SUPERWOMAN SMARTS

The most qualified woman in the room does not always win. The most legible one does.

For more than twenty years, Yevette Lynn watched it happen — at counseling tables, in boardrooms, in the offices of a chamber of commerce in a small Tennessee city. Capable women got overlooked. Forgettable ones got promoted. Eventually she stopped pretending she did not know why.

Superwoman Smarts is not a book about doing more. It is a book about being read correctly.

Most advice written for ambitious women lands in one of two camps: work harder, or perform confidence. This book declines both. It argues that leadership and substance are two halves of the same thing, and that a woman who carries one without the other will keep meeting a ceiling she cannot see. Then it does the harder work of showing what that looks like on a Tuesday — in a negotiation, in a hiring decision, in a room where you are the only one who looks like you.

The argument is carried by women, not theory. A caterer who had to build her reputation twice. A stylist who learned that the chair she sat in was a boardroom. A marketing executive who stopped apologizing for her ambition. A small-city mayor on what he notices in the first thirty seconds. And a chapter written as a letter to the author's daughter, on what she hopes she has managed to pass down.

New in this second edition

Three new chapters, and a substantial revision throughout.

• Presence Before the First Conversation — what the research on rapid judgment actually found, and what it means for the woman walking into the room. People form durable impressions of competence and trustworthiness in a fraction of a second, and more exposure rarely changes them.


• The Visual Dimension of Leadership — why the photograph attached to your name is a working tool rather than a vanity, and how to think about it without becoming someone else.


• Building a Reputation Twice — a returning contributor on what it costs to rebuild, and what she would do differently.

The edition also carries a rewritten twenty-one-day brand boot camp, discussion questions for book clubs and leadership groups, and a resource list for women starting or growing a business.

Who this is for

Women stepping into their first leadership role, and women who have held one for a decade and are tired of being underestimated. Founders. Chamber and economic development professionals. Anyone who mentors women and needs better language for what they are actually up against. It is written to be read straight through, and to be argued with in a group.

Yevette Lynn is Chief Business Development Officer of the Kingsport Chamber and the founder of Yevette Lynn Photography, a portrait studio in Kingsport, Tennessee. She holds an MBA and has spent her career in small business development, counseling and community leadership. She previously published as Aundrea Y. Wilcox; the first edition of Superwoman Smarts appeared in 2015.