Hello, corporate badasses. Welcome to another episode of Maximize Your Career. I'm your host, Stacy Mayer in super excited, as always to be here with you again this week. 

I just got back to the Bay Area from a whirlwind trip to Austin, Texas, for Forrester Consulting's bid to be North America conference. And I was a presenter in their Women's Leadership Forum on a panel discussion about how to accelerate our careers. And I was so honored to be there and have this conversation. But what I'm going to talk to you about in today's podcast is one of the questions that kept coming up during the Q&A. So after we got done with our brilliant panel discussion, we had open time for Q&A, and there was only one question that was asked and that question was asked three times. So three different women raised their hands and asked the same question in a different ways. So over and over and over again, and when I see things like that, I'm like, okay, this is on your mind. This is something I need to speak to. And I definitely, definitely have opinions about it. And so I want to share that with you on today's episode. 

So the first woman raised her hand and asked, How do you deal with being told that you're too aggressive at work? And specifically, she had received feedback three years ago from one leader that she was too aggressive. And then she also clarified and said she no longer works at that company and she's already moved on to another role and she's thrilled about it. 

Right. So this is something that happened a very long time ago and she's obviously still thinking about it. But her particular lens of questioning wasn't what she should do about it personally, but more, how do I address the behavior with the other human being? So should she have spoken up? Should she have said something in her case? She just left the company. 

Now, I want you to know that I have a very strong mission. Part of my mission, including doubling the number of women promoted to the C-suite, is to actually keep you if you want to be in the corporate world. Now, I have women join Executive Ahead of Time and when we start doing the modules on three X in your vision and looking forward into the future where you want to be before you retire, they'll say, Not here and not in the corporate world, and I want to start my own business. And so I'm not saying that you can't leave, but what I want you to know is that you have choices, right? So you have the ability to work within your current organizational structure, and you also are fully empowered to leave at any time. But the most important thing I want you to do is when you do decide to leave, I want you to leave with an understanding of what you're going to do differently in the next role. 

And that understanding is not less aggressive or stop worrying about what people think, but it's more about how am I going to navigate the opportunities in front of me so that I'm building executive-level relationships so that I have an open feedback policy so that if some person tells me that I'm too aggressive, I already have established relationships with ten other executive leaders where I'm openly receiving feedback and understanding what my valuable leadership skills are, what I bring to the table so that I can measure if that feedback is valid and if that feedback is a problem. And what and I understand the political structure of my current organization so that I can actually do something about it, right? So that's our goal. If whether you leave or don't leave, I want you to understand that you have options, that you are fully empowered and we certainly aren't going to leave just because one person tells us something about our leadership style that we disagree with. Now we might because if that one person has an inordinate amount of power at your organization, you could be like, Well, I choose not to be a part of this, which is totally valid as well. Everybody's choice. But I just want you to be making a choice rather than running away from something. So it's interesting. So she asked this question and there were two other incredible leadership coaches on the panel with me. 

And each one of us had very, very different points of view on how we view executive coaching and leadership. And so I also found. That is incredibly compelling. But the advice that was being given to her was specifically on how to have a difficult conversation with that executive leader. Basically how to stand up for herself, how she could approach the subject and inquire a little bit more about why he felt that she was being too aggressive, and basically learn from that particular feedback. And I totally agree with that. And there is definitely information out in the world about how to have these difficult conversations, how to stand up for what's happening to you. And you should totally do that. 

But the thing that I noticed is that as the other women were giving their coaching is that the room was very heavy. So I often look at energy and feel the energy. I'm an incredibly emotionally intuitive person and I could just tell that everybody was down. Like even just having this conversation, the women in the room, just like the energy of the room, just dipped really far down. And I was thinking at that moment about all of you and especially after and I'll tell you what the other two questions were after this. When two more women still, after we started having this conversation, were still asking about what to do if you're told that you're being too aggressive. 

And I was like, wow, your minds are fixated. On what to do so that we aren't basically aren't told that we're too aggressive. And can you imagine, like you spend 80% of your day in terms of professional development, right? So we're all very good at our job and we spend 100% of our day being good at our job. But when we think about professional development and the skills that we want to learn and how we want to transition into executive leadership, if you're spending 80% of your time thinking about how not to be seen as aggressive, don't you think that you will be less likely to raise your hand? You'll be less likely to speak up, you'll be less likely to share your opinions, and you'll be less likely to ask directly for that promotion or that pay increase. You'll be less likely to build relationships with executive leadership simply based on the fact that you're so darn afraid of being seen as too aggressive.

