Expanding Your Power
A Woman's Opportunity to Inspire Teams and Influence Organizations
With broad applicability across industries and organization size, Expanding Your Power is a thorough guide for women in leadership roles.
Consultant, entrepreneur, and corporate professional Marsha L. Clark’s Expanding Your Power is a systematic, inspiring leadership guide for women.
Expanding upon the lessons of Clark’s long-running leadership program for women, the book examines group dynamics, psychology, and organizational systems to provide thorough guidance on how to grow as a leader. Methodical in its approach, it outlines a holistic and thorough developmental framework for women to expand their power and make the most of their “seat at the table,” including by supporting other women. Its guidance has broad applications across industries and regardless of an organization’s size.
In addition to gendered issues like the accumulation of disadvantage in the workplace, the book covers general abstract leadership principles in a practical manner. It makes itself useful as a resource via frequent summaries, recapitulations of key points, and recommended reading lists. It is divided by broad themes of power, inspiration, and influence, subdivided into topical chapters on the art of influencing, building high-performance teams, and asking for what you want. Its guidance on how to bridge differing points of view and find common ground is clear, as is its advice on matters like quantitative metrics and managing performance.
The workshop origins of the material are unmistakable. There are bids for class participation after every block of instruction, for example, and each section ends with discussion questions to deepen understanding. Further, there’s guidance for assessing collective behavioral statements and the introduction of interactive tools like leadership readiness assessments. Still, the book often relies too much on its formula, making it seem rigid at times; it seems to elevate process over principles.
Some of the book’s frameworks are quite elaborate, too, as with its organizational systems of tops, middles, and bottoms, and its tendency to classify, categorize, and itemize renders it dry at times. The pithiness of the prose also comes at the expense of sustained interest, while the checklists, charts, and acronyms that appear throughout result in a fragmented and bureaucratic feel. Nonetheless, the book makes good on its central premise of going beyond embracing power to expanding power. It includes helpful advice on decision-making, meetings, communication, and celebrating employee successes to help women in leadership roles level up and achieve greater organizational success.
Expanding Your Power is a precise and thorough women’s leadership guide with clear advice for growing in one’s roles.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
