When I began my career over 30 years ago, I was truly a woman in a man’s world. I worked in sales and marketing for a large tech company who was IBM’s largest competitor at the time, and the founder was overheard saying that he saw no reason why a woman should ever be in a senior management position. Despite that culture I rose pretty quickly in my career and when I was in my early 20s I was managing a team of 30 techie guys. Today I like to tell people that in addition to speaking English, French and Portuguese, Tech is my 4th language and that’s where I learned it. I had no choice, since I needed to make decisions for our team so they learned to explain highly technical concepts in layman’s terms, and I learned to step up my understanding of technology. I learned to love it and still nerd out when I see cool new tech products and software.

Back then, being a woman leader, meant becoming more like a guy. For 27 years I wore my hair up every single day, because I thought that if I wore it down, I would look too feminine and be taken less seriously. The day I started my own company I wore my hair down to work for the first time, and now the only time I wear it up is to go to the gym. It’s a small thing, but it was a part of my identity I had to change. I also learned to use the same expressions that men did, which in business tended to be terms from war like “flanking strategy and guerrilla marketing”, and terms from sports like someone “dropped the ball” or “we’re down to the wire”. I know I still do. Some habits are harder to break.

I think most women back then experienced some form of harassment. I remember when I first started, my boss moved my desk into his office so he could work closer to me. He took me out to lunch in a dimly lit restaurant and put his hand on my leg. I was really scared but I went to HR, who told me that he was a married man and that I had probably misunderstood. About 8 years later I attended an HR presentation on harassment in the workplace, ironically by the same woman who had brushed off my complaint years earlier. I called her on it privately after the meeting, and said “hey Angie, do you remember that conversation we had a few years ago?”, and she just looked down at her shoes and said, “yeah things were different back then”.

So as I share my 4 D’s of career success, I recognize that thankfully today’s working environment is different. As women we may not be satisfied with our equality in the workplace, and we shouldn’t be, but we have made tremendous progress and rather than complain about where we are, I would love to see more women just make positive role model examples of themselves.

Diane’s 4 D’s Of Success:

D#1 Decision, as in make one or in the words of Nike “Just Do It”:

According to a study conducted at the University of California, men’s brains have approximately 6.5 times more gray matter than women’s, and women’s brains have nearly 10 times more white matter than men’s. Because gray matter characterizes information processing centers and white matter facilitates the connections among those centers, scientists theorize that those differences might explain why men tend to excel in tasks that depend on sheer processing while women show more strength in tasks that call for assimilating and integrating disparate pieces of information.

Men tend to end a conversation once they connect with a good idea or solution, while women are inclined to be more inquisitive, wanting to hear everyone’s thoughts before deciding. We spend more time finding the ideal solution—listening for ideas, adjusting our understanding of what is important, and asking for relevant details.
Let me give you an example of how my husband and I shop…which is never together by the way. Let’s say he needs a pair of work pants. He’ll go to the store, walk over to the work pants rack, pick out a pair that look good on him and maybe buy them in a couple of different colors so he doesn’t have to go back. He’s in, out and done. Now let’s say I need an outfit for a speaking event. I go to the store thinking that I want to buy a black suit. But when I get to the store, I walk around to see if there are better options. I find a really sharp black business dress which looks great on me, so instead of the suit I buy that. Now to a man like my husband, it looks like I’m being a typical woman and changing my mind, when really I was assimilating additional information from the store to make a better decision. So ladies try using that one the next time someone gives you are hard time about changing your mind.
The upside of this is that women are more likely to seek collaborative solutions that stick, but the downside when dealing with our own careers, or with making a time sensitive business decision, is that we can overthink it. We can get caught up in the pros and cons of so many different scenarios and agonize over whether we’re choosing the right path and sometimes obsessing over the path we didn’t choose. My advice is this: Don’t get caught up on your life plan or even your 5-year plan as the world is changing too quickly. Focus on your next right decision. Your next, right decision. Because that will likely open doors to other possibilities you never considered.
Personal example – 22 years ago I was invited to a coworker’s wedding in Bogota. There I met another coworker who was living in Germany as an expat, which basically meant that our company had paid for him to move to and work in Germany while maintaining his home in the U.S.. I didn’t know our company would pay for people to move to Europe and thought I want that. So I spoke with our leadership and they said they could move me to London. I assessed the risk realized that by keeping my house in FL it was pretty minimal, hired a pet sitter to basically move in with my dogs and went.

That decision kicked off my international consulting adventure and was also the reason I met my husband and have the life I do now. I have had the good fortune to have travelled to 26 countries, worked in 10 and lived in 3. I could never have planned that and when I was living back in Canada, and had someone told me that I would pack up and move to Europe sight unseen, travel the world and launch a business practice in Latin America I would have thought they were nuts! But I didn’t worry about the end goal, I just focused on the next, right step.

D#2 is Drive:

Reality check time. Getting where you want to go will take a lot of work and sacrifice. As a woman you’ll probably need to do more juggling when it comes to family. That’s just reality and it’s going to be tough to change until men start having babies. And if you think your workload will be lighter the more senior you are, it just won’t. Work doesn’t become any less when you’re higher up the food chain, it just changes because now a lot of your work is through other people, but you are still ultimately responsible.
But if you’re putting in all of this effort and making these sacrifices, make sure you’re being fairly compensated. If you work for a company know your worth and ask for it. Honestly I believe that one of the reasons for the gender wage gap is that women don’t ask. I didn’t for years. I falsely assumed that if I worked really hard and produced high quality output that I would be recognized. And sure I got raises and promotions but I never knew how out of line my compensation was. Then at one point one of the partners in our firm told me that he was leaving and he wanted me to take over his role of managing a 200 person team. This was a big step up for me. The partner took me aside and gave me the greatest gift ever by telling me how much money he made, which was a heck of a lot more than I made. I went back to my new boss and said look, I’ll take the job and I know I’ll be great at it, but I want to be made partner, or I want the equivalent salary. It turned out that the company was reorganizing and disbanding the partner structure but he came back and gave me a $25K raise, so clearly I took the job!

