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Think Bigger, Aim Higher

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

—MARY OLIVER

Anne headed marketing for the education division of an e-learning company. For eleven years, her job was to work with school systems to provide customized interactive materials to improve student performance. Anne had a reputation for being creative and energetic, and she earned the support of several key leaders, including the chief marketing officer (CMO), who hired her and was her direct supervisor.

Over the years, Anne became comfortable in her job; she earned a bit of autonomy for herself and created a lifestyle with predictable hours and the ability to work from home. She liked her job and even recalled a time when she felt poised and ready for bigger and better challenges at the company. But more recently, every time she thought about making a change or sponsoring a new project, she froze. She wanted to dream big and be dynamic, but she wasn’t even sure what that might look like. To make matters worse, the company had become mired by bureaucracy, which led to lackluster results in Anne’s unit.

After two years of sluggish sales, the board demanded action. The CEO fired the CMO, and Anne’s comfortable life was turned upside down. The new CMO reorganized the division and hired three new marketing executives. Anne found herself reporting to a new boss, instead of directly to the CMO. The new boss treated Anne as if she were part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Anne was stunned and felt as if she were being punished.

Anne tried to remain positive, working hard to win over her new boss. She put forward new ideas, but she couldn’t gain any traction. Anne was left wondering, what happened here?

Like many of the women we coach, Anne lost sight of her career goals for a time. She was talented and achieved enviable success, but then she hit a wall and became complacent. Anne did not have the time or the energy to make change happen for herself or for her department.

Anne’s story typifies the challenge many of us face when we first wade into higher levels of leadership: we fail to think big. It is hard work! Anne aimed low and stuck with the status quo instead of creating the change she knew needed to occur. As a result, the change happened to her.

THE UNWRITTEN RULE: Bigger Really Is Better

Let us coach you for a few minutes. Close your eyes and visualize yourself achieving everything you want for yourself professionally. Allow your mind to imagine two or three possible paths for your career. To make this exercise easier for you, we will add two conditions. First, you cannot remain in your current position. You must do something different, bigger, with broader impact. The second condition is this: no matter what you choose to do, you cannot fail. This is good news! Get busy and visualize some options for yourself. What would they look like? What would you be doing? Think bigger. Aim higher. What is the secret career goal you haven’t told anyone? What do you really want for yourself?

Thinking bigger is critical for several reasons.

1. It delivers big ideas. Big thinking signals change—it generates action. It gets us beyond the here and now and forces us to think about the future. Thinking bigger is associated with solving big problems and achieving big dreams.
2. It helps us attract followers. Big ideas are engaging and exciting. They inspire others to join our cause and they brand us as visionary leaders. People admire and follow individuals who are brave enough to imagine a bold future instead of thinking small.
3. It leads to bold decisions. Once we train our brain to think bigger, our lofty vision serves as the filter for future decisions. Thinking bigger helps us proceed courageously and dynamically.

Thinking bigger and aiming higher sets us up to have options and the courage to pursue them. Yet, this is admittedly challenging in a complex world in which we can easily become paralyzed by uncertainty and ambiguity. Like Anne, we need to summon a great deal of courage in order to supersize our thinking.

LIMITING BELIEFS That Lead to Small-Time Thinking

Many of us admire big thinkers, but we seldom see ourselves in that role. Why is that?

Limiting beliefs in women stem from multiple sources. One source is outdated gender stereotypes that box us into traditional gender roles: “Women are not supposed to be ambitious”; “Women should be nurturers, not leaders.” Limiting beliefs also originate in the dark place within ourselves where self-doubt and denial reside. In our work with women leaders, we focus on coaching women to replace the limiting beliefs they harbor about themselves with positive messages. We can learn to funnel our energy in a positive direction. All of us can take steps right now to change our limiting beliefs.

Before moving full steam into the specific tools that women can use to think bigger, let’s look at three common limiting beliefs and start to set them aside.

“I’m not naturally strategic”

A 2009 study by INSEAD professor Hermina Ibarra revealed that female leaders were superior to their male counterparts on many leadership and performance measures but they fell significantly behind in one key area: vision.¹ In our coaching conversations, we hear that women feel more comfortable implementing vision than formulating it and selling it to others. As one woman told us, “It feels easier to keep my head down and get the important work done. Setting the larger strategic agenda is a different matter altogether.”

