Recently, we searched through the archives and selected our top 10 posts. They cover a broad range of topics—from how to be a great non-profit board member to defining a vision for your company’s future.

Hope you enjoy reading them, learn from them, and forward them on to others who might find them insightful.

All the Best,

Karen’s Top Ten

1. Tips for Leading Efficient, Effective, and Enjoyable Meetings
2. Emotional Intelligence: A Different Way of Being Smart
3. How to Use (and How to Choose) an Executive Coach
4. Get Better Results from Difficult Conversations
5. Making a Truly Excellent Hire
6. Defining a Vision for the Future
7. Who are You? Defining Your Purpose and Values
8. How to Be an Outstanding Non-Profit Board Member: 10 Tips
9. “George, can you step into my office for a minute?”: Delivering Effective Feedback
10. Be Creative: Success Flows Directly From Innovation!

Here’s a brief look at each of these favorites.

Tips for Leading Efficient, Effective, and Enjoyable Meetings

What if all our meetings could be decisive, productive, and no longer than necessary? Our 10 tips enable you to lead meetings that are to die for…not to die at.

Here’s how:

1. Determine if the meeting is really necessary.
2. Create and use a detailed agenda.
3. Ensure proper room arrangements are made.
4. Always have a facilitator, timekeeper, and scribe.
5. Set clear guidelines.
6. Manage participation.
7. Make periodic process checks.
8. Take and distribute action minutes.
9. Plan next steps.
10. Begin and end on time.

Emotional Intelligence: A Different Way of Being Smart

In this post about Emotional Intelligence we summarized Daniel Goleman’s seminal book, which now, from a quick check of Amazon, seems to have spawned a cottage industry of similar books and seminars.

Successful leaders need these emotional competencies:

• Self-awareness
• Self-management
• Empathy, and
• Social skill.

This popular blog discusses leadership styles in light of the EQ concept, and provides a wealth of specifics on learning emotional competencies, and using them to create leadership styles that yield positive results.

How to Use (and How to Choose) an Executive Coach

Executive coaching has become a preferred approach to executive development– it focuses specifically on your individual leadership development needs, and can be directly applied to your current work.
Our  2007 newsletter “How to Use (and How to Choose) an Executive Coach” shows how to successfully employ executive coaching.

Get Better Results from Difficult Conversations

There’s nothing easy about difficult conversations. Whether the talk is about performance issues—Her work is just not where it needs to be—or behavioral issues—He was late again today—many of us avoid having to deal with conversations that we know will be unpleasant. Inside every difficult conversation are three separate conversations:

• The talk about what happened
• The conversation about feelings
• The discussion about what this information says about each person’s identity

Re-read “Get Better Results from Difficult Conversations” to get yourself started on more productive difficult conversations.

Making a Truly Excellent Hire

Whether we are expanding our businesses or just replacing employees lost through attrition, the need to “get the right people on the bus” never goes away. “Making a Truly Excellent Hire” focuses on five best practices:

• Learn from those who leave.
• Know what you want in a new hire.
• Base your hiring decisions on more than your gut.
• Hire for smarts.
• Don’t expect your new hires to sink or swim—orient them.

Defining a Vision for the Future

“If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up someplace else.” So we began our newsletter, “Defining a Vision for the Future.” Today, the need to define a clearly envisioned future is essential, and the vision processes are as important as the outcomes.

Who are You? Defining Your Purpose and Values

Start with this: What is your organization’s fundamental reason for being? Our newsletter on Defining Your Purpose and Values,” explores this essential element of a sustainable organization. Check out the model we recommend for defining your mission and values.

How to Be an Outstanding Non-Profit Board Member: 10 Tips

One of the most gratifying aspects of giving back to our communities is service on non-profit boards. In a 2006 blog, we provide 10 tips for making ourselves outstanding non-profit board members.

1. Get to know the organization.
2. Be an advocate for it.
3. Recognize that serving is volunteer, but not optional.
4. Make commitments you can keep.
5. Know your job and stick to it.
6. Find ways to translate what you know to benefit the non-profit.
7. Expand your skills.
8. Recognize that fundraising is a reality and a responsibility.
9. Don’t spread yourself too thin.
10. Rotate off.

Your favorite non-profit will thank you!

“George, can you step into my office for a minute?”: Delivering Effective Feedback

Giving candid and timely feedback may be one of the most neglected of all business skills. We all know we need feedback. So why don’t we give it?

