Play Like A Man, Win Like A Woman Part 1

PLAY LIKE A MAN, WIN LIKE A WOMAN.

by Gail Evans.

For Julianna, Jason, and Jeffrey.

PREFACE.

WHEN IT COMES TO ROLE MODELS, I WAS LUCKY. I grew up believing a woman could do anything-a conviction inherited from my mother. On the surface, my mother seemed like a conventional woman, a suburban housewife who tended to her home and husband's career. But all the while she was sending me the message that a woman is responsible for her own life, and that she should live it to the fullest.

My mother certainly did. Even while taking excellent care of her own family, she helped care for an "adopted" younger brother and sister from a local inst.i.tution for juvenile delinquents, she taught at the Jewish Guild for the Blind, and as a volunteer Red Cross ambulance driver, she drove physically and mentally disabled veterans to picnics and ball games.

The manager of a chain of millinery stores in the 1920s, my mother gave up her career for marriage. But she never surrendered her drive or her belief in herself. Throughout my life, she gave me two sets of instructions: I must be a good and proper woman and I could be anyone I wished.

I took that advice to heart. After leaving college in 1963, I began a successful career in politics, working on Capitol Hill and at the White House. But when I married, like my mother and most women of the time, I abandoned my career for my husband's. We moved to Atlanta and then to the Soviet Union. After returning to Georgia, where I raised my three children, I began doing freelance research and public relations for international corporations. In 1980, I joined CNN, which was beginning operations.

Eventually I got the opportunity to create the first central booking department for a network (booking means finding the experts who appear on television). When CNN International was created, my responsibilities were extended to that network as well. In 1987, I was made a vice president; two years later I created CNN&Co, the first television talk show to feature women discussing the major issues of the day rather than simply "women's issues." After a promotion to senior vice president, I co-developed TalkBackLive, the first interactive television news program, and in 1996 I was instrumental in creating Burden of Proof, the first daily legal talk show on network television.

Along the way, like my mother, I have tried to give my time to others. In 1997, the same year I was made executive vice president of CNN, President Clinton appointed me to the Commission on White House Fellows. I'm a member of the Committee of 200, the International Women's Forum, the Citizens Review Panel of the Juvenile Court of Atlanta, and have taught a seminar on gender issues in business at Atlanta's Emory University Business School. And I serve on the board of several universities and not-for-profit organizations.

I also have a daughter and two daughters-in-law, as well as a granddaughter, all of whom I hope will feel as optimistic about being a woman as my mother and I have felt.

If they do, they are lucky. Over the last two decades I have met thousands of women who have told me they feel lost in a workplace where the men generally rule and the women generally follow. I have always tried to give these women my best advice, and I've always hoped that somewhere I would encounter a group that didn't need what I had to say.

Then I was invited to address the female students and alumnae at Harvard Business School. I thought here, if anywhere, is the place where women have conquered the workplace.

I was wrong. The Harvard women had learned their academic lessons well and risen to high positions, but they felt isolated. They still complained that they often felt lost in the male-oriented workplace, and weren't sure how to cope.

So I decided to write down the gist of all the talks my mother had given me, and all I have pa.s.sed along to my own daughter and daughters-in-law, as well as all the hundreds of speeches I have made to groups of women around the country. Although television is the great medium of the day, I feel the best way to pa.s.s along history is through the printed word. Personally, I believe that I'm only as good as what I have taken away from the last book I've read.

What I want you to take away from this book is the ability to work in an office atmosphere where you don't say, "I didn't get what I deserved today because, as a woman, I didn't know how to play the game."

My greatest desire is that someday we will eliminate the conversation about inequality between women and men at work, so that when we come to the workplace as peers, how we do our jobs will be all that matters.

INTRODUCTION.

NOT LONG AGO, I SPOKE AT A SMALL CONFERENCE of successful businesswomen. Afterwards came the deluge, as one woman after another came up to me and asked for advice.

It always happens at these events. I speak, I listen, I hear the same words over and over-"baffled," "angry," "lost," "trapped," "stuck," "overwhelmed" - as each woman tells me she feels that she's gotten only so far in business and can't get any further.

One of the women at the conference told me she's a vice president at the Fortune 500 company where she's been working for two decades. In the last four years she has been given two new lofty-sounding t.i.tles, but no more power. She thinks she has. .h.i.t a wall.

