This is a teleseminar I'm conducting for women in October, 2008.

As women we are considered to have good soft skills. These are the people skills, interpersonal and communication skills that are seen to be increasingly important to people who want to grow and advance their careers.

In fact, some male managers and CEOs think we have them in abundance. That's why we often get promoted to leadership roles in soft skills areas like human resources, marketing or public relations. Have you ever stopped to wonder why women are rarely appointed to hard skills areas like finance, building and maintenance or corporate governance?

Yet, in spite of our supposedly strong affinity with soft skills, many women find them very hard to use to advance their careers. In fact, the way we use them often has the opposite effect - it damages our careers.

Lois Frankel wrote a book a few years back called "Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office", subtitled "Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers". In that book she argues that women are socialised from childhood to act and behave in certain ways. such as being nice, polite, being the peacemaker and the nurturer, focussing on relationships and connections and being compliant. She says that too many women continue to live by those "rules" in their professional and business lives. Everyone loves having them around the office."They are so nice, such a lovely person", but no manager or CEO ever considers them to be leadership or management material. They are just "too soft"; they are not considered to have what it takes to make the hard decisions that leaders and managers have to make.Lois Frankel says that all it takes  is for you to start "acting like the woman you are capable of becoming than the girl you were taught to be."

In all my work with women in leadership workshops and in my coaching and mentoring, the main response from women regarding this is that they realise some of this, but they don't know what to do about it. 

The male models of leadership they see around them in abundance are not what they aspire to. They don't want to do it that way. Women who have made it often don't want to talk about what it was like on the way through, how they struggled and what they had to endure to get where they are. Again because it will reflect on their capabilities.

For example, what professional woman with children who has reached the top is going to talk about the stress of balancing work and family, or what it was like being called to school, on the day of an important meeting they were chairing at work, to sort out an acting out son or daughter, or how they managed the sometimes chaos at home? What would that say about their capacity to lead an organisation?

Ever noticed how harshly women are judged in these areas? 

So this teleseminar is about providing some new ways of being and doing for women in leadership. The qualities that we, as women, bring to our leadership - for example, valuing and appreciating our people, listening to their viewpoints, favouring collaboration in decision-making, attributing success to their teams rather than themselves - can be exercised in a way that sits well with the way we want to lead and manage as women, while at the same time heightening our profile and our talent and potential.

To find out more about this teleseminar, go to my website.