Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman: What Men Know About Success that Women Need to Learn
208
Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman: What Men Know About Success that Women Need to Learn
208Paperback(Reprint)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Women make up almost half of today's labor force, but in corporate America they don't share half of the power. Only four of the Fortune 500 company CEOs are women, and it's only been in the last few years that even half of the Fortune 500 companies have more than one female officer.
A major reason for this? Most women were never taught how to play the game of business.
Throughout her career in the super-competitive, male-dominated media industry, Gail Evans, one of the country's most powerful executives, has met innumerable women who tell her that they feel lost in the workplace, almost as if they were playing a game without knowing the directions. In this book, she reveals the secrets to the playbook of success and teaches women at all levels of the organization—from assistant to vice president—how to play the game of business to their advantage.
Men know the rules because they wrote them, but women often feel shut out of the process because they don't know when to speak up, when to ask for responsibility, what to say at an interview, and a lot of other key moves that can make or break a career. Sharing with humor and candor her years of lessons from corporate life, Gail Evans gives readers practical tools for making the right decisions at work. Among the rules you will learn are:
• How to Keep Score at Work
• When to Take a Risk
• How to Deal with the Imposter Syndrome
• Ten Vocabulary Words That Mean Different Things to Men and Women
• Why Men Can be Ugly, and You Can't
• When to Quit Your Job
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780767904636 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crown Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/11/2001 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 201,419 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.19(w) x 7.97(h) x 0.59(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1
THE OBJECT OF THE GAME
Action is the antidote to despair. Joan Baez, folk singer and activist
As the young man in my business class asked, isn't the object of the game to win?
But what is winning? Does it mean being the most powerful CEO? Does it mean being the one with the biggest bank account? Or is it the person who's the most feared?
For me, the object of the game is simply to feel great about what you do. That's the most important directive of all—because that's how you end up feeling fulfilled, and that's how you win.
I know for a fact that I have been successful because I've always loved my jobs. And believe me, these haven't all been well-paid positions in glamour industries—I've done everything from run the addressograph machine to fetch the coffee. But no matter what I've done, I've always been able to enjoy myself doing it.
For instance, when my kids were little, I took several years off to take care of them. To earn a little income along the way, I found a part-time job as a sales representative for a clothing company at Atlanta's semiannual merchandise mart. I then created a game out of it, seeing how much I could sell to stores even if they didn't need the line. I couldn't have done this forever, but while it lasted, it was fun. And I bought all my children's clothes (as well as mine) wholesale.
Similarly, not everything I've done on Capitol Hill or at CNN sounded exciting when it was originally proposed. But I've usually managed to make it so. For example, at one point my boss announced that I was going to revamp CNN's intern program. This came at a time when two of my children were already in college, and the last thing I wanted was to worry about other college-age kids. But I made the job challenging by taking on more responsibility than I had been offered, which turned out to involve recruitment and talent development. I gave my job so much visibility that when the new vice president of that area was announced, she was told to report to me.
So the ultimate winner in the game of business is not necessarily the person with the most power or the most money or the most fame. Rather, it's the person who loves his or her work. I know many miserable people with important titles. But I don't know anyone who loves her job who's miserable. It's that simple.
There's more: If you can love your business life, you'll be playing the game the way the guys do. They don't run out on the football field or stride into an important meeting wishing they were elsewhere. They are enthusiastic, eager to have an opportunity to satisfy their competitive urges.
Loving what you do is self-empowering. It makes you more brilliant, it gives you the ability to become a visionary, it helps you become the best businesswoman you can be. You improve your chances of rising to the top.
For some men, of course, loving the game is synonymous with material success. It's a basic cause-and-effect paradigm: If they get to the top and they get rich, they love it.
Women aren't as likely to love success as an isolated entity. We want to love our entire life. And that's fine. Unlike men, we don't tend to compartmentalize the various aspects of daily existence (see Chapter 5: Think Small). So it's hard to feel upbeat when we take a job that isn't intrinsically interesting—even if we see the possibility of success somewhere down the road.
Why do women have such a hard time understanding the importance of loving our work? My sense is that in our society, women are raised to feel comfortable in the role of nurturer, the ones who make things better for everyone else. We don't get permission along the way to love ourselves, or to love what we do, outside of our caretaker's role. Only in the last few decades have we learned that we can be the center of our own lives. And that means we, too, can start loving our jobs with the same enthusiasm as those guys who rush out onto the sports field and into the boardroom.