"Have you made it clear what you want?" I asked. "Have you taken any action?"

"No," she said.

Like so many women, she doesn't understand that when you have an ongoing serious complaint, you don't simply, meekly, live with it. You try to change it.

I told her that she needed to take action.

"What kind of action?" she asked.

"Anything," I said. "One action will lead to another. Talk to the CEO. Job hunt. Anything. Just do something!"

She sighed. "I don't understand. They know what a good job I am doing. Why don't they just reward me for it?"

With that att.i.tude, she is losing the game.

If you don't read the directions manual when you start a game, you won't know how to proceed. You open the box, and in front of you are the board, markers, and dice, but you don't have a clue. If you're playing by yourself, you can improvise, but you may get it wrong. If you're playing with others, you can always follow their lead. But while they're focused on winning, you have to keep asking yourself if you're getting it right.

Whether that game is croquet, Monopoly, field hockey, or football, you have to understand the directions first. So why play the game of business any differently? Business is as much a game as any other board, individual, or team sports game. Consider all the metaphors like teamwork, making the right moves, playing your cards close to your chest, picking the best players for your team, rolling the dice, making a preemptive bid, raising the ante, finding the right captain, getting the team into position, hitting a home run.

The bottom line: When it comes to business, most women are at a disadvantage. We're forced to guess, to improvise, to bluff (which is not something we're always good at-see Chapter 5: Toot Your Own Horn). This is why so few of us play the game well, and even fewer find it fulfilling.

And what about men? They don't read directions manuals, you say. True. They don't need to. The male mind invented the concept of directions. It wasn't that they deliberately ignored women, or disliked what women had to say. Rather, as business culture developed, few women were around to help. Men wrote all the rules because they wrote alone.

Women have made great strides in the last century. But that progress hasn't always been smooth, nor has it been straight ahead. Sometimes it's even retrogressed. During the labor shortage in World War II, for example, women were called in to perform men's jobs, and they did well. But when the war was over, Rosie the Riveter was sent home, and women had to wait decades for another chance.

The best you can say is that we've seen a kind of creeping incrementalism. Large numbers of women dot the current workplace, but like trees on a mountain, you'll see fewer and fewer of them as you climb higher in the executive landscape, until you reach a kind of timber line where you'll find about as many women as you'll find magnolias.

Fortune magazine recently ran a cover story on the 50 most powerful women in America. Nothing wrong with that. What I found worrisome was that the positions these women occupied-group presidents, vice presidents, founders of their own businesses-were not comparable to what a similar group of men would have held. All the men would have been CEO of large companies.

Women now account for over 46 percent of the total U.S. labor force, up from 29.6 percent in 1950. But as of 1999, only 11.9 of the 11,681 corporate officers in America's top 500 companies were women. In 1998 it was 11.2. If this pace continues, the number of women on top corporate boards won't equal the number of men until the year 2064.

Last year only 3.3 percent of these companies' top earners were women, with 98 women holding positions of the highest rank in corporate America, versus 1,202 men. And 496 out of 500 Fortune companies had male CEOs. Many of America's favorite companies-General Electric, Exxon, Compaq-have no women officers at all.

And even when women do make it to the top, we don't make as much money: Compensation for the top-paid female officers ranges from $210,001 to $4.96 million, whereas men earn from $220,660 to $31.29 million. All in all, top female executives earn on average 68 cents for every dollar a male executive earns.

The reality in today's business landscape: A woman is most likely to occupy a position of power when she started, or inherited, her own business. We're not going through the ranks and making it to the boss's office, and that's where the power lies in corporate America.

What can-and should-a woman do? The answer would be easy if men and women were born with similar instincts and were similarly socialized. But that isn't the case. In fact, the general thinking among biogeneticists is that the social skills of males and females are inherently different. After that, according to the sociologists, they're raised in ways that accentuate that difference.

Let me tell you about my three children, two boys and a girl, whom I was committed to raising in a thoroughly nons.e.xist environment. Starting from day one, I could spot gender-based disparities among them. For instance, the way in which my sons and daughters nursed: My two boys behaved alike. They sucked until their stomachs were full, they burped, filled their diapers, and promptly went to sleep. It was a quick, effortless transaction. End of story.

