I was going to publish another article but just saw that the Secretary of Defense is going to announce a plan to open all combat positions to women. I’m glad women will now have the opportunities I couldn’t.
When I was in the Air Force women weren’t allowed to be any “combat” position. I was offered a pilot slot but turned it down because I couldn’t fly fighters. Women were limited to transport and refueling aircraft which meant we had to either “haul trash” or “pass gas.” Neither was appealing to me.
As an engineer, men could be part of the “combat engineers” which to me sounded like a great adventure because they got to do all the really cool stuff. As a woman, sorry, no can do. However, I was sent to the training and I was either the first or second female officer to go through the course. The instructors literally wanted me to sit in the tent and watch. I refused. I wanted to direct the entire exercise scenario because I had experience doing it back at my base. I was told “No.” So they sent me out to the field where they expected me wilt under the Florida heat and humidity.
In our scenario we had to recover from a major strike. It began as chaos and only grew worse. Very hot and frustrated I grabbed a radio out of an NCO’s hand and started talking to the “director” about the situation. I described the scene and what I thought the priorities should be. The director was confused. He was removed from the scene and couldn’t picture what was going on. Eventually I started directing from the field. It was multi-tasking Nirvana which is why I always loved that role.
Afterwards, I went up to the instructors and told them that for the next scenario I was going to be the director. I was and the exercise went very smoothly. The instructors who looked down on me the first two days were now suddenly very friendly and dragged me off to meet the commander to talk about how well I did even though I was starving and dying to take a shower.
For the third exercise I didn’t direct, I instructed the man who was the director.
What I noticed was the difference in my perspective about being the director from the men’s. The scenario was set up with the director removed from the action because men believed that is how you direct – to manage the big picture you have to be removed from it. For women, to understand the big picture we do better when we are part of it. For the first scenario I was in the field, amongst all the action so I understood what was happening. For the second scenario when I was removed from the field I still kept asking questions and picturing what was happening to make myself feel like I was amongst the action. When I instructed the next director I tried to teach him to be part of the action and not removed from it.
To their credit the instructors understood exactly what I was doing. After the third exercise we had a long discussion. Because of their previous roles the instructors were used to being in the field and part of the action. They were uncomfortable being in the command tent and like me really didn’t get it as to how you can direct something without being a part of it. We talked a lot about communication and how during the first exercise I described the scene so they understood what was going on even though the director who hadn’t been out in the field was clueless. What we really discussed was blending male and female perspectives to improve how we approached the scenario. Until I came out there they didn’t know what was possible. They didn’t believe that a woman could actually enhance the exercise.
That training only intensified my desire to be part of Red Horse which was the Air Force’s combat engineers. I knew I would excel at it. That Florida training proved it. But I couldn’t. Every few months the assignment people would call and ask me if I would go to Korea. I always had the same reply “Can I be in Red Horse?” Their answer was “No” so my answer to them was “No.”
I am glad women now have the opportunity to enhance combat roles. There may be only a few women who are qualified for the various roles but I have no doubt they will make a significant positive impact. It’s been a long time coming.
Empowered Women Have the Opportunity to Fulfill Any and All Roles
How do you recharge yourself after a stressful day at work?
I used to answer that question by saying I go running or I go cycling. I also love massages and reflexology. In one high stress job I got a pedicure every 4 weeks. But in thinking about it that is how I got rid of negative energy which is different than how I take on positive energy. There is a distinction between the two and we need understand that.
So how do I recharge? Well sometimes it is through cycling – I ride out in scenic areas and explore. I don’t care about how fast I am going or if I am climbing enough hills. It is a very different experience than cranking away hard and fast.
I also work around my house – my house was a bit of a fixer upper when I bought it. While the inside is almost fully renovated the outside landscaping needs constant attention so I can always go out there and “play”. I walk in the mornings checking plants to see where the irrigation needs adjustment and to see which plants the bunnies, chipmunks and jhavelina made a meal of. As I walk around I am joined by the hummingbirds who literally chat in your ear. I also have hawks nesting nearby who swoop down to see what critters I send scurrying as I walk around. It’s really cool to see them up close. There is also the roadrunner who perches in the trees and is very noisy in his mating calls. But by the birdfeeder amongst the doves, finches and quail, I also get the brightest reddest cardinals I have ever seen. And just as I am writing this my dog lets me know the coyotes are sauntering across the driveway to return to their daytime resting area. But the best part is that every night I have that perfect expansive view of the desert sunset which when I am home I always take a moment to enjoy. I think all of this is pretty cool and it recharges me.
Even though I enjoy the beauty of many landscapes, I love living in the desert where I can see mountains in every direction. Some people enjoy the ocean or the lake. For others it is the vast plains of the Midwest. What is important is that we recharge ourselves and where we recharge ourselves from.
We shouldn’t look to other people to recharge us – we should not take their energy and use it for ourselves. Unfortunately this is often the case in the male-dominated workplace. We go to work and instead of being energized we become depleted. And while we go home and rest and attempt to de-stress, we don’t always recharge. And it is important that every woman who works in the male-dominated workplace finds her way to draw energy from the infinite supply of the earth’s energy.
