Please Sit Over There

Book excerpt: The key to your career advancement is understanding how power works--who has it, where it hides, and how it's used. Please Sit Over There teaches Black women the career skills they need to navigate an uneven playing field and achieve long-lasting professional success. Black women continuously navigate systems that were never intended for them while playing by a set of rules they never agreed to or were ever trained for. In this book, Francine Parham shares her knowledge as a Black woman and a former global executive of two major corporations on how to move up in the workplace while maintaining a sense of sanity. The key skill--one that Black women are rarely taught--is understanding the power dynamics within your organization and learning how to shift the power to your advantage. Parham shows how to use your voice, strategically build the right relationships, and support others once you have achieved a powerful position--tools any woman can use to increase her power and ensure a successful, fulfilling career. Parham says Black women are already empowered; there is no shortage of qualified professional Black women in the talent pipeline. But it does not feel empowering when organizations force Black women to work every day to overcome biases, discriminatory institutional practices, and unwritten rules of power at play that hinder their career development and professional advancement. Please Sit Over There honors the painstaking work being undertaken to deconstruct broken institutions and demonstrates how Black women can achieve their goals while those institutions still exist-effectively opening doors for all women of color.