The Career Launchpad: Why Do Most Women Not Have the Career They Want?

Hi everyone, my name is Margaret Spence and welcome to the Career Launchpad. Tonight is our first Facebook Live under the Career Launchpad umbrella. This is shown live through the Employee to CEO Project, and for those of you who don't know me, who've never seen me live on Facebook before, my name is Margaret Spence. I am the founder of the Employee to CEO Project and um, leadership development for a number of years. I've run my own consulting practice for 21 years, and I am super excited to be hosting the Career Launchpad every Thursday evening at 7:00 PM Eastern time. So let me tell you a little bit about the Employee to CEO Project, a little bit more about me., and a lot about the Career Launchpad. So I have, as I said at the beginning, I've been in HR, workers' comp, and, um, running my own consulting practice for a number of years. And one of the things that I've seen over the years is, um, women not being able to effectively manage their career. And as I work with corporate organizations, I've seen that women are sort of stuck on the vine. We go into an organization with a lot of great goals, a lot of things that we want to accomplish, a lot of hopes and dreams and aspirations of where we want to go with our career. And then all of a sudden we hit these roadblocks, we hit these stumbling blocks. Somebody tells us no. We aren't sure where to go. From where we are. And unfortunately, unless you're in senior or higher level leadership, you generally don't get career help. You don't get career coaching. You don't get career guidance. You're really dependent upon your manager or your supervisor to help you manage your career effectively. So out of that came the Employee to CEO Project. And my goal is to empower women, not only to build the career they want, but to really be focused around your future resume. The first job you have should not be the last position you hold in an organization. It's not okay for women to arrive in the workforce, get into their first job, get that first promotion, and never get another one. All the statistics show that women are stuck in supervisory positions. We get that first promotion, we move from the employee desk to that manager desk or that supervisor desk, and then we never go beyond that spot. So the Employee to CEO Project is here to say to women, we have an opportunity to manage our careers effectively. It's not your employer's job to manage your career. And one of the things that I say to women over and over again is, your job is not to work. It is a task. Work is a task. Work is not your job. Your company's job is to hire you. Your company's job is to sell a product. But your singular job is managing your career. The task and the vessel is work, but your job, what your assignment is in life, is to be and live to your full potential. Your assignment when you were born, when you came into this world, your assignment was to live to your full potential, to take the gifts that you've been given and utilize them in every area of your life. It's not enough for us to show up to work not having the career and the vision and the goals that we want. But more than that, when women don't learn how to manage their career, we lose financially. So imagine this for a moment. You start off in your job and you're dependent upon a 3% or a 5% pay increase every year. You sit in the same desk for 5 years. For 5 years you're getting— and nobody, I, in my history, in my time of work, I never got 5% on a raise. So what I got was 4.8, 4.2, 3.9. And in some years, the organization said, ah, we don't have any money to give you. So if you sit in a desk for 5 years and all you're dependent upon is getting annual reviews and raises, you're financially stagnant. You're stuck. Your finances is at a, is at a ceiling, and the company you work for has decided what amount of concrete they want to add to your ceiling. So it's not enough for us to sit around waiting for the 5% pay increase every year. It's not enough for us to do that. As women, we must get out there and decide that we are ready to build an effective, powerful career, that we're willing to show up with our vision on our shoulders, that we're willing to articulate our vision and to say to our managers, this is what I want from my career. This is what I want from my job. This is what I want from the organization. So a part of my goal with the Career Launchpad, and the reason why I'm doing these live programs every week, is because I want to now say to women, what are you going to do week over week to manage your career? What is it that you're going to do? It's not that you're going to show up Monday morning and do the same thing you've done for the last 52 Monday mornings. It's that you're going to show up ready to manage your career, that you're going to show up powerfully and ready to say, I'm ready to manage my career. And so the Career Launch Pad is here to say to you, Don't just show up Monday morning with the same ol' same ol'. Show up Monday morning with a plan on how you're going to empower yourself, how you're going to move forward in your career. What is that gonna look like for you? What is it that you want from your career? And the biggest question is, why don't you have it now? So I have scheduled 8 of these sessions, 8 of these live 7:00 PM Thursday evening, 7:00 PM Eastern time. And my goal here is to make an interactive dialogue with you around your career. So this week, I'm going to talk about the bold question, which is, why do so many women not have the career they want? In fact, I went out and I made a sign. Here's the sign. Why do the vast majority of women feel that they don't have the career they really want? This is a big question. Why do we constantly feel that we don't have the career we want? And I think I have an answer for you. The answer is pretty simple. We don't know how to ask for what we want. We haven't been empowered to really take on the organizations that we work for. We're often told that we should wait for opportunity, and we sit around in positions waiting for opportunity. Ladies, we cannot wait for opportunity. Opportunity is not going to come to us because this is a boys' world. I'm sorry. You know, men are out there. They are our advocates because without them we can't get from point A to point B because the majority of companies are run by men. But we cannot sit in a desk for year over year over year not move our career forward, not have the financial security that we want, not feel that we are empowered to ask for what we want. And when we ask for what we want and we don't get it, we have to be bold enough