If you do end up starting your own business like I did, make sure it is something you absolutely love. That old saying that you should work at something you would happily do for free really is true. As an entrepreneur, you need to always be looking at the external environment and figuring out how you’ll get ahead. You need to always have a critical eye on your internal processes and systems and find ways to improve. You always need to think about how to better develop your team so they can do more and in turn you can do more. It never stops and you’re always thinking about your business so make sure it is something you feel passionate about and are driven to do.

D#3 Diversity of thought:

- There is a lot of talk these days about Emotional Intelligence. I would argue that men are now discovering what women have known all along. Emotional intelligence is basically soft skills, including work ethic, resilience, the ability to network, collaboration and oral & written communication.
- In a study by global consulting firm Hay Group found that women outperform men in 11 of 12 key emotional intelligence competencies. The one we missed by the way is emotional self-control, which is a skill I definitely learned early on in my career of working with men because it was survival. It didn’t matter how bad a situation was, how stressful or how much someone was saying horrible things to me, I willed myself not to cry or show emotion in my voice.
- On a bright note, I was speaking with the Dean of the School of Engineering at UM a few months ago, and he mentioned that he is really trying to encourage hiring more female faculty members because he appreciates the diversity of thought they bring to meetings and how they challenge the status quo. Clearly we have a very long way to go with women’s leadership in STEM, but it is encouraging to hear these pockets of progress.
- But diversity of thought begins with each one of us. It starts with not being afraid to state your viewpoint, even though it may differ from others at the table who may be men, or who may simply be more senior than you. I was promoted really quickly to leadership roles in my corporate career because I never sat back and accepted the status quo. If a process was broken or something was getting in the way of us doing the right thing for the customer, I was always very vocal with recommendations on how we could change things and I was always volunteering for special projects. If you take the risk and speak up, you may not always be right and you may not always be appreciated, but you certainly won’t be remembered for being a wallflower.

D#4 Be Distinctive – Stand Out:

This is where marketing comes in. You must find a way to set yourself apart as a professional. You need to do you, but you also need to recognize that you’re creating a persona, especially online. Now if you take a photo of you hanging out on a yacht over the weekend looking like you’ve had a bit too much to drink, and you’re in a band so that works with your persona, then go ahead and post that. Otherwise you might want to think twice as that may not be the way you want to stand out. I know I sound like your mom but what is online is forever and there is no privacy.
Whether you work for a large corporation, or you have your own business, you need to work on your personal brand. Either way it increases your value and can help get you promoted or bring in new clients.
Let’s say you’re an attorney working for a mid sized law firm and you want to make partner some day. Think about creating a website in your name, with a nice full body professional picture of yourself on the home page and what you’re all about (for example, “Fearless Advocate. Activist. Author. Mom.). Then write a monthly blog with your opinion on various things happening in the legal community. If you’re all about women in law then write about that. If you’re about defending the little guy, then write about that. Once that blog has been indexed on Google, upload it to LinkedIn as an original article for additional eyeballs. Since Google only gives SEO credit to the first place it finds content, and it is always indexing LinkedIn, if you post simultaneously then LinkedIn will get all the credit.
Find opportunities to speak, either on a panel or on your own. There are always groups in town who want to hear what you have to say. When you do have a speaking event, be sure to have someone take a video, even if it is on their phone, but make sure you invest in a wireless mic so the sound will be good. Add that video to a YouTube channel that also has your name, or whatever handle you’re using to make it consistent with your other social media. On YouTube you can transcribe the video and turn on subtitles, which I strongly recommend since many people scan through videos with the sound turned off.
Now you can embed the video on a blog page on your website, and include the transcription, edited a bit for flow. That gives you blog #2 which you will also add to your LinkedIn once indexed. Now on LinkedIn you’ll also want to include the video in your profile.
You should plan on spending 20 mins/day on your LinkedIn, engaging with other people, in addition to any time you spend blog writing. Start by searching top hashtags in your space. Read through a few posts and make relevant comments. Connect with others through LinkedIn suggestions or upgrade to Premium if you want to connect more. People often ask who they should connect with on LinkedIn and my rule of thumb is that if you would exchange business cards at a networking event, then you should connect on LinkedIn. However, if someone is a competitor, just know that when you connect directly, they then also have access to your network so if you have never thought about that it’s not a bad idea to run through your contacts and do a little cleanup.
Also create an Instagram profile for your business persona and post a mix of semi-personal and business posts, all consistent with your personal brand. You should post at least 2x weekly although if you can do 5x that’s even better. Videos do better than pictures so edit those videos you’re shooting down to 1 min or less and post. You’ll need to do a lot of engagement on Instagram to grow your brand. Similar to LinkedIn, start with a hashtag search, comment on posts and also DM targeted micro influencers with something of value, don’t just ask or say something without substance.
Depending on your field you may also want to include Facebook but if you need to focus and you’re in most professional fields, I would suggest LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram. Ideally if you have time, you can also create a presence on Twitter.

So to sum up, remember the 4D’s of career success:

Decision
Drive
Diversity of Thought, and
Be Distinctive

I would love to continue the conversation with you on LinkedIn and my Instagram handle is @marketingstrategygal.