Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [82]
Career strategist Adele Scheele once gave me a wonderful tip about handling a peer who has been poaching or backstabbing. Take notes during your “discussion” with him. It's amazing how that prevents future problems.
AND ALWAYS GO ONE-ON-ONE
Always try to solve the situation directly with the person, rather than involving your boss, human resources, or six people you're friends with along the corridor. It's not simply that the person will respond better if you don't appear to be a tattletale. When you complain about someone, the person you're complaining to will always assume that you are partially responsible for the problem, and may even consider you a troublemaker. Years ago I had a problem handling a young woman who worked for me. I should have spoken to her directly, but we were the same age, and I felt awkward, so I went to my boss and complained about her. He waved his hand dismissively and announced, “I'm not going to get in the middle of the battle of the blondes.” At that moment in his eyes I was on about the same level as a female Jell-O wrestler.
SHOULD YOU EVER BLOW A GASKET?
The idea of being diplomatic doesn't offer much relief if someone has tried to take advantage of you or has damaged you because of their ineptness. What you really want to do at a time like that is let them have it. A ballistic approach certainly can be satisfying—at least during the moment and for the first five minutes afterwards. But then you're left to pick up the pieces.
What you have to decide ultimately is whether blowing a gasket will get you anywhere. Dr. Peggy Saylor, who helped conduct one of the largest studies of women and anger, says that she always advises women to ask themselves, Is it in my best interest? “It might make you feel good momentarily to call him an SOB,” she says. “But in the long run, going overboard with your anger may not serve you well.”
THE HIDDEN SABOTEUR
It's not just people who can sabotage you. There are also certain things that can act like land mines to your getting your job done—a confusing hierarchy, poor interdepartmental communications, a lack of back-up help, inadequate technology.
Good girls often are befuddled and immobilized by such things, even more so than by human saboteurs. But you must confront this kind of trouble as well. Assess the problem, consider the possible solutions and then ask for what you need.
MEN AT WORK
Just after my boss at Family Weekly left to become editor-in-chief of GQ, one of the top guys in the sales department sat down with me and another woman on the staff and discussed some fun things we might do for the going-away party. “Oh, I gotta great idea,” he suddenly announced. “You know how much he liked you two. You could both put on falsies and parade up and down in front of him.”
Rather than feel offended. I left the room laughing to myself. The times they were a-changing, and I knew that a guy like that was a dinosaur, on the road to extinction.
Every successful woman I've talked to admits how much more comfortable life is with men in the workplace compared to what it was like when they first started their careers.
And yet that doesn't mean there aren't still problems. Discrimination exists, hostility exists, harassment exists. According to a 1992 Korn Ferry study of executive women, 59 percent have experienced what they consider to be sexual harassment.
The most common situation I see these days isn't out-and-out hostility or harassment, but rather something I call guerrilla chauvinism, or what Mary Rowe, a labor economist at MIT, describes as “microinequities” and “microaggressions.” It's a very subtle form of discrimination, sometimes intentional, sometimes not, that's very tough to deal with because it's so subtle and slippery.
“Microinequities are woven into all the threads of our work life,” reports Rowe. “They are micro not at all in the sense