When you have a new baby, changing her diapers isn't drudgery, because it's not the diaper you're changing, it's the baby. You want to do everything you can for her. But when she's three years old, the focus shifts to the diaper, not the baby; so you toilet train her.
Likewise, in an office, you can teach yourself to do any job you're given and be okay with it. But ultimately, if you don't feel good about your job, you'll just be going through the motions, which means that you're turning off that button that I call possibility.
You can't play any game well if you don't enjoy playing it.
2
FOUR GROUND RULES
I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore. Georgia O'Keeffe, artist
A few years ago I asked the students in my business course at Emory to interview successful executives, both men and women. Their assignment was to uncover the qualities of good leaders and write up a report.
The assignment wasn't intended to be a gender discussion by any means, but it was hard not to notice that the words both the students and the executives used to describe men differed from the words they applied to the women.
Some of the most common terms describing male executives were: "quarterback," "absolute winner," "aggression," "boastfulness," "the desire to win," "holding power," "tough-skinned," "having fun," "part of a dog-eat-dog world."
These were the words and phrases used about women: "cooperation," "social involvement," "teamwork," "respect for others," "uncompetitive," "willing to share power," "concern for the harmony of the group," "feeling that everyone can be a winner," "wanting to be liked by all," "caretaker."
In the course of every discussion I've ever had about men and women, certain themes seem to appear; fair or unfair, professors, students, businessmen, and businesswomen all share the same vocabulary.
The same broad categories of women as "social" and "cooperative," men as "aggressive" and "tough" hold true in this book. Whereas not all men learned to play football or chess or poker, and not all women played with dolls or ignored competitive games, the majority of men and women were socially acculturated according to their sex.
Now, I know many men never played competitive sports or games while they were young. Certainly some women are stronger and more competitive than any number of men. And I'm not suggesting you should dismiss this book if you're a woman who is more comfortable with rugby than with dolls. I was a high school athlete, making all-Westchester County (New York) hockey goalie.
For the most part, however, the women's game was and is different from the men's. This is because men and women are wired differently, and we are brought up differently.
And when we are adults, we work differently. It is important for women to understand these differences, because the more aware we are of them, the more possible it is to gain access to power. Ignorance is never bliss. You cannot know too much.
Following are four fundamental ground rules underlying the strategies you need to understand if you are going to play.
1. You Are Who You Say You Are
Playing any game means being faced with a variety of choices, and the game of business is no exception. You will do well only if you make your decisions from a position of power rather than a position of weakness.
Whenever I sit on panels I am always amazed at the wide variety of backgrounds among the women—they have seldom traveled the same straight and narrow path the men do. A woman's way has many more obstacles, mostly because we face this huge issue called family. I've never met a woman so alone that she didn't have an important personal relationship somewhere in her life, whether it's parents, sisters, brothers, or children. That means that many of us have gone back and forth between family obligations and careers, sometimes having to leave work, or change our hours, or take jobs in other cities.
Men generally don't feel that pull between staying home and advancing within the organization. So your career will be colored by a greater number of factors than his—your game board is more complicated.
Don't make your life more difficult by seeing yourself as a victim of this system. For instance, one of my closest friends has been with the same Boston-based conglomerate for 25 years. She's very successful, but she has reached the point where she's not going any further. She takes care of outreach seminars, she writes proposals, she orga-nizes meetings, but the guys have taken her off the core line businesses. She complains that they don't appreciate her, that her boss is horrible, that her work is boring.
"Your kids are grown, you have money, your husband is prospering," I tell her. "If you're that miserable, get out."
She looks at me as if I've suggested she vacation on the moon. She accepted the role of being a victim years ago, and she's comfortable with it. In fact, she took on this role before anyone else in her company ascribed it to her, but now it's impossible for them to imagine her in any other way.
Too many of us tolerate the role of the passive, put-upon person, probably because it's the one most often taken by our primary role model—our mother. Remember when you used to get up late on a Saturday morning? Dad was calmly reading the paper, while Mom was complaining, "I've got tons to do so I'll drop you off at your ballet class on my way to grocery shop because your father's parents are spending the weekend with us and I don't have anything for dinner."
How many of us ever heard her say: "If you need to get to your class, tell your father. Also tell him what you want for dinner, and remind him to pick up his parents so they can spend the weekend. I'm meeting a friend for lunch."
