002. Get Promoted in 6 months: Part 2 - Skills Development & Self-Advocacy

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Intro Song: Cumbia No Frills Faster by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Transcript

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Hello. Welcome. You are listening to the Latinas in Leadership podcast, where we empower Latinas with the guidance, knowledge they need to get promoted into leadership, increase their salary, and step into their purpose. I'm your host, Alejandra Thompson, leadership coach and first gen Latina, on a mission to see more Latinas in leadership. Inside of my one on one coaching program, the Confident Latina Leader. I've helped Latinas increase their salary by 000, and even 40, 000. I've helped them get promoted into director level positions, quit toxic jobs, and change careers without taking a pay cut. In this podcast, you can count on me to share strategies, tools, and knowledge to help you break into the next level of your career. Let's go.

Shure MV7 & Lumina Camera - Raw: 0:54

Welcome back to part two of three on the series of getting promoted in six months. This is how I wanted to kick off the podcast. before I started this podcast. This is a few weeks ago. I did a poll on LinkedIn and asked y'all. What is the thing you're struggling with the most right now I'm starting a podcast. So what would be the number one topic you would want to hear about getting promoted into leadership and overcoming imposter syndrome tied at the top? So I will be going overcoming imposter syndrome I will cover that because they do recognize that that's so important for us Latinas. But here I'm doing a series on getting promoted in the next six months. And this is part two of three. In part one, we went over self-assessment and goal setting and these steps build off of each other. So if you came straight to this episode, I'm going to tell you, please go back. You want to go back to part one? Trust me. I do this for a living. I help Latinas break into leadership. You want to go back to the first episode and listen to that one. Today we are going over skills development and self advocacy in part three, we're going to go over networking and personal branding. When it comes to skills development. I'm going to go over key skills that I firmly believe every Latina needs to develop. If they want to break into leadership. In the past episode you identified. Five key areas where you need to improve. So you have those, you want to make sure that you have those listed out. These are the five key areas that I want to improve. Now below, I'm going to go over the six skills. That every aspiring Latino leader needs to develop. Number one we're starting off with speaking up. This is probably one of the biggest skills that I help, the vast majority of my clients with speaking up. I see this as such a struggle for us Latinas, especially if you're introverted, but even if not, this is just such a big struggle. For us. And I think part of that is culturally the way that we are raised, the way that we understand being a good girl, the way that we understand, we need to show up and present ourselves within the family and be very agreeable and not be disrespectful and not do things that are. Rude. Speaking up. Is one of the biggest struggles that I see my clients face. And it's so important when it comes to leadership. The way that this shows up is you struggle to share your ideas in meeting rooms. You've struggled to raise your hand and say, Hey, I have that idea. I have some of my clients who say, like, if someone asked me about my idea, I can feel a little bit better, but I can't just raise my hand and say my idea. And then I have other clients where like, if someone asked me about my idea, I freeze and I. I don't know what to say. I'm terrified. That's one way speaking up shows up another way more like public speaking, for example, presenting in front of senior leaders. A lot of my clients struggle hard to present in front of senior leaders or present in general, but it's exacerbated when they are presenting in front of executives. Who are primarily white males. I find this to be a really big theme as well. Many of my clients feel uncomfortable in white male dominated areas, which is. Very difficult because most of leadership are white males. Speaking up is also about self-advocacy. My clients really struggle with self-advocacy. Being able to. Talk about their wins. I had one client in particular who really struggled with even talking about wins, even though they were true. She knew that they were true, but for her, it just felt like it was bragging. It felt like it was wrong. It felt like why can't they just see the work that I'm doing? Why do I have to tell them what I'm doing? And so this is a skill that's incredibly important for you to work on is speaking up now, how do you do that? Where I'm going to have whole episodes that are dedicated to how you can learn how to speak up. But if you tips that I'll share with you is you can start small and build your way up. You don't have to go in and be like, okay, next week, I'm going to present in front of senior leaders. You can start small. So let's say you struggle to even share your ideas in meetings. Start with sharing one idea in a meeting in the next week, we talked about smart goals. In the previous podcast episode. So you can set a goal around speaking up, like over the next two months, I am going to share my ideas at least three times in meetings. That's a very specific goal that you can have to help you with speaking up. Speaking up is important because as a leader, you are going to need to advocate for the people that are your direct reports. You're going to need to. Talk about your ideas in meeting rooms and then advocate for why those ideas are the best ones. You're going to have to explain to your team what's going on, whether that's positive news or negative news. Imagine yourself, would you want to work for someone? Who did not speak up for themselves or for others? I don't know anyone who would say yes to that question. So you want to start working on this? If you know, you struggle with speaking up, you need to start working on this skill right here. Speaking up. Number two, his bigger picture