She welcomed the interviewer into her cluttered office. There were stacks of papers on the desk and on the floor nearby, so the interview was conducted at the adjacent round table.
In 2 1/2 hours she portrayed corporate life from her vantage point: a 36- year-old woman who has a husband and two children, goes to church, is active in the community and in 15 years with her company has worked up to general management. Her stories covered three jobs, starting with one she held at about age 23:
”My first managerial job was a three- to four-month assignment for which there was no precedent. It was a trial. They picked three women, all young like me, and we wrote methods and procedures. We expected we`d hand them over, but once that part was done, we were each assigned to head up a part of the operation, to implement the methods over the summer.
”I supervised 300 people. I recruited college kids for the summer; I had to fire someone for the first time; there were braless women, drug use. I didn`t see light that summer.
”My boss for the first three months was wonderful. She was an old-school nurturing type who had made it to first-level supervisor after years and years with the company. I learned how to manage people, to be unafraid of confrontation, unafraid to praise. I learned who to trust.
”(About a year later) I was challenged to take a nontraditional job in engineering. A manager two levels higher said I couldn`t do it, people wouldn`t take me seriously. He told my prospective boss, in front of me, ”I think you`re taking a big chance with this one, but it`s up to you.”
”That forced me to take stock. Do I prove him wrong? Do I stay with the company? I took the job. I wasn`t confident, but the challenge was exciting. I believed my competence would show. It was the first time I encountered discrimination. It was a live-or-die situation.
”My first project was to solve a technical problem. I had to get people to teach me without resenting me. One male peer gave me to one of his subordinates. ”He`ll help you,” he said. He wouldn`t even talk to me once he discovered I was a woman. I learned how to present myself in a nonthreatening way without compromising my sense of self.
”My boss told me I had to put in my time in the field. I went into a marketing role at an affiliate company. I had no background in marketing. I didn`t understand the affiliate`s structure, and I didn`t know anyone there who could help me. I couldn`t even read the company`s phone directory!
”I took a cut in pay. I was very frightened by the challenge, and I wasn`t sure I could get back. I had to trust my boss. The year I spent there was the worst year of my life. People thought that I took the job from someone there. I was the only woman in the department. No one helped me. And there were malicious things done to me in the first weeks. They took the casters off my chair and rigged my desk drawer.
”I cried a lot, walking from the train the three blocks to my house. During the day I learned and did what I was supposed to do. I went outside my group to learn what I could. I never admitted that they were getting to me. I was determined to get out successfully, and I did. I was offered a promotion out of there.
”(A later career move was) a quantum leap, level-wise. It was the first time I felt I might not be able to handle the job. Others at that level had experience, and I respected them. I had to catch up. I was afraid I wouldn`t be accepted. I was so young, plus I was the first woman at that level.
”I worked until 10 at night. I learned my bosses were people like me, with the same fears–competence, acceptance, whom to trust. I called them if I wanted help, and I called them to clarify their requests. I didn`t use memos. I learned to cut through the bureaucracy and save time.
”You need to be willing to diversify. Take challenges that will round you. Take anything that will help you understand how the business works. Knowledge is an important component of success, especially for a woman.
”There`s no formula for success. The total package needs to be right. It`s not just intelligence. The package includes integrity, judgment about when to fight and being someone senior managers can picture in the
boardroom.”
This executive and the other 75 women we interviewed about their experiences had many stories to tell and some strong feelings about what it takes for a woman to succeed in business at their level. The lessons they learned represent developmental leaps that they made to cope with the demands placed on them. There are six developmental leaps (or lessons) that pervade the experience and advice of these 76 executives to such a great extent that we believe they are what female executives must do to succeed in a large corporation.
— Lesson 1: Learn the ropes.
Executive careers often are stopped because of undocumentable, even unexplainable factors. ”She just never fit in,” the executives murmur to themselves as another high-potential executive disappears.
A revelation for some executives in our study was that doing a good job
–being smart and working hard–wasn`t enough to propel them up or keep them from derailing. They came to understand the importance of fitting in.
”Believe me,” a retired CEO advised us recently at an informal gathering,
”what can be put on paper doesn`t make the difference in selecting high-level executives.”
Women begin with a disadvantage because they are an unknown commodity and are clearly different. Those who succeed find ways to be similar, to minimize differences, to become more familiar, predictable, safe. They identify what constitutes the narrow band of acceptable behavior in their company, and they adjust their actions and attitudes to fit. In short, they learn the ropes.
They did much observing, and they actively solicited feedback on their own performance and on company expectations in general. Interacting with senior executives in their companies turned out to be the key to identifying what was expected of them.
There were five general elements that described the narrow band of acceptable behavior:
1. Women executives are expected to be nonthreatening. Women trying to hide their femaleness by acting like men, and women making their femininity a factor to be reckoned with, are the extremes to be avoided. Often the woman has to figure out what that means, because top management knows it only when they see it.
