Are you double-voiced?

February 6, 2014

"You're adjusting what you have to say in light of what you think they want you to say." - Judith Baxter

We spend a lot of time speaking, but most of us don’t focus on the way we use language. Yet language is one of those often imperceptible, everyday things that subtly affects the way women come across at work. And, according to my next guest, using it well is part of being a good leader.

In the next episode of The Broad Experience we'll talk about the use of language at the office. My guest is linguist Judith Baxter, a professor at Aston University in the UK and author of The Language of Female Leadership. In the podcast we discuss how senior men and women use humor in the workplace, specifically in meetings, and how that affects the way they come across (hint: if you’re a woman, it does not generally go down well - tune in to find out why). But our interview covered other aspects of language use, something I’m particularly interested in because sociolinguistics formed part of my degree. It was my favorite bit, so it’s great to be able to dabble in it once more.

As she's studied men, women, and language use in corporations, Judith has witnessed a lot of what she calls ‘double-voice discourse’. She describes it like this: “It’s the awareness that when you’re talking you’re always considering the agenda of person you are talking to.” Which sounds quite positive, and, dare I say, very female: All that taking into account of other people’s feelings as we interact with them, all that careful treading and subtle flattery. But then she adds this: “You’re aware of what they’re thinking and adjusting what you have to say in light of what you think they want you to say.” Which sounds less positive and more needy.

For example, you’re in a conversation with a colleague or manager and you suspect they may not rate you much. You pre-empt them with something like, “It may not be the best idea, but…” or, “I realize I’m no expert like the rest of you, but…”

Judith gathered over half a million words of data from men and women and found that, statistically, women were four times as likely as men to use this type of hedging language.

“I worked out double voicing is a means of guarding a person from criticism,” she told me. “For example, ‘That person thinks I’m stupid, that person doesn’t take me seriously, doesn’t think I’m an expert,’" so by adjusting your language, you’re deftly adding some criticism before it can emerge from the other person’s mouth. Rather like making a joke about yourself before the other person can. 

I've used language this way over the years, and although I try to keep an eye on in now, it probably still happens. The issue for women in the workplace is that this kind of language can make us look hesitant and wishy-washy. When I look back on the number of times I’ve started a sentence with an apology or a ‘I could be wrong, but…’, I’m horrified. Why would anyone else trust me if that was the way I was presenting myself? If you sound unsure of your convictions, others are unlikely to have faith in you.

Still, Judith says double-voice discourse isn’t all bad. She’s seen women use it to their advantage. “They can be very responsive to events and prevent trouble that way. If they see something brewing, they’re onto it right away." So the 'female' tendency to be alive to others' wants and needs can work to our linguistic advantage when a situation is getting heated.

Tune in here to find out what Judith's research says about why women aren't funny. (Just kidding. We are. Details to be revealed in the podcast.) 

Cultivating your inner badass

January 30, 2014

Sophie Tucker, definitely a badass

When a listener described me as ‘badass’ last year I got an odd thrill. It didn’t sound like me at all: the self-doubting, not-sure-I-can-do-it person born and brought up in the self-deprecating UK.

So how can a person like me – or the old me, anyway, because I have been improving – become more ‘badass’? That was the question posed in a webinar I was on yesterday, courtesy of 85 Broads. Barbara Roche was the speaker. She’s a leadership communication coach who also teaches at the Wharton School of Business. She works with a lot of professional women who are highly accomplished. Yet many of them still have crises of confidence.

A lot of women pretty much live in that state. Lack of confidence has haunted me all my life. If women had the same sense of self-belief many men do, we’d be making far more of a mark on the world. But we're hampered by an inner voice that is always chattering, telling us we’re not quite up to par.

Cultivating confidence: 

• Before I outline some of Barbara Roche's points, I'm putting a stake in the ground. Confidence comes from doing things that make you uncomfortable. At the start of each new job or project I've been a mass of nerves, questioning my abilities and worrying I'll flop. Looking back, I can see how much my confidence has grown over the years. This wouldn't have happened if I hadn't taken on new challenges and done things that terrified me (like live radio). So at least some confidence comes from new experiences. That said, the evil inner voice still has a lot to answer for.