thinking. And you can think about this as strategic thinking. I teased this a little bit in the last episode, it's so important for you to be able to think of the bigger picture again, when we're entry-level or when we're individual contributors, we check boxes, we are given tasks and we check those boxes and that's fine for the early part of your career is to be really good at that. Be really good. at accomplishing tasks be really good at taking initiative and being proactive. Once you start stepping into leadership, it's important that you think about the bigger picture. How does this impact other departments? How does my decision or my work impact my team members? What are the company goals and how is the work that I'm doing impacting company goals? That's strategic thinking. That's looking at the bigger picture. You want to start to build that muscle. And this is something you can start doing right now, even as an individual contributor. We're even at the manager level, before going into the director level, how is your work impacting the company's bottom line, the company's goals? How is it fulfilling the company values? Do you know the company values? How are you living by those company values within the workplace to make sure that the work is aligned with that? Those are bigger picture thinking and it's a skill that every single leader needs to develop. Number three influence. This can be kind of an icky word. It's so funny. I was actually listening to. I'm a podcast. It was a couple. And one that it's a couple, a husband and a wife and the husband described themselves as influencers. And the woman, the wife was like influencers. Like I don't, I don't think for influencers and the husband was like, we're definitely influencers. And she was like, really. Like what's the definition of influencers and she starts Googling it and she's like, oh man, I think I'm an influencer, but I don't want to be an influencer. And so there's, I've noticed that some people have this kind of discomfort around being an influencer. I think it has to do with the level of responsibility that we need to take. And also being seen, like we are now. Being recognized and seen, and that can be uncomfortable. Influence is a skill that every aspiring leader needs to develop. How are you going to influence other people? How are you going to influence other people to get onboard with your plan? How are you going to influence people to be motivated in times where it can be challenging? How are you going to influence people to do the right thing, even though people are angry and don't want to. You have to develop yourself as someone who has influence that is a critical skill that every. Leader needs to develop number four, conflict resolution. This is another one tied to speaking up that I find to be incredibly challenging for me. Latinas here. Most of my clients want to run away from conflict. We don't want to deal with it. I have a few that are more of the confrontational, but most of the time we're like, no, rather not. And the way that we handle it is by people pleasing, we become agreeable. We want to avoid it. And then we become resentful and bitter in our hearts about certain situations and certain people to the point where we're like, we need to leave this job. What I like to say is wherever people congregate, wherever people exist together, there will be conflict. Period. Whether that's in school, in the workplace. In families at church, wherever people congregate, there will be conflicts because we're humans. And we got so many things going on in our brain. And we make up so much stuff about each other. There will always be conflict. Every single leader needs to know. How they can resolve conflict. This is an incredible skill that every leader needs to develop is conflict resolution. So one of the first things you want to start doing is actually recognizing how do you react in conflict? Do you run away? Do you become confrontational? Do you shut down? What is the way that you react to conflict? And then you want to start thinking about ways that you can resolve conflict. So there is a framework that I really enjoy called nonviolent communication. And VC is the acronym. It's by Marshall Rosenberg, I believe is his name. And you can Google it. It's a really great framework. I believe in the way that you can communicate through conflict. It's one that I teach my clients. And leadership development and then actually practice it in their day to day. Conflict resolution is so important because you, as a leader are going to need to be the person who's going to support your team and resolving conflict. And if you yourself cannot resolve conflict, you cannot lead other people to resolve conflict. The higher you get into leadership, the more responsibility you have, the more that people are going to look to you to come up with solutions, especially in difficult situations. Number five. Every aspiring Latina leader needs to develop the skill of feedback. You have to be able to give feedback and receive feedback. These are the problems that I see with my clients. With giving feedback, you feel guilty, you feel like you're being mean you're scared that you're going to hurt their feelings. You're scared that they're going to hate you. And then when it comes to receiving feedback, the problems I see is that you take it super personal. You make it mean that you suck at life. You make it mean that you're not worthy. You make it mean that you don't belong in this role. So it's super personal when you receive it and then it's super personal when you give it, which makes sense. Right? If you receive feedback as an attack on who you are as a person, and that you're not good enough, then of course, you're not going to want to give feedback. That makes sense. So it's really about understanding what is the purpose of feedback? The purpose of feedback is for us to be able to improve. Us to be able to see blind spots. And to be able to collaborate better with other people. I was just working with a client recently, who is in her first leadership role. And it's the first time that she is hiring someone. So this has been a learning curve for her. It's the first time she's hiring someone. And when she posted this role, internal candidates were reaching