1. We don’t know how.
2. We wait too long.
3. We don’t want to be hurtful.
4. We lose focus on why feedback is important.
5. We are fearful.
6. We are not measured on it.

For more information, see the full 2008 blog. 

Be Creative: Success Flows Directly From Innovation!

In our newsletter on creativity, we took a look at the creative process of Twyla Tharp, one of America’s foremost choreographers. In her book on developing creativity, Tharp comments: “It takes skill to bring something you’ve imagined into the world! No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that’s both painstaking and rewarding. It takes time.”

We hope you will enjoy TWC’s Top Ten and feel free to pass them along, post on Facebook or Twitter—and let us know how the Wunderlin Company can help you.

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A number of The Wunderlin Company workshops address these newsletter topics in more detail—Facilitating for Results and Advanced Models for Facilitation, Coaching as a Leadership Skill,  Effective Meetings, Myers-Briggs and Difficult Conversations.  For a full schedule or registration information, check out the workshop page on our website.

When my children were young, I did a fair amount of parenting with my eyeballs, reading books of all descriptions.  One of the books that really impacted my approach was The Optimistic Child by Martin Seligman.

So, while at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, I made sure to attend his session.  And, Seligman is two-for-two in my book—the session was truly helpful.  He shared the session with Matthieu Ricard, who among other roles, is the Dali Lama’s French interpreter.

In this newsletter are my notes on their recommendations for improving your day-to-day authentic well-being by employing simple daily practices. I hope they are as meaningful for you as they have been for me!

A New Theory of Well-Being

Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, is the Zellerback Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and serves as director of the university’s Positive Psychology Center.

This bestselling author has devoted his career to examining the opposite of what most psychologists study: not what can go wrong, but rather, what can go right—positive emotions, character traits, and institutions. He believes that many people feel they are powerless to change situations that are, in fact, changeable.

Freud and Schopenhauer posited that our highest aspiration is not to suffer, to have as little misery as possible.  Psychology, then, was dedicated to minimizing suffering. Seligman believes that stance is morally, politically, and psychologically flawed.  And he has developed the empirical evidence to support his claim that if we emphasize and develop the positive, we can have fuller, richer, lives.

Got PERMA?

With a foundation of belief in the value of the positive, Seligman notes that it is not enough just to talk about positive emotion; authentic well-being has several dimensions, which he terms PERMA—

• Positive emotion,
• Engagement,
• good  Relationships,
• Meaning and purpose, and
• Achievement or accomplishment.

With intentional effort, we can increase our PERMA—and this isn’t just touchy-feely, feel-good mush.  The practices are evidence-based and have survived random assignment placebo-controlled testing.

In the preface to his latest book, Flourish, Seligman says “I am a research scientist, and a conservative one at that.  The appeal of what I write comes from the fact that it is grounded in careful science:  statistical representative samples.  In contrast to pop psychology and the bulk of self-improvement, my writings are believable because of the underlying science.”

And that’s why his suggested practices are credible to me, and, I hope, to you as well.

Seligman has more than 12 practices that have passed his rigid level of scrutiny, and he shared four of them with us:

1. The What Went Well Exercise (improves Positive Emotion): Our natural focus is on the negative events in life; and there is certainly benefit in learning from the bad experiences. But focusing on the negative increases anxiety.  This exercise strengthens your ability to discern and hold tight to what is going well. For a week, before sleep, write down 3 things that went well and why.  Actually writing or typing it is important.  Next to each put a place to answer: “Why did this happen?”  Do it for a week even if it feels awkward.  Seligman noted that in psychotherapy, we are always doing skill building that is “like fighting against the mountain.” Sooner or later, you will wear down and give up. The PERMA practices, on the other hand, are self maintaining– even addictive—try them, and you will sleep better and feel better!

2. The Signature Strengths Exercise (improves Engagement): Doing this practice requires knowing your signature strengths.  You can complete the assessment that will give you that information at this link. You want the Via Survey of Character Strengths.  When I took the test today, it took about 30 minutes.

Now think of something you do every day that you don’t particularly like to do, then do that thing you don’t like to do, using a signature strength. Here’s an example—one of Seligman’s graduate students had a job bagging groceries which she did not like. One of her signature strengths was social intelligence.  She did this exercise when she bagged–connecting with each customer with the goal of making an interaction with her their best moment of the day!

