President Obama Launches White House Internship Program
President Obama today launched the White House Internship Program for his administration and announced that applications are currently being accepted for the summer of 2009. Those selected to participate in the program will gain valuable job experience and an inside look at the life of White House staff while building leadership skills.
"This program will mentor and cultivate young leaders of today and tomorrow and I'm proud that they will have this opportunity to serve," said President Obama. "I look forward to working with those that are selected to participate and I want to commend all who apply for their desire to help through public service to forge a brighter future for our country."
In addition to normal office duties, interns will supplement their learning experience by attending a weekly lecture series hosted by senior White House staff, help at White House social events, and volunteer in community service projects.
The 2009 Summer Internship program runs from May 22nd to August 14th and the submission deadline is March 22, 2009.
Those interested in applying to the White House Internship Program must be:
* US Citizens
* Eighteen years of age on or before the first day of the internship.
* Enrolled in a college or university (2-4 year institution) or must have graduated from college in the past two years.
Interns will be placed in a departmental office for their internship. Below is a list of departments in the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President where interns could be placed.
White House Department of Scheduling and Advance
The Office of Cabinet Affairs
The White House Communications Department
The White House Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs
The Office of the First Lady
The White House Office of Legislative Affairs (OLA)
The Office of Political Affairs
The Office of Management and Administration
The Office of White House Counsel
The Domestic Policy Council=2 0
The White House Office of Presidential Personnel
Office of the Vice President
More information on the White House Internship Program, including application instructions, can be found at: www.whitehouse.gov/about/internships
THE WHITE HOUSE, February 26, 2009.
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Wednesday, March 4, 2009
President Obama Launches White House Internship Program
Monday, March 2, 2009
Where Are The Women's Voices?
I came into adulthood with the stand: A world with no one and nothing left out.
As I look at the “forest,” one thing is pretty consistent; women’s voices are gone missing, generation after generation with a concurrent almost virtual non-curiosity about that from a lot of people. (Are the women simply not speaking? Are they speaking but not published? Do they know they are not speaking and stay quiet on purpose? What’s up with the silence?)
Do most women and girls know that our being public is a relatively new human phenomenon; that Virginia Woolf was not allowed to study at the university library simply because she was a woman? Knowing that has made a deep difference in how I “be”. It encourages and inspires me to know my history as it pertains to the public voice and public discourse of women.
I have been relatively involved in the United Nations system since 1995 and women’s voices — including their writing which I consider to be a form of voice — are missing. Whether it’s the membership of the Security Council, the General Assembly or lesser committees, we are missing. And then if we’re not missing completely, there might be a token woman but I’ll watch her be pretty quiet and reserved and/or having her focus on being not kicked out of the primarily male group.
I know without a doubt that I make a huge difference with individuals in and out of my community. I get e-mails all the time from people who have read my book or seen my play and they’ve taken what I’ve thought through and made a difference in their lives and the lives of their families. But I don’t think I’ve been able to impact the culture of my community. I’m practicing what it takes to make a global difference. So far, as a for instance, I haven’t made any difference that I can see in the quotes that are used. I have been requesting that women’s voices be included in the examples of leadership, not because I’m a brat but because I am a stand that it makes a difference to be able to see yourself in other people’s leadership. And if the only woman whose leadership is cited is Mother Teresa, we get yet another example of a woman who had to attain almost saintly status before she’d be listened to. I say that makes a difference in women’s and men’s listening for female leadership.
Fundamentally, knowing that I stand on some pretty powerful female shoulders in the arena of leadership has made a profound difference; knowing what Margaret Sanger, Jeanette Rankin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Clara Barton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, et. al. went through to be seen and heard has given me the strength to not go away, to hang in there, to work to inspire other women to show up, lead and play with carving out what it means to be human; invent who they are and what they can say that has never been said before. Gandhi got his ideas for non-violent social change from observing the women in the U.S. and Great Britain go after the vote. Talk about an enrollment conversation!
There’s a United Nations resolution, 1327, that is something that’s never been said: that women must be included at the table in peace negotiations. Women and children are disproportionately impacted by war and refugee status due to the movement AWAY from combatant to combatant conflict in wars and yet, (wars now kill more civilians than anyone else) their lives, experience, needs, vision are largely missing from what “peace” looks like or how it can be attained and/or maintained. That’s an extreme example. Now implementation of 1327 has been another matter. The councils can’t see how including women’s voices might make a difference; they don’t get it; they don’t see how “hearing and seeing” women at the table, (and not just one woman but a critical mass) could have something new happen.