The earth is our energy source. Connecting with the earth was an essential part of spirituality in many ancient and Indigenous cultures. Native American cultures believe in Mother Earth and Father Sky but western culture through its separation of science and spirituality has estranged most of us from our spiritual connection to the earth. The earth has become merely an object that is to be used for our own purposes. We no longer consider earth as a living entity so we don’t see it as having energy. We have forgotten that Mother Earth provides us with everything we need and nurtures every level of our human existence. And as a result we believe we have to pull energy from each other instead of the world around us.
This may sound truly corny but whenever I think of this subject I am reminded of the opening scene in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. We all know the feeling we feel when we watch this scene and listen to the music and we know this is why the movie touches us so much. The symbolism in this scene captures a woman completely connected to herself and the world. Watch the clip, look at the scenes and listen to the lyrics.
Julie Andrews comes into the scene opens her arms and twirls – she is connecting with the universe – she is both taking in the energy of the hills and sharing her energy. This is what women do. When we are happy we throw open our arms and let our positive energy radiate out. For as much as feminism wants to put down the concepts of True Womanhood, they had it right – women shine bright light out into the world! And we have the power to recharge that light as often as we need.
When Julie is done connecting with the universe she then puts her hands in her pockets symbolizing that her energy is fully replenished.
“The hills are alive with the sound of music with songs they have sung for a thousand years. The hills fill my heart with the sound of music. My heart wants to sing every song it hears.” It is the hills (nature/universe) that fills her heart with the positive energy that she in return wants to express without limit or boundaries. It is through women that the universe shares and spreads its positive energy.
“My heart wants to beat like the wings of the birds that rise from the lake to the trees.” Women have the power of making connections and become part of the nature/the universe. It is through our need to connect that we rise up.
“My heart wants to sigh like a chime that flies from a church on a breeze.” She wants to say what is in her heart but she doesn’t need to be loud or forceful. When speaks from her heart the message is naturally carried and spread.
“To laugh like a brook when it trips and falls over stones on its way.” We will have trips and falls as we journey through life but we laugh at them and don’t let them stop us. We just keep flowing and bubbling along on our journey.
“To sing through the night like a lark who is learning to pray.” We don’t give power to fear but learn to ask for strength.
“I go to the hills when my heart is lonely. I know I will hear what I’ve heard before. My heart will be blessed with the sound of music and I’ll sing once more.” It is from our natural connection to the hills and nature that we find our strength and replenish our energy. We don’t get it from men or even other people. When women connect one-on-one with the universe, the universe will give us what we need.
So next time you are feeling depleted, play this. Oh what the heck – play it loud, twirl and sing!
Instead of a blog, let’s get your thoughts. I stumbled across this webpage and immediately thought it represented a lot of what I discuss. Follow the link and give me your first reaction. Conference Room Training.
What was your first reaction?
Mine was “Woah!” this is a male-dominated conference room! I bet this company is in the Blue Zone! I understand what they are trying to portray with the photo but I don’t think my reaction is in line with it.
I was immediately drawn to the guy up front doing the talking because he is using the Power Seat. Notice he is not sitting at the table like women are told to do but pushed back as far as he can against the wall. Notice all the space he has in front of him – he is commanding the room. There is no doubt his ideas are being heard. I know I picked up on this so fast because it reminded me of me in a meeting.
If you want to know what the Power Seat looks like – there it is. If a person was sitting where the projector is at the head of the table then this picture would show the complete power seat and meeting configuration.
What also struck me is that this is on their careers page. As a woman, does this company look inviting to you? The guy who is talking is pointing. How does that make you feel if you were looking for a job with this company?
By now you’ve noticed there is only one woman in the room. And where is she sitting? She is not in a power position but more of a learning position. At least she is not far back in the corner, notice there is another man in back there.
Who are the power players? The two guys sitting directly across from the speaker in the I-am-listening-to-what-you-are-saying-and-judging-how-it-affects-my-status pose. Did you notice how similar those guys look? Notice the other guy sitting next to them – he looks like a junior version. What does that say to you about the company?
Notice these guys are sitting with their back against the wall with no one behind them. This makes me question the amount of trust there is between them and the rest of the people in the room. Their position also doesn’t allow them to take command – to me they looked trapped in their position which makes me question if they are trapped in their roles in the company. What does that say about the company?
How about the guy in the dark blue shirt who is standing up? He is slightly aggressive and ready to pounce because he has ideas and he is not about to let the speaker steam roll over his ideas. He will be heard which is why he is standing. The chair between him and the speaker is what is moderating him from pouncing.
You probably didn’t miss the other guy who needs hard convincing – he is the big guy in the middle of the back table. He is sitting forward and definitely ready to voice his opposition to what the speaker is saying. I noticed him pretty quick because he looks very much like someone I worked with and I can read his expression.
Did you notice that just about everyone is where a blue shirt? Start tracking what is going on in your office when guys wear blue shirts – especially the long sleeve bottom up shirts like the two guys against the wall. To me this shirt always means – I am open to listening today but I am still formal and not giving up my position. In other words, just because I am listening, don’t think I am going to give your opinion as much weight as mine.
Did you notice the one guy in the red shirt? He intrigues me. If I was in this room listening to the speaker, that is where I would be sitting – power seat number 2. He can see the room and he has space to push back and claim floor space. He is in a counter position to the speaker. Actually, if I were in that room, I would probably be standing. If I agreed with the speaker I would be projecting support. If I disagreed I would be joining with the other guy who is standing and ensuring our objections are heard.
