We women have a lot of roles to fulfill. Societal pressure can feel limiting and weigh us down.

When it comes to work, expectations are often unclear as to how we are supposed to show up.

There is still a lot of bias about women who do have families to take care of as being less invested in their work.

Maybe you don’t have children but as a woman seem to be overlooked for opportunities and promotions already. 

Are you being confident but coworkers or managers see it as being bossy? It can be tricky to know when to push and when to take a step back. 

After-hour beers are not your thing. You might be the only woman in the C-suite.

Playing golf is not your cup of tea, but that’s what the male leadership does. And you wonder how you could build relationships that further your career?

In college you got to supervise your first lab assistant, without ever being trained on how to lead them, how to set proper expectations, or hold them accountable for them. If it worked out fine, you were lucky but most of them needed supervision and were learning what it meant to do experiments and how to report back.

Have you ever held onto a person in the lab because he/she got something done, but you’d never trust that person to participate in a critically important project?

I know I have.

Sometimes, it was easier to give up on them and not let them perform key experiments, so you were trying to find experiments that were less important, because you felt uncomfortable talking about expectations and commitment needed from their side.

You have gone through college, maybe even through PhD and PostDoc where a culture of collaboration and trust had not been modeled very well.

Now you find yourself working in a company, in your first managerial position but have never had leadership training, and so you worry how to build a high-performing team.

You find respite in meetings that are focused on data but aren’t quite sure how to navigate the issues related to people, like how to have conversations about (silent) conflict at work, career development of the individuals on your team, how to give feedback in annual performance reviews, etc.

As you get ready to advance to the next level you feel the need to be better prepared. Your company might have offered some training, but it feels more like they are trying to check boxes rather than train their managers well.

Nothing is more frustrating than having to go through assessments without proper follow-up and training afterwards.