Women have tended to live in the complaint, to grumble to our friends and our daughters about it—but until relatively recently, we haven't taken action to fix it. Like women who remain in unhappy or abusive marriages, we are often more comfortable remaining with the devil we know, no matter how unpleasant or disagreeable, than making a proactive (and therefore potentially risky) change.
As I see it, women have two options: to structure our world around our own choices, or to let someone else make the choices for us.
In the 1980 Olympics, the U.S. hockey team was expected to lose to the Soviet team. But no one told this to the U.S. players, who were clear they were the best team in the world. Eventually they said this to themselves enough times that other people began believing it too. By the night of the finals their conviction had become truth, and they won the gold medal.
If you want to take charge of your own business life, begin by sending out the equivalent message about yourself. Pick your goal and say it aloud to yourself. "I could manage this department. I would do an excellent job."
Picture yourself actually doing the job. What would it feel like? What does it look like? Try to make your positive fantasies real. The first step to being successful is convincing yourself that you are successful.
2. One Prize Doesn't Fit All
Have you heard the story about the couple who was seeing a marriage counselor to help save their disintegrating relationship? The husband says, "I don't understand—we have a great house, we have great kids, we have a great car—what do you want?" And the wife responds, "I just don't feel fulfilled." The man looks exasperated; he has no idea what she means.
Women demand a greater sense of fulfillment from our jobs than men do. The standard male-oriented rewards—money, power, prestige—don't necessarily have the same sway with us.
Today women are learning to pay attention to our own needs, as well as everyone else's. This is helping us discover a new sense of freedom and independence in the workplace. Our jobs are not about our husbands or our children or our parents. Ideally, they are about us.
But can we handle this change? Many of us aren't always clear about what we want from this thing called a career. We anguish over whether it will be a career at all, or just a job to provide supplementary income. We obsess about whether it will have any real meaning to us, or whether we are doing it solely to please our family. We have incessant internal discussions over where we are going, and the route never seems to be as direct as we thought.
We live in what I call divine discontent. The work is never quite right, the company isn't either. Now, this feeling can keep smart women on their toes, because it can make them strive a little harder. But even so, such needless turmoil eventually wastes energy.
For most men, the actual job content isn't crucial. The trappings of success, such as title, prestige, and/or money can ameliorate the boring, unpleasant daily grind. Men reconcile doing work they don't like by getting high-profile rewards.
Consider the following: Over many years of public speaking I've often run into the CFO of a large manufacturing company who always tells the same story. Starting off in the accounting department, he slowly but surely worked his way up through one uninteresting position after another until finally, at the age of 60, he received his Glorious Reward and got the one job he'd always coveted. He is a smart and decent man. But every time I hear his speech, I shudder.
Unlike this male CFO, we women are much more likely to find an area in our company that we find fascinating and remain there for years. We tend to ignore the stars, bells, and brass rings that men consider necessary markers of success. For us, the ultimate reward can simply be the ability to say: "I feel great about what I'm doing."
Remember: Loving your job means you are the ultimate winner. But you must remain alert to all potential pitfalls along the way. No matter what the game, if two players are looking at a different goal, the manner in which they advance with the ball will differ.
Let's say you and John Doe start work the same day at the same level. John enters Sales, because he wants to be rich, and you enter Human Resources, because you're fascinated by interpersonal behavior. Fifteen years later, you look up to see that John is a vice president making $250,000 a year, and you're a vice president making $125,000. You think, "Did I do something wrong?"
