Play Like A Man, Win Like A Woman Part 4

HIS MOVE: He doesn't care.

HER MOVE: She feels hurt. She feels guilty. Did she do something to offend her?

Aware that schools all over the country are now encouraging women to play sports, I was curious to talk to a young friend who plays varsity soccer at a small East Coast college. She's a good athlete and her team does well. But last week, after watching her first soccer match between two top NCAA female teams, she was in shock. "They were so mean," she said. "They play for keeps. We like to win, too. But mostly we want to have a great time with each other."

Things are changing-very slowly. While at some colleges, in some athletic programs, some women are learning to play to win, that is not the prevailing att.i.tude. The emphasis on victory is still a male concept. Playing to make friends is not. When was the last time you heard a bunch of guys, back from a serious football game, whooping it up and saying, "What a wonderful weekend, we met some really nice guys on the other team. Too bad we lost"?

Work is no more about friendship than a tough compet.i.tive sport is. Men are clear that business is business, and personal is personal. When they disagree over job-related matters, they don't see each other as being unsupportive or uncaring or disloyal. They know that they can have a tough fight on Friday, and still drink a few friendly beers together on Sat.u.r.day.

For many women, our relationship with a co-worker is so significant that we forget the importance of appropriate distance.

For instance, the bookers at CNN are responsible for finding the right expert to feature on air. The job of the researchers is to do the prescreening, which involves talking to the chosen guest and going over his or her material. Sometimes, after that preinterview, a researcher decides a booker has selected the wrong person, and she says so. I can't tell you the number of times that tempers have flared and friendships have ended over these disagreements. The booker takes it personally that her close friend the researcher has undercut her.

I tell the booker and the researcher (when they're ready to listen) that our work is not about friendship. It's about getting the job done in a professional way.

The ideal work situation for most of us is to run the ball toward the goal line, then pa.s.s it to our best friend who lobs it to our sister who throws it over to our cousin and then back to us to score. But what happens if your best friend or sister or cousin doesn't like the play? Are you going to stop the game while you're in danger of being tackled by your opponents and accuse her of disloyalty?

THE PROBLEM: If you insist on being close friends with co-workers, you may soon have a lot of ex-friends-and an ex-job.

WHAT TO DO: Keep in mind that your job is only a part of who you are. Your work is your work, and your life is your life. Decisions and comments that make sense for work may not make sense in any other context. Always remember that making friends is not an objective of a business situation. It's a by-product.

GAME HINT: One of the major myths in the business world, and one primarily perpetuated by men, is that women don't support each other. Not so. Women do a great deal to help each other. And don't forget it.

If there is any truth to the myth at all, it may reflect the way the male hierarchy often pits one woman against another as the designated female for the job, creating an unpleasant compet.i.tion.

But more often this myth stems from overpersonalization of work-related issues. And when the resulting disputes become public, it's usually the men who disseminate the story to all.

Years ago, one of my peers, Joanna, confided to a male co-worker, Jordan, that the only other woman at her level had promised to support her at a meeting, but had backed down when confronted by the chairman. Joanna expressed her surprise and anger that her friend hadn't stood by her, but her friend later explained her reasons, and Joanna accepted her apology-and that was the end of it, she thought.

But Jordan never let the matter drop. To this day, whenever the two of them are in a meeting and the conversation turns to an issue concerning women, Jordan will look at Joanna, wink, and say, "You, of all people, know exactly what I'm talking about. Don't you?"

No matter that Joanna has told him repeatedly that her friend had explained her silence. Jordan refuses to drop the subject because he wants to believe their enmity persists. He also enjoys sharing it with other men-which he does, inside and outside the office.

So even if you can't help but become angry with a female co-worker, for the sake of the rest of us, keep it to yourself.

GAME HINT: You can't expect to make friends of everyone. And you can't make everyone happy.

Another friend recently approached me about her husband, who was having trouble with his boss, a man I've known for years. "My husband is so smart," she said. "You know that. Maybe you can help."