And so today's podcast episode, I just want to talk to you about my opinion about this and really start to point out that that is if that is leading your behavioral choices at work. Now, one of the reasons why this comes up a lot for women is because we are told that we're too aggressive. Right. Like it actually happened to you at some point in your career.

And then some women are told that they're too aggressive and they say, screw it, I'm just going to be aggressive. Right? That's just what I need to do. And they fight it that way. And then other women are told that they're too aggressive and they shut down and they say, Oh, well, maybe I shouldn't put myself out there, or they leave that company and they're like, oh, I'm going to go to a company that accepts my aggressiveness, right? My outspokenness. And so whatever those might be, I want you to start to investigate. What is your emotional reaction when these things happen to you? And I think part of the reason as women that we are so horrified of being told that we're too aggressive is because the leadership table that we are trying to create, the definition of power in leadership is something that we're actually trying to shift. We're trying to change because the leadership and the corporate structure that's being modeled to us is one of power over people that your executive team has power over you. And I don't care if you're a man or a woman. It doesn't matter to me because a lot of women have this mentality that in order to be an executive leader, I have to exhibit and exert power over other people at our organization, because literally that's being modeled to us by every single human being around us, at, you know, at so many companies.

Not all for sure. And definitely not all leadership teams, but as women and I'm just going to go out on a limb, we want to have power with others, right? We're willing to get ourselves into those higher-level executive positions. We're willing to hold that seat of influence and power and authority. But we're also going to lift other people up with us. Right. That's like literally, fundamentally part of the equation for us. When we get to the leadership table when we think about our three X visions in the world that we want to create, and when we think about really changing our organization from the C-suite out, it is going to be a model of having power with other people. And so one of the reasons that we're so afraid of being seen as too aggressive is because we're like, that is not even us. That's not the world that I'm trying to perpetuate. Right? And so so we either lean into it because we really want the power and influence. But what I see more is we lean out, right? We step away, we leave, and we stop engaging. Right now, I want to point out that one human being told her this three years ago in her career at a previous job. Right now, you may have heard of negativity, and bias. And essentially what this means is that we can have two circumstances happening at the same time.

Right. So we can have a positive situation happen to us in a negative situation happen to us and all things are created equal. We're going to spend more energy, focus, and attention on the negative. Right? We're going to think about that negative bias and we're going to be biased towards negativity. Right? This goes way back to the caveman era, the Cave Woman era, when we had to fight for our lives and not be killed by a saber-tooth tiger because it was literally fought or flight. Right. It was like we had to either fight for our life or run away. And so our brains are cognitively built that way so that we have this negativity bias so that we literally hear danger, danger, danger, or danger, right? You're going to be exiled from the tribe. And then we fixate on that and we really try very hard to fix it. And I noticed that the conversation in the room was going also toward this negativity bias. So she asked this question and then all of the coaches get to work on how to fix, you know, this sort of aggressive feedback that she's been receiving or received once, three years ago. Right. And so I literally pointed out that. Right. I was like, you know, I raised my hand. I was like, what if you spent this amount of energy on all of the positive feedback that you're receiving? Right. So we received positive feedback and this is basically what we do.

So let's say that you received feedback that you were good and at a presentation, we just say thank you. Let's say that somebody tells you that you should apply for a role. Like I have a role on my team and I want you to apply for it. And you just say, Oh, cool, I will. Right? And we end the conversation there. Yet here we were on this panel having it and I say us, but I wasn't engaging this, having an in-depth conversation about how she can approach this man and talk about and get more feedback on her aggressive behavior. And I was like, I think a better conversation is how can we talk to the people who give us compliments and have a more in-depth conversation about why?

So I tell this to my corporate badasses inside of Executive Ahead of Time all the time. If somebody says you should apply for a job, the first words out of your mouth are be Why? Literally, just why. I want you to ask that question. Why? Why should I apply for this job? And this is so critical because, at that moment, that person has an opinion about why you shoulda. Apply for it and they're going to give it to you at that moment, just like this guy from three years ago had a reason that he felt that she was too aggressive. Like he would have told her why if she asked.

And so what I want you to start doing is start asking why the compliments that you receive instead of just thank you. And most definitely instead of blowing them off. Right. We are. But I think as women we've evolved, right. You know, you've probably heard that you're terrible at taking compliments and stuff like that. We're like, Oh no, this dress. I just bought it at a thrift store. But I know that the corporate badasses who listen to my podcast, they're over that, right? So we do know how to say thank you graciously, but now I want you to inquire more. I want you to understand why. Why are you receiving that feedback? Because if somebody's telling you you should apply for a job, then they have a reason. Now, the way that we have solicited positive feedback in the past is we have gone into our boss's office and saying, Can you tell me what I'm doing? Well, can you tell me some good things about myself? Can you tell me? Actually, maybe even not well, but just can you give me feedback, right? And you're totally putting them on the spot. They're not thinking of a specific situation and then they sort of make stuff up, right? They might give you positive, they might give you negatively, but it's definitely not rooted in reality. And so what I want to do is start rooting your feedback in reality.

