Why You’re the Smartest Woman in the Room

by Solange Lopes | Feb 10, 2014 | Career

blindie.com

Happy Monday! Need a boost to start the week?
There’s one thing that Dear Hubby has been telling me for years since I entered the corporate workforce, that I never pay much attention to. Yet lately as I’ve faced some of my most important, and most life-altering career challenges, I’ve realized that after all, he was right all along.

As corporate sisters, it’s no secret that we tend to not toot our horns as much as our male counterparts in the professional sphere. Generally being dubbed as caretakers and nurtures, many times we tend to give credit to others, or to the team, for our hard work. As we are striving to change the corporate landscape to make more room for women, and especially for minority women, we must teach ourselves to value our work and contributions, even before others do, and even if others don’t…And this is why it is crucial to remember that for a host of different reasons (some funnier and more obvious than others), YOU are the smartest woman in the room:

• Chances are, YOU may be the ONLY woman in the room, and probably the only minority woman in the room: According to the Catalyst, although women’s representation among senior executives grew between 2013 and 2014 from 16.7% to 21.7%, in many a corporate setting, women, and minority women in particular, are still standing alone among their male counterparts.
• Your emotional EQ ranks you higher than you think: While men are better at compartmentalizing their emotions, women tend to have an edge when it comes to perceiving emotions around them and tuning into these. Although this may be perceived as weaknesses, it also empowers women to sense the emotional energy in any room and directly attune their response to it. It is also a crucial factor when it comes to identifying needs of stakeholders and customers alike, and tailor their responses in uniquely effective ways.
• Last but not least, we make others feel like the smartest people in the room: Great leaders do not present themselves as the smartest people in the room, although they may very well be. Instead, women leaders try to inspire through collaborating with and helping others. As a corporate sister, your empathy, collaborative spirit and efforts to inspire others are never wasted, as they definitely show your leadership.

Do you feel like the smartest woman in the room?

The Corporate Sister.

Why Women Make Great Leaders

by Solange Lopes | Feb 4, 2014 | Career

Women Leaders – madamenoire.com

Women’s leadership has been undervalued for the longest time, and still is…Even as more and more women are learning to lean in and fill increasingly important roles in the corporate world, women leaders are still desperately undervalued. As reported by Forbes, “as of July 2013, there were only 19 female electedpresidents and prime ministers in power around the globe.  In the business world, women currently hold only 4.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positionsand the same percentage of Fortune 1000 CEO positions.”

I grew up in West Africa surrounded by powerful, strong, hard-working women. Most of them did not hold anything close to a high school or college degree, and that is if they had ever stepped into a school at all. Yet they supported our family with an iron fist and the loudest of laughter, as the men in our family unfortunately faltered. They built small businesses selling just about anything from clothes to beignets, made sure all the children were taken care of and the household was running like a well-oiled machine.
While women may process things in different ways, their leadership should not be ignored or misunderstood. Instead, we all, and professional men who have not been exposed to female leadership in particular, should learn to recognize the great leadership traits of women. These are only three of all these female leadership traits that I find to be the most amazing:

Women are passionate leaders. What many see as weak emotion in women leaders is really an indomitable passion in what we stand for and in what we do. My mother is the most independent and passionate person I know, and over the years, has turned this passion into excellence by always striving for the best. I believe as women we tend to always want better, better for ourselves, better for our families and better for the world out there, and that makes us go beyond what we ever thought we could do.

Women are nurturers of tradition. Even as a single mother raising four children, my mother gave us the stability of a family like any other. A family with traditions, a family glued together. She taught us to pray together, eat together, bond together, and fight together. She not only held us together, but taught us to hold each other together upwards. As leaders, women have the potential to hold businesses and institutions together, to instill a sense of tradition and belonging to keep most structures together.

Women are born entrepreneurs. When she occasionally ran out of money, my mother started baking wedding cakes for a fee. She invested in gold jewelry when the market was profitable, so she could re-sell at a profit. As women, we are not just resourceful, we are born entrepreneurs. In the face of difficulty, we strategize, plan and devise schemes to turn obstacles into opportunity. From baking cakes for a fee to building empires, women have the potential of turning seeds of entrepreneurship into full blown business ventures.

Do you believe women make great leaders?