Advancing your career in 2024 with Stacy Mayer

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What’s it going to take to get promoted and advance your career in 2024? I asked this question to executive coach and promotion strategist, Stacy Mayer, who explained that the first step to getting promoted is ownership. We need to decide, as women, what we want out of our career and what we are willing to do (and not do) to get it. In today’s episode, Stacy shares with us what it takes to own your advancing career, how to get exposure to your boss’s boss through strategic ally meetings and the #1 thing you can do, right now, to lay a foundation for a promotion by the end of the year.

Topics in this episode:

  • What’s different about 2024, when it comes to getting promoted, then in past years?

  • What is different about how men have traditionally been promoted vs. women today?

  • Setting up ally meetings and what to say

  • The importance of building trust and the 3 aspects of trust that are required to get promoted

  • Do you need to shut down your emotions to get promoted?

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

What is it going to take to get promoted and to advance your career in 2024?

I asked this question to executive coach and promotion strategist, Stacy Mayer, who explains to us that the first step to getting promoted is ownership.

We are not men, and the work culture has changed dramatically. The strategy of going out for drinks after work or even rubbing elbows with people in the hallway, just simply doesn't work. Or more specifically, is not the way we women want to operate.

In today's podcast, Stacy shares with us what it takes to own your advancing career, how to get exposure to your boss's boss through strategic ally meetings. And she shares with us the number one thing you can do right now to lay a foundation for a promotion by the end of the year.

If you're ready to advance your career or have felt hesitant about advancing your career as a working mom and aren't exactly sure how to do it in a balanced way, this podcast is specifically for you.

You ready? Let's get to it.

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it. 

Rebecca: All right, working moms. I am so excited to have a good friend of mine, Stacy Mayer, here on the podcast. Hello, Stacy.

Stacy: Hello, Rebecca.

Rebecca: You have seen Stacey before on this podcast, or actually you've heard her. You haven't really seen her. She came on… Gosh, I don't even actually remember. I don't think that was last year. I think it was the year before, maybe the fall before that. Anyway, it doesn't really matter.

She was talking to us about advancing your career as a working mom, because Stacey is an executive coach that helps women get promoted, and she's going to tell us a little bit more about herself in a second.

I hope I gave that the right intro. It was such a brilliant podcast last time, and it's actually one of the most listened to expert interviews that I've had on the podcast. And it just feels like this is the right time to have another conversation around what it looks like to advance your career.

We're at the beginning of 2024. Women, I think, more than ever, have an opportunity to move up if they want to move up. And I just see the job market shifting. Cultures are shifting within workplaces. There's a different dynamic going on. The game isn't the same anymore as it used to be. And I just think that you're the right person to have this conversation with.

So I'm so excited that you're here. Thank you for being here. Tell us again a little bit about yourself. Hopefully, I interview you pretty well, though, and you're also a mom, so we want to hear about that as well. And then let's dive into talking about this year and what people need to do to get promoted and to move up.

Stacy: Yeah. And what's really fun is, so I wrote a book that came out in 2021 called Promotions Made Easy: A Step-by-Step Guide to the Executive Suite. And the other thing that we're coming upon right now is it's been out in the world for two years.

And so, as Rebecca and I, the other thing she didn't say is that we've grown our businesses and our message and our work in the world at the exact same pace.

Rebecca: We're friends.

Stacy: We’re friends. But you know, you evolve. What we thought was important for working moms back then. What I thought was important for women to get promoted back then, it still has that relevance today, but it has a different flavor.

And so when we're thinking about 2024 and what's happening in the world and the fact that I'm getting different types of feedback now that people have read my book and actually started to implement it. So the questions I'm being asked are slightly different. So I'm very excited about that opportunity, as well. So that kind of adds to my introduction in that, I have a book as well.

What’s the flavor of 2024?: Ownership

Rebecca: Yes, definitely. I love that. And so let's dive into the different flavor. I like to use that word, too. I like to think about things as being ice cream flavors. Sometimes I even like to name those ice cream flavors. What's the flavor of 2024? Tell us a little bit about that.

Stacy: The big thing that I'm thinking about is up until this point, it was very clear that in order to advance our careers, that we needed to own it. Right? We needed to take ownership. And you and I have talked about this before.

Rebecca: It's, like, on your shoulders.

Stacy: Yes!

Rebecca: You're the bulldozer forward.

Stacy: Right? So what I'm thinking about in terms of ownership now is, yes, in terms of owning the career path, but at the very beginning, at the very heart of it, it is owning the fact that it's different. Owning the politics, owning that women do have a different world to navigate than men, owning that that's okay because we're willing to do that work.

We need to start by owning that the workplace is different for women.

So what does it take to kind of own that part of it? First of all, it's acknowledgment. So there's a lot more talk, at least in my world, and even my vulnerability, to talk about toxic workplace and what is working against us as women.