So you're going to have to be ready for this. You're listening to this podcast and you don't know when a compliment is going to come, but you can reply with the words Y, and this is huge, huge, huge. Because what you're going to start to do is train your brain to look towards the positive and to spend more energy looking at what's working than what's not working right. That one human being that said you were too aggressive. Now the next woman who raised her hand to ask a question, she actually didn't ask a question. She just raised her hand and talked about how she handled a situation when she was told that she was too aggressive. And I wanted to share this with you because absolutely I'm not saying that we need to walk away or deny negative feedback, because when you're being told that you're too aggressive, it is worth investigating. Again, hopefully by listening to my podcast, you have relationships with the entire executive team, right? You have built out these relationships. You have asked a couple of people why you should apply for certain jobs, and why you're good at what you do. So you have built up and you understand your unique leadership style and you know that if you just receive this random feedback, it has nothing to do with the political culture or the state of the company or the state of your position in the company or really anything.

It's just like, Oh, that's on him. Nobody cares about him anyway or whatever, right? Like if that's the case. And so that's another way that we can start to understand this behavior. But I had a couple of women inside of executive ahead of time because we all get told that we're too aggressive. Right. It's just like and that's why so many people raise their hand to ask this question because it's happening, right? So either we're putting ourselves out there and we're told that we're too aggressive or too ambitious. Right. Or we're not putting ourselves out there and we're beating ourselves up. Right. For not putting ourselves up for not throwing our hat in the ring, for not speaking up when we have an idea for letting somebody else take our ideas. Right? So we kind of lean in and then we're told that we're too aggressive. So what I want to share with you now is that just the nature of being a woman, literally being a woman, you are automatically perceived as so there are two sides to this, right? So every woman has a cultural background and ethnicity, right? So what happens for black women is different than what happens for white women. And I, being a white woman, can only speak for my own personal experience. And there are lots of amazing leaders that you've heard on my podcast that are black leaders, and they will speak about their personal experiences as a black leader.

So right now what I'm sharing with you is not firsthand, but it's the information that has been shared with me, is that as a black woman, when she asserts herself in any way whatsoever, like literally actually sometimes just walking in the room, she is seen as potentially aggressive. And so what she has done is she's learned to kind of tone down her behavior over the years so that she doesn't automatically exasperate this cognitive. The bias that everybody else in the room already has about her. Now, in my own personal experience as a white woman who is not always perceived as too aggressive, outwardly, I overcompensate by being too nice, by being a people pleaser. And it's still based on this idea, this fear that I don't want to be seen. I desperately don't want to be perceived as aggressive. So I overcompensate. Complicated because the cognitive bias against me is that I am kind and gentle and smile and keep quiet. Right. That's the unconscious bias, right? Against me. So we all have these biases working against us before we even open our mouths, literally, before we even open our mouths. Then we add to that the political structure. So we add to that the people in power at our organization and whatever they look like, whatever their stature is or whatever we want to think of them, what's accepted politically at our organization, and when we go against that in any way, even in the smallest way, we're going to be told that we're too aggressive or too ambitious, like literally like it could just be the teeniest, tiniest thing.

And so inside of executive, ahead of time, this has happened for so many women. Right. So they'll start to have conversations about getting a promotion. They'll start to have conversations with and build relationships with their CEO. And somebody over here is going to judge them. Right. They will start to post on LinkedIn a little bit more, sharing their thought leadership. It's like, well, what's going on there? You know, she's too aggressive. She's too ambitious, right? So these judgments are going to happen. And so what I want to share with you now is like it happens, it happens. It happens to every single one of us. And the life that I am choosing to live right now is the one of leaning in. And it's not the leaning out life that I used to live when I was like, you know, comfortable being a people pleaser and just the status quo. And I'm not doing that anymore. And so for the women inside of executive ahead of time, they're also not doing that right. They're wanting to lean in, but rightfully so. They also don't want to sabotage their career. And so when you receive feedback that you're too aggressive, in some ways it's a good thing to investigate.

