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.

Ditching the rules to claim your value (part 2)

February 5, 2015

"Women need to learn not just to risk, but to risk reputation, to barrel through - as most are petrified to do." - Broad Experience listener

In part one of this post I told you about a listener of mine and how she'd found out to her delight that she could pull off a well paying project for a client - a client who didn't know she was relatively inexperienced.

There's a twist. You know her husband, the man who urged her on? My friend was undoubtedly under-confident. But here's a story about her spouse's over-confidence and the aftermath.

My listener says her husband, "like many men, is willing to risk big for the possibility of winning big." He took on a huge project last year, one he knew was outside his scope. "He thought he could pull it off by hiring a small team and charging the client a very large sum," she says. But it turns out he couldn't. He wasn't competent enough to do the job, even with the team, and the project "unraveled...totally exposing his lack of knowledge in the area."

Just reading that part of her email made me squirm. This is my worst nightmare: taking on something I'm not good enough to do and having it all end in guilt and recriminations. This is why so many women say no to projects they consider too risky and why we end up working for free to 'prove ourselves' - we're afraid to price ourselves too high in case we screw up. But although this sounded like a hideous situation - a duped, angry client, a stressed project lead having to spend a few thousand dollars of his own money to try to clean things up - things did not end in tears. 

The client didn't pull the project, perhaps because doing so at that late stage wouldn't have made sense. But meanwhile my listener's husband came clean, admitting he'd bitten off more than he could chew. He hired, at his own expense, outside experts who could take care of all the stuff his team couldn't, and the project will soon be finished. 

"The end result is that my husband quadrupled his skills overnight and actually could complete this project perfectly next time around for the same very high sum, precisely because of all the potholes he went through on this project. The risk in the end, even after falling on his face, is totally worth it. His reputation takes a small hit, but he keeps on moving and most future clients aren't fazed by this snafu." 

She adds that she believes these are traits women need to learn. "Not just to risk, but to risk reputation, to barrel through, as most are petrified to do. I suspect that successful female CEOs have done exactly this on their way up. Battled through gritty moments, pushed through and developed that incredible confidence in capabilities and accurate judgement of scenarios that most men are capable of, seemingly almost naturally."

To me, what her husband did was a huge risk that I'd never have taken, and the aftermath would have been excruciating for me. Yet he seems to have come out on the other side OK, as far as we know (the project after all is not quite finished).

What do you think? Should more women force themselves to take more risks for the chance of increasing their skills and reaping a great reward?  

Communication problems in your twenties

January 23, 2015

"Men get feedback more easily than women. Everyone's afraid of hurting women's feelings." - Joanna Barsh

I'm about to release a new show focusing on the careers of women in their twenties. I did it because a listener asked. But at the time I admit I wasnt that interested in the topic. How different could navigating the work world be from when I was that age?

A lot, as it happens. Much of the stuff that comes up in the show, which will be out next week, is about communication. I've learned it can be incredibly exasperating for millennials of either sex when they try to communicate with older colleagues (insert your own joke here about how Gen Xers and others cope with being on the end of those attempts). They have their own shortand for connecting with eachother, but two of my guests talked about how tough it is to translate that to the office, with its weird rules and roundabout ways of getting things done. 

But there's a gender thing I want to write about. The person I interviewed gets to be anonymous because, well, she likes her job and doesn't want to stir up any trouble. She's new to the workplace. She and her boyfriend work at the same place, on the same team. Recently there was a big decision the team was asked to contribute to - it had to send an idea to the two top brass, via a direct manager, a young man.

The team's idea was ultimately rejected. My interviewee wanted to clarify why, so first she wrote to the higher-ups and asked if they could meet to discuss it. She heard back that she had to go through the interim manager first. So that was her first frustration, that she couldn't speak directly with the ultimate decision-makers, she had to go through their deputy (to her, an absurdly indirect way of doing things, and inefficient). But then came the reaction of the deputy manager to her emailed request. She wrote to him saying she thought there had been some communication problems in getting across the team's idea, and could they meet to talk about it?

