More and more corporate boards are seeking to diversify their ranks. Yet, in the US only 15.7% of board seats are held by women. The data published by Catalyst, shows companies with three or more women board directors in four of five years outperformed companies with zero women board directors ― by 84% return on sales, 60% return on invested capital, and 46% return on equity.

And corporate boards are one of the best part-time jobs around. Median pay in 2010 was $212,500, up a projected +10% in 2011. That is a pretty good hourly salary for an average of 4.3 hours of work per week according to a survey by NACD.  In addition to a great salary, 96% of board members according to a survey by WCD [PDF] are satisfied with their job. Great salary. Short hours. Great job satisfaction. Does this sound like a job you would like to have?

Here’s the challenge. Many women don’t understand the steps to take early in their careers to best position and prepare themselves to get on boards and miss the boat. Another challenge according to a Heidrick & Struggles 2011 Survey done with the Women Corp Directors group, is that it takes women 6 months longer than men (an average of 2.3 yrs vs. 1.7 yrs) to get on a Board. According to the research [PDF], women feel that the primary reasons why there are fewer women on boards is because of the closed networks that decide who gets on what boards. Men on the other hand believe that fewer women on boards is attributable to the fact that there are fewer women in executive roles to choose from.

Here are 5 practical steps to take to increase your chances of getting on a public company board.

1. Excel at What You Do. Get great experience where you are in your corporate career. Ensure that you have business and financial decision-making experience. Getting P&L responsibility is critical. Boards also look for people who have strong emotional intelligence and can work well with others. According to Mary Madden, Executive Director of WCD and NACD in Atlanta, if you happen to be in a Senior Executive position in a corporation, make sure you understand what restrictions may exist related to you being on a corporate board. On the positive side, it is a huge advantage to have your company’s CEO support your candidacy within his or her networks (see point #4 below).

2. Develop A Clear Articulation of Your Brand/Value Proposition. Start with getting clarity on why you would like to be on a corporate board and what kind of corporate board you want to be on. What is your unique value proposition or personal brand for a prospective board? Why should a board hire you? What unique skill sets and strengths, experiences do you bring? Create a Board resume that highlights your experiences, strengths and skill sets.

3. Get some Non-Profit Board Experience. According to Carol Tomei, CFO of the Home Depot, who sits on the Boards of UPS and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, non-profit boards are an excellent way to start getting Board experience. Make sure that these boards are not rubber-stamp boards but have tough issues to address, where you will learn board governance. If you’re in a large organization, connect with the community relations person and get their advice on a good non-profit board to be on. Make sure you are passionate about the cause, as it requires discretionary time for which you are not getting paid. According to Donna James, CEO of Lardon Associates, being on the board of a powerful non-profit is what gave her exposure to the people and relationships that would eventually result in getting her on the board of the Limited Brands. She also sits on the Boards of Time Warner Cable and Coca Cola Enterprises.

Another option to get experience is to start with smaller company or start-up boards. They often do not pay or pay a whole lot less but you get a feel for the issues and learn to have a voice at the table, learning the difference between being a leader running a company and being on the board of one.

Once on a board, make sure you contribute. According to Martha Brooks who is on the boards of Harley Davidson and Bombardier, your contributions will get noticed and will allow you to be known for other possible Board opportunities.

4. Build a Powerful Network of Relationships. Relationships count. Who to build relationships with? People who are on boards themselves. Connect with recruiters who do Board searches.  Make sure you have your Board pitch and resume ready as you connect with people. You can join organizations such as the NACD to connect with others who are already on boards.

5. Get Educated/Trained on Governance Issues. Some of the major universities have Directors’ colleges. The NACD has chapters and programs across the US some of which are open to non-Directors. The WCD also has programs that are available.

I hope this has been thought-provoking for you to create an action plan for yourself. I welcome connecting with you to help you create a powerful action plan to get on a corporate board.

Henna Inam is a CEO Coach focused helping women become transformational leaders. A Wharton MBA, and former C-Suite executive with Novartis and P&G, her passion is to engage, empower, and energize women leaders to transform themselves and their businesses. Sign up for her blog at www.transformleaders.tv.

You’ve set your New Year goals. You’re highly motivated to achieve them. And then something happens and you lose steam. Meet the culprit. It’s called resistance. And it lies in each of us. The fact is the #1 factor standing between us and achieving our goals is ourselves. We often search for the culprit outside. It’s the economy. It’s my mom’s chocolate cake. The gym doesn’t have the right equipment. Sound familiar? Here are 5 steps you can take to manage your resistance so there can be greater flow in meeting your goals.

1. Make Resistance Your Friend.

Acknowledging that there is resistance inside of you and it is what keeps you from meeting your goals is the first and most important step. You stop looking on the outside and start looking on the inside. A corollary to this step is to not beat yourself up for having resistance. It’s like tooth plaque – somewhat undesirable but we all have it. When you beat yourself up for having that chocolate cake that sabotages your diet, what happens? You feel guilty, and then go for that second piece of chocolate cake. So fighting resistance creates more resistance.

