How to avoid the “friend trap” at work: A collection of advice from the WIT Regatta 2023

Should women in leadership positions have to compromise their likeability to be recognized for their competence? And does being a boss mean you can’t be feminine or friendly?

Technically, the answer to both of these is no.

But realistically? It’s closer to yes, or maybe. If you’re a female founder (or executive, or manager) that has played in the unwinnable game of “how to be a better leader without being called bad names,” you know that navigating these dynamics is a minefield.

That’s where we took the conversation yesterday at the WIT Regatta, focusing on:

Do women in leadership have to give up being liked to prove we are great at what we do?

The short answer is: There’s no one right recipe to avoid this double-bind of “Iron Lady” vs. “bff” - it will completely depend on your leadership style, your role, and your people. Knowing that, here’s the tactical advice, wisdom & further reading my panelists Adda van Zanden , associate partner at EA Inclusion , Laureen Rwatirera Chivere , chief learning officer at ASML , and Kimberly Fuqua , managing director of customer success at Microsoft , shared from their careers, wins, and challenges in being a boss.

Wisdom, Advice & Statistics

We started off our conversation by asking: What was the earliest occasion, or most junior role, where you experienced the tough standards for women in power - i.e., being too bossy, or being too friendly. It ranged from the first time being a freelancer to being appointed to a director role, but what they all had in common was navigating.

Navigating looks like trying to answer questions like:

Should we allow others to take up room, since that’s what a good leader does? What about if they criticize our leadership, since we are still learning? Or do we start off stronger and more direct, asserting ourselves to make it clear we are a leader?

Kimberly Fuqua shared that the best step you can take is to figure out your leadership style. The right way to navigate this is to know yourself and show up authentically - otherwise, no matter what you do, it won’t foster that trust. Because people follow people they trust. You build trust through authenticity. And your authenticity comes from self-assuredness (knowing yourself).

To get there, be a “learn-it-all” - learn as much as possible about yourself. You can start by:

1. Getting mentors to help you grow.
2. Journaling - what you learn about yourself and situations when you journal is unparalleled.
3. Putting yourself in uncomfortable situations - this is how you learn yourself and trust yourself. Fear is ok to feel, just don’t let it keep you from trying. Note: This is like her moving to the Netherlands after never living in another country before to take on a major leadership role. Challenging, but not dangerous!

Laureen Rwatirera Chivere had plenty of advice and wisdom of this subject too, sharing that to be a good leader, you should invest time in knowing yourself and knowing your personality. To do this for herself (leading a large team, 80+, in a engineering & technically focused environment), she commits to three actions every year:

1. Do a program that focuses on leadership or self-knowledge, such as a course. There’s many assessments out there to take too if you want to self-study. (My own coach recommended those from Positive Intelligence just this week if you want somewhere to start!)
2. Pick 3-4 skills from across life to work on. These don’t need to just be work - they can be family, hobbies, personal, etc. This helps you stay a student in more areas than just work (and progress begets progress)
3. Ask for feedback, constantly, from people you trust. This is another version of self study.

Keeping these pieces of advice in mind, we turned to how to implement what we learn and trial being the leaders we want to be.

Kimberly Fuqua said that, without a doubt, that when you think you have a handle on your leadership style and start trying it out, you’ll run into a case where it isn’t working. In that case, think about your impact over your intention. If you are intending something, but it is having a wildly different impact, then you have to adjust course. Having a good intention doesn’t make up for leadership that doesn’t have the right impact. Adjusting how you lead for different members on your team is not wrong - it is crucial to good leadership. Just make sure it is authentic to you.

Laureen Rwatirera Chivere confirmed this advice by saying that different flavours of your leadership is required - one size does not fit all - as the people you manage will be different. If what you’re doing really isn’t getting through, ask another leader for help. It’s possible that the information will actually have the impact you want if you can deploy another voice.

Adda van Zanden echoed this by saying that, to get to this place of leadership, stay curious about yourself and use what you learn to be really clear on you. And when we do, she added, it’s our role to make sure our company culture has room for introverts and room for feminine leadership. Companies with a more direct, Dutch, male, or other type of culture can lead to people not feeling seen unless they operate in this way, which means the company may be losing out on valuable insights and diversity of thought (and therefore missing out on commercial success and market share).

The underlying question of our panel came back around to us when we started discussing why doing this work is important.

Truly - do we have to do all of this work just to avoid being undermined in (or punished for) our leadership roles? Can’t women just be bosses now - in other words, is this issue still an issue?

Adda van Zanden kept us grounded. It hasn’t been that long since the law was revoked in 1971 that said women in the NL had to be obedient to their husbands, and where your grandmother would be fired when she got married. I heard in our breakout sessions about an amazing woman who was a mathematics PhD who could only get hired as a grade-school reading teacher. So, if we think we wouldn’t want to accept a job that we got in part because of our gender, she advised: Remember on whose shoulders we stand.