3. The Gratitude Visit (improves good Relationships) Close your eyes and think of someone who years ago did or said something that improved your life.  (This needs to be someone who is still alive.)  Now, write a 300-word testimonial–what she did, how it affected you at the time, and how it affects you today. Then call and make the visit, but don’t say why.  When you visit, read them the letter.  Seligman noted that in their tests, people who did gratitude visits were less depressed and had better well-being one month later. Seligman noted that gratitude is very closely correlated with happiness.

4. Active Constructive Responding (improves Relationships) Seligman noted that marriage counseling is the worst kind of therapy because it is just teaching people to fight better! Dr. Shelly Gable of UC Santa Barbara looked instead at how married couples celebrated together, and learned that how they celebrate is more predictive of good relationships than how they fight.  So, how we help others celebrate can be a powerful means for improving relationships.

When someone tells us of a good thing that has happened to them, we can respond in an  active or passive, and a constructive or destructive fashion.  When your spouse comes home and tells you he or she was promoted, an active/ destructive response is “Do you know what tax bracket that will put us in?  Passive/ destructive is “What’s for dinner?”

An active constructive response has the greatest positive impact, and it has a constructive script.—“What great news! Let’s relive that moment– where were you? What did he say? How did you react?  We should go celebrate!”

So the practice is, for a week, listen carefully each time someone shares good news.  Go out of your way to respond in an active constructive way.  The key is to help the person relive the positive event or emotion. Seligman noted that this is another self-maintaining practice, but it is not one that comes naturally to most of us.  Intentional practice will help you become better at this practice with double benefit — “people like you better, they spend more time with you, and they share more of the intimate details of their lives.  You feel better about yourself, and all this strengthens the skill of active, constructive responding.”

To learn more about Seligman’s latest research, check out his website. It is full of free assessments, articles, and information.

Money Can’t Buy Happiness…Unless It is Spent on Another

Matthieu Ricard’s comments come from his experiences of forty years as a Buddhist monk. But Ricard is not one-dimensional: he is also an artist, a photographer, and an author. Most of the proceeds of his work go to humanitarian causes.

Ricard notes that, when we wake up, we don’t think, “I would like to suffer all day.”  We generally think that something better is coming down the road. For him, despair is not seeing any improvement coming in the future. The desire of all conscious beings is to get rid of sorrow and achieve some happiness.

Yet Ricard believes that there are things that look like well-being, but need to be distinguished: well-being as a way of being, as distinct from a pleasurable experience.  Happiness that comes from outside can provide pleasure, but true well-being comes from inside.  So we are not talking about the thrill of buying a new car or a new designer handbag, but rather altruistic love, inner peace, and inner strength that creates a deep reservoir of well-being.  This kind of happiness suffuses all states–You can experience sadness and still have genuine well-being as a way of being.

Some people try to build a bubble of self centeredness, thinking “I will focus on my own happiness.”  Selfish happiness doesn’t work because failure and successes get magnified — You feel miserable and are miserable with others.  This approach is dysfunctional because it is at odds with reality—genuine happiness comes through and with others.

The meditative state that brings the most positive result is compassion.  It functions because it is in harmony with reality.  It recognizes the fundamental motivation of all to avoid suffering and seek happiness. Genuine happiness is not a reward for good behavior; it is a result of living a compassionate life.  We have a biological urge to care, and we can extend that through training.

But How?

We know that high levels of skill require persistence and practice.  We can’t get kindness and compassion without that kind of practice.

Ricard suggested the following exercise to build compassion and therefore authentic well-being: Sometimes we have magic moments – focus in on what made them special.  Tune into the feelings you experienced in that moment — harmony, no inner conflicts…. Then, cultivate those feelings. As a starting point for practice, recall a genuine moment of unconditional love, like you have for a child.  Matthieu said, “That feeling has a different fragrance. Identify those qualities, then don’t let it go. Hang on to it–bring it to mind, keep it there. If it goes, bring it back, in a clear, stable, and vivid way. Maintain it. If you do regularly it will become part of yourself.

Ricard noted that short reflective sessions performed frequently were much  more effective than an occasional long effort.  Do this practice every day– don’t expect swift results, but genuine gradual change.