2. Re-Evaluate Your Goals.

Take a step back. If you are losing steam on a goal you have, ask yourself a series of questions: “How important is this goal really to me?” “Why is this goal important to me?” “How does this goal inspire me?” “Is this a goal that I really WANT to achieve or something that I think I SHOULD achieve?” “SHOULD” goals are usually driven by external expectations rather than internal motivations. One great way to distinguish this is to take a deep breath, close your eyes and feel into the goal. Does it make you feel excited or is there a feeling of dread or confusion? If the answer to that question is the latter, you may want to determine if the goal is truly authentic. Finding a way to connect the goal to something that is intrinsically important to you will create more energy to overcome the resistance. It’s hard to achieve a goal we truly don’t want.

3. Use Resistance to Look Inside.

Resistance is a great tool for us to increase our self-awareness, which will eventually get us to a more effective way to meeting our goals. Once we’ve determined that a goal is important we look inside to determine what are the beliefs or habits that are causing us to undermine our goals. For example, I know a leader who is an extremely talented individual. Her goal is to get to the next level but she feels uncomfortable asking others for help or promoting her own work. She will need to do both of these in order to get to the next level. She has a belief system that in order to “earn her promotion” she has to get there on her own and anything less would be “unfair.” Examining our resistance without any judgment or blaming ourselves allows us to become aware of limiting beliefs, and to work with these limiting beliefs and reframe them.

4. Use Your Strengths and Energizers.

Each of us brings great and unique strengths to our goals. We are often unaware of our signature strengths or don’t proactively use them in meeting our goals. Utilizing our strengths also brings us great joy in accomplishing our tasks and creates positive energy. When we are fully energized, that energy is contagious and makes us more optimistic and able to overcome barriers and habits that don’t serve us. Use the resources here to determine your signature strengths and energizers.

5. Take Baby Steps & Focus on Positive Progress.

When you initially face a goal that is daunting, breaking it up into baby steps can make it easier. You may have limiting beliefs about your ability to accomplish a goal. Worse, you may have even failed at that goal before. Breaking it down into baby steps you KNOW you can accomplish creates positive energy and momentum. For example, your goal is to get more mentors at work and you are terrified of asking someone to mentor you. Start by just making a list of people and reward yourself for doing that. Then ask one of these people to lunch. That’s all. Then reward yourself for doing that. Constantly ask yourself “What is working well in meeting this goal?” When we focus on the negative, we beat ourselves up. When we focus on the positive it creates tremendous energy.

I hope you can use these five strategies to help you meet your goals and I wish you much success. Do comment and let me know which of these strategies worked for you or if you have any strategies that you’d like to share with others.

Henna Inam is a CEO Coach focused helping women become transformational leaders. A Wharton MBA, and former C-Suite executive with Novartis and P&G, her passion is to engage, empower, and energize women leaders to transform themselves and their businesses. Sign up for her blog at www.transformleaders.tv.

Does this situation sound familiar? You have worked hard to climb the corporate ladder. You’ve had to burn the candle on both ends to get there. When you get to the corner office or the next rung in the ladder, after the initial euphoria of meeting your goal wears off, the grind remains. The rewards can seem a bit empty relative to the sacrifices made and the energy expended to get there. At various points in your career it is easy to burn-out. Or you decide to opt out by physically leaving or disengaging. According to a Gallup survey, 71% of US employees are disengaged. Your disengagement is not just linked to your productivity but also your health and wellbeing.

It’s easy for us to disengage either by leaving our work or leaving our full passionate selves at the door when we enter our workplaces. We ask ourselves, “Is the effort worth it to continue to climb the corporate stair master?” The answer to the latter question is very personal. However, one thing is pretty clear. As women leaders, our passion for what we do is a big part of our success and fulfillment, as well as our power. So how do we reignite that passion when it’s beginning to fade?

Here are five steps to reignite the passion and fall in love again with what you do. Remember the five P’s to reigniting the passion in your work.

1. Peak Experiences.

Get a journal and start to write about the jobs or experiences in your career that you absolutely loved or aspects of your current job that put a spring in your step. Look for the common themes. For me it was always situations where I had opportunities to coach and mentor my team, challenging and entrepreneurial assignments, and my time spent with my customers understanding how we could make their business better. What is it for you?

2. Personal Brand

A big part of our engagement in our jobs is whether we have the ability to fully express our talents and strengths in the job and connect the impact we are making to what is personally important to us. Take the time to articulate your personal brand. Reflect upon your purpose, strengths and core values. Here is a great talk by Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsi about the importance of connecting with our purpose. The peak experiences exercise will help you articulate your personal brand by helping you identify not just how you create value in your job but also what brings you great joy.

