Being your authentic selves boosts your success—and triggers the gender multiplier effect to benefit other women as well.
By Andrea Stevenson Conner
The gender multiplier effect is the idea that when one woman takes a step up, she brings others along with her. You can put the GME into motion by doing something so “simple” as bringing your full self to the table in whatever you do.
I put “simple” in quotes because we women can find being our authentic selves to be daunting in some settings. But doing so will not only boost your success but also multiply the good by inspiring women around you.
I was thinking about these ideas recently when I listened to the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, “What Black Leaders Bring to the Table.” The guest on the show was Chad Sanders, a former tech executive, and entrepreneur and the author of the book, Black Magic: What Black Leaders Learned from Trauma and Triumph.
Early in the podcast, Sanders talks about how jarring it was to him to enter the highly white workplace at Google and trying to be “what the company wanted” rather than who he was: a Black man who grew up and went to college in much more diverse settings.
“You’re trying to make yourself be someone that you’re not,” he says, “and your body and your mind and your spirit can feel the jarring transition between identities every day as you dress yourself up to be someone else, which includes the way that you talk. It includes the way that you dress. But I think with more depth, it includes what you say that you like, what you say that you’re familiar with, your music tastes, your food tastes, the way that you talk about friendships and travel.
“I wrapped my entire identity around, how can I be Google-y?” he continues. “How can I be someone that fits in here, someone that they want to keep around? Because it seemed like that was the key.”
Trying to be “Google-y,” rather than himself, he explains, was a losing game.
“What it worked to do was to make me feel inadequate,” he says. “What it worked to do was to make me feel like I had a job on top of my actual job, which was to present myself as someone who was harmless, safe, reasonable, likable to white people, and it dulled so many of the sort of things that are core and most intrinsic to me in nature. It dulled my Blackness, which I see as something that’s been a very positive part of my identity.”
Sanders writes in his book that when he embraced his own “Black magic” and started being more authentic, he became more successful.
“I would recommend that you try the boldness of being yourself at work,” he says in the show. “I found when I … switched to my own persona as a very entry-level person working at a big company, that it changed the way people responded to me. When I started to speak of my own voice and throat, when I started to really call out colleagues when I found their behavior or the way that they treated me to be objectionable, when I stopped feeding into company consensus and just echoing the loudest or most powerful voice in the room and started to speak with my own keen eye of opinion, things were different for me.”
You can benefit, as Sanders did, by bringing your true persona forward. Here are some suggestions for how to do this, even when it’s challenging:
· Cultivate self-confidence. For some great tips and inspiration, check out the pearls of wisdom in this video featuring Carla Harris, vice chairman and director of Morgan Stanley, author, and singer.
· Embrace uncertainty. It takes courage to try new things, stretch into new roles, and—yes—sometimes fail. Learn to reframe what you may have previously perceived as a failure as new learning. Tennis pro-Serena Williams didn’t hit an ace the first time she played tennis; it took lots of training and hard work.
· Build a tribe of trusted advisors. These should be people you can count on to give it to you straight and to celebrate your successes. My tribe always includes both men and women of a diversity of ages.
· Take time to be quiet. Meditate, walk, stretch. Turn off the voices that tell you that you need to be anything but yourself.
What Sanders learned about bringing his authentic self to work led him to write his book, for which he interviewed 15 Black people about their successes.
“These people, to a person, every single interview subject, at some point in their careers, for many of whom this point came in their mid-20s, they stopped making decisions based on what they thought and they started making decisions based on what they believed,” he says.
When you are transparent about who you are and what you stand for, you’ll set yourself up for success. And, as a woman, your actions will have a larger impact because of the gender multiplier effect. When other women see the good things you do, they’ll emulate you, boost their own efforts and inspire still more women to bring their authentic selves—the very best thing they can contribute—to the table.
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