The Sisterhood Strategy; How Women Lift as They Climb
The Myth of Solo Success:
Every year, anywhere from six to nine hundred people brave earth’s highest peak; yet, no one climbs Mount Everest alone. Even the most experienced are tethered to a team. Sherpas guiding the way. Fellow climbers breaking the trail. Base camp crews monitoring conditions throughout. Ascent is always a group effort.
Surprisingly, career success works the same way. Often, we’re introduced to a different narrative, convinced that getting ahead means competing for limited space at the top. Not only does that mindset isolate us, but it limits what we can achieve together.
What if there was a different approach? Introducing, The Sisterhood Strategy: an intentional, powerful practice of uplifting other women while pursuing your own growth. In a recent conversation with leadership coach Anna Cuglietta, I sat down to discuss her work centred around this very idea. One image stood head and shoulders above the rest as she described the women who make the deepest impact. The ones remembered years later show up in a specific way, transforming the workplace by shining a bright light: “They don’t look for the spotlight, they look for the broad. They use a floodlight mentality”.
Reframing the Narrative: An Internal Shift
So, how does one acquire this mindset? It starts with work a lot closer to home.
The climb up Everest doesn’t begin at base camp. It starts long before, with mental preparation: the belief you belong on that mountain in the first place. For women in professional environments, this doesn't always come easily.
“A narrative that no longer serves,” Anna responded as I asked about the most common limiting mindset she encounters. “An old narrative that keeps coming back, that may sound like ‘I don’t have enough experience to speak up at the table. I'm not as good as I should be at this skill.’”
This inner critic is familiar to most of us, although we don’t always notice its subtlety. Most times, we fail to realize what we’re experiencing isn’t realism, “just being honest” about our own abilities. It's fear. Anna offered two correctives I believe are worth holding onto:
Presence: If you are in the room, if you are “invited to the table,” then “you add value, your perspective is different. It may not be the perfect answer, but it may be an answer that spurs on a different perspective in conversation that leads the group to come up with a better decision.”
Patience: “You're in a new role, taking on new responsibilities or starting with a new organization. So you're not good at it yet. But just like you went through your degree, you have the resourcefulness and drive to get better at it. So it's that growth mindset that says, you're not as good as you could be. Yet.”
Yet has the power to turn dead ends into detours. When we learn to embrace this power, we stop treating our struggles as unique failures, and begin to see them as phases.
“It also helps when we are being mentored, to understand the struggles and challenges that our leaders and mentors may have faced. It helps to remind us that we face challenges and struggles in our careers. When we acknowledge this, we feel less alone in these challenges.”
This is the first step toward lifting someone else. It comes only after acknowledging you’ve been through this terrain yourself.
Our Action Toolkit: How to Champion Others
Once the internal narrative shifts, we can begin the real work. What does the action of lifting other women up actually look like? Anna doesn’t hesitate to describe women who do it and do it well. Remember the floodlight mentality?
“They bring to light what others may have thought of and they help. They give others credit for the work, the idea, and the solutions they come up with.”
The goal isn’t performative praise, but intentional illumination. Circling back to the ideas you notice got overlooked, acknowledging those who contributed by name, using your platform to make someone else visible. This takes courage, but it doesn’t have to be the loudest-voice-in-the-room-kind:
“They stop wondering why they're there and they just know they belong there. When you have that mindset, you don't always need to be talking. Your word means something.
Wouldn’t we all like to become this kind of person? Colleague? Friend? There are two tools she’s added to my toolbox I’d like to share:
Feedback: “Ask people whose opinions matter to you, ‘How are you experiencing me at work? I trust you enough to tell me the truth and I know you respect me enough to tell me where I can grow.’”
Feedforward: “Even top athletes, when they win (or lose), are going back and reviewing game tape. They look and go, ‘Okay, here's what I do really well. What do I need to do to make it even more powerful? To be even better?’”
By involving others in our individual growth process, and contributing to theirs, we create a synergy that fuels the entire community.
The Organizational Layer: Building Sustainable Cultures
So we’ve learned individual mentorship matters. But, would things be different if support wasn’t left to chance, and instead integrated into how organizations operate?
Anna puts it simply. Development cannot be a “nice to have, but a critical driver and enabler of strategy and business results”. She posed a question organizations should be asking themselves:
“If we're going to pivot and do this, or if we're going to be even better than we were last year, what are the skills, behaviours, and/or attributes we need from every single person in this organization? And how do we learn together quickly?”
When corporations practice intentionality, support systems stop being optional. Collaboration replaces competition. Mentorship gets baked into structures. A floodlight mentality becomes company culture.
The First Five Minutes of the Run:
Is any of this easy? Nope! The climb never is.
But, “any time you're in a bigger arena, it is going to feel uncomfortable. That is not an indication you cannot do it. It's an indication the arena just got bigger. That's it. It should be equally terrifying and exciting at the same time.”
An analogy that stuck with me (and I’ve used once or twice since our conversation), is based on the first five minutes of a run. Now, I’m no runner, but I’d imagine my body would protest, my mind looking for exits and all my senses pleading with me to stop.
“The narrative we tell ourselves about, ‘Oh, I don't know if I can handle this,’ might be part of the process. It doesn't mean we shouldn’t do it. We should just be aware: this is the first five minutes of the run, and it sucks. Embrace it.”
In the same way, it may be a bit uncomfortable to ask for feedback at first. It’s also easier to stay quiet than amplify someone else’s idea. But the women who do it anyway are the ones who are remembered.
“Be one of those people that ten years from now, people will remember what it was like to be on a team with you, what it was like to be led by you, what it was like to be mentored by you.”
The Sisterhood Strategy isn’t meant to be complex. Simply put, it's showing up with a floodlight, even when you could have the spotlight to yourself. It's adding yet to the end of our limitations. It's asking “Who can I bring with me?” instead of simply “How do I get ahead?”
Nobody summits alone. And the view from the top?
That’s best shared too.