Leading Her Introvert Way: Conversations about executive leadership, career growth, business and mindset for mid-life Black women.

109: Career Advancement for Black Introverted Women: Why Year-End Is Make or Break

• Nicole Bryan • Episode 109

Share episode

It's November. You're drowning in year-end tasks. And you're thinking: "I'll focus on my career in January when things calm down."

Here's the problem: The decisions about who gets promoted in Q1 are being made NOW - not in January.

In this episode, I'm sharing three real stories from women in my LeadHER Lowdown community who are navigating different versions of year-end overwhelm - and what each of their situations reveals about why "waiting for perfect timing" keeps us stuck.

If you've been telling yourself you'll deal with your career "after the holidays," this episode is for you.

Links mentioned:


_________

LET’S CONNECT!

* Work with me 1:1 to land your executive promotion, increase your impact, hone your executive presence and increase your salary by $50-100k. Book your call here to get your Elite Executive Experience.


**Leave the podcast a 5-star review and help other introverted women find us and join our community.



SPEAKER_00:

Hi, lady leaders, and welcome to another episode of the Leading Her Introvert Way. I am Dr. Nicole Bryan and I am geeks. I am excited that I'm excited to be here. I'm excited that you're here and you're listening. Um, I'm actually recording this episode on the weekend before it is scheduled to be released. And it's been an actually really good weekend. Had lunch. Brunch, had a meal with my grown nephew. He likes to remind me he's almost 40. So he is grown grown. But I had lunch with him yesterday, and it is always a joy to be with him. He's one of these guys who has an entrepreneur, entrepreneurial mind and entrepreneurial spirit. He works for a government agency right now, right? But he spent probably his all of his 20s, maybe into his early 30s, trying to build a business of his own because he just did not want to work for the man. And he has come such a long way in terms of the way he sees the world, the way he thinks. It's honestly been an honor to be his aunt and kind of watch him grow and develop. But every time I'm with him, he re-energizes me as well as I learn something new, right? Because he's a totally different generation than I am. So I always learn something new. And I like that it's a reciprocal relationship now. There was a time in our journey of auntie and uh nephew where it was only one way. Like I was constantly giving, giving, giving, giving, and wanted to do that. No shade. I wanted to do that in terms of investing him and help him grow and help him develop into the man that he is today. But now it's a reciprocal relationship where yes, I'm still auntie, I'm still, you know, giving advice and sharing experiences, but he's doing that also. So I always leave our conversations and the time that we have together super energized. I am confident that you have relationships like that as well. And I just think that, particularly for us introverts, it's so when we have those deep, meaningful relationships and interactions, it just does something for us. And when I'm with him and we, I mean, our marathon brunch yesterday was I think four, four and a half hours. We left stuffed, both physically, our stomachs were very, very full, but also I think emotionally and mentally, we were overflowing. Um, so I'm hoping that you have something, some relationship like that in your life that just fills you up. Having said that, over the last couple of weeks, uh, in my content that I've been putting out on social media, I've been talking about and recognizing where we are right now in terms of being at the end of the year. And the last two to three months of any calendar year for any leader is always, always overwhelming. And it dawns on me that we don't talk about that enough. There's just an expectation that we as leaders will push through that, right? Despite everything that we have going on. And one of the reasons why I created this podcast, and one of the reasons why I show up on social media, is because I feel like we need to do two things. Start talking more positively about leadership in general, because there's a lot of hate and there's a lot of negativity about working leaders. But the second reason is because no one is caring for the leaders. Our role as people leaders and even project leaders is actually taking care of others, taking care of our team, taking care of the organization, our direct reports, our departments. We are the individuals whose responsibility it is to make sure that everything and everyone under our purview is okay. But no one is necessarily doing that for us, right? Because we get to a certain level of leadership, and even those who we report into, they have a belief that we should be able to take care of ourselves. So their desire or their intuition to make sure that we're okay, that kind of evaporates once you get into that middle manager role. So the platforms that I am a part of and that I create, I want to make sure that we are talking about that, that we not only acknowledge the challenges and the joys that we get out of leadership, but that we're also talking about how we're able to take care of ourselves as leaders. And I'm not necessarily just talking about this all the self-care, um, all the self-care talk and recommendations that are out in the marketplace. This goes beyond self-care. What I'm talking about is we as leaders are also still employees, we are also still professionals, but the organization doesn't necessarily treat us like that. Our bosses, our executive leadership don't necessarily treat us like that because they need us to help take care of everybody else. So if our companies don't necessarily create an environment where we can be vulnerable and talk about what we need and what we want as leaders, and our teams, we can't rely on our teams to do that for us because they need us to lead them, then where are we getting that type of support? Where are we getting that type of forum where we can focus on our development, focus on our mental and emotional health as individuals as well as leaders? Where can