3. Position Alignment

Connect the position or job assignment you are in proactively to your articulation of your personal brand. How can you bring more of your personal brand to be successful and fulfilled in your work? One of Gallup’s 12 statements they use to measure employee engagement deals directly with this topic. The statement is “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.” Do you fully capitalize on this opportunity? If your work is not fully aligned with your personal brand, find ways to transition into work that is more congruent.

4. People

This is one of the most important areas of reigniting your passion and engagement. Several of the 12 Gallup statements have to do with whether your direct supervisor and others around you recognize your contributions, encourage your development, care about you as a person, and whether there is a “best friend” you have at work. Ask yourself, who are the people that I work with and know who fulfill these roles for me and who I fulfill these roles for. Proactively seek out mentors and sponsors and play that role for others. Relationships are an important part of our fulfillment and engagement at work.

5. Past-times.

Find time for what energizes you. When you are fully energized you are better able to be engaged and engage others. Do the Energy Audit to see how energized you are. The energy that you generate from pursuing personal passions is contagious to what you bring to work. It lifts your spirits and it is essential for engaging, motivating and leading people around you.

I wish you great luck in re-igniting your own fire as it is an essential ingredient for your success, fulfillment and personal power. Do comment and let me know how you are utilizing these five P’s to bring more of your passion to your work and to your life.

Henna Inam is a CEO Coach focused helping women become transformational leaders. A Wharton MBA, and former C-Suite executive with Novartis and P&G, her passion is to engage, empower, and energize women leaders to transform themselves and their businesses. Sign up for her blog at www.transformleaders.tv.

I was worried after my most recent coaching session with “Rina.” We had been prepping for her performance review as a top-level financial advisor, and I didn’t have much time to make a few key points. Rina was talking about her hard work and hurt feelings rather than about her accomplishments and comparative salaries, so in order to shock her into a productive mindset, I chose to use some untempered bluntness. Afterward I wondered, had I been a tad too blunt?

And then I received this update from Rina:

“Hi Ann,

Just a quick note to let you know I had my review. It went very, very well. I am happy. My salary has been increased 11%, which is substantially above the stated 7.5% cap for the firm.

I spent a good amount of time preparing for the conversation, thanks to our talk together. You helped me get clear about what my goal was going into the meeting. I had a little speech written out for myself and rehearsed it well. I was ready with all sorts of numbers and facts on the firm’s growth and how I didn’t get to participate in it last year, although I had strongly contributed to it. I didn’t find real comparative numbers, but I did have relative internal numbers that I could have used, if necessary.

Also, importantly, I managed to have a relaxed and interesting conversation with my CEO. I was worried I was going to let myself babble uncontrollably. Instead, I forced myself to stop at the end of each point.

I came out of the review with much more confidence in my career strategy. We explicitly talked about the fact that I am involved in so many different initiatives and whether this might be perceived as a lack of focus. He reassured me that this “portfolio attitude” was actually the right way to go at this time of high uncertainty and volatility.

Tonight is the office Christmas party, and I am now ready to really celebrate. Thank you again so much!”

The only reason I went for the blunt tool was that I knew Rina to be a really smart cookie and a quick study, to boot. She doesn’t get stuck in ego, and she is serious about her career. Let me break down the tools and techniques she used to get that 11% pay bump, so you can go get your own raise!

1. Walk into the performance review with a clear goal.

As with any meeting, you share responsibility for driving the outcomes. What do you want to get out of the review? Literally, what do you want to walk away with? It might be a raise, which was Rina’s goal. It might be a cross-functional training opportunity. It might be P&L experience. It might be leadership development. Don’t squander this rare opportunity to focus your boss on how you see your performance, your value, and your future. Then suggest how she can help make it happen.

2. Document your case.

A performance review is no place for feelings (i.e., what I “deserve”). Feelings, however strong, do not argue for the quality and merit of your performance. Facts and figures, on the other hand, do make for a convincing argument. It was a challenge for Rina to find industry numbers, but she came up with internal figures she could use. Research has shown that, in workplaces where career advancement is left to subjective criteria, women are consistently disadvantaged. So make your language as objective as possible. Organize all the information you have been gathering throughout the year (you’ve been doing that, right?) to demonstrate your accomplishments in terms of what is important to your organization. Not what you think is important, but what you know is valued and rewarded by your organization. You’ll want to provide documentation in two categories, depending on your goal: 1) your contributions to the company, and 2) comparable salaries.

3. Rehearse.

A performance review is an inherently nerve-wracking situation, even for the seasoned exec. But what the seasoned exec knows is how to look cool, calm, and collected. That comes from practice. Rina knew from experience that her boss is quiet and awkward in one-on-ones, so she practiced how to deal with what was, for her, an uncomfortable interpersonal situation. So she did two things to prepare. First, she rehearsed saying out loud what she wanted. It gets easier and more natural every time you say it out loud, even if it’s to the mirror when you’re getting ready in the morning. Second, she trained herself to restrain from rushing in to fill up the blank spots in the conversation. Make your point, take a breath, and give your boss the time and space to respond. (BTW, speaking strategically is a great power tool in any situation.)