This type of thinking reveals a confidence issue that has massive career implications. It’s no surprise that a study of more than forty-seven thousand global leaders found that the biggest single differentiator between top management and middle managers was their strategic vision.² Having strategic vision is a critical competency. Part of the disconnect for women may be a style issue. Women tend to be collaborative and work to create a consensus around big ideas as opposed to owning them themselves. While there is no doubt that female executives have big-picture vision, the challenge is giving ourselves permission to speak up and enroll others in our visions.

“I can’t think of myself as big”

One of us was coaching a young partner at an engineering firm. She was striving to gain traction as a leader and struggling to articulate a career path for herself. When pressed to think broadly and articulate an ideal future for herself three to five years out, she was stumped. “I can’t think of myself as big,” she said. “I feel stuck in the moment and I can’t envision landing in a larger role.”

This type of limiting belief is common. Most of the women we work with feel stuck at one time or another. There’s no question they are committed to building their careers, but everything from office politics and financial pressure to commitments at home and anxiety about world events can make them feel trapped in their current circumstances. Their careers can sometimes become unstuck on their own, when things inevitably calm down. Other times, people benefit from an intervention from a coach or mentor.

It’s vital for women to aim higher and envision a future state for themselves. A male executive friend of ours said, “You have to be able to outrun your headlights.” He meant that we need to see ourselves beyond the here and now. If we don’t see ourselves as “big,” no one around us will.

“I’m an impostor”

A coaching client of ours, Karen, fell victim to her limiting beliefs six years ago. Karen is a CPA and an accomplished partner at a large accounting firm. She had provided outstanding service to many medium-size and large clients over the years. However, when the firm nominated Karen as a candidate to be an engagement partner for a large and prestigious blue-ribbon client, she faltered. Karen was one of the two outstanding candidates that the firm was proposing to the client. The audit committee of the client’s board would interview both candidates and choose the one they thought was the best. Karen confided in her coach that she believed she was “not a good match” for the job. She had a litany of concerns, both rational and otherwise: “I am not as sophisticated as the board members on the Audit Committee. I get nervous in interview situations. I’m not good at small talk. I’m sure they will not pick me.”

Karen felt like an impostor. She believed that she was not as good as the firm said she was and that the audit committee would see right through her. After that, the firm would know she had been “faking it” all these years, and that would be the end of her career.

The impostor syndrome, a term coined by clinical psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Ament Imes in 1978, is a phenomenon in which very accomplished people are unable to believe and accept their own accomplishments. They believe they have “fooled” others into thinking they are more competent than they really are.³ Many successful women fall victim to the impostor syndrome, but it is a somewhat rare phenomenon for successful men.⁴ One reason is that the parameters of success in contemporary society are biased toward men.⁵ According to Psychology Today writers Satoshi Kanazawa and Kaja Perina, “Nobody recognizes women who are successful in female terms. So, part of the problem may be definitional.”⁶

Karen worked hard with her coach to rid herself of the extreme limiting beliefs. In preparation for the interview, she spent many hours reviewing information about the client and its history with the firm. She also worked on executive presence—right down to clothes, jewelry, and makeup—which was of particular concern to her. She even practiced entering the boardroom, shaking hands, managing introductions, and making small talk. All of this helped to build Karen’s self-confidence.

Most important, Karen worked on her psyche. With her coach’s help, she began to notice the negative thoughts she had about herself. She learned to catch herself when her inner voice told her something irrational, untrue, or belittling. Gradually, Karen learned positive thinking and self-talk.

When the day before the interview arrived, Karen called her coach. We asked her, “Are you feeling ready and prepared for tomorrow?” Karen answered, “Yes, I’m definitely ready. I feel great about my preparation and I feel great about myself as a candidate. I am convinced that I can do an outstanding job for this client. If they don’t pick me I can handle it, but I know they would be lucky to have me.”

Karen faced the impostor syndrome head on and put it behind her. We were delighted to see her conquer her limiting beliefs. For the record, the audit committee chose her as their new engagement partner, and she was a noted success in the role.

STRATEGIES for Thinking Bigger and Aiming Higher

Regina works in a pressure-cooker environment. She assists states in setting up multi-million-dollar disaster recovery projects and emergency response systems that enable the distribution of critical funds, program monitoring, and oversight that complies with federal regulations. It’s a highly complex job that saves lives, and Regina thrives on it. Yet it didn’t start out quite like this. Regina made it happen by thinking bigger, aiming higher, and courageously steering her career.

As a resident of Metairie, Louisiana, in 2005, Regina was distraught as she witnessed the widespread devastation delivered when Hurricane Katrina crippled the region. As part of the New Orleans metropolitan area, Metairie was in the epicenter of the storm. At the time, Regina was an oil and gas consultant for a big professional services firm, focusing on business opportunities in the Gulf Coast region. When she looked around following the storm, all she saw was stagnation.