• Barbara Roche started the session by defining ‘badass’. Turns out it has two definitions. She immediately rejected the first, ‘tough or aggressive’, and embraced the second: ‘formidable, excellent.’ I’ll take that one too. She said the point was to talk to us about “how to bring out the most formidable parts of yourself so you can seize the moment and advance in your career – or your family dynamics.”
   
• Women "caveat all our sentences about what we're good at." Sound familiar? I've done this countless times. You start saying something positive about yourself and then insert a 'but'. One of the things Barbara forces clients to do is speak an entire sentence about themselves that does not include a caveat. And do it again - and again.
  
  
• She cited the work of Carol Dweck of Stanford University, who has done a lot of work on mindsets.

 First, the fixed mindset:

Must be perfect

Fear of failure

Qualities set in stone

Then, the malleable mindset:

Continuously learning

Willing to try

Qualities are malleable

• It probably won’t surprise you to learn most women Barbara sees have a fixed mindset. The majority of men have a malleable one. I’d say I am now much closer to having a malleable mindset, but for most of my life it was fixed, and I still struggle with some of those qualities.

• One of Barbara's male clients told her he thought of himself as Arnold Schwarzennegar – yes, that’s how he began his days (as a badass, essentially). Whereas “most women look in the mirror and see flaws, things that are going wrong." You have to set an intention to start each day with a "growth mindset” in order to cultivate badassdom. 

• Shed the people who are bringing you down: the colleague who wastes hours of your week moaning about their life, or the friend who is mired in negativity. They're sucking your energy and your ability to get anything done and feel good about yourself. It sounds a bit woo-woo, but bad energy saps you.

What I took away from this webinar was that a lot of what keeps women under-confident is in our heads. Yes, I knew that. But sometimes being reminded that this self-sabotaging mindset is just a mindset is helpful. I can attest that it takes practice to start silencing 'the voice' and getting it to talk to you in different and positive ways. It's difficult to break the habit of a lifetime. But it can be done - in stages. One suggestion? Start looking at the men around you and observing their behavior. I did this and marveled at their chutzpah (especially when they were years younger than me). Then I tried to copy it - within my own comfort zone, yes, but still, I took a leaf out of their collective book. 

One woman who truly fits the 'badass' moniker is Erika Napoletano. She's written a book called The Power of Unpopular. If you need a little female badass in your life, head to her site and check out some of her blog posts. And be prepared for some forthright opinions. 

The meaning of success

January 25, 2014

“A magnificent career comes from being a magnificent woman first. It’s a flipped-up, upside down paradigm of success.” – Emily Bennington

Living in New York City, it’s tough not to fall for the traditional US version of success: a good job, lots of money, the right title, address, and so on. Time and again in recent years, as I’ve diverged from a traditional career path, I’ve berated myself for not being successful enough. Some friends my age have titles with ‘VP’ or ‘partner’ in them. They seem to have all sorts of secret knowledge about the business world. They earn very well and have plenty of nice clothes. Yet I don’t want those jobs myself, so why am I beating myself up? I genuinely love what I do, even if I find myself wondering if it’s as ‘grown-up’ as what some of my friends do. We all compare ourselves to others – it’s a common career/life curse – but also, the society I live in tells me those outward trappings constitute success.

So it was refreshing to talk to Emily Bennington recently. She’ll be appearing in the next episode of The Broad Experience, along with Kathy Caprino. The topic is success – the traditional definition of it, why some people seem to think it’s achievable overnight, and re-framing the whole idea of success.

Emily teaches mindful or ‘conscious’ leadership to women. You’ll hear more in the show about how she came to that. She was such a mass of anxiety and ambition (or fear, as she later described it) during her early career that she finally burned out. This is a woman whose boss told her during her first ever performance review that he couldn’t promote her “because no one on this team respects you.” More on that during the episode.

She contends – and I, ever the cynic, listen hopefully – that you can achieve a leadership role at work by pursuing your career in a mindful way – taking others along with you rather than stepping on them to get where you want to go.