we do that? That's one of the reasons why I show up every day is because I want to make sure that we have a forum for that, particularly as Black introverted women. So one of the things that I've been talking about in my content for the last couple of weeks is in fact the experience that we're all going through right now as the year ends, where everything is kind of pulling on us. And so I've been more vocal about that. And in return, you, as my audience, you guys have been responsing to it. So it's clearly resonating. And I've been doing it, like I said, on social media, I've been doing it here on the podcast, and I've been doing it particularly in my leader lowdown community, which is a private community that I have offline, where if you're not a part of it already and you want to be a part of it, the link will be in the show notes. It's free, it's more close-knit, and frankly, it's where I say all the things that I can't necessarily say on public forums about being a black introverted leader. And what I'm hearing from you and from my audiences is that you're going through a lot, and it totally makes sense. This is our experience. Now, I want to share a couple of stories I have heard in the last couple of weeks because I think you will likely hear yourself in it, or you'll see yourself reflected in these stories because they are very representative, I think, of what our shared common experience is right now. Um, so I'm gonna tell you three three stories. I'll tell you about these three women that I've been talking to recently, and um we'll go from there. So the first story is about a friend of mine. I have a friend, she's also a part of the leader lowdown community, but she is a friend, she's not a client. She gets my my weekly emails, she pays attention to what I'm doing on social media, she is an introvert, she is a senior leader, and she responded to what I put into the leader lowdown community last week, and she was like, girl, get out my head. Okay, so let me share. So she actually loves her job. She is a senior leader at a university and she loves her job. She hasn't always loved the different jobs that she has, but right now she is in an environment where she absolutely does. She feels challenged, she feels supported, she feels appreciated, and she loves her work. So she loves her job, but everything around her right now is high pressure. So she's clearly working, doing a lot for the year end. And in addition to what she's holding in terms of responsibilities at work, she's also going through a big home renovation. And shout out to UT. I know you're probably listening to this, so let me just give you a shout out. She's going through a big home renovation. And she has social obligations as well. She's single, but she has a large social community, friend community, family community, and she has social obligations, which normally happens at the end of the year between Thanksgiving and Christmas and all the other holidays in between. So there's a lot happening. And everything that's happening, it's not that she's not grateful for all of it, she actually is, but it feels like all parts of her life are pulling at her at the same time. And I say that because many of us, when one part of our life ebbs, the other part flows. So if work is normally pulling at us and, you know, uh making it very intense, we have a calmer home life. Or when home life kind of spikes and requires so much attention, we can count on work to kind of calm down a little bit. In this situation, all aspects of her life are intense at the same time. And the question that she's been asking herself and continues to ask herself is how the hell do I do all of this and also think about my career? This is why so many people, when it comes to the year-end, October, November, December, even starting in September, start checking out of the year-end experience when it comes to their career. They're willing to be like, you know what? I just want to get through the next few months and I'll focus on rebuilding my career sometime next year. Right? That's what they say to themselves. And it totally makes sense because of all the pressure that you're feeling in September, October, November, December, because everybody else and everything else is pulling at you and your energy. Okay. So you may see yourself, you may be going through something similar where it feels like right now there is no peace for you because everything and everyone and every part of your life is demanding more. All right. So that is story number one that I wanted to share with you. Story number two is another young lady who actually is a client of mine, and she's also a member of the uh leader lowdown community. And she, her big thing as I help her to connect in with her emotions and what she's feeling, her word is frustrated. Like that's the word that she's chosen. Now, she's a director in her organization, and she does work for a multinational company. She's a director. And honestly, if you ask her, she will say that she wouldn't describe herself as uber ambitious. She wants to grow her career, but unlike some of my other clients who are like, I want to get to the very top of my organization, the very top of my career. I want to be the ultimate decision maker and strategy setter. This is not her. That's not her ambition. Does she want to grow her career into higher levels of leadership? Yes. But she's not set on the fact that she wants to take her career as far as she can possibly take it. So right now, she's at a director level in a multinational company. And she is, however, the most senior person in her function in her current division. Not the most senior person in her function in the company, but in her current division. But what that means is she can make some decisions, but she's not the final decision maker. So ultimately, she gets caught between employees who need her and leaders who don't appreciate her. This is frustrating for her at work. Now, she also, in her personal life, she's been in a 20 to 30 year romantic relationship that she currently feels is not giving her what she needs. So she's feeling like she's stuck in the middle everywhere. She's stuck in the middle at work and she's stuck in the middle at