5. How to Confidently Navigate the White Male Leadership Inner Circle
Do you ever feel frustrated watching the boys’ club of white male leaders rise in your organization while you're stuck on the sidelines? If you’re a high-achieving woman in a male-dominated industry, this experience will hit close to home. It’s natural to feel some tension here, but what if this tension with white male leadership is actually holding you back from stepping into your own leadership potential?
It’s important to acknowledge the frustration many women leaders like you feel towards the white male leadership in their organizations. But what’s more important is giving yourself the tools you need to turn that frustration into influence. It's time to stop letting frustration sideline you and start making the impact you know you're capable of.
Tune in and discover how to transform your frustration with white male leadership into influence. You’ll learn practical strategies for building trust with male leaders so you can start showing up with more openness and curiosity, positioning yourself as the leader you're meant to be.
If you haven’t already, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review to let me know what you think. I'm creating this show just for you, so I want to know what you would like to hear about in the coming episodes. Find complete instructions here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why frustration with white male leadership often holds women leaders back.
How to acknowledge your feelings while not letting them limit your actions.
The difference between judging white male leaders versus discerning strategically.
Why building trust and finding common ground with white male leaders is key to enhancing your influence.
How to attract the right people and opportunities by managing your energy.
The power of showing up with openness and curiosity to change dynamics in your organization.
Practical ways to show up with the kind of energy that attracts people and creates influence as a woman leader.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
If you haven’t already, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review to let me know what you think. Find complete instructions here!
Full Episode Transcript:
Do you ever feel sidelined by the boys club at work, watching white male leaders rise while you're stuck on the outside? If you're a high-achieving woman in leadership, especially in a male-dominated industry, this frustration might feel all too familiar. But is this tension with white male leadership holding you back from stepping into your own power? In today's episode, we're unpacking how you can turn that frustration into influence and start showing up as the leader you're meant to be.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Welcome listeners, today's topic will feel very familiar and on point for many of you. For some of you, it might feel a bit controversial. For others, it might be something you've never considered before. This episode is about white male leaders, specifically your frustration with white male leadership and whether or not this frustration is consciously or unconsciously holding you back.
Over the years of coaching women leaders, this is a topic that's come up over and over, particularly in today's time when DEI is more in the spotlight than ever. But what I want you to do today is to look at how your particular frustration and experiences with white male leadership might be preventing you from showing up as the leader you want to be. Why are you frustrated with the white male leaders in your organization? And what can you do to turn that frustration into the kind of influence that accelerates your career?
Picture this, it's Monday morning, you come into work and you notice a group of senior leaders and some of your peers all talking, chatting away, laughing, telling jokes, patting each other on the backs. You realize that they all went on a special golfing trip. They had a great time, but it seems that it was only the white males having a good time.
After a big meeting, a group of senior leaders gather to discuss going to the bar for drinks, but it's only the white male leaders that are invited. During a layoff announcement, you notice that many of the people whose jobs are being eliminated are women or people of color, while most of the remaining senior leadership team consists of white males.
Is this a pattern you've picked up in your organization? What stories are you telling yourself about the white boys club of informal networking at your company? Do you notice yourself feeling like the odd one out? Like you don't belong? And how does this experience shape how you are showing up as a leader?
Right now, you're understandably frustrated. But instead of letting this frustration create resentment inside yourself, limiting how you show up and contribute, and believing you'll never be in the inner circle, it's time to turn that frustration into influence.
I want to offer that oftentimes when you are noticing a pattern, particularly a pattern that you're not a part of, it can feel very limiting for you. You could have feelings of hurt, rejection, sadness, even anger. If you're noticing this pattern and your mind is also giving you thoughts that you don't belong, that you're not good enough, and you will never have what it takes to make it to the highest levels.
So I want to unpack this because there's a couple of things going on here. There are patterns in society, and naming that we live in a very patriarchal masculine society where, if you're in the Western world, there are a lot of white males in leadership. And there is a difference of knowing that these are just the statistical facts versus the stories and the internal narrative that we may be attaching to it.