If you have never been in a male-dominated conference room, this picture is a great representation of what it looks like. Really think about your observations and how it made you feel. This is what you need to do in every meeting – read the room! Understanding the room, is critical to not being intimidated by it and giving yourself the confidence to take a leading position in the meeting.
Empowered women are not intimidated by the male-dominated conference room. – they read it!
I’ve probably mentioned this before but my biggest pet peeve at work is that people can’t problem solve. Working in the construction industry where we come across problems on a daily basis this is especially frustrating. Looking through some old notes this week, I found some examples of problems that were difficult to solve until I got some women involved.
In the male-dominated workplace when a problem arises, solving the problem can take a distant back seat to being a competition of status. The first concern is who is to blame for the problem. In the autonomous, expertise driven Blue Zone, a problem occurred because someone did something wrong. Watching men try to assign blame to each other is literally like watching a game of hot potato played around the conference table. What they fail to understand is that the problem arose out of complexity and the inability of the male-dominated workplace to adequately deal with complex issues that require the integration of three or more parties. No one person or team is to blame – they way men operate is to blame.
Once blame is assigned to either someone who isn’t present or no longer with the company, then attention is turned to the generation of ideas on how to solve the problem. I love this part! Every man must voice a solution or opinion or risk being considered irrelevant. Some of the ideas can be fairly far fetched but at least he said something. Over a period of time men will start dropping their idea in favor of adopting another man’s idea until there are two or three solutions left. Now it becomes really interesting as they try to decide on solution. Picking a solution really about picking a winner but the problem is that there is a 900 lb gorilla in the room – they know neither of the solutions is a complete solution. The reason they problem occurred in the first place was due to a lack of coordination or integrating all parties. Those same issues are preventing them from coming up with a complete solution. If left to their own devices then no solution is accepted. The problem just lingers on and on and on.
An even worse outcome is when the men convince themselves a half-baked solution will work and charge full speed ahead down this path. This always winds up generating new compounding problems that in my experience take an inordinant amount of time and energy to untangle and resolve. So I am always glad when they decide to do nothing instead.
Unlike other people I tell women not to jump in while every man is busy voicing his opinion. Instead just listen to the ideas. Then when the discussion simmers down and the men are vying for their idea to be deemed the winner that is when you start speaking up. As women we are better at seeing the big picture. By listening to all of the ideas, you start putting together the big picture. It is like working a jig saw puzzle. You know what information you have and you know there are missing pieces – you don’t know exactly what they are but you know something about what they look like. So you start asking questions and integrating the ideas. The men will continue to voice their ideas, if they have any – and that is a big if. The missing information is often information no one at the table. So now instead of the problem just lingering, there is a path forward.
In my experience when it comes to problem solving in the male-dominated workplace men are good at generating the basic building blocks of ideas and women are good at assembling the blocks and driving the group to a decision. This is a natural skill all women should practice and become very comfortable with. Start doing this within your own peer group and you will find that the men are receptive. Then as you grow in confidence you will find yourself doing the same thing in meetings with more senior managers. We often make the mistake thinking that senior managers have better decision making skills than our peers but they often fall into the same trap. Speaking up in front of senior managers and helping them come to a conclusion on a decision is a great way to get noticed.
Having problem solving and decision making skills are the most important skills to have in business so those are what you need to hone. A lot of your male peers will concentrate on building their expertise in the profession or trade and keep a narrow focus. Women don’t do that, we always keep a wide perspective. As a woman, you want to take the expertise of your peers and continuously bring it all together for planning, decision making and problem solving. When you build that expertise, you are no longer in competition with your male peers, you compliment their skills. This is also the foundation of leadership and you prepare yourself for larger leadership positions.
Empowered women are leaders who use their inherent female traits to compliment the traits of their male colleagues for the betterment of the company.
I can’t believe I haven’t written about this yet because out of all the topics I can think of, this is the topic I deal with the most – people using company cell phones, computers, office, desks and file cabinets as if they are their own personal property.
I think I kept pushing it off because I kept thinking that people have learned to keep personal and professional separate. But they haven’t.
Years ago, my employees believed that our company couldn’t look into phone records, computer usage or even go into an office or cubicle without their consent. I had to inform them “Sorry, it is all company property and the company can and will go through it whenever they want.”
Management goes through computer usage, emails and phone records more often than most people think. Yes, Big Brother is active – scanning and digging for dirt on employees.
If you have dirty little secrets and you think you can hide them on your work devices, think again.
Management will discover them.
Men are particularly bad about using company computers and cell phones to hide their secrets.
I got a phone call from the accounting department about a few employees cell phone data usage. According to the cell phone carrier, the data could only be explained by downloading movies. That didn’t make sense. I knew these guys are working and not watching movies all day. Why would they download movies on their cell phone to watch at home?
Call me naïve!
When one of the guys quit, his cell phone sat on my desk for a few days. Alerts kept going off. There was a long string of text messages with a link to a porn site as new little videos were loaded.
Many people don’t think about it but when you get a company cell phone, the number was used before by another employee. At one company I was given a used phone number and started getting weird texts from a woman. At first I thought she was texting the wrong number. Then she got angry because I didn’t reply. It took me a couple of days to figure out that the former employee was having an affair with this woman. When he came back to work for the company and found out that I had his old phone number, he was embarrassed!
