5 Ways Women Can Accelerate Their Careers

Listen, I'm not famous. I'm not a guru. I'm not an influencer. But, I am a woman who is doing pretty well professionally and I wanted to take a moment (and a day late for International Women's Day), to recap some of the things that have helped me get to where I am today in case it helps you get ahead in your own career.

Before diving in, I want to call out that while my goal in writing these tips is to be useful for others, I recognize that my lived experience will be different from yours, thus, the advice I give may not ring 100% true for you. Hopefully, there will at least be some common elements that you can take and make your own.

Without further ado:

5 of the most important things that have helped me in my career progression

1. Create visibility for your accomplishments. Unfortunately, work doesn't speak for itself. You have to speak for your work. Compound that with the fact that everyone is busy and focused on their own problems, and you have a situation in which your best option is to bang your own career pots and pans in order to get noticed. If you don't, then you run the risk of being overlooked and under-appreciated. Creating visibility doesn't necessarily mean hiring a skywriter to write your praises in the heavens. It can be as simple as telling your boss about a project you're particularly proud of completing, or a result you were happy to achieve. Telling a partner in another team about your accomplishments as a means of helping them understand the types of skills you can offer. One of my favorite tools, is creating recap slide decks with highlights and lessons learned from projects I've worked on to share with as many relevant people as possible. I like this one because it's both a tool that helps others and a means of highlighting my own expertise. For many of us, talking about our strengths and achievements feels unnatural. The reason for that? Historically, society told women to not speak unless spoken to. They want us to stay quiet. DON'T BE QUIET.

2. Create visibility for your own professional goals, needs, and expectations. Bosses are terrible mind readers. But on the whole, they usually mean well. So, explicitly tell them what you want. You want a better title? Say it. You want more money? Tell them. You want to take on more responsibility? Ask for it. Once you make your boss aware, it is their job to partner with you to make those dreams a reality. Note, I didn't say it's their job to give it to you. You still have to do the work. But it's incumbent on them to be an advocate and a guide to help you see how you can get the things you want. If they don't, that's a strong signal to you that maybe they're not the right boss. And, similar to my first point, the reason it often feels unnatural to ask for what we want is that we've been made to feel like we don't deserve more. You deserve more, and to quote Hamilton, "[WE] WILL NEVER BE SATISFIED."

3. Treat your working hours as a precious resource--spend your time on work that has the greatest impact on the company. There are only so many minutes in the day. So how you choose to use them is directly correlated with how your career progresses. When you value your time, you will increase your value to the company. Get clarity from your boss on what exactly is your role and responsibilities. What does success look like in your role? And what areas you need to work on in order to grow within your level? Then prioritize your time on doing those things. This doesn't mean you should never go outside the direct confines of your job, or never volunteer to help with an administrative task, but I am saying that you should be thoughtful about when and how much you give to those peripheral tasks. When it starts to be more than a few mins here and there, ask your boss "can you help me understand how you value this type of work, and how it will factor into my next review and raise assessment?"

4. Stop second-guessing yourself. I don't even know you, but I know that you have good questions. You have good ideas. You have good insights. Sure, sometimes you'll be wrong. But, who isn't? No one is ever ALWAYS wrong. And no one is ever ALWAYS right. So, why do you censor yourself? By not speaking up you are robbing yourself from career-advancing visibility and preventing others from benefitting from your wisdom. (note: speaking up doesn't have to mean publicly speaking in a large group, if that's not your thing. It can be an email, a slack, a comment on a document. Just don't keep it bottled up inside). Another way to think about this is to imagine that each person in a meeting has a secret code in their mind. At least one of those secret codes will open up a safe full of treasure. But none of us knows which is the right code until we tell the group and discuss. When you share your insights, ideas, or questions, you're essentially sharing your secret code with the group. If you choose not to share your secret code, there's a chance that the group will never unlock the treasure. Wouldn't that be a tragedy? Note: If you work in a toxic environment where men speak over you, shut you down when sharing ideas, or generally discount your insights...RUN, don't walk, to a new job (if that is at all feasible).

5. Find other women to lift you up. The term "boys club" exists because men have long known that if they stick together they can continue to rule. Well, guess what? We can have clubs too. And, when we get together incredible things happen. So, find your group of women who lift you up, support you, empower you, even if they're not at your company. Sometimes you just need someone to cheer you on from the sidelines. Sometimes you just need someone to talk through a situation with to validate your feelings. Sometimes you need someone who has been there to tell you how they got through it. Sometimes you need someone who understands what it's like.

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It's relatively easy to write these tips out, but actually doing them is a whole different thing. Just between us girls...I still struggle every day to take this advice. And I mess up all the time.

The goal is not perfection, just progress.