Table of Contents
| Preface | 3 | |
| Introduction | 7 | |
| 1 | The Object of the Game | 15 |
| 2 | Four Ground Rules | 19 |
| 1 | You Are Who You Say You Are | |
| 2 | One Prize Doesn't Fit All | |
| 3 | Work Isn't a Sorority | |
| 4 | You're Always a Mother, Daughter, Wife, or Mistress | |
| 3 | Preparing to Play | 37 |
| Learn the Playing Field | ||
| Check Out the Team Culture | ||
| Get Picked for the Team | ||
| Wear the Right Uniform | ||
| Set the Right Goal | ||
| 4 | How to Keep Score | 57 |
| 5 | Playing the Game: Fourteen Basic Rules for Success | 63 |
| 1 | Make a Request | |
| 2 | Speak Out | |
| 3 | Speak Up | |
| 4 | Toot Your Own Horn | |
| 5 | Don't Expect to Make Friends | |
| 6 | Accept Uncertainty | |
| 7 | Take a Risk | |
| 8 | Be an Imposter | |
| 9 | Think Small | |
| 10 | Don't Anguish | |
| 11 | Follow the Team Leader | |
| 12 | Don't Assume Responsibility Without Authority | |
| 13 | Sit at the Table | |
| 14 | Laugh | |
| 6 | Six Things Men Can Do at Work That Women Can't | 121 |
| 1 | They Can Cry. You Can't | |
| 2 | They Can Have Sex. You Can't | |
| 3 | They Can Fidget. You Can't | |
| 4 | They Can Yell. You Can't | |
| 5 | They Can Have Bad Manners. You Can't | |
| 6 | They Can Be Ugly. You Can't | |
| 7 | He Hears, She Hears: Ten Genderbender Vocabulary Words | 137 |
| 1 | Yes (Exactly What It Means) | |
| 2 | No (Not What It Means) | |
| 3 | Hope (The Worst Word in the Game) | |
| 4 | Guilt (It Means Trouble) | |
| 5 | Sorry (It's a Sorry Word) | |
| 6 | Aggressive (It's Not Assertive) | |
| 7 | Fight (It's Not a Pretty Word) | |
| 8 | Game (a.k.a.: Fun) | |
| 9 | Glass Ceiling (Their Term, Not Ours) | |
| 10 | Future (Then and Now) | |
| 8 | How to Enter and Exit the Game | 159 |
| 9 | The Two Final Rules | 175 |
| 1 | Be a Woman | |
| 2 | Be Yourself | |
| Acknowledgments | 189 |
Introduction
It always happens at these events. I speak, I listen, I hear the same words over and over--"baffled," "angry," "lost," "trapped," "stuck," "overwhelmed"--as each woman tells me she feels that she's gotten only so far in business and can't get any further.
One of the women at the conference told me she's a vice president at the Fortune 500 company where she's been working for two decades. In the last four years she has been given two new lofty-sounding titles, but no more power. She thinks she has hit a wall.
"Have you made it clear what you want?" I asked. "Have you taken any action?"
"No," she said.
Like so many women, she doesn't understand that when you have an ongoing serious complaint, you don't simply, meekly, live with it. You try to change it.
I told her that she needed to take action.
"What kind of action?" she asked
"Anything," I said. "One action will lead to another. Talk to the CEO. Job hunt. Anything. Just do something!"
She sighed. "I don't understand. They know what a good job I am doing. Why don't they just reward me for it?"
With that attitude, she is losing the game.
If you don't read the directions manual when you start a game, you won't know how to proceed. You open the box, and in front of you are the board, markers, and dice, but you don't have a clue. If you're playing by yourself, you can improvise, but you may get it wrong. If you're playing with others, you can always follow their lead. But while they're focused on winning, you have to keep asking yourself if you're getting it right.
Whether that game is croquet, Monopoly, field hockey, or football, you have to understand the directions first. So why play the game of business any differently? Business is as much a game as any other board, individual, or team sports game. Consider all the metaphors like teamwork, making the right moves, playing your cards close to your chest, picking the best players for your team, rolling the dice, making a preemptive bid, raising the ante, finding the right captain, getting the team into position, hitting a home run.
The bottom line: When it comes to business, most women are at a disadvantage. We're forced to guess, to improvise, to bluff (which is not something we're always good at--see Chapter 5: Toot Your Own Horn). This is why so few of us play the game well, and even fewer find it fulfilling.
And what about men? They don't read directions manuals, you say. True. They don't need to. The male mind invented the concept of directions. It wasn't that they deliberately ignored women, or disliked what women had to say. Rather, as business culture developed, few women were around to help. Men wrote all the rules because they wrote alone.
Women have made great strides in the last century. But that progress hasn't always been smooth, nor has it been straight ahead. Sometimes it's even retrogressed. During the labor shortage in World War II, for example, women were called in to perform men's jobs, and they did well. But when the war was over, Rosie the Riveter was sent home, and women had to wait decades for another chance.
The best you can say is that we've seen a kind of creeping incrementalism. Large numbers of women dot the current workplace, but like trees on a mountain, you'll see fewer and fewer of them as you climb higher in the executive landscape, until you reach a kind of timber line where you'll find about as many women as you'll find magnolias.
Fortune magazine recently ran a cover story on the 50 most powerful women in America. Nothing wrong with that. What I found worrisome was that the positions these women occupied--group presidents, vice presidents, founders of their own businesses--were not comparable to what a similar group of men would have held. All the men would have been CEO of large companies.