Of course, there are things that are unfair and are not equal in the world. And it makes sense to be frustrated when you are the one out and you're not the one that's part of the in-crowd or the one that is getting the goodies for belonging so easily. But what I'm noticing is also a pattern where women are getting stuck in this thought pattern and they're getting stuck in the frustration and they are feeling even less motivated to show up and they feel like the world is against them and it's an uphill battle. And this is really heavy energy to be carrying around.
So what I can share with you is there's a difference between noticing your feelings, validating yourself, and realizing that there truly are systemic issues in leadership today, but also knowing that they won't change if you are continually feeling frustrated and drained by these issues.
There's also in our minds this all-or-nothing thinking that we're either in or we're out, and that is oftentimes our survival brain going on high alert. Our survival brain wants to feel safe and to belong. And so when we see a pattern where we don't belong, or a pattern of activities where mostly white males are getting those leadership roles, our brain wants to say, okay, I know what's happening here. And our brain wants to find evidence that that is true again and again.
But what happens when this happens in our minds and in our bodies, our energy, if our anger and hurt and sadness is what is showing up when we come to work, then it actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don't feel like we belong, so we shrink down. We don't speak up. We don't expect to be heard.
So basically, we end up doing two things that aren't helpful. We either get out of the way and let the system and issues continue to recreate themselves and persist because we don't have the energy to fight them, or we go and we fight them. We rage against the system. We make the white male leaders our enemies and we don't influence them or build trust with them because who wants to trust somebody who is judging them, superior to them, and there's no trust in that relationship.
And this is really what I want to focus on today, the opportunity cost of staying in that frustrated upset cycle. So there is the one of acknowledging your feelings and expressing them and being with the feelings. And then there is also using that frustration to move forward in a way that is effective for you and your career and to actually create the sustainable change in the systems that you want to change.
I often tell my clients that it is about evolution, not revolution. And what I mean by that is, if you are somebody who wants to rage against the system, who wants to judge the system in place, then it is very hard to change that system. A revolution is one where everything gets burnt down and things need to be rebuilt. And of course that's a strategy. You just need to think for yourself, is that a strategy I want for my career and my life and the livelihood for my family?
So I want you to know that that is an option, but that option tends to be very painful, very limiting, and a lot of hard work. Now the other option is evolution, which is, again, using more of that prefrontal cortex, which is expansive and visionary and really full of creative thinking. And in this scenario, what you're doing is still feeling frustrated, still feeling upset, but using that as fuel to influence and make changes.
I often tell my clients that it's very difficult to change a system, an organization, a group of people without building trust and rapport. And this is what emotional intelligence is all about, building trust and rapport with people. But if your mind is having the thought that all white male leaders are bad and they are not there to help me or support me and they're in my way, then what typically happens is you cannot connect with that part of you that wants to build these connections, that wants to build the bridges and trust people because that is the thought that you have in your mind.
So it ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy because you're not fully showing up as yourself. And then what happens is that you are being judged on how you are showing up, which is a holding back of who you truly are in terms of what you're capable of creating and speaking up for what matters to you in the business sense, right? You're allowing this frustration to hold you back and to create these narratives in your mind that these white male leaders are not there to help you.
So I want to share with you that I see this as a huge opportunity cost for a lot of women out there because they are using this whole definition of white male leaders as a way to stay with their upset, which is fine to stay with your upset, but what typically happens is people are not feeling their emotions and they're not staying with them because they feel uncomfortable, right? It's easier to blame something or focus on a reason rather than actually be with your emotions.
But what I can tell you and what I help my clients do is the more you can stay with your emotions and feel your feelings, the better you will actually feel about yourself and you will connect with yourself and instead of going to blame other people, you will think more creatively and you will think more strategically about how to improve the situation for you.
I truly believe that you can and another woman, and what I'm noticing is that they are always interrupting each other, they're chiming in, they're speaking over each other, and I don't like the way that it is being handled. And I want to be heard, but I sit back and I am just noticing all of this happening. And then I'm noticing the other female in the room where she is starting to act like the men and she's getting her words in and she's interrupting just like them.
And what I wanted her to notice was that she was judging the group, that she was holding on to this belief that I don't belong, and not only do I not belong, the way they are doing things is wrong, and I don't want to be the type of person to interrupt other people. And she's almost taking it offensively, that this is being super disrespectful. Although, if you look at the dynamics and the culture of things, everybody's doing it.