So, there you are–some quick notes from the Aspen Ideas Festival, that I hope will prove genuinely helpful to you.  If you are interested in reading more, below are lists of Seligman’s and Ricard’s books:

Martin Seligman’s major books:

Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

Practicing Positive Psychology Coaching: Assessment, Activities and Strategies for Success

The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children Against Depression and BuildLifelong Resilience

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control by Christopher Peterson, Steven F. Maier and Martin E. P. Seligman

Matthieu Ricard’s major books:

Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard and Daniel Goleman

Why Meditate: Working with Thoughts and Emotions

The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life by Jean-Francois Revel, Matthieu Ricard, John Canti and Jack Miles

The Great Medicine That Conquers Clinging to the Notion of Reality: Steps in Meditation on the Enlightened Mind by Shechen Rabjam and Matthieu Ricard

It is from this need that we developed this newsletter – our observations on what it takes to be really successful in driving change in your organization.

Change is a Process

A study of change projects concluded that 100% of successful change initiatives had good technical solutions. Not surprising. But it also found that 98% of unsuccessful change initiatives had good technical solutions!  So successful change is not about whether we have a good idea for change, but rather: Can we get the people who work here to support this good idea?

Because it is about influencing people as well as changing procedures, change is not a one-time event. When we work with clients, we focus on leading change as a four-step process:

• Initiate change by  grounding it in a solid purpose and a shared need.
• Mobilize commitment by engaging people in shaping the outcomes and understanding what the change will do for them.
• Transition to the new systems and processes in a transitioning period, and
• Make change last by monitoring results and having the change become a way of doing business.

Change Acceleration works in tandem with project management to assure that your change is delivered on time, on budget, and with support in the organization!

A savvy change leader* understands the complex interplay of these four elements, and realizes that the success of any change depends on the support of those affected.
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*Note: If you – or someone in your organization – would like to master the change leadership part of influencing people to accept change, The Wunderlin Company is offering its most popular workshop: Facilitating for Results on December 14-16. For more information or to register, click here.
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Switch!

A new book by brothers Chip and Dan Heath provides a compelling metaphor for creating effective change. In Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, the Heaths argue that implementing change is like getting a rider to control an elephant along a path. Lots of things have to go right to get the elephant where you want it to go!

Imagine you want to make a change. Every person – or team – has an emotional side, “the Elephant,” and a rational side, “the Rider.” To accomplish change, you have to reach both. And, of course, you have to clear the way for them to advance.  Using example after example, the Heaths focus on ways to “direct the rider, motivate the elephant, and shape the path.”

For example, two researchers in West Virginia wanted to try to find ways to persuade people to eat a healthier diet. Milk was identified as a pivotal part of the problem. Almost everyone drinks it, and whole milk is the single largest source of saturated fat in Americans’ diets. If people who drank whole milk switched to 1% or skim milk, they would reach the recommended levels of saturated fat in their diets.

First they appealed to the elephant – emotions – by showing grocery shoppers a tube of fat equivalent to the fat in a half gallon of milk and by explaining that one glass of whole milk contained saturated fat equal to 5 slices of bacon! Everyone’s reaction, of course, was that the fat was gross. Having monitored milk sales before the reduced-fat milk campaign began, the researchers knew that the market share of low-fat milk in the area was only 18%; during the campaign it rose to 41%, then leveled out at 35%.

The experiment covered all three bases: It clearly and simply directed the Rider to buy 1% or skim milk, it motivated the Elephant with images of tubes of fat, and it made the path easier by allowing people to make one simple change that started them along the road to better life-long health.

Direct the Rider

A few years ago The Wunderlin Company worked with a major airline, identifying 40 changes that needed to be made in the reservations division in the post 9/11 environment. As Laura Butcher, a Wunderlin Company associate, explains the challenge:

“Making 40 changes in one year – with many having impacts on the skills, compensation, and efficiency metrics – required substantial planning. We worked with a cross-functional team to put together plans to integrate the most significant initiatives first so that the airline minimized disruptions, overcame resistance, and realized efficiency and cost savings more quickly.

We helped the team complete a gap analysis for each of the initiatives to describe the current and future states, and we helped them identify the specific gaps that needed to be addressed.

We also guided the team in completing analysis of the stakeholders – what their needs, concerns and influencers were on each of the change projects. In dealing with these issues, we helped to construct adoption strategies, communication plans and action task lists to ensure that the initiatives and teams remained on message, integrated and aligned in purpose. Finally, we facilitated the group in identifying risks to successful execution and action plans to mitigate them.”

Clearly, managing change is not all about the change itself; in fact, most of our work deals with the more emotional, less rational side of the ‘change ride’: motivating the elephant!