4. Ask for feedback.

Women tend not to get plentiful or comprehensive feedback. And that’s a significant impediment to advancement. The performance review is your ideal venue to get your boss’s feedback in as much specificity as depth as you desire. If the feedback is too vague to be useful, then ask clarifying questions. Ask for examples. Ask for more. One exec I know sat down with her boss and asked him point-blank to do a side-by-side comparison between her and each of her colleagues! She was not going to get left behind because she didn’t know where she stood in the pack. For Rina, getting explicit feedback on her “portfolio attitude” permits her to stop second-guessing its strategic value.

Give it a try. Turn your annual performance review from a necessary evil into a secret weapon. You have nothing to lose, and 11% to gain—at least, Rina did.

(Do you have a career question you’d like Dr. Daly to answer? Email her with your question.)

Ann Daly PhD (anndaly.com) is an executive coach, consultant, and speaker devoted to the success and advancement of women. She is the award-winning author of six books, including Clarity: How to Accomplish What Matters Most and Do-Over! How Women Are Reinventing Their Lives. For more career development advice, sign up for her free eletter.

It’s the end of the year. You’re scrambling to make the numbers, completing performance reviews for your people, finalizing business reviews so plans for next year can be fine-tuned. Sound familiar? For each of the last 20 years of my corporate career, as each year drew toward a close it was a mad scramble to year end. This year as an entrepreneur, I followed some of the familiar steps.  Then I had a bit of an epiphany. I was leaving out perhaps one of the most important measures of my future success and fulfillment – how did I do as a leader this year?

So this year I am planning to give myself the gift of reflection during the week between the Christmas and New Year. I hope that each of us takes some quiet time, a journal, and the inspiration to do a “Personal Leadership Review”. Most leadership is fairly unconscious, based on habits and behavior patterns we’ve learned over time.  A “Personal Leadership Review” helps us become more conscious of ourselves as leaders and over time we can choose to adopt leadership practices that will help us grow as leaders. According to Emotional Intelligence 2.0, the traits of knowing and managing ourselves and knowing and managing others are highly correlated with our success and fulfillment. On average, those who score higher on Emotional Intelligence earn $34,000 more that those who don’t.

Here are some questions I am planning to ask myself during my “Personal Leadership Review.” What will you ask yourself?

How Did I Lead Myself?

A big aspect of growth as a leader is in self-awareness of our strengths, our energizers, and our potential derailers. Here are some questions I am planning to ask myself.

1. What did I learn about my leadership strengths? Were there any new strengths that I discovered?
2. How well did I leverage my leadership strengths?
3. What were the peak experiences this year where I found both success and fulfillment? What were some common themes among these peak experiences?
4. How well did I take care of my personal energy? What have I discovered about my personal energizers? What demotivates or de-energizes me and what can I do about that?
5. What were some areas where I did not meet my objectives? What would I do differently in order to have greater success in the future?
6. How much did I get myself out of my comfort zone this year? In what areas did I grow this year?
7. How well did I integrate my personal and professional priorities? What needs to be put in greater focus?
8. Who are the people I can count on to give me honest feedback?

How Did I Lead Others?

I remember one of my biggest surprises was discovering what people truly remember about my impact in one of my corporate assignments. When I was running our company’s business in Mexico, we experienced great share gains, significant increases in innovation, and very good improvements in profit – the stuff great resumes are made of. Yet, what I hear from the people in the business – those who still keep in touch with me five years later – is more about the impact I had on the culture. What people remember is how a leader makes them feel. What they remember is the kind of environment for success the leader creates.

So here are some questions for reflection:

1. What do my direct reports, superiors and peers believe about my impact on them?
2. How well do I recognize and leverage the strengths of people on my team?
3. How clearly am I communicating and engaging others in the vision/strategy?
4. How engaged is my direct report team and the team under them?
5. What did I do well in engaging others, what can I improve?
6. What is the culture I am creating through my actions? Culture is simply the behavior we exhibit as leaders, not something we put on a fancy power point presentation.
7. How do I leave people feeling when I meet with them? I had a boss who used to say that the mark of a good leader is not how people feel about the leader after they meet with them, but how the leader leaves them feeling about themselves.
8. Who are the people that I mentored and sponsored this year? How well did I do as a mentor or sponsor to them? How well are they succeeding?

I hope these questions provide some starting food for thought for your own “Personal Leadership Review”. Do comment and share some of the questions you chose to ask yourself. Was this a helpful exercise for you? What did you discover?

Henna Inam is a CEO Coach focused helping women become transformational leaders. A Wharton MBA, and former C-Suite executive with Novartis and P&G, her passion is to engage, empower, and energize women leaders to transform themselves and their businesses. Sign up for her blog at www.transformleaders.tv.

I had a client recently share with me her desire to be a more inspirational leader in her organization. I asked her why this was important to her. She said she wanted to have greater impact and greater engagement within her teams. Shoulders slumped, she quickly confessed she was not really sure how to do that. What would you do to be a more inspiring leader?