That’s the macro level as for the forest I’m talking about.
My micro level, the place where I practice making a difference so I can go into the global-difference-making domain, I see women missing from the public discourse there too. And I’m curious about the “how come” women’s voices missing doesn’t show up as missing for very many people. One analogy may be listening to a chorus of tenors, baritones and basses a lot and wondering not only why there aren’t any altos and sopranos joining in but that they haven’t even shown up for choir practice. And yes, I’m proud and encouraged that there are so many women who lead in my community. That doesn’t mean necessarily that they know their own history of whose shoulders they stand on. They grew up in the same male-centric educational institutions that we all did.
One thing I observed as a professor at Cal State LA is that the women were almost ALWAYS reluctant to engage, and/or to risk looking stupid, or to insist on inserting themselves into the conversation. Not so for the men. Their strength oftentimes was the willingness to risk. They know men have engaged publicly and I say that makes a difference for a person’s willingness to participate. I would read quotes by women and they, women AND men were amazed that a woman could say such a thing and then, how come they’d never heard of her? Intellectual curiosity begets intellectual curiosity.
One of my missions is to prick people’s “what’s missing?” chord. But the trick here is of course, if you don’t know something is missing how do you know it’s missing?
Is everyone so sure that it doesn’t make a difference to find out what might be said, or learned, by including women? I’ve asked a few men to consider what it might be like for them if (almost) everything they read, heard, considered philosophically or intellectually had been generated by men; the books, the quotes, philosophy, etc. were all generated by women. Would they notice? Would they wonder where men had gone? If men were just not all that bright, or not “good” in those areas? Does it have any meaning? Would it make a difference if their presence were there? What if probing the meaning of life was the exclusive domain of women? And if so, how did that happen?
Anyway, these are the areas that I long to explore and be heard in... mostly because I feel called to be that voice that wonders about missing female voices and what difference it make in transforming what it means to be human.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
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Friday, February 6, 2009
Welcome To The 5050Leadership Fitness Challenge 2009
Come to this site regularly and post your successes, chat with others who are taking the challenge and get inspired and motivated all over again!
On the right side, you will see there is a Fitness tip of the day - check it out, there will be some great tips in there.
Good luck!
Pauline Field
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Centered leadership-McKinsey 2008
Centered leadership: How talented women thrive
A new approach to leadership can help women become more self-confident and effective business leaders.
September 2008 • Joanna Barsh, Susie Cranston, And Rebecca A. Craske
Women start careers in business and other professions with the same level of intelligence, education, and commitment as men. Yet comparatively few reach the top echelons.
This gap matters not only because the familiar glass ceiling is unfair, but also because the world has an increasingly urgent need for more leaders. All men and women with the brains, the desire, and the perseverance to lead should be encouraged to fulfill their potential and leave their mark.
With all this in mind, the McKinsey Leadership Project—an initiative to help professional women at McKinsey and elsewhere—set out four years ago to learn what drives and sustains successful female leaders. We wanted to help younger women navigate the paths to leadership and, at the same time, to learn how organizations could get the best out of this talented group.
To that end, we have interviewed more than 85 women around the world (and a few good men) who are successful in diverse fields. Some lead 10,000 people or more, others 5 or even fewer. While the specifics of their lives vary, each one shares the goal of making a difference in the wider world. All were willing to discuss their personal experiences and to provide insights into what it takes to stay the leadership course. We have also studied the academic literature; consulted experts in leadership, psychology, organizational behavior, and biology; and sifted through the experiences of hundreds of colleagues at McKinsey.
From the interviews and other research, we have distilled a leadership model comprising five broad and interrelated dimensions (exhibit):meaning, or finding your strengths and putting them to work in the service of an inspiring purpose; managing energy, or knowing where your energy comes from, where it goes, and what you can do to manage it; positive framing, or adopting a more constructive way to view your world, expand your horizons, and gain the resilience to move ahead even when bad things happen; connecting, or identifying who can help you grow, building stronger relationships, and increasing your sense of belonging; andengaging, or finding your voice, becoming self-reliant and confident by accepting opportunities and the inherent risks they bring, and collaborating with others.
We call this model centered leadership. As the name implies, it’s about having a well of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual strength that drives personal achievement and, in turn, inspires others to follow. What’s particularly exciting is that we are starting to discover ways women can actively build the skills to become more self-confident and effective leaders. Centered leadership also works for men, though we have found that the model resonates particularly well with women because we have built it on a foundation of research into their specific needs and experiences.