I let her know that their style of working might not be the style that she likes. However, in order to get her word in, in order to build that trust and rapport with the group, she may need to adapt to some of these styles. But the biggest thing that's happening is, instead of listening to the content, chiming in where she feels passionate and wants to make an influence and an impact, she's spending more time sitting on the sidelines judging people and judging the white men leaders and the dynamic and the whole culture rather than getting in there, saying what's true for her, and shifting the conversation.
She's allowing those judgments to take away her leadership ability and what her strategic thinking is because she's not even showing up with that. Her brain is in the judging part and in the I don't belong part. When I showed this to her, she was like, you're absolutely right. I am sitting on the sidelines. I am judging.
And I said, I know it feels uncomfortable to be sitting on the sidelines, but it's also uncomfortable to dive in and to stretch yourself and to adapt to a group structure that maybe in the long run you don't agree with and that's not how you run your meetings. But for this scenario, your growth is to adapt and be part of and get work done and to use your strategic thinking and to feel empowered.
I always teach about the skills that I'm teaching people is you have a lot of tools in your tool belt. The more tools you have to work with any type of person, whether they're a white male, whether they're older than you, whether they're younger than you, the more things that you have in your tool belt, the better off you are going to be as a leader. And the more things that you could take into your leadership style to influence and to make a difference, right? This is not losing yourself. This is not shifting away from the things that are valuable to you. These are just different ways of being.
If you know lots of different ways, for example, to cook, right? It just makes you a better cook. You're gonna be able to do a lot of other things and make lots of more complex things. And, you know, that's just like an analogy to use. But I really think about these different skills where we adapt ourselves, where we learn to speak up, where we express with assertiveness, or where we are able to be quiet and listen and be active in that listening. These are all different skills that are important and it's good to have a tool belt where you are dynamic and you can switch things up.
Because you're going to hit roadblocks, you're gonna get stuck, and the more ways you are able to jump back into the discomfort and to empower yourself through whatever obstacle is coming up, the more you're going to trust yourself and feel confident in yourself.
So I want you to notice yourself in this. Where are you showing up? Where are you blaming other people and stuck in your anger and frustration, and how might that be holding you back? Maybe there is somebody in your workplace right now that you're like, actually, I wish I could forge a better relationship with him if I didn't have all these stories about what type of white male leader he is.
So let's take this to a practical level, and I want to share with you a real-time leadership challenge that somebody reached out to me and asked me for help with. So her company was actually in search of a new board member, and the board member that was leaving happened to be a female, and she was really looking forward to another female joining this board, right? This is an opportunity. And since one female left already, she wanted to make sure another one came.
She brought this to her leadership team and said, hey, I think it’s really important we fill this role with a female. And what her leadership team said to her was, we understand that, but we are looking for the best candidate. She did not like that answer. She felt dismissed, hurt, angry by it. And she was asking me, what should I do? This is how I feel. I think diversity is super important.
And what I had shared with her is that the coaching that I gave her, and so you just want to notice for yourself, what would you do? What would you do at this scenario if this happened to you? If somebody came to you and said, hey, if you wanted your leader team to pick another woman and you spoke up and you felt hurt by that, you felt frustrated and stuck.
The coaching that I gave her is that I shared with her that, number one, I understand being upset and not feeling heard. And number two, that I could sense the impact that she wanted to make was to ensure that there was going to be a strong female there. And what I said is the common ground that you have with these people, with your leadership team, is that you both want an ideal candidate. You both want a candidate that has strong skills. And of course, you want a diverse candidate.
And instead of focusing on making them wrong for not saying, yes, let's get a female in here, I coached her to make it, yes, I want a female leader and I want her to be the best candidate. So really focusing on also what was important to these white male leaders, which was to get the best candidate.
And I said, listen, you can focus on trying to coach and change your leadership team to think about just women, or this is the opportunity here that you could be embracing, turning that frustration into influence. You can go out to the recruiters you know. You can go out and actually source and attract the best women with the best qualifications. It could be a win-win for you and that leadership team by finding the best people and by ensuring that there's enough women in that pool of candidates.
