The Introvert’s Guide to Surviving in Business

I am an introvert. I will always choose email over phone. If we are mutual acquaintances and I see you in a public place, it is more than likely that I will avert my eyes, move to a different aisle, or exit the building to avoid talking (legitimately, it’s not you, it’s me). The day I found out I could order pizza online instead of calling the store was like a second Christmas (although there’s still no automated protocol for the actual delivery– how much do I tip??). I value my alone time, and need it frequently to recharge my batteries.

People used to think being an introvert meant you were shy. I did, too, until someone explained to me that introverts aren’t necessarily shy, they just derive most of their energy from being alone, and being around others drains that energy. This nugget of information explained so much. Like the story my mom loves to tell me about my own childhood birthday party where I became so overwhelmed with too many friends at my house that I asked to take a nap in her room. Chalk another one up to introversion.

But now that I’m a little older and a group of rambunctious toddlers playing games and singing doesn’t stress me out (as much), I face a whole new set of problems derived from my introversion: the workplace. I’m an introverted girl in an extroverted world.

I’ve held several jobs at start-up companies, all of which have been in Marketing. In an industry dominated by networking and the apparent strategy to make oneself heard over all others, an introvert can get very overwhelmed. On more than one occasion, I’ve had bosses double and triple check if I’m logged into a business call because I wasn’t talking (If I don’t have anything useful to say, I’m not going to pollute the call with useless information). One of my coworkers described me as “a do-er”. You send me what needs to get done, and I do it. But sometimes productive work in solitude comes off as unresponsive, or disconnected.

So what’s an introvert to do?

1) Don’t try to fight it.
Remember that story about my birthday party? Chances are, if you’re an introvert you’ve been in a similar situation. What would have happened if I had fought that urge to nap and stayed out with my friends? Considering I was a toddler, I probably would have had a tantrum. The grown-up version of this, I have learned, is called a “mental breakdown”, and they are not fun. The best thing you can do is to just go with your introversion. This is part of your nature, and it’s not going anywhere.

When it comes to rolling with your introversion, compromise is best. Obviously networking can be an overwhelming idea to someone who gets drained just talking to people. If you’re at a conference or new in an office with lots of people, break it down into small chunks. In an office of 50 people, talk to 5 new people every day. If speaking out on a business call is hard for you, use your wallflower tendencies to your advantage: take detailed notes and be the first person to send out a summary email following the call. This brings me to my next point.

2) Different Traits for Different Jobs
Sure, extroverts are predisposed to do well in outgoing offices. That doesn’t mean there aren’t places where introverts have a natural advantage. Know your strengths, understand the advantages you have as an introvert, and use the crap out of them!

My first internship technically had the title “Sales and Marketing Intern”. Day one of that internship, I knew I didn’t belong in Sales. Constant contact with people was not my cup of tea, and if I had to be doing something for 8 hours a day, I wanted it to be enjoyable. But Marketing was something I could get behind. Creating useful content, helping people understand how to get the most out of products, building a relationship with contacts based on trust; these were things I could do all day every day. You have to know yourself and your comfort level, and apply that to your work.

3) Fake It Til You Make It
The best advice I ever received was not actually given to me specifically but was given in a Ted Talk by Social Psychologist Amy Cuddy, wherein she tells the audience that “‘power posing’ — standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don’t feel confident — can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, and might even have an impact on our chances for success”. While I will admit to doing some Superman and Don Draper poses in my car before interviews, what I took away most from this Ted Talk is that you can trick your brain into behaving how you want it to. I’m not saying fight your introversion. But I am saying that eventually, there will come a task you need to complete that will go exactly perpendicular to your introverted grain. And when that time comes, you had better know how to accomplish it.

The first time I organized a webcast for a company, I was completely behind the scenes. Someone else made the slides and did all the talking, all I had to do was the technical stuff. Once I got further and further into the process, the day came when I was the only option to moderate the webcast. Obviously I was terrified out of my mind. So what did I do? I faked it. Literally. I used a fake name, I made up a fake work history in my head, I became that alter ego during the webcast. For that hour, I was an expert in the field, and I had given so many webcasts that this was a breeze. And guess what? It was a breeze. Sometimes, when your brain resists something that might be uncomfortable, you just have to tell it to get in line, because it’s happening one way or another.

