Her Place at the Table: A Womans Guide to Negotiating Five Key Challenges to Leadership Success

Newcomers can hesitate to mobilize the backing they need for many reasons. They may feel compelled to prove their worth and tackle the job without asking powerful allies for help. They may underestimate the testing ahead or the doubts their appointment will raise. They may take it for granted that the title carries adequate authority. Tantalized by the problem they are charged with fixing, they may concentrate on its complexities and let important relationships slide. Or, not surprisingly, they may get so caught up in their own concerns that they overlook the legitimate worries others might have. Whatever the reasons, they close themselves to opportunities to start the new assignment off on the right footingwith key players engaged and solidly behind their efforts. And they do so at their peril.

Three traps, in particular, get in the way of negotiating critical support. If allowed to go unchecked, they can lead to one of two conclusions, both unfortunate. The new leader taking on a visible assignment can minimize the important role key backers can play in her transition. Or, alternatively, she can underestimate the difficulty of bringing them on board.

• "My appointment speaks for itself. " With a big job in the offing, it is only prudent to try to negotiate the conditions that will make you successful. A critical aspect of that effort involves convincing yourselfdeciding that you can make a success of the assignment. But the thought process can be a slippery slope. It is an easy slide from thinking you are the right person for the job to concluding that you are the only logical person to take it on. Pretty soon the assignment seems inevitable and any gap in experience or qualifications dwindles to inconsequential proportions .

  The appointment seldom "speaks for itself"; others in the organization may mount some quiet and not-so-quiet opposition. Perhaps they do not think your credentials stack up against theirs or those of a valued mentor. Perhaps they enjoyed productive relationships with the previous incumbent and worry about disruption. Or perhaps that gap in experience does not seem so narrow from their perspective. Even when political expediency cautions against articulating the real reasons behind their opposition , they easily find proxies.

  Negative first reactions are perfectly natural. But they must be curbed, or you will not be able to command the authority in the role that you need to perform it. For example, when an international consulting firm promoted Carlotta, she was delighted . A star performer in one of the firm's major concentrations, Carlotta had accumulated impressive credentials in client service and business development. To her, the move to a leadership role seemed an obvious next step. Not all her peers agreed. Good performers, they did not accept that Carlotta should be the one to lead them. The rainmakers among them figured out that they brought in more business. Others thought about their own happy clients .

  Carlotta failed to recognize that the appointment did not automatically convey credibility. Convinced that she was the right person for the job, she never anticipated the resistance. It never occurred to her to ask the chairman to pave the way. She was content with a formal announcement. Six months later, Carlotta was still having problems pulling the team together. Team members had little incentive to accept her leadership. In fact, the silence from top management told them that little cost attached to their lack of cooperation.

  The task of providing a rationale for an appointment naturally falls to the key players in the organization who made the decision. But they may never be asked if the newcomer assumes that those reasons are self-evident. No one, and particularly not a woman , wants to take up a prime position without a credible and persuasive introduction.

• "The results are what's important. " The opportunity to work on an intriguing problem can be seductive. Often it provides that extra motivation to take on a demanding role. On the job, however, a tantalizing problem can turn into a different kind of lure. It is hard to resist the temptation to dig right in and get on with what got you the assignment in the first placeyour demonstrated ability to solve problems. Credibility and authority, after all, flow from results. So you focus all your energy on a problem just waiting for a solution. Soon day-today pressures squeeze out the time it takes to engage key people in the new effort. When, as one of our commentators put it, "you are driving down the road at eighty miles an hour ," it is all too easy to lose sight of the bigger political picture and let key relationships slide. A partner in a technology start-up characterized the dilemma:

  You're working hard, getting the results. You've developed fifty accounts at X companies that have enabled the firm to make Yamount of sales. You don't have the interest or the time to manage the political or personal sideor somehow don't see it as that important.

  This approach poses two dangers. First, results lag efforts. Impressions, however, form quickly. Perceptions of you as aloof, disconnected or, even worse , as merely a "worker bee" without the ability to think strategically may gel before you have a chance to fix the problems you were brought in to remedy. Second, results are not always immediately visible. While certain performance indicators are easily measured, others are less obvious. Nancy Hawthorne, former chief financial officer at Continental Cablevision, ventured that her bosses often "wondered what the heck I was doing." Hawthorne, however, was in no doubt: "I was into building a department that hummed. . . . I was being traffic cop and coach and facilitator." ^{[ 6]}

  Building a department takes time. But beyond that constraint, progress is not so easy to define or quantify. Others in the organization may not even be aware of the accomplishment, much less give credit to the driving force behind it. Without vocal appreciation from the top, a terrific performance can, in effect, become invisible within the broader organization. With no public acknowledgment, no credibility or authority attaches to the performance or the performer. That is what happened to Julia when she was hired as CFO of a quasi-public agency.

