I haven’t written any blogs lately because I’ve been consolidating all of my ideas into a book. It turned out to be more involved and comprehensive than I expected. Now that I am in the editing stages, I am focusing on a central theme – How women’s natural traits are the key to achieving high performance in the workplace.
This is a message we seldom hear.
Instead society is still caught up in the stereotypes and the idea that men excel in business – the way men do business is the way business should be done. But as I say in my book my first impression of the male-dominated workplace was pretty much “What the Hell?” I saw chaos and crisis management all around me.
I knew I could better and I did. And the reason I did better was because I used my female traits. I am very proud to say that I always outperformed my male colleagues. I say this, not to brag, but so women know – Our traits bring tremendous value to the workplace! Any workplace that balances male and female traits will outperform a workplace that only uses male traits.
And what is so amazing, is that when we start using our traits, performance soars immediately.
As some of you know I worked in an extremely male-dominated environment. When I started, the workplace was on course to lose $7 million. In 10 months, we were turning a nice profit of $3.2 million.
How did I achieve such a miraculous recovery?
I empowered all the women to use their female traits.
Of course I know my profession extremely well and that is important. But after trying to work through my all-male management team for three months and getting nowhere, I switched my attention to working through the women.
The women who were project engineers, project coordinators and project administrators became the leaders. The women led my male managers.
No one can tell me that female traits are not powerful. Been there, used them, got the results!
So, all of this advice that tells us that to be successful in the workplace we have to act like men, needs to go away. It is time for society to accept that women hold up half the sky. We bring our own unique traits to the workplace and add to what the men are already doing. When men and women work in balance with each other, then we hold up the entire sky.
As I’ve written my book I refined my list of male and female balancing traits. Why my book is taking me so much longer than I expected is because I am discovering how all traits interact with each other. It is not just about each set of traits balancing each other but a group of female traits working to balance a group of male traits. It is really pretty amazing. And I am in awe of how powerful women really are.
Male |
Female |
|
BLUE ZONE |
PURPLE ZONE |
PINK ZONE |
|
Autonomy |
Group | |
|
Tangibles in Action |
Abstracts in Action |
|
|
Task Expertise |
Multi-tasking |
|
|
Done! |
Done Well |
|
|
Line |
Balance |
Circle |
| Ego Protection |
Dispensable Ego |
|
|
Train |
Teach |
|
|
Stress Limits |
Stress Endurance |
|
|
Power Over Change |
Adapt to Change |
|
|
Offensively Aggressive |
Defensively Aggressive |
|
|
Energy Restraint |
Energy Projection |
For women to come into their own, we have to start by embracing who we really are. We should be proud of who we are. We are not weak, powerless or inferior in any way. We just haven’t been taught how to apply our traits in the workplace. That, I promise you, will change.
Empowered Women Know Their Value!