But there is a smart way to investigate it in a bad way to investigate it. So I'll just start with the bad way to investigate it because I've already touched on it in the rest of this episode. And this actually goes into the question that the third woman asked, which is whether she was too aggressive with some clients. This is what they said. That's the feedback she received from her boss. And she actually had to go apologize to those clients and tell them that she was sorry for being too aggressive. Right. Because it was a big client. And so she was like, how do you even handle this? That's just terrible, right? It's obviously very terrible. But this is I want you guys to know that this is happening. So now we move forward is we accept the feedback and the bad way of accepting the feedback as what it is is to internalize it, to make it something mean something about you personally. Like I am a bad person because of this. And the other thing is, is to make it mean more than what it means, right? So if you have 30 people at the organization, including the CEO, who is just really always on the Joanna train and 100% on board, and then you have this negative leader that nobody really likes. But for whatever reason, he's been at the company for 20 years and he's still there.

But everybody knows he's a jerk, right? But yes, he's still there at the company. This happens all the time and they don't really care about his opinion very much. And you can still get promoted, you can still advance your career. You can still have a ton of influence at your company regardless of what he thinks. Right. That is a possibility. And so what you're going to start to do is, is divorce yourself from the feedback itself. And so you're just kind of looking at it. What are the pieces in play here that actually led to that feedback? Who is this person? Does he give that feedback a lot? Does he give that feedback pretty much to every woman, you know, everywhere? Right. Is that just who he is? And it's not to diminish the experience that you had the negative experience, but it is like who they are sometimes. And the other way we can start to investigate it in a smarter way is really to just start to ask ourselves about that political environment. Right. Does it matter? So sometimes we put more weight on ourselves. Here's opinions of ourselves rather than the executive team. And this is because we want to be liked. We want to get along. We have to work with these people. But frankly, once you start to get promoted into those higher executive positions, it doesn't matter what your peers think of you.

If five peers think that you're too aggressive and there are two women that are high up on the executive chain and they think you're fantastically ambitious and amazing and unapologetic and they love everything about you, you're going to continue to be able to make that impact and have that influence. And yeah, you're going to, you know, people are going to be jealous. Like, we can't control what other people think about us. But you can own your responsibility. And the fact, like, I don't want to hurt other people. I don't want to actively cause more pain and suffering. But what I do want to do is to really have that impact and make that and have that influence at my company. And, you know, if a couple of people aren't going to like me along the way, then so be it. And most of the executive leaders that I have on this podcast, I'll ask them, like, have you ever been told you're too aggressive? And it's like. I've been told it a bunch, right? Like a lot. You know, and sometimes it leads to having to leave the organization. Right. But for the most part, it's not a reflection of their nature. It's a reflection of the systemic problem of the corporation itself or the leadership itself or that person himself or herself. Right. So I want you to start to look at this behavior and see.

How it is hurting you in terms of your ability to speak up, your ability to raise your hand, your ability to ask for more, and then choose what it is that you want to do with your life. As I said, I'm choosing, leaning in, I'm choosing, asking for more, I'm choosing, raising my hand. I'm choosing to insert myself in conversations. But what I'm going to do is understand that the more that I do that I can't also lean into having power over people. Right. Because that's when aggressive nature blows up in your face, right? That's when aggressiveness goes awry and really becomes a problem for you emotionally. Right. We can't we can't sustain that. Right. It's not us. It's not true to ourselves. It's not authentic power. It's just power over people. None of us want to perpetuate that cycle. Well, none of you listening to this, hopefully, a lot of people want to perpetuate that cycle. But if you're listening to this, remember, I am going to speak up. I am going to assert myself, I am going to ask for more. And I'm also going to bring other people along with me. I'm going to understand that my goal is not to have power over people so that when someone says You're being too aggressive, I'm going to say I'm sorry that you feel that way. That wasn't my intention. When somebody says you're being this, you make me feel this way.

I'm going to acknowledge that it's true. It's their truth. I'm not going to add more anger and frustration and say, Well, that's your problem. You just got to get over it. You know, I'm not going to go adding more power issues by going around and telling everybody how much of a jerk they are and putting them down even more right so that I can continue to have power over people. Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to keep quiet, but I'm going to do it in the right channels, the channels according to my organization or according to how people respond, or the channels according to, you know, taking my own career development seriously and being able to get myself into a position of influence so that I can actually start to implement this change. Because really, that's the leadership table that we're creating. And I don't care if it's full of men and women, mixed genders, mixed races, sexuality, whatever that might be. I want that on the leadership table because my friends, those people are the ones who notice this power struggle and they're like, No, my goal is not to have power over people, but I am going to ask for what I want. I am going to speak up. I'm still going to post my thought leadership on LinkedIn and I am going to figure out myself along the way. All right, my friends, thank you so much for listening. And I'll see you next week.