In the minefield of office politics, navigating your way up the ladder can be as nerve-wracking as swimming with sharks -- even if they are congenial, cake-eating sharks.
At a glance
Name: Lois Frankel, Ph.D.
Hometown: Pasadena, Calif.
Education: Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Southern California.
Career highlights:
- Author of "Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office" and "Stop Sabotaging Your Career."
- Featured on AOL as an online business coach.
- International keynote speaker.
- President of Corporate Coaching International, a consulting firm.
- Founder of MOSTE: Motivating Our Students Through Experience.
Learning how to play the game, identifying weak points in your workplace strategy, and developing skills and behaviors to succeed could benefit almost anyone. That's where coaching comes in.
Dr. Lois Frankel has devoted her career to helping people with theirs, first as a human resources professional in a Fortune 100 company then as a career coach and author striving to empower women in the workplace.
For our most burning career questions, such as why are women still struggling and what the heck does branding mean to individuals anyway, Bankrate caught up with Dr. Frankel and got some answers.
 It's 2009. Women in the workplace should be a nonstory by now but it's not. Why are women still struggling?
 We are still struggling. I recently did a survey of Generation Y women, or "millennials," and what we found is that they are encountering the same things that their mothers did or older sisters did.
Things aren't that much different and you would think that they would be. And when you ask the question why not, the problem is the problem. This is a saying that we use in consulting: The problem is the problem.
We live in a society where we don't like women who are too pushy, and as a result, each time a women tries to stand up for herself and assert herself and advocate for herself, she is called names. And what woman wants to be called names?
So she ends up acquiescing and backs down.
I think the system works to deny women who want to achieve more, who want to be considered equal. The system still works against them
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What mistakes do women make in business? |
Do women make mistakes? Yeah, they do. There is a thread back to that diseased place, the desire to be the nice little girl we were taught to be, and be accepted, and that is what underscores the mistakes we make.
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