Yes Please! 7 Ways to Say I'm Entitled to the C-Suite

By L. Michelle Smith and Jeff Gardere

Yes Please! is a leadership development tool that is grounded in positive psychology and neuroscience. It supports high- performing women leaders of color in finding happiness in the midst of the uniques challenges they face as they aim for senior executive ranks. Author, L. Michelle Smith surveyed 100 high-pe

• Language: English
• Publisher: no silos communications llc
• Release date: Jun 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088140123

L. Michelle Smith

L. Michelle Smith empowers high-performing, professional women leaders to lead like rockstars as an author, speaker and certified executive & personal coach blending leadership development and strategic communications.  She also advises the Fortune 100 companies they aspire to lead at the intersection of tech, culture & business. She supports an international clientele and has been an official contributor to Black Enterprise. She is a former corporate leader, a serial entrepreneur and an adjunct professor of strategic communications at Texas Christian University.  

Book preview

Yes Please!

7 Ways to Say

I’m Entitled to the C-Suite

Secrets Women of Color Need to Know Now to Find Their Happy and Win in an Exclusive Corporate Culture

L. MICHELLE SMITH

FOREWORD BY DR. JEFF GARDERE,

AMERICA’S PSYCHOLOGIST

Copyright © 2023 no silos communications, LLC

All rights reserved.

DEDICATION

To my smart, beautiful, overachieving, creative, and incredible sister

Dr. C. Joyce Price, my best friend, partner in crime, ace, and auntie to Joni.

I see you, and you are amazing. Never forget that.

Thank you for seeing me and being my accomplice.

PRAISE FOR YES PLEASE!

"Yes Please! is an absolute must-read for any person looking to demystify ascent to the C-Suite, but more importantly, through authentic storytelling and proven leadership principles exercised by Black women achievers, Yes Please! provides mid-level, mid-career women of color all-important access to essential knowledge that is not always readily shared. Thank you, L. Michelle, for this timely work and word."

Xavier Williams

Retired Fortune 10 Executive & CEO, NWS Wireless

L.Michelle gives you the secrets to navigating the corporate world on your own terms.Anyone who wants to experience higher levels of personal and professional success should read this book.

Trudy Bourgeois

Author of EQUALITY: Courageous Conversations about Women, Men and Race to Spark a Diversity and Inclusion Breakthrough

L. Michelle is a sister who knows how to help you find success in business.

Toure

Media Personality & Author of Nothing Compares 2 U: An Oral History of Prince

"Using her experience as both a corporate executive and an advisor to Fortune 100 leaders, and incorporating the stories of fellow Black women professionals, L. Michelle Smith advises high-performing women on surviving – and thriving – on their own journeys to the top. Yes Please! is as practical as L. Michelle Smith’s other books. Her advice to women about speaking out in a time of great flux in the work world is especially helpful."

Kristie Bunton, Ph.D.

Dean of the TCU Bob Schieffer College of Communication and author of Having Their Say: Athletes and Entertainers and the Ethics of Speaking Out (McFarland Press, 2021)

Once again, L. Michelle has her finger on the pulse of what's going on in corporate America. For me, this book could not have come at a better time. The concept of what we deserve should be required reading for every woman inside and outside of workplaces--and their daughters and nieces. L. Michelle is an important voice in the discussion of work and life, women and people of color, one we should listen to.

Maria Reeve

Vice President, Texas Initiatives for Hearst, Former Executive Editor, Houston Chronicle

"L. Michelle Smith is a passionate advocate and coach for women in the C-Suite. She knows what it takes to open the right doors. If you want to build a confidence and right skill set, Yes Please! is the how-to guide you’ll keep going back to."