out to her and were like, Hey, I'd love to talk with you about this job. And she got really uncomfortable and was like, oh, I don't know, like, how am I going to tell this person that I don't think they're the right fit that I'm looking for, something really specific. And I don't think they fulfill that. She got super spirally about feedback, about how do I express and give them feedback about where they have gaps and how, I don't think that they're the right fit for this. And when we started digging into it, of course it goes back to people pleasing. It goes back to things we learned in childhood. About what is a nice lady, a nice girl, and how we're supposed to act. And so when we address that and we looked okay, In what ways? Are you helping this person by giving them this piece of feedback. And when we started going through that, it was like, okay, well it would help them because then they can actually know what they need to work on in order to land a job like this. It would help them because it would save them time of going through the entire application process. And in what ways would it help her? I asked my client. And what ways would it help you? She was like, well, it would help me because I would be able to cross this off of my list and be able to look at the candidates that I think are going to be a good fit. And it will help me because it will make sure that I put someone in this role that is going to be the best fit for this team. And make this team more effective. And that goes back to bigger picture thinking. So all of these are actually going to start working with each other, these skills that I'm laying out to you. You giving good feedback and receiving feedback helps you with bigger picture thinking. It's wild, but some of you would rather hire someone that isn't a good fit. At a fear of not wanting to give feedback that you think may hurt their feelings. So number five is feedback. You want to get really good at giving it? You want to get really good at receiving it. Number six boundaries, boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. Our favorite word boundaries. This is a skill specifically. That I see with my Latina leaders. When I introduced this podcast to you all. I mentioned, why is this different? How is this podcast different? Well, number one, it caters specifically to Latinas. Not first gen not women of color, not women. It's specifically for Latinas and number two, these are episodes that are going to be strategy action, given guidance things for you to go and do, to be able to break into leadership and rise in leadership. I have not seen the intersection of those two things anywhere in any podcast. And this is an example of the ways that that intersection is showing up when it comes to the top. Six skills that every aspiring Latina needs to develop. The reason why speaking up. Conflict resolution feedback. Boundaries bigger picture thinking and influence are on here. R because this is what I've seen over and over again, that my Latina clients are struggling with. They struggled to share their ideas. They struggled to feel comfortable, claiming influence. They struggled to resolve conflicts and rather run away or shut down. They struggled to give or receive feedback because they take it super personal and they struggle to set boundaries. We say yes to everything. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I got it. I'll do it. We're afraid if we say no, we look like we're not a team player. We look like we don't care. We need to work harder and harder and harder. That's going to be a whole episode in and of itself. The struggle that Latinas have with working, working, working, working, overworking ourselves. I'm a bit like we got to work hard. I believe in work. This is work right here that I'm doing for this podcast. And there's a difference between working and doing work in a way that is boundaried and smart. And fits into our overall quality of life and the life that we want to have versus overworking, because we don't think that we are good enough with what we give and that if we don't work more and more and more, we're not going to get enough. That's scarcity. So boundaries, let's go back to boundaries. Really important skill that you need to develop, because if you don't have boundaries, As a leader. You're going to lead your team to lack boundaries. And I know most of you know, what it feels like to work for a leader who has no boundaries to work for a leader that is sending you emails at 9:30 PM. But then maybe it's like, yeah, you don't have to reply. It's okay. But like, it doesn't feel good to have a leader email you at 9:30 PM. Regardless. It doesn't feel good to work under a leader that has no boundaries. So why would you be a leader then that has no boundaries? You have to have boundaries. Boundaries are going to help you. With bigger picture thinking you can't keep in mind the bigger picture if you don't have no boundaries, because you're going to get boggled down with a bunch of things that aren't a part of the bigger picture that aren't taking into account. The bigger picture. You can't have boundaries. If you don't know how to resolve conflict. Because part of resolving conflict is setting boundaries. So you see how all of these start to interact with each other. All six of these skills are critical for you. Recapping the six skills, every aspiring Latina leader needs to develop. Number one, speaking up number two, bigger picture thinking number three, influence number four, conflict resolution number five, feedback and number six. Boundaries. Now let's talk about self-advocacy. We just went over skills development. These are skills that you want to be developing. So set some smart goals for them. Assess where are you right now in these and set smart goals for these. Let's go into self advocacy. Really difficult one for my clients. Self-advocacy. There's a lot entangled in this, like I said, cultural. Societaly being women growing up Latina, maybe being a daughter of immigrant parents. There's many things that, that intersect to make this really difficult. Self-advocacy is. Critical for your career development. And here are some ways that I want you to think about starting number one, ask for feedback. Ask your manager for