If men don't lean back, women can't lean in

I’ve been wanting to talk about men staying home ever since hearing from a listener last year. She wrote that she wouldn’t be able to do what she does without her husband staying at home with their little girl, that her job involves a lot of travel and that he’s been game for all her trips, and their international moves. Yet the reactions he gets form society are mixed: he’s had someone walk away from him at a party in DC after finding out what he did. Other women have asked her things like, ‘Oh, so your husband doesn’t want to work?’ My listener was sick of the assumptions everyone made about her other half – and grateful she could excel in her career because of him.

Christopher Persley, his wife Jenelle, and their daughter Camilla

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the cult of masculinity and what that means for both men and women. You could start with the worst and most obvious results of this, such as domestic and sexual violence, which is why organizations like Promundo exist. Because the cult of masculinity – what men feel they have to be to be a man – is the flipside of the stuff we talk about on The Broad Experience all the time. Society has long wanted women in a particular box, and so many of us women feel we need to live up to all those stereotypes. But men have their own societal expectations to live up to – and plenty of those come from women as well as men (see above). But this stereotype of the ‘real man’ harms both sexes. It keeps men putting in long hours at the office, living for work, measuring their worth by their roles as employee and provider rather than, say, as partner or father. Yet as one guest told me last year, not much will change for women at work until the workplace and society in general ‘lets men be fathers’ and accepts that not all men are burning to get to the top, just as many women aren’t.

Until more men are willing or able to lean back, there’s a limited number of spots for women who lean in.

Still, as Meg Jay said in one of my recent podcasts, it’s not acceptable for men to say what women often do – that they want to take a career break for kids, or that they want to stay at home altogether. Those expectations about male/female roles are deeply embedded in our psyches. Society still wants men to be go-getters above all else.

One of my guests on the latest show on men staying home, stay-at-home dad Christopher Persley, voiced some of this when he said when you interview for a job, it’s not done to act like you don’t want to get to the top. We’re expected to pretend, to play that awful ‘where do you want to be five years from now?’ game, which always made my heart sink when I was in a traditional workplace. I couldn’t say, “I have no idea” or, as he wanted to say, “I just want to be doing this job exceptionally well,” because that would not be considered thrusting enough for the modern workplace – especially if you’re a guy.

I suppose it’s a bit ironic that I’ve released this show on men just after International Women’s Day. But I’m with former guest Avivah Wittenberg-Cox: women as a group won’t progress unless gender roles in general blur – and we need to stop judging when they do.

Ask questions to minimize stress - and get what you want

Oliver Twist asks for more

A lot of women hate asking for things. We don’t want to impose, we fear ‘no’, we fear other people judging and resenting us for asking in the first place.

I’ve written and broadcast many times about women’s difficulty in asking for raises – and how they’re judged when they do. But it’s not just raises that stymie us. It’s making any kind of ask. This came up in my latest show on women and stress. Psychotherapist Marjorie Hirsch made a simple but excellent point: she encourages her stressed-out clients to ask questions that could help reduce their stress.

Take the woman she talked about in the podcast whose boss was sending her emails all weekend. The woman felt her anxiety rising from Saturday morning through Sunday evening. She was frazzled and felt her free time slipping away. Hirsch said, ‘Well, have you asked your boss if she expects you to read these emails?’ The client had not. The following week she did just that, asking her boss what her expectations were. The boss told her no, she didn’t expect her to read and act on them over the weekend, she was simply unloading tasks in the expectation her employee would follow through during the week. This client prompt sounds so simple as to be almost redundant, but it’s not.

When we’re in a spiral of stress and/or anxiety we are not necessarily thinking straight. I started seeing Marjorie Hirsch myself when my own father was dying several years ago and I was a mess. One of my big fears, being single at the time, was that I would get ‘the call’ from England and have to pack up in a state of great distress and go to the airport on my own. This idea scared and depressed me to no end and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Marjorie made a suggestion: why not ask a couple of friends if they’d be up for getting my possible middle-of- the-night-in-tears call and be willing to come with me to the airport when I could book a flight? That is such sensible, simple advice, yet I couldn’t see it myself. For one thing, I wasn't thinking clearly, for another, something in me wouldn’t have wanted to ‘bother’ my friends. Yet as soon as she gave me the advice I could see its strength and immediately got in touch with two friends, who both said yes very quickly. (As it happened I didn’t need to act on this – I was able to be with my father when he died.)

Reluctance to ask for something you need or want is a reality for many women. I just listened to one of Ellevate’s webinars from last month given by Annette Saldana on asking for what you want. She rightly points out that women tend to be held back by mindsets that say either we shouldn’t impose, or that if we ask we won’t get what we want anyway, or that we shouldn’t need to ask in the first place because we do best just powering through achieving everything on our own.

I believe most women who don’t ask keep quiet because of something else Saldana said:

“A lot of what kept me from asking was this perception I’d have to turn into someone I’m not. I didn’t want to do that. I thought taking care of myself and asking was selfish and wrong.”

Exactly. Asking – to many of us – translates to being less than nice, being pushy, putting ourselves before someone else, and we hate that. Upbringing and culture teach women to be good girls, to be happy with what we’ve got. No wonder asking for stuff is so uncomfortable.

Saldana says there are three mindsets to get into for a successful ask.

1)   You have the right to ask for anything

2)   The other party has the right to say yes or no

3)   ‘No’ does not equal ‘you can’t have what you want’. Adopt the point of view that ‘no’ means ‘not now’. It just means that it’s time for another conversation, that there’s someone else you could ask.

