A Healthy Culture of Women Helping Women - A 'How To' Question

Post a work event discussing my book, I received this follow-up question: "What have you found to be effective strategies for engaging and encouraging a healthy culture of women supporting other women? Specifically, when you see it not happening? Productively addressing the tension, so to speak." This is such an interesting question that I spend a whole chapter in my book digging into why this is tough.

My tips?

First off, avoid the blame game. Most people aren't avoiding helping others because they're off to the spa. Most people are genuinely very busy and are feeling stressed managing their workload and life. With that in mind, I have found these to be effective strategies: 

1) Offer opportunities of different sizes: Remind people that helping others can be as little as attending an event, speaking on 1 panel, or mentoring 1 person for 1/2 hour per quarter. It's all about each of us doing a little, not one person carrying the load. 

2) Watch out for places where the culture feels 'scarce': Humans will naturally compete for limited resources. Is there a feeling that only 1 woman can sit on the leadership team? Does it always seem like 1 woman speaks at an all-hands? Work to dispel scarcity for minoritized populations which will naturally cause competitive vs collaborative tendencies. The feeling should be more of 'we can all be successful here'. 

3) Expect the same of everybody: Don't just make it about the women not helping women, make sure all the genders are pitching in. Are men expected to mentor for example? Don't put an unfair load on women and then expect them to happily bear the burden -- that ties into society's expectation of women to likeably serve others which isn't necessarily fair and won't always happen!

In turn, make sure that helping is fairly recognized across everybody in your culture. Don't fall into the trap where women are just expected to help and then the men get commended for doing so!

What else would you recommend?

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