Tip 1: Challenges for Women in Business

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” — Mark Twain

If you consider yourself a minority in your chosen field of business, you will no doubt come across obstacles in your path, and the way you deal with them will define your experience of being a minority. Is it a challenge or is it an opportunity for you?

What is your situation? Fill in your own label for how you’re a minority. Are you a woman in business or aspiring to go into business? Are you Native American, African-American, Latina, Asian American, lesbian, religious minority, a veteran? Are you widowed, elderly, too young, on welfare?

What labels do you carry? Whatever the challenge that lies ahead, your chosen path towards business success may have side trails where others use these labels to hurt you, demean you, or anger you. Our biggest task in moving forward on our stated path is to approach these potential pitfalls, understand them, and formulate and act on a plan to steer clear!

Richard Nelson Bolles, in his excellent job hunter’s guide, “What Color is Your Parachute?” points out that you are in charge of your own destiny, and you choose how you want your particular set of circumstances to affect your attitude. He’s worked with people with Down’s syndrome, people who are on welfare, people who are divorced, people who are disabled, people who have gone bankrupt, and all other kinds of situations. His premise is that jobseekers simply need to find employers who don’t make an issue out of that particular situation.

As women in business, we need to find clients and customers for whom our particular situation is not an issue. Even better, we use our unique set of circumstances to create our dream clientele. For example, when I first started developing websites for my business, I took on any kind of client, even if the project wasn’t the best fit or I didn’t have a good feeling. After some near-disastrous experiences, I realized that the quicker I relied on my intuition and the more I cleared my plate of projects that didn’t “fit,” the better the types of projects would appear. Since then, we’ve focused narrowly on our field of specialty and our company has thrived. We focus on building websites for women entrepreneurs and business owners, progressive organizations, and membership groups and we do exactly that. We’re happy, our customers are happy, and everyone benefits from the right match of resource, technology, social connections, and enthusiasm.

If you carry particular labels, it’s time to hold them up and examine how you may be using those labels to limit your beliefs about what’s possible in your business. Here are some potential ways that a label impacts your business success.

Challenge #1: Stereotyping

When has stereotyping affected you? Do you believe potential stereotypes, brush them off, or embrace them? As one of our oldest ways to find meaning, stereotyping may be as simple as thinking one person’s behavior represents an entire race or religion, or it may be as complex as an employee being passed over to perform a task because of mistaken assumptions about their skill level.

In business, the best way to overcome stereotyping is to be extraordinarily clear about needs, expectations, desires, and priorities. With a project, put the focus on personnel, timing, deliverables, and levels of responsibility to reduce the murkiness associated with stereotypes. Furthermore, develop a good sense of all interested parties’ abilities (through formal training, testing, or some other analysis). Hard numbers give decision-makers better information on how to finish a job.

While reputation, social status, brownie points and stereotyping may be at work in a company, the organization’s health and longevity will depend on creating more clarity about goals, procedures, and fair policies.

A good stereotype for you to engage in is to consider how you want to promote your business: get your company name to be synonymous with superior products, excellent customer service, or a niche industry, and take advantage of the opportunity to create your own stereotype. “Mary? She’s the expert in e-commerce, isn’t she? Javier’s company does network setups. Siobhan is who you need to call for home appraisals. Russ is the best financial planner for small business owners.” Those are stereotypes you’d want to foster.

Challenge #2: Finding Opportunities

For years, one of my complaints was the existing “old-boy’s network” that closed out any new kind of competition. Little did I realize that my best solution was to assemble my own “new-girl’s network” comprised of women in business who I appreciated and wanted to support.

If you find yourself getting continually locked out of particular opportunities, or not even knowing about a potential opportunity, now is a good time to:

1) make a list of key decision-makers in your field of interest and meet with them
2) join a group in your industry
3) network with business leaders
4) expand your circle of contacts
5) volunteer

Information flows to people who have many different “loose” connections, so strive to become a connector. The more types of people with whom you make connections, the more information you’ll be able to access, and the more your network of people will be able to help each other. Opportunities become plentiful as you realize you know more and more people.

Challenge #3: Open Avenues of Communication

With more direct methods of communication, you reduce the time you spend clearing up misunderstandings, clarifying cloudy statements, or brushing away cobwebby data. Identify agendas, proposals, or outlines in advance. Use written followup to verbal communication by sending out meeting notes or summaries. Write out job descriptions. Lock up contracts with deliverables. By identifying sticky points before they become unworkable, you provide a great relief to others and you open up potential for collaboration and free exchange of ideas.

Find ways to clarify communications for all stakeholders and use people’s natural desire to be part of a harmonious group to encourage shared communication. You and your colleagues will appreciate the opportunity to air grievances, brainstorm new ideas, or take on organizational issues in a supportive atmosphere.

Challenge #4: Business Know-how

My best friend’s mom always said there are two kinds of people: people who know things and people who know how to look things up. Women in business have to deal with a myriad of different moving pieces in their endeavors: it’s great when we find other people who are experts in their own field and who will help us.

Your team will include varied people who have skills different from your personal skills. Ideally your team includes someone knowledgeable about the numbers like your accountant, someone knowledgeable about legal issues like an attorney to help with contracts or intellectual property, someone like a strategy person who thinks long term, someone like a manager who gets things done, and others to focus on sales, marketing, information technology and other aspects of your business.

If you’re just starting out or you’re a sole proprietor, the importance of expanding your team will become more and more apparent as you realize that one person is physically incapable of covering all the different aspects of a business. The quicker you find your teammates and organize people, the better.

Challenge #5: Leadership and Delegating

If you’re in a leadership position (as most competent people find themselves), you’ve benefited from learning how to delegate. As women in business, we often want to take on every single task by ourselves. It’s the smarter, more efficient, and more prepared woman who delegates non-essential tasks to others to complete.

Michael E. Gerber, author of The E-myth Revisited, hammers home the point that most small business owners are good at their specific field of expertise, but they are not good at running a business. If this applies to you, find assistance as quickly as possible by delegating tasks like bookkeeping, data entry, and customer service to others. Focus on what you do best and hire others to do their best. As businesswomen, our biggest challenge is thinking big, systematizing, and forecasting, rather than getting bogged down into the technical aspect of doing our jobs.

Challenge #6: Mentorship

Finding a mentor is one of the first steps to developing an extended network of support people who will guide you on your path and help you identify crossroads and opportunities for growth. A good mentor is someone who excels in the field they’ve chosen and who is open to communicating with you on a regular basis. A good mentor also opens up doors for you and introduces you to potential allies.

Identify someone in your company or in your industry who you’d like to model your own business (and life) after, and inquire if they’ll agree to mentor you: you’ll benefit from the lessons they’ve learned and you’ll probably make a friend for life.

Challenge #7: Personal, Family, and Community Obligations


No resource on women in business is complete without mention of the work/life balance and our responsibility to our own lives and the lives of those we love. When our lives are consumed by our work, we lose perspective and our relationships (with ourselves, with our families, and with others) suffer. Let’s work smarter, not harder.

Women in business, especially minority women in business, are often seeking a better balance between what they love to do and the people they love to be with: let’s keep our priorities straight and find more and more ways to maximize our efficiency. Finding better ways to work will mean creating greater value for others through our products, services, and ideas: greater value means greater profits, greater balance, and more time for the people we love.

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