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4 Tips for Succeeding as a Woman in Male Dominated Career Field

Today’s post comes from a guest blogger, Sara Beth Wilcox. Sara Beth is Project Manager with a large construction company.

With high aspirations to be an architect, I went to Auburn University and spent a year in the program before my professors told me what I already knew: I was not a good fit. I switched to Building Science and found immediately that it had all the things that made me want to be an Architect and was a better fit for my interests and skills in organizing and scheduling activities in a sequence to reach a finished product.

As a reflect on my work, there are four key observations and advice from my first ten years working as a female in a sea of males on construction sites:

1. Shake it off. People are going to assume, and usually will ask if you are the secretary when they walk into a construction jobsite trailer. Once people are informed that you are not the secretary, they usually have additional comments about the fact that you are a female in construction. Sometimes these folks are genuinely interested in what got you interested in construction, sometimes their comments are mean and intended to be so. Work to learn how to discern between the two and when you encounter the latter, let it roll off your back then get in your car and turn on Taylor Swift’s “Shake it off”. I find it impossible to remain angry after a good “haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate …” sing along.

2. You can be a part of the team and still be you. You can be a part of the team without having to be “one of the guys”. About 99% of my coworkers hunt. I do not. And I do not have to hunt for them to like me. Support your team by sharing in their excitement when they kill the big buck or call in the turkey but do not try to tag along or fake interest unless you genuinely enjoy it. Have your own interest and use those to your advantage. In addition to already mentioning Taylor Swift, I am going to further perpetuate the female stereotype here: I really love to bake. And, I have found that my co-workers and field staff are usually more willing to help me when I bring homemade cookies to a meeting, this is known as the ultimate win-win.

3. Be real. I was at a conference recently speaking on a panel with other women in construction. A fellow female panelist advised the high school students we were talking to: ”NEVER let them see you cry”, the “them” referring to male counterparts. I was more than a little taken aback by this statement and disagree completely. We all deal with things differently. Unfortunately, when I am stressed I cry. I wish it wasn’t true but I have tried my hardest and there’s just no getting around that knot in my throat when I experience a major disappointment or setback at work. This does not happen on a regular basis, but it has happened and will happen again. I try to seek privacy but sometimes it is just too late. I am not ashamed by the fact that I deal with stress differently than my male peers, it is who I am.

4. Work hard; comparisons aren’t necessary. Construction is hard work. It is physically and emotionally (see above) taxing on me. Do I have to work harder to prove myself because I am female? Do I make the same as my male co-workers? I honestly have no idea. (I am able to focus less on fair wages because I trust the company I work for. I recognize not everyone has this luxury and am not suggesting that it should be overlooked if you think as a female you are making less than your male counterparts.) I work hard because I love what I do, I do not want to let my co-workers down, and because it is the right thing to do for my company. Someone smart once said “Comparison is the thief of Joy.” So true, and it’s also the thief of productivity. The less time you spend comparing yourself as a female to your male coworkers, the more time you have to give your job your all!

Be Yourself. Work Hard. And don’t spend much time thinking about being a female in a male dominated industry. When you do come across something that distinguishes you from your male counterparts: recognize it, embrace it, then get back to work!

Are you a female or a male in an industry dominated by the other gender? What is the best advice you have for navigating in your role?

April 12, 2016
Thank you for a great 2015!
2015 has been a great year for Horizon Point Consulting thanks to our wonderful clients and partners! We have been fortunate to meet and work with some great people and organizations, partner with innovative companies, and continue our own professional development to better serve our clients.

As a thank you to our clients and friends, and in keeping with our Give Back Value,of supporting organizations and causes that work to create passion and productivity by putting people first, we have made contributions to these two organizations:

The Neighborhood Christian Center

Decatur City Schools Foundation

Both organizations work in some capacity to improve the workforce in our community through innovative and results-driven programs.

In other news, we were honored this year to be selected as a finalist in the BBB Torch Award for Ethics in the Small Business Category from the Better Business Bureau serving North Alabama.

We look forward to 2016 and offer these pieces of advice as you prepare and plan for the New Year:
We’d like to end the year with a look back on our Top 10 blog posts of the year:
We thank you for following us in 2015 and hope to see you back in the New Year!
December 29, 2015
3 Steps for Driving Employee Engagement through Personalization

Remember the wind chime, the umbrella, the party, snacks and bonus check in our last post?

Well during the corporate foray of employee rewards and recognition efforts, everyone in the department, regardless of their level of involvement in the project, got the wind chime and the umbrella and the party and the snacks and, yes, the bonus check.

In addition to the one size fits all approach whether earned or not, although an umbrella at some point is going to come in handy, and the wind chimes do actually still hang in my backyard almost ten years later, no one asked me, or anyone else if we particularly wanted any of it or we might have preferred say a rain jacket or maybe a decorative flag.