I told her firmly that it would be a grave mistake for me to get involved (and that what she was proposing was a possible first step to divorce court). The instinct to help out any way you can is the sign of a good heart, but it doesn't make for good game strategy-and it's certainly not the way guys play the game. Can you imagine a man making an appointment to see his wife's boss to help her advance up the corporate ladder?

I don't care who you are. You can't please everyone. If you try, you'll end up taking care of not only your kids, your spouse, and your parents, but also your a.s.sistant, your boss, your vendors, your accountants, and G.o.d knows how many others. First and foremost, your job is to do your own job.

6 Accept Uncertainty.

SITUATION: The boss gives everyone at a certain level new areas of responsibility.

HIS MOVE: He doesn't tell anyone he's uncertain how to proceed, and he forges ahead.

HER MOVE: She is so worried about her new responsibilities that she finds it almost impossible to get any work done at all.

Fact: Unlike men, who owe their success to a variety of factors, women a.s.sume we get ahead because we're better at our job than anyone else. I don't think any woman ever believes she was promoted for any other reason than her excellent performance.

As a result, over the years we've adopted a perfectionist model. We don't say we know something unless we're completely confident we do.

Men are brought up to feel comfortable with a generalized sense of the right answer. If they're familiar with the game board, they believe they can smell out the correct way to proceed.

If I wasn't aware of this fact already, teaching at business school gave me proof positive. Whenever I asked a broad question about a subject, the guys nodded their heads knowingly. They guessed I wasn't going to quiz them. Who knows, maybe if they racked their brains, they really could come up with an appropriate response if called on.

The women, on the other hand, always waited until they fully grasped the particular point I was making. They weren't about to nod their heads unless they felt they could make a solid contribution to the subject.

Think of the way men play games. They don't run out on the field, saying, "Who the h.e.l.l knows if we can beat these guys!" They're filled with bravado, bluff, swagger. They psych themselves up. They say, "We can do anything!"

Whether they can or not, they know that if they start the game feeling confident, they have a much better chance of triumphing.

THE PROBLEM: If you have to feel completely safe before you move on or up, you'll never move at all.

WHAT TO DO: Have faith in your general ability to perform, and stop worrying about whether or not you have the specific competence to do a new job. You'll figure it out soon enough. There's no such thing as Completely Certain-not in business, not in life. Part of being good at a job is learning how to make it up as you go.

That's not being a liar. That's being able to improvise. Most difficult situations that arise at work have no precedent. A great executive can always figure out how to do that which hasn't been done before.

7 Take a Risk.

SITUATION: You feel stalled at work, and the boss tells you that the only way to get ahead is to break out of the box and take the occasional risk.

HIS MOVE: He takes the risk.

HER MOVE: She becomes so preoccupied with weighing the pros and cons that she never takes any action at all.

How do you break the training of a lifetime? From the get go, men are encouraged to take chances. We are told not to. Little boys are told to get out there and fight. We are told not to. He's 42, and he's happy to be guarding a boy who's 58. He learns what risk is.

Women are brought up to be physically careful, to avoid situations that are potentially dangerous. Don't jump off that wall. Don't touch that dog. Don't play near the water. The last thing our parents want is for us to hurt ourselves. What if we scarred ourselves for life? What man would want to marry us then?

But you can't get ahead without making risky moves. No one who is content to play safe ever sees her career skyrocket. No one who's afraid to stretch the boundaries ever becomes CEO. Being pa.s.sive gets you nowhere.

Risk seems frightening, because it involves being active. What if I make that move and get fired? What if I accept that new project and make a mess? Why take a chance at all? Why rock the boat?

Fact: All boats rock. If you're going to be successful, you're going to make mistakes, and at some point you're probably going to get fired. But not to worry: Mistakes and firings can mean that you've done something out of the ordinary or that someone has noticed you. In fact, as long as mistakes represent the exception and not the rule, they are often signs of success. A career made up of many pluses and a few minuses is the career of a winner. "I don't care if a manager makes five serious mistakes. At least that person is making decisions and learning from them," says Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.

