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Is there a woman alive who hasn’t made a suggestion to a man or a group of men, only to be blown off?
The response you get is: “No, we got this handled. We know what we are doing.”
Then you think to yourself, “No, you don’t.”
You think about all the things they aren’t taking into consideration and how things aren’t going to work out nearly as well as they claim it will. You know they will claim there were “unintended consequences” but you know they were completely preventable if they only listened to you.
Some of us just walk away from these situations, rolling our eyes and muttering something about how foolish men can be under our breath.
Some of us get offended and chalk it up to sexual biases.
I have a different reaction that respects men’s highly prized right to decide for themselves what they think is best.
My response is,
“You guys have the right to not listen to me. That doesn’t mean I am wrong. It just means I reserve the right to remind you when things don’t work out as you expect, that you should have listened to me.
I reserve the right to say, ‘I told you so.'”
I don’t think there is a man alive who doesn’t know the fact of life, that when a woman tells him something he should listen. It is just that every so often (or frequently) men want to believe that this particular situation is that magical exception to that fact of life.
It isn’t.
Working in a male-dominated industry I got to say, “I told you so” a lot. Sometimes several times a day.
Every so often, I walked in on a group of male colleagues as they discussed how they could hide from me the fact that I was right and they should have listened to me. I enjoyed those moments when I got to be smug.
On one of my projects, the men were so determined to prove that this was the project where they never had to listen to me that they blew off everything I said. If I said they should turn right, they deliberately turned left.
They continued to blow me off for months. It wasn’t long before I had many opportunities to say “I told you so.”
I said, “I told you so” so many times that eventually I stopped having to say it. I began just pointing to myself as if to say, “Who was right? Oh, that was Me!”
They still didn’t learn.
Actually, they did learn. They just got very stubborn and refused to concede. So, we kept going.
My motions became less dramatic. Eventually, all I had to do was walk into the room and look at them. They hung their heads in shame saying, “We know.”
It took two years for them to concede. And it cost the project millions of dollars.
Later in my career I got a lot more assertive.
If a man tried to blow me off I gave him a look and said, “DO NOT blow me off. Listen to me. I am right and I know it. If you ignore me and things don’t work out, I will climb on top of this desk and announce to everyone that, ‘I told you so.’ Is that what you want?”
The wise ones conceded.
More than once when they listened we later got to see how my advice prevented a major mistake or catastrophe. In those moments I wasn’t shy about saying, “Aren’t you glad you listened to me?”
Watching me, other women in my workplaces also got more assertive, exercising their right to be right and to say, “I told you so.” Together we changed the workplace dynamic – men not only listened, they ran things past us and sought out our advice.
Empowered Women Know When They Are Right
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