Women In Workforce

🗣️“You must be more assertive.” Last year, those five words burned into Amy’s memory. She’d walked out of her 2023 review at XYZ Global determined to “step up.” Speak more in meetings. Push harder on decisions. Stop softening her tone so she wouldn’t intimidate anyone. She did exactly that. Fast forward 12 months. Same conference room. Same 2 VPs across the table. 🔇“You’ve become too intense, need to work on softening your approach.” 😑 Amy stared at them, speechless. Wasn’t that what you asked for last year? Which version of me do you actually want? She thought about the past year: 🤔 The time she challenged a flawed budget forecast in front of the CFO, saving the company $3 million, but earning whispers that she was “abrasive.” 🤔 The time she stepped in to rescue a failing project, praised for her “grit” publicly, yet privately told she “dominated the room.” 🤔 The time she finally got invited to an executive offsite, only to overhear a VP say, “She’s great, but can be… a lot.” This is the tightrope trap senior women walk daily: • Be assertive, but not too assertive. • Be collaborative, but don’t fade into the background. • Be visible, but not “hungry.”    The same behavior praised in men (decisive, strong leader) gets women penalized as abrasive or too much. Until you set the narrative yourself, you’re trapped performing for a moving target. If you’re exhausted from balancing on a wire men don’t even see, here’s how to step off it and still rise. 1. Audit the pattern, not just the feedback • Track every piece of feedback, especially contradiction. Patterns reveal bias. If the goal keeps moving, it's not you! • Phrase to use in review: “Last year I was encouraged to increase my presence; this year I’m told to soften it. Can we clarify what success really looks like?”    2. Control the frame before the room does • Pre‑set the narrative in 1:1s and emails leading up to reviews. I.e., “This year I focused on driving results while bringing the team with me, you’ll see that reflected in project X and Y.” • This primes leadership to view your assertiveness as an intentional strategy, not a personality flaw.    3. Build echo chambers, not just results • Secure 2–3 allies who reinforce your strengths in rooms you’re not in. • Promotions happen in the absence, you need people echoing your narrative, not someone else’s. • Phrase to brief an ally: “If my leadership style comes up in review, can you speak to how I challenge decisions but still align the team?”    Women aren’t just asked to deliver results. They’re asked to perform, decode, and reframe, all while walking a wire men don’t even see. If you’re exhausted from balancing between “too soft” and “too aggressive,” stop walking the wire and start controlling the narrative. Join the waitlist of our next cohort of ⭐ From Hidden Talent to Visible Leaders ⭐ https://lnkd.in/gx7CpGGR 👊 Because leadership shouldn’t feel like an impossible balancing act.

Early in my career, when I shared the story of a workshop that completely bombed (an email announcing layoffs arrived in everyone's inbox during day 1 lunch of a two-day program -- and I had no idea how to handle this), three women immediately reached out to share their own "disaster" stories. We realized we'd all been carrying shame about normal learning experiences while watching men turn similar setbacks into compelling leadership narratives about risk-taking and resilience. The conversation that we had was more valuable than any success story I could have shared. As women, we are stuck in a double-bind: we are less likely to share our successes AND we are less likely to share our failures. Today, I'm talking about the latter. Sharing failure stories normalizes setbacks as part of growth rather than evidence of inadequacy. When we women are vulnerable about their struggles and what they learned, it creates permission for others to reframe their own experiences. This collective storytelling helps distinguish between individual challenges and systemic issues that affect many women similarly. Men more readily share and learn from failures, often turning them into evidence of their willingness to take risks and push boundaries. Women, knowing our failures are judged more harshly, tend to hide them or frame them as personal shortcomings. This creates isolation around experiences that are actually quite common and entirely normal parts of professional development. Open discussion about setbacks establishes the expectation that failing is not only normal but necessary for success. It builds connection and community among women who might otherwise feel alone in their struggles. When we reframe failures as data and learning experiences rather than shameful secrets, we reduce their power to limit our future risk-taking and ambition. Here are a few tips for sharing and learning from failure stories: • Practice talking about setbacks as learning experiences rather than personal inadequacies • Share what you learned and how you've applied those lessons, not just what went wrong • Seek out other women's failure stories to normalize your own experiences • Look for patterns in women's challenges that suggest systemic rather than individual issues (and then stop seeing systemic challenges as personal failures!) • Create safe spaces for honest conversation about struggles and setbacks • Celebrate recovery and growth as much as initial success • Use failure stories to build connection and mentorship relationships with other women We are not the sum of our failures, but some of our failures make us more relatable, realistic, and ready for our successes. So let's not keep them to ourselves. #WomensERG #DEIB #failure

