Johan

Goal Setting for Women Entrepreneurs

Most successful women create a set of goals that they strive to reach, which helps them stay on track as they work toward success. Without setting goals and applying effort to long-term improvement, you won’t get very far even if you do work hard.

This is especially true if you’re trying to balance maintaining a busy household with helping your young business flourish. Here are some tips that may be helpful to women entrepreneurs while setting goals for themselves and their businesses.

Consider Using Visual Aids

You may not think of visual aids like graphs or progress charts when it comes to forming a professional plan. But, these things are more effective motivators than you may think. Looking at a visual representation of the progress you’ve made can make a bigger impact than simply looking at the numbers.

Not only that, creating a fun graphical image also gives you something that you can display around your workplace to motivate your team members and to help the business accomplish the goals that you’ve laid out.

Be Optimistic, But Realistic

It’s important that the goals you set for yourself or your business be things that you can realistically accomplish. If you strive to do something that isn’t possible for you to do, you’re only setting yourself up for disappointment in the future.

If you can’t imagine yourself possibly achieving a goal, you may want to set your sights lower for the time being. However, it’s also important to challenge yourself with the goals that you create. If you set goals that are too easy to achieve, then it will create the illusion of success without motivating you to do everything that you can.

One Thing at a Time

Motivating yourself to complete a complicated project can be daunting. When you try to deal with every aspect of a problem at once, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed. Try to break each project up into as many smaller parts as you can in order to keep your short-term goals as simple as possible. This will give you something to feel accomplished about at every successful stage of the project, rather than only once everything is finished.

Keep Track of Your Progress

Once you’ve laid out your goals, you need to stick to the plan in order to make them happen. Make sure that you keep track of what you’re doing in order to achieve your goals, and see how much success you’ve had. Take some time each week or month to go over the progress you’ve made and adjust your goals according to your current needs.

You should always be comfortable with the goals you set. The process of setting goals doesn’t need to be an arduous task. Take time to think about what you really want to accomplish in the next year… five years… and even ten years. Don’t just scribble something down on paper for the sake of saying you have goals. You’ll rarely accomplish anything that way.

Are Certain Types of Businesses Harder for Women to Break Into?

One of the most popular slogans of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s was, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Fast forward to the present day and that might hold true in some businesses, but there are some which seem to maintain a closed-door policy and a glass ceiling that women are still battering themselves against more than 40 years later.

Technology

The most obvious types of businesses that are harder for women to break into are tech-related. Tech seems more of a boy’s club than an industry in which women can achieve equality. While a recent report from Pew Research has shown that the majority of Americans think women are just as capable in terms of leadership as men, very few women hold positions as CEOs in general (only 26 out of the Fortune 500 companies), and women as leaders in tech companies is even more rare.

The skewing seems to start at a young age, with schools encouraging boys in math and science and girls in softer subjects like liberal arts. This bias continues in high school and the trend is maintained at college level as well, with very few women majoring in computer science or technology. An “old boy network” shuts them out still further.

Financial Corporations

In financial institutions, women seem to have to do more to prove themselves than men, and to have to keep on doing it over and over again. They often work harder, for one-third lower wages, and are held to a higher standard than men. Even if they try to make a real difference, this can often be held against them.

In a recent opinion piece published in the New York Times, studied showed that if a male executive expressed their ideas freely, they got a 10% better competence rating in their annual review. By contrast, if a woman did the same, they received a 14% lower rating. If a man and woman both express the same idea, the man gets a higher performance rating, while the woman’s stays the same.

Other Big Businesses

Studies have also shown a “motherhood penalty” and a “fatherhood bonus.” Women with children are seen as less committed to their job than men. If a man is a father, however, he is actually seen as more committed. Factors such as the majority of childcare burden resting on the mother’s shoulders is never taken into account. Fathers are actually sent on more management training courses than single men, who in turn are sent far more often than women.

Start-Ups

Start-ups also tend to be “old boy networks” that shut out women except for the more subordinate tasks, even though studies have shown that start-ups led by women are more likely to succeed and innovative firms with women at the head are more profitable.

New companies with more gender diversity have more revenue, customers, market share and profits. This demonstrates that while there is still a glass ceiling in some businesses, there is also room for women to bring their skills and talents to play. In this way, they can build stronger companies by daring to be entrepreneurial, and to support each other with an “old girl network” that can open more doors for women.