  This was a great opportunity to step up from director of finance to the CFO role. I could see all the problems. In a quasi - public organization you have a lot of funds. They didn't understand how the money flow was supposed to work and come together . We had a million cash accounts and I helped them consolidate those and get them invested. I did lots of very concrete things to get our financial house in order. I was well liked . My reports loved me.

  But I never developed a relationship with my boss and his other direct reports. The consequences affected me personally . Frequently I was out of the loop. It could have been anything from a conversation at the State House that would impact an investment to the CEO's notion of an off - site retreat. All of those items fell in my shop.

  Julia accomplished a great deal in a short time. In fact, she did manage to get the agency's financial house in order the problem she was hired to solve. Her performance, however, was discounted in the organization. It went essentially unrecognized at the top. Soon others took their cue from the CEO and his team. As the lack of appreciation spread, Julia found her ability to claim her success undermined and her credibility as a leader in jeopardy. There is only so much you can do on your own. Perceptions of performance count and they are shaped in large part by key players.

• "I don't want to seem weak." Even in an era that extols the post-heroic leader, ^{[ 7]} images of the heroic version die hard. Take, for example, the word picture of a leader Fortune conjures up in an article on Bank One's Jamie Dimon.

  A slim, handsome 6-footer with iron-gray hair , Dimon yanks off his turquoise tie and chops the air like a karate master. ...

  Then, in what seems to be a masterful tonal switch, he turns from pep-rally arrogance to locker-room inspiration. "Winning isn't about patents or your IQ or where you went to school," he says, punching out the clauses in his staccato Queens accent . "It's about one thinghow much you want it!" ^{[ 8]}

As the lead-in to the article suggests, "He's tough. He's loud. He's irrepressible." It is easy to picture this man, decisive and self-contained, inspiring the troops. It is much harder to imagine him asking for helpor being in need of it.

Images like these are powerful metaphors. A strong leader is, well, strong. It's not surprising that a request for help can be read as a sign of weakness. In the coded language of gender stereotypes, it is women, not men, who ask for help and are expected to give it. Any appeal by a woman runs a certain risk. It can push these gendered notions to the forefront. She's a woman, she needs help, she can't make it on her own. She is, in the words of several of our informants, "high maintenance."

A request does not necessarily trigger these associations, however. Couched appropriately, it may be interpreted as a sign of strength, not weakness. It all comes down to the way in which the appeal for backing is madeto the how, when, and what. Keisha failed to appreciate the distinction when she was appointed vice president of administration at a large research organization.

The lion's share of the organization's revenues came from government contracts. Keisha's brief was to control costs and to ensure that the accounting on any given contract was above reproach. Operating in a hierarchical environment, she assumed that the job came with a mandate to institute accounting controls. "I was the new sheriff in town," she says.

Keisha developed protocols that introduced greater transparency to contract expenses. The staff members responsible for the contract work, however, were research scientists who had held significant positions in government and academia. Getting them to adhere to any policies was like " herding cats." Although Keisha had some control over reimbursements, she had virtually no authority to compel the researchers to adhere to the new reporting guidelines. Determined to prove herself, she did not seek help in implementing them. She thought that any request would be viewed as evidence that she could not make it on her own. So she resorted to holding up the researchers' expense accounts. The triviality of this response served notice that they didn't need to take her seriously. It would be "business as usual" on the contracts.

Keisha could have mobilized support from the vice president of R&D to enforce the guidelines. The scientists reported to him, and it was in his interest to make sure that government oversight committees remained happy. The high-maintenance label usually gets applied when the appeals are continual or when the request is impossible to grant. It is unrealistic , for example, to enlist backing for a series of trivial requests or for a configuration of reporting relationships that would have negative and broad implications elsewhere in the organization. Neither criterion held for Keisha. She saw weakness in asking for help. Ironically, because she could not perform and institute necessary changes, she confirmed the weakness she wanted to avoid and put the organization in an equivocal position with its clients.

The missteps that these notions encourage are all unavoidable. Why go it alone when, instead, you can have help?

^{[ 6]} As quoted in Sharpe, "As Leaders , Women Rule."

^{[ 7]} Joseph Badaracco, "We Don't Need Another Hero," and Joyce Fletcher, "The Paradox of Post-Heroic Leadership."

^{[ 8]} Shawn Tully, "Bank One: The Jamie Dimon Show."