Leadership Self-Transformation: 52 Career-Defining Questions Every High-Achieving Woman Must Answer

By Margaret Spence

BEFORE YOU CAN GET THE “CORNER OFFICE,” YOU MUST GET CLEAR ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT FROM YOUR CAREER.

A Powerful Career Management Model to Move Women into Executive Leadership. As an aspiring woman leader, you must ask yourself tough career questions and be bold enough to hear your answers. It’s easy to say,

• Language: English
• Publisher: C. Douglas & Associates, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780978940744

Margaret Spence

Margaret Spence is on a mission to disrupt the leaky leadership development pipeline for women by empowering them to manage their careers effectively. To increase the number of women in key executive leadership roles, we must move women from empowerment to strategic action. Women can no longer arrive at the front door and lose their identity, vision and leadership aspiration because they are loyally waiting their turn. Margaret founded the Employee to CEO Project - A community to support women's advancement beyond middle management. Her seminal book, From Workers' Comp Claimant to Valued Employee, lead the revolution to value injured and disabled employee in the workforce. Her new book, Leadership Self-Transformation aims to change the leadership development trajectory for women. She is a business strategist, keynote speaker, leadership development coach, corporate consultant, and the CEO of C. Douglas & Associates, a leading Human Resources and Risk Management Consulting Firm.

Book preview

Where is the forgotten person

inside you, tucked behind the

trappings of success but yearning

for more?

SELF-TRANSFORMATION

"Self—a person's essential being that distinguishes them from others; an object of introspection and reflection.

Transformation—to change in composition or structure."

What does it mean to be transformed?

In a business context, transformation is a process of profound and radical change that orients any organization in a new direction and takes it to an entirely different level of effectiveness.¹

Self-transformation, however, assumes there is nothing wrong with you. We are born with gifts that can get buried and deferred because of fear: afraid to live the life we want to, afraid to say what we want, and afraid to demand what we need. Self-transformation of your career requires that you reflect inward—finding your power center and catapulting your career based on a renewed vision. You get to decide what you want, you get to select your path to success, and you get to champion your progress.

Unfortunately, the conversations around leadership are always discussed as a win or a loss—you either win the coveted job or you lose to the competition. Winning and losing are based on a scarcity mindset. Life is about abundance, but the one thing that corporations teach us very well is how to conform to scarcity. If you think there's only one job that you can do, or only one job that you are good at, or only one job that is yours for life, then you've limited the possibilities that life offers. Life is not about picking a path and then never course-correcting. Where you start shouldn't be where you end up. We are so conditioned to mentally checking off boxes that we stop appreciating the life that we have put inside the box and the possibilities that exist outside the box's four corners.

Career development involves an internal, personal process. Are you ready to lead, or aren't you? What's holding you back? Have you done the work to prepare yourself to lead others, or are you still focused on yourself? Have you addressed your internal mess, demons, baggage, and insecurities? Or are you waiting to unleash that mess onto your team? If so, will your team let you? Leadership demands consciousness.

Do you take 100 percent responsibility for your career and your life's journey?

The previous questions are critical ones that women don't generally ask when seeking leadership roles. Women have internal issues that can sabotage their ability to be effective leaders. Let's be honest: we walk around with internal baggage that has yet to be unpacked. Men have the same stacks of baggage, but they manage to ascend to leadership even if they exhibit narcissistic tendencies and are clearly unqualified. Men don't second-guess their decisions; they are okay being wrong if they get to their goal. Women, on the other hand, make excuses for their leadership aspirations, and they often blame others when they don't get there. Fortunately for women, statistics validate our assumptions, but the question remains: Why do some women make it to the top while others take the first step up the ladder and stall there?

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

—Alice Walker

One answer could be addressed by questioning women's loyalty. Women's sense of loyalty can outweigh their rational sense of wanting more out of life. Women are loyal even when that loyalty is not rewarded by their employer. They stay in a situation long after its half-life. Why? Why do women get to the front door and lose their identity, vision, and aspiration? Maybe their mothers taught them how to be princesses, but never taught them how to own the kingdom.

