Office politics is as much a part of work as drawing a salary. And yet, I don’t know anyone who wants more of it.
In fact, many clients come to me because they feel stymied in their career advancement goals because they perceive “office politics” to be getting in their way. People blame office politics for everything from making them unproductive (e.g., sitting in unnecessary meetings cozying up to the “higher ups”) to putting up barriers due to favoritism, bias or “baggage” of various sorts (e.g., gossip sullying their reputations.)
Throughout most of my career I have felt the same way about the peculiar interpersonal group dynamics that dominate the way people interact in an organizational context. When I started coaching and heard so many other people citing office culture and interpersonal relationship dysfunctions as a career hurdle, I started paying more attention.
I certainly used to think so. But with miles on my odometer, I’ve come to realize that unconscious bias trumps merit more often than the reverse. And it’s probably going to be that way for a long time because organizations are just groups of humans who come together to make things happen. Human group dynamics require communication and emotional intelligence, but they also offer us opportunities to be our whole selves. Along with all this comes the constant struggle to balance bias and flawed judgments with merit, productivity, and outcomes.
The office:A perfect petri dish to see what a drop of human insecurity plopped into a base mix of miscommunication, misalignment, and differing objectives might brew.
I had originally thought of office politics as simply a derogatory word to describe human and group dynamics among people forced to spend too much time together. But with observation I now think of these group dynamics, including the political elements, as a unique environment offering each of us the challenge to rise to our better natures.
Especially as our personal connections outside work trend towards tighter connections with people more like us, creating polarization and alienation at the level of civil society, the workplace is one of the few places left where we have incentives to get along with people who are NOT like us. Work provides us a rare opportunity to create spaces where psychological safety breeds creativity, inspiration and innovation.
And if we turn our irritation into motivation to improve our social skills and ability to influence others in complex social systems, we rise to our higher potential. This higher opportunity exists both in our own achievement and in positively affecting others. Of course, the skill of this is to do it without losing our values, our morals or our minds.
Are office politics more detrimental to women’s careers?
Immediately upon beginning to observe office politics more closely, I noted more women than men articulating “politics” as a career dilemma. This surprised me because generally women are strong communicators, good at establishing relationships and adept at emotional intelligence. All these skills should help them survive and thrive in any group dynamic, so why would women struggle so much to surf the waves of interpersonal relationships in the workplace?
Over the years I’ve come to believe that many women struggle most in those office politics environments where a stereotypically male work culture permeates. Typically when women encounter highly competitive, ruthless and gender toxic environments, they feel less equipped, less tolerant and less interested in following the cultural norms than men. Because they don’t play by the rules of the male-defined culture, they’re more readily ostracized by it, facilitating their belief that they’re in a no-win situation. Penalized by the culture, they struggle to receive the kind of visibility and recognition needed to keep opening doors and receiving opportunities.
This is true for men who don’t buy into cultural norms–or aren’t welcomed into a dominantly female office dynamic–as well. Plenty of men have complained to me that they are held back because they refuse to “play the game.” And indeed, office politics of any flavor is a game of sorts, as is business itself.
All that said, you can’t win a game you don’t play.
Playing the Game vs. Taking it Personally
Whether we like it or not, most business endeavors (including nonprofit and academic environments) are essentially games we play to try to accomplish some kind of goal. It’s a “game” in the sense that you have a limited set of players, pieces, rules, and a goal. The challenge is to reach the goal using the players, pieces and rules you have access to. If you can’t make it work, including by changing some of the players, pieces, rules and objectives, you have to put away the board and go play somewhere else.
Office Politics: You can’t win a game you don’t play. ⇐click to tweet.
Of course, real people’s lives and livelihoods get caught up in this game, and to most of us it doesn’t feel like a game at all. This is where office politics tends to factor in as our attention drifts from the business game and we jockey for interpersonal security and acknowledgement.
To make matters more murky, most of us don’t feel like players in the business game itself, giving us little else to do but play interpersonal (political) skirmishes on the sidelines. While board members and senior executives focus on the major business strategy, little of that usually reaches employees in ways that captivate them personally. Leaders have some level of strategic authority to roll the dice and make the moves in the business game, but most employees are just pieces on the board getting moved around, often without a real sense of the objective, much less the rules.
Gender Dynamics in Office Politics
Here’s the gender dynamic: men tend to arrive in their careers already acculturated to playing the business game and sloughing off interpersonal dynamics, while women tend to have been acculturated to playing the people game with less investment in the business game. This makes women more vulnerable to being interpersonally ostracized and less skilled at seeing it all in the context of the business game.
Of course, business is neither totally a game of objectives or interpersonal belonging, it’s both, and women and men need to balance these perspectives to succeed. Men who focus too little on the interpersonal dynamics can become isolated and/or hurt others. Women who overcompensate on people issues can find themselves taking some aspects of the game too seriously and too personally, and in doing so may be less effective or discredit themselves in the eyes of the game-players.
In the end, I advise my clients to play the game, and learn to navigate office politics adeptly, if they want to rise higher in the organization.
I also advise them not to take the business game too personally and to play the interpersonal, office politics, game by taking the high road. This becomes an exercise in stretching themselves to grow emotionally and in learning to manage risk, manage the business issues and gain experience in setting boundaries, among other things. All good skills to have in the game of life as well.
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Originally written in 2012 to announce The Woman Effect, I still stand by this and will be updating it in 2024. Stay tuned!
