Regenerating & Sustaining of Career Advancement

This is day 4 of the pre-summit of She Believed, So She Did! Supporting Women’s Career Accelerations. You are in a community of like-minded women leaders who are ready to break all of the barriers in career advancement and take the next leap to success in their lives.

Let’s face it, when we as women advance into leadership positions, it is easy for us to lose ourselves in so many ways.

• We lose balance between work and home.
• We lose our north star of self-care.
• We lose our creativity to regenerate new ideas and focus for our continued growth.

In essence, we begin to take on the masculine leadership traits of leadership.

I am Brandi P. Sheffield, CEO of Learning Associates and designer of The Outlier Leader Program, where we support women on the leadership continuum to break barriers and attract new career opportunities by clarifying their leadership messaging. I am also the coordinator and host of the summit ‘She Believed So She Did!’- supporting women to accelerate their career to bring you a well-rounded holistic approach of being a woman in the job market. Does the statement, “There is the skill of getting the job, and the strategy of keeping the job” resonate with you?

Each day has been building on the prior day. Make sure you have downloaded the workbook.

I also want to encourage you to black out any distractions you might have over these next 20 to 25 minutes together really leaned in and invest the time for yourself to walk away with some really strategic career actions at the end of this session and every day for the rest of this week as we keep coming on live PD viewing the stomach topics and all that you are in store for in the actual Summit which launches December 13th.

While you are populating your thoughts, let me share more deeply the impact and opportunity for regenerating and sustaining our career accelerations. One of the gifts given to us in leadership is the opportunity to both lead and create highly productive work environments and cultures. As a female leader, we begin to have great opportunities to reshape those working environments and cultures that rejuvenate and sustain every person in the organization. Since this new world of the pandemic and working from home, many companies have come to realize the opportunities afforded to them in creating new work environments and cultures. One popular trend is a different balance of the work day, work meetings, and increased productivity. Even as children have returned back to schools, companies have remained virtual working environments. It has shown itself to be a great contributor of increased work culture and employee sustainability. The opportunity that it creates for us as female leaders is to elevate our nurturing nature and re-imagine the work space, the work environment, and the work culture that encourages a healthy balance of home and work.

So, let’s take the next step. Let’s place ourselves in the seat of the leadership role that we seek and imagine what would be our actions and communication for creating new work environments and new cultures all for the benefit of rejuvenating and sustaining every team made an employee. Turn in your workbook and use this as an opportunity to begin to imagine this new environment. The benefit to this exercise is that it will begin to help you to envision your leadership impact and influence what you might bring to the new space and how do I begin to communicate these new transitions that support everyone.

Is this resonating with you?

You see, not every organization thinks deeply about how to make impact in this space. Far too many organizations attempt to operate in the status quo and replicate the office space in the virtual space. It creates an undue pressure and unrealistic expectations. Also, the absence of thinking intentionally about the balance of home and work in these new virtual spaces, or even in the home office space with a new environmental culture, creates ambiguity and inconsistency amongst employees which in turn creates inconsistent behaviors, product outcomes, and quality of work streams as a result. I used to work for an organization that was part bold virtual and part in the office. To their detriment, they also lacked clarity and vision for defining the balance of working from home and working in the home office. There was so much chaos in our virtual space, as well as in our home office space. Mostly because there was no environmental culture established by the leaders nor any norms alignment in core values to align work streams, nor any vision from the leadership. Fast forward as I lead a large team within another organization I knew not to make the same mistake. But instead I created monthly pay days off for employees to feel and know that the organization valued and recognized their whole being, as well as providing clarity in the quantity of work within each day virtual or in person, accountability systems, and clear metrics of progress.

So, I am going to give you an exercise that you will also find in the workbook on day 4.

This will be a reflection exercise. As you sit in the leadership role imagine how you want others to feel under your leadership. What do you want others to know about you from the work environment and culture that is created under your leadership? As you ponder these thoughts, begin to brainstorm work structures and processes and policies that you might put in place to create this regenerating and sustaining work environment.

As we close today’s session, I want to invite you to start the real transformation for which begins with accountability. Use this link to submit your responses. I want to highly encourage you submit your reflection by video using Loom and provide the hyperlink. All of your transformation starts from what comes out of your mouth and how you articulate and present yourself. By taking this first career action step, you would have put yourself at 5 times the growth rate for success than those who won’t take this step. So, don’t worry about “how you look or sound”. Don’t do that thing we do when we say, “I hate seeing myself on camera”, or “I hate the way I sound”. That is self-sabotage because, guess what, we look and sound like this everyday! The purpose of using video to send your submissions is to begin practicing how you will show up when you actually go for that advanced career position.

Now, if you simply don’t want to, there is no pressure. You can simply type in your responses and submit them also.

As a reminder, anyone who makes the full investment of time and effort to complete all 5 career actions each day, and submit them daily, will be given FREE FULL LIFETIME ACCESS to the summit which begins on December 13th. We will make the donation to The Women’s Shelter of Long Beach on your behalf!

Submit your career action responses using this link, and we’ll see you here tomorrow. Our topic will be Strategic Skills to Career Acceleration.

Until then my friends….be well.