And this way you come across as you're listening to them and you're still validating what matters and is important to you, but you're not getting derailed and sticking with the frustration or trying to influence the way people are thinking when what they're thinking is actually not wrong. It's not wrong for them to want the best candidate, right?
So if you focus on that common ground, she was able to then go out and do that and source more candidates. And that's action, right? That is actually things that need to happen. We know that mostly men apply for roles and women don't. So that action for her was actually going out and doing something about it to bring in to attract those women candidates.
And that's the way that she could influence that group of people without getting stuck in that frustration loop and losing time and losing focus and also being seen as somebody who cares more for gender diversity than the best quality person to fill the role, right? And that's, of course, not the way that you want to come across because it matters both. You want a person to fill the role that not only brings that diversity of thought and thinking but has the backing and has the qualities and experience that is best for the company.
All right. So I want you to notice for yourself, if this comes up for you. If you notice, wow, all these bros are in this room and I can't network with them because I'm so different, I want you to number one, acknowledge your frustration, but don't let it define your actions. Don't let it define you showing up with curiosity and openness and using discernment.
You can get into that room and you could actually be like, wow, that guy was such a bro. But then when I got to know him, he really cares about his kids. He does so much volunteer work for these underprivileged communities. Wow, he totally blew my mind in what I thought he was because of the way he looked and acted with this group of people versus actually who he is. And being able to find common ground in that, you know, you could be able to influence, connect with people, work with all sorts of different people, and not judge them just by the big stereotype that is out there in the world.
And you could lead with emotional intelligence using frustration as a signal of how you want to improve either the organization, collaboration, the communication, or assertiveness. The other thing that I always tell women to is, obviously there's a lot of informal networking, but you could also create those for yourself too. And we can empower ourselves by creatively thinking about how to create more networking opportunities for us versus judging other people for what they're doing, right? You can get to a point where you're like, well, this is something that's important to me. Let me invite people into it.
And again, having your emotional awareness is going to be important because you want to notice if your fears of rejection or hurt or anger or any of those things are standing in the way of you fully showing up. And that's where being with the emotions and moving forward in a productive, empowering way makes such a big difference.
Alright, well, that was the session for today, really about using frustration and changing it into influence. I want to hear how it works for you. When you are starting to see other white male leaders and your mind goes to judging and being superior, I want you to take a deep breath, ground yourself down, go through it with more openness, go confront, go into the wild, connecting with these people with more openness and curiosity, and of course, using your strategic discernment.
But don't start with discerning. You need to start with being open and seeing what's possibly there. Whatever energy you have in you is showing up and is either going to create a connection and attract people to you or it's going to repel people away. And I get it, sometimes we want to repel people away, but in leadership, especially with white male leaders, we want to attract people in and we want to be able to strategically discern.
Okay, let me know how that goes. I would love to hear your reviews or feel free to DM me directly on LinkedIn. And I look forward to seeing all of you next week when we dive into how to cultivate confidence within yourself.
Alright, see you then. Bye. Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Welcome listeners, today's topic will feel very familiar and on point for many of you. For some of you, it might feel a bit controversial. For others, it might be something you've never considered before. This episode is about white male leaders, specifically your frustration with white male leadership and whether or not this frustration is consciously or unconsciously holding you back.
Over the years of coaching women leaders, this is a topic that's come up over and over, particularly in today's time when DEI is more in the spotlight than ever. But what I want you to do today is to look at how your particular frustration and experiences with white male leadership might be preventing you from showing up as the leader you want to be. Why are you frustrated with the white male leaders in your organization? And what can you do to turn that frustration into the kind of influence that accelerates your career?
Picture this, it's Monday morning, you come into work and you notice a group of senior leaders and some of your peers all talking, chatting away, laughing, telling jokes, patting each other on the backs. You realize that they all went on a special golfing trip. They had a great time, but it seems that it was only the white males having a good time.
After a big meeting, a group of senior leaders gather to discuss going to the bar for drinks, but it's only the white male leaders that are invited. During a layoff announcement, you notice that many of the people whose jobs are being eliminated are women or people of color, while most of the remaining senior leadership team consists of white males.
