wonder how she hears the whole room?
“… there is no way I can possibly ever lead like that…”
…probably 1994, at Fannie Mae. Julie was a senior vice president, and she was drawn out of a hat to mentor this awkward tech guy Director… me. She did something I had never watched anyone do up close. She put the numbers and the people in the same thought. Not a numbers meeting and then a people meeting. 1 conversation, both halves of the brain running at once. I was an engineer. I had been trained to think those were 2 different jobs, done by 2 different kinds of people, and that I was the first kind. Julie was quietly showing me I had been using half my own head.
When did you last let a woman’s way of thinking change yours… instead of grading it?
Charlotte heard it in 5 minutes…
…after years of listening. Charlotte Caffey joined The Go-Go’s 2 months after it started. She played lead guitar and keyboards and did most of the composing and arranging. One day she was listening to The Miracles, “Going to a Go-Go”, and a song arrived. She said it “came to me within five minutes” and “just went right through me and came out my hand.” A Motown record in the ear of a Los Angeles punk… wonder in 1 move, connecting 2 things nobody had put in the same room.
We Got the Beat came out as a single in January 1982 and went to number 2 on the Hot 100. It sat there for 3 weeks, kept out of number 1 by Joan Jett’s I Love Rock ‘n Roll, and finished as the 25th biggest song of the year. Less than 4 years earlier, none of the founders could play. It is still the song people know them by, and the one the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame put on their page.
5 minutes of wonder sits on years of listening.
…and to wonder is to connect what nobody connected
The Signpost for wonder is the leader who stays curious about what is changing out there, keeps generating ideas, and connects notions nobody thought belonged together. And has good judgment about which of those ideas will actually work. The Roadblock only trusts what has been done before, and shuts the conversation down before it starts with closed, judging language. “We tried that.” “That will never work.” You heard me say that one on Monday.
The ambition story is not what it looks like
69% of entry-level women want a promotion, against 80% of men. Easy to read that as a gap in wanting. Look again. The senior women who say they do not want to advance are more likely than the men to say they have already been passed over, and stepping back is a reasonable answer to a room that stopped asking.
The high-achieving women in 1 long study of business school graduates expected careers equal to their partners’, and many watched theirs take second place. And when women who stepped out came back to work, only 5% wanted to go back to the company they had left. They did not stop being curious. They took it somewhere that was curious about them.
Even the women who already had a sponsor asked for less. 44% of them said they were likely to ask for a stretch assignment, against 56% of the sponsored men, and 38% would ask for a raise, against 49%. If you are the senior person in that room, your curiosity is the door. Ask her first. In the big-company data only 13% of women had a sponsor at all, and men were 46% more likely to have one. Most of these women are not waiting on advice. They are waiting on a question.
empowering her starts with wondering about why she stopped asking.
Julie heard both halves
Julie went on to be a great CIO in multiple businesses. What I carry from her is not a piece of advice. It is a way of listening… and wonder. When I coach an engineer who can only hear the numbers, I am mostly doing what Julie did for me in 1994… asking about the people in the same breath, and waiting.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: take 1 woman whose thinking runs nothing like yours to lunch this week. No agenda. Ask what she would build if nobody said no… and do not grade the answer. wonder is the cheapest way to empower anyone.
Helping leaders stay curious long enough to hear the whole idea is the fun part of my work. Schedule time with me here.
Some leaders hear it in 5 minutes. The rest of us needed a Julie. Either way… We Got the Beat
