How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise, Promotion, or Job

In How Women Rise, authors Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith, Ph.D., explore how women can reach greater heights in the workplace. We each have a different perspective on what it means to rise, and the authors acknowledge early on that the definition is personal: “Maybe for you it’s moving to a higher, more lucrative position. Maybe it’s finding a wider playing field or getting more recognition for your work. Maybe you want more say in the direction your organization will take in the future. Perhaps you want to create a new business or product. Maybe you want to instill a spirit of joy among your collaborators, customers, and clients. Or you’re fired by the desire to help other women get ahead.”

Once the book examines what rising means, it turns its attention to the self-sabotaging behavioral habits that keep us stuck and limit that ascent. The authors explain that “women face specific and different roadblocks from men as they advance in the workplace. In fact, the very habits that helped women early in their careers can hinder them as they move up.” The 12 habits highlighted are:

1. Reluctance to claim your achievements
2. Expecting others to spontaneously notice and reward your contributions
3. Overvaluing expertise
4. Building rather than leveraging relationships
5. Failing to enlist allies from day one
6. Putting your job before your career
7. The “perfection trap”
8. The “disease to please”
9. Minimizing
10. “Too much” (i.e., too much emotion, too many words, too much disclosure)
11. Ruminating
12. Letting your radar distract you

Many of these habits resonated as I read through them. For example, habit 8 (the disease to please) struck a chord with me. When I’ve taken personality assessments such as Gallup’s CliftonStrengths assessment (formerly StrengthsFinder) or the PrinciplesYou assessment, traits such as harmony, empathy, and agreeableness tend to bubble to the top. I deeply value collaboration among team members and leveraging each other’s distinctive talents to reach greater success. A dark side of these strengths is that I can avoid conflict or become stuck in indecision because I want to people-please. Setting stronger boundaries, being more disciplined and data-driven in decision-making, and setting having clarity about expectations are a few ways that the book recommends to combat this behavior.

Break the routine

Being aware of which habits might be holding you back is the first step to overcoming them. Each chapter focuses on a habit, including anecdotes from women in the workplace facing these obstacles and tips for taking action to break these habits. In the final section, the authors present a few strategies for making lasting change:

• Start with one thing: Break down a problem behavior into discrete and specific habits, then focus on making small changes one at a time. This gives you the opportunity to practice each behavior until it becomes automatic and long-lasting. Moreover, it helps build momentum. Something that can help with this is knowing your purpose. What do you want to achieve? What most inspires you? What is your why? Figuring that out and being able to clearly articulate it can help you identify which behavior you might benefit from addressing first.
• Don’t do it alone: Enlist at least one person you trust to give feedback and help address a habit you want to change. One coaching template for this engagement involves four components: listening (being present and focused when absorbing feedback), thanking (to demonstrate humility and limit pushback), following up (keeping your coach in the loop and expressing how you’re using the coach’s suggestions), and advertising (making everyone around you aware of how you’re modifying a behavior and broadcasting your commitment). Peer coaching is a variation on enlisting help, turning it into a reciprocal activity. You can collaborate regularly with a friend or colleague to hold each other accountable for specific behavioral changes and support each other on your own journeys.
• Let go of judgment: You are your own worst critic, but you are also your greatest champion. When you fail or fall short of expectations, forgive yourself, quiet your inner critic, and take what you learned to move forward into the future. One of the techniques mentioned that I liked was creating a “to-don’t list,” a list of behaviors you want to let go of. These actions or activities might “eat up your time, keep you trapped, or offer minimal reward,” and listing them will help bring “intentionality to what you want to say no to.” As someone who lives by my to-do list to stay organized and maintain progress, I’ve found this approach useful in becoming better at delegation, managing relationships, and reducing the number of moments I feel overwhelmed.
• Remember what got you here: The 12 habits the authors identify are rooted in strengths. There are healthy ways to express them, and you can continue to embrace the characteristics that contributed to your success while shifting behaviors that might be getting in your way.

While acknowledged in the book, the authors did not fully discuss systemic biases in which particular groups experience disadvantages, whether that is driven by gender, race, culture, sexuality, age, religion, or another part of our identity. I would like to have learned how that intersectionality influences our ability to push back against these habits.

Still, I found How Women Rise useful in building greater self-awareness of common behavioral obstacles women face. The book serves as a useful starting point for having more personalized, relevant discussions about how to rise in the workplace.