But then, to also really speak out against men, or perhaps the traditional approach to advancing our career. I mean, it might even be better than saying men/women. Now it's masculine/feminine, right?

Because a woman can take on a very masculine approach to advancing her career. And that worked very well in the 80’s and 90’s, and It's not working for us. We want something different, right? We want to bring our whole self to the leadership table.

And so really acknowledging and my voice has shifted into being able to speak out against it. For instance, I was actually in a women's group conversation where I was brought in to work with both the mentors and the mentees.

Unfortunately, at this particular company, 80% of the mentors are men, have this masculine approach still to advancing their careers. And to your point, Rebecca, at least they're in the room. They're willing to join the women's group and help mentor these women. And that's wonderful.

So we do have more male sponsorship, which is fantastic, but they're still giving us the advice that worked for them, which is not necessarily going to work for us. At least for us, in the sense of bringing our whole self to the table, right? Being able to make sure that we really have that voice. So that we don't just get promoted, and then we feel ostracized and we're in the same boat. Even worse, because now we're making more money and we have more responsibility.

Rebecca: And all of that still is happening on the back end of the family life and all the things that are going on.

Stacy: Exactly!

Rebecca: Those 80% of men, most of them are not doing the dominant household work and child rearing.

Stacy: Well, let me tell you what this is. And he actually said this. So I went around the room, and I was just like, “Hey, what's the best advice you ever had or a mentor that really helped your career?” And he said something about the bar and the whiskey sours. And I was like, it was basically like, access, right? Which for women, a lot of times, it is about access. And I teach a very specific approach to gaining access on our terms.

But he said something like, “I was so grateful, because I kept getting invited to the bar and the whiskey sours, and that just really took it over that edge.” And I just looked at him and I was like, “Not only does that not work for us, mostly because we don't want to be at the bar and we have other priorities, so when I talk about owning it, that's the piece that I'm owning is actually that we don't want to be at the bar.”

Rebecca: We don't want to do it the way they were doing it.

Stacy: Exactly. But we acknowledge that being at the bar is the unwritten rule of advancing your career. Right? So that type of ownership, right? And so then that gives me a place to work with you where you sort of say, “Hey, okay, this is the way it is. You have to be at the bar in order to advance your career. I don't want to be at the bar.” And so traditionally you’d be like, “All right, well, then I'll just not advance,” because women are smart. They're not going to totally give up everything.

So they'll try it a couple of times and they'll be like, “This isn't for me,” and then they'll move on. So finding that middle way comes from that ownership of saying, “Hey, what works for you is not going to work for me and I have to find a different path, but the goal is still the same. How do I get that exposure to executive leadership? How do I have those casual conversations that happen at places like bars? But I'm not going to do it that way.”

Rebecca: I'm loving what you're saying for a couple of reasons. It's really bringing up a couple of things for me, because I talk about ownership when it comes to work/life balance, right?

That's a really important concept for me as well, is to not believe that anybody else or any circumstance or any perfect set of circumstances or any boss or a helpful husband, or whatever it is, is going to create a life that feels balanced for you.

You have to take ownership over that and believe that within your circumstances, you have the ability to own and create the balanced life that you want. And you're kind of saying the same thing within your career as well.

It's like, it doesn't really matter your boss, it doesn't really matter your company, you have to take ownership - or the way things were and have been in the past, right? - You take ownership over your own career path by acknowledging what it is you want, acknowledging that what's worked in the past hasn't worked, and believing that a different way exists. And then you just have to find it.

If you kind of live in this place of like, "Well, this is how it has been, and I don't really want to do that, and so I don't really know what to do. And I'm just going to kind of keep doing what I'm doing and kind of hoping that either things work out or I'll wait till life circumstances changes so I can go join them at the bar or whatever later,” versus just saying, “Well, I still want to be promoted. I don't want it to work this way. Hmm. What does this look like? Let me problem solve for this.”

Women are amazing problem solvers. We have an ability to do that, but sometimes we don't even realize there's a problem that we're trying to solve and we just have to put some effort into figuring it out. So now we're at this point and what you're talking about is like owning, you say, “Yes, I don't want this, but I do want to move forward. I just don't want to do it in this way. Hmm. Now what? How do I do it?”

Stacy: You know, the interesting thing is, because we're really talking about 2024, and if you sort of pick your head up and you look out and you say, “Oh, my gosh, times are changing for women in that I have other women who are also doing this path, as well.”

What could a different way look like?

And so I think what would happen for women in the past is that we went through this decade of just like, “We are not going to take it,” right? It's just like, "No, we don't want it this way.” But now we're moving into the, “What does the different way look like?”

And really know that your actual role models in the C suite didn't get there that way. They got there the old way that we're not going to take it. We have to fight and we're going to figure it out. But what you're talking about is like a smarter, it's like a balanced, ambitious, working mom.

