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Welcome to the Unapologetic Welcome back to EDGE podcast for the Unapologetic edge. women leaders ready This is Dr. Shans and I have to lead on their terms. No apologies, just real talk, a really interesting question for you. strength, and bold moves. Just curious, when the last time you looked at a job I'm Dr. Shannon Sims, founder, board and thought, this of Athena's Ally. If you're here to own your can't possibly be it? leadership with confidence, Because if you're a woman you're in the right place, leader with 15 years or 20 so let's dive in.
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years or 25 years experience, somehow every option out there just looks like a demotion or a detour into burnout. And you know, maybe the model might be broken. So let's just be real. The ladder's broken.
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Maybe it was never actually built for you. Not if you're caregiving, not if you're managing an autoimmune disorder or symptoms or hormonal shifts. Right? Perimenopause, menopause, or maybe post postpartum.
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Or not. If you're leading in silence while you're expected to do 200% emotional labor for 80% of the credit, you're definitely not failing. I think the system might be failing. And the problem is that most career advice was written for someone else.
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I don't know who that someone was, but sometimes I feel like that advice was definitely not written for me. Someone with unlimited stamina, all the energy in the world, maybe someone who had a stay at home significant other and absolutely no interruptions and nine and a half hours of sleep every single night.
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Do you know what I'm talking about? The old climb the ladder model that assumes it is the only way to win is up, up into more meetings, up into more politics, up into a role that costs you your health and your sanity.
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But if that role doesn't fit anymore, maybe it's because your entities change or your needs have changed, or maybe your values have changed, or maybe your values haven't changed. Maybe you are just more clear on what your values are and what you are and are not willing to put up with.
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And that's not a failure. That's just intelligence. It's wisdom. Maybe it's time to pivot. So let's take a step back and talk about what's really going on. Because this isn't just personal discussion comfort, it's a systemic design flaw.
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And there are some major institutions that are actually starting to say it out loud. The World Economic Forum flagged it a, handful of years ago and they basically, they said, to the world that the career ladder is outdated.
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What women in leadership are actually doing is following non traditional lateral and flexible career paths. That's what works. And that is a direct quote, in their 2019 feature, the World Economic Forum spotlighted a CIGNA study showing that 86% of women leaders attributed their advancement to nonlinear moves.
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Not promotions, not neat job titles, but lateral jumps, part time work, industry shifts, or project pivots. So I'm going to translate that. We're not failing the system.
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The system has failed to evolve with us as women because the traditional model of career sex climb fast, stay available, outperform, don't blink. That assumes three things. Infinite energy, zero complexity, and no interruptions.
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So I'm going to ask you something. Who does that model serve? Well, it wasn't designed for women that are navigating caregiving. And it wasn't designed for bodies that deal with hormone fluctuations or autoimmune conditions or long haul chronic stress.
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And I just had a conversation about what that long haul chronic stress does to our bodies. It wasn't designed for lives that include invisible labor of holding up everyone else's expectations while trying not to lose yourself in the process.
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As Williams and Molthop in 2022 put it, career frameworks haven't caught up with the lived realities of Gen X women managing multi dimensional roles. They weren't built for complexity, they were built for conformity.
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I'm a Gen X woman. I, feel that to my bones. I believe that millennial women feel that. I believe that Gen Z women are going to feel that. And I believe that that is why so many smart, capable women look around and think, why is this not working for me?
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And the answer is it's not that you've lost your edge, it's the framework isn't going to fit the full range of who you are. Okay, I'm going to tell you a story. And this isn't theory.
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This is my timeline. I didn't climb the ladder. I feel like in a lot of ways, based on where I came from in, a small town in northeast Ohio, I dominated it.
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I played the game, I cracked the code, and I sat in the rooms where strategy got, got made. And then my body pulled the fire alarm. Not once, not twice, but three times.
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And so by the time I was 40, I had gone through menopause three separate times. Yes, you heard me. I am, a woman that can tell you I have been through menopause three times. And you're like, how is that even physically possible?
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So let me let that land for a second. Once it was medically induced through a chemotherapy, an off label chemotherapy, that was designed for prostate cancer.
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Nope, I do not have a prostate. But they put me into a medically induced chemotherapy. Medically, induced menopause. Second time it was surgically induced when they took out everything. And then a third time, just to keep things interesting, my right ovary regrew enough tissue to reactivate hormone production and pulled me back out of menopause.
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And then I had to have emergency, surgery. I found myself sitting in an ER post surgery wondering if I was somehow starring in a bad medical drama, with no commercial breaks. Right. The whole experience didn't just hijack my hormones, it hijacked my sense of career trajectory.
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Because the version of success that I was chasing as a senior leader, it was one that said, just keep climbing, just keep pushing and keep proving that you are unfazed.
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It didn't fit my body that I was living in. It didn't fit the energy I had to work with, and it definitely didn't fit the woman that I had become. I had difficulty making decisions.
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I had brain fog, like I couldn't even explain. I felt disheveled, I was putting on weight. I still had to show up and try to look like an executive, but the energy just to figure out what I was going to wear in the morning.
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And I remember thinking, and I did not have a family. I only had to take care of myself. And I remember looking at, my co workers who had children and who had significant others and I thought, how do they do this every day?
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How do they like, come to work and like, do a full day of work and like, then go home and take care of like the, keep small humans alive and like go chauffeur them around and do other things?
