Career success rule-Enlist your allies

Spoiler Alert! If you plan to watch Shrek The Third, here comes a spoiler, so stop reading now. DreamWorks launched the movie over ten years ago, and it is a great example of why we need to enlist allies.

Princess Fiona is locked in a tower with Queen Mum and her ladies—the ladies are the fairy tale characters Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White. Throughout the movie, the characters show little in common, but to fight the villains, they pitch in with their special skills. The ladies transform themselves into DreamWorks’s version of Charlie's Angels. Fiona whistles the sign for the attack, after which Snow White starts singing a high tone to charm the animals and then screams the command to attack. After Snow White gets them all into the castle, Cinderella hurls her glass slipper like a boomerang, knocking the guards out, and Sleeping Beauty manages the rest of the guards by yawning and falling to the ground, causing the knights to trip over her and fall.

Allies to the rescue, with a great mix of skills within the team for the attack, minus any gender diversity though!

The value of allies

Failing to enlist allies is one of the 12 habits that typically hold women back from their next raise, promotion or job according to the book How Women Rise by Marshall Goldsmith and Sally Helgesen . Why do people fail to enlist their allies?

The main contributor is because we naturally gravitate towards people who are similar to us, when people who are your opposite are potentially very valuable connections that are overlooked. When someone is different to you, it can be more challenging to connect with that person, unless you are adept at seeing how being different is an asset not a deficit.

Rarely does one deliver a work product without crossing paths with others, either as team members, clients, or suppliers. Are these allies? Certainly these are formal allies, since they all come together for one purpose and their mutual benefit. But allies can also be informal, and these are the people who you need on your side, even better if they connect with your purpose.

A case study from How Women Rise By Marshall Goldsmith and Sally Helgesen

Dianna is an example of how to avoid the habit of failing to enlist allies. She’s a Trademark litigator for a mineral conglomerate headquartered in Melbourne but finds herself sent to Singapore for an assignment through a sponsor of hers. On her arrival, Dianna feels overwhelmed and out of depth with regards to her expertise in a highly complex industry. Dianna tells her new boss that she will spend every waking hour getting up to speed.

Her boss reminds her, however, that he did not bring her on board to be another lawyer but to be a strong team leader of a team known to squabble amongst themselves and withhold information from each other. The team, of course, resents her as an unqualified outsider who has taken a promotion away from one of them, so the tip her boss gave her makes all the difference in her approach.

Dianna begins by forging relationships with people in operations, customers, and suppliers—instead of her team members—and starts to realize that Australia’s connections were a valuable currency in the shipping world. She becomes a visible ambassador for the company in Singapore, and the moment Dianna starts sharing her web of resources and connections with her team, she wins their trust, not because of her legal knowledge but because of the favors she is able to call on and the connections she is able to make that adds enormous value to her team. Dianna had become an active allies engager.

What you are doing to become an active allies engager?

Learn more about the 12 habits that typically hold women back and help women rise in your organization with the How Women Rise Leadership Program. Available now as a workshop, a webinar series and a train the trainer globally.

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