It is the person who is not going to take it, but then is also willing to be humble enough to work within a system and not fight against that system, but to really say, “Where do I fit into this? Where does my leadership? Is it ever going to be valued here?,” and start kind of playing around with that.

Rebecca: Gosh, such a really important question to ask, “Is like the opportunity going to be there at all based on the culture of this company?” Do you even want to put your effort into that? And all the various things. Also really important. Yes, I love that.

It's definitely a strategic approach, but it also lives within this belief that it's possible. I say that a lot to my clients when we talk about all sorts of things. It's like, “Hold on, hold on. Let's just assume that nothing changes except for you. That's the only thing you have control over, and it's possible to have whatever it is you want. Now what? Now tell me the options out there.”

And it really pushes you to have to think about, “Okay, if I'm truly in control of this and nobody else changes, and now what? Now what do I do?” What are some of the things that you kind of work with your clients on that you promote as you start talking about what women have ownership over and what they can do?

Cultivate an attitude of possibility.

Stacy: The other thing that I want to point out there is this attitude that you're expressing, this attitude of possibility. If you think about your current C suite and executive team, are they having regular correspondence with you about the impossibility of their future vision?

So if we just get total stereotype about this idea of motivating your team, motivating your organization, having this big vision, getting other people on board with it, it does sound like what you just described. So this idea of going to possibility first.

And so what we're also doing, as we're learning to advance our careers and we're learning these skills, then we're also learning how to motivate and lead other people at our organization. So we're going to have more success in that executive suite because we've learned those tools of communication.

So we practice it on ourselves, this idea of possibility, and then we start realizing, “Oh, my gosh, that's what I'm saying in the all hands meeting.” This is the same, same. That's just a really important differentiation.

Have conversations with C Suite executives.

And so kind of to that point, I think you were asking for actual things that we can do to begin to advance. And one of those things is to really have conversations with c suite executives.

So that sort of gets into my 15 minutes ally meetings. So many of us are talking to our peers on a regular basis, because that's part of our job. We're talking to our team and there's a different way of communicating that they do than what your executive team does.

While a big piece of advancing our careers is just flat out exposure, and I can kind of talk about that, but then there's the more curious, investigative piece. And I know a lot of women who are listening to this podcast are learners. Like, of your top five strengths, probably one of them, in there, at least in your top ten, is learner.

Rebecca: Learner. Growth. Yeah.

Be the witness.

Stacy: Yeah, growth. And all of these things, because it's one-for-one, knowledge, right? So it's like, it is what it is. That being said, and I did this with my own career in psychology, they call it “the witness,” right? Being able to pull out and really see what's happening as opposed to being in it.

And so my encouragement is to start to be the witness for what's happening around you in terms of your executive leadership. And part of the role of the witness is to be unbiased. So I'm not going to pull out so that I can judge and then give me further fodder to complain and be like, “Look at how dysfunctional this executive leadership team is.” And then now I just feel miserable.

But more just like, “What is actually happening here? What are the dynamics? How are they communicating with each other? The one guy who typically annoys me, right? So I can't even listen to him. But why is it that everybody else listens to him? What is it that he's really saying?”

This is like a goofy trick, but let's say you're in a leadership team meeting, and you're like, “Earlier, Jennifer had a really great point when she...” Right, right. Like, so I think it's probably in the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. If we bring someone else's name into the conversation, people perk up and they listen.

This is like a very basic tool, a very basic communication tool that we can start to use for ourselves. But in order to figure out, like, I can give you, and there's lots of communication books that sort of say, “Hey, say this, do this, sit up straight, blah, blah, blah.” But we can start to use that to our advantage, right?

So that when we're communicating, we're not just communicating about our work, doing our check in, but we're actually adding in those influential communication behaviors so that people do start to listen to us. So people do let us speak for a little bit longer, just like Jim over there, who seems to always have the floor.

15 minutes ally meetings build trust with your executive leadership team.

Rebecca: Tell us a little about ally meetings. I don't recall us talking about that in the last podcast, whenever that was, a year plus ago. But I know it's something that's so important to the work that you do and that you teach. And I love the concept. I know what the concept is. I'd love for you to share that a little bit because I think it is such an important tool as people think about advancing their career.

Stacy: The 15 minutes ally meetings are the replacement for the whiskey sours, the replacement for the bar, the golf outings, the camping trips that we don't really want to go on anyway. But yet there's a core truth to it. So what happens in those camping trips and bar outings? The biggest thing that happens is that trust is built.

So I'm going to talk about the philosophy of 15 minutes ally meetings, and then I can just give you a couple of quick, “do this, do this, do this.” But understanding, again, the why it is so important to really do them is a key factor.