My daughter gave a different performance. She sucked a little, she closed her eyes, then she'd touch, reach out, feel, suck, rest, try to open her eyes, burble, suck, touch, and so on. It was clear from the earliest moment that she was interested in some kind of social relationship with me. She wanted to know who I was and where she was. The boys just wanted to get their fill.

Nurture also has a say in gender distinctions. While teaching a course on gender issues in business at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, I asked my students about the games they played as children. What was the object of the game, how many other children partic.i.p.ated, what lessons did they take away from them, and so on?

As usual, the sharpest young man was the first to raise his hand. "I always hung around with at least a half dozen other boys," he said. "We played games like pickup baseball, soccer, street hockey." He added, "The silliest question you asked was about the object of the game. We played to win. What else is there?"

"Oh, my G.o.d," interrupted a young woman. She explained how she usually played with one, or maybe two, other girls at a time, rather than a large group, and that they were always more concerned with building a friendship than with winning. Then she told us a story about playing a game of jacks with two friends at camp. When one of the girls was about to win, they all made up new rules so they wouldn't have to stop. "The object was to keep the game going as long as possible," she said. "And we wanted everyone to win."

The point is not that one of these perspectives is better than the other but that, from early childhood on, boys and girls play with different sets of rules. And because men created the rules in the game of business, and because women are only now trying to be effective compet.i.tors, we will prosper only when we are familiar with those rules.

None of this is to say that men are doing a bad, or a good, job. The business world is male-dominated. That is not a criticism nor a condemnation-it's a reality. Most of the time the male advantage isn't due to conscious discrimination against women. Like most people, men prefer to surround themselves with others who make them feel at ease. The relationship between men and women in business is not so different from that between a Caucasian Christian and an Indian Sikh, or an army general and a pacifist. Like attracts like. Differences create discomfort.

There is no denying that our society has created a division of labor between men and women, and historically one s.e.x has tended to supervise certain tasks, and therefore write the rules. Recently, however, that division is becoming muddied, as both s.e.xes are thinking about expanding the traditional boundaries, whether at work or at home.

For instance, some men are now staying home to raise children. The way we nurture our children in our culture is a female-determined system-these directions were written by women. It might turn out to be excellent for our children, however, if men have more of an impact on how kids are raised. We might have healthier children-just as we may have healthier corporations if women were to play a bigger role in them. The more heterogeneity there is at the table, the more likely we are to discover better solutions for everyone.

In the pages that follow you will find pointers to help you create your own personal directions manual for success. To become a player in the world of business, you have to know the prevailing rules that men play by-not because you must follow them word for word, but because you need to understand the playing field even if you eventually choose to make up your own game. It is not a level playing field if you don't know what to do on it.

THE OBJECT OF THE GAME.

Action is the antidote to despair.

JOAN BAEZ, FOLK SINGER AND ACTIVIST.

AS THE YOUNG MAN IN MY BUSINESS CLa.s.s ASKED, isn't the object of the game to win?

But what is winning? Does it mean being the most powerful CEO? Does it mean being the one with the biggest bank account? Or is it the person who's the most feared?

For me, the object of the game is simply to feel great about what you do. That's the most important directive of all-because that's how you end up feeling fulfilled, and that's how you win.

I know for a fact that I have been successful because I've always loved my jobs. And believe me, these haven't all been well-paid positions in glamour industries-I've done everything from run the addressograph machine to fetch the coffee. But no matter what I've done, I've always been able to enjoy myself doing it.

For instance, when my kids were little, I took several years off to take care of them. To earn a little income along the way, I found a part-time job as a sales representative for a clothing company at Atlanta's semiannual merchandise mart. I then created a game out of it, seeing how much I could sell to stores even if they didn't need the line. I couldn't have done this forever, but while it lasted, it was fun. And I bought all my children's clothes (as well as mine) wholesale.

Similarly, not everything I've done on Capitol Hill or at CNN sounded exciting when it was originally proposed. But I've usually managed to make it so. For example, at one point my boss announced that I was going to revamp CNN's intern program. This came at a time when two of my children were already in college, and the last thing I wanted was to worry about other college-age kids. But I made the job challenging by taking on more responsibility than I had been offered, which turned out to involve recruitment and talent development. I gave my job so much visibility that when the new vice president of that area was announced, she was told to report to me.