His reply came: "It’s OK, we can figure out something to do with this later, I don’t want anyone to be upset."

Her boyfriend wrote an almost identical email, but the reply he got from the guy was quite different.

"I completely agree with you, I take responsibility for the communication problems. Let's figure out a time to talk."

This surprised her.

"His response to me was more placating than anything else," she says. "'It’s OK, everything’s fine, don’t be sad. Don’t be upset. Don’t cry.' And I feel like the tone of our emails [hers and her boyfriend's] was very similar. It was, 'I have some concerns, can you talk about these concerns?'" 

This incident tallies with research that shows men are uncomfortable giving women feedback. When I spoke to former McKinsey partner Joanna Barsh in 2012, this was one of the things she talked about: that men will often assume that a woman will crumble on hearing something difficult. So they end up soft-peddling whatever it is they want to say. As a result, the woman often doesn't get the honest feedback she needs to progress at work. 

But in this case, the young male manager was getting ahead of himself. He already seemed to assume a request to 'talk' from a female co-worker meant she was upset about something. When a man wrote to him about the same thing, he met the request with equanimity. It's just another example of how a small act of communication is often deceptively tricky, especially when you throw gender into the mix. 

Smiles and power

December 19, 2014

"Higher power people smile when they're relaxed or happy but low power people...smile because they have to." - Marianne LaFrance

The latest show is all about power and body language at work. Something I couldn’t fit in was the subject of smiling. Most of us don’t think about this, except perhaps to notice when someone seems unusually grumpy. But smiling is social glue. It’s also linked to power.

Yale professor Marianne LaFrance, one of my guests on the podcast (left, smiling), told me that during her years of studying smiles she’s found a very quick smile from someone else has an immediate effect on the person who sees it.

“It’s a mini emotional high, an up in the day, although the person may not know where it came from,” she says.

If you’re female, chances are you smile a lot more than the men who surround you. Marianne says women not only smile more but “more intensely than do men”.

Women are expected to be pleasant and accommodating, and to make those around them feel comfortable. Smiling is a short cut to achieving this.

At work, it turns out those in lower-power roles smile more than people high up the food chain. Marianne says the smiliest employees are people – usually women – in roles that are all about making other people happy, such as executive assistant or paralegal. Smiling is their way of creating a harmonious environment. But they’re not necessarily content when they crack those smiles.

“The thing we’ve found in our studies is higher power people smile when they feel relaxed and happy….but they won’t smile because they have to, whereas low power people will report they will smile because they have to.” In short because it’s their job to please.

Broaden that and you’ve got women as a group. Our unofficial mandate is to please others. That’s why people of both sexes seem affronted when we don’t meet grinning expectations.

I was a reflective teenager, and on my way to school in London every day I’d be lost in my own thoughts (which, being a teenager, weren’t always particularly cheery). A loud voice in a Cockney accent would often erupt from a nearby building site with “Cheer up love – might never ‘appen!” or “Come on, smile!” accompanied by male laughter.

At the time I didn’t consider that complete strangers never seemed to do this to schoolboys, only schoolgirls. When I told Marianne LaFrance this story she reminded me that these days this kind of thing is considered street harassment.

“It’s not injurious but it is another way women are reminded they have to put out, and one of the ways they do that is by smiling and always appearing pleasant and agreeable.”

I don’t know that anyone’s ever done a study of the smiling patterns of male and female CEOs.  As is so often the case women tread a fine line between being viewed as cold and unfriendly and smiling too much, which can hurt their gravitas.

In an email, I asked Marianne LaFrance about female leaders’ body language, citing IBM CEO Ginny Rometty as an example. Marianne replied she didn’t know any details on Rometty’s body language as such, but “she is often photographed with a big smile.” 

Marianne is the author of Why Smile - The Science Behind Facial Expressions.