subject: Can These Seven Secrets for Corporate Women Help You to Stand-Up and Stand-Out? [print this page] Can These Seven Secrets for Corporate Women Help You to Stand-Up and Stand-Out?
It's vitally important for corporate women to build a strong thought leadership position within their organization as well as in the marketplace. It's the most effective way to grow your business and help corporate women forge strong relationships with customers and build better relationships with key stakeholders. It helps to position you as more of a strategic ally to your clients as opposed to a commodity.
As you think about expanding your business, perhaps into global markets, thought leadership is a great way to expand cross borders and remove barriers to your success. Executive management and corporate women need to focus on two critical things - authenticity and audience
1. Authenticity - means knowing yourself. As corporate women, what are your strengths and values? It's asking and answering. - What do I care about? How do I want to change the world? What matters to me? What can my business do to help?
2. Audience - be externally focused - look at patterns and trends in the marketplace. What could be the impact on you and your customers? Raise questions about this with your customers. Take a position on issues that may concern them.
3. Differentiate yourself from other corporate women in order to stand up and stand out - standup for what you believe in, stand up for your point of view
The business world seems to embrace corporate women leaders who stand up and stand out for something. It also creates additional to grow your business. You are in the minority and clearly can stand out amongst the competition. Only 14 % of corporate women head Fortune companies and women in top, visible positions are still rare. If you are able to break through by differentiating yourself, your upside success potential is high.
For corporate women, there are four additional key strategies to becoming a successful thought leader.
4. Have a point of view - raise issues and give intelligent solutions base upon key trends and market data.
5. Focus on conversation - engage others in conversation paying particularly to their views and agenda. The more conversation you have, the more likely you will be seen as a person to do business with. Face-to-face conversation with other corporate women is always preferred but if distance is a challenge, social media tools will suffice.
6. Build trust - make sure people know you. Who you are? What you stand for? What you value and how your actions relate to that? As corporate women, it's not what you say but how you interact with others that creates the trusting relationships in the hearts and minds of customers.
7. Continually get data - about where you are versus where your customer and the marketplace want you to be. Perhaps design an interesting survey asking women about things that are critical to them. Engage others. Have conversations with corporate women who you admire. Ask them what they care about. People like to be asked their point of view. People rarely turn you down and are willing to speak with you. Build offerings around what you have heard. Focus on women who are future focused. You now become a thought leader to those individuals that you interviewed. You can become a thought leader to others
So, your goal should be to stop being a commodity - It's not what can I say but how can I be of value to the customer. Become their strategic ally so they will trust you, depend upon you and become your best customers or source of referrals to other corporate women and leaders.
To accomplish this, the most valuable tool for corporate women is to take the time to ask how is it going. How you interact is extremely helpful. Respect their input and take action based upon their information. This shows people that their information is meaningful and important to you. People realize that you value and use their strategies. Always ask, how am I doing? What could I be doing more of? How can I help you get more successful?