Motivate the Elephant

A couple of years ago in a newsletter written at the depth of the recession, I discussed Ram Charan’s “Six Essential Leadership Traits for Hard Times.” The same skills needed to weather the changes brought about by a downturn are valuable in leading a company into better times. But as a change leader, you might also want to evaluate your team’s skills in dealing with the emotional aspects of change:

• How are my team’s influencing skills?
• What about their communication skills?
• Can they address the right questions? Like…
  • Where are we meeting resistance?
  • What do our employees need to effect this change?
  • How can we influence them to support the change?
  • What is the next milestone?

Failure to bring the organization along with you can ensure individual and collective resistance, along with reactions to the change ranging from apathy to downright sabotage, so inspiring a buy-in is absolutely essential.  So how do you handle the inevitable resistance?

In recent months, we have been working with a global company whose senior team wants to achieve some dramatic culture change  AND give leadership development opportunities to a number of “next generation” leaders. The executive team elected to launched a number of change initiatives, simultaneously! Senior team leaders had spent a good amount of time hand-picking the team members for each initiative, and providing resources for their work, but issues and resistance still arose.

For example, teams  feared disagreeing with senior management.  The first time such an issue came up,  the team took the risk, presented their case, and let management decide whether to accept what ended up being a very modest change (and they did!). Another team made a recommendation that actually wasvery significant – involving a change in the company’s logo and tagline – and after robust conversations, senior management supported them. All these issues were more about the elephant than the rider.  As senior leaders proved they were serious about letting the teams do their work, commitment has increased.

The early experiences with change management helped senior management and the change acceleration teams understand how to really “bake in” a culture difference across the globe. TWC’s “Equation for Success” had turned into the company’s mantra for change: the Quality of a solution times its Acceptance in the organization determines the Success of your result.

Sometimes, getting that all-important buy-in from your employees is as simple as maintaining your sense of humor–

A Fortune 500 company was changing its time sheets from paper to electronic. This was a major change, involving staff reduction, job assignment changes, and major alterations in methodology. The head of payroll  knew the change was going to have an emotional impact on over 15,000 employees.  So those most involved were invited to a funeral for the paper time sheet! Eulogies extolling the virtues of the old system acknowledged the pain of its passing. When the new system came online, birth announcements were sent out. The transition was much smoother because the stress brought about by change was anticipated and addressed with respect and humor.

Shape the Path

Once changes are formulated, and individuals and departments have bought into the changes, leaders have to shape the path to make the changes last.

The Switch authors suggest that you tweak the environment to make right behaviors a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little bit harder. Think about Amazon’s 1-click ordering. With one-tenth the effort of dialing a phone number, you can buy a new book or DVD. Talk about instant gratification. Amazon’s site designers have simply made a desired behavior – you spending money on their site – a little bit easier.

Here’s how Wunderlin Company associate Carol Schifman explains our approach to helping leaders shape the path for change: “Change is never easy, but the process and likelihood of success improves measurably when leaders understand how to initiate change, mobilize commitment for it, make the transition, and make the change last. We help get them to this level of understanding.”

Final words of advice from Switch authors Chip and Dan Heath: “For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your team. Picture the person (or people). Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side. You’ve got to reach both. And you’ve also got to clear the way for them to succeed.”

Direct the Rider • Motivate the Elephant • Shape the Path

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Some Great Reads on Change

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. Chip and Dan Heath. Broadway Books, 2010.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. Penguin Books, 2008, 2009.

Harvard Business Review on Change. A Harvard Business Review Paperback. 1998.

Change the Way You Lead Change: Leadership Strategies That Really Work. David M. Herold and Donald B. Fedor. Stanford Business Books, 2008.

Radical Change, the Quiet Way.Debra E. Meyerson. Harvard Business Review. October 2001.

Leading Change: An Action Plan from the World’s Foremost Expert on Business Leadership, John P. Kotter. Harvard Business School Press.

When I went to college in 1974, most women I knew still expected to marry shortly after graduation.  Many of my friends majored in nursing and teaching, the most common and “available” careers for women.  When I graduated from business school, instead of luggage and a brief case, I got a sewing machine and a vacuum cleaner! But while in school, our world began to change.  Friends switched their majors to business, or began planning to go to law school or med school.  And, most of us didn’t get married right out of school!