Are you loyal without a reason for your loyalty? When you arrived at your current job, what was your vision and mission? Does that mission still apply?

Why do women get to the front

door and lose their identity, vision,

and aspiration?

Throughout my career I've coached many women, and I've had hard conversations with my own inner demons around loyalty and waiting my turn. Somehow, women have been told that they should wait to become leaders. Women have been told that if they let the boys go first, the boys will prepare a spot for them at the head of the class. The only problem with this theory is that men don't make a place for women, and women who demand a seat at the leadership table are seen as offensive, brash, and out of place. Women are conditioned to wait in line. Waiting in line definitely worked during my mother's generation and it still persists in my generation, but I hope that this book will inspire the next generation of women leaders to get clear about what they want—regardless of their children, husbands, parents, friends, and employers.

We must be willing and able to voice our wants without fear of being labeled. We cannot lead as males do. Instead, we must lead softly but firmly. We must be brash, audacious, respected, and revered, while balancing on high heels.

What do you need to focus on to keep moving toward your career goals?

The impact we want to make during our lifetime is important—it is our reason for being. None of us enter this world to simply work, pay bills, and die. We are here to contribute to society; we are here to live the life we want and to embrace our full potential. But before we can live our dream life, we must address all our inner demons and get really clear about our career path and our personal journey.

Self-transformation is not about how well we do on an annual review, how the boss scores our progress, or how high we score on a standardized test. It is also not based on a list about how to change this or that to be successful. Self-transformation consists of the work that we perform on ourselves in preparation for our next level of career advancement. Self-transformation creates an opening to the path of success. Self-transformation nurtures the place within ourselves that enables our voice and gathers our power to be able to speak up at a corporate meeting, for example. The universe will not give what we are not ready to receive.

Self-transformation helps deepen your understanding of what you want—the act of transforming yourself into the real you. Where is the forgotten person inside you, tucked behind the trappings of success but yearning for more? We hope to help you find your leadership persona and unleash your leadership voice. So, who are you? Where are you going? What do you want? Are you embracing any labels? And more than anything else, what are your fears and how will you address them?

Digging Deeper:

What is the most significant thing that's happened in your career? In the last month? In the last six months? In the last twelve months?

If nothing significant has happened in your career over the last twelve months, you've got a problem. Your career is a living, breathing process—it is you. So how do you allow yourself to show up but live in perpetual animation at work? (Since you're reading this book, you must want more.) Perpetual animation is akin to suspended animation: you arrive at a spot and get stuck there.

Self-transformation consists of the

work that we perform on ourselves

in preparation for our next level of

career advancement.

Self-transformation creates an

opening to the path of success.

Lesson—You are whole. A leadership role will not fix what you think is broken.

THE SCARCITY MINDSET

The scarcity mindset revolves around the idea that there isn't enough to go around for everyone. It focuses on a single outcome—a short-term view of life's decisions and only one path to any destination.

If you want to be in leadership, you must eliminate the scarcity mindset. Organizations perpetuate scarcity without even knowing that they are doing it. When a manager says there is only one position with multiple applicants, it perpetuates scarcity. When you are being groomed for leadership and are competing with several other people for the same positions, you are a pawn in the scarcity mindset game. When someone else gets a position and you get angry, you're now stewing in scarcity beliefs. You lock yourself into the bitter fight to get what you feel you deserve. Instead of working to your highest good, you begin to think: This is about me and what I should have. Scarcity empowers jealousy and diminishes your self-worth.

As Stephen Covey said in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, scarcity is based around the idea that there's not enough of the pie to go around. But guess what—there's enough career fulfillment for everyone. Shift your mindset from the belief that there's only one job, one position, or one path. There are multiple paths to the leadership chair, but you need to find the path that is right for you. Get clear about what you want. Don't let anyone enter you into the scarcity game.

Leadership is also a mindset—you've either decided that you are leadership-ready, or you decided that you are willing to be led and have someone else control your destiny. For me, the latter was not an option. I refused to be a cog in the corporate machine. I refused to be led—I was destined to be a leader and determined to lead, even if that meant leaving my cushy corporate job and embracing self-employment. When I