Lily Vlach has a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration from Saint Mary’s College of California. She is also a marketing consultant for a tech recruiting startup in the San Francisco bay area. She hasn’t read Lean In yet, but she really did mean to. 

Everyone’s Smiling and No One Is Happy: How Facebook is Probably Ruining Everything

A couple weeks ago I went to go get lunch with a friend, and as is usual for us Millennials, the conversation veered towards our peers in a more than slightly gossip-y manner. While we quipped back and forth about several of our mutual friends, particular emphasis was given to friends of ours who had recently gone through breakups and had advertised their new changed relationship status on Facebook. One comment my friend made was particularly memorable: “If you’re really all that hurt about your breakup, you wouldn’t post about it on Facebook. You would want to avoid thinking about it altogether”.

That thought stuck with me for a while, and in the process of considering its implications, I realized that a huge majority of the personal posts on my Facebook news feed (meaning only posts from friends, not advertisements or liked pages) were gloating in nature. The idea of Facebook itself is quite narcissistic: a platform where we can broadcast to all of our acquaintances at any time about anything. And while I’m sure it was not the original intended purpose of Facebook, there’s an overwhelming tendency on the part of my peers to construct a profile of their lives that appears impossibly happy and perfect. But when nearly 20% of Millennials suffer from clinical depression and another 12% from anxiety, and all we see is posts about perfect lives, someone somewhere isn’t telling the whole truth [1].

This tendency is unsurprising: no one wants to update their friends that they’re “feeling super depressed today” or their “relationship is falling apart”. Aside from a societal penchant for shaming the victim, often times the unhappy Facebook-goer just simply doesn’t want to open the door to hear everyone’s opinion on things they’d rather ignore. As my friend so aptly stated, if you’re really heartbroken about being dumped, the last thing you want is a barrage of “sympathetic likes” and comments of “what happened?!?!1?!”.

While Facebook is being used less and less by Gen Y (users 16 to 24 were widely eclipsed by every older age group in terms of website membership [2]), that doesn’t mean that we aren’t subject to the behavioral influences of trying to look happy on Facebook. Previously dubbed the most stressed out generation, we are constantly plagued by pressure to be perfect. And of course, the easiest way to make people believe your life is perfect is to leave out the parts that are imperfect .

By no means is Facebook the only social media site that influences our desire to appear perfect. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Vine, and countless others are all platforms on which to broadcast our satisfaction with life. And then of course there’s Pinterest. For a social media site supposedly based around such innocent fodder as crafting and recipes, Pinterest can be one of the most high pressure sites for those desiring to be “perfect moms”. According to one study, “42 percent said that they sometimes suffer from Pinterest stress – the worry that they’re not crafty or creative enough”.

Again, on Pinterest we see the overwhelming desire to represent the definition of perfection. If we believed only what we saw on Facebook and Pinterest, we would think that moms bake all their own bread while juggling triplets into piano lessons and soccer practice, all the while avoiding high fructose corn syrup and trans fats. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to achieve “mom perfection” according to Pinterest, so what do most moms do to achieve day care cred? The same things Millennials do to look happy on Facebook: They lie.

This cycle is easily repeated and rapidly growing: I see that you look happy on Facebook. So as not to be bested, I also post an exaggerated happy experience on Facebook, repeat ad nauseam. Pretty soon, every post on your news feed will be a gross exaggeration of real life. Simply put: unless we rein in our desire to appear perfect to our peers, we’re just going to keep encouraging each generation to focus efforts on their social media image.

[1] – http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/06/stress-psychology-millennials-depression/1878295/
[2] – http://marketingland.com/study-social-network-growth-across-the-globe-driven-by-mobile-users-older-generations-41982

Lily Vlach is a Senior business administration major, French language minor at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is also a sales and marketing intern for an event tech startup in the San Francisco bay area. She has memorized nearly every line of Back to the Future. 

