Successful Womans Guide to Working Smart: 10 Strengths That Matter Most

Successful Womans Guide to Working Smart: 10 Strengths That Matter Most, by Caitlin Williams (2001, Davies-Black Publishing, PaIo Alto, CA, 244 pages, Soft Cover, $20.95) Intended Audience: A, C, F, G, I Major Headings from Table of Contents: Building Your Inner Resilience; Developing Your Abilities to Enhance Your Career; Improving Your Quality of Life; Keeping Focused on Big Picture How is book most useful for its intended audience? Working Smart meaningfully guides women in career management including work/life and work/family choices, plans, and strategies. It also informs career practitioners, development specialists, and HR professionals of how women will be looking to focus and even shapeshift careers, and how that new breed of what I will call the branded workforce will benefit organizations. The top five things you learned from reading this book: 1. Interpersonal is a woman's edge, not a weakness, and it brings much to today's fluid workplace. 2. What Caitlin Williams calls core strengths, such as confidence, resiliency, balance, and coping, are needed to succeed, even more than and creativity. 3. More than ever, development is needed for professional success, and that takes what I call personal leadership. 4. Keywords for working smart and personal leadership in 21st century are flexible, creative, and focused. 5. Set yourself up for success is one clear intention needed by women. This means branding through planfulness, focused action, and ongoing development and a growing sense of self-trust. The main theme of this book is doing work that needs doing - which totally takes advantage of today's fluid workgroups, global workplace, women's skills, and technologies. For women this means self-directing your own careers, constantly looking for opportunities, and having vision and courage to flexibly shape-shift as chances are spotted. The keyword here is flexibly. Without it, few opportunities will be harnessed. Other strengths that Caitlin Williams brings out make perfect sense to me, and she brings these into four categories: 1. The core strengths of confidence, self-reliance, direction, and action to support it. 2. Career-enhancing abilities such as knowledge, skills, and learning, blended with interpersonal competence for dealing with people. 3. Quality-of-life necessities such as balance, short-term and long-term coping skills, and self-care strategies. 4. The creativity and to spot and tap workplace opportunities, and advance your career in process. Of these, core strengths form foundation upon which every other strength is built. To actually set yourself up for success by inventorying past successes can really build your confidence and self-reliance and increase your resiliency during stressful times and new experiences. Another part of foundation is being ready for what Caitlin calls planned happenstance, and counting on the certainty of uncertainty to spot opportunities that will help you advance. So for women, opportunity means understanding your general direction and spotting chances to marry that to work that needs to be done. This can propel your career and your life plan, while helping your current company. …