Description
This book uses the insights of neuroscience to tackle your career challenges from two angles – literally.
Reading from one end, you’ll find guidance on the career-management issues that confront both men and women: how to be more resilient, giving up on multi-tasking and being more productive, building networks and finding sponsors, developing the mindset that will help you, and becoming an inclusive leader. And reading from the opposite end you’ll learn about the particular challenges for women at work: the power of deeply-entrenched gender stereotyping, how to challenge the kind of language and meeting-management that keeps women down, finding new ways to negotiate pay rises, juggling warmth vs competent, resisting a backlash, and building the kind of gender equal organisation we all want to work in.
Dip in and out for the solutions for your career stage. Or dive right in and develop a brain-savvy approach to your working life. Use the Career hacks to tackle bias, manage your career and be more influential.
Biography
Jan Hills and Francesca Hills are a mother-and-daughter writing partnership. Jan is a respected leadership consultant; her company Head Heart + Brain works with leaders and organisations in the UK, Europe and Australia. Francesca has a marketing and advertising background and is an executive director in communications planning. The neuroscience focus of the book comes from Jan’s longstanding commitment to this approach: she was one of the first people to gain the only academically-recognised qualification in the neuroscience of leadership. “Neuroscience can show why particular policies work, and help leaders and organisations to be even more successful,” she says. She is the author / co-author of three books on neuroscience and business practice: Brain-Savvy HR, Brain-Savvy Business, and Brain-Savvy Leading. The inspiration for this particular book came from Jan’s post-grad research work at the newly-formed Equal Opportunities Commission, years before Francesca was born. “I assumed back then that traditional male and female work roles would soon be a thing of the past,” says Jan, “and we would have equal numbers of male secretaries and female engineers. “Some 40 years on I wanted to understand why we’d made so little progress towards that goal, and to ensure that my daughter wouldn’t look back from the same stage in her career and see the same snail’s pace of progress.”
Francesca says that the most surprising things she’s learned since she first started work was: “You won’t always like who you work with, and you won’t be able to change that.” And the person she learned most from at work was “A boss who had no idea what they were doing!” As for the mother-daughter writing experience, Jan says: “If you ever want to bond a relationship, write a book together!” Francesca says: “My mother is the font of all knowledge and has no limits.”
