Young happy concentrated chinese female intern asking confident middle aged male team leader questions about work. Diverse coworkers sitting together at office with computer, discussing project ideas.
As a leadership coach specializing in supporting female executives, my clients often come to me feeling stuck and frustrated. They ask, “Why was I passed over for a promotion?” “Why does my boss think I lack strategic vision?” “Why isn’t doing good work enough to get ahead?”
They’re not alone. Despite substantial improvements in recent years, women remain persistently underrepresented in top leadership roles, accounting for fewer than one in four executive level positions. And of course, there are countless systemic factors that drive these ongoing disparities, from bias in hiring and promotion to a lack of access to sponsorship and mission-critical assignments, flawed approaches to leadership development, and an educational system that often fails to prepare students (especially women) to navigate the pitfalls and complexities of organizational life.
The onus is on organizations to address their own roles in perpetuating these systemic issues. But at the same time, my decades of experience coaching hundreds of female leaders from around the world have demonstrated that there are tactical steps managers can take to help women thrive in this imperfect system. These steps can help us move forward today, while governments, companies, systems, and structures continue to evolve.
Specifically, I’ve found that it’s often helpful to think of workplace challenges like an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg — the part that you see — is the triggering event. But below the surface lie first our patterns of behavior, then systems and structures, followed finally by the limiting mental models that can hold us back. Each layer of the iceberg offers a different avenue for managers to explore, ultimately providing their reports with the agency and choice to determine which elements will be most helpful to their growth. Below, I’ve outlined how managers can use this framework to help women break through each level of the iceberg, giving them the tools to help female leaders overcome both internal and external barriers to leadership success.
Level 1: The Tip of the Iceberg
The tip of the iceberg is what’s immediately visible above the surface. It’s the specific, frustrating event that a female leader experiences, such as getting passed over for a promotion; dismissed, ignored, or not even invited to an important strategic meeting; or criticized in a review.
When a direct report comes to you about an event like this, opt for a coaching approach. Your primary focus should first be to listen without judgement, and without attempting to rush in and solve the problem. Don’t assume you already know what’s going on, or jump to conclusions about why the employee is upset. Instead, signal your support by responding, “Let’s chat. Tell me what’s happening.”
When you give people space to share their experience, they feel seen, heard, and witnessed. This is a powerful way to provide support, and it is also an important step in processing workplace hurt. For example, I worked with a senior VP at a global cloud computing company who became furious just recalling being passed over for a coveted promotion, unleashing a flood of toxic, negative emotion. Coaching her felt like lancing a boil: She had to release all that negativity before we could even start to think about solutions. Another client, a director of research at a European think tank, received criticism that she perceived to be “unfair” and personal. Rather than getting angry, she started sobbing as she recounted her experience.
When managers are able to provide a supportive space for their employees to express their emotions and be truly seen and heard, it can foster an incredibly healing experience. Moreover, in the long run, it can also be more effective than jumping to solutions, as it can help people both to process (rather than bottle up) their feelings and to engage in more clear-headed and generative thinking to identify the most helpful strategies to move forward.
Level 2: Under the Surface
Just below the surface lie patterns of behavior. These are the underlying habits and activities that play a part in driving our tip-of-the-iceberg events, such as prioritizing low-visibility projects or putting in long hours in a strategically unimportant area. For example, I worked with a General Council at a large international organization who described feeling like she worked hard, but that all her hard work hadn’t gotten her the recognition or promotion she felt she deserved. After getting passed over for a promotion for the second time, she described feeling angry, resentful, and wanting to quit.
As a manager, always begin with compassion: “I hear you are frustrated, and I understand this is the second time you have been passed over for the promotion. Let’s talk about this.” Next, help your report explore the counterproductive patterns of behavior that may be hiding just beneath the surface by asking, “What have you learned about yourself and about what the organization values? How do you currently spend most of your time? How much time do you invest into the activities that the organization values — and how visible are your contributions?” Most importantly, remember to prioritize empathy and learning, showing genuine curiosity about their experience throughout the conversation.
By helping your employees to connect the dots of their experiences, you encourage them to move from anger to curiosity. As the General Council reflected, “I never thought about the experience of being passed over or about how I work as patterns, or as learning opportunities.” By zooming out to identify the underlying patterns at play, she was able to reflect on what her organization valued — in this case, a more visible and vocal representative and ambassador for the organization — and she began to see that her “heads-down and deliver” way of working was unlikely to get her the promotion she was after. By opening herself up and refocusing from blaming others to analyzing the factors driving her situation, she determined that proactively seeking out more opportunities for visibility, applying for a promotion as soon as an opening was announced, and making sure she leveraged her network would likely be more effective strategies to achieve her goals.