Is this a pattern you've picked up in your organization? What stories are you telling yourself about the white boys club of informal networking at your company? Do you notice yourself feeling like the odd one out? Like you don't belong? And how does this experience shape how you are showing up as a leader?
Right now, you're understandably frustrated. But instead of letting this frustration create resentment inside yourself, limiting how you show up and contribute, and believing you'll never be in the inner circle, it's time to turn that frustration into influence.
I want to offer that oftentimes when you are noticing a pattern, particularly a pattern that you're not a part of, it can feel very limiting for you. You could have feelings of hurt, rejection, sadness, even anger. If you're noticing this pattern and your mind is also giving you thoughts that you don't belong, that you're not good enough, and you will never have what it takes to make it to the highest levels.
So I want to unpack this because there's a couple of things going on here. There are patterns in society, and naming that we live in a very patriarchal masculine society where, if you're in the Western world, there are a lot of white males in leadership. And there is a difference of knowing that these are just the statistical facts versus the stories and the internal narrative that we may be attaching to it.
Of course, there are things that are unfair and are not equal in the world. And it makes sense to be frustrated when you are the one out and you're not the one that's part of the in-crowd or the one that is getting the goodies for belonging so easily. But what I'm noticing is also a pattern where women are getting stuck in this thought pattern and they're getting stuck in the frustration and they are feeling even less motivated to show up and they feel like the world is against them and it's an uphill battle. And this is really heavy energy to be carrying around.
So what I can share with you is there's a difference between noticing your feelings, validating yourself, and realizing that there truly are systemic issues in leadership today, but also knowing that they won't change if you are continually feeling frustrated and drained by these issues.
There's also in our minds this all-or-nothing thinking that we're either in or we're out, and that is oftentimes our survival brain going on high alert. Our survival brain wants to feel safe and to belong. And so when we see a pattern where we don't belong, or a pattern of activities where mostly white males are getting those leadership roles, our brain wants to say, okay, I know what's happening here. And our brain wants to find evidence that that is true again and again.
But what happens when this happens in our minds and in our bodies, our energy, if our anger and hurt and sadness is what is showing up when we come to work, then it actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don't feel like we belong, so we shrink down. We don't speak up. We don't expect to be heard.
So basically, we end up doing two things that aren't helpful. We either get out of the way and let the system and issues continue to recreate themselves and persist because we don't have the energy to fight them, or we go and we fight them. We rage against the system. We make the white male leaders our enemies and we don't influence them or build trust with them because who wants to trust somebody who is judging them, superior to them, and there's no trust in that relationship.
And this is really what I want to focus on today, the opportunity cost of staying in that frustrated upset cycle. So there is the one of acknowledging your feelings and expressing them and being with the feelings. And then there is also using that frustration to move forward in a way that is effective for you and your career and to actually create the sustainable change in the systems that you want to change.
I often tell my clients that it is about evolution, not revolution. And what I mean by that is, if you are somebody who wants to rage against the system, who wants to judge the system in place, then it is very hard to change that system. A revolution is one where everything gets burnt down and things need to be rebuilt. And of course that's a strategy. You just need to think for yourself, is that a strategy I want for my career and my life and the livelihood for my family?
So I want you to know that that is an option, but that option tends to be very painful, very limiting, and a lot of hard work. Now the other option is evolution, which is, again, using more of that prefrontal cortex, which is expansive and visionary and really full of creative thinking. And in this scenario, what you're doing is still feeling frustrated, still feeling upset, but using that as fuel to influence and make changes.
I often tell my clients that it's very difficult to change a system, an organization, a group of people without building trust and rapport. And this is what emotional intelligence is all about, building trust and rapport with people. But if your mind is having the thought that all white male leaders are bad and they are not there to help me or support me and they're in my way, then what typically happens is you cannot connect with that part of you that wants to build these connections, that wants to build the bridges and trust people because that is the thought that you have in your mind.
So it ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy because you're not fully showing up as yourself. And then what happens is that you are being judged on how you are showing up, which is a holding back of who you truly are in terms of what you're capable of creating and speaking up for what matters to you in the business sense, right? You're allowing this frustration to hold you back and to create these narratives in your mind that these white male leaders are not there to help you.
