Hey lady leader. Welcome back. Or if you are new here, I am so happy that you have found us here on Leading Her Introvert Way. I'm Dr. Nicole Bryan. I am your host and I am your biggest cheerleader. I'm an executive leadership coach. I am a psychologist and an executive. And I created this podcast specifically for you, the ambitious, introverted black woman who knows that she is meant for more. Because here on this podcast, we talk about getting you promoted to the executive level, growing you into the leader that your title requires, and building a team that actually performs. And we do all of that without you having to shrink yourself, fake being extroverted, or hustle yourself to the ground. Now, if any of that sounds like what you need, then definitely stay tuned. You know, I'm sitting here today as I'm recording this. It is a morning, and I am holding my little orange coffee mug. And I usually don't drink coffee, but I really needed it today. I really needed the energy because this weekend was so good, but it was jam-packed. And my little introvert heart, my little introvert body has not recovered yet. It was good on so many different fronts. First and foremost, we hosted the name your number workshop. And it was a two-day workshop that if you've been listening to my podcast for the last several weeks, that's what we've been talking about, right? All about growing your compensation, about getting promoted, about making sure that you understand the value that you add to your company and that you are actually getting compensated for it. And so we're going to talk a little bit more about that today. But the workshop that we had this weekend was so good. And I love it when introverted women get together and we hold each other up, right? And I wasn't really expecting that, honestly, but we had a great group of women who showed up both days. They came fully prepared, they came to work, and we had some major breakthroughs. So I am so looking forward to hearing how they move forward with everything that they learned and use it to get the compensation that they deserve. So that was one win for the weekend. The second win is, and I don't know what I was thinking about, but I decided to be social this weekend while I was also working in terms of hosting the workshop. So I went out with a group of girlfriends. And you know the group of girlfriends who uh you don't get together often, you know, you get together maybe two, three times a year. But when you do get together, you have a blast and you just pick up right where you left off. It was one of those groups of girlfriends. And all we did was go up to Baltimore and we hung out. It rained. We went to an outdoor festival and there was a lot of people out there. It was hot, hot, hot. But we got rained out. We found a good restaurant to hang out in, and we stayed in the restaurant for like three hours. It was so good. So, so good. But I'm still trying to recover from that experience. Um, but one of the things that has given me some excitement and some energy is actually coming and recording and talking to you today.
So, before we get into today's episode, especially for anyone who's new here, I want to take a moment to share exactly what I do and who I do it for. So I work specifically with ambitious Black introverted women leaders, and the work that I do with them centers around three core problems. The first is getting you your executive level promotion because that path isn't always clear, and it's almost never handed to you. We build the strategy together to get you there. Problem number two that I help you solve is closing the skill gap between being a strong manager and being a true executive leader. Those two roles are very different from each other, two very different jobs. And the transition requires new capabilities, having new ways of thinking, and honestly, it requires you to have a totally new leadership identity. The third problem that I help you solve is setting up your new team and your new department to ensure that they are high performing. Because getting your executive level seat is only the beginning. What you do once you're in that seat determines everything that comes next. Okay, if any of those three things describe where you are right now, then I'm glad that you're here with us.
Okay, so like I said, this past weekend, something powerful happened. A room full of black women leaders showed up. They were ready to work, ready to learn, and ready to finally have the salary conversation that they have been putting off. Some of them have been putting off for years or their entire career. We spent two days together. We calculated market value, we identified everything on the negotiation table that most women don't even know is there. We built language and strategy, and every single one of them left with a roadmap. But here's what I know from years of doing this work. Leaving the room with a roadmap is one step. It's only step one. What you do next in the days and weeks after you get clear determines whether that roadmap actually changes your financial trajectory. Or whether it just sits in your notes app or on your desktop or in your notebook, your journal, collecting dust. Because here's the truth that nobody actually talks about after a workshop. Information without action is just inspiration. And inspiration alone ain't gonna pay your bills. So today I want to talk about what comes next for the women who showed up this weekend and for the women who didn't. But who knows that they need to do something different? I know I always learn as much from the questions that people ask in rooms that I'm in as I do from the actual content that is prepared or shared. And this weekend honestly was no different. So let me share three moments from our two days together that I think every woman, including you, listening today, needs to hear.