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Like, I can barely like, take care of myself and keep myself alive. Right. I had a decision that I had to make not to start over because I had failed.
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I hadn't failed, but in fact I had actually been extremely successful. I built a multi million dollar business, and had been promoted and done all kinds of amazing things.
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But to start differently, I stopped chasing some performative version of power and I started to design something that was smarter for me, that was more fluid, that was more real.
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And what the World Economic Forum calls a career lattice. It's multi directional, it's flexible, it's built to fit life as it actually unfolds. And I'm telling you now, the latter is not your only option.
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It's just the loudest one because it's the one that is probably more capitalistic and the one that is the most convenient. And it's the one we see the most popular in media and it's been around, the longest.
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So I have some thoughts and some ideas and some insight and three things for you to think about. Right. The first, and these are based on kind of how I started to think about it when I made a decision to climb down the ladder.
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Three things just to think about. The first is to really sit and name what your non negotiables are. Not your preferences but your standards because you've earned them. So what are you no longer willing to trade?
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Is it control over your calendar or flexibility for caregiving or recovery or pay that respects what you've actually done? Your receipts? Right.
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Because if your current role violates all of them, that's not drama, that's a little toxic, but it's data. Pay attention to it because you're worth it. The second thing is reclaim your career currency.
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You're not starting over. It is not starting over. You're repositioning and you're repositioning with power. So take inventory of your assets. Strategy. Are you a strategy person?
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That is phenomenal for fractional chief operating officer work. Do you do people leadership? That's advisory, that's facilitation. That's coaching kind of work. Do you do systems thinking?
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Non profits think tanks. They're starving for it. Are you a tech person? Are you stem? Like, are you tech? Are you in engineering? Oh my goodness.
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You can make your own way. Maven. I was out on Maven the other day. They are getting high dollar to teach in AI and machine learning.
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But even at a part time or a remote or a nomadic kind of lifestyle, in some of these skill areas, from a tech perspective, if I had the, if I had the brain for some, for some of these like coding and AI skills, if I were a little younger, maybe I'd go back and get some of these, these skills.
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But there are so, so many options, right? You. When, when I think about career currency and I have conversations with women, I get so, so passionate about it because I, I have a, a like Liam Neeson, I have a special set of skills but, and one of them is to really see people's superpowers and to name it.
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And when women tell me they're not sure what they're good at or they can't name their strengths, I'm like, well have a 30 minute conversation with me because I'll be able to name it for you. And you're not less valuable. You're often just misaligned or discounting what others can see clearly.
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The third thing to do then is to map your lattice, not your ladder. The ladder is going to. In my strong and personal opinion, based on personal experience, the ladder often will put us into a dead end. So look for adjacent roles, look to the left, look to the right, look for lateral moves, look for project based options.
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Think ecosystems, not org charts. Think optionality, not one. Next title. Think about how to Think about how to translate what you do into other industries or into As a businesswoman I'm always thinking how can this turn into a spin off into into a service line or into, into another I don't know, into a business area or into a job aid or a book or collateral or.
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Because somebody would want your, the insight in what you do or to teach it to somebody else. Because what you do, somebody else could pick up and learn to do what you do. So here's the move that I would recommend that you think about doing this week.
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Run a fit test, not a job search. Reach out to someone already doing a role that you're curious about. Something that's like, that sparks my interest. Maybe offer a one time paid consult or take on a small pilot project with a mission aligned organization or reverse shadowing.
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You know, go sit with somebody and just reverse shadow them, and watch what they do. Or just sketch out what your, what a fractional offer could look like if you were to test it. Or even just go Google.
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What is a fractional. What is a fractional chief operating officer do? What does this concept of a fractional, A fractional leader. Because you don't necessarily need to sit on it or think about it a little bit more.
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Sometimes we just need motion, we just need action. Because I know in your role you've likely done everything right. I know high performing women, ambitious women show up and deliver and outperform and often second guess and question themselves as to whether it's them.
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And somewhere along the way the career that you built has maybe just stopped making sense for the life that you are living or the life that you want to be living. And from my perspective, if you're questioning it, you're not crazy and you're not ungrateful for wanting more.
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Even if you're looking around thinking it doesn't seem stressful, like it's my job isn't as stressful and it's just maybe not fulfilling. So I shouldn't, you know, I shouldn't want more.
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It's okay to want more. You should have something that is fulfilling. You're allowed to evolve, and you're allowed to want to evolve. You're allowed to choose a version of life that is meaningful, that it feels successful, that centers on you, that is not selfish.
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You should allow to be. You should be allowed to have a life where it is not just about managing, fixing, or carrying things for everyone else. And if the ladder doesn't, fit you, you don't have to keep climbing it. So this isn't about breaking it down, it's about breaking things open.
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So if you're ready for the kind of career clarity that doesn't come from, so if you're ready for the kind of career clarity that doesn't come with a side of shame or hustle, then I'd say download the "No Ladder" Career Map and get some ideas on strategy and language and decision making structure that isn't linear, that's going to meet you where you are and gives you the ability to think about how to spot what isn't working and what is, to test what might work and to build a roadmap for what the future could look like.
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And if this episode cracked something open for you, then pass it on and let another woman know that she's not the problem. She's just maybe outgrowing a system that wasn't built for her brilliance. So until next time, protect your energy, honor your evolution, and I'll see you right back here on the Unapologetic EDGE.