Have you noticed the steady drumbeat of research studies coming out over the last 15 years – I mean real, serious research – that find that when more than 30% of an organizations’ leadership is made up of working women, the organization is measurably more successful? When I first started reading about this research, almost a year ago, I thought that this must be little more than an anecdotal feminist narrative that women are great. I was about to dismiss it as wishful research (on my part and others’) when I stumbled across studies by McKinsey & Associates (2007) and Catalyst (2010) that probably started all the subsequent studies regarding women in business.
Reading more deeply I noticed a few things that made me sit up and take notice – these studies included exhaustive analysis across sector, country and organization size. They documented improvements in organizations with women in leadership as measured by productivity, profitability, corporate culture and sustainability – in ten different categories of performance. Catalyst’s 2011 numbers show that companies with a significant percentage of women on their boards performed better than those with no women on their boards by 84% return on sales, 60% return on invested capital, and 46% return on equity.
All this women-are-good-for-business stuff wasn’t a fluke! I began researching this phenomenon more deeply, as of today InPower Women has indexed over 200 research studies since 2007 that measure the positive impact of women in business and that paint an intricate reality about the potential and challenges of women in business and the economy.
Then I started talking to other working women – my colleagues, clients and friends – about this research, many of whom were in positions of power in businesses, nonprofits and government. They all said, “Really? I had no idea! How cool!” What? They didn’t know either? I was shocked and felt compelled to get the word out.
The Woman Effect Was Born
The fact is that a significant presence of female leaders in an organization measurably contributes to its health and wealth. Period.
Know what this means? It means that even with our negative self-talk, feeling never enough and work-life struggles – we are more than enough and we have become a critical ingredient for economic success.
It means something else too. It means that when we get rid of the negative self-talk, feelings of never enough and work-life guilt, women have the potential to be an even more significant factor in healing our economy and our world.
In fact, economists at The World Bank and other development institutions have been doing parallel research in developing nations and found that when girls and women thrive in villages and towns anywhere on the globe, their communities and economies are healthier and wealthier. I tip my hat to The Girl Effect for getting this word out through philanthropic circles over the last few years. And yes, I chose “The Woman Effect” to reflect this parallelism – because it is indeed the same phenomenon. For many reasons, which I’ll delve into more deeply in future blog posts, the female of our species is equipped to make every effort she is a part of thrive. What the research is showing in developed and developing economies both is that our impact on business is no different than our impact in little villages and organizations everywhere. The Woman Effect is in our blood, hearts and minds. It’s part of who we are.
No More Excuses
The Woman Effect has one other implication, which is the reason I’m devoting my professional life to exploring it, raising awareness of it, giving it voice and inviting others to join me and create a powerful chorus. Here it is: now that we know The Woman Effect is not just some wishful idea but real, every woman who participates in the economy which means all of us (even if you ‘stay at home’ and exercise consumer power and raise the next generation of economic participants) – we all bear a responsibility to activate our personal leadership power to play a significant role in the economy. We bear this responsibility whatever that looks like in each of our individual lives – whether you aspire to be on a Fortune 100 board, run a kickass small-or-not-so-small business and/or play a leadership role in your volunteer and family life. Why is this your responsibility? Because it all matters. Because it is your world. And because you can.
For me, personally, this means no more excuses. No more whining. No more victimization. My intention from here on out is to use the personal power within me that I can use to activate change and good things in the world. Starting with this. Starting with you.
What about you? Are you ready to put the excuses aside and activate The Woman Effect in your life? In your business? If something is in your way, how will you let it go so you can claim your power to lead? What will it take for you to say “no more excuses”?
I welcome thoughts – and especially declarations of how you are living The Woman Effect in your own life – in comments below. Please share this page and invite others!
Guide to Women in Leadership
Organizations with women in their executive suites regularly out-perform others. Yet rising female executives (and their mentors) are frustrated at how hard it is to break through the glass ceiling. In this extensive guide, Executive Coach Dana Theus shares her tried and true strategies to help women excel into higher levels of leadership and achieve their executive potential.
Early in my career, empathy was my ace-in-the-hole management technique. I was all business when it came to helping my team on technical, process and performance issues, but if they had an emotional reaction or issue, I reverted to empathy because it was the easy thing to do. I learned that when I was empathetic, people liked me more, and early in my career, I really wanted to be liked. In retrospect, there might have been a correlation between my empathetic management style and the glass ceiling I smacked my head on the first time around, but then again maybe not. One of the folks who got the job I wanted was a woman… though now that I think of it, her management style was anything but empathetic.
Empathy didn’t work on everyone, though. I remember Employee B at a subsequent job. He just pretty much hated me and did everything including lying to my face to try to undermine me – despite the fact that I was the one with the VP title. I was flummoxed and pissed off. I kept trying to empathize in order to connect, and failed time and again. I never did figure out Employee B. I rejoiced when he transferred to another department and to this day I consider him my biggest management failure.
Empathy Off Balance
As I grew into leadership positions, I added more tools to my management toolbox, gained more confidence and relied on empathy less and less. But it was years later that I fully recognized empathy for what it is – an implement with very specific – and limited – uses in the leadership and management toolkit.
