard that we're going to be recognized. I know certainly in my former life, my former corporate life, I should say this is something I think I really believed that if I just put my head down and worked really hard that I would be recognized for all of the hard work, for the contributions that I was making, but I was never being recognized and it really frustrated me a lot. So think about is that a belief that you have that the hard work you're doing should speak for itself? Is that something that you think? So the remedy for that is to share your wins in an authentic way. What are your values? Do you know what your values are? And how can you use your values to be able to talk about what wins you've had? So, for example, one of my really strong values is learning. I absolutely love learning. So that is something I could authentically talk about with my boss. Like here is a problem I encountered and here's a learning that I took from it and here's what the result of that was. And again, thinking about who are you sharing your wins with? Is it in private because you don't want other people to necessarily see that? That's something we can work on another day.

But think about who is it that's going to hear what your wins actually are. Another thing that you can do is to promote other people. So talk about wins of the people within your team, talk about wins of your colleagues. And it's not that you're going to talk about what they are doing so that they'll talk about you. But I think this mindset of givers get that you will be recognized as someone who recognizes other people. There is a brilliant previous episode where I talked with Nicola McGinnis all about promote yourself in a non sleazy way. And I think this is so relevant for women, especially because I think we are brought up to stay quiet and to not boast and not brag about our successes. So definitely go and check out that episode if you haven't yet.

Something I do with my group in the accelerating leadership excellence is Friday wins. So talking about what wins you've had this week, and I think it's a really nice way to recognize, even just yourself, if you're not taking that time for yourself, to recognize the achievements that you've had in any given week. Number three, then, is additional unpaid work, which is usually invisible work like Ergs, like being on an ERG committee. I know there's a lot of listeners here who are on ERG committees. It could be organizing the Christmas party, it could be taking notes in meetings. Tick, tick, tick for all of those. For me, I was a co lead on the women's ERG group in my last company. Founded it, actually, because it was a big global initiative and we were bringing it to Ireland.

I also was heavily involved in organizing the Christmas party one of the years, actually, I did it all by myself. Such a thankless task. So many complaints from people about what we could or should have done differently. If you can relate to this, you will absolutely know what I mean. Taking notes in meetings, being on the sports and social committee as well, that's something I was quite involved in. And we tend to get distracted by these kinds of things, but they're not moving the dial in our own personal objectives or the objectives of the organization. So for me, the remedy to this is really prioritizing what moves the dial on your own objectives and what moves the dial on the company's objectives, and being really explicitly clear on the link between those two. So if you are doing your day to day work, what relationship does that have with your own objectives for what you're trying to achieve in that year, for your own objectives, for what you're trying to achieve in your career overall.

So how is that getting closer to you, satisfying your career goals, but also how does that relate to the overall business objectives and being really explicitly clear on those, I think can really help, and prioritizing that type of work rather than other types of work, which is kind of, let's be honest, it's quite fun to be involved in those things. As I said, sometimes it can be a thankless task, but it's still kind of fun to get involved in those things as well. Number four, then, is not asking for help or not getting help from, like, a coach or a mentor or someone who can be a sounding board for you. And I know there's so many thoughts I have on this, and one of them is this idea of, and if you're a time listener, you'll have heard me talking about this before. The type of impostor from Valerie Young's imposter syndrome types, there's a type that is called a soloist. And a soloist is the kind of person who, they don't seek out help, but they also don't accept help when it's offered. So it's really interesting. We feel if we want to achieve something, that we have to have achieved that thing by itself.

Can you tell that I'm a total soloist. I am the kind of person, if I want to do something, I very much value doing that thing on my own without getting any help, and I'm learning how to not do that anymore. So that is one of the kind of big triggers for me, I suppose, I think, is you're not getting help because you feel like your accomplishments are not your own if you seek out that help. But actually, the remedy to this is building a support network around you. So that could be support within your own company, within your industry, and then adjacent industries as well. And this is something I probably definitely did not do enough of in my career. I spent a long time living in London. I also spent some time in Australia.