Even more difficult for many women to accept: The things we think of as risks are often not risks at all. Let's say you've been working at the same job for seven years. You're bored and you can't figure out exactly where you're going next. The guy sitting across from you is in the same position, but he's thinking that it's time to move on. One day he walks into the boss's office, announces he has a new job, and quits.

You may think he's making a mistake by leaving his secure, if unexciting, sinecure. Actually, while you've been obsessing about how bored you are, he was doing his job, plus all the work that goes with finding a new position-putting out feelers, sending out resumes, talking to headhunters, and so on. He's not randomly rolling the dice, he's got them all loaded. And while you're still trying to justify staying put, he's in a new world, with more money, better contacts, and new status.

THE PROBLEM: You can't get ahead because you're terrified to take a risk.

WHAT TO DO: People who take risks are people who have their fear under control. Without fear, it's not a risk.

Take small risks to prove to yourself that you can manage your fear. Set up minor tasks that you can afford to fumble. For example: Say a competent woman arrives at her office an hour before-and leaves an hour later-than everyone else. She doesn't get much done in those hours; she's just proving how hardworking and dedicated she is. She's confusing busy with productive.

For this woman, real risk would be to come in at nine and leave at six. I've recommended this schedule change to several women, and all of them were able to face their fear that they owed their success to their long working hours. After shortening their day, they discovered no one else thought less of them for spending fewer hours in the office-and they still got all their work done.

Start a conversation with someone you're afraid of, or someone you suspect is twice as smart as you are, or someone who's obnoxious. Or, walk into the office of someone you think is mad at you. It helps you define your own boundaries when you can sense that another person's bad mood has nothing to do with you. Try thinking, "He must have had a fight with his wife last night." Very often, when someone's yelling at you, he's probably just angry. The "at you" part only means that physically you're in close proximity.

If risk continues to scare you, consider that you're taking risks every day. Driving to work is a risk. Eating raw fish is a risk. Life is filled with risks, but you've become so inured to most of them you don't notice.

There really isn't a fundamental difference in how men and women approach their personal fears. It's just that men are more used to confronting them than you are. He's taking his 236th risk, you're taking your fifth. Of course you're more scared.

In the modern business world there is no such thing as safety, which means that risk is a relative term. Something is risky only if you don't know what you are doing. Otherwise, you're simply calculating the chances that a potential move will be good or bad, and then taking action. Fear is part of the braid of success-don't let it paralyze you.

Yes, you can fail, but if you're ready for the possibility, you have a backup plan. Today's failures can pave the way for tomorrow's successes.

8 Be an Imposter.

SITUATION: A man and a woman have been promoted to positions of power.

HIS MOVE: He arrives at his office, admires his fancy desk and furniture, and contemplates his new responsibilities. He realizes that there's much he doesn't know about his new job, but he tells himself that if he's gotten this far, he'll probably go further.

HER MOVE: She arrives in her office, sees the fancy furniture and the corner view, and feels uncomfortable. She knows she worked hard to get here and that no one deserves a promotion more. "But now I'm in over my head," she thinks. "It's only a matter of time before they figure out I'm an imposter."

The one game that most girls learned to play well was The Game of Knowledge. This is the one we learned in school, the one where we were rewarded (with good grades, parental approval, teacher attention) for being a good student, for doing our homework, for being prepared when called upon.

Since we're only now learning about the game of business, we still rely on the Game of Knowledge. As a result, we usually enter the workplace convinced that the only way to advance is to master our subject backwards and forwards. We collect information, we acc.u.mulate anecdotes, we do whatever it takes to get the job done.

When we're ready to make a presentation, we make sure we haven't missed a single fact, and we enter the conference room trailing highlighters, annual reports, and computer printouts, thoroughly overprepared and overeducated.

Feeling that you know everything about your subject means you don't have to worry about being caught off guard. But it has a downside: No one knows everything. Eventually a colleague will ask you a question that you can't answer. And when that time comes, you suspect that you're an imposter.

This is the horrible, sinking feeling, experienced by the intelligent and the hardworking, that success is accidental. This imposter syndrome causes us to live in constant fear that we will be discovered, that our inadequacies will be exposed, and that we will be humiliated, demoted, dismissed.

