The Power of the X Chromosome in the Workplace (Part I)

(Imagine how psyched I was when Elizabeth Albrycht, editor of my favorite new blog, Corante's Future Tense, asked me to contribute a series to the site. I thought about what's been on my mind in the work world these days, and I find that I'm living an interesting dynamic. I'm experiencing first-hand the power of women's leadership. Here, as it appears in Future Tense. See what I'm talking about.)

My phone rang early on Saturday morning. Calls like these, from people who assumed I had no personal life, used to come from my mother, but that was before I started working on the BlogHer Conference.

“You up?” it was Elisa Camahort, one of the BlogHer co-founders. She and Lisa Stone took me up on my offer to “help out where I could” back in March. Who woulda thunk we’d practically end up appendages of each other?

“Yep, I’m up,” I said, lying.

“I need you to look at something before I send it out,” she said. It was a note to a key figure we needed to engage for a session we were developing. After three months a Pavlovian response was starting to kick in. I had unlearned my usual Saturday-brush-off response, “yup, looks fine”—and sat at my computer to read the note she’d written.

Since March, we’d moved full-force into developing a conference for women bloggers. The finish line (at least for now) is July 31—the day after the event. What started as a pet project scheduled in the periphery of my time has stirred in me a renewed interest not only in blogging and the power of online communities, but in the power of feminine leadership. Why, despite my varied past working with women leaders, was this experience so transforming, and others so disappointing?

While I always advocated, even marched, for women’s rights and insisted on top positions being given to them, I wasn’t sure I wanted to work for one. For one thing, I knew how I could be when it came to work and management issues. Even as I’ve found it easier to express my opinions in a business context, I still think that at times I don’t assert myself enough; and at other times I assert myself too much. Just last week I realized I underbid on a project because I was completing it for a good friend, while I breathed fire and brimstone on another project manager who informed me that a project had temporarily derailed. I became Scarlett O’Hara—Oh so very, very tired of all the lies. (Swoon) The lies! The lies! I had become emotionally attached to the outcome despite myself.

In situations where I’ve been in charge my failure has been overthinking my hand and not playing it with confidence or a bold sense of instinct. The first few management positions I held I was overly deferential—wouldn’t want people to think I thought I was better than them because I was their BOSS, now. Unfortunately this strategy failed miserably for me when a woman I’d hired walked all over me, even admonished me in front of my peers if I asked her to do something. I ended up doing the things I asked her to do, just to avoid the confrontation. I couldn’t even fire this woman properly: I had HR do the clubbing and the dragging away—I just handed them the club.

I thought the “Friend, just with better title” model of female leadership was a vast improvement from the model that played at my previous company--a media company owned and largely run by women. Before starting the job I envisioned smart women who didn’t feel compelled to dress up in front of each other, slogging out content and working late but ordering sushi and hitting the bar for a drink after work. In many ways it was Type-A-Female heaven: tons of smoothies and yoga mats littered the place, there was always plenty of chocolate. But in my two-and-a-half-month tenure I think I had lunch with a colleague once, and she had started the same day as me. By week two we’d learned to jump out for a salad and eat in silence next to the other zombies. Occasionally an emotionally heated exchange would pierce the industrious quiet, and a woman’s tear-soaked face would emerge from over the top of the cube partition for a brief moment before she ducked into the rest room.

I soon learned that working at this company was not about employee experience—the women owned-and-operated moniker was just to convince customers that we knew of what we wrote. But, in fact, it was a men’s club in drag. Those with some sense of self survived by keeping their noses clean and ignoring those like me, who asked too many questions. One man, interestingly a male, said to me when he found a typo in my copy, “I’ll point this out to you this once, but ONLY this once.” This, from a man who strapped his newborn to himself while editing copy; he understood that the workplace was changing to accommodate women, but not embracing our collaborative, supportive nature. He became like the rest of the Stepford Wives there; career-driven women who’d willingly given up their remotes.

I saw X-Men on cable recently. What fascinates me about this film are the mutants—these uniquely gifted individuals who can’t make heads or tails of their special powers. They accidentally maim or burn their loved one to embers until they are taken in by a genius who understands them and helps them to vector their powers for good. I’ve met a few female Wolverines in my time—their highly manicured fingernails equally capable of slicing and dicing, and toxic if their emotions get the better of them. But I could never call them incapable, or untalented. Their gifts make them forces to be reckoned with, but their neuroses wreak havoc. I’ve also seen women groomed to a fault and dulled to a point of complacency. In both instances we’re deprived of the full effect of our power to get things done. 

I’ve come out of these varied experiences a skeptic, though I suppose my real issue with women’s leadership is that I’ve encountered—and personified—the less-evolved versions of it.

Unflinching women’s advocate Tom Peters says, “Tomorrow belongs to women.” In his book Re-Imagine, he lists the reasons why a women’s model of leadership will prevail if business is to prevail. My first instinct upon reading this chapter was, “What’s in this for him?” In the past efforts to hire women into leadership positions have been more about quota-filling than deep appreciation of what we inherently bring to the table. This list wasn’t surprising, but it was a good reminder: I’d almost forgotten these qualities, tossed them aside in favor of others that I thought would better serve my resume. According to Peters:

• Women practice improvisation better than men
• Women are more self-determined and more trust sensitive than men
• Women appreciate and depend upon their intuition more than men do
• Women focus naturally on empowerment, rather than on hierarchical “power”
• Women understand and develop relationships with greater facility than men 

Through the course of the next few installments I’ll explore how these qualities do reflect themselves as better business practices, and I’ll chat with some ladies who knew this stuff all along.

Comments

[regina]

Jory - Trackbacks on WordPress are a problem...Here is what I said on my other blog:

Pause and the Power of X
By rmiller on Leadership Brand

Jory des Jardins has a wonderful blog called Pause that I just love! She is chronicling her story of being a "soloist." I think it is a superb articulation of what she calls "life without a net" - the joys and perils of working for oneself. (There are so many things that she writes about that I can totally relate to given that I am in the midst of transitioning to the life of a "soloist.")

She is also a guest author this month at Corante’s FutureTense and is posting a series called The Power of the X Chromosome in the Workplace. Definitely worth checking out her funny yet sobering take and experience as a woman in leadership roles. Check it out and join the conversation!

[single women]

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