Most people believe they can be more inspirational by watching others who are inspirational and then doing what they do. There are certainly lots of books and tapes we can buy to read about how we can be inspirational leaders. Earlier in my career, I enviously observed my boss’s boss. He was a large man with a commanding presence – at least 6ft 2 inches, 230+ pounds. One time I saw him palpably excite a roomful of 400+ people with his booming voice and speech, ending in a standing ovation. But here’s the problem. I am 5ft 2 on a good day and hard as I try, the booming voice is hard to emulate.

So, here’s what I have learned on my journey to be more inspirational as a leader. The most important first step in being an inspirational leader is being INSPIRED ourselves. So the right question to ask is not who we need to emulate and how we become an inspirational leader. The right question to ask ourselves is WHAT INSPIRES US?

Critical Inspiration

Research on neuroscience is proving why being inspired is critical to being inspirational. Our human brains have evolved over millions of years. According to research quoted in a book “The General Theory of Love,” simply stated, our brain consists of three different evolutions. The original reptilian brain has a critical function. It keeps us alive. It keeps our heart beating and organs functioning. The second evolution of our brain is our mammalian brain called the limbic brain. It’s the seat of our way of relating to each other, of reading each other, and our emotional center. It is what allows us to nurture each other, to communicate, to love, to crave friendships. The third part of our brain is our neocortex. It is what allows for reasoning, for playing “what if”, for planning.

Recent research into our brains shows that our limbic brain is where we make many of our decisions (unlike what we tend to think, i.e. decisions are made in our “rational” neocortex brain). Our limbic brain is also the place where we communicate with each other at a very subconscious level. In fact 93% of our communication is derived from signals other than words we speak. There is a process called “limbic resonance” that happens, where human beings read each other, the others’ motivations and feelings, and then adjust their own to match the person they are relating with. So if I am walking in with a friendly attitude toward a colleague, the chances are they will match their attitude to mine. On the negative side limbic resonance is what leads otherwise rational human beings to develop mob mentality.

What does all this have to do with being an inspiring leader? The more inspired we are, the more our limbic brains will communicate that inspiration to others at a very deep and subconscious level. Here’s a quick exercise to prove this point. Pick your favorite inspirational leader. Now ask yourself, were they inspired themselves? Did they have a message that they were so convinced of, they could not help but convince you about it? Some of my favorite inspirational leaders are Jimmy Carter who inspires by his message of peace. Or Martin Luther King, Jr., who had a dream he was inspired by. Or Mother Theresa, who was inspired by what she saw as her clear mission in life.

So we come back to the questions about how we can be more inspirational. Here are 3 questions to ask ourselves and how they can be important in us being more inspired and inspirational leaders.

1. What inspires me? The answer to this may not be easy. It requires some space from our daily frenzied lifestyles to consider and to listen to our inner voices. The voice is there, trust me, it just requires some quiet time. The paradox is that sometimes the answers come when we are least focused on the question. The answers may not be earth shattering, like world peace or ending world hunger. They may be small. The important thing is that they must inspire us. For instance, one of the many things I am inspired by is my Zumba classes.

Now you’re probably lifting one eyebrow and asking yourself, “And how does that make you a more inspirational leader”? My Zumba classes give me vast reserves of happy, fun, self-confident energy and that energy makes me more creative, more joyful and more connected to others… and of course it helps me be more inspired. For some of my friends, their inspiration is their garden or cooking gourmet meals or working on their spiritual growth.

2. How can I integrate more of what inspires me into my life? This includes our work lives and our personal lives. I have a client who is Chinese American and is deeply inspired by helping others. In particular, she chooses to get involved in a lot of Chinese American community and business activities. It gives her energy, and she is also able to develop her law practice in this area where she is not only an expert but also deeply inspired.

3. How can I discover what others around me are truly inspired by? Connecting with others and truly and deeply listening to them allows us to be more inspired and inspirational. At our deepest level, human beings have a need to connect. If you have a limbic brain (and I am taking a pretty good guess that you do), you have a desire to connect with others. You may not have actively nurtured this but it exists. When we connect our inspiration with those of others around us, it allows us to be more inspired and inspirational as leaders.

I would love to hear your comments about what inspires you and how you plan to integrate more of this into your work and personal lives. I wish you good luck and great inspiration in your journey.

Henna Inam is a CEO Coach focused helping women become transformational leaders. A Wharton MBA, and former C-Suite executive with Novartis and P&G, her passion is to engage, empower, and energize women leaders to transform themselves and their businesses. Sign up for her blog at www.transformleaders.tv.

Back to school!

It’s a rallying cry we usually associate with kids’ backpacks and notebooks, but don’t forget about mom. More and more, working women are heading back to school to upgrade their skillsets and resumes with an advanced degree.

