As covered in recent blogs, many women under-estimate how their attitudes and actions about power and how their traditional sex-role socialized behavioral patterns can impact their career, influence, and team’s credibility. We’ve discussed how they may define power differently, dislike traditional power versus collaborative power, slip into language conventions that attract disparaging labels, or allow [...]

Losing Through Language
Deborah Tannen, in Talking from 9 to 5, and others have documented how women use different language patterns than men. It is not that these are mistakes in and of themselves, since they are simply different conventions. The risk occurs when women do not recognize how some habits are interpreted by some men. [...]

A core career mistake women can easily correct is that of ignoring blind spots about organizational politics, and overlooking common behavioral differences between males and females that often lead to unfair corporate “buzz” and interpretations that impact credibility. Sometimes blocking, negative perceptions are the outgrowth of mere language conventions, which we’ll cover in my next [...]

Next month, I’m addressing the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association’s annual Leadership Conference on women’s political blind spots, so I’m writing several blogs on this focused niche–– ethical politics for women. To keep myself honest, I’ll first address three common resistance points about the very premise of treating women as a politically marginalized group: Are such niche [...]