I just finished another career/self-help book called How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise, Promotion, or Job, by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith.

I’d heard about this book through blogs or podcasts or something in the past year, so it’s been on my list for awhile.

It’s about the fact that all of the skills and tactics that make women successful up until the mid-to-upper career level may be the very things that are holding them back as they look to move to the upper management or C-level.

At first, this book didn’t really resonate with me. The introduction was long and odd – the intro seemed to be covering more of Goldsmith’s other book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, than it was intro-ing the actual book I was reading.

I was also very thrown off by the way the book was written in sort of third person and sort of first person. I actually didn’t realize that the “Sally” and “Marshall” that the book kept referring to were the authors until about halfway through, because it felt like they were referring to themselves in the third person, but the the next sentence they’d use the word “We.” I felt like the “we” was writing the book and Sally and Marshall were just hanging out. It was strange.

And then, I felt that I didn’t really agree with the book at all. They were trying to tell me that the skills I take such pride in weren’t good enough skills to have and that they would eventually hinder my ability to get ahead, if they weren’t already. My whole adult life, I’d been focusing on certain workplace skills. I’d been working on being a team player, I’d been showing gratitude to my team members, I’d been getting certifications to position myself as an expert. And they were telling me that at a certain point, that’s all wrong. I didn’t believe them. I almost put the book down. Continue reading →