I recently had a business coaching client who helped me crystallize this learning. She was facing her equivalent of Employee B – someone who really got under her skin and had a personal beef with her, put her on the defensive and undermined her in public. She was flummoxed, just as I had been. What tool did she take out to try to reach this person? Empathy. “I keep trying to empathize and figure out where she’s coming from,” she told me. But what result did it give her? Frustration and anger – but worse, I could see her falling off balance, just like I had done with Employee B. She was falling off balance – out of her personal power – and losing her most important audience, which was everyone on the team BUT Employee B. Everyone else was watching her teeter off balance and wondering if she could right herself in time for the big deliverable.
So I vowed to help her learn the leadership development lesson I’d failed to learn when Employee B gave me the chance. I had her feel how her empathy for her troublesome Employee B was like an emotional thread connecting them. The more she deployed empathy, the more the other person tugged on that thread, pulling her into their sphere of emotional distortion until she was off balance and out of power.
Women use empathy so naturally that many times we think that being off balance for empathy’s sake is a good thing because being in their sphere means being so in touch with the other person that we’re actually helping them. Maybe this is why we keep turning to empathy even when it’s clearly not working. But when we’re out of our own power and off balance, we’re not helping them. We’re just feeding their illusion and giving away our power.
Find The Limits Of Empathy
As managers and leaders, we are stewards of company resources and goals, and we must do our best to stay clear on the situation as it actually is, unclouded by emotional distortions to the greatest extent possible. To be clear on the situation as it is, we must also be a steward of our own power. But when we’re off balance in empathy, we’re out of power, less adept at staying focused on our business targets and susceptible to the emotional distortions of others. We need to rely less on empathy and more on our judgment in order to respond appropriately, for the good of all involved.
By keeping ourselves in balance, we’re not being “cold” or “heartless,” we’re just being in our own power. This is a good thing! Let’s give ourselves permission to be in our own power first, before we try to help someone in need of our empathy, or strength.
Empathy Good — Compassion Better
I’m not trashing empathy in the workplace. It is an important skill and has its place. It’s also an element of emotional intelligence that’s been purposefully lacking in our leadership cultures for far too long. The emphasis on shareholder value has deemphasized the importance of all kinds of emotional intelligence (EQ), and empathy is an excellent gate to reintroduce EQ back to the workplace. Our collective social traumas associated with the COVID pandemic have made it clear to almost everyone that empathy is key to everything from employee engagement to customer communications.
Empathy’s greatest gift is to ease the other person into understanding that we can appreciate the challenges others are facing, and that we do have insight into their situation, even as we focus on the business. This can open them up to us so we can help them in a management capacity. But there comes a point where you need to stop the empathy once that connection is made. Once they know you’re warm-blooded and caring, don’t keep falling into empathy. Research shows that if we don’t move beyond empathy, we can get stuck in negative thought patterns and are more easily trapped in a thoughts of overwhelm.
The solution is to begin with empathy in order to connect, but to use compassion to manage and lead them. Compassion solves two problems for leaders:
keeps you from getting stuck in the negative with the other person, which can make you feel helpless to help them
moves you into a place of action that is more likely to help them (and you!)
How to Be Compassionate
However, be sure to stay out of the trap of trying to solve their problem. Compassion allows you to be present for them and provide information, options and opportunities they might take up to solve their own problem. However, to successfully be compassionate the problem doesn’t need to be solved then and there. The most important gift of compassion is to help the person get out of the negative space that they’re in, and which empathy alone can unintentionally reinforce. If the person you give compassion to feels better at the end–even if they still have a problem–that’s a big win. Take it and come back to a solution at another time.
Here are some simple ways to be compassionate when someone is suffering and you’ve opened the door with some empathy so that they’ll allow you to support them compassionately. They key is to ask questions like these, but do not answer for them, or even try to tell them your opinion until they’ve sorted through it themselves and asked for your opinion (and sometimes even then you don’t need to weigh in):
What would be most helpful to you right now?
Is there something I can do–or not do–to help you?
What options do you have right now? Which one feels right?
When is a good time for us to come back to discuss this in the future, and can I get it on the schedule so you have time to work through what you need to?
Remember that sometimes the best thing to “do” is nothing. Sometimes, your presence with them in their pain and interest in helping them is all they need. This can be tough work for leaders who like to fix things, but rest assured, you are taking an important step towards helping others find their own fix when you choose to be with them in their pain without sharing it.
When precisely should you dial down the empathy and dial up the compassion? Does it matter whether you’re managing or mentoring the other person? That’s a judgment call in each situation, and I believe it works the same in management and mentoring roles. However, if you imagine your empathy as a magic thread pulling at you towards the other person – and make sure you don’t lean in so far you wobble off center, lose perspective on the situation and lose your balance – you’ll be ok.
The moment they open up to you because you showed them empathy, start looking for the right time to move to compassion. Compassion is so powerful that it’s best to move there as soon as possible. It’s the best way to give someone a path out of a negative emotional state without getting caught up in it yourself.
What’s your experience with empathy? Have you found it’s limits?
Break Free from Emotional Triggers
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When you’re emotionally triggered, your reactions to stressful situations (and people) feel out of control. All the stress reduction in the world can’t help you if your emotional triggers are in charge. These 3 lessons will get you back in the driver’s seat.
First written and posted in 2012, I still stand by this philosophy, and am updating it in 2024. Stay tuned!
This last year blogging here on Reclaiming Leadership has been fun and fascinating. Along the way I found myself speaking to and with wonderful, powerful women. And I’ve also been having fun blogging on women’s web sites, like Blogher, The Glass Hammer, Success in the City and Owning Pink. But I wanted to have a place of my own to speak to women about the trends I see from reading the leadership research that many women – heads down in their career – don’t get a chance to see. So I’m starting a new leadership and professional development blog and website for powerful, high-achieving women.
