Making an Impact

Most women I know have, at some point in their career, been told they need to make more impact.

Whether they’re just starting out in their career, stepping into a new field or stepping up to a more senior role, receiving this feedback can be frustrating. It typically comes up after a meeting where the person has failed to:

• significantly influence the direction of the conversation
• achieve particular objectives for the session
• make a strong impression on the group
• have their ideas or views considered and/or adopted.

As a coach, where I see women in this situation my response is typically two-fold:

1. exploring with them what they might be able to do to increase their impact (which I’ll cover below); and
2. reminding them that there are often two types of bias they’re having to overcome in these meetings— workplace deference favouring the most senior person in the room, and personal biases in favour of (typically) older, white men. The talented, younger Asian woman struggling to make an impact in the context of this disadvantage needs to remember that it’s not her shortcoming, it’s theirs.

So back to what might be done. The women I’ve worked with have found the following tactics really effective:

• Prepare well. Not only do you need to know what you’re talking about to make an impact, but you need to be prepared. Know what you want to achieve from the meeting. Go over the agenda and begin forming opinions in advance so that you can have speaking promps at your fingertips.
• Speaking early. Comments made early in a meeting tend to anchor the conversation and shape everything that follows it — so make sure you don’t wait until the end to share something that should have defined the conversation. If you don’t share important thoughts early, the discussion may go in a completely different direction and then you may feel unable to contribute without seeming contrary or unhelpful. Also, consider that ideas shared early are the most debated and receive the most (useful) feedback: you owe it to your ideas to share them early.
• Being the person asking the questions and summing things up. If you find people are addressing your boss instead of you, or if you’re finding you aren’t influencing the conversation much, then change your role. Can you chair? Can you set or feed into the agenda? If you can find a way to be the person asking the questions, participants in the conversation will be unable to avoid addressing you when answering them. Finally, we know that, because of the peak-end effect, people remember conversation highlights and endings — so don’t clam up once you’ve said your piece, continue as an active participant in the conversation all the way to the end. If you have a weak chair (or none), then a great way to end with high impact is to be the person who sums things up — shaping the outcome by running through the meeting conclusions, next steps and calls-to-action.
• Creating space for their voice. If you’re still struggling to get a word in, or are feeling like you’re in the shadow of others, you need to create space for your voice. Find allies among the other attendees and co-opt them to your plans to change the dynamic; ask to switch up the format (perhaps to one of the Liberating Structures); and work with your boss so that s/he’s happy speaking less and later in the conversation (or, even better, not attending at all).

The women I’ve worked with prefer to find a natural opening in a conversation, or to be invited to speak. As British women, they were raised to be polite and so have worried that they might misjudge the situation and come across as rude. Nonetheless, these women moved out of their comfort zones and, with the strategies above, increased their impact in meetings.

Most of them are now in positions of authority, changing workplace and meeting culture so that those that come after them don’t have to fight quite so hard for airtime. As Sheryl Sandberg says,

We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.

If you’re hearing that you need to make more impact, then try some of the strategies above. You deserve to be heard.