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Look Within

Escaping Your Career Plateau: Perfectionism, Risk, and What's Actually in the Way

Time and Date: 11:00 am–12:00 pm on Saturday, May 4
Session Type: Workshop
Facilitator: Holly Burton

Research shows that women are held to higher standards in their work leading up to promotions. While career progression requires high-quality work, the stringent standards women must meet to be considered for promotion can lead to perfectionist behavior. This very behavior is then often identified as showing lack of leadership acumen, creating a career-stalling catch-22 for ambitious women. 

This workshop aims to give women a look at how their working lives are affected by the complex forces surrounding promotions, quality work, perfectionism, and risk. We'll cover:

  • What perfectionism is and how it shows up in your work
  • The relationship between risk, perfectionism, and gender
  • How ambitious women subtly undermine their own career progress
  • What's really at play when our careers stall—and what to do next

The goal of this workshop is to help you get at the deeper reasons for your career-limiting behaviors so you can keep your career moving forward.

Holly Burton is a speaker, facilitator, consultant, and coach with expertise in leadership, career development, feminist theory, and the unique mix of issues that make it challenging for women to succeed in STEM fields. She is a leadership coach that specializes in working with women in male-dominated industries. She works one-on-one with ambitious women to help them lead, get promoted, and create the careers they actually want in industries they love.

Holly spent the first ten years of her career as a mining engineer in an industry that is only 17% female. She now coaches ambitious women that want to advance their careers and works with companies to develop programs to retain female talent.

Holly speaks regularly at organizations including EA Games, Elastic Path, the Canadian Institute of Mining, DevOps Days Vancouver, Women in Mining BC, Disrupt HR, the BC Women in Energy Network, UBC Masters of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Women in Tech Week, the Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology (SCWIST), the Women in Leadership Foundation, and her own Women in Male-Dominated Industries Speaker Series.

Holly can be found online at her website, or via her meetup, Women in Male-Dominated Industries.