Level 3: Deeper Underwater
Yet another level deeper are the systems and structures that influence our patterns of behavior. These factors can be both organizational and individual: On an organizational level, they may include a company’s values, its code of conduct, DEI policies and training, job descriptions, promotion process, learning and development opportunities, recognition systems, and company culture. Individually, socialization as a “good girl,” entrenched gender norms, lived experiences, and unique personality traits can also drive these patterns.
To start to unpack these issues, managers can ask, “Given your experiences and knowledge about the organization, what could you do (besides ‘work harder’) to improve your chances of promotion?” Other specific avenues to explore include:
- How can we make you and your work more visible? What can you do? What can I do? Is there anyone else we should enlist?
- How can we advocate for you and the position you want?
- How can you leverage your networks?
- What kind of support do you need from me? The organization? (This might include training, sponsorship, a stretch assignment, etc.)
For example, I worked with a woman who shifted from feeling angry to skeptical to fierce. While she might not have liked the structures and systems that stood between her and her goals, beginning to recognize them helped her identify strategies to move forward. Specifically, she organized a one-on-one with her boss to discuss her concerns, and even convinced him to set up a meeting with his boss as well. Together, the three of them agreed on a plan to boost her visibility within the organization. She also started proactively networking, she volunteered to be a mentor, and she started delegating more. Just a year later, she landed a major promotion, working on a much bigger and more visible project.
Level 4: The Base
Finally, the base of the iceberg is the mental models — our values, assumptions, and beliefs — that shape both ourselves and the systems in which we operate. Here too, there are both organizational and individual components to consider. An organization might be defined by assumptions such as “We are old, big, established, reputable. We have a way of doing things. We prioritize tradition, and we pivot only when necessary.” Similarly, an individual may hold a value of meritocracy and fairness, an assumption that good work should speak for itself, or perhaps even a sense of entitlement (i.e., “I work hard so I deserve a reward”).
When drilling down into the base of the iceberg, managers can encourage their reports to consider what they might do differently if they knew and accepted what really drove recognition and promotions in their organization. They can then ask, “How can I support you in making those changes?” This is all about promoting contextual awareness, and then leveraging that new self-awareness to co-create actionable solutions.
This level was particularly powerful for the distraught Research Director I described earlier, who found herself stuck in sadness and despair. By depersonalizing her experience and instead focusing on the larger organizational belief systems at play, she began to recognize her organization (and its promotion processes) as they actually were — not how she may have wished them to be. As a result, she was able to explore what she could do differently without taking such a major hit to her already-bruised confidence. Asking the question “What does my organization actually value and promote?” was empowering. It reminded her that she wasn’t the problem, and it invited her to engage with solutions rather than getting stuck focusing on how she wished the organization was and her own perceived shortcomings.
Once she was in this headspace, it was easy to start identifying practical next steps. Since she had a negative relationship with her supervisor, she started by talking to her department head to discuss where she was and where she wanted to go. She started preparing for and speaking up at high-level meetings, volunteering, and networking. Soon, she was recruited by another organization for a role with higher pay and more leadership responsibilities — and she happily took the job.
To Stop Treading Water, We Need to Dive Beneath the Surface
By exploring what’s beneath the tip of the iceberg, managers can get to the core of an issue, embracing the nuance and complexity of organizational challenges and co-creating solutions that actually work for everyone. This approach acknowledges that it shouldn’t be all on women to solve problems that are systemic and structural in nature, while also helping women to question and update the unhelpful mental models that may hold them back from achieving their goals.
As a manager, you have the power to help your reports recognize that simply “working harder” might not be enough. Instead, we must all identify what our organizations actually value — and then decide whether we are willing to change our patterns of behavior accordingly. And to be clear, the answer isn’t always yes. If an organization values strategic growth, prioritizing more strategic projects is likely a reasonable plan. But if an organization values the talkers (the “blah blah blahers,” as one client called them), then a more introverted employee might rightfully decide that a job change is their best move.
By talking openly and honestly with your reports about their ambitions and frustrations at every level of the iceberg, you can help them identify the practical steps that will help them advance in their careers. Thinking through each of these four levels has helped my clients learn to prioritize and prepare for higher-level meetings that boost their visibility, to take on strategic stretch assignments or attend major conferences, to participate in learning and development programs, to embrace networking, and more. As a result, they’ve been invited to participate in more strategic initiatives, they’ve been selected for coveted promotions, and they’ve reported feeling a greater sense of agency in their careers.
Of course, this is seldom a linear process. To the contrary, these conversations may move back and forth between levels — and individual managers will no doubt have to adapt the strategies I’ve outlined to meet the needs of their unique reports and organizations. But by pushing past the surface and diving below the waterline, managers can empower female leaders to break through their own icebergs and navigate an imperfect workplace with confidence.