to say, "This organization is not serving me." And we have to be willing to say, I'm going to put all my ducks in a row. I'm going to make sure that I'm checking the right boxes. And not only do I have what I want, but that I also have the correct qualifications and that I am moving forward effectively in my career. What I find when I'm working with organizations and I'm working with leaders is women tend to be so qualified for the job. Sometimes it's so scary, I want to shake the women that I'm working with by saying, listen, you're so qualified right now. What's stopping you from applying for that next position? You're already super qualified. You have the education. You have the experience. In fact, some of you have trained the managers and supervisors who are leading you, and you're still sitting in the desk waiting for somebody to validate your existence, to give you that stamp of approval so that you feel that you are ready to move forward. You don't need a stamp of approval to apply for a next position if you have aligned your qualifications and and you've looked at your qualifications deeply enough to know that you are ready for that job. So the question, the bold question that I ask, the very bold question, the very bold question is, why do the majority of women not have the career they want? That was my bold question for today. And my answer was, we don't know how to ask for what we want. Every day that you go into work, you have to be able to say, what is it that I'm learning from this position? What is it that I'm gaining from working for this organization? What is it that I'm getting out of this position? And am I advancing myself by staying in this particular role? Let me give you an interesting example. I met a young lady at a conference that I spoke at in Philadelphia a couple months ago, and she said to me, I work for a huge organization, and they've given me a ladder. They've told me that these are the 5 positions that I should be applying for, and these are the 5 positions I should work with, that I should go from position A to position B to position C to position D, and they're preparing me because they've given me a ladder. And I said to her, why are you on their ladder, and why aren't you on your ladder? And so that was the question. Why are you on someone else's ladder And why aren't you on your own ladder? Because if you work for a company and the company says, here are the 4 positions you should have, here they are, don't pick any other ones, these are the 4. You go from the desk A to supervisor, and if we think you're good enough, you get to be manager, and if we think you're good enough, you get to be a director, but somehow women don't make it past manager. Is that the right track that we're on? Did the company give us the right track to stay on? Are they empowering us correctly to be on this particular track, or are they giving us a track that leads to nowhere? Um, are they aligning us so that we never truly advance into a position of power? Are they aligning us so that we never truly become who we want to become? Are they aligning us so that we never increase our earning capacity beyond a certain point? Those are some of the questions that, as women, we don't ask. Instead, we get frustrated, we get upset, and we get angry because we're not having the careers that we want. Let me talk to new women who are joining the ranks of career right now. You're a new graduate. You've just left school. You walked across the stage, and congratulations. I'm so proud of what you've done. But here's the deal. You have to be strategic about how you enter the workforce, how you advance yourself in the workforce, how you stay in the workforce, and what you get from the workforce. It's not showing up. It's not getting opportunity. It's not getting that first job. It's none of that. It's, is this job going to prepare me for where I have a vision of where I want to go? One of the reasons why I love millennials, I absolutely, positively love millennials, is because millennials have taken a different track. Us boomers are comfortable sitting in jobs we hate year after year after year after year because we're waiting, we're expecting something different to happen. When the reality is, if it hasn't occurred by now, it's probably never going to occur. That's the truth. If you've been at your company for 15 years waiting for a promotion and you haven't gotten it, it's never gonna happen. Fact. They've aligned you as not promotable. And in the back of everyone's mind, they're saying, "Yeah, Margaret, come on down and apply for that job. Come on down and apply. Sure, the application process is totally open to you." But the reality is, when you get there and you apply, you're not gonna get the job. They're gonna pick somebody else over you, and you're gonna get this garbage what I call BS about you don't have executive presence, you don't have management quality, you need to go out and work on some things before you're ready for the job. That's code for you been typecasted, you ain't going nowhere, you're gonna be in that job till you die or retire or get enough balls to quit. So the reason, the bottom line reason why women do not have the career they want is really singular. We haven't figured out what opportunities we want, not what opportunities are being given to us. It's what opportunities we want. What do we want from our career? What do I want from my career? What am I asking for from my company? What am I expecting them to give to me? And it's not just a paycheck, because again, as I said, if you're sitting in the same desk year 10, then you're missing an opportunity to grow. There's no way else to put it. You're missing an opportunity to grow. So the question for those of you who are joining a little bit late into the process, I'm going to introduce myself again. My name is Margaret Spence, and I'm the founder of the Employee to CEO Project and the founder of the Career Launchpad for Women Leaders. What I want to do tonight is take you through a systematic process. I want to take you through a couple things. And for those of you who don't know me, I've written a great book. It's called Leadership Self-Transformation: The 52 Career-Defining Questions Every High-Achieving Woman Must Answer. And this book has some amazing questions like, this one. What is your winning career strategy? Does your destiny include your why? Who will champion your success? These are bold questions. The book is available on Amazon, um, and you can purchase it there. Shameless plug. Anyway, tonight I want to walk you through some processes. Just a tiny process of where do you go from here. So the first