Companies routinely monitor cell phone bills and look for employees who go through a lot of minutes. If there are excess minutes, the company requests the detailed bill with all the numbers of incoming and outgoing calls. Then it is just a matter of dialing the unrecognized numbers. Management finds out who is going through a bankruptcy, collections and has legal problems.
Generally I don’t dig into computer usage unless there is a performance issue with an employee. If an employee minimized their screen every time I walk or stop by, you bet I am going to look into it. I want to know what they are doing instead of working.
I learned when I got my first work computer in the mid 80’s to befriend the system administrators. I thought it was always pretty amazing what they could do from behind the scenes. While it used to be difficult and expensive to have monitoring programs, today, any company can shadow your computer any time without you even knowing it. If your computer is on, it can be monitored. Even away from the office.
Don’t ever think you can hide how you are using your company computer!
And don’t think any of your emails are private. Your email account can be loaded onto anyone else’s computer and they have full access. They can even send emails from your account.
The good news is you can catch on when someone is monitoring you. Outlook tends to get a little glitchy especially if you keep thousands of emails in your inbox. So if you’re having problems with your email and no one else is, don’t be surprised if it is being monitored.
All of this is important because managers use work computers and cell phones to look for dirt on employees.
That is how I got turned onto this whole issue – I overheard managers talking about how they were going through an employee’s email and phone records to see what they could find because they were mad at him. Management knows that if they want to find dirt to document or substantiate their claims against an employee, then the computer is an excellent place to start.
After hearing that, I made sure I never put anything personal on my work computer and I bought a personal cell phone.
I’ve carried a work cell phone and a personal cell phone for years. I keep them very separate and distinct. I don’t give out my work cell phone number to friends and I don’t give out my personal cell phone number to work colleagues. With the exception of my daughters’ phone numbers under ICE, I don’t keep any personal phone numbers on my work phone. I don’t load apps for games, social media or my bank. I don’t load my personal email accounts. I make it so anyone who goes through my work cell phone, learns very little about my personal life.
I treat my work computer the same way. I don’t load my personal email account into Outlook or even access through the internet. I minimize the use of my work computer for anything personal. Years ago if I was going on an extended business trip I used to carry my personal computer too. Fortunately smart phones, iPads and thumb drives have replaced the need to carry a separate personal computer.
Also keep your work devices 100% professional. Don’t send snarky texts or emails. If you aren’t willing to stand up and make the comment verbally, then don’t send it.
My objective was very simple: I made sure that anyone who went through my work computer or cell phone only saw work. Dull, boring, professional work.
Always remember that after you leave your company your phone and computer will be reused. But before it is, everything on your computer will be loaded onto another system or backup drive so others can access it.
Don’t be like the guy who used his work computer as his personal computer while going through a messy divorce. He kept all of his personal documents on the computer and used his work email to correspond with his attorney. Every detail of his divorce and personal finances got scattered throughout the company systems.
And don’t think deleting is a safe guard either. It can all be easily restored.
I extend the separation of professional and personal to Linkedin and Facebook respectively.
I am connected with only a few former co-workers on Facebook. I don’t recommend you connect with current co-workers on Facebook – actually let me rephrase that – as a manager I implore you not to connect with your co-workers on Facebook. Personal issues and drama will get dragged into the workplace and cause problems. It will not reflect well on you.
Unless you build the barriers and the separation, personal issues and drama have a way of seeping into the workplace. There are a lot of people, including (male) managers who are titillated by drama. If you leave the door open, even a crack they will walk right through it. Even worse, there are a lot of managers who get off on creating drama as a way to sidetrack people from their own poor management issues. Don’t be their source. You will be used and pay the price.
I used to think that I took a pretty extreme position on this issue but as I went higher in the management ranks my conviction to the absolute separation of personal and professional has only increased. If you value your career and plan on moving up, you have to consciously build barriers and separation between personal and professional.
In this super connected world, people are always looking for access to places they don’t belong and for an advantage they can use to advance themselves. I know my strict policy has save me a lot of problems especially as I am breaking the glass ceiling and walking through the door of the All Boy’s Club.
The blog-o-sphere is full of articles right now telling women how unfair the male-dominated workplace is towards women. We hear about how much harder we work but get fewer rewards, pay and promotions. We hear that women are viewed as abrasive and bossy. We hear that if we are not bossy, then we are timid and don’t project self-confidence. We hear that if women are confronted about their “poor behavior” we respond emotionally and irrationally. We hear that our male co-workers manterrupt us and take credit for our ideas. We hear that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
The overall message out there is that the world is working against women. The more subtle message is that we are victims of the male-dominated workplace.
My message to you is that you are not a victim and that you cannot view the male-dominated workplace as being against you. If you do you will never get anywhere!
I know all of the difficulties of being a woman in the male-dominated workplace. This past week I was reminded again that I’ve never had the title of Sr. Project Manager even though I have carried 5 large projects at once and been in charge of a $100 million project which by any industry standards warrants the title of Sr. Project Manager. While I was carrying the 5 projects, I had the company check my pay against the other Project Managers of my level and found that I was the lowest paid by 20%. I was not compensated with a pay increase but only an additional stipend while I worked on those projects that brought me up to par with the average pay of my male colleagues.