Uh, and participants pulling their own data in real time. So if you're someone, for example, who is like, I don't know where to look to find what I actually should be paid, that's what we did in day one. When we were doing this market research, Jay dropped something in the chat that kind of stopped me in my tracks. What she said was, my interviewer asked me for evidence. They want to see my W-2 to verify my salary. Now, let me tell you what that actually means when a company asks for proof of your salary. It means a couple of things. So the first thing that it means is that the number that you put on the table is likely outside of what they expected to pay for this role. The second thing that it means is they actually want you because if they didn't want you, they would have just said, no, we can't match that number at all, and they would have moved on. They wouldn't still be talking to you or even asking you for proof. Okay. And then the third thing that it means is that they really don't want to pay that level because it's outside of their range, and they they don't want to have to pay it if they don't have to. That's it. That's what it means. So if that happens to you, what should you do? The first thing I would say, and I said this to Jay, is you don't have to provide the paycheck. Yes, they're asking for it, but you don't have to provide it. And here's why. Beyond the obvious privacy concerns, most paychecks don't just show your salary. They show your employee ID, your social security number, your 401k match, your benefits deductions, personal financial information that has nothing to do with the negotiation that you're currently in. So you can easily say to the prospective employer, the place that you're trying to interview for, you can easily say to them, hey, I'm not comfortable sharing that my paycheck. My paycheck contains a lot of private information beyond just my salary, and I don't feel like it's appropriate to share. And then you hold your number. You don't apologize for it, you don't revise it down. You ask them, is there a specific concern about the salary that I'm asking for? Right? Is it outside of your budget? If so, can we talk about it and see where we can meet? Because here's the thing: if they're still at the table asking for proof, they definitely are interested in hiring you. Do not let them use your own paycheck to negotiate against you.
The second moment that happened that I was like, wow, we are we are really doing it in this in this workshop was from Kay. Now, Kay came into day two with a real life situation that she's going through right now. She had gone through an entire interview process. She shared her experience, she made her case, and the company told her that the role would be in a similar range to what she was currently making. Then she got the official offer, and the official offer was $25,000 less than what she's earning right now. And their justification was that the manager wants parity within the team. Now, I want to sit with that for a second because parity within the team is one of the most common phrases that companies use to justify a lower offer. And a lot of us women, we hear it and we think, well, I can't argue with that. They're trying to keep equity inside the organization. They're trying to keep equity inside the team. But I'm telling you that you can absolutely counter that. You can argue with that. And here's what parity actually means in that situation. It means that the company has anchored your starting point to the lowest common denominator in that team. It means that any future merit increase you receive will be calculated as a percentage of that lower base salary. And it also means that you are starting behind and compound interest works against you for as long as you stay in that role and in that company. So the question Kay needed to ask was not, okay, how do I get them to come up? The question she needed to ask was: if I come at this from a parity level, what does that mean for my earning potential today and in the future? What is the range of the role? Where does parity sit within that range? And what does growth look like from there? Because coming in at the bottom of a team's range doesn't just affect today's paycheck. It affects every raise, every bonus, every negotiation you'll ever have with that organization. And that is the conversation you need to be talking about, right? Not take it or leave it. It's tell me more about what this means for where I can grow from here.
Now, the third moment was with I'll call her to respect her privacy, I'm gonna call her Patty. And it also happened in day two. Now, Patty shared something near the end of day two that I have been thinking about ever since she said it. She said, I take note of my wins. I've always done that. But what I'm taking from this weekend is that I need to articulate my wins, not just in terms of the impact that I'm making, but specifically in terms of the business impact. And then she said, those are two different things. And she's absolutely right. And I'm smiling because it feels so good when you see the learning happen, when you see people understanding the changes in the behavior and the thinking and the words that they need to be using, right? To position themselves as having executive leadership potential. So Patty was absolutely right. Documenting impact sounds like I led the onboarding initiative and it went really well. Documenting business impact sounds different. It sounds more like I created an onboarding guide that saved each department one to two hours per week in search time, which across a team of 24 translates to roughly 48 hours of recovered productivity every month. Same initiative, but completely different conversation. One is a story that you're telling yourself, the other is a business case you're presenting to your company. And here's what I know from years of sitting in human resources on the other side of the table. Companies don't respond to stories the same way that they respond to data. But here's what Patty also picked up that I didn't want to let go by. She said she realized that she could apply the same principle everywhere, not just in salary negotiations or total compensation negotiations, but in how she runs meetings, in how she presents recommendations, in how she advocates for her team. When you learn as a leader to speak the language of business impact, not just inside a negotiation, but as a daily practice, you stop having to ask for recognition. You become impossible, impossible to ignore. This is what I want every black woman who was in that room and every black woman listening to this show to understand.