thing that I want you to do is decide what the vision is that you have for your career. What is the vision that you had for your career? What did you want when you started? What did you say to yourself at the very beginning? And for those of you who are new graduates, what is it that you want to accomplish in your career right now? What do you want besides experience? Do you want to work with people? Do you want to empower people? What do you want to feel inside every day when you show up to work? For those of you who've been in your career for a while, you 5 years, 10 years, 15 years in, the question that I want to ask you is, what is fulfilling right now about the work that you're doing? What is it fulfilling for you? Is there a gaping hole between the vision you have and the work you're doing? Is there a gap? Between the vision you have for your career and the work you are doing in your career. Because if there's a gap between A and B, meaning there's a gap between what you thought you, or where you thought you would be at this point, if there's a gap there, what is that gap? Get a journal. Pull it out and ask yourself, what did I want at the beginning of my career? And what stopped me from having it? And then the other question is, when did I lose my courage to ask for what I want? Because asking for what you want takes a lot of courage. It's not just getting up and saying, "This is what I want today." You have to be courageous to ask for what you want. You have to be courageous to feel that you can handle the no. Because oftentimes when we ask for the what, we get the no, and there's all of that interpersonal negative— negativity that comes with the no. When you ask for what you want, sometimes you get that no, and that no goes straight to your core. The no makes you feel inadequate. The no makes you feel that you're not worthy of having what you want. The no makes you feel that you can't create the life you want. The no affects your self-confidence. And so when you go out on that proverbial limb and go into the office and ask your manager for permission to apply for a job that you saw posted, Or you go into your boss and you say, this is what I really want. Or during your annual review, you say, this is how I want you guys to develop me. I want you to develop me this way. And your boss says, that's not what I think I want to do for you. I don't think you're ready. That no of rejection can set you back another 5 to 10 years because now you begin to second-guess your purpose. You begin to second-guess your vision. So for those of you who've had the no, who've been told no by your company, been told no by your managers and supervisors, I want to say to you How do you go back to the what when you've had the no? Let me say that again. How do you go back to the what when you've had the no? When someone has said no to you, how do you go back to the what that's fueling you? How do you go back to the what that you really want? How do you find the courage now to pick everything back up and go back and say, I know you told me no, but this is what I really want? You know, sometimes I know that having a no is huge. Having someone say no to you, um, can be the difference between you're feeling empowered and you're feeling lost, especially if you think you've done a great job for the organization and they just aren't seeing you. So I want to say to you, even if you don't think that your organization has rejected you by not promoting you, even if you don't think that you've lost out by not getting a promotion, Or if you're currently in a job that you think, boy, I really want to move from here, you have to get comfortable with no. No is important. No is your best friend. Because sometimes when you hear the no, it builds that backbone. You step up a little bit more and you say to yourself, No is not gonna define me. Let me tell you a little bit about my story. When my son was a little bit over a year old, I was working for an insurance carrier here in West Palm Beach, and I had a wonderful boss. And I say wonderful with tongue-in-cheek. She was evil. She hated the ground I walked on. Every morning she met me at the elevator. She made me feel uncomfortable and she did it deliberately. Um, I was the only woman of color on the team. I was the only woman of color working for the organization and this was 1994. And I saw a position posted, and I wanted to get out of her department. I decided I want to get out of here. There's no way that I'm going to stay working for this woman. So I went in and asked her permission because I had to. I was told by HR that I had to have her permission to apply for the job. So I went in. I said— her name was Lynette. So I went in to see Lynette, and I said, I want to apply for this position. And she said to me, I don't see you in that role. I mean, quite boldly, as soon as the words came out of my mouth, she said, I don't see you in that role. I don't see you as being qualified for that position. And I don't think I'm gonna recommend you because, you know what, I don't see your potential for that job. And she made me feel like crap. And I'm on this— this is my Facebook Live, so I could say whatever I want to say. So crap offends you, too bad. And I was emotionally shaken at the end of my conversation with her. And I went back to my desk, and I said to myself, this woman doesn't get to define me. She doesn't get to determine where I go. She doesn't get to tell me whether I'm good enough for this position or not. And I'm going to start looking for a job. So I boned up my resume. I got it all typed. And in those days, there was no email. There was stamps back then. And there was no Facebook. There was no nothing. There was— you see a job posted in the newspaper or at one of the job boards. There were some job boards back then. And you apply for the job. So I started sending my resumes out to organizations.. And I sent my resumes out. And I got an interview. And I went for the interview. And when I got back to the office, I took the morning off. And I did what every other red-blooded human being does. I had an I'm sick and going to the doctor moment. And when I got back to the office, she said to me, I don't think you were sick. And I said, OK, that's your choice to think I'm not sick. I have sick time. I took half a day and I'm back here within the time that I allocated. And she said, I'm gonna write you up. And I said, okay, no problem, write me up. 'Cause for me, I was already job hunting. I really didn't care. She wasn't gonna define me. And I really, looking back, I knew that was harassment. I think my Facebook Live has cut off. Ah, don't tell me that the internet went out.