From The Sunday Times, 07 Mar 10 (http://meltwaternews.com/prerobot/sph.asp?pub=ST&sphurl=www.straitstimes.com//Think/Story/STIStory_498943.html),

Women, your work won't speak for itself

Tomorrow is International Women's Day. Women have made great strides in the boardroom, but why are only 29 of the world's top 2,000 performing companies headed by them? What do women need to do to get noticed? And no, it's not work harder.

By Tan Hui Yee

The story is common: Bright, driven female executive comes up with an idea for a new product. She leads her team to conceptualise, design and market it.

The product is a success, but she is passed over for promotion. Reason: Her bosses do not think she is leadership material. They do not know she was responsible for the product. In fact, they do not even know what she looks like.

Corporate coach Jane Horan, 53, has seen many such cases in countries as varied as Spain, Britain, the Czech Republic, China, India and Singapore.

The women, she says, all believe the same thing: 'My work will speak for itself.'

What they fail to realise is this attitude will eventually put a spanner in their career prospects.

Ms Horan is an American who runs a Singapore-based consultancy that teaches women leaders organisational savvy.

She conducted a workshop at the recent Women in the Community: Change Movers conference organised by Singapore Management University's Wee Kim Wee Centre and supported by the Shirin Fozdar Trust Fund.

Speaking to The Sunday Times, she notes how many women ace business school, only to graduate and get stuck on the middle rungs of the corporate ladder.

In fact, as the world celebrates International Women's Day tomorrow, it bears remembering that just 29 of the world's top 2,000 performing companies are headed by women, according to the Harvard Business Review.

Singapore, meanwhile, slides down in the World Economic Forum's annual gender gap ranking and was last year ranked 85th out of 134 countries.

Ms Horan thinks many of these women get stumped by one word: politics.

Not shady, backbiting, hustling office politics, but the political savvy involved in reaching out to influential people to get their ideas past the door.

This requires women to do one thing they have been brought up to avoid: talk about their achievements.

She says that there is nothing self-serving about this process.

'The thing about self-promotion is that it's not always about you,' she says. 'Because you are in a management role, it's about your team. The company expects you to do that.'

There is nothing unethical about it either. 'When you tell people what you have done, you have to have substance behind you. If you tell people: 'I did this,' and you have not done anything, then you lose all credibility.'

She concedes that women who have been taught from young to be modest - even as their male peers were being schooled in one-upmanship in the playground - will find her proposition counter-intuitive, even downright uncomfortable.

'They always go: 'Oh, I don't want to brag' or 'I don't want to be seen as a brown-noser'. But if you do it with ethics and values, it is in essence about sharing your know-ledge with the company.'

For women new to this whole business, she suggests four easy steps:

1. Study power

How many times have you attended a meeting and realised that the outcome of the discussion had already been decided beforehand through a tacit agreement among key figures?

This is how you can get in on the act: Think about your organisation and draw a map of those who hold real power. It could be the managing director, or the one who controls budgets. There are also informal power networks as well.

If, for example, you decide that the chief financial officer has power, start 'mapping' him by figuring out those who are close to him. Does he often consult his assistant, who in turn is close to someone in your team? Speaking to that particular team member, for example, could then allow you to understand what makes the CFO tick.

Staying connected to both formal and informal power networks will help you suss out how best to sell your idea.

In this regard, men are often quicker off the mark.

She says: 'When I give workshops, I often ask women, 'Who do you go to lunch with?' They all say 'My friends.' When I ask men: 'Who do you go to lunch with?' they always say 'My boss' or somebody of influence.'

That does not mean having to spend forever logging time with influential people.

'I understand that you want to relax, you don't want the pretence, you don't want to spend your lunch talking about what you do all day.

'But if you take one day out of your month and go to lunch with somebody who is powerful and influential, you can maybe gain a mentor or two and promote what you do.'

2. Hone your pitch

Heard the one where a chief executive asks an employee: 'What do you do?' and he replies: 'I work here'?

It pays to be clear about what value you bring to the company and not to be afraid to say it to people you meet.

Ms Horan says: 'I worked with a woman who could walk into a room and within the first three minutes, people would know where she travelled, what she did and whom she had lunch with.

'She was great for dropping names of very powerful people. And most people in the room would think: 'Wow, that's incredible.''

This corporate trailblazer's self-introductions gave people a glimpse of her achievements in a couple of minutes and made an impression on whoever she met.

If you are starting from scratch in this area, start working on your pitch. What do you really do in the company that brings it value?

The next time your CEO asks you that question, you will be more prepared with smart answers like: 'I drive innovation.'

3. Work your e-mail

The more tongue-tied among you can take comfort that there is an electronic form of self-promotion. It comes in the form of a 'lessons learnt' e-mail.

Write a report whenever you do a project, and send it to your boss without him asking for it.

'You want your organisation to learn more about what you have done. Say, for example: 'I went for this interview with Jane and here's some lessons that I learnt and here's the value that it adds to our work.''

This e-mail shares your know-ledge with other people in the organisation. It is a self-promotion tool that is both ethical and valuable.

'If you don't do it, your bosses do not know what you are doing. When it comes to promotion or performance reviews, they say: 'I don't really know what she does.''

4. Be visible

You do not have to spend your Friday nights drinking with your boss to get noticed, as long as you play it smart.

Show up at office parties, linger for an hour, before heading off. Most of the time, your early departure will go unnoticed.

You can be visible by turning up in other people's conversations. If someone says he likes your work, ask if you can use him as a reference. Start building focus groups of influential people that you can test your ideas on. If one of those ideas takes off, no one will be able to challenge your claim to it.

Ultimately, says Ms Horan, mastering politics is a 'key leadership skill' no matter what type of organisation you work in.

'You have to have it. If you don't, you will find yourself derailing at some point in your career.'

For women struggling with work-life balance, she dangles another upside to organisational savvy.

'Women work a lot harder than they need to. If they embrace the political side and the unwritten rules of their organisations and delegate and prioritise a lot more, then they can have balance.'

Hmm, I think more women are making to the top of the corporate ladder. Think one of the most famous one is Tan Yen Yen, MD of HP Singapore, who is always featured in the womans' magazine.

hmm... thot there're lotsa women power in S'pore? I'd seen a few cases of lady bosses pormoting only ladies in her department, all the guys never got promoted and are stagnant in their careers...

At the end of teh day, it all boild down to managing people and their expectations.

How far you will climb in your career also depends on who you know.

You don't necessarily have to be the best in your job but if you are a better "people" person, you win the game.