It’s Time to Win Together

We have a lot of work to do to make American businesses truly diverse and inclusive — and to thus unleash the economic growth, higher returns, and greater innovation that ‌research tells us diversity drives. Public policy work, work in changing company cultures, and work in challenging gender expectations all top the list. 

But there’s something else every woman can do starting now. 

No, it’s not to work harder, or to adjust our styles to be less threatening, or to find a graceful way to deal with people who talk over us, or to make our requests for raises less demanding. 

It’s to recognize that some of the “lessons” we’ve learned about how to get ahead haven't served us well; that we've been fed a steady diet of “money lies.”

The first “money lie” that needs to go: the rock-solid belief that women can sidestep the systemic issues listed above with some grit, some pluck, some good cheer, and the right career self-help book with the right “to-do list for career advancement.” The underlying message: “If I, the provider of this career to-do list, can make it to the top, then so can you. I’m living proof. And if you don’t make it to the top, you must not have followed the list correctly.”

Does it feel empowering? Yes. 

Is it successful? Not always. 

Because an unsaid-but-crystal-clear message of so many of these books: Business for women is an “individual sport.”

The problem with this? 

So many men have approached business as a team sport. They’ve promoted each other, hired each other, talked each other up, put each other on their boards, funded each other’s businesses, hired each other’s kids, sent each other RFPs, provided back-channel reference checks. You get the point. 

And the cold, hard truth is that a team most often wins over an individual. (There’s a reason they call it a “boys’ club,” isn’t there?)

Of course, the irony of this is that one of women’s and girls’ strengths is building and nurturing relationships. It’s why so many of us spent so much of our high school and college years traveling in packs. But we were somehow convinced to drop this tendency once we began climbing the corporate ladder; maybe because we looked up and saw that there were only one or two women in the C-suite, and most often no women of color. So we intuitively knew they had made the journey on their own, or worse, had been pitted against each other. 

And maybe it was because we saw that so many of those senior women were the proverbial Queen Bees, who, after making it to the top, didn't support other women in getting to the big table. And maybe it was because we also intuitively understood (as research has told us) that women who promoted other women — and people of color who promoted other people of color — were often penalized for it.

And also because of that aisle of books.

The solution? 

Changing the game to play it as a team sport. Networking, supporting each other, promoting each other, putting each other on our boards, funding each other, buying from each other, introducing each other to people we should know. And recognizing that by doing so, you’re not lowering the bar; that diversity raises the bar. And that the table at the top can grow. 

But even for women who achieve business success, there’s a further “money lie” that can eat away at our well-being: the belief that “women can have it all.” That we can achieve work-life balance, rock our careers, start that business, get that VC raise, score that board position — all in those three-inch heels and without breaking a sweat.

I know that I’m now supposed to quip, “Women can have it all; we just can’t have it all at once.” And that’s true. But I'd add to that: The expectation of having it all (or even of achieving “work-life balance”) is a means of raising the bar even higher — a bar that’s already higher for women in the workplace. 

I remember when I was CFO of Citi, being on a panel with other CFOs of global companies. I was the only woman on the panel, and I was the only one asked about “having it all.” I remember thinking that it wasn’t enough for me to have achieved the position of CFO, with all of the traps I’d avoided along the way; but that I was expected to clear the additional, even higher hurdle of “having it all.” 

Which is why I took to joking that my goal was to be successful in the workplace — to make it to the C-suite — but to just be an average / mediocre / fine / 50th percentile mom. 

To be clear, that doesn’t mean I don’t love my children; I love them almost more than I can stand. Or that I wasn’t there for them when they needed me; both of them had health scares and I turned into a mamma bear, advocating for them and navigating them through those times. It did mean that I didn’t do the “make homemade cookies at midnight for tomorrow’s class play.” And it meant that I didn’t feel guilty about sending along store-bought baked goods instead. (Now that they’re old enough, it’s become clear that my mothering approach didn’t turn them into delinquents.)

The message of these “money lies” is that our issues getting ahead rest on our shoulders — that somehow, it’s our own, individual fault that we’re unsuccessful while the system gets zero blame. It’s a tactic that can serve to keep us apart and believing we need to be “empowered.”

But women don’t need to be “empowered”; we have power, something that we clearly demonstrated this summer as women across generations stepped into their financial power. We bought tickets to Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Barbie and caused economic earthquakes. We used our money as the freedom to leave bad relationships during what was dubbed “the summer of divorce.” We pushed our industries further, whether we advocated to close pay gaps as athletes or took our company public as CEOs. We can keep the momentum going by continuing to use our financial power. And we can increase that power, too, by considering how we spend money, how we invest it, and who we invest it with. This summer was the blueprint, so let’s run with it.

Because, as we like to say at Ellevest: “Nothing bad happens when women have more money.”

If you’re reading this, you’re ready to flex your financial power. And Ellevest’s team of all-women financial advisors can help you build women up while you build your wealth.

• Book a complimentary 15-minute call with an Ellevest financial planner to learn how you can invest for impact.

• Learn more about investing with Ellevest to hit your goals while supporting companies that do the right thing by women.

This article was originally shared on Chief's blog, Path to the C-Suite.