Ultimately, there are a couple of reasons that people get promoted and one of those reasons is trust. I trust that you can do the job at the next level. I have a trust and a familiarity with you. Good news is…. well, good news/bad news. We don't have to do very much to build trust.

Literally, I'll just be flat out honest. Rebecca and I kind of look alike. We kind of think alike. We kind of are alike. So when you look, think, act, and talk like the rest of the room, you build trust. I liked Rebecca right out of the gate. I was like, I don't know. She didn't have to do much, right? When we start to understand bias and become that witness, we sort of say, “Oh, this is how things work, right?” This is how trust is built.

Okay, well, we can't play that game. So we've tried, right? We tried to be more like a man. It doesn't work for us. So we're like, “Okay, you can't build trust that way. So what are we going to do?”

The first key component is that trust is built also through that sort of obvious way that we can't do anything about. But it's also built in between the meetings. So when you also think about bar outings and golf trips and stuff, they're casual. So remember when we were in the office every day, we were bumping into people, and you would feel it. You would feel what we could identify as trust.

You would say, “Wow, that was a great conversation.” Generally speaking, it happened super casually, right? It was like walking by, and then the CEO is like, “Stacy, can I talk to you for a minute?” And you're like, “Oh, my God, this is amazing. Yes. I have all these ideas.” Right?

So now you're building trust. 15 minute ally meetings are a proactive way to build trust with your executive leadership team. They're very failure proof in that they're only 15 minutes. So you literally reach out to somebody, and I always say it's somebody that you have no business reaching out to.

What I mean by that is like a skip level or a boss's boss's boss. That person that makes you a little nervous. You say, “Hey, can I get 15 minutes on your calendar?” Generally speaking, they're very open to that. Don't ask for a lunch meeting. That's a really bad idea. Think about it like that first date, the coffee chat. You want a way to get out of it.

In that conversation, then what you're going to do is you're going to talk about anything other than work. And I want to caveat this, because I know a lot of women default to when I say “anything other than work,” we go personal. It's not personal. We're not going to talk about our children, our family, even our passions, right? Other things that we do in life. What I mean is, other than work, like your work product. So what you care about the company, what's standing out to you in the industry, those are great things to talk about. Also, what they care about.

So you're asking good questions to learn more about the person across the room from you, even if they do all the talking for the 15 minutes. And then you're like, “I want to value your time. Let's continue this conversation next month.” Gosh, that's the best thing that could happen. And so now you're building that trust because they're seeing you. They get to know you. They feel more familiar with you. I mean, heck, they even just know your name.

And then on the other side, you're also able to become that investigator. Like, “Wow, what are the questions they were asking me? How do they communicate different than what I'm doing?” And we're starting to kind of own that, and we're saying their day-to-day is very different than what I'm currently operating at. So maybe I should think about that a little bit as I continue to rise.

Rebecca: The whole time you were describing that meeting to me, I was thinking about the whole meeting happening over a whiskey sour.

Stacy: Exactly. But it happens on women's terms. And these are just made up women's terms, but they seem to be universal, which is during work hours.

Rebecca: Right.

15 minute ally meetings can bridge the gap for women working virtually.

Stacy: And quite frankly, over Zoom, because some of us would prefer to do things in person, but then there are a lot of us who are like, “No, I really enjoy working from home, and this is actually the life that I want to create for myself.” But the problem is that the corporate culture isn't reciprocating that. But when we do these 15 minutes ally meetings, then we can be on the West Coast with an East Coast headquarters, and they can all know us just as well as everybody who actually lives on the East Coast. Being able to have that location freedom as well.

Rebecca: That's something that I for sure have heard a lot from clients that are wanting to advance career. There's this roadblock to, I work virtually and, or like, I work virtually and the whole company works virtually, or I just work virtually and everybody else doesn't. So I don't have the same opportunity to do the bump in at the water cooler or in the hallway or whatever with anyone. And so that's holding me back.

But again, we come back to the very first piece of this is ownership and possibilities. So, yes, those are the parameters. We're not going to change those circumstances. Now what do we do? And then it's, how do you make these types of 15 minutes conversations really impactful and have them in a consistent way so that it becomes…It's kind of like bumping into them in the hallway. It looks totally different. That's okay. We're just working at honing this skill of being able to have the more casual water cooler conversation on a very focused, planned Zoom call.

Stacy: This is the other thing, is that I actually came up with the idea of 15 minutes ally meetings in a coaching conversation in 2020, March of 2020. This woman said, “The worst part about going home is that I don't get to bump into my CEO anymore.” What I said to her was, “Well, you also realize that's not a strategy. That's an accident.”

A lot of times, we're taking accidental approaches to advancing our career. And truthfully, that works up till a certain point. And what some of those accidental approaches are, is being good at your job. Up until a certain point, especially at that director, senior director level, it is a huge requirement. Like, you’ve just got to be good at your job. You have to be better than somebody else.