My name is Ruth Penfold-Brown and I have previously been invited to leave a company and offered a settlement agreement. I accepted. Why am I telling you this? Because I coach so many women in this situation, where, for whatever reason, they are being invited to leave a company. There's usually a surprise performance issue, some workplace gaslighting and a whole lot of self doubt that comes with it. What happens is we internalise it, and see it as a failing in some way. We carry shame about it and that starts to creep into how we see ourselves in our career. This has to stop. When you speak to most leaders, I promise you that at some stage they will have been invited to leave a company. I appreciate it often means that we sign agreements not to talk about it, but by not acknowledging that it has happened to us, when it happens to others, they feel paralysed by it. Even when they work in HR and know that it happens to others. Can we all just be a little more open with each other please? There is nothing wrong with any of us. Often a company just chooses that they want something different, and that is okay. You have not failed. I have never coached anyone who has given anything less than their best in those circumstances, even if it didn't result in what the company wanted. It's never going to be an easy thing when it happens, but as quickly as you can, I recommend the following: 🤩 Shake off the 'performance issue' narrative. Often those are magnified as part of the exit process to get you to sign. Look instead at your track record, build your casefile of excellence (a list of all your achievements and praise) and check in with people that see you as the shining light that you are. 🤩 Connect back in with who you really are, what you stand for and what you really want, move forward from that place and that place alone. If you want my values exercise, DM me. 🤩 Change your environment, do things that light you up and be your own best partner whilst you weather the storm. If you can do that, you'll soon realise that a better reality awaits you like a shiny new dawn. If any of you reading this have also been invited to leave a company and feel comfortable sharing it, comment below so that those going through it know that they are not alone. #OurTimeToBloom #BloomTogether #WomenInLeadership #PeopleLeaders #TalentLeaders #HRLeaders 

Failure is still hard. But here's how I've learned to grow from it.   Even after years of working on my mindset, I still have moments where I want to head to the nearest mall and shop.   Between the self-doubt and the new shoes, I've learned something valuable. I used to think failure was a permanent mark. Every setback felt like proof that I wasn’t good enough. I’d hide, shrink, and try to make myself invisible. It took me years to realize that those moments weren’t the end of my story—they were the beginning of a better one. Here’s what I’ve learned (and still practice): 1) Pause for a couple of days …or longer. → Let the emotions settle → Write it down → No decisions yet 2) Ask: "What am I learning about myself?" (This takes time) → About my limits → About my strength → About what matters most 3) Then ask: "Who could find strength in this story?" → Not to overshadow their experience → But to share what helped me through → And stand beside them in their moment Me now…I don’t have it all figured out. Failure still stings. But now, instead of letting it keep me down, I use it to grow. And sometimes, if I’m lucky, I get to use it to help someone else grow too. Your missed deadline? That failed presentation? The promotion that went to someone else? They’re not just setbacks. They’re connection points. The strongest leaders don’t hide their failures. They transform them into wisdom. They turn scars into stories that serve others. So, what failure are you carrying? What lesson could it teach? Who needs to hear your story? Because your failures aren’t just yours—they’re someone else’s survival guide.

On the first day back to work after maternity leave, I locked myself in the office restroom and cried. (I felt like I was failing everywhere.) I was worried about my kid: - Will the nanny pay attention to him properly? - Will T be okay without me? - What if he misses me too much? And at work, I was freaking out about: - What if I’m not as sharp as before? - How do I create space for myself, when so much has changed? - Can I still show the same ambition and drive? Recently, I polled moms in my network. One-third were thinking about leaving within 15-18 months of returning. Not because they didn’t want to work. But because they returned to a system that wasn’t designed for them. What no one told me about coming back was: - How others will treat me differently ("You're a mom now") - High-stakes projects will move forward, without me - People will assume I would want to take it easy (no one asked me) That’s when I realized: If I don’t take control of my return, I will continue to struggle and my performance will suffer. So I did two things (which I recommend to any woman who is returning to work after a break): ✅ I built my own re-onboarding plan. Drafted a 30-60-90 day plan and co-created it with my manager & skip. It ensured I was ramping up on the right things, not just playing catch up. ✅ I focused on high-value, high-context work first. Instead of drowning in old project docs and emails, I set up 1:1s with key people to get real insights. If you're returning to work, please know you are not the same as when you left. And that’s a strength. You don’t need to fit into the old version of yourself. You need to create a new meaning of success for yourself. ——— 🔔 Follow me, Bosky Mukherjee, for more insights on breaking barriers for women in tech leadership. #careergrowth #womenintech #leadership #womeninleadership #leadershipdevelopment