Now, let me be really honest with you about something I've observed over and over again. We as black introverted women, we love a good workshop. We like to go, we like to learn, we like to take in information, right? You are taking courses, you consume the content, you get the information, and then you don't move. Not because you're not ready, not because you're not capable, but because there is a very big difference between knowing what to do in general and feeling and being equipped to do it in your specific situation with your specific organization, with your specific boss, with your specific politics, with your specific leverage, in your specific timing. The workshop gives you the strategy. But what most women need next is the personalized application. Because a negotiation strategy that worked for one woman who moved to a different division in the same hospital may not work the same way for you inside a Fortune 500 organization with a compensation committee and a CFO who signs off on everything above a certain threshold. Context matters. And that context requires someone who can sit with you specifically and help you navigate it. That's where the real transformation happens, not in the information, but in the application. Now,
before I tell you what the elite executive experience includes, which is my one-on-one private coaching, I want to tell you how I actually work. Because I think that matters more than any feature list. And truly, if you're evaluating coaches, I want you to know what to look for, not just with me, but with anyone you're thinking about working with. Here's what's different about the way that I approach this work. First, everything I do, absolutely everything that I do, is psychology-based. Not just tactics, not a list of leadership strategies that you can Google on your own, not a framework someone handed me in a certification program that I now try to apply to every client regardless of their unique situation. My work and how I think is rooted in relationships. Your relationship with yourself, your relationship with the people that you lead, your relationship with your peers, your sponsors, your organization, and yes, your relationship with money, with ambition, with what you believe you deserve, and why. Because here's what I know after working my whole entire career inside of corporate America and years as a psychologist working with high-achieving women. Most career obstacles are not strategy problems, they're relationship problems. You don't know how to advocate for yourself because of something in your relationship with self-worth. You're not getting promoted because of something in your relationship with visibility. You're underpaid because of something in your relationship with asking. And when we fix the relationship, the strategy works. That's what psychology-based coaching does, that tactics-based coaching cannot. The second thing that is different in terms of how I work and my approach is that I use data. I want to hear your perspective. Your perspective matters a lot. And I genuinely want to know about it. But I also need the perspective of how other people are receiving you. Because those two things, believe it or not, are usually very, very different. The gap between how you see yourself and how others experience you, that gap is where your career is stalling. So as part of our work together, we do a full battery of leadership assessments. Not one tool, not two, but several, including a 360 assessment. So we're not just working from your self-perception or what you think might be wrong or what you think your challenges are, but we're working from actual data about how your leadership lands with the people around you. Because you can tell me that you're a collaborative leader and your team might be experiencing you as something completely different. Both of those realities matter. And I need both to be able to help you reach your ultimate career goals effectively. The third way that I'm different from most other executive leaders, executive leadership coaches is that I understand the psychology of your organization. Not just you, but your environment. Because every organization has a culture, a set of unwritten rules, a power dynamic, and a power structure that operates completely different than what the org chart says. There's norms around who get promoted. There's how decisions actually getting made, right? How those decisions get made, what it takes to be seen as executive ready in that specific place with those specific people. And any career strategy that doesn't account for the specific culture that you are operating inside is incomplete. So when we build your strategy together, we're not just building it for you in the abstract. We're building it for you in the reality of your current organization. That's what makes the work actually work. Now, I will say, I don't tell you any of this to suggest that other coaches don't add value. They absolutely do. What I'm saying is if you are a black female leader who is already accomplished, already capable, and already doing excellent work in your field, you don't need someone to teach you leadership from scratch. You need a thought partner, someone who respects what you've already built, someone who can sit beside you, not above you, beside you and help you see the things that are hard to see when you are inside of it. Someone who brings real world. Experience and psychological depth to the conversation. That's what I bring. And that's what the elite executive experience is built around.
