Helping women elevate

CENTER OF ATTENTION: Donna Sams, left, and Tejal Tarro of Centered Change LLC focus on helping women elevate their careers, and helping companies identify institutional barriers that may keep women from advancing. / PBN PHOTO/JAIME LOWE
CENTER OF ATTENTION: Donna Sams, left, and Tejal Tarro of Centered Change LLC focus on helping women elevate their careers, and helping companies identify institutional barriers that may keep women from advancing. / PBN PHOTO/JAIME LOWE

If a manager sits back and listens, and is deliberative in a meeting in which her colleagues are more forceful with their comments, is she displaying weakness?

And if a company values leadership, and wants to promote managers who are results-oriented, does it value only those behaviors traditionally associated with men?

Centered Change LLC, a consulting company in Providence, is focused on helping women identify ways in which they can elevate their careers, and helping companies identify institutional barriers that may keep women from advancing, or lead to turnover.

Begun by Donna M. Sams and Tejal P. Tarro, both former consultants and corporate managers, Centered Change offers workshops and coaching for women, and works with companies to improve leadership and promotion programs. The business partners met at CVS Health Corp., then moved on to employment as independent consultants before agreeing to start their own company.

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With companies, Centered Change will conduct an assessment of existing policies to determine if they present barriers for women, then work with executives in enacting changes. For example, sometimes the leadership competencies valued by a company may not include behaviors traditionally identified with women, including collaboration and communication skills.

A company may say, for example, that it values people who ‘get results.’ Some of the behaviors often associated with that include “the ability to control and give direction to your employees,” Sams said. “There’s nothing wrong with that, per se,” she said. “But that’s not necessarily the only way to get employees to follow you.”

In a recent workshop, a client shared an experience in which she attended a meeting. Other managers were more direct in sharing their opinion, while she sat back and listened. “She got feedback that she was ‘weak’ in that meeting,” Tarro said.

Even if unintentional, such barriers can lead to turnover, which is expensive and time consuming for companies, particularly at the management level.

Often, internal barriers are a problem in advancement for women. They may hesitate to seek promotions or ask for raises, and when job hunting, may only apply to those openings for which they are “perfect” matches.

A widely reported statistic, from a Hewlett Packard report, found that women were far more likely than men to not apply for positions if they didn’t match the advertised qualifications. The internal report found men applied if they met 60 percent of the qualifications, whereas women did so if they hit 100 percent, according to an article in the Harvard Business Review.

As a business, Centered Change works with women, individually or in groups, on how to elevate themselves. “[Women] are so good at figuring out the other 50-60 percent, and we don’t give ourselves credit for that,” Sams said. •

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