How Successful Women Sustain Career Momentum
I’d like to share with you the highlights from (and a link to) the Harvard Business Review article on How Successful Women Sustain Career Momentum. When reading it and listening to the interviews, I was struck by the many parallels with the insights from our interviews for our Wonder Women in Marketing book.
In the HBR interviews female leaders with varied backgrounds, interests, personalities and careers were asked to describe pivotal moments that helped them maintain career momentum. Analysing these moments helped to understand the key traits that helped them persevere when they felt stuck.
- A focused drive – tenacity, determination, and persistence. When faced with setbacks, you need to tap into your inner mettle to help situate short-term difficulties in the context of their higher goals.
- An incessant desire to learn – being motivated to seek out opportunities that provide new experiences, challenges, and knowledge. It’s about asking the right questions, cross-examining the data, and always being curious. Knowledge is power and you want people to recognise that you are a learner – even if you don’t know a topic, you’ll pick it up quickly.
- An agile mindset – flexible thinking, the ability to quickly assess a situation and determine a path forward. It’s also about reinventing yourself if necessary, or transforming the project you are working on.
- Resetting Your Career Momentum – the ability to pivot, move sideways, gather more experience, or move to smaller companies to maintain momentum, whether that be geographical moves, entire field changes within a multinational company, or agile maneuvering to survive acquisitions. Just make sure your pivot is grounded in your career goals.
- Have epic clarity on your personal brand – conduct a little brand research on yourself. Is your reputation what you want it to be? What do they say about you when you are not in the room?
You can read more and listen to some of the interviews via the link below.