Want to achieve more success in your career? Worried that your current actions and habits might be holding you back from achieving the success you deserve? If so, How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith might just be the book for you.

 

How Women Rise is broken down into three parts:

• Part 1: On Being Stuck
• Part II: The Habits That Keep Women from Reaching Their Goals
• Part III: Changing For The Better

 

Part I talks about the focus of the book and a bit about why women can get stuck. It talks about why women resist change and how if you don’t learn to embrace change you’ll remain stuck.

Part II is the largest section of the book and goes into great detail about the 12 habits that are supposedly holding women back. The 12 habits are

 

Habit 1: Reluctance to Claim Your Achievements

This habit looks at women struggle to claim their achievements. The book suggests that if women have an “either/or thinking” then they don’t usually see a graceful middle ground where they are able to own their achievements, without viewing themselves as obnoxious or self-serving. In addition, they discuss how women can struggle to self-promote themselves and own their contribution.

 

Habit 2: Expecting Others to Spontaneously Notice and Reward Your Contributions

Habit 2 focuses on the idea of women working hard and expecting others to notice and reward them. This is a highly damaging habit to have because the reality is most people won’t notice and reward and then resentment can set in.

 

Habit 3: Overvaluing Expertise

Habit 3 looks at how when you move up the ladder overvaluing your expertise can have a negative impact. Earlier in your career building your expertise is key and being good at your job will often on your ability to deliver the work to a high standard. However, as you progress into higher roles your expertise is one thing, but being your skills around influence, communication, internal politics, negotiating etc, all become increasingly important.

 

Habit 4: Building rather than leveraging relationships

The book states that “Whilst women are often stellar relationship builders, they tend to be less skilled at leveraging relationships” and that “Leveraging relationships is key to achieving professional success”. This section focuses on the idea of not focusing on building friendships that have personal value, but concentrating on ensuring you have the right connections that you are happy to contact when necessary.

 

Habit 5: Failing to Enlist Allies from Day One

Everybody needs allies in their life and this is especially true in a new job. However, the book suggests that often “Women who assume new positions resolve to keep their head down until they’ve mastered the details and are confident they can perform to a certain standard”. This results in them not building the network of allies they need at the beginning, which will mean more work from them in the future or more drastically, a reduction in the level of success they will feel across their entire time within that company.

 

Habit 6: Putting your job before your career

This book was written for women who want to “rise” and whilst at the beginning the book seems to suggest that rising looks different to everyone it is clearly concentrated on women wanting to rise up the corporate ladder. With that in mind, Habit 6 looks at how you can put your current job before your whole career. This habit is increasingly important not only as people rise up within companies, but as people move from company to each company. The book suggests that you treat each job as a stepping stone, and not to get trapped because of loyalty.

 

Habit 7: The Perfection Trap

A habit that is mentioned in this book, and a trait that is mentioned in many other books, is that perfection isn’t good for you. It is mentioned that “high-achieving women tend to take failures deeply to heart, get tangled up in self-blame, and stew over mistakes instead of moving on”. If you take failure to heart then you need to work on this as it will hold you back. Failure is just part of the process of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and into something new.

 

Habit 8: The Disease to Please

The Disease to Please is a problem both personally and professionally. However, it definitely will hold you back from moving into positions of power and influence. The fact is the more power you have and the more higher-level decision you make the more you need not care about what people think. People aren’t going to like all of the decision you make and you need to make decisions based on what is right for your team or your business and not just to keep everyone happy.

 

Habit 9: Minimising

Making yourself small is no way to make it to the top. Your body language and your words need to assure everyone that you know you are meant to be in the room and that you are owning your decisions. This is also where it is important to use the word ‘I’. Make it clear about what you have done and don’t hide behind the people you have been working with.

 

Habit 10: Too Much

As a woman in the workplace it can be tricky and times and one of the areas where you “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” is around being too much. Talking too much, being too emotional, sharing too much. These are all things women have been told. However, the advice in this section is never to speak whilst “in the grip of strong emotion” and remembering that to bond with others, especially men, you don’t have to share your personal life.

 

Habit 11: Ruminating

Have you ever made a mistake and then spent ages going over the moment again and again in your mind? If you have then you struggle with ruminating. Ruminating isn’t productive as you are wasting time in the past and since it often tied to feelings of regret and blame there really is no value. Instead focus on quickly reviewing the mistake, identifying the lesson for the future and moving on.

 

Habit 12: Letting Your Radar Distract You

The final habit looks at how women can be distracted by everything around them. This could be anything from picking up signals from everyone in a meeting when they are talking to struggle to keep a focus on the bottom line. There are tips within the book to help you not block out your radar view but ensure you aren’t overwhelmed by it.

 

Part III is the final part of the book and aims at helping you to start making a change. It talks about how you should start with just making one change, it is best to get the support of someone else and warns successful women to be careful of being too hard on themselves.

 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Overall, I was disappointed by the book. I had previously read What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith and enjoyed that book. I, therefore, had high expectations for this book. I thought I would find it even more useful and relatable because the focus was on women and it was co-written by Sally Helgesen. However, whilst the book is meant to be co-written the overall tone feels very much as if it has been written by Marshall (all of the members of PropelHer’s Book Club agreed with me on this). This makes some statements seem like massive sweeping generalisations or stereotypes of women.

In addition, it felt like a lot of time was given to going into great detail about the habit and why the habit would be holding you back, but not enough advice on how to break the habit and move forward.

 

 

WHO I WOULD RECOMMEND HOW WOMEN RISE TO

Given the title How Women Rise it will come as no surprise that this book is designed for women and therefore, I would only recommend it to women. I feel that although the book says that the focus is on “helping you to recognise the behaviours that get in your way as you seek to become more successful on your own terms” it actually isn’t about creating success on your own terms. In my opinion, the book is definitely written with a focus on your achieve success in a traditional employee situation within a big organisation or corporation. It feels very much about climbing the traditional career ladder, and whilst some of the habits definitely do hold businesswomen back to, I would say it is most appropriate for a woman looking to succeed in a traditional career.

 

 

If you like the sound of How Women Rise you can buy a copy for yourself by clicking here.

This book was read as part of PropelHer’s Book, which is a women-only non-fiction book club. If you are an ambitious women who want to read books to support your personal development and professional success then you can find out more about PropelHer’s Book Club at www.propelher.co.uk/bookclub.