Women now account for over 46 percent of the total U.S. labor force, up from 29.6 percent in 1950. But as of 1999, only 11.9 of the 11,681 corporate officers in America's top 500 companies were women. In 1998 it was 11.2. If this pace continues, the number of women on top corporate boards won't equal the number of men until the year 2064.
Last year only 3.3 percent of these companies's top earners were women, with 98 women holding positions of the highest rank in corporate America, versus 1,202 men. And 496 out of 500 Fortune companies had male CEOs. Many of America's favorite companies--General Electric, Exxon, Compaq-- have no women officers at all.
And even when women do make it to the top, we don't make as much money: Compensation for the top-paid female officers ranges from $210,000 to $4.96 million, whereas men earn from $220,660 to $31.29 million. All in all, top female executives earn on average 68 cents for every dollar a male executive earns.
The reality in today's business landscape: A woman is most likely to occupy a position of power when she started, or inherited, her own business. We're not going through the ranks and making it to the boss's office, and that's where the power lies in corporate America.
What can--and should--a woman do? The answer would be easy if men and women were born with similar instincts and were similarly socialized. But that isn't the case. In fact, the general thinking among biogeneticists is that the social skills of males and females are inherently different. After that, according to the sociologists, they're raised in ways that accentuate that difference.
Let me tell you about my three children, two boys and a girl, whom I was committed to raising in a thoroughly nonsexist environment. Starting from day one, I could spot gender-based disparities among them. For instance, the way in which my sons and daughters nursed: My two boys behaved alike. They sucked until their stomachs were full, they burped, filled their diapers, and promptly went to sleep. It was a quick, effortless transaction. End of story.
My daughter gave a different performance. She sucked a little, she closed her eyes, then she'd touch, reach out, feel, suck, rest, try to open her eyes, burble, suck, touch, and so on. It was clear from the earliest moment that she was interested in some kind of social relationship with me. She wanted to know who I was and where she was. The boys just wanted to get their fill.
Nurture also has a say in gender distinctions. While teaching a course on gender issues in business at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, I asked my students about the games they played as children. What was the object of the game, how many other children participated, what lessons did they take away from them, and so on?
As usual, the sharpest young man was the first to raise his hand. "I always hung around with at least a half dozen other boys," he said. "We played games like pick-up baseball, soccer, street hockey." He added, "The silliest question you asked was about the object of the game. We played to win. What else is there?"
"Oh, my God," interrupted a young woman. She explained how she usually played with one, or maybe two, other girls at a time, rather than a large group, and that they were always more concerned with building a friendship than with winning. Then she told us a story about playing a game of jacks with two friends at camp. When one of the girls was about to win, they all made up new rules so they wouldn't have to stop. "The object was to keep the game going as long as possible," she said. "And we wanted everyone to win."
The point is not that one of these perspectives is better than the other but that, from early childhood on, boys and girls play with different sets of rules. And because men created the rules in the game of business, and because women are only now trying to be effective competitors, we will prosper only when we are familiar with those rules.
None of this is to say that men are doing a bad, or a good, job. The business world is male-dominated. That is not a criticism nor a condemnation--it's a reality. Most of the time the male advantage isn't due to conscious discrimination against women. Like most people, men prefer to surround themselves with others who make them feel at ease. The relationship between men and women in business is not so different from that between a Caucasian Christian and an Indian Sikh, or an army general and a pacifist. Like attracts like. Differences create discomfort.
There is no denying that our society has created a division of labor between men and women, and historically one sex has tended to supervise certain tasks, and therefore write the rules. Recently, however, that division is becoming muddied, as both sexes are thinking about expanding the traditional boundaries, whether at work or at home.
For instance, some men are now staying home to raise children. The way we nurture our children in our culture is a female-determined system--these directions were written by women. It might turn out to be excellent for our children, however, if men have more of an impact on how kids are raised. We might have healthier children--just as we may have healthier corporations if women were to play a bigger role in them. The more heterogeneity there is at the table, the more likely we are to discover better solutions for everyone.
In the pages that follow you will find pointers to help you create your own personal directions manual for success. To become a player in the world of business, you have to know the prevailing rules that men play by--not because you must follow them word for word, but because you need to understand the playing field even if you eventually choose to make up your own game. It is not a level playing field if you don't know what to do on it.