Confidence is a quality that seems to distinguish men from women. Men seem to naturally have it.
But after working with so many men I know this isn’t true.
The truth is men are just better at covering up their lack of confidence.
The male-dominated workplace expects men to know what to do and how to get things done. It rewards men on this premise. Therefore, men are afraid to admit they don’t know what to do.
As a woman working with and supervising men, I had to become very good at detecting when men were giving me a line of BS and hiding the fact that they really didn’t know what to do.
I also had to be very assertive in calling them out on it whenever my BS detector went off. I had to do so without criticism or making them feel incompetent because that alienated men. It was learned dance that began with me just saying “No, that’s not going to work” and holding my ground when faced with (sometimes intense) challenges.
As women, we need to understand that most men derive their sense of self and their value from their expertise in their job or profession. If their expertise is questioned, then so is their right to be in their job.
How many of us expect our boss to have all the answers?
And how many of us have had the experience of asking our boss what we should do and he just throws out an answer – sometimes accompanied with anger and yelling. We feel like he is just trying to get rid of us (and he is before we discover his lack of expertise.)
When we go and do what we were told to do, it often fails and we don’t know what to do. We know we certainly can’t go back and ask our boss again. While we may get mad at our boss, we should be looking in the mirror instead.
The fundamental problem is that we were conditioned to take direction from above and not conditioned to problem solve. We readily accept this conditioning because it’s easier. It gets us off the hook.
This is the attitude we need to change.
Teaching ourselves and our workplaces to problem solve is one of the greatest challenges we need to take on because many male-dominated workplaces would rather just fumble around making mistakes, wasting time and money than admit they don’t know what to do.
Admitting we (as in ourselves) don’t know what to do is the first step in problem solving. But too many women have been conditioned by the male-dominated workplace to be afraid to admit they don’t know what to do. This is a cycle we have to break – and can break.
Unlike men, women are more open to admitting they don’t know what to do because we expect other women to step up and help us. We naturally collaborate!
This makes us a gazillion times better at problem solving than men. And it is why women must take on a leadership role in teaching our workplace to problem solve.
If there are just a few women or many women in the workplace, they can start by choosing a problem and taking the lead to solve the problem on their own – no one needs to ask the boss’s permission. Just do it.
Women draw men in by asking the men questions within their area of expertise. (Men love to share their expertise.) Before you know it, men are engaging in the collaboration process. Men soon start bringing their problems to women to help them solve (it helps men hide their lack of expertise from the rest of their male colleagues.) Before you know it, the whole thing grows organically and changes the workplace.
I’ve successfully done this in many of my workplaces and it is a wonderful experience.
When I was the only woman in my workplace, I still did this on my own. I admitted what I didn’t know and I asked men questions based on their expertise. It took longer to get the collaboration going because I was the only collaboration leader between the men. On the plus side, my expertise grew quickly because I was drawn a variety of issues.
And yes, there were a couple of jerks, who shall remain nameless, who wanted to mock me for asking a question. But my response was to call their bluff, “Well, why don’t you just step up and tell us all what to do…and we will see how well it turns out.”
I learned this was a very powerful challenge – because – confidence is easy to project when you aren’t going to be held accountable for the outcome. When men are held accountable, it’s a whole different story. (There’s a lot of silence.)
As women our power won’t ever come from projecting fake confidence. It will always come from acknowledging what we don’t know and leading our workplace through the problem-solving effort to figure it out. This is what prepares women to move up and take on a greater leadership roles.
Empowered Women Lead In Problem-Solving
Sign up to receive more empowering articles
Checkout my book to understand the The Value of How Women Think in the Workplace
Follow The Woman In The Room on Facebook