I’ve even been given a bonus of a pedicure and manicure for myself and my daughters while all of the men got trips for their families. I had the same manager distribute the graphic write-up of a sexual harassment complaint to other managers who stopped him from including it as an attachment to a larger complaint to a client.
I’ve been back-stabbed, front-stabbed and sabotaged by younger male colleagues overly-eager to take my job.
When the young men take me on and try to take over my job, I’ve learned to step aside and tell them to “go ahead and give it a try.” Each and every one of them has come back with the same words “I didn’t realize how much you do!” I take my job back and in return I get their respect.
I can empathize and share all kinds of stories with women who want to show that the male-dominated workplace is unfair. But I never let that hold me back. I didn’t let it affect my attitude about who I am or what I can accomplish. I didn’t let it erode my self-confidence. I know what I can do, I know that being a woman in a male-dominated workplace is an advantage – that I can outperform any of my male peers using the techniques I talk about on this website.
It’s all about attitude. I heard something on TV today about how men need to change. I don’t believe I can wait for men “to get the message” and change the workplace. (I will be retired and buried before that happens!) My attitude is that I and we, as women, already have the power to change the workplace – we just have to choose to exercise it.
Choose your attitude. You can be a victim, a passive bystander or a leader. I have always chosen to be a leader and I believe all women can be leaders in the male workplace. I believe the male-dominated workplace needs us to be leaders. And I also believe we will be rewarded.
In my career I have not focused on how I was treated – I focused on performance, making things happen and providing results. This is why I figured out how as a woman to out-perform my male peers, in ways that are difficult for them to match. My attitude is that no one can take away my accomplishments. Oh, and yes early in my career a jealous manager decided not to write me up for an award. My response to him was “I didn’t do all that I did so I could get a medal. And not getting a medal doesn’t change what I accomplished.” I own my accomplishments, they give me confidence in what I can achieve and that is what matters.
So, please don’t buy into the whole the workplace is unfair to women mantra. If you do, it can easily become an excuse that deters you from leading your workplace. Believing you are helpless is how you hold yourself back, fail to speak your truths, fail to live up to your values and fail to be responsible for the betterment of your community and workplace. And as a woman in the male-dominated workplace, your responsibility is to project positive energy and provide leadership so the workplace becomes fair and so those who perform are rewarded and recognized for their accomplishments.
Empowered Women Don’t Allow Negative Attitudes Deter Their Leadership.
There are days at work when I am just overwhelmed by the long line of people outside my door, all with problems we need to solve. In my frustration I think, “Do I have to solve everybody’s problems for them?! Can’t you guys solve problems yourselves?”
Twenty years ago, when I had fewer responsibilities, I liked solving problems, any one’s problems. I found it challenging. But as a manager supervising nearly a dozen people, I fantasize about employees who come to me and tell me how they successfully took care of a major problem on their own. Since this has been a recurring problem for years and across several workplaces, I used to think that the problem was me – I was a perfectionist control freak, But the sad truth was, that wasn’t the issue. The problem is that most of my employees genuinely do not know how to solve problems. And digging even deeper, I found I had to give them permission to think.
What the heck is going on?
In the past couple of years, I’ve been discovering the answer. It seems in many companies only certain people are allowed to think. Only certain people can make decisions. Only certain people can “think strategically” which I discovered is considered the highest level of thinking. The directive is simple – they think, you act. Thinking and doing are separate and distinct and never done by the same people.
I am also learning that construction has been a little slow in adopting this concept. It seems this philosophy is well entrenched in some industries and it has a name – Taylorism.
I’ve written about Taylor before and how his philosophies shaped the workplace. Basically, Taylor at the beginning of the industrial revolution decided there would be experts who decided the best method for doing work. The experts designed the methods for the working man to carry out. The working man was supposed to park his brain at the door and follow the directive of the expert. Early in my career I thought we were evolving past this – we wanted a thinking workforce. But it seems we made a U turn and Taylorism has met Intellectualism and created Elitism.
So what do we get? A new corporate hierarchy!!
At the lowest rung are all those blue collar guys. You know those guys who work with their hands because they weren’t “smart enough” to get into college.
Then there are the office people who may have tried college but didn’t make it.
Next rung is your basic state college or unknown private university graduate.
Then comes the management levels who have to deal with all those lower people.
Next there is a big gap. Think of a moat. Filled with alligators.
The gap separates and distinguishes the corporate level. I think this is what they are talking about when they say “the C level.” I’ve heard this term thrown around with a resounding air of snobbery and I don’t know what it really means. I just know that we are to be impressed by its exclusivity. But anyway, on this side of the moat, we start a new ladder.
At the bottom are the people who interact with the management of the working and undereducated workforce. As the management of the undereducated working class you are only allowed to talk to these people in the corporate level. It doesn’t matter that you have more degrees, certifications or experience. It doesn’t matter that this low level C person has no concept of the work being done, that’s not his job. His job is to act as a buffer between the regular management and executive management – so executive management doesn’t have to get down in the weeds, get their hands dirty.
The senior executive level is filled with people who have long titles. Everyone is a vice-president and some are Senior VP’s, others Executive VP’s, and still others Senior Executive VP’s. What distinguishes them? I have absolutely no idea!!