“Nothing was moving. Not trash, not water, and especially not the money parishes and townships needed to start the long road to recovery.”

Regina was pleasantly surprised when her firm asked her to be part of a three-month project to help the State of Louisiana begin to make their disaster recovery efforts more efficient. She knew very little about government contracts and public works risk assessment. But she did understand how to connect the dots between problems and processes. She thrived in crisis situations and had a talent for finding solutions.

Regina saw a big opportunity to make things better. “We couldn’t speed up the trash pick-up ourselves or return people to their homes,” she recalled, “but we could find a way to get billions of dollars into the right hands faster.”

Regina and her team created a process to make government recovery funds available within ten days of a request. It was a dramatic improvement that required thinking differently. The bureaucratic roadblocks were significant, and there was potential for misappropriation of funds.

The twelve-week engagement stretched out to three years, and every second was a roller coaster ride. By then, Regina was hooked on the mission. The project was an aha moment for her, and she had no intention of returning to everyday management consulting.

Regina had a big dream, and she turned it into a vision to build a new practice at the firm that focused on crisis management and recovery.

For Regina, thinking bigger and aiming higher were pivotal steps along the path to achieving influence. For all of us, achieving influence requires that we have a bold vision to guide our actions. There are five strategies that we use with our coaching clients to help them create and sustain lofty visions.

1. Nurture your vision

Now that you have been practicing thinking bigger, you are getting close to creating a bold career vision for yourself. Don’t let go of it. Don’t tell yourself all of the reasons it won’t work. Your vision may be somewhat blurry or vague right now, but if you continue to nurture it, it will develop into a clear picture that guides your behavior and your decisions.

So how do you nurture your vision? First, you need to share that vision with others. One of the reasons we lose out on jobs and assignments is that we don’t declare our interest. If you have a bold vision, you need to tell people about it. The more you do that, the better you will become at making your case and enrolling others in your cause.

To nurture your vision, you must step outside your comfort zone. You must take the risk of owning your big idea before gaining full consensus from the group. You may need to stand firm when your ideas are challenged. In Regina’s case, she put her career on the line. She told us, “If this doesn’t work, I’ll need to leave the firm and reinvent myself.”

Nurturing your vision also requires the courage to act. As women, we need to communicate our vision without resorting to overanalysis. Many of us are armed with reports, case studies, and rigorous financial modeling. Are these things important? Sure. Can they sometimes be crutches that slow us down? Definitely. Nurturing your vision requires the courage to know when to set aside the PowerPoint slides and simply say what you believe in.

Similarly, nurturing your vision requires leaving your emotional baggage behind. One of the things we’ve learned through our coaching is that many women take adversity personally. But remember, being a change agent invariably leaves battle scars. You will meet resistance and you will have to overcome obstacles. When your ideas are voted down or can’t get the attention of key leaders, don’t take the setback personally. This is all part of your career process.

2. Check the weather

Now that you have a vision, you must remember to “check the weather,” again and again. Think of it this way: If your vision is to drive from Cincinnati to Chicago, you will do a lot of checking before and during your trip. You will check the weather forecast. You will make sure your car is tuned up and filled with gas. You will pack clothes, food, and other supplies.

Checking the weather in a business setting is similar. While keeping your destination (your vision) foremost in your mind, you must simultaneously look for all external influences and obstacles that could impact your progress. What is going on with your customers? What about budgets? How does your vision coincide with overall company strategy?

Checking the weather is different from vision, because vision places emphasis on a single desired outcome. It is also distinct from strategies, which are the approaches we use to achieve our desired outcome. We advise checking the weather continually, because external forces can alter our options and perceptions. Checking the weather keeps us moving forward. It helps us navigate uncertainty and steer our path successfully. The executives we interviewed for our research overwhelmingly emphasized the importance of having a “panoramic view” of the journey, not just a narrow focus on the destination.

Regina’s vision was her ultimate dream of building a practice around crisis management and recovery. The moment she envisioned and identified this goal, she started checking the weather repeatedly. She encountered the initial challenge of creating a process for delivering funds in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She managed the ongoing bureaucracy during the extended recovery process for New Orleans and beyond. She factored in the implications of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and how the legislation might impact her grand plan. She also considered the trillions of dollars in government grant money and how that would be the basis for building a business case within her firm.