Then in the late seventies, we began our careers… and have ended up as CEO’s, CIO’s, GM’s, senior partners, business owners, public sector leaders, elected officials, and presidents… and that’s just my friends! We have worked in a time when social mores and expectations were shifting at an accelerating pace.

A couple of months ago, some of us were reminiscing about those days… and the idea for a newsletter emerged.  I hope you enjoy reading about and gain some in learning from our stories.

Lessons Learned:  Beyond the Glass Ceiling
Women who entered the work force in the 1960s and ‘70s – and even managed to break through the glass ceiling – may not know whether to laugh or cry at AMC’s Mad Men, set in an ad agency around 1960. If they laugh, it might be because of the truth they see in the depiction of women in the workplace. If they cry, it might be because of the truth they see …well, you get the picture.

You don’t have to turn to television for stories of behavior in the workplace of the past that would be unimaginable by today’s standards. You just need to ask the women who were there! That’s just what we did for this edition of Changing Times. Compiled here are the stories of women’s early days of their careers.  They relate, with a humorous twist, some of the challenges they faced. Then, we share gems of advice for finding success as a woman in the world of work today. And, it’s not too hard to see that many of these lessons apply to both women and men.

Looking Back
In the mid-80s I was on a team at GE that spent significant time in Japan and Korea.  My first trip there, I asked one of our Asian hosts to point me in the direction of a rest room.  Following his directions, I unknowingly walked in on all my male teammates!

As the project progressed, we developed strong bonds with our Asian counterparts. On my final visit to Japan as part of the team, we held a dinner, followed by a visit to our Japanese host’s club.  After several rounds of scotch, this fellow with whom I had spent so much time finally opened up about the question that had clearly been on his mind all along—“ Why does your husband allow you to do this?!”

I was not alone: A former manager of a firm specializing in corporate design and relocation tells the story of a phone call she thought was a mere formality to closing a deal to design a series of child-care centers. Working from home the day of the call, she failed to notice the family parrot mimicking voices in the background, but the would-be client abruptly ended the call, telling her he would not consider doing business with a woman who left a child crying in the background during the whole call.  Her explanation that the sounds were a parrot, and that her youngest “child” was a college student, did nothing to counter his position that in the South, families were revered, and he would not trust the design of his facilities to such an unfeeling “professional” woman.

One of the ways most women have succeeded is by looking for the humor in situations.  A former auditor mused that one controller asked her directly why a “gal like you is in a job like this and not home having babies.” The same man had the documents needed for the audit stored in boxes in the men’s room.  Of course, she ventured in anyway, reviewing the documents and stepping out any time someone came in to use the facility.  (That controller, by the way, ended up being convicted of embezzlement, giving her one more reason to trust her instincts.)

Other stories aren’t really tinged with humor, but rather make you cringe. A long-time IT and HR executive recalled that she was promoted to management when she was 8 ½ months pregnant, but was told that her boss’s boss at the New York headquarters of the company wanted to hold off on her raise until she returned from maternity leave – they didn’t really believe she would come back! Fortunately, her boss stood firm, saying she had earned the promotion and the pay that accompanied it.

When Everything Changed
Gail Collins’ 2009 book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, tells the story of our move from a society in 1960 where most young women grew up never seeing a woman doctor, lawyer, or engineer, and where most had to have their husband’s permission to get a credit card, through the 2008 Presidential campaign of Hilary Clinton.  The book is full of astonishing facts and stories of the early years:

• A young woman was thrown out of court in 1960 by a judge because she was wearing pants.
• A medical school dean in 1961 candidly said of women, “We don’t want them here.”
• A NASA spokesman announced that “talk of an American space woman makes me sick to my stomach.”
• The Boston Marathon was men only, because it was “unhealthy for women to run long distances.”

A report on women in management by Harvard Business Review in the 1960s noted that there were so few women in higher echelons that “there is scarcely anything to study.”

Yenise Alonso and Vickie Brint, in their essay “Women in the Workplace,” note that social and economic changes enabled more women to attend college in the 60s, thereby increasing their job opportunities. According to Nancy Gibbs, Time magazine’s editor-at-large and author of Time’s 2009 special report, “The State of the American Woman,” the birth control pill, the civil rights movement, and a changing economy enabled women to start their families later and made us less tolerant of discrimination in any form, opening doors for women to go to work.

By 1998, the number of women entering the workforce had risen to 3 out of every 5 women, compared to 1 in 3 in 1950. By 2006, women represented 46% of those working, and in 2010, for the first time, women were generally reported to be at least 50% of the workforce.