Here’s my opening play: The Woman Effect (1:48 min video).
For those who like THIS blog, rest assured that my plan is to continue blogging here on the subjects of leadership, corporate culture, change management and teambuilding.
Thanks for all of you who have friended, followed, commented, discussed and debated with me over the last year. I’ve never had so much professional fun in my life and it’s only getting better! I hope you’ll continue to follow my journey to understand and document The Woman Effect!
The original text of The Woman Effect Manifesta, 2012
The Woman Effect – A Manifesta
Women are powerful.
Women’s significant leadership presence[1] in any socio-economic system – a country, a government, an economy, a market, a province, a city, a town, a company, a non-profit, a family – helps that socio-economic unit become sustainable, profitable, productive, resilient and healthy.
It follows that if we seek these qualities in our institutions – to ensure their health and well-being (and sometimes, survival) – then we have a solution in front of us.[2]Bring a significant women’s leadership presence into our institutions and we provide them a key resource for health and wealth.
This is The Woman Effect: Women Create Positive Change When They Lead
To the extent that women’s participation in leading our institutions today lags a “significant” presence,[3] we are starving ourselves of a critical ingredient for survival, health and wealth.
Our modern world – and its social, technical and economic structures – has become interdependent to a degree unprecedented. Women are skilled at managing, negotiating and maintaining interdependence for the purpose of sustainability and growth. So are many men. As we sit on the threshold of the Twenty-First Century, our desire for prosperity demands that we explore new leadership models, which optimize this facility with interdependence. We cannot wait another day. Our world demands that we activate The Woman Effect now.
Activate The Woman Effect.
Since the turn of this new century, our research institutions and forward thinkers have recognized The Woman Effect and spoken of it in circles that talk about statistics. Papers have been written, conferences organized and programs developed analyzing the potential and challenges of retooling our socio-economic structures to adapt to this “new,” much-needed resource. But culture doesn’t change because analysis says it should. And women are not new to leadership.
The missing piece is the women themselves. For us to activate The Woman Effect in our institutions, we must activate it within ourselves. We must accept our unique value to the world as it is today. We must grow beyond the cultures that created an unsustainable world and establish new partnerships with the men and institutions that run the modern world. We must take on the responsibility for leading our institutions to create the world we want to live in and we want our children to live in.
The Woman Effect will activate in individual lives for those who take on more purpose and achieve meaningful results. It will look like promotions gained, entrepreneurial success achieved, elections won, personal choices made, families nurtured and the quiet battles of the soul laid to rest. We cannot wallow in what has yet to be achieved and we must celebrate every victory as though it is the decisive one. Because it is. Each time The Woman Effect is activated in a woman’s soul, our world becomes healthier.
You are The Woman Effect.
This is new territory for our world and for its people. There is no one who can instruct you, no one who can tell you exactly what your role is in activating The Woman Effect on a global, local or personal scale. And there doesn’t need to be. The research demonstrates it and youare The Woman Effect. It’s living inside you. No more excuses. No more waiting. You are powerful just as you are. InPower yourself and activate The Woman Effect within you– your life and your business – starting today.
Follow this call and join us. Together we will learn and fail and live and love and succeed spectacularly. Together we will activate The Woman Effect and our world will never be the same. Activate your own special power to change the world. Share this document and your own thoughts about it to help other women see and realize their highest potential.
[1] For organizations evaluated in multiple research studies (http://www.inpowerwomen.com/research/), The Woman Effect kicks in to bring these benefits to the social units studied at approximately 30% female participation in the organizations’ leadership.
[2] Women represent 51.5% of the U.S. populous (49.5% global) and 53% of the educated populous with some college education or more.
[3] Statistics show that in the Fortune 500, for example, women’s participation on boards of directors was approximately 15% in 2011.
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Mar 19 – Is the era of “good leadership” over?
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To kick off Stress Awareness Month, Dana let her mind wander and this is what came out. – InPower Editors
I’ve been working hard lately and last week I hit a wall. My brain couldn’t take another step and it took me 20 minutes to write a two paragraph email simply because I felt so sluggish and uncreative. So three hours before I had planned to stop working I went downstairs to watch a stupid movie with my son before he went back to college. For a few moments I felt like a failure for not finishing the email, but I knew I needed to tap into my ace-in-the-hole stress reduction strategy.
When your brain plays, it creates amazing things. – Click to Tweet
The Surprise Value of Unstructured Time
I don’t remember the first half hour or so of the show (or what the movie was) but suddenly my brain woke up and I found myself laughing light-heartedly. My brain was clear! I started puttering around the room while we giggled at onscreen dumbness.
Note to self: take care of your brain with a dose of humor once in a while.
I read once that the brain takes more energy than any other human organ and I believe it. But I’ve noticed that I can’t eat my way to brain energy. Lots of downsides to that strategy! Brain energy flourishes on other things, too. Just like the rest of my body, it needs rest and work, but I find the most effective stress reduction technique—guaranteed to refresh my mental energy is simply giving it unstructured time to daydream and focus on “nothing”.
Sure, I need my ToDo lists, my intentions, and deadlines, but a few hours of puttering and cleaning or creative play seems to give my mind the kind of energy boost it needs to tap back into its creative best.