And when I returned to Ireland, something like this would have been hugely beneficial to me to really get to know the industry that I was working in, to get to know who the key players were, the big names in the clients that I worked with, things like that, or, sorry, the clients that my company dealt with, generally speaking, because I had, obviously, relationships with the clients that I was dealing with, but kind of getting out there, and it would have definitely stood to me if I had done that. Now that I'm running my own business, that I have more of a network in Ireland, whereas I came back, having been away for seven years, I came back and worked here for about four years, but was very kind of insular and not reaching out to other people that I could and should have connected, which would eventually have helped me in my business as well. So I think another really important thing here is to seek out a mentor. So is there someone who can mentor you even if they're mentoring you from afar? So it's just someone who you admire who is a role model for you and whose behavior you can essentially model because you really like their leadership style, getting a sponsor. So that's essentially someone to mention your name in a room where you are not. So rooms where decisions are made about your career, essentially. Can you get someone to advocate for you in that room? It's so important, I think, to have that alternative perspective as well, just to bounce ideas around. And someone who I was mentoring, one to one, recently told me that she has more clarity from our conversation than she has in the entire time that she's been running her business.

And I think that, I mean, obviously, I was really flattered. I was so pleased about that. But sometimes we're so reluctant to ask for that help because we think it's not available or it's not there for us, whatever it might be. And again, in tying with this year's theme, it's all about investing in women to accelerate progress. When's the last time you invested in yourself? I think sometimes we expect our companies to invest in us, and I'm seeing a bit of a pinch with a lot of organizations, especially when it comes to investing in women these days. But how about investing in yourself? You are a woman. Sorry. I will assume that if you're listening to today's episode, you are a woman.

How about investing in yourself? Number five, then, is all about staying in the wrong environment for too long, thinking you can change it or that it will change over time. And for me, I think when I've ever detected some sort of toxicity, some sort of toxic masculinity, misogynistic type of culture, I've sniffed it out and I've left. I've got out of that situation quite quickly. But I can see with clients, with friends, with a lot of different people, that if they're experiencing that, they think it's better the devil you know, and I can stay here for longer than maybe is necessary, or they think they can change things from the inside out, when oftentimes that's not the case. Now, this has a huge impact on your physical health, on your mental health. So if you are thinking that you can change things, if you try to change things and it's not working, look for an exit strategy. What are your finances like? Can you quit? Can you try and secretly try and find something else that you can do? And again, this reminds me of a really great episode from last year with Neve Hannon, where we were talking about how do we help women to get to those more senior positions? And one of the key takeaways for me was it's not just about how do we help women to climb the ladder and to get to those more senior positions. But it's thinking about what environment they're in and is it the right environment where if they do climb that ladder and if they do get to the top, that's going to be a positive environment for them? So making sure that you're in that right environment where you're climbing the ladder.

So for me, yeah, it's getting out as quickly as you can. Now, this episode has gone on a lot longer than I expected because I thought there's five points here. It's going to be quite quick, but I will just summarize quite quickly the key points that I talked about. And do let me know whether you're putting a comment on Spotify, whether you're commenting on LinkedIn, whether you're commenting on Instagram or reaching out to me directly, do let me know. Do any of these resonate or do all of these resonate? And what specific actions are you going to take? So the first one was about people pleasing and the solution there was about implementing boundaries, knowing what your boundaries are, but implementing them over time as well. So it's not just a one and done. My boundaries are set. It's about thinking every day, how can I have those clear boundaries? Number two then is not sharing your successes.

So how do you find an authentic way to share your wins? And being in touch with your values, I think can really help with sharing the wins and sharing other people's wins in an authentic way. Number three then is the additional unpaid, invisible work that oftentimes falls to women. So organizing the Christmas party, being a volunteer on the ERG, and the remedy or the solution to that is prioritizing the work that is going to move the dial for the business, for your objectives and for your career overall as well. Number four then is not getting help. And really the solution to that is investing in yourself, seeking out a coach, a mentor, or building a support network around you of people who can support you in your career, in your career growth. Number five then is staying too long in the wrong environment. So that could be a toxic environment. And for me, if you can't change things, if you do try and change things, just get out as quickly as you can.

Make that exit strategy. So I really hope you enjoyed today's episode. Do have an absolutely fantastic International Women's Day. Here is to celebrating women close.