How to reach your smart goals

Remember last New Year’s Eve? Probably you were out partying and enjoyed ringing in the New Year with your friends.

But do you also remember your New Year’s Resolutions? Doing more sports, getting organized, quitting smoking, or eating healthier was probably on your list. And with utmost probability, one or several of these resolutions have been on your list before. So why is it so hard to actually reach our goals and do more sports, get organized, quit smoking, or eat healthier?

Research by Dr. Locke has shown that goals are often not reached because they are not specific enough. If a goal is too general, it does not function as a powerful motivator and you are more likely not to reach it.

Setting smart goals

In order to influence yourself and to increase your motivation, every goal should be clear and challenging. By following the SMART-principle, any goal can easily be converted into something more specific and motivating.

SMART is for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Applied to a specific idea like getting organized this would mean:

-Specific: What exactly do you want to organize? Your laptop, your receipts, your apartment? Specify as much as possible!

-Measurable: Define at what point you consider your goal completed, for example when all the stuff in your apartment has been organized into boxes and drawers.

-Attainable: Are you actually capable of reaching your goal? Set goals that are challenging, but still attainable.

-Relevant: If something is irrelevant to you, you will not be motivated to work for it. So tweak your goals in a way that clearly reveals your personal benefit from reaching the goal.

-Time-bound: Always set up a deadline for your goals, for example to organize all the files on your laptop by next Friday.

The importance of goal-setting

Why is this type of goal-setting important for ambitious women (and of course, ambitious men)? If you want to have a successful career, you will constantly have to improve your work, continue learning and developing new skills. This does not happen over night and it will demand time and persistence. However, by setting goals that follow the SMART principle, you can easily keep track of what you are working on and how well you are doing. Consequently, you will be less likely to just give up on your plans.

So why not think about three goals you’ve been trying to reach for a while and define them according to the SMART principle right now?

Carolin

A New Perspective on Equality

In many of our previous articles we wrote about gender equality as a fundamental prerequisite to increase the number of women in male-dominated industries and in C-suites throughout the business world. Equality. Such a promising – and, at the same time, mystified word. Today, I got to thinking about the term. What do we actually mean by it, especially in the context of business? 

Quantitative and Qualitative Aspects
I started asking myself what equality really means while I was writing my Bachelor’s thesis on (you guessed it) a gender and business topic. I was reading a journal article about gendered social entrepreneurship elaborating quantitative and qualitative aspects of gender equality.
Here’s the scoop: quantitative aspects comprise an equal distribution of women and men in all areas of society, like education, work, and positions of power. On the other hand, qualitative aspects imply that knowledge, experience, and values of both women and men are granted equal weight and are used to enrich and direct all areas of society.

Theory of Equality in the Business World
That all sounds pretty theoretical. So let me break this down to the practical business world. We need quantitative equality in all businesses, in all industries. We already know that the current situation is pretty bleak. Less than 5% of women hold the top job at Fortune 500 companies in the US, and hold less than 15% of executive officer positions at these companies. We also need qualitative equality in firms so that on-the-job experience of women is valued equally to that of men. There should be a shift in values, especially in those businesses and industries dominated by males. Think of cutthroat venture capitalist investors, or massive oil companies. Remember the blowout of BP’s drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010? Men typically lead these types of companies, often with traditional male values such as self-interest and sole profit orientation. 

The Potential of True Equality  
If we think about gender equality under these circumstances, beyond quantitative equality, this provides a whole new dimension to equality. To me, it is also a paradigm change in the ways in which companies operate and people view the purpose of their jobs. 

Annamarie

You can(not) have it all

In today’s world, many young women grow up believing that they can have it all. We attend university, study abroad, and do exciting internships. Once we start our first jobs, many of us dream of a successful career. At the same time we think about getting married and starting a family one day. This is pretty much the image of “having it all” for most of us: being able to fulfill our personal and professional goals.

This combination is something most ambitious young women think about. They wonder how it will all work out. I definitely do not know the answer to this question but I do know for sure that it will sometimes be a struggle if you want to have it all. However, with companies and politicians trying to improve the conditions for working women and mothers, I tried to believe that things will probably work out once I am in that particular situation. And before this will happen, I do not have to think through all the details as I wrote here.

But then I read an interview with PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi in the Atlantic and she said the exact opposite of what many women (young and old) believe in: she can’t have it all. I was surprised! This woman is the CEO of a huge international company, she has been married for years, she has two daughters and she is ranked number 13 on Forbes’ Power Women’s list! So why would this woman say she can’t have it all? In the interview, Mrs. Nooyi said “having it all is just an illusion that comes with painful sacrifices and tradeoffs”. So she has it all, but at the same time she feels guilty towards her daughters and her husband for not being able to spend more time with them.

What the PepsiCo CEO said really made me think: if even a woman like her says that women can’t have it all, maybe what we have to do is reframe what we assume to be “all”. If you want to start a successful career, get married and have children you have to compromise. You cannot have 100% of all of these things. Most of us won’t be able to be a full-time stay-at-home mom and at the same time climb the corporate career ladder (well, unless you have Hermione Granger’s time turner…) In my opinion, we should be clear about what we want and how we are going to do it. Not all the details have to be planned, but if you want to have children and work at the same time you probably have to accept that you will see your children less than other moms who only work part-time or stay at home. However, that should be fine with you!

So maybe we really cannot have it all. Instead, I guess we can have all that we want!

Carolin

If you want to read another article about this topic: go and read “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All." by Anne-Marie Slaughter.

Support your Sisters

Have you as a woman ever caught yourself acting in a gender-biased way? You may answer this question with "no", but think again. We are often unconscious of our gender-biased behavior, especially in a business setting when we are doing our best to advance as quickly as possible. 

An exemplary situation for gender bias

Here is a typical situation you may have at work: you are working in a team project with your close colleagues Tom, Mike, and Sarah. One of you is supposed to be selected to be team project leader. Tom is a laid-back guy who gets the job done, but nothing more or less. Mike is an efficient and reliable employee who goes the extra mile for important projects. He can be persuasive and has proven before that he has leadership potential. Sarah is very ambitious, accurate and reliable. In fact, she is so ambitious that sometimes coworkers remarked she was being kind of pushy and annoying. When she was leading teams in the past, team members said she was behaving in a bossy way.

Who would you prefer to lead your project team?

If you answered with "Mike", then you were probably subject to gender bias. It may have seemed to you that, although Sarah and Mike have similar qualifications, she may be less suitable for the job and corresponding responsibilities. You may not like her as much, because you heard she might be a bit bossy or brusque. Mike is more suitable for the job… Right?

No. As we wrote in our last post, don’t let yourself be fooled by double standards. Instead, support your female colleagues and celebrate them for their qualities and capabilities.

Work as a coalition, not as competition 

Stanford Professor Deborah Gruenfeld puts it simply: “We need to look out for one another, work together, and act more like a coalition. As individuals, we have relatively low levels of power. Working together, we are fifty percent of the population and therefore have real power.”

Sadly, it is mostly women who criticize other women at the top. For example, when Marissa Mayer announced that her maternity leave would only be a few weeks long, women spoke out, denouncing her decision. Instead, why didn’t they cheer her on as a talented young business leader and mother who made the situation work out for herself? Wasn’t this a personal decision of Marissa Mayer?

As women, we need to look out for our female peers. We need to support our female colleagues and cheer them on, and grant them the success that they have earned instead of criticizing them where we wouldn’t criticize our male colleagues. Or would you criticize your boss for taking that promotion when his wife was days away from delivering their first child?

I love Taylor Swift’s quote, which I probe women to never forget: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

Annamarie