Leadership run wild

IF YOU THINK THOSE PERENNIAL HEADLINES about women getting paid much less than men are all just hype, just talk to the WILD women.

The members of Women in Leadership Development, a program of Appleton’s Mid-Day Business & Professional Women, don’t buy it for a minute.

“Even when you account for experience and education, women still are paid less than men,” said Janet Hagen, the first speaker in the WILD program series and the owner of Pegasus Leadership Development in Oshkosh. “The glass ceiling has moved up. Women make it to middle management but not past middle management.”

WILD is an inaugural series of four 90-minute workshops hosted by Mid-Day BPW members. It focuses on fostering the leadership abilities of its members.

And yes, these kinds of workshops are still needed, even in the 21^st century, say WILD participants, despite women’s achievements in space travel, science and medicine over the course of the last four decades.

Women are still lagging remuneration-wise, according to those who keep tabs on this sort of thing. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that women working fulltime make just 80 percent of what their fulltime male counterparts earn, in the same line of work after the same amount of time on the job.

In Wisconsin, the statistic is more abysmal: Women here make 76 percent of what Wisconsin men with the same experience and in the same line of work earn, according to a 2007 study done by the American Association of University Women.

No navy pantsuits

THE FOUR-PART WILD SERIES kicked off this past March with Hagen’s workshop titled “What You as a Leader Need to Unlearn.”

Hagen owns Pegasus Leadership Consultants, a professional development program that centers its life lessons on horses. She’s also a professor and chair of the human services and professional leadership department at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

The WILD ringleader is Carrie Garczynski, co-president of Mid-Day BPW and owner of the consulting firm Centric Fusion.

“We wanted it to be fun and different,” Garczynski said of WILD. “No navy blue suits and no PowerPoint coma.” Garczynski said she absolutely didn’t want to put on the kind of seminars that involve handouts and overhead projectors.

“People’s eyes glaze over,” she said. “Someone is standing up in front talking; there’s a screen, you have a handout and the screen says the same thing as the handout, and you aren’t sure where you are supposed to be looking.”

The target audience for WILD is women organizational leaders from age 30 to 55, Garczynski said, but WILD welcomes women of any age. Women don’t have to sport high-profile titles or six-figure salaries to qualify as leaders, either.

“We have a really wide definition of leader – anyone in a leadership role,” Garczynski said. “A mom is a leader – she runs her household and takes care of her kids. Whether it’s paid or unpaid, that’s a leadership position.”

Mid-Day BPW meets monthly on the third Wednesday at the Radisson Paper Valley in downtown Appleton for lunch and a half-hour program. Sometimes that’s just not long enough.

“The WILD program allows this hour-and-a-half forum, which allows for more ongoing, in-depth professional development than you could provide in a lunch meeting,” Hagen said.

The main requirements for each workshop: That they be interactive and provide something participants “could use tomorrow.”

 Myth or reality?

IS IT MYTH OR REALITY that women are afraid to negotiate.

Reality, says Hagen.

Once, in a goodhearted attempt to extend a hand down to a woman applying for a job, Hagen shared information on the salary range with the applicant.

“I told her (when negotiating) to ask for the highest number, because I knew they (management) were willing to go up to that amount but not over,” Hagen said.

But later, the woman applicant told Hagen she hadn’t asked for the highest amount, as Hagen had advised.

 “That befuddled me; this was a woman who was confident and self-assured and in business for herself,” Hagen said. “She was afraid she wouldn’t get the job.”

Hagen said at the same time, she understood why the woman didn’t go for the brass ring. It all boils down to cultural and social learning, she said.

“Cultural learning is so powerful, and that’s a real-world example” of cultural learning in action. Part of that cultural paradigm is the word “negotiate” in itself. It has a negative connotation for women, Hagen said.

“They think of Donald Trump and face-to-face confrontation in an office,” Hagen said.

Replace the word negotiate with “ask for,” she suggests.

“When I go to buy a new car, I ask for whatever price I think is fair,” Hagen said.

Once you break out of your comfort zone, it’s not so excruciatingly painful to negotiate.

“Go out and negotiate something that is totally unreasonable, in order to get over this nice-girl/good-girl problem women have – they don’t want to be pushy and unreasonable.”

Start small. Go to a rummage sale, and if you see a lamp for $10, ask if they will take $2 for it, Hagen suggests. “Do something that makes you uncomfortable, but not so much so that you can’t do it.”

Some of Hagen’s observations:

• Women don’t communicate directly but over-explain, provide too much information, and tap-dance around delegating tasks. “A woman will explain the different reasons why she needs a report done early, whereas a man will just say he needs the report done early.”

• Women aren’t given the opportunity on the job to expand their skill sets – they tend to keep doing the same types of jobs they’ve always done, even though they may be rising in seniority.

• Women don’t mentor each other enough. Even though men compete with each other, they mentor each other, too.

 Social learning hard to unlearn

The next WILD session – titled “Unconscious Mistakes We Make That Sabotage Our Careers” – will be presented Sept. 23 by Vicki Updike, vice president of marketing and merchandising for Miles Kimball Co. in Oshkosh.

Some of those girlish gaffes are easy enough to recognize, as they’ve been stereotyped and proliferated in the media for decades – tilting the head when talking to a man, couching a statement in a question, and giggling at meetings.

But other miscues Updike plans to talk about aren’t so blatant.

“There are things that change and as you progress in your career, being female, allowing you to succeed early in your career – you usually succeed at getting things done; you are the doer. As you progress, you take on more of a leadership and management role, and it’s more about leading and mentoring others to do it and not doing it yourself any longer. You have to get over the guilt of assigning work,” Updike said.

Also, as women ascend the career ladder, they “become a smaller percentage of the population sitting at the table,” Updike said.

Updike’s presentation will cover first impressions and poise.

“The rules of being a girl don’t always translate into being a strategic leader or moving up in your career,” Updike said. Some of the more subtle ways women sabotage themselves, according to Updike:

• Excessive smiling;

• Over-apologizing;

• Always being the official note-taker in meetings; 

• Not taking up space at table, huddling in a corner.

It all boils down to cultural and social learning, said Hagen.

“You have social learning about cultural expectations that get translated to the workplace, about how women should smile,” Hagen said.

“If you don’t smile, you aren’t friendly, 

you are a bitch, and when you get into 

an authority position, smiling too much 

is a bad thing,” Hagen said.

Early in Updike’s career, someone handed her the book, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, by Lois Franken, and she’s never forgotten the lessons it taught her.

“It was such a guidepost for me that I am taking much of what I am speaking about from that publication,” she said.

 An alumna of Ripon College, Lee Marie Reinsch is a freelance writer based in Green Bay.