In fact, this fall a record number of women will be entering two of the country’s top MBA programs–the Harvard Business School and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Women will make up 39% of Harvard’s class of 2013, and at Wharton, women will represent 45% of the incoming class.

Those happy numbers are the result of national efforts by groups such as the Forté Foundation, a consortium that advocates the MBA as a career-advancement and leadership-development strategy for women.

That said, a concurrent MBA – attending classes while keeping your job – isn’t for everyone. “If you’re looking for career advancement within your current company or within the same industry, the part-time/executive route is a good option,” advises Elissa Sangster, Forté’s executive director. “But if you are looking to change your career or industry, I highly recommend taking the full-time route.”

The pay-off for a concurrent MBA is big. “You get your education while continuing your career progression and drawing a salary.”

But there’s also a downside, Sangster adds: “Your life will be very complicated.”

So, how to minimize those complications? Here’s what Sangster recommends:

1. Explain why.
Learn how to communicate to supporters and skeptics alike exactly why it’s important for you to get your MBA. Repeat that message as often and as patiently as necessary.

2. Decide what is a necessity and what is expendable.
For example: Does the house need to be spotless? Do you need to volunteer as chair of the annual fundraiser for the third year in a row?

3. Build your support system.
For those activities that make the cut, how will you outsource or supplement them? Who will do them, when, and how? Put processes and structures into place ahead of time.

4. Get buy-in from your boss.
Make sure you have the full support of your boss, which means that s/he is willing to give you the necessary accommodations.

5. Be upfront with your co-workers.
Your co-workers might not always be supportive – especially if your performance is impacted. Be upfront about expectations, and be careful not to over-promise. Meet all your deadlines.

6. Just do it!
Don’t let demands from family and friends end up being an excuse for why you can’t go back to school. If this is your passion, then make it happen. Figure out what you need and then tell everyone what you need. Family and true friends will rally behind you to see you succeed!

7. Take advantage of Forte’s online resources.
The Forte website is filled with women who can provide you with inspiration and webinars that can provide you with more tips and strategies.

And if you’re still on the fence about enrolling for your MBA, learn more at a Forté Forum, a series of live events being held across the country this month. You’ll find out how an MBA can help you can find your passion, open doors, and present opportunities you never knew existed. Click here for the Forté Forum schedule.

(Do you have a career question you’d like Dr. Daly to answer? Email her with your question.)

Ann Daly PhD (anndaly.com) is an executive coach, consultant, and speaker devoted to the success and advancement of women. She is the award-winning author of six books, including Clarity: How to Accomplish What Matters Most and Do-Over! How Women Are Reinventing Their Lives. For more career development advice, sign up for her free eletter.

The stock market is a roller coaster. You find out you’re not going to hit the numbers for the quarter. More people you know are out of jobs. Congress can’t seem to agree on what they want for breakfast, let alone decide how to run the country. The global markets are in chaos. Your boss just gave you another impossible deadline. Plus, your kid’s on the other line asking where you are. You’re a half hour late to pick them up from soccer practice. We know this is not your life, but perhaps a friend you know? What to do?

Here are five leadership practices that transformational leaders do to manage in chaos.

Five Leadership Practices

1. Take a deep breath. And since we’re over-achievers, let’s take three. Taking deep breaths allows the emotional center in our brains to calm down while enabling the rational center to take over.

Our runaway emotions, once they take over, have the ability to create a downward spiral. It goes something like this. The stock market just fell. Now I may not be able to retire until I’m 100, that is, if my company still wants me around. If we keep missing our numbers I’m out of a job, and then I’ll be out on the street. I’ll have no money to feed my family and I’ll lose all my friends. Does this sound familiar?

Taking that deep breath allows us to calm ourselves so we regain perspective. Anxiety turns off the creativity in our brains and actually shuts off the very ability we need to come up with solutions to challenges we are facing.

2. Reframe. This is a key leadership practice in times of crisis. Even under relatively “normal” circumstances, our brains, unmanaged, create crisis situations. That is where we come in to assert our power of choice. We always have the choice to redirect our thinking. Here’s what that looks like. “Ok, so the stock market just fell. My portfolio took a hit. But here’s the good news. I’ve still got a job. We’ve got a gap on the numbers but last quarter I was able to close the gap.” When all else fails, remind yourself that your dog still loves you! You can channel your inner cheer leader by asking yourself the following questions:

• What’s working well?
• What is within my control? What’s outside?
• What are the strengths that I bring to the challenge that is in front of me?

Reframing is a key leadership practice in learning how to be resilient when faced with failure. Yes, resilience can be learned. You can see how resilient you are and practice resilience techniques here. Look for resiliency in action.

3. Enroll Others. Under crisis mode we often tend to look for someone to blame, ourselves or others. Now that your inner cheerleader is back in charge, it’s important to determine the impact of any crisis on those around you and start to ensure that you understand their perspective, their needs, and if necessary, refocus them back on what’s really important. As leaders, our energy is enormously contagious and we infect others with that energy. If a crisis is prolonged, it is even more important to consciously manage your energy. Here are some resources to do that by taking the Energy Audit.

