A professional woman whom I coach had been invited to give a short presentation to another department by that department’s head, another professional women with executive and professional degrees.  After finishing what she felt was a well-received talk, she sat down in the audience, a few rows in front of the department head.  When the meeting was over, the department head approached my client, telling her, “I noticed how tired you seemed while you were sitting there.  Are you ok?” This is organizational politics at its very worst!  Let me be very clear: if anyone at work (unless they are your very best friend and close confidant) tells you that you look tired, they are insulting you, attempting to undermine your…

I am fortunate to work closely with my undergraduate alumnae association.  When I did my undergraduate work Douglass College, a division of Rutgers University, was all women, serving as the sister school to Rutgers College, then all men.  Rutgers College admitted women in1972, my sophomore year, but Douglass remained a degree-granting, single-gender school until 2007.  Now it’s been renamed as Douglass Residential College but it remains focused on programs and services dedicated to women and women’s education. I am the head of an alumnae-mentoring program (alumna to alumna) and, along with my work as an executive coach, I come in contact with many young millennial women.  I get it that my sample is skewed.  However, I am fascinated with how many…

It happened again last week at my regular chiropractor appointment.  I’ve been suffering from a sciatica flare-up and the back cracking seems to work.  My doctor who happens to live across the street from me asked me how much walking I did the day before, given that I was groaning just rolling off the table.  When I told him my Fitbit recorded upward of 16,000 steps, he exclaimed, “You sure stay busy for being retired!”  Who ever said anything about being retired? But I hear it all the time from family and friends, who murmur in somewhat suppressed amusement about my many hobbies and the ways I find to “stay busy.” At the same time, my coaching practice is rife with…

I reached my current height when I was in fifth grade and all of 11 years old.  I still carry a vivid memory of going out trick or treating with my friends the year before, towering over them, and some dad saying to me, “You should be ashamed of yourself, begging for candy with the little kids at your age!”  I was ashamed after that, feeling wrong in my 5’7” self. Unfortunately “feeling wrong” in your skin is an all too common feeling among young women, even after decades of women’s advancement in education and their subsequent rise in the working world.  There is a pervasive cultural message that a woman’s value is closely linked to her appearance.   Young women today…

By the time this essay sees the light of day, our election will be over and some of the vitriol of this campaign may be behind us.  It will be remembered for many things, not the least of which will be the discussion of sexual harassment and the treatment of women in the workplace.  The presidential campaign was the “highlight” of the news but the advertising and the media industries have had their shares of gender harassment scandal this year as well.  The CEO of J. Walter Thompson resigned after being accused of making rape jokes, the executive chair of Saatchi and Saatchi resigned after making dismissive comments about gender diversity and a 4A’s survey showed that more than 50% of…

Our organization was undergoing a complete revitalization: new brand, new divisions, new reporting structures, new corporate policies and new human resource approaches.  All critical business heads (emphasis provided by the Management Board) had been invited to a two-day workshop in Europe to learn about the new structure and understand what it meant for them and their business responsibilities.  One of the presentations over those two days was given by an HR consultant, who spoke about the development of a schema of leadership competencies that were unique to our organization and critical for future success.  She made numerous references to the interviewing she had conducted with our leaders over the last few days and talked about the assessments she had given “us.”  …

Well, of course I take notes.  I got out of college with good grades.  I got to the ABD (all-but-dissertation) stage of graduate school with boxes of file cards recording details and dry statistics from scholarly journals.  And presently I am at the point of my life where so much information is packed into my brain (wry sarcasm here) that I find it helpful to write things down to remember them.  But like many women my age or older, we wanted to make certain that we were not mistaken for the secretary or the assistant and so, in climbing our career ladder, we refused to perform some of the basic functions that were necessary in the workplace.  For some of us,…