Please Sit Over There: How to Manage Power, Overcome Exclusion, and Succeed as a Black Woman at Work

Summary

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 using a set of rules that was never designed for them. There are so many unwritten rules of power still at play in professional organizations that repeatedly hinder Black women in their career development and overall workplace experiences. In this book, Francine Parham shares her knowledge as a former Black female global executive of two major corporations on how to move up in the workplace while maintaining a sense of sanity. The first section lays the foundation for understanding power dynamics, while the second section shows how to "shift the power" as a professional Black woman. Finally, the third section helps readers to pinpoint and navigate the particulars of an organization's flawed systems and processes so they can advance to the next professional level. 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 to come.