And it’s not just me. It’s you too. Psychologists call this phenomenon “incubation” when you daydream and focus on mindless tasks. Your prefrontal cortex relaxes and opens up new mental pathways to make unorthodox connections. Bam! Your brain finds its energy—and maybe some new ideas too!
After cleaning the room and laughing with my son I sat down and banged out that email in five minutes. And it was a much better email! More inspired and concise than the old version I had tried and failed to create. The three hours I hadn’t worked got done in one hour.
How Not to Undermine Your Goof-off Stress Reduction Strategy
I was lucky to be at home on the day I needed to reduce my mental stress and revive my creative mind, but when I first discovered this strategy I worked in an office. I used to reorganize my paperclips and pencil drawer when I hit the mental wall. Or a file cabinet, my reading pile or my pc desktop. That way if a colleague stopped by I looked busy. Nowadays sometimes perusing cat videos on Facebook can have the same effect if I just need a little break. So does “forcing myself” to stare out the window until I finish a cup of tea.
Is this a cop out? Is giggling at cat videos just an excuse not to work? It can be, in which case you might find yourself feeling guilty—adding stress to an already stressed brain. Don’t do this! It undermines the effectiveness of your strategic goof-off time! D
How not to feel guilty? For unstructured time and mindless tasks to give you a creative boost it’s important to choose to give your brain a break. Believe you’re investing in your ability to do a better job when you refocus and you will be!
Ironic as it sounds, it takes mental practice to believe goofing off is a strategic investment in your productivity. Conduct some mental experiments on yourself to find out what kind of daydreaming and puttering help you get more done. Be intentional about how you deploy your stupid movie time, your midday yard work, shopping or extra walks around the block.
What strategies do you find most useful to reviving a stressed out and exhausted brain? Share in comments or our coaching forums.
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Daily meditations, mindfulness and reflection exercises to help you manage stress, improve your productivity and lead others from a centered place of calm.
Is women’s emotional intelligence (EQ) likely to help you or hurt you when you’re on the leadership track? How well do you handle your emotions at work?
Too many women and men read that question as a damnation of women who can’t control their emotions in the office. In fact, it’s more important that you learn to use your emotions intentionally at work, than merely control them. And in the ability to use their emotions, both women and men have a potential advantage.
We might even start with, “Do your emotions help you do your job better?” They do! Emotional Intelligence is one of the most important business and leadership assets you can develop, but emotional intelligence doesn’t always look as “emotional” as most people think. Often, it’s the more subtle emotional clues that give you the “intelligence” to decode a tricky interpersonal situation, read a negotiating partner or motivate challenging employees (and employees in challenging situations.)
How does understanding emotional clues make you a good leader?
Here’s a short list:
Reduce stress (yours and others’)
Build win-win relationships
Motivate yourself and others
Communicate more effectively
Give and receive constructive feedback
Run meetings
Handle difficult situations and people
I often hear people say that women’s emotional intelligence is more acute than men’s. Any broad generalization like this is going to be easily proven wrong, but it’s true that women do tend to be good at empathy, social cues, collaboration. However, men tend to be better at managing difficult and stressful emotions in social situations, including not allowing too much emotional empathy keep them from taking needed action. So maybe a direct comparison is less useful than an assumption that we all have emotional intelligence and that we can all become better at using it. In fact, given how important EQ is for being a good leader (according to all the leadership gurus out there), if women had all the EQ they needed, wouldn’t we be better represented in leadership than we are?
Get ahead strategy: use your emotions intelligently – Click To Tweet
As you can probably already tell, I’m a big believer in emotional intelligence as a coach and I see many opportunities for women to refine their natural emotional talent. I’m not talking about emotions like crazy-in-love or seeing-red-anger. I’m talking about the emotional clues that help you understand yourself and others better. Intelligence like this comes in handy when you’re trying to suss out things like:
when people are buying into what you’re saying and when they’re holding back without saying so directly;
when you’re genuinely excited and want to go for a new assignment and when you’re not interested but likely to do a poor job because you think you “should” do it even though you’re heart’s not in it; and
how to tell what to say to keep a rocky working relationship from spiraling out of control.
Women with Emotional Intelligence Often Outperform Men
While the benefits of the above scenarios may seem obvious from an interpersonal standpoint to help reduce stress and improve communications, there is another benefit for women–promotions and salary increases! It’s long been known that good leaders of all genders modulate their responses based on the situation. This kind of situational leadership means that when time is short and the stakes high, for example, the leader can be decisive without needing to bring a lot of people into the decision process (which threaten to bog down the process unnecessarily). That same leader can encourage and stimulate more collaborative, consensus-oriented discussion when there is time and engaging more people in the decision builds consensus and buy-in. Another example of situational leadership might be that when a worker is struggling to learn a new skill the leader can be patient, supportive and non judgmental. In other circumstances where the worker simply isn’t bringing their A game to the office, that same leader might choose to be more judgmental and less patient.
When a single leader demonstrates the ability to use judgement to decide on the most appropriate response in any given situation, they tend to advance in salary, title and responsibility. Impressively, however, in these increases, women outperform men. This means that a woman’s best chance for advancement at work is to master her emotional intelligence and use it to build a wide range of leadership responses to any given situation.
So how do you start refining your emotional intelligence and leveraging it for your leadership skills? Start by paying attention to your emotions and looking for the good information they’re bringing you. Become aware of how they guide you to make decisions and take actions tailored to each situation more effectively. Stop pushing emotions away and start inviting them in for the gifts they bring along with them. If you’re struggling with too many negative emotions, practice detriggering, but keep paying attention to what the good – and bad – feelings are doing to help you. This isn’t a race won by the hare, it’s definitely a race where the tortoise has the advantage. Be patient with others, and with yourself.