home. So she's asking herself right now, why would I add career advancement to this list when I'm already feeling overwhelmed? You might be able to relate to that as well. Why would I add working on my career or growing my career, which she absolutely wants to do? She wants to get to the vice president level. And between where she is now at the director, the traditional route in her company is to go from to go to a VP to then to a VP role. But she ultimately wants to be a vice president. And she's like, you know what? There is too much going on right now. I think I'm just going to postpone or put a hold on working on my career until sometime early next year. If you see yourself in her situation, I call her the stuck in the middle woman. If you see her yourself in that, I get it. I totally get it. And the third situation, the third story I want to share with you is the executive who's already thinking, I've made it, but she's still struggling. So there's a woman that I am working with, and she is already an executive. She is literally a senior vice president. She wants to take her career to the executive vice president level. She is probably within maybe eight years of retiring. So she has in her mind that she wants to hit that executive vice president level or executive vice president title before she retires. So she wants to get into that level and then she wants to be successful in that level. So for her, she feels like the clock is quickly ticking. So she's someone who looks at herself as already extremely successful, which she is. She's a single mother. She reports to the CEO and she has a small team. Her team has kind of morphed over time, but right now she has a small team, less than 10 people, but a small team, which she used to refer to as small but mighty. But her team has changed over the last couple of years, where now she has a lot of new people to her team, and many of them have development issues. So she has been spending a lot of her time and energy managing people out of their current roles just because they weren't a good fit or their skill set, she wasn't able to help them develop the skill set that they need to be able to execute on their role. Or she has other team members who are good at their job but need to be better. So she's trying to develop them in their current roles. So she's spending a lot of time and energy, not necessarily focusing on the strategic work that she used to focus on and now having to be proactively managing her small team. And she's asking herself, how do I take care of home? Because she has a young child. So how does she take care of home and invest in her team who needs more time than she has to give? And what I want to point out here is that even at the executive level at which she is, some of the struggles and challenges don't necessarily stop. How you might handle them or how you might address them looks differently, but the problems don't always go away. The problems of being a good leader don't necessarily go away. The challenges of how do you manage your time and energy as an introverted leader that doesn't necessarily go away just because you get an executive title or executive compensation. Many of us have to deal with and have to figure out our own individual rhythms around all of these things repeatedly, right? It just the vantage point from where you're looking at it or dealing with it might look different, but the core issues and challenges don't necessarily disappear. So this executive leader is trying to figure out for herself how to move through what she's currently dealing with. So if you are someone who's thinking, okay, once I get promoted to the executive level, everything will be easier. There's a lot of things that go into what your day-to-day looks like. And so just because you are officially an executive or just because you have an executive title doesn't necessarily mean that everything is smooth sailing from that point. So here's what these three women and probably you have in common. They are all waiting for things to quote unquote calm down before they invest in their career, before they reinvest in their career, before they focus on their career. But here's the truth things never calm down. There's always some new project. There's always some new team member or team issue that you have to deal with. There's always some new strategic direction that the company is going to go in, right? Things never slow down. If you think about it, first quarter is usually bogged down by a bunch of other things, the new goals and the goal, the new goals and the new metrics that you have to manage towards, right? The new strategic plan that the company has put out and the new clients that you have to onboard. Like all of those things usually take up a lot of time first quarter. Second quarter, we spend all of our time getting ready for mid-year performance reviews. We uh get ready for repositioning our annual strategy because we now we have data about what happened or what didn't happen, what worked well, what didn't work well in first quarter. So we spend second quarter repositioning or realigning with the reality of what's happening for the year, right? Third quarter, you're trying to make up for what you didn't accomplish first quarter and second quarter, because now you know the year is about to end and you only have third quarter to kind of make that up. And then fourth quarter, you got all of the other obligations that we're talking about right now, all of the leadership uh responsibilities of managing your team, uh, merit increases, planning the strategy for the next year, doing performance reviews, uh, doing uh trainings that have to get spending the money and the budget that you didn't spend so that you don't lose it and you get you have it uh scrolled aside for two for the next year, right? So all of those things happen. There is no good time. There is no easy time throughout the year, particularly as a as a leader. So when you are saying, oh, I'm going to put this off until things calm down, things don't never calm down. If you can tell me as a leader when something has truly calmed down for you, right? Other than maybe when you take a vacation, and even then you might not be in the office, you