Too often I’ve run off into the bushes after a no, assuming nothing more will happen, only to discover later that it was worth re-framing the request and/or asking someone else.

This is important stuff. I wish I had the innate confidence many men have that lets them assume they deserve things. I come from the opposite position, assuming I don’t deserve anything and need permission to do everything.

As Saldana says, it’s time to change that. 

How to stop others from wasting your time at work

February 22, 2015

Photo by Jlhopgood used with creative commons license

A couple of weeks ago I signed onto a Harvard Business Review webinar with Dorie Clark on how to stop people from wasting your time. Dorie was one of my guests in the Hell of Networking episode of The Broad Experience and contributes regularly to HBR and Forbes. This woman knows a thing or two about being efficient. She’s on a mission to spend every hour wisely and get other people to follow suit. I wanted to share a few of my takeaways from the webinar here.

If you work for a company, this may be a daily issue you’ve been wrangling with for years. There’s good stuff in here for consultants too.

Dorie’s tips:

Handling the boss

If you’re trying to be more efficient at work but you have this boss who’s holding you back (by monopolizing meetings with personal stories, for instance), try to bring them into the endeavor – make the idea seem collaborative so the boss is part of it. So say something along the lines of, “I want to be my most effective – would you be willing to help me think that through?” The boss then recognizes the worthiness of the enterprise.

Meetings – the deadliest time suck

I haven’t spent a lot of time in meetings compared to many workers. But most of us spend hours in these things and feel our souls ebbing away with each passing minute.

Dorie says every meeting should have an agenda. And if anyone questions it, again, emphasize collaboration, i.e. “It’s in the interests of being productive.” How can anyone argue with that? “It’s the ultimate laudable goal,” says Dorie.

You should also have a timeline for the meeting. You could even try holding meetings standing up to see how much less time you fritter away when no one can lounge in a chair.

Also, ask if you really need to be at the meeting. Dorie calls it policing the guest list: should you be there? Who else should be there?

One example she gave is something that’s happened to her as a consultant who has found herself in meetings that were a complete waste of her time.

“If you’re asked to a general meeting ask what it’s about and why you should be there,” she says. She suggests saying something like, ‘It occurs to me if this is a preliminary meeting it might be more efficient for me to look over the meeting notes and then comment on those.’”

Still, we have to be careful how we couch these suggestions. Dorie says you must avoid giving the impression that this is about you or your needs – you need to couch it in terms of, “This is about using my time wisely so I can benefit the company.”

Can I pick your brain?

I’ve written about this before. Dorie is not a fan of brain-picking requests as they are generally so fuzzy and eat your time. She mentioned a woman who was flooded with such requests and finally opted to have her correspondents fill out a form: the form was designed to make them think through what they wanted to ask and invest the time to be ready for the meeting when it came. Needless to say, only the most serious people bothered to go through this process.

Can we talk?

How to deal with employees stopping by your office, asking if they can have a word? Many managers don’t want to have a closed-door policy but they find it hard to get any work done with people always dropping in. Dorie suggests having office hours on a specific day or days, and making sure the time spent together is targeted.

She has a sensible way of funneling meeting times herself – she blocks out chunks of time on Mondays and Thursdays to book calls. The rest of her week is then free for other work. 

You can read Dorie's Harvard Business Review piece on this topic here.

Ditching the rules to claim your value (part 1)

February 5, 2015

unless you're a woman in the workplaceAs you know if you listen to the show and read this blog, I'm obsessed by the topic of how women value themselves - or rather, how they don't. I have no scientific proof, but I strongly suspect women end up working for nothing a lot more than men do. Why? Because women are conditioned to be nice, helpful, and generally to please others. We find it hard to say no. So when some nonprofit or maybe just a friend or acquaintance asks us to 'help out', we say yes.

I first wrote about this here and again here. I also produced a show on the topic. In this post I want to share the story of a listener who wrote to me last week.

She has been edging into a new career as a web developer. She's been enjoying learning this trade, which she has largely taught herself. She told herself that in order to get work she'd have to go and do a formal course, then start off building a portfolio by doing free work, then charging a low fee as she was 'new'. I'll let her take it from here:

"My husband shook his head and pushed me into a paying project immediately. I learned an incredible amount on the job, but more importantly, I was paid to learn those things. Obviously the client didn’t know this, but was thrilled with the result. My husband smiled smugly when I was dumbfounded and guilty at “lying” to the client. He replied that I wasn’t lying. I was not 20 and at the beginning of my career anymore. I needed to change the way I worked and thought about working. While I may not have known the technical skill set needed, I am a fast learner, I have a core basic knowledge and my previous experience in that industry greatly shortened the learning curve so that I could deliver on time, accurately. And he was right."

Think about that for a minute. How many women would have the balls to do what came naturally to her husband - to have confidence in their abilities, to bluff a bit, and hope everything worked out?

This experience was a revelation for my listener. She felt proud that she'd gone forth and essentially said, 'This is my price because of the value I bring to this project - which comes as much from my inside knowledge of an industry as it does the immediate technical skills needed to express it.' 

"It's hard," she added, "because it does go right back to the cultural expectations of women: be a good girl, follow directions/protocol, and wait your turn."

She says she still has trouble speaking up about the value she brings, because like a lot of other women, she has always valued herself and her skills so poorly, "and thus, no surprise, so do others," she says. It's her instinct to talk her price down, not up. But she's practicing, repeating her prices to herself so she gets comfortable with them, and sticking to her guns. 

Still, her husband's methodology isn't foolproof. You can read part two of this post here.