Align with your team. Ask the following questions:

• What is really going on? Get input from various perspectives.
• What are the strengths each team member brings to deal with the situation?
• What is an innovative approach to solving this challenge?
• Who are others that need to be enrolled?

4. Reprioritize. With a more clear perspective and input from your team you can focus with your team on:

• How have your long term or short term objectives changed?
• What is most important to get done now?
• Who do you want to delegate what to?
• What is no longer important to manage and can be deferred to later?

5. Take Action. Crisis can often cause a “fight or flight” reaction. Or it can cause us to freeze. The first four leadership practices allow us to take considered action.

Do you have a story of your really, really bad day and how you handled it that you’d like to share? What are the strategies you use?

Henna Inam is a CEO Coach focused helping women become transformational leaders. A Wharton MBA, and former C-Suite executive with Novartis and P&G, her passion is to engage, empower, and energize women leaders to transform themselves and their businesses. Sign up for her blog at www.transformleaders.tv.

Once upon a time, when managers made implicitly gender-biased judgments about which staff got the pay raises and the promotions, we called a spade a spade: gender discrimination. When Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Betty Dukes et al. was recently heard by the Supreme Court, we gained a new euphemism for structural sexism in the workplace: “excessive subjectivity.”

This phenomenon is no news to most women: When a company fails to establish objective criteria for its managers to decide on pay raises and promotions, then personal, subjective, unexamined biases kick in. And if you’re operating in a male-dominated environment, you can bet that those cultural biases ain’t gonna benefit the women. If the workplace lacks a rational process for making a decision (it’s called a “policy”), then bosses fall back on the most primitive assumptions, including sexist ones.

The result? In the case of Wal-Mart: Women fill 70% of the hourly jobs but make up only 33% of management employees. Women working in the company’s stores are paid less than men in every region, and the salary gap widens over time even for men and women hired into the same jobs at the same time.

Lawyers for the female employees argued that local managers exercise their discretion over pay and promotions disproportionately in favor of men, which has an unlawful disparate impact on female employees, and that Wal-Mart’s refusal to restrain its managers’ authority amounts to disparate treatment.

While the Supreme Court minority opinion, including all three female justices, found that excessive subjectivity was sufficient grounds to proceed with the class action suit, the majority did not. For reasons both technical and ideological, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s opinion that the women of Wal-Mart constitute a legitimate class with a common complaint. Women employees at Wal-Mart can move forward with gender discrimination suits, but on a smaller scale rather than as a single class.

As you can imagine, women’s advocates are dissatisfied with this diminished legal protection against gender discrimination in the workplace.

But not to despair! If you find yourself facing the invisible hand of excessive subjectivity, you are far from powerless.

Remember “subliminal advertising”? Take a page from that playbook and launch a subliminal counter-campaign of your own. Here are four simple, on-the-ground tactics to protect yourself from excessive subjectivity. These tactics will enable you to transform it into an objective framework for conversation, evaluation, and decision-making:

1. Ask, “What’s the policy?” Or, “What are the criteria?” By asking this neutral question in a neutral tone of voice, you send multiple messages without making a direct challenge. First, there should be a policy, or set of criteria. Second, you speak and think in objective business terms. Third, you won’t be willing to accept vague, unsubstantiated, arbitrary decisions about your career advancement.

2. Know your worth. Don’t assume that your boss is keeping track of your achievements. Sad, but true. Make it a habit: at the end of every quarter, document your accomplishments in concrete, measureable terms that matter to your boss and to your organization. Use this exercise as a way to figure out the best metrics for your job, and use these documents to prepare a killer annual report. Be prepared to casually communicate these objective metrics whenever your boss veers into la-la-land.

3. Keep score. Career advancement isn’t just about your performance. You are also in competition with the performance of your colleagues. So make sure that you keep a private written record of who gets what raise or promotion based on what track record. If push comes to shove, you’ll have a set of objective “comparables” to strengthen your own case for advancement.

4. If you want it, say so. Nature hates a vacuum, and so does your boss. If s/he doesn’t know what you want, s/he will make it up. And thus creep in all those regressive fantasies about what women want—or don’t want. So speak up! If you want an overseas appointment, say so. If you want a rotation, say so. If you want more responsibilities, say so. If you want your boss’s job (eventually), say so. This way, you’ll be the one who frames the discourse. Remember: she who sets the terms of the debate usually wins.

Because subjectivity is so resistant to rational argument (even the Supreme Court majority was impervious to reasoning), subliminal intervention is likely your best option, at least initially. What’s mission-critical is to be consistent and persistent with your counter-campaign tactics. Deploy each and every one of them to make a full-court press. You’ll make it near-impossible for your boss to ignore the objective facts of your value. And if s/he tries, you’ll be armed with enough objective data to make the strongest possible case for your advancement.

