Kelli Thompson is a leadership coach on a mission to help women advance to the rooms where decisions are made and show them how trusting their intuition will help them align their career with their values. For over a decade Kelli worked in tech and banking, which are both dominated by men. Often as one of very few women in the room, she accepted the established way men do business as the way things were done. Who was she to try to change it? It wasn’t until she discovered mastermind groups and supportive women working together and answering each other’s questions that she developed a new way of looking at leadership and business. Now, she has written the book she says that she needed to read, Closing the Confidence Gap: Boost Your Peace, Your Potential & Your Paycheck. And she has coached hundreds of other women through her Clarity & Confidence Women’s Leadership Program, and won a Stevie Award for Women in Business—Coach of the Year.
Choose to Do Something Different
The way Kelli felt as a woman in a male dominated business she says is the greatest barrier for women today. She believes that it’s almost like there is “a sense of learned helplessness.” When women look at the higher-level jobs and the hours the men work to do those jobs, they don’t even try to advance. Kelly encourages her clients to think about how they can change the workplaces as they accelerate into leadership. She says, “When women have the courage to lead in alignment with their values and create the workplace that they actually want to work for, and not just move up the chain and just kind of do what’s always been done…we can change the world by changing the workplaces.”
Closing the Confidence Gap
Kelli touches on several ideas she covers in her book, Closing the Confidence Gap: Boost Your Peace, Your Potential & Your Paycheck, that’s coming out this fall, and one that many women don’t want to discuss is money. Kelli says the opposite is true. When she was an HR professional, she wanted to talk about money. She says that money ought to be as easy to talk about as the weather. And she warns about trying to rationalize a little bit lower salary to make up for lack of experience. She says that men don’t do that, but women often do. She gives several pointers:
- Do your research, check out websites like payscale.com and glassdoor.com
- Take a lesson from men who negotiate pay four times as often as women
- Don’t hinge your salary requirements on ticking off every bullet
- Don’t use your current salary as a baseline because it’s probably already lower than a man’s
Finally, and most of all, Kelli says, “I want you to ask for what you deserve.” Women make wonderful leaders, and the reason is the way they intuitively know what people want. She says, “Your body is so trustworthy, it knows what’s right for you in terms of your yes and your no because it’s kind of where your values live. Our values are the language, but our gut is the barometer, the CEO of what’s right and wrong.”
More Women Leaders Create More Women Leaders
Listen or watch this amazing conversation for more insights from both Kelli and Dr. Nancy about women in leadership. Kelli says the time is now to create change. She says that no matter what you hear about workplaces in this post-pandemic world, “the companies who are valuing diversity, flexibility, catering to all the needs of people who’ve been impacted the most by the pandemic do not have a talent problem.” People want to work for these companies. Learn more about Kelli’s advice on her website, KelliRaeThompson.com and her book, ClosingtheConfidenceGap.com.
Listen on Red Circle| Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Watch on YouTube