You see, one of the main tricks of employers who do the employee engagement game well know that perks and benefits should be personalized, fitting with each individual’s motivational preferences based on their personalities, interests and place in life.

As The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Todaystates,

“Rather than a standard package of health, wealth, and paid time off, companies can provide employees with a budget and a widely diverse set of options. These can range from sponsoring paid community service time overseas to allowing for credits to buy a hybrid car or even financially supporting an increased personal skill, such as learning a new language. The options are endless.”

So if you want to focus on making it personal, here are three steps:

1. Ask. Ask and ask often what employees want.   You need to do this in aggregate and individually. We suggest you design a survey to ask employees what they want and value in order to design overall benefit package options and structure. However, each person should be asked individually by their manager what things actually motivate them and what situations they are experiencing in their life and in work that cause one thing to be more motivational over another. For a list of motivational factors we use, email us and we’ll send you a copy.

2. Create. Create a package of program options based on survey results of what people want inline with what is fitting with your organization’s budget.   The above quote goes on to say, “How to fund this? In one survey, Millennials indicated that they are willing to make trade-offs in terms of base salary in order to have a job that fits with their values.”

In addition, some of the benefits/perks you see people want may cost little to nothing such as flexible work schedules and the ability to work remotely. These options in many cases have been shown to increase the bottom-line through productivity instead of decrease it.

3. Evaluate.   Evaluate if your program is working to drive employee engagement. We recommend usingGallup’s 12 engagement questions for this. Regardless of the mechanism you use to measure employee engagement, these results should be positively correlated with desirable overall business results such as increased profits that every organization tracks. More on these business results that should be seen in next week’s post…

Are your rewards and benefits personalized? If so, what positive results have you seen?

If you like this post, you may also like:

The Best Way to Thank Employees is to Make it Personal

Want to keep great employees? Know how to compensate them.

October 8, 2015
It Doesn’t Matter How and Where Work Gets Done. The Death of Office Space, Office Hours and the Employee-Employer Relationship.

My brother started a new job in business development for an international company about six months ago. His boss lives in Toronto. He lives in Memphis, TN. In fact, he didn’t meet his boss until after he was hired. He works from home, or his car, or an airplane, or a hotel room, a Starbucks or really anywhere as long as he has a WIFI connection and a cell phone, it doesn’t matter where he is.

We at Horizon Point just finished a project on wage analysis. Neither I nor our other full-time employee did any of the number crunching for it. The data analysis was done by a contract employee who works comp projects for us from time to time. She lives two hours away and has a full-time job by day. I never saw her once face-to-face throughout this project. I have met her once in person two years ago.

In reading Start Something that Matters by Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes (read further insights from his work here) it was interesting to learn that when he first started, everything was done out of his small apartment in Venice Beach, California. He asked a coffee shop if he could use their prominent address as his business address to receive mail. He emphasized several times how office space is simply a waste of money.

What do all of these illustrations point to? The world of commerce doesn’t care how or where or who gets work done, it just cares that is done, and done with quality, of course.

Our first inclination is to think the reason for this is because the worker wants it. Newer generations are “demanding” more flexibility and we live in a time where technology allows this to work. In fact, the search for the keyword “remote” work has increased 85% over the last two years on indeed.com. While this may be true, the reality of why these shifts are taking place is simple. It makes bottom-line business sense.

In a study highlighted in HR Magazine, of those who telework, “77% reported greater productivity while working offsite, 23% are willing to work longer hours from home than they would onsite, and 42% feel just as connected with colleagues as if they were working on the premises.”

Contract labor will continue to increase as the employer/employee relationship “costs” too much for both the individual and the organization. Because of this, people will be working multiple “jobs” for multiple “employers” at any given time and over their lifespan.

Devoted “office space” in many obsolete in some industries where it is an expense that isn’t needed. Rising shared office space models will continue to grow and become the norm and people will continue to work more from home.

If you’re a part of an organization (more on what this means for the individual stay tuned for our post on June 30^thby guest blogger Stephanie Siebel) consider these steps to adapt to these changes in order to stay competitive in the war on talent and on the war for your bottom line:

1. Assess your “workflex” against peers in your industry. To do this, visit whenworkworks.org/workflex-assessment. Not all industries are created equal when it comes to tapping into these trends. For example, many of our manufacturing clients can’t tell an employee to go make a machine run to produce a “widget” from their couch- one day maybe- but you need to consider how you compare with your industry peers when considering how, where and who gets work done. Are you behind the times?

2. Shift your paradigm of thinking by analyzing what is really necessary to get work done at a high quality. Make a list of all the things that are absolutely necessary to meet customer or client needs. You’ll find that often a permanent physical location, an employee that works only for you all the time and/or specific hours they work, all of which can eat up a substantial amount of capital, isn’t needed. Are you stuck in the way things have always been?