And, of course, once you become the policy-maker, you can be as direct as you want about creating a level playing field.

(Do you have a career question you’d like Dr. Daly to answer? Email her with your question.)

Ann Daly PhD (anndaly.com) is an executive coach, consultant, and speaker devoted to the success and advancement of women. She is the award-winning author of six books, including Clarity: How to Accomplish What Matters Most and Do-Over! How Women Are Reinventing Their Lives. For more career development advice, sign up for her free eletter.

If you want to be a better golfer what do you do? Practice. How about if you want to be a better musician? Practice. If you want to be a better leader, what do you do? You get the picture. So what’s your daily leadership practice?

To improve our leadership, we read leadership books, attend seminars, observe famous leaders, even look at our bosses and swear we will never be like them. But do we have a conscious leadership discipline that we practice every day? Based on my observations (including exhaustive research on myself), most leadership is fairly unconscious, so here are three tips to come up with your very own leadership practice.

What’s A Leadership Practice?

It is a leadership behavior or behaviors that you choose to practice consciously every day. Here are several criteria for an effective leadership practice.

1) Keep it Simple. Limit your leadership practice to 2-3 behaviors and no more so that they are simple, easy to remember, and easy to put into action.
2) Make it Stretchy. Make sure you have one leadership practice that you work on that stretches you outside your comfort zone, that helps you grow.
3) Make it Fun. Find a leadership practice you love to do that brings you energy and joy and then make sure you practice it every day.

What’s the Right Leadership Practice for Me?

There’s not a one size fits all leadership practice. What’s right for you may be very different for what’s right for someone else. Here are four simple questions for picking a leadership practice for yourself. They require some reflection and self-awareness to answer. My recommendation is to pick 2-3 practices and definitely pick one that stretches you outside of your comfort zone.

1) What is a behavior that helps me express my strengths? Practicing a behavior that reflects a strength is important because your greatest strengths help you be most successful. To discover your true strengths, read more here. For example, one of my strengths is seeing connections. When meeting people, I can see how a person can benefit from knowing another person, so a natural leadership practice for me is to make connections for people that they can mutually benefit from.

2) What one change in behavior will help me accelerate my impact or meet my goals? I was recently coaching a Senior Executive who has strong strategic thinking skills and drive, but has a hard time enrolling others to follow. The feedback from peers and direct reports is consistently that this person is so focused on their agenda that they do not listen. A simple leadership discipline this person chose was to practice active listening and ask at the end of each one, “Did you feel heard?”

3) What core value is most important to me and what behavior demonstrates this core value? I recently met with a senior leader and although the meeting was a short half hour, the impact was strong. I felt tremendously energized from the conversation and asked this woman if she had a leadership practice. She said her leadership practice was to be present with people so they felt more comfortable in their own skin after they met with her. So reflect on your own core values (for more on this read here).

4) What is one behavior that always motivates or energizes me? We underestimate the importance of motivating ourselves and keeping our personal energy up. Staying personally energized is a huge foundation of our leadership. So pick a leadership behavior that you know always lifts you up and practice it every day. It is very hard to lead others if you are depleted yourself.

One that I love and employed at one point in my career was to at least thank one person a day for a job well done or a strength that I observed in them. It always made me feel good and it engaged others more deeply in the organization and in their own contribution.

How Do I Stay On Track

You know yourself, so pick a way to motivate yourself to stay on track. Here are three ways to stick to your leadership practice.

1) Keep Score. It’s the Weight Watchers Points method, except more points are better. Calculate each day how many times you took the opportunity to practice your leadership practice.
2) Make it Public. Let your friends and colleagues know your leadership practices so they can give you feedback, hold you accountable, or publicly shame you (this works often with teen kids).
3) Keep Reminders. On your desk, in your to-do list, in your car as you go to work. Make up a mantra that you repeat to yourself before heading into meetings. You get the idea.

By the way, I have three leadership practices I am working on these days. Here’s your opportunity to hold me accountable. First is to always assume positive intent from others no matter what their actions or behaviors, especially when I have to have tough conversations (which I historically tend to avoid). This is my stretch area. The second is to always ask “How can I help you?” when meeting with others and to take notes on this to follow through. The third is to remind myself of three things I am grateful for every morning and journal about them. These leadership practices help me create all kinds of great opportunities for my company and build toward great relationships with others. They make me a happier, more energized person too!

Just like music class or golf, don’t move to a new leadership practice until you’ve nailed one already. Research says it takes 21 days of repetition for a behavior to become habit so keep up your practice. Your brain takes 3,000+ thoughts to rewire its natural instincts so keep up your practice.

Do let me know how this worked for you and what you’ve chosen as your leadership practices.

Henna Inam is a CEO Coach focused helping women become transformational leaders. A Wharton MBA, and former C-Suite executive with Novartis and P&G, her passion is to engage, empower, and energize women leaders to transform themselves and their businesses. Sign up for her blog at www.transformleaders.tv.