Centered leadership emphasizes the role of positive emotions. A few characteristics particularly distinguish women from their male counterparts in the workplace. First, women can more often opt out of it than men can. Second, their double burden—motherhood and management—drains energy in a particularly challenging way. Third, they tend to experience emotional ups and downs more often and more intensely than most men do. Given these potentially negative emotions, centered leadership consciously draws on positive psychology, a discipline that seeks to identify what makes healthy people thrive. Although none of the women we interviewed articulated her ideas in precisely those terms, when we dived into the literature and interviewed leading academics, we found strong echoes of what our female leaders had been telling us.
Meaning
‘To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?’
Meaning is the motivation that moves us. It enables people to discover what interests them and to push themselves to the limit. It makes the heart beat faster, provides energy, and inspires passion. Without meaning, work is a slog between weekends. With meaning, any job can become a calling.
It starts with happiness. Positive psychologists (including Tal Ben-Shahar, Jonathan Haidt, and Martin Seligman) have defined a progression of happiness that leads from pleasure to engagement to meaning. Researchers have demonstrated, for example, that an ice cream break provides only short-lived pleasure; in contrast, the satisfaction derived from an act of kindness or gratitude lasts much longer. Katharine Graham, the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 enterprise (the Washington Post Company), famously said, “To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?”
Why is meaning important for leaders? Studies have shown that among professionals, it translates into greater job satisfaction, higher productivity, lower turnover, and increased loyalty.1 The benefits also include feelings of transcendence—in other words, contributing to something bigger than yourself generates a deeper sense of meaning, thereby creating a virtuous cycle. Finding meaning in life helped some of the women leaders we interviewed take new paths and accept the personal risks implicit in their goals.
Shelly Lazarus, the chairman and CEO of the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, described how she “just followed [her] heart, doing the things that [she] loved to do.” This sense of meaning inspired her, early in her career, to jump from Clairol to Ogilvy. Lazarus commented that everyone she knew thought that her decision to go from the client side to the agency side was a strategic move. But “it wasn’t really like that,” she says. “I just loved the interaction with the agency because that was the moment I could see where the ideas came to life.”
People seeking to define what is meaningful can start, as one interviewee put it, by “being honest with yourself about what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing.” Building these signature strengths into everyday activities at work makes you happier, in part by making these activities more meaningful. Although there is no simple formula for matching your strengths to any single industry or function, you can look for patterns in jobs that have and haven’t worked out and talk with others about your experiences.
The connection between signature strengths and work can change because priorities do; sometimes, for example, a job is better than a calling, especially for young mothers. Our interviews show that this ebb and flow is natural and that the key to success is being aware of the shifts—and making conscious choices about them—in the context of bigger goals, personal or professional.
To read more on meaning:
Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment,
Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment,
Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want,
Managing energy
‘Flow’—a sense of being so engaged by activities that you don’t notice the passage of time Actively managing energy levels is crucial to leaders. Today’s executives work hard: 60 percent of the senior executives toil more than 50 hours a week, and 10 percent more than 80 hours a week.2 What’s more, many women come home from work only to sign onto a “second shift”—92 percent of them still manage all household tasks, such as meal preparation and child care.3
We’ve found that work–life balance is a myth—so the only hope women have is to balance their energy flows. This means basing your priorities on the activities that energize you, both at work and at home, and actively managing your resources to avoid dipping into reserves. Burnout is a reality for men and women alike, but for women who can opt out, so too is throwing in the towel.
But work doesn’t have to be exhausting. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a founder of positive psychology, studied thousands of people, from sculptors to factory workers. He found that those who frequently experienced what he called “flow”—a sense of being so engaged by activities that you don’t notice the passage of time—were more productive and derived greater satisfaction from their work than those who did not. Further, it energized rather than drained them.
Zia Mody, a top litigator inIndia, described how she gained energy from a life that most people would see as exhausting. Even when her three daughters were young, she put in 16-hour days to prepare her cases. A woman among thousands of men at court, she lit up as she told us, “I love it! I love winning. I love being in court. . . . It excites me—I cannot tell you how much.”
One useful tactic is to identify the conditions and situations that replenish your energy and those that sap it. Self-awareness lets you deliberately incorporate restorative elements into your day. It can also help you to space out your energy-sapping tasks throughout the day, instead of bundling them all into a single morning or afternoon. A particularly useful tip, we have found, is to give yourself time during the day to focus without distractions such as blinking lights and buzzing phones. Your productivity will benefit several times over.