Does this sound a little over-the-top and cynical? A year ago, I would have told you it is. But not today.
As I mentioned in my last article, I was on webinars with world-renown consultants trying to teach senior managers how to develop their people. According to the consultants, it is a manager’s responsibility to train people and teach them how to think and problem solve. But there was resistance by men on the call.
And as I mentioned in my last article, one of the things you do in problem solving is ask “why.” So the consultant asked why – why did so many men on the webinar resist the concept of training the workforce to problem solve?
Because the average worker wouldn’t come up with as good of an answer.
Dare I ask “Why?”
Because they didn’t go to college.
Why?
Because they aren’t as smart.
Shall I continue with another –Why?
Because they aren’t as genetically gifted as me.
So why don’t we just say it – a lot of the men on the webinar believed they were better than the average working man. Going to college made them better. Going to a prestigious university instead of a state university made them better. The expansive separation between them and actual work made them better.
Remember the male-dominated workplace is where men can establish their status in the world. And education has emerged as a great discriminator of status. So, if the average working man without a college diploma could solve work problems on his own, then how does the C level employee or manager distinguish himself? What criteria does he use to establish his status?
So, why don’t we teach our employees to think and problem solve?
Because it would ruin the new hierarchy we have been working diligently to establish since Taylor came up with his concepts early in the industrial revolution.
But we aren’t in the industrial revolution anymore – it is time to evolve again. As women in the male-dominated workplace we need to lead the workplace past this newfound elitism. We need to lead in teaching our employees to think and be problem solvers. Our focus for work is not to establish our personal status but to improve the performance of our teams. That is how you win at work.
Empowered Women Discourage Elitism By Teaching Everyone to Think
When you attend training, what do you hope to get out of it? Do you expect to get step by step instructions or the answer on how to solve a problem? Do you expect the person training you to be better at the task than you? Is it Ok with you that person a professional trainer/instructor with no practical experience in the subject?
There are many approaches to training but in the male-dominated workplace the primary approach has been for the more experienced, more knowledgeable person to train the less experienced, less knowledgeable. The trainee watches and copies what the trainer does. When I worked with trades, this was called OJT – on the job training. In my office environments, I noticed female managers give their female employees step-by-step instructions which they were supposed to write down then replicate on their own to accomplish the task. Female employees with a female supervisor are typically shown how to accomplish a task once, whereas male employees under a male supervisor are often placed with a sink or swim situation – if they need help, they have to ask. In either case, most training seems to be rote and based on memorization of steps.
I first became acutely aware of how we teach and train while I was in college. We memorized formulas and equations and in which situations to apply them to. If you could remember a homework problem that was like the test question, you used the same formula and applied the same sequence of events. It seemed kids that were good at memorization were the A students. To me, this was boring so I came up with a different approach.
I dove into understanding the formulas. I asked myself “why” continuously until I understood the relationships and how each element worked and its limitations. I tell people this is why I don’t understand electricity – I got down to asking “why” does an electron excites the next electron – what makes that happen? Since no one could explain, I gave up on understanding electricity and consequently did not do well in that class.
But my other classes turned around. I was no longer bored, I was applying myself. My approach was to understand the fundamental principles then apply them to a problem – understand then think my way through to solve a problem. I became a lot more involved in my classes – I started asking more questions and my professors ate it up. They came out of their trance and started explaining their theories, their thoughts and their logic.
We were thinking.
But at work, we try to train employees by memorization of steps without ever explaining why. As supervisors and managers, we do the thinking and we tell employees what to do. Isn’t that what makes us managers – we think for the doers? Isn’t that how we distinguish ourselves – through our intellect?
Last week I was on a webinar about training employees. The consultant’s concept was that as a manager, your job is not to give answers to your employees but to lead them in thinking and solving the problem on their own. He said to do what I did in college – ask “why”. Ask employees how they would solve the problem then as they go through the steps, ask “why” and keep digging deeper and they will refine the answer or change it altogether for a different approach. Employees who are not accustomed to coming up with answers will produce less than ideal answers and according to the consultant that is OK. As a manager you are the trainer and you need to accept the less than ideal solution or keep asking “why” until the employees arrive at an acceptable and workable solution.
This is the same concept I use in my Process Meetings. I let my team develop the process as a team and my role is to guide them, ask questions and make them delve in deeper. The concept requires that as the manager, I stand back, if not subordinate my position and let my team take the lead.
However, the problem is that many managers get frustrated with the less than ideal solution, take over and start providing THE answer according to themselves and employees are expected to just follow the manager’s instructions. As a result employees don’t learn how to think, problem solve or be creative.
There were a lot of men on the webinar that struggled with the consultant’s concept. One man was even bold enough to say he was writing a “book of answers” for his company. He was listing all of the conceivable problems his company could come across and THE correct solution. To date he had over 200 problems and solutions identified and he planned on distributing his book to all employees. He was taken back when the consultant said this was the wrong approach. Actually, the consultant didn’t answer right away but we could hear his thoughts loud and clear “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been saying? This isn’t about you and your knowledge, this is about letting your employee think.”
The male-dominated workplace embraces the concepts like Mr. Answerman proposed and it wasn’t until I attended these webinars that I realized how bad it was. On the next webinar which discussed applying this concept to construction, I thought the consultant and I were on a different planet than the other men. It made me think back to the previous webinar – what was the Answerman with the “book of answers” really after – improving company performance or impressing everyone with his superior knowledge? The guy gave me the creeps!!