So the ultimate winner in the game of business is not necessarily the person with the most power or the most money or the most fame. Rather, it's the person who loves his or her work. I know many miserable people with important t.i.tles. But I don't know anyone who loves her job who's miserable. It's that simple.

There's more: If you can love your business life, you'll be playing the game the way the guys do. They don't run out on the football field or stride into an important meeting wishing they were elsewhere. They are enthusiastic, eager to have an opportunity to satisfy their compet.i.tive urges.

Loving what you do is self-empowering. It makes you more brilliant, it gives you the ability to become a visionary, it helps you become the best businesswoman you can be. You improve your chances of rising to the top.

For some men, of course, loving the game is synonymous with material success. It's a basic cause-and-effect paradigm: If they get to the top and they get rich, they love it.

Women aren't as likely to love success as an isolated ent.i.ty. We want to love our entire life. And that's fine. Unlike men, we don't tend to compartmentalize the various aspects of daily existence (see Chapter 5: Think Small). So it's hard to feel upbeat when we take a job that isn't intrinsically interesting-even if we see the possibility of success somewhere down the road.

Why do women have such a hard time understanding the importance of loving our work? My sense is that in our society, women are raised to feel comfortable in the role of nurturer, the ones who make things better for everyone else. We don't get permission along the way to love ourselves, or to love what we do, outside of our caretaker's role. Only in the last few decades have we learned that we can be the center of our own lives. And that means we, too, can start loving our jobs with the same enthusiasm as those guys who rush out onto the sports field and into the boardroom.

When you have a new baby, changing her diapers isn't drudgery, because it's not the diaper you're changing, it's the baby. You want to do everything you can for her. But when she's three years old, the focus shifts to the diaper, not the baby; so you toilet train her.

Likewise, in an office, you can teach yourself to do any job you're given and be okay with it. But ultimately, if you don't feel good about your job, you'll just be going through the motions, which means that you're turning off that b.u.t.ton that I call possibility.

You can't play any game well if you don't enjoy playing it.

FOUR GROUND RULES.

I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE, ARTIST.

A FEW YEARS AGO I ASKED THE STUDENTS IN MY business course at Emory to interview successful executives, both men and women. Their a.s.signment was to uncover the qualities of good leaders and write up a report.

The a.s.signment wasn't intended to be a gender discussion by any means, but it was hard not to notice that the words both the students and the executives used to describe men differed from the words they applied to the women.

Some of the most common terms describing male executives were: "quarterback," "absolute winner," "aggression," "boastfulness," "the desire to win," "holding power," "tough-skinned," "having fun," "part of a dog-eat-dog world."

These were the words and phrases used about women: "cooperation," "social involvement," "teamwork," "respect for others," "uncompet.i.tive," "willing to share power," "concern for the harmony of the group," "feeling that everyone can be a winner," "wanting to be liked by all," "caretaker."

In the course of every discussion I've ever had about men and women, certain themes seem to appear; fair or unfair, professors, students, businessmen, and businesswomen all share the same vocabulary.

The same broad categories of women as "social" and "cooperative," men as "aggressive" and "tough" hold true in this book. Whereas not all men learned to play football or chess or poker, and not all women played with dolls or ignored compet.i.tive games, the majority of men and women were socially acculturated according to their s.e.x.

Now, I know many men never played compet.i.tive sports or games while they were young. Certainly some women are stronger and more compet.i.tive than any number of men. And I'm not suggesting you should dismiss this book if you're a woman who is more comfortable with rugby than with dolls. I was a high school athlete, making all-Westchester County (New York) hockey goalie.

For the most part, however, the women's game was and is different from the men's. This is because men and women are wired differently, and we are brought up differently.

And when we are adults, we work differently. It is important for women to understand these differences, because the more aware we are of them, the more possible it is to gain access to power. Ignorance is never bliss. You cannot know too much.

Following are four fundamental ground rules underlying the strategies you need to understand if you are going to play.

1 You Are Who You Say You Are.

Playing any game means being faced with a variety of choices, and the game of business is no exception. You will do well only if you make your decisions from a position of power rather than a position of weakness.