Millennials to Executives: How the Pay Gap Affects the Workforce

As you may have noticed, I am, in fact, a Millennial. What you may have also noticed, if you have eyes and can read my bio, is that I’m also a woman. And being a female Millennial means that I face a very particular set of challenges when it comes to my future career.

To understand the specific obstacles I face, let’s start by setting aside the fact that I’m a Millennial, and instead focus on the fact that I’m the proud owner of two X chromosomes. What does that mean for me as a woman who hopes to enter the corporate workforce? Well the most blaring crisis I face is what’s called the Gender Pay Gap, and much like other things women deal with in their lives, there’s much controversy surrounding its pseudo-mythical existence. The Huffington Post tells us that the difference in pay between men and women is still as present as always. Except that they also say it isn’t. But they really mean that it is.

Disregarding information from any third-party sources where conflicting information abounds, the most recent information from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics states that average weekly earnings were $860 for males and $707 for females, so for every dollar a male makes, his female counterpart makes 88 cents. Myth busted! There is a wage gap, and in Quarter 2 of 2013, it was 12%!

In true Millennial fashion, I want to take this time to look at how these statistics affect me as a young female hoping to become an executive. In the coming spring, I’ll be graduating from college with a shiny, brand new Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration. Like many of my graduating peers, I foresee myself in the corporate world. What do I have to look forward to as a female in the corporate workforce? The forecast, unfortunately, is not bright.

Among the five top paid executives at each S&P 500 company, only 198 are female, meaning that particular niche is 92% male. The last time I checked, females accounted for roughly 50% of the population, only slightly more than the 8% in top-paying executive positions.

So I’ve established that there is in fact a Gender Pay Gap, and that there will be significantly fewer corporate executive jobs available to me as a woman. But what’s the outlook for Millennials? Most agree, it’s not great: unemployment is high among 16-24 year olds: 16.3% compared to a 7.7% national average. And, if they can manage to find a job, Millennials earn only 42% of the national average.

Millennials have been billed as one of the most accepting and diverse generations to date, so I thought that maybe the Gender Pay Gap might be slightly smaller among people my age. Unfortunately I thought wrong. The average weekly earnings of males ages 16 to 24 is 12% higher than females of the same demographic; the Millennial Gender Pay Gap perfectly mirrors that of the national average.

The outlook for me is not great: positions for female executives are scarce, as are jobs for Millennials, and if I do manage to land a job, my wages will inevitably be significantly less than my male counterparts’. It’s frustrating, as a woman, that in April I celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, and still have yet to see equal pay.

But, to my distraught peers, take heart: the workplace is changing into something we’ve never seen before. Technology and diversity are leveling the playing field, and all bets are off. Closing the Pay Gap is a tough job, but who better for it than us female Millennials?

Lily Vlach is a Senior business administration major, French language minor at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is also a sales and marketing intern for an event tech startup in the San Francisco bay area. She completed her tenth half marathon this weekend.

In the Business of Inequality: Colleges Perpetuate Gender Inequity

Spring semester is in full swing at Saint Mary’s College now, and with it, comes the usual abrupt reality check that accompanies the shift from a typically “fun” or “easy” January Term course back into the usual drudgery of business classes. One of the only things I love about Jan Term at Saint Mary’s (a program where students take a one month-long course unrelated to their major for the month of January) is that it allows me to make connections to students outside my usual business classes. As with any major at any school, it’s not unusual to have the same group of students in a majority of my classes. However, unlike Business Administration majors at most schools, I find myself surrounded by male students on a regular basis.

Saint Mary’s College follows the same trend as many small, private, liberal arts colleges in that its student population is overwhelmingly female. The average gender ratio at American private colleges is 59% female and 40% male, and Saint Mary’s is essentially on par with that average, clocking in at 60% female students and 39% male students [1][2]. Narrowing those averages down to just the Business Administration majors like myself, the national average gender ratio is about 51% male and 48% female, very closely mirroring the actual population[3]. At Saint Mary’s though? Our Business majors are just about 65% male and 34% female– significantly more offset than the national average [4].