So I want to share with you that I see this as a huge opportunity cost for a lot of women out there because they are using this whole definition of white male leaders as a way to stay with their upset, which is fine to stay with your upset, but what typically happens is people are not feeling their emotions and they're not staying with them because they feel uncomfortable, right? It's easier to blame something or focus on a reason rather than actually be with your emotions.
But what I can tell you and what I help my clients do is the more you can stay with your emotions and feel your feelings, the better you will actually feel about yourself and you will connect with yourself and instead of going to blame other people, you will think more creatively and you will think more strategically about how to improve the situation for you.
I truly believe that you can and another woman, and what I'm noticing is that they are always interrupting each other, they're chiming in, they're speaking over each other, and I don't like the way that it is being handled. And I want to be heard, but I sit back and I am just noticing all of this happening. And then I'm noticing the other female in the room where she is starting to act like the men and she's getting her words in and she's interrupting just like them.
And what I wanted her to notice was that she was judging the group, that she was holding on to this belief that I don't belong, and not only do I not belong, the way they are doing things is wrong, and I don't want to be the type of person to interrupt other people. And she's almost taking it offensively, that this is being super disrespectful. Although, if you look at the dynamics and the culture of things, everybody's doing it.
I let her know that their style of working might not be the style that she likes. However, in order to get her word in, in order to build that trust and rapport with the group, she may need to adapt to some of these styles. But the biggest thing that's happening is, instead of listening to the content, chiming in where she feels passionate and wants to make an influence and an impact, she's spending more time sitting on the sidelines judging people and judging the white men leaders and the dynamic and the whole culture rather than getting in there, saying what's true for her, and shifting the conversation.
She's allowing those judgments to take away her leadership ability and what her strategic thinking is because she's not even showing up with that. Her brain is in the judging part and in the I don't belong part. When I showed this to her, she was like, you're absolutely right. I am sitting on the sidelines. I am judging.
And I said, I know it feels uncomfortable to be sitting on the sidelines, but it's also uncomfortable to dive in and to stretch yourself and to adapt to a group structure that maybe in the long run you don't agree with and that's not how you run your meetings. But for this scenario, your growth is to adapt and be part of and get work done and to use your strategic thinking and to feel empowered.
I always teach about the skills that I'm teaching people is you have a lot of tools in your tool belt. The more tools you have to work with any type of person, whether they're a white male, whether they're older than you, whether they're younger than you, the more things that you have in your tool belt, the better off you are going to be as a leader. And the more things that you could take into your leadership style to influence and to make a difference, right? This is not losing yourself. This is not shifting away from the things that are valuable to you. These are just different ways of being.
If you know lots of different ways, for example, to cook, right? It just makes you a better cook. You're gonna be able to do a lot of other things and make lots of more complex things. And, you know, that's just like an analogy to use. But I really think about these different skills where we adapt ourselves, where we learn to speak up, where we express with assertiveness, or where we are able to be quiet and listen and be active in that listening. These are all different skills that are important and it's good to have a tool belt where you are dynamic and you can switch things up.
Because you're going to hit roadblocks, you're gonna get stuck, and the more ways you are able to jump back into the discomfort and to empower yourself through whatever obstacle is coming up, the more you're going to trust yourself and feel confident in yourself.
So I want you to notice yourself in this. Where are you showing up? Where are you blaming other people and stuck in your anger and frustration, and how might that be holding you back? Maybe there is somebody in your workplace right now that you're like, actually, I wish I could forge a better relationship with him if I didn't have all these stories about what type of white male leader he is.
So let's take this to a practical level, and I want to share with you a real-time leadership challenge that somebody reached out to me and asked me for help with. So her company was actually in search of a new board member, and the board member that was leaving happened to be a female, and she was really looking forward to another female joining this board, right? This is an opportunity. And since one female left already, she wanted to make sure another one came.
She brought this to her leadership team and said, hey, I think it’s really important we fill this role with a female. And what her leadership team said to her was, we understand that, but we are looking for the best candidate. She did not like that answer. She felt dismissed, hurt, angry by it. And she was asking me, what should I do? This is how I feel. I think diversity is super important.