To read more on managing energy:
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,
Edy Greenblatt, “Work/Life Balance: Wisdom or Whining,”Organizational Dynamics, 2002, Volume 31, Number 2, pp. 177–93.
Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal,
Positive framing
No matter how pessimistic you are by nature, you can learn to view situations as optimists do
The frames people use to view the world and process experiences can make a critical difference to professional outcomes. Many studies suggest that optimists see life more realistically than pessimists do, a frame of mind that can be crucial to making the right business decisions. That insight may be particularly critical for women, who are twice as likely to become depressed, according to one study.4Optimists, research shows, are not afraid to frame the world as it actually is—they are confident that they can manage its challenges and move their teams quickly to action. By contrast, pessimists are more likely to feel helpless and to get stuck in downward spirals that lead to energy-depleting rumination.
Martin Seligman, a psychologist who was an early proponent of positive psychology, found, for example, that optimists are better able to deal with the news that they have cancer. Confident that they can handle the prognosis, they immediately start to gather facts and dive into treatment plans; pessimists, on the other hand, become paralyzed with fear. Seligman also shows that optimism can be learned—an important insight that underlies positive framing.
Positive framing and positive thinking, we would emphasize, are two different notions. The latter tries to replace adversity with positive beliefs. The former accepts the facts of adversity and counters them with action. Talking yourself into a view contrary to the facts has a temporary effect at best.
The experience of Andrea Jung, the chairman and CEO of
No matter how pessimistic you are by nature, you can learn to view situations as optimists do. The key is self-awareness. If a meeting goes badly, for example, you should limit your thoughts about it to its temporary and specific impact and keep them impersonal. It helps to talk with trusted colleagues about the reasons for the poor meeting and ways to do better next time. These discussions should take place quickly enough for you to make a specific plan and act on it. You should also undertake some activity that will restore both your energy and your faith in yourself—perhaps having a hard workout, going out with friends, or spending time with your children.
To read more on positive framing:
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom,
Martin E. P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life,
Connecting
‘We were supporting each other, and there was power in the many’
People with strong networks and good mentors enjoy more promotions, higher pay, and greater career satisfaction.5 They feel a sense of belonging, which makes their lives meaningful. As Mark Hunter and Herminia Ibarra have noted in the Harvard Business Review, what differentiates a leader from a manager “is the ability to figure out where to go and to enlist the people and groups necessary to get there.”6 Yet not all networks are equal. Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist who studies social belonging and rejection, believes that men tend to build broader, shallower networks than women do and that the networks of men give them a wider range of resources for gaining knowledge and professional opportunities.7 This theory is a matter of substantial debate among academics. Our experience with hundreds of women at McKinsey, however, offers additional evidence that women’s networks tend to be narrower but deeper than men’s.
The experience of Dame Stella Rimington, who in the late 1960s joined MI5, theUK’s domestic intelligence organization, offers an example of the power of broad networks to get things done. Rimington, later the agency’s director general, says that “women were definitely second-class citizens” in those days. They weren’t allowed to do fieldwork, for example, yet “many of the women were completely indistinguishable from the men: they had the same kind of education.”
She continues: “So we women—there were quite a few of us by then—we sort of ganged up and did a kind of round-robin thing and said, ‘Why is it that we have a completely different career than men who are exactly like us?’ And for the first time, the powers that be started to scratch their heads because they suddenly had to find an answer. . . . And in the end, of course, they decided that they would have to promote a few women.” She later concluded that “no one of us would have asked that question on her own. We were supporting each other, and there was power in the many.”
The leaders we interviewed also talked about the importance of having individual relationships with senior colleagues willing to go beyond the role of mentor—someone willing to stick out his or her own neck to create opportunity for or help a protégée. Such a person is what Ruth Porat, a vice chairwoman at Morgan Stanley, called a “sponsor.”
A number of studies have shown that women who promote their own interests vigorously are seen as aggressive, uncooperative, and selfish. An equal number of studies show that the failure of women to promote their own interests results in a lack of female leaders. Until one of these conditions changes, sponsors, we believe, are the key to helping women gain access to opportunities they merit and need to develop.
Porat explained how a managing director took a chance on her when she was a second-year associate, asking her to present to a client’s board of directors. “The consumer client wanted a woman to be present. I had never been in a boardroom, let alone presented in a boardroom. ‘Sink or swim,’ he told me. ‘You’re in.’ I still remember to this day a mistake I made and that it was, overall, a good presentation. He took a real chance on me.”