Women who suffer from the imposter syndrome frequently expend as much energy trying to figure out how to survive their presumed unmasking as they expend doing the actual job.

They also become very good at convincing themselves not to take risks, because moving into any new territory makes them even more vulnerable to exposure.

The real truth is, we are imposters. Each and every one of us, men and women alike. None of us has a grasp on all the facts. Think about it. Does any one of us truly know everything there is to know about raising kids? No. But that doesn't stop us from doing it, or from doing it very well.

Business is no different from life. Men know that. They fake it whenever and wherever they have to. They go from one place to the next, gathering as much information as they can, and the closer they move to the top, the more they rely on improvisation, self-confidence, and the generalized ability to draw on past experience rather than book knowledge.

In business, when you're doing something new, there is no safety net. That is nerve-racking. That is also how creative business ideas are advanced.

THE PROBLEM: With every new promotion and every new step comes the feeling that you're an imposter waiting to be exposed.

WHAT TO DO: Accept the fact that there isn't one of us who can honestly say that he or she knows everything there is to know about the job, or who can't be caught off guard, or who couldn't be replaced one day by someone more talented. And believe me, the same is true of all of your bosses.

More important is how you talk to yourself. Do you tell yourself you are an overachiever who has no idea what she is talking about? Or can you admit, "I'm in new territory, but I wouldn't be here if I weren't competent and knowledgeable. So instead of focusing on what I don't know, I'll focus on my store of information and learn the rest as I go along."

Ask yourself reasonable questions. What are the things that someone in this job should know? Do you know them? If not, how long would it take you to learn them? Did your predecessor know more at this stage than you do?"

When I was first asked to start a central booking department for CNN 17 years ago, I had no idea what form it should take or what help I needed to set it up. But I did understand that the company's president had selected me for two reasons. First: He had confidence in me. So instead of worrying that he'd chosen the wrong person, I looked on my job as an adventure and decided that the worst outcome would be to return to my old job-which I'd always liked anyway. Second: The president knew I wouldn't besiege him with questions. I'd just do the job.

Bosses delegate work to you because they want you to figure it out. If they'd wanted to figure it out themselves, you'd be superfluous.

Replace your imposter scenario with a self-confident one. Confidence is half of the game. Whenever you can convince yourself you'll score, your chances improve. When you convince yourself you'll fail, your chances diminish. I know that whenever I think I'm going to drop the ball, I frequently do.

9 Think Small.

SITUATION: The company is in crisis mode and everyone has been given more responsibility.

HIS MOVE: He a.s.sumes he can do what has to be done, and slowly and methodically gets to work.

HER MOVE: Feeling overwhelmed, she frets away valuable time.

Boys like games that are straightforward. They want to get from point A to point B, and they want to win while doing it.

Girls prefer games that offer a variety of possibilities. In the dollhouse, for example, there are dozens of options to consider-where should the living-room furniture go, where should Daddy sit, would Baby be happy with a view of the back-yard?-and a mult.i.tude of tasks. Rather than racing to reach some kind of goal or endpoint, girls enjoy drawing out the game, making up stories about the occupants of each room, inventing relationships, personal histories.

By and large, as these games turn more complicated, as the relationships between the characters grow more involving, the more interested a girl becomes.

These games teach us to become mult.i.taskers, and this ability to mult.i.task becomes part of a woman's existence. As in the dollhouse, there are myriad responsibilities to attend to in a real house every day.

Unfortunately, women are apt to bring our dollhouse/real house sensibility to the office. As a result, not only do we have to focus on our new important project, we also worry if our mother went to her doctor's appointment; if our daughter did her homework; if our son got beat up by the school bully; if the cleaning woman changed the beds in the guest room, which makes us remember that we still haven't bought groceries for our sister's visit this weekend, or that we need to get the slipcovers replaced.

At home, overwhelmed or not, we cope with our responsibilities because the solutions are well-defined. We can deal with a crying baby by picking her up and soothing her. Unfortunately, we can't do the same with the budget projections. Spread sheets don't calm down with a hug and a burp.

"It's too much," we say. "I can't get it done." "I'm giving up."