Valorie Burton

National bestselling author of Successful Women Think Differently and CEO of the Coaching and Positive Psychology Institute

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

1 GUIDING PRINCIPLE: YOU MUST BE HAPPY TO DO THIS, SIS

2 AFFIRMATION #1: I AM LIKABLE AND BRING VALUE TO ANY SPACE

3 AFFIRMATION #2: I WILL ATTRACT THE RIGHT SPONSORS WHO WILL OPEN DOORS FOR ME

4 AFFIRMATION #3: I AM WORTHY OF EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION SO THAT I CAN BUILD GENERATIONAL WEALTH

5 AFFIRMATION #4: I DESERVE A PARTNER WHO RESPECTS, LOVES, AND ADVOCATES FOR ME AND MY LEADERSHIP ASPIRATIONS.

6 AFFIRMATION #5: I DESERVE TO BE HAPPY, SAFE, AND WHOLE ON MY LEADERSHIP JOURNEY.

7 AFFIRMATION #6: I AM A VALUABLE LEADER, AND I WILL BE OPEN TO OTHER ORGANIZATIONS THAT WILL DEMONSTRATE THAT TO ME.

8 AFFIRMATION #7: I AM ENTITLED TO THE ADVOCACY AND MENTORSHIP OF AT LEAST TWO HIGH-POWERED WHITE MEN.

9 ONE MORE THING…: A LETTER TO MY BROTHERS

10 COACHING GUIDE: 32 POWERFUL QUESTIONS TO LEAD YOU TO HAPPINESS AND THE C-SUITE

THE 7 SECRETS CHEAT SHEET: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO GET TO HAPPY & GET TO THE C-SUITE AS A WOMAN OF COLOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FOREWORD

I remember meeting L. Michelle by phone back in 2003. We were introduced by a mutual friend who shared a column with her I had written that supplied advice on anything from mental wellness to relationships. From our first conversation, I recognized her keen insight into people and what drives them. She was going through a tough time, but she was thoughtful and empathetic, even to people who may not have treated her well. All this while showing incredible business acumen throughout our conversation.

At the time, she was running her own PR agency, and since then, we not only became friends but we worked together on multiple assignments for some major brands where I was able to share my ability as a practicing forensic psychologist and subject matter expert on national television news and entertainment shows.

Eventually, I became known as America’s Psychologist after appearing on cable news to chime in on the headlines of some of the biggest crimes, disasters and global events. I’ve even been featured on some of TV's most-watched reality shows, commenting on family and relationship issues. I’m in the business of understanding and bringing context to human behavior, and that is what particularly excites me about the work L. Michelle is doing as an author and certified executive coach who is trained in the tenets of applied positive psychology and neuroscience. She is one of less than 9% of black executive coaches in the U.S. who are also women and who are credentialed to coach Fortune 500 executives in leadership and personal development. Her ability to back her insights with science is not only unique but sorely needed in a subject matter area that has long gone unaddressed until recently. Namely, the severe lack of women of color, especially Black women leaders in the C-Suites of Fortune 500 companies.

In addition to having had the privilege to work with L. Michelle over the years, I’ve also watched her career from afar. She is one of the few in this arena who has direct experience in her subject matter, having immersed herself in the stories, lives, and cases of women of color in leadership in corporate America through her international private coaching practice and speaking engagements all over the country. She has personally interacted with the women who are striving and struggling to make it to the top, and she is also one of them. She made vice president before the age of 30 at one of the largest strategic communications firms in the world and became an officer at another global agency not long after running her own boutique agency for about a decade. She has also advised the C-Suite in the Fortune 100 for more than half her career, which spans over 25 years. Throughout this time, she has kept her authenticity, approachability and positive countenance despite the cut-throat nature of the upper ranks in corporate America. She is real, so she keeps it real. You can count on L. Michelle to give it to you straight.

I’ve found that when the lack of women of color in leadership is addressed, it is typically anecdotal, and the advice comes from heartfelt, yet solely personal experiences. Those accounts are rarely based on research and science. I applaud the voices in this space who are finally providing a platform for this discourse, and I’m incredibly encouraged that L. Michelle has stepped up to bring credible, science-based perspective and actionable leadership insights that I believe will finally create change for the women who have struggled to make it into the C-Suite for far too long.

L. Michelle writes directly to her sisters, intentionally bypassing any real discourse with other decision-makers in corporate America. She counseled corporate leaders on matters of diversity and inclusion at one point in her career, standing up an entire practice in its global marketing organization. While it was rewarding, she said it was also exhausting. After all, why would the oppressed find joy in educating the oppressor? I liken that to telling an abused spouse to educate and change his or her abusive partner. I understand why L. Michelle has finally decided against this. There are a deluge of business books and experts trying to tackle the conundrum and challenge of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. L. Michelle honors these warriors, but she chooses a different path. As she adeptly said in her writings, after 50 years of DE&I programs not solving the problems of bias, sexism and racism, there is no more time for women of color to waste on waiting for corporate America to finally get it right.