Now, the elite executive experience is a fully customized private one-on-one coaching program. It's not a course. You can't watch it on your own over time. It's not a group program where you have to share your coach with 20 other women. It's not a cookie cutter curriculum that gets applied the same way to every client, regardless of what they actually need. This is one-on-one. It is personalized and it's built around you and your specific goals. So here's what's included: 12 weekly one-on-one coaching calls, just you and me. No waiting your turn, no sharing airtime, your challenges, your timeline, your strategy for 12 weeks. Executive leadership assessments. We start with a complete picture of who you are as a leader and how others experience you. That includes a 360 assessment, the MBTI, a leadership styles assessment, and a few others. These aren't just instruments, they're the foundation of everything that we build together. You get a personalized leadership success profile. This is a comprehensive document built specifically around your strengths, your gaps, your goals, and your environment. It becomes your career roadmap, something you can refer back to long after our 12 weeks together are done. You also get VAPSER access between sessions because let's face it, breakthroughs don't happen on a schedule. When something comes up between calls, a conversation you weren't expecting, an opportunity you need to think through fast, a moment of doubt right before you're about to make a big ask, you have direct access to me in real time. And that's all my trainings that I've built over the past 10 years that are around major skills and capabilities, whether that be executive presence, managing up, navigating organizational politics, and the list goes on and on. So it's not a generic program that you sit through, whether it applies to you or not. Every client gets what they actually need. Now, the elite executive experience is built on my proprietary quiet rise framework. It's a framework that I design specifically for the introverted leader who is ready to rise, ready to grow her career without pretending to be extroverted and without overworking herself. Here's the eight pillars. Pillar number one is clarify your destination. You cannot build a strategy for a place you haven't defined. We start here, right? We get crystal clear on where you are going so that every decision, every conversation, every relationship you invest in, every risk that you take moves you closer to your goal. Pillar number two is own your own power. This is about understanding and activating the leadership strengths that you already have, not the ones that you think you're supposed to have, the ones that are already yours. Because the introverts quiet, the deep thinking, the precision, that is power. We just have to make sure you're using it on purpose. Pillar number three is build your brand. You've heard me say this before if you've been a longtime listener. Your leadership brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. It's the reputation that either opens doors for you or keeps them closed. And we build it deliberately so that the right people in the right rooms know exactly what you stand for and why they need you at the table. Pillar number four is navigate your environment. Now, organizations have politics. Every organization has politics. I don't care if it's you're you're working in a two-person organization. Your organization, you best believe they you have politics, right? Every organization has politics, they have decision-making structures, they have unwritten rules. And the woman who understands how to read and move through her specific environment strategically, not naively, is the one who advances the fastest. We build that skill in our work together. Pillar number five is cultivating your allies, sponsors, advocates, champions, the people who will say your name in rooms that you're not in, the people who will put you onto opportunities that you don't even know about, right? You don't even know they exist yet. This pillar is about identifying who those people are in your company and in your industry and building the kind of relationships that make them want to go to bat for you. The sixth pillar is commanding your total value. This is where everything that we built this weekend in the Name Your Number workshop lives: your market data, your business case, your negotiation strategy, your total compensation picture. Salary negotiation is not a one-time event. You don't just do it one time and then you're done. It's a skill that lives inside a much bigger strategy. And pillar number six is where we make sure that you are using it and that you are using it well. The seventh pillar is rise to the top. Now that's all about promotion. That's all about advancement, right? That's the promotion strategy, the executive identity, the visibility, the sponsorship, the positioning that makes the next level that you're going after feel like the obvious next step, not just for you, but for the people who are actually making the decision to promote you as well. And the eighth pillar is sustain your career wealth. Because listen, getting to the top of your career, getting to the ultimate level that you want to achieve, that's one thing. Staying there and continuing to grow once you get there requires different habits, different systems, and a mindset that most people never, ever, ever build. And pillar eight is about making sure everything we build together lasts. Now, here's what makes this program different from anything else out there. Every client works through the pillars that match their most pressing challenges. A woman who's recovering from work addiction, for example, she needs to build her relationship with her career before she can advocate effectively for herself. She gets a completely different experience than a woman who is six months away from a promotion she's been building toward for two years. It's the same framework, but it's a completely different journey through the framework. That is extremely rare in the coaching space.
And it's what you actually deserve. Now, let me be specific about who the elite executive experience is actually for, because I get this question a lot. I will have people reaching out to me and saying, hey, your program sounds really interesting, but I don't know if it's for me. I don't know if I'm ready for it yet. And I respect that. I totally respect that. So let's let's get clear on who it's for. If you attended this past weekend's workshop with clarity and you know you're ready to go further with personalized support, then reach out, right? And if you didn't make the workshop, but you know you want more, if you want to get promoted faster, if you want to negotiate a salary that is truly commensurate with what you contribute to your organization, if you want to position yourself as the premier leader in your company, not just the one everyone says has potential, but never quite moves forward, if you want to become the decision maker instead of the order taker, and if you've been floundering, honestly just going through the motions, not quite sure what the hell your next career move is supposed to be, and you are finally ready to get clear and get moving, if any of those resonate with you as a black woman who is ambitious, introverted, and ready, then the elite executive experience was built for you. Here's how to take the next step. There's a link in my show notes to learn more about the elite executive experience and to book a call. Or if you're on LinkedIn, you can DM me directly. But tell me where you are and where you are trying to go, and we'll figure out together whether this is the right next step for you. I want to work with you, not because I need to fill a program, because I have been in the rooms you are trying to get into. I have sat on both sides of that leadership table and the negotiation tables, and I know what it takes. And I know that you are closer than you think, right? You named your number this weekend if you joined us. Now let's make sure you get it. I'm Dr. Nicole Bryan. This is Leading Her Introvert Way. And your quiet power, the quiet power that you have, it is real power. I'll see you next week. And until then, keep leading your introvert way.