One surprising thing we learned as a result of talking with female leaders was that they often fail to reciprocate and find expectations that they should do so distasteful. A senior partner at McKinsey noted that men naturally understand that you must “give before you get,” but women don’t. This tendency—which other leaders have described to us as well—combined with the sometimes awkward sexual politics, real or perceived, between senior men and younger women, makes it harder for women to find sponsors.
Yet women can learn reciprocity. To start, it’s important to assess your comfort level with the people you know through work, as well as how influential they are professionally. Most women we’ve worked with typically find that the colleagues they are close to are not influential—and vice versa. Explicit planning and some risk taking are needed to change this.
One approach is to provide and ask for help on a regular basis. Finding ways to forge connections through interests outside of work is another. Over and over, we heard, “Make it personal,” in the sense that others will get along with you more easily if they see your human side. You can express this in all kinds of ways at work, without inappropriately blending your professional and personal lives. The female leaders we interviewed acted on this insight both to find sponsors and to build networks.
To read more on connecting:
Catalyst, Creating Women’s Networks: A How-To Guide for Women and Companies,
Monica Higgins and Kathy Kram, “Reconceptualizing Mentoring at Work: A Developmental Network Perspective,” Academy ofManagementReview, 2001, Volume 26, Number 2, pp. 264–68.
Lois J. Zachary, The Mentor’s Guide: Facilitating Effective Learning Relationships,
Engaging
‘You did the work, so you’ve got to talk about it’
Many people think that hard work will eventually be noticed and rewarded. That can indeed happen—but usually doesn’t. Women, our interviewees repeatedly told us, need to “create their own luck.” To engage with opportunities by taking ownership of them, you must first find your own voice, literally. Julie Daum, a prominent Spencer Stuart recruiter who specializes in board placements, told us that even senior women on boards still lose out by not speaking up: they hang back if they think that they have nothing new to say or that their ideas fall short of profound.
One senior woman we interviewed told us how she learned to join in: “Every Monday, we had a senior-management meeting. In the beginning, I just listened. I learned from the guys because they were all there. And after a while I started to speak up. You did the work, so you’ve got to talk about it. And I did.”
Women who want to grow as leaders should also take ownership of their professional development. Mary Ma, Lenovo’s former chief financial officer, said that she drew inspiration from using the Japanese auto industry as a metaphor, reshaping herself to become more competitive by identifying what she had to change and then actually changing it. As Ma noted, she didn’t complain to her boss or to her colleagues but rather looked inward to see how she could be a more effective leader. Instead of waiting for someone to tell her what to do, she took a systematic approach to self-improvement.
Engagement is equally about risk taking. The women we interviewed accept risk as a part of opportunity. Some have the confidence and courage to dive in; others use analytic problem solving to assess risks and then proceed to action. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert says his research indicates that people who make a choice for risk and work with it, rather than avoid it, report a greater degree of happiness than others do.
Shona Brown, Google’s senior vice president of business operations, described how she handles opportunities and the risks that accompany them. “I’ll use a skiing analogy because I like to jump off cliffs,” she says. “But I generally jump off cliffs from which I’m relatively confident I’m going to land—or if I don’t, it’s not dangerous.” Brown said she enjoys risk. “I like to be at that point where you’re about to jump. Your stomach is kind of going ‘woo’! It’s not so simple that you’re sure you’ll succeed. But you’re not in a life-threatening situation.”
Our interviews have shown us that to embrace opportunity, people must often take sharp detours and that the risks of unexpected changes commonly seem more obvious than the benefits. Reaching out to others—not to avoid making decisions yourself but to learn the best outcome from change can often help you see opportunities in the right frame and decide whether to go for them.
To read more on engaging:
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling On Happiness,
Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation—and Positive Strategies for Change,
Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life,
Within McKinsey and in the corporate world, our work on centered leadership continues (see sidebar, “Initial results”). To understand how men and women practice it across tenures, industries, and regions, we are interviewing more female and male leaders and launching large-scale surveys—again, with female and male respondents.
Our research is exploring the hypothesis that today’s leaders can become even more effective through the model of centered leadership: a shared purpose with deep meaning for the people involved, explicit awareness and management of energy, positive framing, strong informal and formal networks, and the collaborative creation of opportunities. In time, we hope to help increase the number of female leaders significantly by giving them the tools to build leadership skills for any playing field.