The problem with THE solution is that it only applies to one particular situation. The next time THE solution is used, the situation is not exactly the same, it may be similar but there will be variations. So, the ideal solution is no longer so ideal. It needs to be modified. Who does that? Who comes up with the new ideal solution? Does all work stop until it goes back to Mr. Answerman and he comes up with THE NEW IMPROVED solution?
I kid you not, but there were men on this webinar who would say “yes!”
But the answer is “no.” Employees need to be capable of solving problems on their own. “Ideal” solutions developed by experts in the remote vacuum of their experience and intellect work until they hit the Reality of the actual workplace. This is a difficult concept to get across in the male-dominated workplace. Even in trying to find a picture for this article, teachers and trainers are portrayed at the front of the class, while students/trainees sit and listen. I was looking for a picture that shows employees solving a problem while the manager stands back and the one I used is the closest I found. I think that says a lot about our perceptions of training and learning.
As managers we need to help employees do what I did in college – employees need to understand the fundamental principles of their job and tasks, then think their way through their application by asking “why” in order to solve the problem. Understanding and thinking that leads to creativity!
Whenever I discuss this subject I think back several years when I saw a T shirt that read “Think – It’s Not Illegal”. I didn’t buy the T shirt but periodically, I make a BIG sign for my office that says just that!
One final thought – have you asked “WHY” the male-dominated workplace approaches training and problem solving this way? Why aren’t employees taught to think and solve problems? I will answer that is my next article.
Empowered Women Encourage Their Team to Think and Teach Them to Solve Problems
Let’s admit it – the male-dominated workplace can be pretty dull. This is one of the reasons I liked being out on a construction site – we had a lot more fun! We worked hard and had fun doing it. On site, we weren’t trying to impress anyone with a corporate image like we had to in the main office. In the main office you have to present a “professional” image at all times in case a Client stopped by and made it past the main lobby, conference room and senior offices and got lost in the far back recesses where our offices were located. (more…)
During the Ebola scare I noticed that our government leaders felt compelled to project that they had answers even though they clearly didn’t. They could not admit that they didn’t have the answer. They believe this gives us confidence in them. I recognized their behavior because I recently dealt with a situation at work where my boss could not admit he didn’t know how to solve a problem. He and I disagreed that admitting he didn’t have the answer was the best first step in finding the answer.
Personally, I don’t have confidence in people who project false confidence because I see them as acting out of fear. They are afraid to admit they don’t have all the answers because they rely heavily on previous experience to tell them what to do. This means they have to live and work in safe little boxes and they never venture out into the unknown because they don’t know how to solve problems that they haven’t solved before. So, what they are really trying to hide is that they don’t know how to solve new problems.
I thought my opinion was in the minority until I was on a self-development webinar last week led by a leading international Lean business consultant. According to the Lean consultant, the male-dominated workplace believes they have to know and must always project that they know how to make something happen. The male-dominated workplace is uncomfortable with uncertainty. This is because our culture believes that the higher up in an organization a person is, the more knowledge and experience they have – so therefore they must have the answer. The fear at play is vulnerability – if they don’t have the answer, then why do they deserve to be in that position?
The consultant advocates that managers and leaders admit what they don’t know and then apply a scientific way of thinking and problem solving. When faced with a problem we don’t know how to solve, then the best thing is to just try something. If it is wrong, then it will fail quickly and you learn from the failures.
The less you know about how to solve the problem the smaller the step you take. Again, if it is wrong then failure will come quickly. As you grow in experience in an area, you can take larger initial steps. Again, it is all about being comfortable taking action when there is uncertainty and not being afraid to fail. Failure should be an accepted part of learning.
This is a scientific approach to problem solving – you come up with a theory and try it. How many iterations of the light bulb did Edison go through before he came up with a solution that worked? Anyone who has ever invented anything new, has known failure and has not allowed failure to be labeled a “personal weakness.”
Don’t be afraid to fail early, fail fast and fail often. Just learn from the failure and try again. As the old saying goes, “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
The consultant’s comments were geared towards the very male audience who were taught to project an answer and stick with it, try to make it work in order to prolong the admission of failure. For women we have a slightly different problem implementing this approach – we have to learn to act quickly, not plan and collaborate extensively first. I realize I use this approach and have taught it to others by a comment I make “I don’t know if it will work, but give it a whirl and see what happens.” I realize in writing this that I use this approach in cooking… a lot!!
So when you have a problem you don’t know how to solve, don’t be afraid to admit it and don’t be afraid to come up with an idea and give it a whirl! See what happens. If it doesn’t work, then you learned something and you just try something else.
Empowered women aren’t afraid to fail and learn from the failure.
When I start a new project or a new job I like playing dumb. I pretend I know absolutely nothing about how to do my job.
Is that shocking? It is so contrary to what we think we should do – we should always show our knowledge and that we know exactly what to do in any work situation. How else can we take charge? How do we direct our people and make sure everything is done right?
What is wrong with conventional thinking is that we mistakenly believe that as we gain experience we fill up the knowledge bucket. We believe the 850 pieces of knowledge in our bucket are all the pieces there are. We don’t realize that there are really 1,000 pieces and we are missing 150 pieces.