As with her earlier work, No Thanks: 7 Ways to Say I’ll Just Include Myself, A Guide to Rockstar Leadership for Women of Color in the Workplace, in which I was proud to take part, L. Michelle not only builds a case for why more women of color belong in the upper echelons of corporate leadership, but she shares how women of color deserve to be in the C-Suite and states unapologetically that they are entitled to be there. She shares how to achieve that goal while weaving in compelling storytelling from her personal experience and that of high-ranking Black women in her own circle of influence. More importantly, like her earlier work, Yes Please! is built on the chassis of the core findings of positive psychology, namely that positive emotion and positive self-talk are crucial to anyone’s success but especially important for subsets of society who are othered, – those people who happen to be doubly disadvantaged in spaces that center whiteness and maleness, i.e women of color, but most specifically, Black women.

It has been shown through multiple studies, such as those from LeanIn.org, Catalyst, and the Executive Leadership Council, that in addition to a lack of mentorship and sponsorship, these women are not only lacking in the positive feedback that comes from mentors and sponsors but also from themselves, because the constant microaggressions and biases they face on a daily basis make workplace environments ripe with negativity. This negative emotion can be taken on by people who are othered, sometimes becoming personalized and conflated into ideas of imposter syndrome.

L. Michelle’s prescriptive insights, coaching and advice to double and triple down on the positive emotion is not only effective but essential to moving the needle toward getting more women of color into senior executive leadership and the C-Suite. She also layers on tenets of neuroscience that are particularly effective when coupled with positive emotion. Engaging what we know about how the brain learns and functions is crucial because the work of mindset shifting is tantamount to behavior change. The brain must unlearn certain cultural, generational and societal paradigms for these leaders to navigate corporate spaces that seem to work in a concerted way against their aspirations.

L. Michelle engages concepts like the progress loop, mindful listening, inattentional blindness, radical focus and more, but through a culturally nuanced lens, which is unique, provocative, relatable and most importantly, immediately applicable.

When I approached L. Michelle about penning the foreword in her next work, I was excited about how she would move this crucial narrative forward. You are going to hear more of her personal career anecdotes, her victories and her failures. You will hear from more extraordinary Black women C-Suite leaders who are a part of her tribe, and you will also hear from industry experts who are in the trenches each day working with women of color to crack the code to C-Suite access. What I really love about this book is the idea that coaching can get the reader further faster because we know in psychology that intrinsic motivation accomplishes this quicker than any other kind of motivation as it is grounded in one’s passions, which are informed by personal values. That is the fuel anyone needs to go further faster, and the results are far more sustainable.

So, be certain to answer the coaching questions at the end of each chapter. And find ways to integrate the positive emotion strategies and affirmations that L. Michelle prescribes, especially for getting to the C-Suite. She is right: Black women aren’t happy in corporate, and it is equally true that happy people are successful people. Allow this book to help you find your happy. I can’t wait to see how many lives are changed and how many more women of color realize their dreams to be C-Suite leaders as a result of this book.

Dr. Jeff Gardere, America’s Psychologist

INTRODUCTION

What do you deserve?

Have you ever considered it? Often, we think about what we deserve when someone else raises the topic or tells us what we don’t deserve. But for a moment, simply stop and ask yourself, "What do I really deserve?" Do you know?

The current state of our country may cause you to consider the question now more than ever. As of 2023, some have ventured to say that we are in a post-pandemic world. However, new cases and strains of COVID-19 are being reported every day. Some of us have had three and four rounds of jabs and boosters. By July 5, 2021, about 67% of U.S. citizens had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and companies were beginning to request workers come back into the office. But these people can’t unsee what they saw. Life changed drastically during the lockdown, and this incredible time of change has caused many people to rethink their lives, their futures and the way they work. We are literally sitting in the very lap of change and the way we view life has shifted. Some people made a distinct decision to opt out of work, leaving the job market. Women led the way. Some decided to start businesses. Others demanded that they continue to work from home or moved across the country in the