Anecdotally I can attest to this breakdown. By the end of this semester, I’ll have taken a total of fourteen courses in the School of Economics and Business Administration (SEBA) at Saint Mary’s College, and in most, if not all of those courses I was surrounded by maybe three or four female peers in classes of about twenty to twenty-five students. Only four of those fourteen courses were taught by female professors. Add this to the fact that male students typically receive eight times the instructor attention of their female counterparts, and you’re looking at a pretty biased classroom [5].

But I understand that anecdotal evidence doesn’t hold a candle to the weight of factual evidence. Every year, Saint Mary’s seniors participate in the CIRP College Senior Survey for Graduating Seniors and makes the data available via PDF on their website.  The survey asks questions about students’ general satisfaction with their college experience, and further breaks down the information by gender and race demographics, and compares the Saint Mary’s College results to the averages of Private Colleges and Catholic Private Colleges. Typical questions involve student satisfaction with class size, academic engagement, and faculty interaction.

The most revealing data appears in the section broken down between male and female Saint Mary’s students. From 2008 to 2012, male students reported an 8.4% increase in their ability to find a staff or faculty mentor, while female students in the same time period reported a 1.9% decrease. Males reported an 8.8% increase in satisfaction with career counseling and advising, but females reported a 1.6% decrease in satisfaction. Most poignantly, when asked about their satisfaction with the respect for diverse beliefs on campus, male satisfaction increased by 15.3% while female satisfaction decreased by 6.3%. So increasingly at Saint Mary’s, male students get more attention from their professors, they get more detailed mentorship from those professors, while female students are getting swept to the side and consistently feel disrespect for diversity on campus[6].

None of this is ideal for a campus that prides itself on its diversity and inclusive environment. What can Saint Mary’s do to create a more gender-friendly environment? As a start, including a few more female professors would be great, thereby creating more potential for female mentorship in the department. I don’t know much about the hiring process for professors, but in my experience, many SEBA professors are also business professionals. This poses another obvious problem: the business field is also hugely male dominated. The only way to rectify that issue is to educate more female students about how to enter that field. Schools all over the country face this same “chicken or the egg” conundrum, but maybe Saint Mary’s can be one of the first to enact a real solution.

[1] – http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2012/02/16/the-male-female-ratio-in-college/
[2] – http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg04_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1167
[3] – http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acs-18.pdf
[4] – http://www.stmarys-ca.edu/professional-mba/student-profile
[5] – http://davidsortino.blogs.pressdemocrat.com/10161/when-boys-get-more-classroom-attention-than-girls/
[6] – http://www.stmarys-ca.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/files/CIRP-CSS%20Graduating%20Senior%20Survey%20SATISFACTION-SKILL%20ITEMS%202008-2012.pdf

Lily Vlach is a Senior business administration major, French language minor at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is also a sales and marketing intern for an event tech startup in the San Francisco bay area. She rode in an elevator with BB King once.

Marketing Spotlight: GoldieBlox

I’ve been following the GoldieBlox story for about 6 months now, ever since I read this article about them. Immediately when I read the article, I loved the idea. Engineering has always been a hugely male-dominated field, and when I looked around, I was astounded at how many pre-engineering toys were aimed at boys, but none for girls (i.e. basic Legos for boys, and the widely ridiculed “Lego Friends” for girls). Any product that aims to get girls comfortable with engineering from a young age was worth a further look .

GoldieBlox emerged from its humble beginnings the way tons of businesses do now: crowdfunding (approximately $2.66 billion was crowdfunded in 2012)[1]. By the time their fundraising period ended, they had raised almost double their goal of $150,000. Obviously people were interested in what Founder and CEO Debbie Sterling was selling, and it’s not hard to see why. GoldieBlox offers something that girls had rarely seen before: an opportunity to create something without the “pretty princess” guise that covers nearly every toy targeted at them.