Welcome to “Dear Dana”, our weekly column to give you career and workplace advice/coaching. Please write in and tell me about a career challenge or frustration you’re facing at the office! – Dana Theus
Dear Dana, I loved your article onwhy my dream job isn’t a dream! It sums up how I’ve been feeling lately in terms of my dream job. As you know I have had some pretty tough work environments and I am wondering if it is possible to change a bad work culture. Is it better to stay and try to help improve it, or is it better to search for the right job? — Wondering in Washington
Dear Wondering,
Glad you liked the article about dream jobs. Your question is an important one, can we change a toxic corporate culture or should we just give up and leave? I think I’ve had that question on my mind in every job I’ve ever had – especially at the end when I’m getting tired of the extra “stuff” I have to deal with as a result of that particular job.
I don’t mean to sound wishy-washy but the answer is yes and yes. Here are three things to consider when thinking about how to handle a toxic corporate culture.
1: Get what you can
Every job has some gifts to give you, whether it’s learning a new skill, new ways of handling challenges or how to survive and work to shift a tough corporate culture for the better. You owe it to yourself not to throw the baby (i.e., career experience and knowledge) out with the bathwater (leaving a toxic culture). That said, there comes a point in every position where it’s taking more from you than it’s giving. That’s when it’s time to go. The trick is to be aware of this throughout your tenure there and stay conscious about (a) getting the experience and knowledge you can while also (b) staying attuned to what might be a good next move and planting the seeds to get you there when the time is right. You want to stay aware of noticing “when the time is right,” so you can start making your exit before the toxicity has really gotten to you because if you’re not careful, you’ll carry it with you to your next job. The last thing you want to do is to “hate your job” all the way through, feel “stuck” in a toxic environment and then have it “stick” to you when you leave. Ick.
2: Shift the parts of the culture you can
You also owe it to yourself, and the people you work with, to do what you can to shift a bad corporate culture in the ways you can. Why is it your responsibility? Because organizational cultures are made up of people and a crappy culture can’t change unless the crappy attitudes of the people do. Of course you’re not the only one who’s part of the problem (i.e., by contributing to or tolerating a bad culture), and you’re also not the only one who’s part of the solution. So you have to do your part.So you have to do your part. First, you can learn to detrigger to release the toxic feelings that contribute to your own toxic attitudes, such as frustration, anger, bitterness. When you can reliably stay clear of the emotional food fight* flying around the office, you can let the toxicity slide right off you. A non-toxic attitude polishes up your personal brand and gives you executive presence so that even in a toxic culture, people want to work with you and the leadership sees that you’re able to stay steady even when things are tough. This can open new doors, and behind some of them there will be less toxicity.
* An office food fight is what I always imagine when I see a toxic business culture because the emotional active/passive aggressiveness, insensitivity and outright betrayals are like invisible things flying through the air and even though you can’t see them, they make a serious mess.
When people change, organizations change. – Click To Tweet
3: Learn to create “culture bubbles”
Another reason to build your personal brand to include “managing yourself well in a bad corporate culture” is when you demonstrate that you can withstand the stresses of toxic corporate cultures, you’re also demonstrating leadership that can help you protect your team from some of the toxicity, making them more effective. Happy people are productive people and genuinely not letting the food fight land on you or your team builds their loyalty and your reputation. Sometimes this means you spend a bit more energy helping them ward off the toxicity but to some degree that’s part of your job. Even in good corporate cultures leaders should be mentoring and helping run interference with other parts of the organization to help their teams get things done. In a toxic culture this becomes even more important.
One other thing to remember about a toxic corporate culture is that its not necessarily equally toxic for everyone there. Everyone has a different experience and even though “all your colleagues” are complaining, there are people there who are using it to their advantage. Be the latter and when it’s taking more than it’s giving you, leave with a clear conscious and good experience under your belt.
Good luck and when you’re exploring other opportunities, be sure to check out our career planning tips to help you.
Good luck and let us know how your career search goes!
P.S. – Have a question you’d like anonymous support on? Write me!
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I rescued a pup last Fall. His name is Loki and he’s a Pomeranian and something-or-other mix. One thing I didn’t know about a rescue dog is that they’ve often been traumatized (e.g., abusive owners, time on the streets etc.) and it takes a while for their real personalities to become apparent. This was clearly true for Loki. He was subdued to the point of being depressed when I first brought him home, but slowly his perky little personality started to emerge. He’d clearly been well loved by a family because he was house trained, allowed me to groom him and felt at home curling up among the pillows on the bed or couch. I was relieved that he didn’t require much training.
The life of a coach is a life of analogies and patterns. I’m always seeing connections between people and the things we find in our lives — like dogs! So while walking Loki recently and pondering a current client’s dilemma, I was reminded of a direct report I had a long time ago. His name was Mike, and he was my first major employee performance problem. Mike and I got along well. He was bright and self-motivated. He was thoughtful, tended to produce good work and didn’t require a lot of house training. Mike and I slipped into a comfortable working relationship very quickly. I thought all was well.
Perspectives Matter
Similar to Mike joining my team, Loki slipped into my life pretty easily and I didn’t focus as much on training him as on getting to know him and his quirks (and teaching him mine!).
Then, the first neighbor complaint: Loki barks when I’m out of the house.
