[MUSIC] Hello, everyone. Welcome to our final session of our Women in Leadership Inspiring Positive Change Course. I'm Diana Bilimoria, KeyBank Professor and Chair of Organizational Behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. Today's session is about purposeful career development for women. Our agenda will be to help you to define your own success and to gain enhanced clarity about career planning and work-life integration issues and we'll wrap up this course by giving an overview of what we've accomplished over the past several sessions. Let me start by a quotation from Marie Catherine Bates's book, Composing a Life. Where she says, life is an improvisational art form and the interruptions, conflicted priorities and exigencies that are a part of all our lives can and should be seen as a source of wisdom. Let me invite you to reflect on, what is your life's wisdom? From where does your wisdom come? Pause for just a moment to take the time to reflect on this magnificent quote and then where does wisdom come for you? The trajectory of women's lives and careers is multiplex. As Ruthellen Josselson said in revising herself, there is no single trajectory of women's lives. Women rebalance and reshape themselves, striving for harmony of the parts, responding to the exigencies of living in society and creating a whole where the pieces best fit. Multiple roles are very beneficial to us, because they provide opportunities for women to succeed and to feel good about themselves and they provide more opportunities for managerial learning as well as significant opportunities for support. Brian Dyson who was the CEO of Coca-Cola Enterprises some years ago devised a game. Please follow this and see if you can reach some conclusions about your own priorities. Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air. You name them, work, family, health, friends and spirit and you're keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls, family, health, friends and spirit are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life. I invite you to undertake the following exercise. It has two parts to it and then a reflection. In the first part, which we will call life role exercises current. Fill in the pie chart below showing the percentage of time that you currently spend on your various life roles, such as work, family, children, spouse/partner, parents, friends, self, community. Literally, divide up the circle as if it were a pie chart by your current spending of time on these various life roles. The second part of this exercise is to do this same pie chart over. This time, looking at the ideal percentage of time that you would like to spend on various life roles, you can use the same life roles as you used in the first part of the exercise in the current and just now fill in what you would like to do in terms of your ideal. Once you've accomplished both of these pie charts, I invite you to reflect. And you may go ahead and pause, so that you take some time to make some notes for yourself about these. What insights emerged from the two pie charts, the real versus the ideal? So the current or the real versus the ideal. What learnings can you transfer from one role to others? So each of those areas in your pie chart, what can you take from one and inform the others? And how can you start moving closer to your ideal allocation of time in various life roles? I'll move us along to the second aspect, which is about success. Particularly for women, there are multi-dimensional definitions encompassing all life spheres and changing over time. Success can be defined both objectively and subjectively. Objectively in terms of material gain. Subjectively in terms of inner satisfaction. Success in career and success in relationships with others are most important for women. My colleague, Dr. Deborah O'Neil, when she was doing her dissertation under my guidance. Interviewed more than 60 women from a variety of professions and organizations and determined that women's definitions of success can include any combination of the following as well as others, such as adding value and contributing and having a positive impact on others. Personal fulfillment and happiness. Meaningful relationships. Recognition, achievement, accomplishment and challenge and financial considerations and material wealth. We invite you know to define your own success by filling in the blanks to me success means. To achieve this success, I need to. As a successful woman, I. Please go ahead and fill in these blanks. Pause the session for now as this exercise will enable you to gain more insight about the priorities and the values of what success means to you to be more effective as a leader in your organization. I'd like to move us on to discussing different phases of women's careers. My colleague Dr. Deborah O'Neill and I did a study that looked at the different careers of women and how they've progressed through age related phases. We call these three phases idealistic achievements. Phase two, pragmatic endurance and phase three, we inventive contribution. I would like to spend a little bit of time going through each phase, and I invite you to see where you are, so that you can inform yourself with regard to the strategies, the locus of control and the key issues that you face in this stage and in the coming stages as well. Phase one, which we defined as idealistic achievement tended to be for women who are in the age range of 24 to 35. These women were proactive and strategic. They carried what was called an internal