And then if you find yourself in a circumstance where your boss doesn't have a different favorite than you, then you get promoted, right? It's not that complicated. But then what happens when none of that is true? That's the ownership that we're talking about.

And then also, quite frankly, the women who are getting promoted in that way. They start to get wiser and they say, “Oh, my gosh, this isn't the life that I'm meant to have right where I'm working and constantly having to prove myself, and I feel like I just have to go harder, faster, quicker, getting everything done.”

Rebecca: So good. I love it. We're talking about having these ally meetings that are really strategic. That are focused on building trust. Ultimately, because that seems to be a really important factor in advancing your career. Just out of curiosity, why would you say that's such an important part of advancing your career, like building that trust?

Stacy: I listen to the actual feedback that somebody would give. Let's say that they like, which is you need more exposure to leadership. That's like a thing.

Rebecca: A very standard thing in a review you might get.

Trust is key.

Stacy: Right. And for a lot of women, that feels very passive and like, “Well, great. Well, that would be nice. Right? Like, sounds good. Hook me up. How am I supposed to do that?” Right? So what I'm also doing is looking at, like I said, what works for men? What works in a more traditional environment? And then how do we create our own terms? How do we create it our way?

But to this point of trust, one of the ideas that I had, and I know that you and I are also the same in that we're thinking about our content and how it can connect with people in a richer, deeper, more actionable way. And I did a training a year ago where I was thinking about this idea, and actually, I think the name of it was “How to Advance Your Career as a Woman in Leadership”, which is, like, the whole reason.

I just actually said trust. If there's one thing that you can do, it's trust. And then I broke it into three areas, and you're going to totally love this, which is trust in your ability, trust in yourself, and trust in your leadership.

And so just like, the high level, the trust in our ability is, for a lot of us, we're solving the wrong problem. We're trying to get better at our job. We're like, “if we can prove ourselves.” Those types of things. And so if we can just sort of eliminate that. Everybody who I work with is a corporate badass. We just kind of start from this place that you're good at, your job. This is not the place that we need to fix. And if it is, like, okay, go work on that. Right? If you're actually not good at your job, deal with that, right? You can't do any ownership unless we're actually pretty decent at what we do.

So trust in your ability, which also means you don't have to lead with your ability in conversation. I think that's where we fall short in the 15 minutes ally meetings. And why I really emphasize don't talk about work, is that we'll talk about a project that we're working on, and then we're spending the whole 15 minutes trying to prove ourselves in that conversation. If you just trust, like, "Hey, I'm good at my job.” I don't need to spend 15 minutes talking about that.

Just trust. Trust in yourself. And this is a lot of the mental work that I do have possibilities, that I can do this, that I even want to be in an executive role. Ss long as it's on my terms. I don't want to be on an executive role like everybody else.

And then trust in your leadership team and building that proactive trust that, “Hey, when I do get promoted…”, because one of the misnomers is that women just aren't raising their hands. And I say if we're not raising our hands for the next role, there's the whole statistic that men apply when they have 60% of the qualifications and women apply when they have like 100%.

Rebecca: 90 or something like that. Yeah.

Stacy: Yeah, that's not helpful. Because I mean, it was helpful, like I said when we were in the we aren't going to take it, but we're like, we get it. But there's this other reason that we're not raising our hand. It's not because we don't get it, it's because we don't want it.

And so why do we not want it? It's because we don't have backing. Right? We are going to be on an island by ourselves. We're like, “All the money in the world doesn't replace my headaches every day, my stress.” Right? We're smarter than that. So we're not raising our hands on purpose.

And so having a proactive approach to building trust with your leadership team allows you to raise your hand confidently to say, “Hey, I am ready for that next role.” So really it all comes down to trust. Honestly, I think.

Rebecca: And adding another one into that, not raising your hand because, this is what I get a lot, is because you don't want it to impact your family. So then you feel really held back by the misnomer, the idea that if I move up, that equals more time working or more stress. And the only way to deal with that is to take away time in my family time, in order to handle all of that. And for sure, that has been a truth in the past. It doesn't have to be a truth for you moving forward. You get to decide how you want to operate within your leadership moving forward. So I totally resonate with that.

We have to realize the microaggressions that are happening to us.

Stacy: Can I tell you a conversation I had just last week? Because I think it's so great. We also have to realize the microaggressions that are happening to us. And a lot of times microaggressions aren't purposeful.

So I was having a really wonderful conversation with a really incredible executive woman, just really wonderful. She has a woman on her team. As soon as she got pregnant, the woman on her team, she said, “I'm going to tell you because I trust you. I can't tell anybody else that I'm pregnant because I'm worried it will affect my career, but I'm going to tell you because I know you're going to help me.” And then the executive woman is like, “Yeah, I'm so glad she came to me and she trusts me. And so what I've been doing is I've been going to her and I've been saying, ‘Hey, I don't want to give you too much work, but I am going to give you all the work you want.’”