3. Analyze changes to the way work is structured from a cost/benefit perspective. You’re paying an employee how much in benefits? Do they value those benefits, do they need them? Would they prefer to have the flexibility to work from home helping to better meet their family needs because their spouse has the benefits their family needs? This is an individual cost/benefit example, but the cost/benefits can be weighed on a larger, corporate scale in terms of real financial costs. Do your research and present the facts. The whenworkworks.org website can help with this.

4. Make changes gradually. Try out a contract arrangement with certain duties you think would cater to that type of arrangement. Experiment with your office hours to see if you need to be open from the typically 8 am- 5 pm hours. Implement and assess knowing that all changes don’t have be set in stone and can be implemented gradually.

What is one step you can take today to make your “workplace” more flexible?

Like this post? You may also like:

I may have adult ADD but I wouldn’t trade it for anything: Refusing to choose between work and life

The Best Way to Thank Employees is to Make it Personal

Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

June 16, 2015
If You Want to Make a Difference, Start a Business Not a Charity

“An idea hit me: Why not create a for-profit business to help provide shoes for these children? Why not come up with a solution that guaranteed a constant flow of shoes rather than being dependent on kind people making donations? In other words, maybe the solution was entrepreneurship not charity.” Blake Mycoskie, TOMS Shoes

Although Blake and his TOMS shoes have spurred the whole concept of one-for-one business models, he isn’t alone nor the first to consider how business can be a cause.

With decreasing government funding for charitable causes (and I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing) and so many charities competing for individual’s attention, people who want to make a difference may be better off being entrepreneurs rather than social workers or not-for-profit managers. Blake’s quote tells us why: sustainability. Want to help, then you have to have a continuous flow of revenue to do so.

There are three key ways we see businesses aligning with this idea:

1. The TOMS Model.- One-for-one models.   Buy something, something is given. Simple as that. It’s done with shoes, water, eyeglasses, blankets, meals, vaccines, even condoms. The list goes on. However, in the wake of business as a cause through one-to-one initiatives, there is speculation that these models may actual hurt in the long run by sabotaging local economies.

2. The Microsoft Model- Make a lot of money so you can give a lot of money.   It’s simple, make a lot of money so that you can give away a lot of money (and time) to support needs. What do you think Bill and Melinda Gates spend most of their time doing now?   It isn’t designing computer software. It is working to meet the needs across the globe through their foundation.   Many for-profit companies, large and small, operate charitable foundations, while others give a certain percentage of their earnings to charity.

3. The Patagonia Model- Promote a social cause through your company message, product(s) and profits. With a desire to reduce consumption and waste the impacts our environment Patagonia started this campaign (see image below- subscribers click through) What happened? Profits are up. They sell fewer jackets that cost more, and should last forever, and by doing this they build a loyal brand of followers who are interested in the same thing they are, conservation.

In all of these cases, the purpose is dual: the profit and what the profit can do for the purpose.

In reality though, capitalism or free enterprise systems (with certain controls) where there is the incentive of profit to be made, is THE economic system that actually may be the single best way to reduce poverty in this world and fight the ills that result from it. History has shown that the to be best method for bringing a society, and therefore individuals, out of poverty is to give a person the opportunity to work for something worth working for- namely a profit (and this may be why the TOMS model may actually be hurting local economies). Because what does that profit produce? Self-sufficiency and independence. Then, some people will keep all they earn for him or herself, but most, as we can see by many models, find a way to give much of it back for the greater good.

So what should you or your organization do if you want to start or focus a business on capitalism with a conscience?

1. Identify your greater purpose. What is it that you want to impact and how is your business or how can you position a business to uniquely meet that purpose? Is it tackling poverty, world health issues, conservation, education, entrepreneurship? Define specifically what is you want to impact and get it on paper. You can’t move on to your how of impact until you define your what and why.

2. Learn.

a. Learn by reading about these different models and determine what the best fit for your organization.   For the one-to-one model, read Blake’s Start Something That Matters as well as the pieces that show how this model may actually hurt- such as When Helping Hurts. For the Microsoft model, read Bill Gate Sr.’s, book Showing Up For Life. For a local model, read our Give Back Piece on Valley Rubber, LLC. For a piece on several models like Patagonia, read This FastCompany article.

b. Learn through education. Like Casey Gerald said in his graduation speech from Harvard Business School, if you want to find a method for helping the most today, then go to business school. You may not need to actually go to business school, but you do need to know how to design a business model that meets a market need through your product or service.

3. Create or revise your business plan so that it meets both the market need and the greater purpose you have in mind. For some great resources to do a business plan, visit score.org.

What cause is closest to your heart and what business(es) are doing something about it? My guess is you buy from them.

June 9, 2015

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