Sharing Power

Having co-conspirators who actively propel one another forward is your best path towards self-defined success. 

Let me explain - with a trip down the yellow brick road. 

In the Wizard of Oz we’re all invested in and rooting for Dorothy to get back home. Dorothy was the focal point - the protagonist - of the journey...but hold on, pull back the camera at little, let’s remember that she did not travel on her path alone. The Tin Man, the Lion, and the Scarecrow were all there and not as background extras. They were her companions. Her co-conspirators. And they joined her journey because the journey itself mattered to them, too.

Your ambition may be your own, but to be successful the network that travels with you can't be composed of passive supporters or treated simply as extras. You must always remember that they too have stakes, goals, and transformations of their own.

Or to borrow author Ruchika Malhotra's best-selling book Uncompete: the goal is not to win at the expense of others, but to advance alongside them.

The Social Billionaire lays out what happens when ambitious women stop treating support from other ambitious women as optional, secondary, or merely social - and start building for mutual advancement on purpose.  

• Self-focus actually makes useful collaboration possible. Here’s what the research in The Social Billionaire shows: high-achieving women are laser-focused on their own ambitions, but not to the detriment of their relationships. Knowing the outcomes they’re seeking, they build the right support structure around them to carry the weight of their big goals.
• Confident collaboration vs passive, nice-girl networking. High-achieving women are intentional in their choices and interactions. They do not leave networking to chance, nor do they approach it as social fluff. They diversify their networks, identify gaps in their networks, and make deliberate choices about where to invest their time and energy.
• Collective achievement is a feature, not a bug. Back to what the studies on high-achieving women reveal: women achieve more when they intentionally fuel their careers with the help of other equally ambitious women. So choosing to fuel your career with the help of other ambitious women not only advances the outcomes you’re seeking, it leads to a bigger, better collective outcome: more women achieving more.
• Having a supportive tribe is nice, but an inner circle built around ambition is essential. High-achieving women spend their social capital supporting each other. This is not a one-sided transactional networking game, ladies - it is a framework for mutual advancement.
• The collaboration must be active. The Social Billionaire highlights the networking mindset of high-achieving women - these are women who refer, connect, recommend, broker, and create openings for one another - they are not simply seeking these outcomes for themselves and “go girl” cheering others on without lifting a networking finger to help.
• Access to information is a career asset - not just for yourself. Here’s where high-achieving women also differ: not only do they have an inner circle around their ambitions, they are present and tapped into wider-ranging information networks. They are astute, aware, positioning themselves inside useful streams of information and visibility - a position which helps their careers as well as those in their networks.

Women need to stop treating support from other ambitious women as optional, secondary, or merely social.

Yes, the high-achieving model in The Social Billionaire is self-focused, but it works because it is an intensely collaborative model.

The Social Billionaire framework doesn’t work if:

• you treat networking as a short-term extraction exercise
• you are transactional in your interactions
• you don’t prioritize networking relationships with other ambitious women
• you hoard contacts, information, or access
• you confuse being supportive with actually being useful 

When personal ambitions align inside a group setting, momentum builds and progress becomes far more likely.

Back to Oz and that yellow brick road. 

Dorothy’s goal was to get back home. She achieved that not by waiting for Glinda to float down and fix everything with a magic wand. And she sure as heck didn’t get there without helping others achieve their goals. 

Helping and getting the help of others.

That’s the whole damn point. 

Need more: 

Stop internalizing power as a zero-sum game. In her Forbes piece Why High-Achieving Women Misplace Their Power - And How To Redirect It, Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey quotes, and lays out the necessary corrective to misplaced power argued by Ruchika Malhotra in her book, Uncompete: even among impact-driven leaders, there is still an unspoken rule that to get ahead, you have to be better than the others. That is the scoreboard mentality. Ditch it. The better model is “power with,” not power over: advancement built alongside other women, where support is offered without keeping score. 

📘 My latest book - The Social Billionaire: A Networking Roadmap for Women Seeking to Flourish and Achieve More - is available in paperback (workbook) format on Amazon + Barnes & Noble + Bookshop.org and in ebook on Kindle, Bookshop.org, Smashwords, Vivlio, Thalia, Apple Books, Fable and Rakuten kobo.

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🗝️ If you’re planning events designed to boost women’s business development pipeline, career prospects or professional connections, let’s talk, as I’d love insights from The Social Billionaire to be part of your conversation.