2. Women need to do well in a position that has credibility in their company. The credible jobs often are those in operations, management jobs with profit-and-loss responsibility, or key roles in sales and marketing. These are often the same jobs that are used ”to separate the men from the boys,”
according to our insiders. The jobs seen as most central or most difficult differ from company to company. Therefore, the challenge is not only to perform well but also to indentify and obtain key jobs.
3. Women need to succeed at managing certain people, men and minorities in particular. This was cited as a factor in success for men as well as women in our studies. If men will work for a woman, particularly men with seniority or those who once were her peers, then she must be good, the premise seems to be.
4. Women must learn to trust their superiors. One savvy insider said it bluntly in describing some fatal flaws: ”Being unable to trust others, to put your career in their hands–this is the greatest weakness of people.” Some top managers may feel the need to be in control, to be the guru dispensing knowledge, gatekeepers of the top floor. They want to be asked for permission and for counseling, so that it is clear who is in charge.
5. Women must learn not to expect too much. When describing the biggest challenge they ever faced, six executives said that it was simply being a female executive. As women, they realized that they would be permitted to fit in only in certain respects, only as it would benefit the company and those in charge of it.
— Lesson 2: Take control of your career.
Many women have had to realize sometime during their lives that they would like a career, or that it was even a possibility.
The men and women in our studies realized in their 30s that they needed to take control of their careers; the realization occurred when they were being blocked or set back in their jobs. The men reacted when they were passed over for a promotion or when they discovered that they had been trapped in a dead-end job. They often took aggressive action that won them the result they wanted.
The executive women experienced similar situations, but their wider array of career problems fueled a need to take their career by the scruff of the neck and drag it forward. Women`s career problems included not only being passed over or left on the shelf, but also being banned from certain jobs, not receiving equal pay for equal work and other factors that they saw as overt discrimination and had to handle by themselves. The appropriate tactics weren`t obvious; corporate norms might allow fast-track men to fight and fume to move their career along, but corporate expectations of women, as noted earlier in this chapter, were more confining.
As noted earlier, managing people and getting the right kind of job are two crucial accomplishments that women must tackle if they want to move up in the corporation. Yet these two opportunites are more difficult to find if you`re a woman. Women have to wait longer for a position with supervisory responsibilities. The median age at which our executive women got their first management job was 29, compared to under 25 for men.
Getting into the business mainstream was a key career move, perhaps much more important than the increase in salary.
— Lesson 3: Build confidence.
People expect to see confidence in top executives. It seems that executives are impressive and, to some extent, easy to be with at least partly because others see them as having confidence in themselves.
Self-confidence is an enabling characteristic, a means to an end for many executives. It allows them to charge ahead, to risk, to take on the unfamiliar. True self-confidence may be a key to one`s willingness to listen to feedback, to admit mistakes and to accept fallibility along with one`s strengths. Self-confidence is particularly important for women aspiring to executive heights because image seems to play a bigger role in how women are evaluated and women must counter the popular view that they are not as confident as men and not as willing to take risks.
Some people have argued that success itself is the most powerful source of confidence.
The women executives in our study built their confidence in several ways: 1. They took on a risky new job and performed well in it. Perhaps women need to break out of their field more often than men to find the kind of challenge they need to feel good about their achievements.
2. They had helpful bosses who encouraged risk-taking.
3. They were exposed to a broad range of managers and found that they often compared favorably. They learned that their skills, knowledge or values sometimes exceeded those of others who were equally successful or more successful.
— Lesson 4: Rely on others.
To be successful executives need others` help to get the job done and to receive recognition for it, to obtain good assignments, to learn how the system works, to gain acceptance and to cope with the pressures. Because different people are able and willing to provide only certain kinds of assistance (and perhaps only for a limited time), a number of executives recommended strongly that women develop a broad network of supporters. This network can move executives along, but it also provides the all-important feedback on performance and on how an executive is perceived by others in the company.
Management of subordinates is an often-mentioned factor in success and derailment. One of the most important realizations in an executive`s career is that her main responsibility is to enable others to do the job.
Learning to manage people usually means managing subordinates, but getting others to cooperate also was important, according to our executives. As the jobs got larger, their reliance on other people grew.
Managing others` perceptions of them, given that stereotypes and expectations abound, is critical for women. They must also get feedback to learn what they are good at, along with what to improve and how. Women seem to be at a disadvantage in both regards. Constructive feedback is a rare commodity for anyone in a corporation, but the women we interviewed generally believe they receive even less than men.
Successful executives have made tough choices about how much assistance to accept and from whom. These are difficult judgment calls because, on one hand, senior executives expect you to trust them, and on the other hand, entrusting your career to someone else can be dangerous. The women we interviewed did not always make the right choice, but they learned from their experiences and sharpened their sense of who could help them and who could hurt them.