How Far We’ve Come
Today, women have come so far that it seems acceptable to take a light-hearted look at gender issues. NBC News legal analyst Dan Abrams has written a compelling little book entitled Man Down: Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt That Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers, and Just About Everything Else.

Using empirical evidence and a good dose of humor, Abrams makes the serious case that polls and scientific studies have demonstrated that women have better memories, vote in higher percentages, are better at using social media, are less corrupt in politics, are better at navigating a tough economy, and are even better beer tasters!

One of Abrams’ most interesting and well-documented chapters concerns the effectiveness of women police officers, who, he notes, “didn’t even have a Police Officer Barbie to look up to until 1993.” When crime and police corruption were rocking Lima, Peru, and Volgograd, Russia, in the early 2000s, the countries came up with the same solution: hire women officers instead. A study in Los Angeles backed up their good results: Women were more trusted, played by the rules, and had less tolerance for bad behavior on the streets and among their peers.

Abrams reports that a New York Times study determined that women make more money in the stock market than men. The same newspaper reported that some Ivy League schools have been accused of stacking the deck in favor of boys to try to “balance out” higher achievement by women students.  As Abrams notes: “Wow. Accusations of affirmative action policies—for men. That kind of says it all.”

Fifty years after a wholesale move of women into the work force, many people believe that all issues of gender equity are behind us. In truth, women are still chiseling away at the glass ceiling.  As one friend put it, the cracks are bigger, but the ceiling is still there.

Issues that Remain
Progress to the very top has remained slow.  While women now earn 60% of all master’s degrees and 50% of all doctoral degrees, in 2006 only 10 Fortune 500 companies were run by women.

Pay equity also remains an issue. In 2005, women earned only 77 cents for every dollar men earned. In 2009, according to the US Department of Labor statistics, that figure ranged from 80 cents through 93 cents, depending on the ages of the women. (Young women ages 16 to 24 achieved the higher level.) Pay inequality in part stems from the occupations most prevalent among women.  The number one job category for women in 2009 was secretaries and administrative assistants, and the numbers two and three – registered nurses and teachers.  So there hasn’t been as much change as one would like to believe.

Competing priorities at work and home remain an issue for women, but a consensus is developing that what women want and need in the workforce can be beneficial to men and to employers, as well.

With women’s participation in the world of work largely a foregone conclusion, some old issues have died out, but new ones have arisen. A recent New York Times article focused on a new set of issues facing academic women.  Those in scientific fields, still a minority, spend an inordinate amount of time, for example, sitting on committees, where they feel like the “token woman.”  In addition, author Kate Zernike notes that women feel they—and not the men on the faculty—are too frequently invited to participate in work-life balance panels, where they are expected to discuss family issues, like how much sleep they get, or what they feed their children for breakfast.

Keys to Success
Distilled down, here are some of our lessons learned—

• Focus on what you do well.  Your individuality is your best asset.
• Listen for hints and take advice.
• Trust your instincts. They are a major part of who you are.
• Act confident until you are.
• Always make friends with the HR people.
• Be able to understand and articulate how your initiatives align with the vision of the organization.
• Document and share your accomplishments and those of the people you lead.

Lessons Learned
So where do we go from here? How can we be sure the path from here continues to improve openness and opportunity?

One thing is certain: everyone benefits when the talents of women and men alike are fully utilized, and when employees are able to work with their employers on finding a balance that is beneficial to everyone. Policies that are women-friendly are also men-friendly and business-friendly.

The Last Laugh
Of all of the advice my friends had to offer to young women and to those who mentor them, perhaps the best was to be yourself – your individuality is your strongest asset. We’ll close with one last true story from a colleague:

“It was the early 1980s, and we were all wearing the ‘dress for success’ uniform – suit with oxford shirt and floppy bow tie. I had a friend at work who wore the uniform every day, and I mean EVERY DAY. She was very attractive, but also very shy. She said she couldn’t just start wearing something different, because everyone would notice. This continued until she got a job at another company. When she got her acceptance letter, I bought her a celebration present – a red knit dress with matching jacket that looked GREAT. She wore the new dress the first day on the job, and phased out the uniform. She’s now a senior executive at a Fortune 200 Company. While the killer red dress wasn’t the reason for her success, it sure helped her self-confidence!”

You, go, girl.