AMA Workshop on Women and Competition
Fifty women managers gathered at AMA’s Executive Conference Center in New York City on July 10 to learn how they can use collaborative yet competition strategies to break through the glass ceiling and assume leadership positions in corporate America. The interactive, half-day workshop entitled “Getting to the Corner Office: How Women Can Compete,” included an overview of recent research on women and leadership, a discussion of collaborative vs. competitive behavior and an exercise designed to help determine one’s natural management style.
Kathryn C. Mayer, a leadership development consultant, and Lindy Amos, a facilitator from The Actor’s Institute, led the workshop. Ms. Mayer, a former ranked amateur tennis player, drew on her experience as a sports competitor to offer strategies for women who compete in the business arena. She explained, “The same lessons I learned playing tennis can be directly applied to the business world. When I was very young, I just loved to play the game. Then when one of my friends beat me, I became uncomfortable. I didn’t want to play against my friends any more.” The problem, says Mayer, is that women aren’t taught how to be comfortable with competition. They see competitiveness as a negative trait and fear that if they dare to compete, they’ll be seen as “cutthroat.”
Mayer urged her audience to embrace, rather than fear, competition, telling them, “Becoming a leader means that you need to learn from those who are a level or two above you. With those insights, you better understand what is needed from you. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to compete against your peers for the next rung on the ladder. Competition in its truest essence is about a rivalry. The goal is to try to equal or excel your competitor. My definition of competition focuses on how to use competition to bring out the best in you.”
Mayer’s advice for women leaders is that they combine the traits of a collaborator with those of a competitor to become a “collaborative competitor.” The action steps in this process include:
- Assess individual skills, including the technical, business and people aspects of the current position and the next position above.
- Identify your management style—Initiator/Aggressor, Thinker/Planner, Good Girl/Diplomat or Investigator/Observer of Trends.
- Seek out mentors to provide feedback and advice.
- Set goals to bring out the best of your strengths and challenge your weaknesses.
- Spend at least 5% of your time on career-building activities such as networking and strategic thinking before meetings.
- Secure assignments that are both valued by the organization as career enhancing and move you towards your goals.
- Seek out opportunities to take smart risks where you think you will be successful to build leadership presence/skills.
- Evaluate your progress on a regular basis with your mentor.
- Enjoy the competitive process.
The workshop culminated with a panel of three high-level corporate women--Joyce Erony, Managing Director, Citigroup; Sandra Smith, Corporate Human Resources, Verizon, and Amy Titus, head of Staffing, Development and Diversity, Citigroup International. The women shared their personal experiences in dealing with competition throughout their careers. Their war stories helped audience members see how they can be in the game without losing their self in the process. By observing these successful women, the audience learned how not to personalize winning and losing and how to be comfortable with personal power.
Each workshop participant left the event with an action plan in which she identified a challenging goal in her professional life and devised a strategy for dealing with that challenge. Each individual was paired with another and will check in to report on their progress in the next month.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, consider these AMA seminars: