The Bold Maneuver
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The Bold Maneuver

The Ambitious Woman's Playbook for Achieving Greater Success

Callie Cummings

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eBook - ePub

The Bold Maneuver

The Ambitious Woman's Playbook for Achieving Greater Success

Callie Cummings

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About This Book

The Bold Maneuver: The Working Woman's Playbook helps women understand the factors that produce success outside of education, experience, and hard work, and gives them the high achiever's playbook.

You know you're ready to be the leader you've always dreamed of being, and you're ready to make the impact you set out to make when you started your career, but how do you get past the feeling you're in another episode of The Office? In The Bold Maneuver, Callie Cummings provides an engaging no-nonsense, non-apologetic playbook for creating influence and earning respect at work. With an MA in Global Leadership and thousands of leadership hours under her belt, including leading an all-male combat force in Afghanistan, Callie shares life-tested strategies for finding your voice and making it in the professional world as a woman. If you can't seem to find the balance between being nice and making a shift happen, The Bold Maneuver leads you through the process of:

  • Deciphering the office politics that no one likes to talk about
  • Letting go of the fear of being labeled
  • Creating influence and moving up

Callie helps women find their power and voice through all the struggles that come with real life and work. If you're tired of all the fluff and are ready be taken seriously, The Bold Maneuver is the book for you.

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Information

Year
2018
ISBN
9781642791372
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Introduction

You’ve been working your buns off since the day you started your job. You searched for the right company, waited patiently for the right position to come open, jumped through all of the hiring hoops to finally land your dream job of the moment. It was the right fit at this point in your career. You took it knowing it would lead you to better opportunities of better pay and better positions down the road. Everything seemed to line up just the way you hoped it would. But now, you’re a few years into the position and you’re realizing the dream job is a B-I-G disappointment. You’re not making the impact you think you should be making, and want to make. Your work is being undermined, someone else is taking credit for your ideas, you’re pulling crazy hours unlike your teammates, and your promised time off and bonuses have been put on hold because there are other, more pressing, matters.
The real struggle though is feeling like you have to be someone other than yourself to get things done. Why is it that as a woman in the workforce if you’re direct and assertive you’re considered a bossy, but if you’re easygoing and nice you get walked all over? You’ve tried both angles and both have failed miserably. And on top of that, neither one felt like you!
Then you have the good ol’ boys club, which is very much a thing of the present, not the past
 and the women around you rarely cheer each other on, instead cutting each other down. There seems to be no winning. University business classes somehow skipped over the whole office politics reality that somehow has the ability to make or break you. You’re starting to realize why sitcoms like The Office are so popular. In fact, after your friend laughed at your last work story they suggested you watch a specific episode that depicted your exact situation. You were always good at building relationships, but somehow things just aren’t clicking with your co-workers and you’ve realized you’re in a constant state of self-doubt about how you interact at work.
The same comments run through your head every day,
“What am I doing wrong?”
“How could they promote him/her?”
“Maybe I should just quit.”
This work scenario and feeling is way more common than you think. It isn’t you, and you’re definitely not alone in feeling this way. In fact, in a study done by Hunter College professor Pamela Stone, of 54 high-achieving women, 90% left their careers due to workplace problems. Crazy! Here you are feeling alone, and guilty for feeling the way you do, when in fact the majority of successful women feel the same way. You’re either too bossy, too nice, too emotional, too this or too that. There seems to be no sweet spot for winning, for success.
It seems that women everywhere are missing a very important piece of knowledge. A piece so important that it’s not only hindering their success, it’s making them give up on their dreams.
What if I told you that this dilemma of workplace personality, balance of too nice and too bossy, is solvable? I mean there are thousands of examples of successful women making huge impacts across disciplines. They’ve uncovered the answer, but what is it and why is it not more widely known?
The truth is, there is no one solution that is a one-size-fits-all solution. People are complex, making the world we live in complex, and creating complex problems such as this. Women who have successfully found the solution to this problem have one thing in common whether they know it or not: they are strategists. They play a bigger-than-life chess game, they see systems everywhere they turn and identify opportunities and challenges, and make decisions from a strategic point of view. They have “rules” and/or “plays” that facilitate their movement through life.
Some people are inherently more strategic, and thus have an advantage to the complexity that we live in. In this book, I’m going to teach you how to become strategic in how you communicate and take action at the office. If you’re scared by the word “strategy” or see it as a dirty word, the good news is that I am bringing it to you in a way that is digestible and exciting, and not only that, but strategy can be learned. This book is a playbook for very good reason. I want you to look at your work environment and problems as a game you’re trying to win. If you’re like me and you take life a little too seriously sometimes, a little game theory can lighten the load and help you conquer the ups and downs that come with real life and work.
I had always been one of those people who said, “I hate playing games.” Life is not a game. I saw playing games as a negative and destructive means for bad people to run over good people. It took several years and a few wrong turns to realize that I had it all wrong. To make a difference, make an impact, create positive change and get ahead, you have to understand that they’re playing a game with or without you, and they’re playing to win. Winning could mean getting the next promotion, or being able to create a new team or new division, but you have to know that most people are playing the game of self-preservation.
We are all playing the game, you may not recognize it or don’t want to admit to it, but I guarantee that you have multiple people currently playing the game against you, without you. If you’re thinking to yourself that you’re not competitive, or strategy seems a bit farfetched for you, I encourage you to remember why you picked up this book. You want to have success in your career and enjoy the journey, and what you’ve been doing hasn’t been giving you the result you desire. If you want to achieve your goals, make a difference, and have success on your terms, then it’s time to start making the necessary plays to get there, and this is exactly what this book is set up to do.
To achieve greatness in work and life we have to make bold maneuvers. To initiate change, we have to learn and execute the right plays. The Bold Maneuver is the strategy to push you through your career roadblocks through active initiative, and help you attain the success in your career that you’ve been striving for. It is named the Bold Maneuver because it takes courage, discipline, and boldness to shift how you perceive and react to the world around you. In the following chapters, you will uncover the six plays necessary to initiate and achieve the Bold Maneuver at work. The One-on-One will teach you why building relationships on an individual level with your co-workers is the key to deciphering personalities at work. The Oprah will provide strategies to create buy-in and influence from your peers and bosses that will make you more respected. The Smarter, Not Harder will reframe your perception of hard work to help you climb your corporate ladder. The Alter Ego will provide you a differing perspective and help you build your authentic work persona. The Katniss will help you increase your overall confidence or appearance of confidence to get things done. And the Ice Princess will help you understand how you’re self-sabotaging your own success and how to overcome the mental blocks to change your habits.
Women have the ability to create change, and to make a better future for themselves and society; yet in so many cases women leave the corporate, non-profit, and government sectors before they make the difference they started out to make. The frustration and office politics often leave them feeling like they’re on a mission impossible. This playbook is designed to help you stay on your path through all of the ups and downs so you can achieve the leadership positions and create the change you started out to make. The Bold Maneuver requires you to be bolder than you think you are, and more importantly, bolder than everyone else thinks you are.

The Story of Ice Princess

I always imagined myself one day being in a powerful position within the government or a large corporation. As a little girl I would see women in business suits with pin stripes and shoulder pads and be in awe of the power I thought they (must have) held. This may seem odd to some, most children have dreams of a specific job that they grow in and out of as they mature: a gymnast, a police officer, a marine biologist
. I, however, always knew I wanted to lead. Now, I obviously didn’t know the full extent of what a leader was when I was younger, I just knew I wanted to be one. In this third-grade photo of me you can see how I fashioned myself after these women.
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My mother still laughs at the fact that I would not budge when it came to this outfit choice. Look at those pink pin stripes and that bow tie broach! I just had to wear this for picture day! My entire life I have made decisions, sacrificed, and worked hard toward my desire to be a leader. I started working in business at the age of 14 hoping to get a head start in experience. I diversified my experience when I was young, from working in pharmaceutical inventory to grocery store customer service, from a government-run senior program to a large law firm, all before the age of 20. All in an attempt to gain experience from a young age to build me into my dream of being that “leader.”
Coming out of university, I knew that I needed to go directly into grad school and continue my education to be eligible for future leadership opportunities. I had been working two to three jobs since I was 18, so I thought my work experience was good, but it would be helpful to have the higher education to go with it. It was fairly early in my master’s when I realized there was a huge discrepancy between what we were learning about leadership (theory) and how it is actually applied (practice). In theory, leaders showed great idealism, positivity, kindness, and directness. In practice, leadership is much more muddled. A tactic that works on one person to push them to the next level, rarely works on another. So much of what is taught in theory is statistics and averages, but in leadership practice so much of success is based on your ability to lead personalities. No matter your gender, being a manager and/or leader is tricky business. The gap between leadership theory and practice is wide because in universities we are taught to be idealists, and then we graduate and move into our first job and realize the realists rule the day.
Whether you’re in a worker bee position or a management position, at the end of the day your goal is what mine was, you want to be a leader. Leaders create change, and you want to be that change agent to make a positive difference. Understanding the gap between leadership theory and leadership practice is the first step to getting in the game.
In all of my work experience up to graduating with a master’s, I had never really had any issues at work. I was a worker bee, I knew what I was, I was told what to do and did it. It wasn’t until I started looking for growth opportunities as I started my career that I felt like something was off; something was different. My second job out of grad school was a United States Army officer. I learned very quickly in this male-dominant profession that “being me” wasn’t going to make me successful. Anything feminine about me, personality or demeanor, was going to work against me and not for me.
There is a story that sticks out in my mind when I decided to join the army. It was with a friend who had been a marine while I was at university. He was talking me through my officer application and said, “Women are looked at as two things in the Marines, probably the same for the army. You’re either a b**** or a whore. You can wait and have someone label you as one, or you can decide which one you want to be. Perception is reality, and if they perceive you as being a whore, you might as well forget even going in.”
That conversation made a huge imprint on my years in the army. To my surprise for the four years of my military service there was an underlying struggle between the perception of b**** or whore. My colleague could be the biggest prick you’ve ever encountered and everyone thought he was the greatest for it, he was a true leader. If I was direct and passionate, I was considered a stuck-up princess.
In my first year in the army, I had to attend an engineering school for my job. I was placed in a leadership position toward the end of school, and during this period I was nicknamed “Ice Princess” by a peer for being cold-hearted and ruthless. I had simply done the same thing everyone else had done, but it was “different” with me. Had I not been no-nonsense and direct, I would have been walked all over and seen as weak.
It was at this point, early in my military career, that I started thinking, “How much of a jerk do I have to be to be successful?” If I could figure this out, I could make my mark, I could be that big corporate executive or politician I had always wanted to be. I made this question my personal mission. No matter what situation I was in, what organization I was with, or where I was, I made decisions and moves to solve this question. The answer wasn’t what I thought it would be, and after many years of struggling, fighting the fight, and self-doubt, I realized I wasn’t the problem, my outlook on the problem was my problem.

Let The Chips Fall

The Ice Princess story from above is only the beginning to that story. My first realization about my outlook came several years after when I realized I had a chip on my shoulder. That conversation with my friend telling me I could choose “b*** or whore” made me view almost every situation as me vs. them, men vs. women, and it was self-sabotaging. I felt like every day was a fight. A fight over ego, a fight over fairness, a fight over perception. Every day felt like I was fighting my way through. And what I couldn’t understand, was that I was living in the twenty-first century, shouldn’t the fight be over? At least that’s what I thought when I entered the professional world. The issue was that subconsciously I was seeing every situation as a me-versus-them scenario. And while some situations were very much a gender issue, most of them were not. Most of the situations were personality differences, cultural differences, but with that chip on my shoulder, I limited my ability to see the real causes and symptoms.
When assessing situations, I thought I was being strategic, but my subconscious chip was limiting my depth of understanding. I felt like I was in middle school all over again with the office politics. I felt like I was set up for failure thinking the fight for fairness was over and done, and all I had to do was show up and work hard. You, like me, were likely told that if you work hard and do the right thing, you’ll be successful and have everything you want in life. You’ve likely already come to terms with that wonderful notion not being reality. Whether you have a similar chip on your shoulder, or a different one, no matter what the reason, it is important to identify it and let it roll off. It will sabotage your ability to grow in your career because you’re unable to solve problems at their roots.

The Plan vs. Reality

Reme...

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