Of course, my little puppy has separation anxiety leftover from the trauma of wandering the streets for weeks before being rescued. But what can I do? I’m gone when he misbehaves and when he’s around me, Loki is my dream dog.
This reminded me of my reaction the first time my boss approached me about Mike. He said that in the next reorganization the powers that be were planning to let Mike go; he had a reputation for being difficult. I wasn’t really given a choice in Mike’s fate, and I was flummoxed. I didn’t find him difficult. By contrast, I found him very easy to work with. I liked Mike, and to make matters worse for me personally, he liked doing certain reporting analyses that I didn’t have the expertise to do. The things that seemed to bother others about Mike didn’t bother me at all. But I really didn’t want to lose Mike, so I convinced my manager to give me three months to work with him. With the clock ticking, I started devising plans to help him keep his job.
Engagement Is Personal
When I learned about Loki’s bad behavior behind my back I started getting advice from dog experts. Among other things, I learned that training gives dogs a sense of confidence and reduces separation anxiety. I was a little skeptical that this would work with Loki because he seemed hard to train. Without a treat in my hand he preferred doing what dogs do, not what I wanted him to do. No, the dog experts admonished me, it’s you who’s hard to train. It’s your job to learn to train him. After some more effort I affirmed that if I didn’t have a treat in my hand, I couldn’t sustain his attention. “So keep treats handy, the dog experts said. Even though his behavior didn’t bother me, I started finding things to train him on — treats in hand! — to engage him more. I raised my expectations of him, paid attention to what motivated him and took time out of my busy schedule to focus on evolving his behavior to be more acceptable and useful for the place I live.
Turns out he’ll do almost anything for turkey bits.
Mike didn’t have any particular love for turkey, but when I sat him down to tell him he was on probation (a surprise to him too) and that I was going to help him keep his job, he was very grateful and started paying more attention. I talked to other people about what bothered them about Mike. As I talked with others, I learned that I had become lax in certain areas — allowing Mike to bring deadlines down to the wire for instance. When I thought about it I realized that Mike’s last-minute attitude about deadlines was annoying and caused me more stress than I liked, too. So we started to focus on deadlines.
Just like Loki trots alongside me happily now instead of chasing squirrels when I have turkey in my hand, Mike started coming prepared to our weekly meetings. Deadlines were met early when they could be, and when they had to be last minute everyone was informed to reduce stress. With my support Mike became more engaged with his work and attentive to building habits that made him a more reliable team member. By the end of his three month probation, the higher ups agreed Mike was on track and agreed to keep him. Mike was happy he kept his paycheck and I was happy that I didn’t have to hire a new Mike or figure out how to do those reports myself!
Proactive, Positive Support Can Save A Job
I was reminded of Mike again recently when I read an article about how Amazon has started a “Pivot” Career Ambassador program to give low performers on-the-job coaching to help them improve their skills and ability to provide value or help them find a new job. As Mike and Loki both taught me, taking a proactive and positive approach to employee performance can have a good impact on employee performance and save unnecessary turnover.
In the Amazon article there is some debate about the wisdom of investing in performance coaching for low performers. Shouldn’t we invest in high-performers instead?
Here’s my expert opinion as Mike’s boss and as an executive coach: we should invest in coaching everyone.
Just like I had slipped into complacency with Mike and his last minute deadlines, and with Loki’s squirrel chasing, most of us slip into accepting low performance from employees until it’s too late. We write people off as “untrainable and uncoachable” when it’s really we who need to learn how to train and coach. We get into avoidance patterns until someone else makes it impossible for the behavior to continue, and all too often we take out the problem on the employee (or the dog) instead of figuring out what it takes for that person to do well in that job, or help them move on to another job where they can be more successful.
Good employee performance coaching can also help retain employees with the company, if not the job. Sometimes even a trainable and coachable employee is a good fit for the company but not for the job. Sometimes they outgrow the job and need a new challenge. Why waste talent if there’s a better fit in the company? The average private sector tenure is below four years; why lose a good employee who’s outgrown the job they were hired for a few years ago if there’s a better fit in another group? Our careers are more fluid these days and Career Ambassadors can help keep talent in the company by helping them grow into new opportunities.
I think Amazon’s Career Ambassadors are a fabulous idea to help low performers figure out how to succeed or move on, but instead of focusing only on low performers, I’d suggest giving Career Ambassadors (i.e., career and effectiveness coaches) to everyone. If your company won’t let you bring in coaches for your employees, my suggestion is for you, as their manager, to take on that role with everyone on your team and get yourself a coach to help you see your own blind spots and learn to become a coach leader.
So are my neighbors still annoyed at me and my dog? The jury’s still out on whether our new training regime will calm Loki’s separation anxiety, but he is definitely more engaged and I see potential to teach him all kinds of things that will make him a more productive pet.
I managed to save Mike’s job, so I have high hopes I can save Loki too.
Let’s face it: work is work. Even the best dream job turns into a daily grind eventually. And what if you’re in a job search? Looking for a job is work, too! What can make work less work? Hint: know the answer to the question “What’s your dream job?”
Wait. You may be asking: Is it even possible to lighten your soul, seek career success and succeed at work all at once?
As part of our recent soul-lightening series of posts it’s time to take a look at the motivating power of knowing your dream job. At InPower Coaching we call it your “perfect job” because the dream isn’t about the job, it’s about you. Knowing which job would be the perfect match for your skills, motivations and goals will lighten you up and give you the energy you need to find success.