One of the interesting things Emily told me that I couldn’t fit into the finished show was that when she was researching her latest book, Who Says It’s a Man’s World, she found that most of the women she was surveying wanted very different things from their work life than she had when she was in the corporate world.

“Just coming from my own career, I was thinking everyone wanted to climb to the top of the ladder and have that corner office…and it was super interesting to find what they wanted was to be happier in their own lives.”

It wasn’t that they weren’t ambitious, she says, but to them, success wasn’t ‘getting to the top’, it was being more content in their current situations. I think a lot of people feel the exact same way. We don’t all have the drive and energy to get to the top, but we do want to have more influence and to make our current work lives more meaningful than they are.

Tune in next week to find out about Emily’s prescription for a happier work life, which includes re-defining 'success'. For a more traditional view of what it is to be successful, and on why some groups in America do better than others, here's a piece from Sunday's New York Times by the controversial 'tiger mother' Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rosenfeld.

Are you really a good communicator?

January 17, 2014

“Women tended to come into the conversation being very hesitant about what was possible...I watched them ask for less than they could have and walk away from certain opportunities because they felt they shouldn’t speak up for themselves.” – Wokie Nwabueze

Many women consider themselves good communicators. It’s certainly one of the boxes I’ve always felt safest about ticking when I scan a job description. Women are, we’re often told, wonderful at this stuff. But what does that actually mean? If it just means that we’re more verbal than men, well, perhaps some of us are (although it’s untrue that women speak many more words per minute than men). Many of us like communicating, we are often (but not always) good at expressing ourselves, at forming relationships with other people, at catering to different people’s needs. But a recent 85 Broads ‘jam session’ I attended got me thinking about what being a good communicator really means, and whether those of us who think we’re doing it right actually are.

The speaker was Wokie Nwabueze of Women Prepared To Lead. She’s been a lawyer, a mediator, and a professional communicator for more than 20 years.

She started by acknowledging that many women see themselves as excellent communicators. But later, she made this point:

“Being a great communicator is being able to find the words to articulate and support your goal in speaking – words that will land as they should with the listener.”

So being a good communicator is about getting what you want. How many of us can say we always, or even usually, get what we want when we speak?

Her talk covered some of the topics we’ve spoken about on the show or on this blog before: how to negotiate effectively, how to ask for something you want at work (including a promotion or more responsibility), how to network, how to articulate what it is you do best and why someone should pay for that – all with an emphasis on the type of communication required to get those things.

Tips:

• When you ask for a raise at work you can’t couch it in terms of what you want or need. It’s surprising how often I hear about situations where the person went in and said, ‘I need X more money because I’m having a baby’, or ‘I need Y amount of money because so-and-so is getting it’. Wokie pointed out that you must think about what your boss is looking for, not what you are, and dress your request in those terms.

“You need to influence your manager. You must be driven by what motivates them – so only after that, choose your words.”

Being a truly good communicator is about empathy and listening to the other person.

• Part of getting what you want – a lot of it, I’d say – involves self-promotion, something plenty of women hate. But, says Wokie,“People getting raises and sexy projects are asking for them…it takes a certain level of confidence and a sense of deserving for one to do this. But without promoting yourself you’ll let opportunities pass that don’t necessarily need to.”

• Many of us, especially early in our careers, think all we need to do is work hard and we’ll be recognized. Most of that time that is simply not true. You have to communicate to your managers what you want from your career, and how you can serve the company's needs, otherwise don’t be surprised if they pass you over for that other person who has been working it behind the scenes for months.

So what holds so many of us back from acting on this?

Fear, of course.

Wokie elaborated: “Fear of rocking boat, fear of offending others, of appearing too bossy, needy, desperate, too masculine, fear of not being liked, fear or losing what you have because it’s good enough right now. Fear of being out of your league and out of your game. And of not knowing what to say in those situations [when you want something].”

I can identify with most of those flavors of fear and suspect a lot of others can too. The fact is, women still tread a fine line between societal/cultural expectations for our behavior and what we actually want to be able to do in life. Sometimes it just seems easier not to wade into what appear to be the treacherous waters of advocating for ourselves or putting ourselves 'out there'. But life can be so much more fulfilling when we learn how.