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Quintessential Reading:
Career and Job Book Reviews

 

Book Review: Career Books for Women

 

From time-to-time, as we receive career-related and job-hunting books and other resources from publishers, the staff of Quintessential Careers will review them to help you make better decisions about the best books to use in your career and job search.

 

Reviewed by Katharine Hansen

 

The Next Generation of Women Leaders: What You Need to Lead but Won't Learn in Business School, by Selena Rezvani, $29.95. Hardcover. 181 pages. Praeger. ISBN: 0313376662

 

The Female Vision: Women's Real Power at Work, by Sally Helgesen and Julie Johnson, $17.95. Paperback. 192 pages. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. ISBN: 1576753824.

 

A steady stream of books on women in leadership and management has emerged since the feminist movement began in the 1970s, so separating the wheat from the chaff can be difficult. Here are two worthy of your consideration.

 

Selena Rezvani's research methodology for The Next Generation of Women Leaders: What You Need to Lead but Won't Learn in Business School was very smart. She interviewed 30 top women executives to get their advice and discover what lessons they learned on their way to the top. These women talked about positioning themselves to lead, succeeding on the job, networking, negotiating, office politics, work-life balance, and more.

 

My only complaint about the book: I wish it had a more lively, reader-friendly, engaging design. We are regularly bombarded with so many multimedia stimuli that pages and pages of gray type with virtually no illustrations, charts, or graphs can seem dauntingly tedious.

 

I love the subhead that finishes the book: "Fear regret more than failure." If the book offers one over-riding message, it is that woman can transcend their perceived limitations and create the professional and personal lives they truly want.

 

Here are the top 5 things I learned from The Next Generation of Women Leaders: What You Need to Lead but Won't Learn in Business School (See also our Q&A with the author.):

 

1. If you want to learn how to succeed as a woman in business, go to the source. Not only does Rezvani's book offer wisdom from 30 successful women, but it also provides the list of questions the author used to interview these women. That means any woman who would like to learn from successful counterparts can take these same questions and seek out savvy role models to interview. A few sample questions: What particular competencies or skills have made you promotable? What do you consider the most valuable training a Generation X or Y woman can receive? What advice would you give a woman just entering the workplace?

 

2. Test-driving various types of jobs has a downside. While Rezvani encourages women to seek their ideal careers through trial and error, she notes that employers don't respond well to a string of short-term, unrelated jobs on one's resume. Rezvani doesn't mention them, but numerous options exist for mini-test-drive experiences that can help folks find their ideal job -- such as informational interviewing, job shadowing, interning, and volunteering.

 

3. Women should strive to become chief executives of their own careers. That's what Rezvani did as the result of her research, and she called that goal the biggest mental shift that came out of the book project. Women can take control of their careers and get past the idea that limitations impede their progress. See our Q&A with the Rezvani for specific advice on becoming the CEO of your career.

 

4. Conventional wisdom about professional life is that no one is indispensable -- but women can aspire to be indispensable. Rezvani tells readers to consider what they do or could do that is absolutely critical to the organization. She provides a terrific list of questions to ask yourself about your accomplishments and what you can do better than anyone else. See our Q&A with the Rezvani to see how she believes women can approach indispensability.

 

5. Women should be sure their supervisors know of their contributions. Rezvani's advice here is superb for any worker, but especially women, who tend to downplay their accomplishments. In our Q&A with the Rezvani, in which she recommends the best way to communicate contributions to one's supervisor, her suggestion of a meeting with the boss every two weeks feels a bit too frequent. I think once a month would be adequate.

 

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Twenty years ago, Sally Helgesen published the ground-breaking book, The Female Advantage. Before that book, most books about women in leadership stressed the idea that to succeed, women should act like men. Helgesen's book was one of the first to look at differences in male and female leadership styles and suggest that some aspects of women's style actually made them better suited to leadership than were men. That book was an epiphany for me, and I used it as the basis for a major paper I wrote as an undergrad.

 

Some things have changed for women in the two decades since The Female Advantage -- notably their significant gains in educational preparation -- but few women lead at the highest corporate levels, and women still earn much less money than men. This stagnation was the impetus for Helgesen and her co-author Julie Johnson to write The Female Vision: Women's Real Power at Work. They noticed women were leaving senior positions or watching their careers stall out. They heard countless high-level women say, "I decided it just wasn't worth it." Like Rezvani, they interviewed many women at high levels of organizational life, and they launched a full-scale research study. They conclude that a disconnect exists "between what organizations expect and what women at their best have to offer." What women have to offer, the authors say, is a particular vision -- a way of seeing.

 

The slim book is a quick, easy -- yet rich and well-researched -- read.

 

Here are the top 5 things I learned from The Female Vision (Adapted in part from Helgesen's blog post listing, "The Five Things Women Notice -- and What Organizations (and Men) Can Learn From Them," on the BK Communique Author Lists Blog):

 

1. Women take a robust scan of the emotional temperature in a room. Women employ their capacity for broad-scale notice to read what people in a meeting are feeling. Are they present and engaged, or do they feel isolated and awkward?

Example: One woman in The Female Vision was asked by her employer to "just notice what goes on in a meeting." She came back with vital observations about a key partnership in jeopardy. Her employer dismissed the information, saying that "by notice, I meant notice if the numbers add up."

 

2. Women employ multiple senses when summing up a situation. Notice isn't just about what we see, the authors say; it derives from multisensory impressions.

Example: Details matter. An otherwise powerful conference will not make as positive impression if the sensory aspects of it are unpleasant. Sound, smell, temperature, and feel affect our judgment and how we remember. Yet most organizations don't know how to use sensory information.

 

3. Women notice if the daily experience of work is rewarding. "This sounds like a no-brainer," Helgesen notes, "but many organizations tend to emphasize abstractions when offering incentives and rewards rather than supporting an employee's ability to enjoy the daily practice of work."

Example: In the authors' survey on differences in how men and women perceive, define, and pursue satisfaction in the workplace, they found that women are less likely to be motivated by what a job might lead to in the future if they also perceive that job as offering a low quality of life in the present.

 

4. Women notice when collegiality is not valued. Many companies, the authors observe, have learned to speak the language of teamwork and collaboration, but their policies do nothing to support it.

Example: In most sales units, providing support to help a team member meet a goal is neither recognized nor rewarded. People are instead graded and ranked on their individual achievements.

 

5. Women notice when other women's suggestions get overlooked in a meeting. They see it as a sign of disrespect to women in general.

Example: Jill offers an idea at a sales conference. No one responds. Ten minutes later, Jim makes the same suggestion, using different words. This happens all the time. Men who notice have a great opportunity to show their support for women by speaking up: "Great idea, Jim! I see you're building on what Jill suggested."

 

Final Thoughts
I particularly recommend Rezvani's book for young women starting out in their careers and The Female Vision for established career women who have been tempted to say, "I decided it just wasn't worth it."

 

 

Check out all our book reviews in Quintessential Reading: Career and Job Book Reviews.

 

 

Maximize your career and job-search knowledge and skills! Take advantage of The Quintessential Careers Content Index, which enables site visitors to locate articles, tutorials, quizzes, and worksheets in 35 career, college, job-search topic areas.

 

 

 

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