Why is it important to lighten your soul when thinking about your career? Let me tell you about my client, Terry. Terry was really good at her job and enjoyed it, but when I met her she was coming off a bad boss experience that really sapped her confidence. Her position was being eliminated and she needed income—fast. She was pretty clear on what she wanted but struggled to believe she could have it. As a result, her job search wasn’t moving fast enough for her and she was beginning to experience the panic that sets in when you start to imagine your income drying up within the next 30 days.
Let’s take a look at how taking a “perfect job” approach helped Terry in two scenarios:(more…)
Most of the time when I tell people that I am researching women and business, the conversation wanders into what I now think of as “the analysis paralysis” conundrum in which we try to suss out the why’s of women’s place in society. Here are common themes that come up.
Women are more collaborative than men because we’re genetically programmed for nurturing, so maybe it’s not natural for us to lead authoritatively and authentically? (Research says no.)
Girls don’t think it’s “cool” to be good at math, they’re used to seeing themselves objectified in the media, “insert other cultural truism here;” so how can we change social stereotypes?
Maybe mean-girl bosses are mean because they’ve had to no role models and figure there’s no cultural tolerance for more women at the top, which makes them competitive with other women they see trying to displace them – like trying to keep the alpha female position in the pack?
While interesting mental fodder, I’ve come to see this kind of discussion as unhelpful to the general dialog or for our individual career advancement challenges, because it usually leads us into explaining away the problem instead of confronting the reality and strategizing what to do about it.
Here’s a stark example a friend of mine told me about the cost of such analytical and empathetic reactions. She held a second-in-command position in an company where her second day on the job her male boss told her – to her face – that she would fail. In fact, she lasted almost two years (which everyone working with her seemed to believe was a great success under the circumstances.) After one particularly bruising disagreement that she lost rather publicly, she received emails from female colleagues within and outside the company, at her peer level and more senior, empathizing with her situation. Not one email held advice. In trying to figure out what to do about the situation, she felt betrayed by her male peers and abandoned by her female colleagues – even as they were trying to “help” her by demonstrating they, too, had faced and lost such challenges. Where was the advice on how to win next time?
To the extent we spend our time analyzing our place in business and society more than we spend strategizing actions we can take to deal with it, we’re holding ourselves prisoner to the traditional feminist narrative that holds that we’re oppressed. This only solidifies our perception that we’re oppressed. The InPowering approach to this is to accept things as they are and move to make them better. This is what I find so refreshing about talking with Gen Y women. Raised to believe in their own value, most of them start off here and don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis.
Analysis Can Give Out An Unintended Pass
There’s nothing wrong with having sensitivity to the why’s and wherefore’s of any situation, especially those which are unfair. Understanding history helps us avoid repeating it and certainly research must explore the past and highlight differences. But just like we should place limits on our empathy to help others interpersonally grow through discomfort sometimes, we must also place limits on our over-analysis at a larger level. If we – meaning women and men who are interested in fully tapping into the deep talent pool professional women represent for our economy – get stuck in the analysis, we never move out of paralysis. If we’re not careful, we explain away all that potential to the point where thanks to our analysis it can never be fully tapped. If this happens, we end up giving out a pass to all the bad behavior, thus perpetuating it.
As a blogger (I’m not sure “journalist” quite fits here), I take this responsibility for not perpetuating the helplessness that analysis paralysis can generate. That’s why at InPower Women we’re being very intentional about the new narrative that we’re developing and using, which emphasizes positive, actionable aspects of the analysis we do and report on. We are emphasizing the potential and example for women and men to work together in partnership and create stronger leadership teams that value the strengths both bring to the table. We welcome anyone who wants to write in this new narrative to join us. We are decidedly NOT going to fall into the trap of handing out passes for behavior.
A Special Place In Hell
“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women.” – Madeline Albright
Madeline has it right. Of all the analysis paralysis that makes me crazy, I have to say the discussions that excuse mean girl bosses is the one I have virtually no tolerance for. Can we please stop giving mean girl bosses special attention and just accept that a jerk is a jerk whether s/he is a woman or not?
I believe that when we can start calling on women to stop mean girl behavior instead of trying to explain it, we will have taken a big step towards accepting that women are people, and we are not all to be lauded and protected simply because of our gender. There’s a special place in hell for anyone – woman or man – who doesn’t support other people – man or woman.
Be the solution. Focus on building your own internal power so you can accomplish good things in the world. Spend enough time understanding what’s messed up to present a powerful and positive alternative and then move on following your own truth and model a better way. Don’t get stuck in the hell of trying to empathize with someone else’s dysfunction – of an individual or a society – or you are doomed to become trapped in it.
Do you go out of your way to provide strategy and advice to colleagues or spend most of your energy analyzing why things are? What habits do your colleagues and girlfriends fall into in conversation? Do you find yourself in powerless kibbutzing about the negative or powerful conversations about to make things different? Should we be easier on women? Work harder to understand them? Should we give out passes and forgive? Pass on your wisdom in comment below!
Take charge of your career development to get the job that supports your work and your life. Check out the tools and resources in the InPower Coaching Career Center.
Guide to Women in Leadership
Organizations with women in their executive suites regularly out-perform others. Yet rising female executives (and their mentors) are frustrated at how hard it is to break through the glass ceiling. In this extensive guide, Executive Coach Dana Theus shares her tried and true strategies to help women excel into higher levels of leadership and achieve their executive potential.