Self-described as a “construction toy from the female perspective”[2], GoldieBlox perfectly executed their strategy: they recognized a problem, and formulated a clear solution. There was a lack of engineering-based toys geared towards girls, so Sterling created them.

The advertising surrounding GoldieBlox has been on point. Each ad depicts young girls smashing the stereotypes they’re surrounded with. “Disrupting the pink aisle” is a common theme, and every little girl featured in the commercial looks like she’s having the time of her life. The company won its big break when it won a contest put on by Intuit, the reward of which was a 30-second ad during the 2014 Super Bowl (something that would have cost an unattainable $4 million otherwise). To be honest, I can’t think of a cause worthier than encouraging young girls to consider engineering as a career.

Overall, GoldieBlox is empowering, disruptive, and a welcome change-up to the pink aisle. It sounds like it could actually encourage some young girls to more heavily consider engineering as a career option, so it gets an A in my book.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdfunding
[2]http://www.goldieblox.com/pages/about

Lily Vlach is a Senior business administration major, French language minor at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is also a sales and marketing intern for an event tech startup in the San Francisco bay area. She’s trying to eat vegan for two weeks, but doesn’t know how it’ll work out. 

We’re Defining Future Executives by the Wrong Criteria

I’ve found myself the “token feminist” in a community on more than one occasion, and as such there’s an aphorism that I’ve heard repeated frequently when discussing the positions of women and men in the workforce: the idea that men are physically stronger and more aggressive, and are therefore better suited for a professional workplace.

I’m not the first woman to be presented with this sentiment and I definitely will not be the last. I’ve heard it said by men and women, people who consider themselves to be conservative and liberal, at home, with friends, in classes. The idea can come from any number of places, but it’s always presented in the same matter of fact manner. “That’s the way the world is, and there’s nothing you can do about it”.

The modern workforce is constantly changing. Our now omni-present access to the internet shapes consumer behavior, and subsequently how businesses adapt to those behaviors. In the same way that we treat customers differently now than we did 30 or 40 years ago, the criteria that made a great executive 30 or 40 years ago are far from those desired today . Think Don Draper versus Marissa Mayer. Whereas before, a commanding aggression was the technique to crack that respective target market, our consumers today think and act much differently than they used to, necessitating a different approach.

Sales and marketing both used to be one way streets. Marketers talked at their target market in the hopes that they could capture their attention long enough to sell them. The typical funnel might include print or radio advertising, and a hard sales pitch. It makes sense that in such an environment, with a target market that was far from engaged, an aggressive executive would thrive.

But today’s consumers are more engaged every second. Literally. We can’t shove leads through the funnel anymore because every decision is a conversation. “Ninety-two percent of consumers around the world say they trust […] word-of-mouth and recommendations” [1] more than they trust any other form of advertising. We’re discovering more and more that people don’t respond to being advertised at, because they’re tuning those campaigns out like white noise. Instead, a much less aggressive approach is desired. Less really is more when it comes to marketing today: by toning down the effort to shove information down the throats of the target market, all we have to do now is simply open the door for two-way exchange between the company and the customer .

What does this shift in behavior have to do with gender in the workforce? While it would be an incorrect and sweeping generalization to say that women cannot be as aggressive or more so in the office (I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes), I think the better question to ask is why do we still act as though aggression is the defining characteristic of all executives? A small handful of the golden standards from several decades ago still hold true today, but for the most part we are facing a vastly different workplace, and should pick our executives accordingly.

I’m tired of being told that because I can’t lift a heavy box or command a room with my voice that I won’t be able to succeed in business. Those aren’t the criteria we should be using to evaluate our future executives. Instead, look at a candidate’s creativity, ingenuity, passion, and dedication, none of which are specific to any gender.

[1] – http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-room/2012/nielsen-global-consumers-trust-in-earned-advertising-grows.html

Lily Vlach is a Senior business administration major, French language minor at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is also a sales and marketing intern for an event tech startup in the San Francisco bay area. She’s very enthusiastic about peanut butter and Netflix.