locus of control. That means they felt in charge of their own career direction. They were achievement oriented and viewed their own careers as opportunities to make a difference and as paths to personal happiness and fulfillment. They faced a future of unlimited possibilities and held the expectation of having a successful career and family. The key issues that we identified as being emblematic of this phase of career development or self-confidence and identity. In phase two, what we call pragmatic endurance. Women tended to be in the ages of 36 years to 45 years. They were juggling multiple professional and personal responsibilities and demands on their time. Often, they were torn between career and life choices. They were impacted by negative managers, non-supportive workplaces and experiences of sex discrimination or sexual harassment. They viewed their careers as an extension of self and defined their success as personal happiness and fulfillment. The interesting part was they did not see their career as the path to get there. For many of the women in this stage, there tended to be a struggle, often between balancing home life and family life on the one hand and work life on the other. The key issues that these women faced were self-esteem and the search for meaning. Women in our study who fell into the third phase of career development, what we called re-inventive contribution tended to be in the ages 46 plus. These women saw themselves as contributing to their organizations, their families and their communities. They have an external locus of control where personal and professional others have impacted their career choices. They've viewed their career as an opportunity to be of leadership and service and they tended towards work that provides opportunities to continue to learn. The key issue that women at this phase faced were recognition, respect, integration and authenticity. I invite you to think about the career development stage that you are in and to reflect on the key issues that you are facing as part of your own development. What are the strategies that continue to use? Where is your locus of control, whether your career locus is internal or external? How you view your career and what are the ways by which you define your career success? Let move us along to the paths of women's lives. I picked this quotation from Marie Catherine Bates In Composing a Life book, because it was so interesting and so evocative of the ways by which women's lives unfold. Let me read it out with you. At times, I pictured myself frantically rummaging through the refrigerator and the kitchen cabinets, convinced that somewhere I would find the odds and ends that could be combined at the last minute to make a meal for unexpected guests, hoping to be rescued by serendipity. A good meal like a poem or a life has a certain balance and diversity, a certain coherence and fit. The improvised meal will be different from the planned meal and certainly riskier, but rich with the possibility of delicious surprise. Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity. Sometimes, a pattern chosen by default can become a path of preference. I offer this quotation to us, so that it gives us insight as well as inspiration. Now the paths that we choose, even though they may be improvised can turn out to be amazingly growthful where we can learn new skills of leadership and of contribution, where it becomes not just a path of default, but a path of preference. I'd like to conclude this session with the following insights. Women can benefit by engaging in purposeful career development. That is by defining own success and finding work-life integration while remaining open to where their life paths and life circumstances take them. Embracing change and the unexpected can take us into areas, that are amazingly growthful. I invite you to complete the homework assignment, which is to complete the Defining Own Success Exercise and completing the Current and Ideal Life Roles exercise and writing a reflection describing your insights from these exercises. At this point, we are at the course closure of our Women in Leadership: Inspiring Positive Change course. The whole goal of this course was to inspire you to bring about change in your life and in your workplace and to lead your organization and your team, your family and your community, so that you could bring about positive outcomes in the world around us. We started with focusing on women's strengths as leaders. We discussed next leadership identity, particularly focusing on your values and vision. In the next couple of sessions, we focus on women's leadership at the top. First, in terms of representation and second, in terms of the barriers and challenges that sometimes face women in their advancement to senior leadership. In the next set of sessions, we focused on leadership tools for women. The first of those sessions was on self-confidence. The second on navigating organizational politics and gaining influence and the third, on negotiating effectively. And then we've closed the course by inviting you to engage in purposeful career development, so that you could be most effective. It's been my pleasure to work with you over the duration of this course and to see how engaged you have been through our discussions and through our chats and through various other mechanism provided through this course. I thank you for your participation and wish you the best for your enhanced leadership and your contributions to the world around us. Thank you. [MUSIC]