And so she thinks that this is a really great approach. She's like, “I'm having over communication with her. I'm letting her decide how much work she wants, how much work she can't have. Things like that. And we're just doing this.” And I said, “You do realize that you've said the word work a lot?” And she's like, “What?”

And I was like, “Well, think about it this way. This woman is pregnant. She already thinks that her career is going to be affected, which is why she refuses to tell anybody else. And maybe rightfully so, like, maybe it's a political environment where it would be career suicide. But she's like, ‘I trust you.’ And then you keep telling her, ‘I'm going to give you work or not give you work, and then I'm going to give you more decisions to make in this stressful time in your life. And I'm not actually helping you through this, but I'm over communicating.’”

And then this executive woman looks at me, she's like, “What? Well, what would you do?” And I said, “I would actually talk to her about opportunities. Instead of using the word work, when you're having conversation with her, say, ‘Hey, there is an opportunity here for you to fly to Greece when you're six months pregnant. And I would like to offer that to you if that's what you want, it's fine.’ And if she's like, ‘No, I can't physically fly to Greece when I'm six months pregnant, and nor do I want to,’ then I'm going to figure out what other opportunities I can continue to give you so that you can stay connected because you can't physically fly to Greece.”

So we're having opportunity conversations versus work. I'm going to give you more work. What is work? Women are constantly on the flip side. So we're given these little, and I call them microaggressions because the woman didn't realize that she was doing it, but she was totally doing it, right?

She was basically telling her, the rule of the game is you work harder to get ahead, right? Like, that's it. And so I'm either going to give you work, which equals getting ahead, or I'm not going to give you work, but you decide. So she was very excited about this. She was like, “Oh, my gosh, you're so right. You've changed my viewpoint.” I single handedly knew I changed this other woman's opportunities in this one conversation.

And so as leaders who maybe are on the other side of being a working mom, maybe their kids are getting a little bit older and they have that freedom and they're wanting to give back and they're wanting to help other leaders. It's important for us to check in with ourselves and say, “What are we saying to others and how are we communicating, and how are we sort of perpetuating this toxic environment?”

Or on the reverse, also realize what's being said to me on a regular basis. I hear this all the time, and they're always like, alarm bells. One woman was like, “They kept saying to me, ‘I don't know how you do it all.’” And she took it as a compliment. And I was like, “That's not a compliment.” Because it's such a dig on her self esteem every single day. Because she says, "You know what? I don't know how I do it all.”

Rebecca: Right. Right.

Stacy: And I was like, "Do they say that to everybody or just the one who has three young children at home?” And when we take ownership, we really realize what's being thrown at us and what's being said to us on a regular basis, then we can sort of do something different. Because it's also possible for the woman on the other side to say, “Hey, can we have a conversation about opportunities?” So even if, uh, I wasn't there to coach her boss, and so that's that level of empowerment and what we can start to do for ourselves.

Rebecca: So good. I love those examples of kind of circling back to this idea of, I mean, this all started with the raising of your hand and not raising your hand because of all of this dynamic and needing to parse apart. Is that the right to parse out? That's what it is.

What are our own biases? What are the biases that we're experiencing, being able to speak out against some of those things or speak up about those things and change the things that we can change within ourselves to be able to raise our hand more this upcoming year and beyond.

It’s important to allow space for emotional processing.

I want to pivot for a moment and talk about something that I was reading about on your LinkedIn. And by the way, if you're not following Stacy on LinkedIn, you should definitely go find her. She's doing some amazing, wonderful things, and there's been all these wonderful interviews. Super inspirational. I love what you're doing.

I was reading something on your LinkedIn about the importance of managing your emotions and emotional processing. I do think that that's such a key piece. It resonated a lot with me. It resonates a lot with what I coach on and what I teach on so many levels, moving forward, we're paving a new path. We're not doing things the way things were happening in the past. There is trial and error in that. There is failure in that. There is difficult conversations in that. There is an unknowing if what we're doing is actually going to pan out and work out on some level. Right? Because we can't read into the future.

We know what people have done. We know what men have done. Don't know what it looks like for us, always. We have some great ideas. We have experts like you, me, and so forth helping us, but we don't know. And so what happens is we have all these emotions that come up, and we have the possibility of all sorts of emotions.

We have emotions that come with not knowing how to balance work and life and doing it wrong, and then having to pivot and then have hard conversations and all these things. And so I know that emotions is a piece of this that you also teach on as well. And I'm curious, the importance, as you think about emotional management, emotion processing, as it relates to kind of advancing your career. What are your thoughts?

Stacy: Well, the first emotion, non emotion, that we could start with managing is our judgment. And the reason is, I really don't think of this as an emotion because as you're talking about your emotional state, and we have a new Inside Out movie coming up as well. I think that m the first one was brilliant. I can't wait for the second one.

Rebecca: I cannot wait.

Stacy: I know. It's so incredible. All emotions are needed, warranted, important. And so when I think about being upset or frustrated or sad, I had a woman who her boss got let go last week, and she's like, “I just feel sad. Like, I feel scared, but I feel sad, right? Like, I feel sad for her.” So really allowing space for some of those emotions.

And then I think of judgment as, like, this completely useless emotion. And the only thing it did for us is back in the whatever. It allowed us to kind of push back when we felt like we were getting all walked over or whatever, it was like, “No, stop that. Leave me alone.”

But what's happening for us now in the corporate world is that I just want to go with, “Yeah, you are smarter. You're smarter than your boss. Yeah. You know more than your CEO. Yeah, you should be paid more.” Like all of those things. And I think we spend a lot of spiraling time in judgment. We're like, “Oh, this is so frustrating, and why don't they get me? And I just want to show them.” And so then we're also acting out from that place.

Rebecca: Sure

Stacy: And so, in our truth, a lot of women are very humble leaders. They're very collaborative. They give people the benefit of the doubt. Like, they are really wanting to emulate that type of leadership, but yet they're not giving their leadership team that level of compassion because they're just judging them all the time.

And so if we can sort of start to look at our emotional state and let go of some of the things that just really aren't useful. I'm like, “Does it get you where you want to go to kind of keep talking about how shitty he is? It's like we already know it, right? Like, okay, now what are we going to do about it?”

That's one piece is just really trying to, again, maybe go back to that idea of being the witness. Is this useful for me? And sometimes the tears and the sadness of, once again, I am in a position. The worst part of getting promoted is now you're the person who has to do the layoffs. I had a woman who was a mess because she was the one person that got kept and got a $100,000 bonus and then had to lay off her whole team. And she's like, “I feel terrible.” And I'm like, well, somebody was going to get that.

But allowing room for that, allowing room for the genuine, that frustration that fuels us to do something different, that says “no more” is really, really important. So when we think about a the managing of our emotions that we've got this whole plethora of things happening and emotional states, and then we're just going to kind of manage them like we do our team. Be like, this emotion has this different purpose. Is it useful? Is it not?

And we have this skill set because, like I said, that's why I use the term manage your emotions is because we are great managers. It’s what got us here, right? Like, we're good at that, and so we can start to look at our emotions in that way that some of them are useful, some of them help us, and then some of us are just sort of holding us back.

Rebecca: We hear, at least stereotypically, we hear this a lot. Like, women are too emotional and they get, as they move up in their career, we're told to “cut it at the neck,” if you will. Keep those emotions at bay. You're not allowed to feel them. You're not allowed to show them. What are your thoughts about that stereotype?

Stacy: It has to be like, what is it covering up? So I would never have a conversation with a woman who…there was a very specific instance last week where you could say that she got too emotional because her boss was asking her a bunch of questions. She was in a group meeting in front of other people, and then she started rambling. And then she's like, “and then my eyes welled up and I was so scared,” and things like that, right.

So what I would get to the root cause of is not, like, “Shame on you for crying in front of everybody,” but more like, “Why did you feel that you were being questioned? What was going on for you, that you didn't feel like you belonged? “

And this is where coaching is so effective, is that we can sort of get to, not the shaming part of the emotion, which is what you're talking about, which is like, you can't cry in leadership, that part. But “Why is it that you feel so small? Why do you not belong in this conversation? Why do you turn your camera off?”

I want to know what's going on for you there, and I really want to investigate it because it's not a problem that you had tears. The problem is that you felt really small in an instant, and then you acted on it for about 20 minutes later.

When we think about trust, what the executive leadership is asking is like, “Can that person represent our organization in a public way? Can that person do hard things? Right? Can the person lay off 50 people because it's part of the job without just completely falling apart?”

Rebecca: Falling apart, yeah.

We can learn how to work with emotions in a way that they actually serve us.

Stacy: And genuinely, the stereotype on the masculine side is that they can fake it better. Right? Like, they can hold it together, right? And those things. But we don't have to hold it together. We can have a very empathetic conversation with a person who is being laid off, but then we can also create a boundary for ourselves so that that conversation is only two minutes. So that I know that as soon as that conversation is over, then I can cry on my own. Right, or whatever.

There is a political savviness to the whole corporate world, but I think it stems from not shaming the emotion. Like, we are not too emotional. The problem is that we don't know how to work with our emotions in a way that they actually serve us and are useful. And when I'm at my most powerful, I can feel my heart racing and not make it a problem. I can feel my bumbling words. So that's another piece, is, like, “How do we take ownership of how we're showing up, how we're presenting ourselves?”

