The Ambition Revolution – Smart & Savvy Women

In 2015 I met Amanda Blesing at the Linkfluencer Conference in Sydney. I was impressed by her work on LinkedIn but more importantly I was impressed by her mission because I think we need more women in senior leadership roles.

"My mission in life is to help women to play a much bigger game – change the world if you will – and do so with big ideas, big vision and big, audacious bucket loads of confidence.” Amanda Blesing.

Over 20 years ago Amanda started to work her way through the ranks of management with her last role as CEO in the Not For Profit (NFP) sector. While she has a strong understanding of running a profitable NFP (not an oxymoron) she remains passionate about designing programs that help people do better work.

As the creator of The Ambition Revolution program, she currently works with busy and ambitious, professional women to help keep them focused on their strategic goals around their leadership aspirations. In fact, she is just like a coach for a high performance athlete – but the focus is on their professional goals, not athletic goals.

Here is Amada's advice for aspiring women leaders

One of the things she noticed while working alongside those in professional roles and larger organizations, was that the women tended to require a different style of encouragement in order to step up into leadership roles or opportunities. 

• She says she’d invite women to speak at a seminar or conference, and they would handball her to a male colleague, an ambitious younger staff member, or possibly to their (male) manager.
• She’d call for papers and 10 males would respond and only one female.
• She watched on the side-lines as the males would leapfrog over females when it came to promotions.

According to Amanda, it was fascinating and not a little disheartening – and yet the women looked like they were doing great work – but happier to stay in the background.

But deep down she understood and says; “As women we are frequently tired, exhausted, or drained from getting the run around, hitting up against glass ceilings and bias, or simply picking up the pieces and doing the housework both at home, and in the office, to make sure things run smoothly and everyone is getting along. I get it, because I do it too.”

So she developed a program called The Ambition Revolution - one-on-one mentoring for professional women – to assist them with confidence, to remain strategic, agile and focused on the end goal – elevating themselves more easily to “expert status” and positioning themselves well in advance for leadership roles. She immersed herself in the works of Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In; Tara Mohr, Think Big and Katty Kay & Claire Shipmen, The Confidence Code.  

She also drew upon the latest research and findings in neuroscience to try and understand exactly what is it that keeps women 'mired in middle management'. And finally, she examined the more unsettling research around bias and unconscious bias that keeps women out of leadership despite concerted efforts by both business and governments to meet gender diversity targets.

So if you're a women who wants to get started all on your own; here are Amanda’s favorite tips to help you kick-start your ambition.

1. Stop being busy and start being strategic: Women derive a lot of value in being busy. I suspect that sometimes being busy helps us see that we’re adding value and makes us feel less like a fraud. So we’ve polished up “busily doing the job well” to within an inch of it’s life and we imagine that it’s a sure-fire track to success. One of the key learnings is that being busy is going to make you miss the woods for the trees. Being busy keeps you side tracked. Being busy also wears you out. Work out ways of delegating, automating and systematizing so that you can create time for strategy. Not just strategy at work but strategic about your career.

2. Put your hand up before you feel ready: The reality is that by the time we feel ready, it’s too late. We know statistically that there are more women undertaking post graduate education than men, and yet it’s not translating to more women in leadership or increased salary for women. And the studying is just one aspect of where we over prepare! Remember the old Hewlett Packard research where women will only apply when they meet 100% of the criteria where as men are more likely to apply even if they only meet 60%? Yep, there it is again.

Maybe you remember back in primary school in year 1 or 2, when the teacher would ask a question of the group? The boys in the class would all shoot their hand up to get the teacher’s attention even if they didn’t know the answer. Somehow they knew even then, that it made you look better to be proactive and have your hand up, rather than wait around until you thought you knew the answer. Perhaps they realised that:

• by the time the teacher got around to asking them for the answer, they might have had the chance to puzzle it out or
• even if they got it wrong, there were no serious consequences. They might have looked a little silly but they actually didn’t really care about that either.

Sadly at her school, girls were more worried about how pretty and neat their pencil cases looked than they were with grabbing the teacher’s attention. She asserts that is not unusual.

Amanda encourages women to make sure they volunteer for projects and roles slightly beyond their comfort zone or expertise. Just in time learning is equally valid as an educative tool. The entire discover learning model is predicated on it! Don’t dismiss it.

3. Get comfortable with discomfort: We know from the science of training for any athletic endeavor, that the training will be hard work and will possibly hurt. Whether you like “Biggest Loser” or not, it’s a great example that if you want to achieve great results you need to not only do the work, but put yourself out there.

Is it that the female risk brain is more sensitive and finely tuned? Is it that young girls are protected and nurtured, where as young boys are (figuratively) thrown out into the wilderness to fend for themselves? Or is it something else entirely?

Get comfortable with discomfort because it’s from that discomfort that you will achieve great things – and the reality? Our brains light up like a Christmas tree when we achieve great results that we’ve had to strive for.

And Amanda's #1 career tip for women (saving the best for last) is to learn the language of value.

When many women describe their professional performance they frequently use language such as “loyal”, “hard working”, “thorough” and “diligent” – even at a senior professional level. Remember how we like to think in terms of doing good work and doing it well? The reality is if you can’t communicate in language that the C-suite understands, connecting with overall results, drawing parallels and linkages to the organizations overall strategy, or even as to what keeps your CEO awake at nights, then you’ll be bypassed. This means thinking in terms of big picture and context and helping people to see how what you do contributes in those big picture ways. Susan Colantuono, a career coach for women based out of the USA, talks about the critical “missing 33%” in female business education:

• Strategic acumen,
• Financial acumen and
• Business acumen.

Once again, don’t wait to learn it. Teach it to yourself. Learn the language of value and start using it immediately.

Learn more about how The Ambition Revolution and Amanda Blesing can help you and your career via amandablesing.com. Her book “Step Up, Speak Out, Take Charge: a women’s guide to getting ahead in our career” is available in all good bookstores.

If you valued this article and want more, please hit the ‘like' button and also share via your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook social media platforms. I encourage you to join the conversation or ask questions so feel free to add a comment on this post. Please follow my LinkedIn post page for all my articles.