Regina told us that focusing purposefully on checking the weather enabled her to achieve her vision. It guided her in several ways, including the following:

• AS A FILTER TO GUIDE HER DECISION MAKING. Regina checked the weather when making strategic decisions that advanced her cause. When she was offered a position back in traditional consulting, for example, she was able to take a pass without experiencing misgivings because she knew the role would not take her where she wanted to go.
• AS A TOOL TO HELP HER SELL HER BIG IDEA. Checking the weather helped Regina “see” the idea and describe it to others. She could articulate not only her vision for a new practice but also the potential obstacles and how she planned to route around them.
• AS A WAY TO NAVIGATE AMBIGUITY. Checking the weather gave Regina the confidence she needed to believe in her vision. It also allowed her to change strategies as surrounding events developed. Regina remained agile as staffing, budgeting, and funding ebbed and flowed, because checking the weather forced her to envision various options and contingencies.

3. Train your brain

Vision requires grit and resolve, and we know that women have these things in reserve. Yet, gaining influence and leading change are lengthy endeavors, and setbacks come with the territory. In order to help manage the leap-of-faith aspect of thinking bigger, we use a few thought tools to help us sustain our momentum.

As events change, remember to pause and adjust your approach. Ask yourself, what strategic adjustments must I make to remain on course? Making subtle changes in your actions helps sync your strategy with current realities, and making small shifts in thinking will help you remain relevant and realistic. And both of these will help you keep your message current as you sell your agenda to colleagues.

Practice shifting timeframes. What happens if a major career opportunity presents itself sooner than expected? What will you need to do to be ready? How will you react if your plans are sidelined due to office politics or budget constraints? What are your contingency plans? Considering various timing alternatives periodically will help keep you vigilant and resilient.

Finally, we suggest looking at your vision through multiple lenses. When Regina looked at her plan through a business lens, she articulated it in this way: “I want to build a new practice at my firm around crisis management and recovery.” When she examined it using her personal values as the lens, she thought about it in another way: “I want my work to make a difference to people who need help.” Examining your vision through multiple lenses—business objectives, career, personal values, and so on—is yet another way to make your big dreams attainable.

4. Cut the grass

Much of the work we do to help women think bigger and aim higher amounts to mental boot camp. It takes considerable resolve to develop the type of confidence, resilience, and situational awareness that leadership and influence require. Our final assignment for flexing your mental muscles amounts to metaphorically cutting the grass.

Ideas require time to marinate. Some of us run on the treadmill or sit by the ocean when we need to stop and reflect. One of our clients goes outside and cuts the grass.

Cutting the grass means taking time to unplug from the rush of our day-to-day lives. We need to turn away from e-mail, smartphones, and meetings to think and reflect. Our brains need time to reboot. Our reflection model is simple and powerful: Do. Reflect. Learn. Most of the time we are busy rushing from place to place without pause. Cutting the grass means intentionally taking time out to reflect. Through reflection, we learn. Through learning, we discover what is working for us and what is not working so well. Reflection and learning are the keys to helping us adjust our strategies so we can direct our momentum toward achieving our vision. Only through reflection and deep thinking can we mindfully plan for the future. Escape from the rush and cut the grass!

5. Embrace your passion

We know that Regina’s vision was a labor of love. She said it was much more than a job for her. Hundreds of people worked with her in crisis management and recovery, and most moved on before she found the right core team of people who could help her build a sustainable practice. The common denominator across the team, she discovered, was shared passion. We see this in our work coaching women to think bigger. Our own passion is built on our vision that more women leaders at the top will make business better and everyone will benefit. What is your passion built on?

Passion, confidence, and the ability to think big are some of the starting points for achieving influence. All of these are internal factors that propel us forward and allow us to begin to build the infrastructure we need to develop and grow in our careers. In the next chapter, we will examine some external prerequisites along the journey to fostering the Influence Effect.

Executive Summary

• Failing to think bigger and aim higher is a misstep many of us make when we move into higher levels of leadership.
• Several things drain our influence and power: being perceived as “less strategic” than men; falling victim to the impostor syndrome; the inability to see the immense potential in ourselves and our careers.
• Nurturing a bold vision requires getting unstuck, thinking bigger, and sharing your vision openly with others.
• “Checking the weather,” or looking around our environment to consider context and outside factors, vastly improves our planning and delivers better outcomes.
• Making strategic adjustments, shifting timeframes, and looking at our end goal through multiple lenses are ways we can train our brain to think bigger.
• Taking time out for reflection (or “cutting the grass”) helps us be resilient and maintain perspective.
• Passion needs to be a part of our purpose and what propels us to achieve influence.