might not be on the calls, but you're thinking about it and you're probably on call for your team member just in case they can't carry it while you're out. Like things don't ever calm down, right? We just gotta figure that. And but most of the time we love that. Like we like the challenge of the work, we like the challenge of managing the team. But just because we like the challenge and we enjoy the work doesn't negate the fact that sometimes we feel overwhelmed. Sometimes the pressure feels like it's going to break us. With that said, what I want you to walk away with is things never calm down. There's always going to be something. So the real question isn't when will you have time to focus on your career and continuing to build your career, continuing to invest in yourself? The real question is, are you being strategic with the time that you have? Because those performance reviews, those budget conversations, the team challenges, those are your career development. It's not, you're not too busy to continue to position yourself and your career. You are in the moment where it is actually happening. So let's talk about what happened was happening in November and December. And while you're actually feeling overwhelmed, things are still happening here. So now that you see yourself in one of those three stories that I mentioned, what I want you to know is that while you're managing renovations, while you're frustrated with your boss, or while you're developing your struggling team, executives, your company, the board, they're continuing to run the business and they are continuing to make decisions about your career. Performance calibrations are happening, budget allocations are happening, succession planning is happening, strategy is being set for next year. All of those things are happening right now. So if you're saying you're gonna wait until next year to focus on what you want from your career and to start positioning yourself, I'm telling you that by January, February, those decisions, they're already made. Unfortunately, because you're thinking about putting off leaning into your career, then those decisions get made without you. So what I encourage you to think about is even when you're overwhelmed, I don't want you necessarily to think about adding more to your plate. I don't want you to think about building your career or positioning yourself in your career, in your company, as adding more to your plate. What I want you to think about is being strategic with what's already on your plate. So for the everything at once friend, what I would want her to be thinking about is how do I make my current work count? How do I make my current work visible for me so that people see and understand the real contribution that I'm making? For my client who's stuck in the middle, I would want her to think about how do I position myself even when I'm frustrated, even when I don't have final decision-making power? How can I influence others to get what I think the final decision should be? How do I continue to show up and make a contribution even when I'm frustrated? How do I create the space and time to deal with my personal relationship while still holding the fork down at work? That's what I would want her to think about. And then for my executive client who is struggling with her team, I would want her to think about how developing her individual team members is her own visibility, like how she can showcase and leverage the investment she's making in her team to demonstrate to her CEO, to other senior leaders in the organization, and to model what that should look like and how it can make her stand out as an even stronger leader, not just for today, but also for the future. So you don't have to add more to your plate. Frankly, I wouldn't want you to add more to your plate because the business is going to try to add more to your plate. Your team is going to try to add more to your plate. You don't need to add more to your plate. But what I'm encouraging you to do is to think a little bit differently about what you already have to do anyway, and how you can use that to move your career forward, how you can use that as development opportunities. The fact that you have so many things coming at you, that in and of itself, how you handle that, how you move through it, and how you come out on the other side positively is in and of itself a development opportunity for you. So if you have heard yourself in any of these stories, just know a couple of things. One, you are not alone. Two, you don't have to put off. In fact, it's probably not in your best interest to put off investing in yourself or investing in your career until things calm down because we already established that the calm down period that we hope will happen never does. Instead, I want you to think about the things that are already on your plate, what you're responsible for between now and the end of the year, and how you can leverage that to be a part of your development, how you can leverage that to showcase your leadership skills, how you can leverage it to be more visible to the other decision makers in your organization so that you can land positively, right, and be positioned for higher levels of responsibility, higher levels of leadership, higher levels of pay and compensation in your organization or in your industry. And if you want Lady Leader to be a part of the leader lowdown community that I talked about at the top of this episode, where we are talking about real stuff, like not the polished version of what I feel comfortable putting out on LinkedIn and TikTok and Facebook, then definitely join my leader lowdown community. The link will be in the show notes for you. And stick around for the next few weeks because I'm gonna be sharing with you some new ideas, some new concepts that I believe you're really going to resonate with. I've gotten great, great feedback from my clients who I've previewed it with. And this series is going to be top notch for you. And until then, ask yourself Am I waiting for perfect timing to make my next career move, to build my career, to invest in myself as a leader? Or am I able to be strategic right now? Until next time, lady leader, keep leading your introvert way.