feedback. And now that you have smart goals, you can ask for feedback on the very specific gaps that you're looking to develop. What I like to tell my clients is specific questions. Give you specific feedback. They get questions gave you vague feedback. One of my biggest. Issues in the corporate place is that we have a lot of quote unquote leaders. That don't have leadership skills. Unfortunately, we have people placed in leadership positions that are not been given the resources, to develop their leadership skills. What that means is that we have people in leadership positions that actually don't know how to give proper feedback. Many of my clients come to me. And this is a big point of frustration where they say I never got feedback for it. And now they're telling me that I am not performing well. Where it's like out of the blue. Or I've never been given feedback, but I still haven't gotten promoted on the other hand, I have clients who come to me and they're like, I always get feedback that I'm doing well, that I'm performing well, that I'm doing awesome. That I'm. Hitting all my goals. But I'm not getting promoted. So you want to ask for feedback and you want to ask specific questions. That would be the difference between what do you think about how I'm performing as a project manager? Versus. Tell me, how do you think I did on X project with meeting our deadlines? Two very different ways to ask questions that will give you vastly different answers. And this is also a way that you self-advocate because in now what you're doing is you are creating a space where your leader, your manager is now thinking about, oh, how are they handling that? Oh, yeah, she is like, she did do that. She did meet all those timelines. Now they're thinking about you. In that perspective. You want to ask for feedback? Number two, you want to communicate your goals? You want to say it out loud and tell your manager, tell people, communicate your goals. When I say tell people, I mean, have discernment like you, don't gotta tell everybody. But I have discernment and tell people that you think are important to tell your manager is one of them communicate your goals. For example, if you want to become a manager, Express that I would like to become a manager by the summer of next year or by X time. Can you tell me what are three areas that you think I would need to improve in order for that to happen? You want to communicate your goals? Number three, track your accomplishments. This is a way to self-advocate for yourself. I went and I told you last week, and I will tell you again this week. Clarity build confidence. When you are clear about your accomplishments, when you are tracking them things. You can build your confidence in that way. So track your accomplishments, you can do this in a Google document. You can do however you want to. Do you want to do it in your notes? I'm not going to tell you how to do it. I do it on a Google doc and that's how I usually recommend it. But like, whatever way is going to work for you. Do that and this is also a great way, by the way, for you to be able to keep track of numbers, quantifiable results that you provide, because those are things that we just don't remember. Like y'all, don't even remember what you ate for dinner two days ago. So how are you going to remember. That you increased. Savings by 12% in Q3. So as number three, track your accomplishments and number four, communicate your accomplishments and connect them to results. How did they help others? This is again, going back to bigger picture thinking. So you do want to communicate your accomplishments, also connect them to results. What was the result that it provided and how did that result? Help others. How is that connected to the bigger picture? How has that result connected to the company values to the company goals, to the department goals connected to something bigger. Self-advocacy. Literally is you being your number one cheerleader in your career. Stop waiting for someone to recognize you. I feel this really heavy in my heart because I personally believe. That many of my clients are just hoping and waiting that someone will recognize their hard work. But it isn't working. Stop waiting for someone to recognize your hard work. It is not bragging. To talk about what you accomplished. Bragging is a perspective. Do it with grace. Do it. With other people in mind do it by thinking about how it's helping other people. When people are bragging, they're not thinking about the bigger picture. They're not thinking oftentimes about how it's helping other people. You are not being arrogant or a jerk. You have to trust that you are a good person. You have to trust. That you are not. A jerk. You're not going to turn into a jerk because you talk about your accomplishments to your manager and connect them to the bigger picture. Self-advocacy is critical for your growth because no one is thinking about you as much as you are thinking about you. There is not a single human out there. That's thinking about you as much as you are thinking about you. You are not the center of anyone else's world. You have to advocate for yourself. You have to ask for feedback. Get your manager thinking about the ways that you are accomplishing things, communicate your goals. Track your accomplishments and communicate them in a way that's connected to how it's helping other people. That's what I got for you. We talked about skills development and self-advocacy in this episode, I gave you six skills that every Latina leader needs to develop. And we talked about how you can advocate for yourself in the workplace and very specific ways that you need to start doing that. Next week we are going over networking and personal branding. Thank you for joining and I will talk to you soon. Bye.

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If you are ready to get promoted into leadership and get the salary you deserve, I invite you to book a sales call with me. This is a one hour call where I will assess your career, your obstacles, your goals. I will tell you exactly the way that I can help you. And we can talk about whether the confident Latina leader program is the best fit for you. The link to book your sales call is in the show notes. Talk to you soon. Ciao.