Kimberly Fuqua kept us firmly in the present too by reminding us that we still have to calibrate against stereotypes about our appearance, our skin color, our family & marriage status, etc. We can’t ignore this, she said - don’t discount how these factors can be working against you. You don’t need to change who you are, but you might need to calibrate it in order to prove a stereotype wrong and have a larger impact long-term.

Laureen Rwatirera Chivere shared a piece of wisdom related to a common stereotype - the mother figure. Be aware of how many people may try to put you into child/adult structures, either by condescending to you as if you are a child, or by treating you like a mom instead of a fellow adult. Develop ways, according to your leadership style, to bring it back to adult-adult conversations.

Lastly, there’s at least one opportunity at work where we shouldn’t calibrate our assertiveness - owning our success. Regardless of our leadership style, Adda van Zanden reminded us to make sure we take credit for the work we‘ve done that is ours. If someone takes credit for your idea (or for the idea of another woman!) practice saying something immediately, like: “I’m glad you like my idea from five minutes ago. Let’s talk about how best to execute it. I think…”

Kimberly Fuqua echoed this by saying, when we are in positions of leadership, there is no better time to use our assertiveness than when someone tries to say a woman got a job only because of her gender (or most other flavours of this situation where women are discounted for their contributions). Call it out, directly, by stating her qualifications, reminding them of the hiring process, or by revealing their stereotypical thinking for what it is - an uninformed stereotype!

From me, here are some of the stats you can use next time it comes up:

1. “Actually, the annual Women in the Workplace report from Lean In and McKinsey & Company proves that there’s still not even 30% of women in the C-suite, and one of the contributing problems is women not being promoted to lower jobs. Google the “broken rung” effect.” Source
2. “Moody's Analytics - you know, the analytics arm of the massive American financial company and credit agency - said in a study this year that the number of women in OECD countries holding a master’s degree or equivalent exceeds that of men but still don’t have their rate of management roles. Oh, and it’s likely costing the economy somewhere in the region of $7 trillion.” Source
3. “The U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a whistleblower report this year that called out the fact that, across the board, women are still not getting the leadership positions OR the highest pay, even in industries dominated by women.” Source

Laureen Rwatirera Chivere shared another example of what this can look like in practice - less statistics-heavy! Once, a manager came to her to say he was thinking of marking a woman down as a poor performer because she wouldn’t speak up in meetings, but she would share her thoughts afterward. Laureen reminded him that everyone is different, and that instead of punishing her for sharing her notes, to direct a specific question to her before the meeting ends to ask her input. This, she said, is how all managers can help train their team to speak up.

One of the best pieces of advice she’s been given was by a male manager was related to this, who said: Never leave a meeting without saying something. As a leader, perhaps we should make sure if someone isn’t speaking up in meetings, that we don’t leave the next one until they do.

To summarise - if you’ll never please everyone about how to show up as a powerful woman at work, you have two choices. You can direct that energy outward, trying to make everyone agree with you by contorting yourself in all of the ways. Or, you can direct that energy inward and prioritise your own growth, which begets confidence and self-assuredness, which begets authenticity and trust. Either way, you’ll expend the energy - so give it to yourself.

Further Reading & Learning

Whenever I moderate, I like to prepare in two ways (and I recommend it for everyone that joins panels). First, ask your fellow panelists to record voice notes of their name pronunciation so when you reference them or something you said, you do it correctly. Second, always come with a book or learning recommendation. I ended our talk with this question & got several recommendations!

Adda van Zanden recommended:

Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk on body language

The book Invisible women

For adopting a journaling practice, read The Artist’s Way

For practicing speaking up & confidence, take an improv class!

Kimberly Fuqua recommended:

The book Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

For another version of a journaling practice, read Atomic Habits

Laureen Rwatirera Chivere recommended:

The book The Transaction

The book Standout by Marcus Buck

The book Crucial Conversations by

And I recommended Radical Candor (for developing your feedback voice), and the Nice Work Newsletter for a weekly dose of what nicer (not weaker) workplaces could look like.

Thank you again to the outstanding Melody Biringer , Caroline Williams , Lilla Kovács, and Shea Harty ✨➰ for your organising work and the support of your organisations Women In Tech Regatta and The Do Good Only Company . Can’t wait for the next one!

If you have a recommendation of a course, book, or piece of advice for being a woman in leadership, feel welcome to add it below - we love any and all recommendations we can share with our network & the female founders we work with.

More great wisdom from the comments & input on this article! 👇

Caroline Williams : "I'd add that from my experience, being called the bad name is more representative of the other person's vocabulary than my ability as a leader." (Fire.)