And what I had shared with her is that the coaching that I gave her, and so you just want to notice for yourself, what would you do? What would you do at this scenario if this happened to you? If somebody came to you and said, hey, if you wanted your leader team to pick another woman and you spoke up and you felt hurt by that, you felt frustrated and stuck.
The coaching that I gave her is that I shared with her that, number one, I understand being upset and not feeling heard. And number two, that I could sense the impact that she wanted to make was to ensure that there was going to be a strong female there. And what I said is the common ground that you have with these people, with your leadership team, is that you both want an ideal candidate. You both want a candidate that has strong skills. And of course, you want a diverse candidate.
And instead of focusing on making them wrong for not saying, yes, let's get a female in here, I coached her to make it, yes, I want a female leader and I want her to be the best candidate. So really focusing on also what was important to these white male leaders, which was to get the best candidate.
And I said, listen, you can focus on trying to coach and change your leadership team to think about just women, or this is the opportunity here that you could be embracing, turning that frustration into influence. You can go out to the recruiters you know. You can go out and actually source and attract the best women with the best qualifications. It could be a win-win for you and that leadership team by finding the best people and by ensuring that there's enough women in that pool of candidates.
And this way you come across as you're listening to them and you're still validating what matters and is important to you, but you're not getting derailed and sticking with the frustration or trying to influence the way people are thinking when what they're thinking is actually not wrong. It's not wrong for them to want the best candidate, right?
So if you focus on that common ground, she was able to then go out and do that and source more candidates. And that's action, right? That is actually things that need to happen. We know that mostly men apply for roles and women don't. So that action for her was actually going out and doing something about it to bring in to attract those women candidates.
And that's the way that she could influence that group of people without getting stuck in that frustration loop and losing time and losing focus and also being seen as somebody who cares more for gender diversity than the best quality person to fill the role, right? And that's, of course, not the way that you want to come across because it matters both. You want a person to fill the role that not only brings that diversity of thought and thinking but has the backing and has the qualities and experience that is best for the company.
All right. So I want you to notice for yourself, if this comes up for you. If you notice, wow, all these bros are in this room and I can't network with them because I'm so different, I want you to number one, acknowledge your frustration, but don't let it define your actions. Don't let it define you showing up with curiosity and openness and using discernment.
You can get into that room and you could actually be like, wow, that guy was such a bro. But then when I got to know him, he really cares about his kids. He does so much volunteer work for these underprivileged communities. Wow, he totally blew my mind in what I thought he was because of the way he looked and acted with this group of people versus actually who he is. And being able to find common ground in that, you know, you could be able to influence, connect with people, work with all sorts of different people, and not judge them just by the big stereotype that is out there in the world.
And you could lead with emotional intelligence using frustration as a signal of how you want to improve either the organization, collaboration, the communication, or assertiveness. The other thing that I always tell women to is, obviously there's a lot of informal networking, but you could also create those for yourself too. And we can empower ourselves by creatively thinking about how to create more networking opportunities for us versus judging other people for what they're doing, right? You can get to a point where you're like, well, this is something that's important to me. Let me invite people into it.
And again, having your emotional awareness is going to be important because you want to notice if your fears of rejection or hurt or anger or any of those things are standing in the way of you fully showing up. And that's where being with the emotions and moving forward in a productive, empowering way makes such a big difference.
Alright, well, that was the session for today, really about using frustration and changing it into influence. I want to hear how it works for you. When you are starting to see other white male leaders and your mind goes to judging and being superior, I want you to take a deep breath, ground yourself down, go through it with more openness, go confront, go into the wild, connecting with these people with more openness and curiosity, and of course, using your strategic discernment.
But don't start with discerning. You need to start with being open and seeing what's possibly there. Whatever energy you have in you is showing up and is either going to create a connection and attract people to you or it's going to repel people away. And I get it, sometimes we want to repel people away, but in leadership, especially with white male leaders, we want to attract people in and we want to be able to strategically discern.
Okay, let me know how that goes. I would love to hear your reviews or feel free to DM me directly on LinkedIn. And I look forward to seeing all of you next week when we dive into how to cultivate confidence within yourself.
Alright, see you then. Bye. Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, RSS, or wherever you listen to podcasts!
