In my years of being
in relationships at work, socially, and at home, I have come upon an
observation that seems to stay consistent over time. Gender perspective fascinates me, and I’ll be
curious to read if you experience anything similar. Warning: sexism is alive
and well in these viewpoints; I painted with a very broad brush.
In the world of work,
I and other women often say, “The work will speak for itself.” Our hope is that if we work hard, exceed expectations,
and show initiative that reward and recognition will follow. We don’t want it to be about whom we know,
because that is fraught with landmines, from sexual harassment, to gossip and
misunderstandings, to favoritism. We don’t want to get ahead for any of those
reasons.
Outside of work – we
focus a lot (a LOT) on relationships.
Relationships fuel the majority of our conversational topics, our
reading, our movie choices, and the books we read. Relationships make our world go round. Slightly exaggerated, our life outside of
work can be summed up in this graph:
And when we want to
talk to our significant others about “The Relationship” he can be caught with some
version of eye rolling or we’ll hear a mumbled “Please, no not the talk!” escape from his lips before he
can pull it back. There is not much “letting
the work speak for itself” on the home front.
The relationship’s ups, downs, foibles and missteps will be discussed,
debated, examined and scrutinized, if we have our way.
However, at work, do
you find, as I have, that guys tend to take the opposite view from us: at work, they focus on THE RELATIONSHIP! (And we thought it was called politics).
Guys don’t leave their
careers to the off chance that someone will notice their hard work and reward
them. They initiate. They make sure to have time outside of office
hours to connect in a way that doesn’t always happen in the task-oriented
office environment (the business lunch, for example, our couple’s equivalent of
date night). Men and their bosses often share
hobbies together: skiing, golf, mountain-biking…they find the
common connection and they schedule time to do it. They SCHEDULE TIME TO DO IT. (This is women’s “you never plan anything with me” talk, #147). The other observation regarding the focus on
relationships at home vs. work is that it can’t sustain evolution and time.
It’s obvious that the
landscape is changing and has to change as the numbers of women in leadership
roles grow. As I said earlier, we have adopted this no-nonsense approach to
business relationships because we don’t want our intentions to be
misunderstood. We therefore become
idealists who hope that we can keep it simple: work hard and our work will
speak for itself.
The move to the middle
happens when both sides shift from their extreme. Maybe women can bring a
little more of our focus on relationships into the business world. It would serve us well, because it IS all
about relationships. We can take time to relate to our co-workers of either gender and engage fully in the
moment. We pride ourselves in being
great at multi-tasking, but thinking about the next thing while doing the
current thing only means we aren’t really present. People can sense that.
And for the guys
reading this who are really good at business dinners and networking breakfasts
and coffee meet-and-greets would probably do well to give equal effort to the
important relationships that don’t happen over spreadsheets and email – the
important people in our private world who make life really worth living.
