54. The EQ Edge with Marcelle Fowler, Chief Coaching Officer, C-Suite Coach

What’s more important to rising in your career: hard skills or soft skills?

For this Women of Color Rise episode, Analiza talks with Marcelle Fowler, Chief Coaching Officer, C-Suite Coach. C-Suite Coach is a multimillion-dollar, Black Woman-owned business that empowers diverse professionals through leadership coaching and diversity, equity and inclusion programming. 

Marcelle brings more than 30 years’ experience in organizational effectiveness, talent development and internal communications with companies such as Capital One, Dow Chemical and UPS. Over the course of her career, Marcelle has coached C-Suite executives, County Police Chiefs and US Navy Commanders.

Through her experience coaching women of color leaders, Marcelle shares a few common struggles women of color face in rising in their career including developing EQ or soft skills especially with communication and relationship management. EQ skills include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social management. Marcelle shares how important soft skills are, so much so that in corporations, these are now called Essential Skills. She shares how to develop these skills:

• For self awareness, recognize your beliefs and feelings. Perhaps you are feeling scared or nervous. Know that these feelings are valid. For beliefs, Marcelle shared an example of a Latina who was taught by her mother to be grateful, which led this woman not to ask for promotions or projects to help her career.

• For self management, you can choose which beliefs best serve you. For example, you can take on that belief that I deserve this. Or a belief that to whom much is given, much is expected, and that’s why I need to lean in to speaking up and taking on new assignments.

• For social awareness and management, it’s important to build relationships and network. Contrary to popular belief, you can do this authentically and on your own terms. It doesn’t have to happen after work – you can connect with people on your commute, before or after meetings, at lunch, or a few minutes at the beginning or end of the day. 

• You can build relationships as your authentic self and connect with others as people. While you may want to network with people who look like you, it’s important to bring in others, including white males, who could open up connections and opportunities. Even if you might be nervous to form a new connection, don’t self-select out. Try anyway – you never know how they will respond until you try.

Marcelle shares how she got a job because she had built a personal connection with a senior leader of the hiring team.

Get full show notes and more information here: https://analizawolf.com/ep-54-the-eq-edge-with-marcelle-fowler