Rebecca: Yeah, and you just said a line that I think was really important. I wrote it down. It's making our emotions not a problem and useful. It's like not judging the fact that we're emotional creatures and even the fact that, generally speaking, women experience more emotions than men or display their emotions more than men. Again, we're just, like, owning that that's what it is.

Stacy: Right. Yeah!

Rebecca: But learning how to make that not a problem and then making it something that's useful, not learning how to shut it down, not learning how to cut it off so that you don't experience emotions anymore, which is not really useful.

I say this to my son a lot. “Let's make this your superpower. Let's make your emotions your superpower.” How do you utilize them? How do we not judge them and then make them a part of the toolkit that you have that makes you successful? Because generally speaking, if you call yourself somebody that's emotional, you've been emotional up to this point, and it's made you successful up to this point.

There's something about your empathy and your compassion and your love and your ability to feel that actually displays itself in your leadership, and it's useful and valuable, and we actually don't want to get rid of that.

But there's an element that what most women are experiencing kind of goes a little too far. And so it's learning what that line is and how to balance being okay with who you are at the core and learning how to turn that to a more useful side and experience emotions in a way that actually leans into your leadership and bolsters your leadership, instead of feeling like you have to shut it down and be somebody you're not.

Stacy: Right, exactly.

Rebecca: This conversation has been so good. I want to make sure if there's any other thoughts that you particularly have about 2024 and moving forward and advancing your career in 2024. I want to hear them as we kind of start to wrap up this podcast.

You don’t have to have it all figured out. You can start taking small steps forward today.

Stacy: It doesn't go without saying that promotions happen six months in advance. I can't say that enough. What you're experiencing right now at the beginning of January is going to affect your ability to have success in September. We experience this as entrepreneurs as well. Everything has this pipeline.

And so as we're going into this new year, I think it's important to really think about, even if you don't know, like, “I don't know for sure that I want to be promoted in September because I don't know that I want that next role. I don't know that I want my boss's job, because that exploration, the way it looks today, is not pretty. And I don't want all that.”

Even if we don't know that, we can still take small steps today to set ourselves up for future success, even if we don't know exactly what we want that future success to look like. Just go with the fact that I am ambitious. I want to grow. And so what are the couple of little things that we can do out of the gate to build those 15 minutes ally meetings to create that longer term vision?

If we don't know what we want in September, maybe it's easier to access what we want five years from now. And then the other thing is to just sort of, “Hey, maybe there's a reason I'm not raising my hand.” Let's start unshaming some of the advice that we're being given. Maybe there's a reason that I haven't gotten as much exposure because I was trying to go about it with the whiskey sour approach. And we can do all that in January, February, March. This is our time to be able to set that up.

Rebecca: Stop waiting for the review.

Stacy: Exactly!

Rebecca: I'm sure you say that all the time.

Stacy: Decisions are already made at performance review time, right? And then we're waiting a whole year. So it's really important to kind of get in front of that, and I just can't say that enough. Getting promoted can feel very like, just like managing your emotions can feel very squishy. “Well, you want me to embrace my emotions and change them, like, how does this work?” There are tools, right? There are ways to make that work. We've practiced them, and my clients have practiced them. And so there is a path forward.

Rebecca: Yes, absolutely. And coming back to this idea that maybe you don't know if you want your boss's job, or maybe you don't know what you want yet. That should be a piece of probably the next six months is you putting some clarity to that and making some decisions about that. But you don't have to know that in order to make some of the small incremental steps towards being promoted.

Like, we do know that trust is important. We do know that allyship is important. We do know that building some of these other skill sets are important. So you can work towards that without even having the end result in mind and work towards getting that end result right. I love that. So good. How can people connect with you, Stacy?

Stacy: So one of the things that comes to mind is I have a PDF that I created called a 30-60-90 day plan. And this was actually a plan that I created for women once they get promoted. Like what, the first 30, 60, 90 days of your new role so that you never have to go backwards again.

But I realized, and this is part of what you saw me sharing in 2024, is that it's actually a guide to 2024. So it's basically, what can I do in this first quarter to set myself up for whatever future possibilities. So even if you've been in your role for a while, or you're looking for a new role or you just got promoted, it works. So it's stacymayer.com/90dayplan . And so that's a fantastic tool. And then my podcast, which is called Women Changing Leadership, and Rebecca has been a guest on that, so you should totally link to that episode.

Rebecca: Definitely and I will

Stacy: Also one of my most listened to episodes as well.

Rebecca: Oh, I love it. That's so good.

Stacy: Yeah.

Rebecca: Thank you again for your time, your expertise, what you're putting out in the world, and just sharing some of these things with us. It's just friend, we're doing it. 2024 is going to be a great year for our people and for all these amazing women out there.

Stacy: Thank you so much.

Rebecca: Thanks.

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Rebecca Olson