When we work with a group of people, everyone is anxious to show off their 615, 783 or 847 pieces of knowledge. But what about those missing pieces?
How do we discover them?
By playing dumb.
Our goal is to change the dynamic of the meeting. Instead of everyone impressing each other with their personal knowledge we change the focus to discovering the 150 missing pieces.
Playing dumb starts with listening, not to what is being said, but to what is not.
I like to bring out my inner 3-year old who constantly asks “Why?” By asking “Why; How; Who does that; When?” we go deeper and think about why we are taking the actions we are.
Answers such as “because that is the way we’ve always done it” or “because that’s the way I like to do it” come under scrutiny. Those answers tell you people aren’t thinking and they are expecting this new project to just be a repeat of past projects. They will be unprepared for new issues unique to this project which will result in inefficiency and extra costs.
As I have risen in management ranks, increasing my dumbness has become a critical management skill. If I dictate every action then I don’t train my team to think for themselves and solve problems on their own. But if I play dumb I can guide them through the thinking and learning process.
If my team collectively only knows 600 pieces of information, through my continuous questioning like a 3 year old I can ask the questions that lead them to discovering the other 250 pieces that I know. As for the remaining 150 pieces none of us know, it is amazing how our collective thinking and questioning brings those to light.
One more thing: Do you know what else we call playing dumb?
Being a humble leader.
Empowered women aren’t afraid to play dumb and teach their team.
When I think about teamwork, I think of a group of people working together to achieve a common objective. In teamwork each person has their role and they subordinate themselves and their personal importance to the larger objective. Teamwork makes us feel good about ourselves and our achievements.
Right?? Isn’t that what teamwork is all about?
I thought so, but I had a boss who gave me a different perspective on teamwork, one I had have not fully considered before.
According to the dictionary there is a second definition of teamwork: “A group of people who form one of the sides of a game or contest.” We know this definition well – we think of sport teams. Teamwork is used in a competition that produces a definite winner and loser.
This is how my boss thought of teamwork, as part of a competition. In his logic, if there is teamwork, then there is a competition which, most importantly, produces a winner and a loser.
For me this was really surprising to figure out about him. For months I interpreted his “weekly team checks” with him giving me the thumbs-up and me giving him the thumbs-up in return as making sure we were moving forward on correcting the company problems. I never considered that by his “team check” he was really asking “you are still on MY team –right?” I didn’t consider this because I didn’t know who he and I would be competing against. Using my definition of teamwork, the objective was to improve the company’s performance and that was what my boss, my staff and I were working towards…right??
Not quite.
In my boss’s mind, for my company to move up then something had to move down – actually it is more correct to say that for the company and HIM to move up, someone else had to move down. That calls for a competition that would determine the winner and loser.
It took a few weeks but I figured out who my boss was competing against and… ooppss!!! It was the manager I was reaching out to in order to build a larger corporate team!! So when my boss saw me talking to this other manager, he thought I was defecting to the other manager’s team and working against him. This of course caused conflict between me and my boss.
To me it was an utterly ridiculous situation – this should be about teamwork and positive objectives – not about defeating another manager so my boss’s personal insecurities could be quelled.
But this situation got me thinking – had I worked for other managers who only thought of teamwork in a conjunction with a competition? Did they understand how to use teamwork without team rivalries – ust to improve performance?
Surprisingly I thought of a lot of times when teamwork was used to rally the troops in competition against another company but few when my boss touted teamwork to reach a corporate objective. I had to think back to the days when I was in the Air Force or working with the military to find real teamwork. It made me wonder how the American business culture really views teamwork.
Competition is a part of business – there is always a competitor to out-perform. Many companies I worked for were very competitive with a primary rival – like the Washington Redskins versus the Dallas Cowboys. When competing for new work from a client we weren’t just after the new work, we also had to beat our rival. Even if a third competitor got the work, that was OK as long as our rival didn’t win and us lose. We could find a victory in this kind of defeat. (It’s like the Redskins favoring any team who plays and beats the Cowboys!)
Even though competitiveness and teamwork are linked, we don’t have to defeat another group to use teamwork. We can compete against ourselves – against our old performance. This is how I inspired teamwork – I found something tangible and measureable for us to compete against – a goal. In construction, it is easy to compete against time – completing a project by a certain date. We also can compete against poor quality work – have less than 5 punch list items on each phase of work.
When we meet our objective we celebrate just as if we beat our biggest rival for a new project. We also savor the deeper sense of pride and self-confidence we achieve.
But for a lot of people like my boss, the idea of competing against yourself is a difficult concept. It requires humility and the ability to look inward, admitting that you weren’t measuring up to standards you want to set for yourself. People like my boss find it easier to look outward and push someone else down in order to prove himself to himself.
Most of the conflict I experienced at work could have been settled with my definition of teamwork, but competitiveness was chosen instead. Instead of admitting our mistakes or shortcomings, we argued that the other side was overbearing in their standards or requirements. If our team could find a way to push down and discredit their team then we wouldn’t have to admit our mistakes. While my bosses get a sense of victory in that, I don’t.
I will continue to promote my definition of teamwork where the organization works together to achieve an objective that is bigger than ourselves. I don’t need to push another entity down in order to raise us up. We can rise and other entities can remain stationary.
This is what really great managers and companies understand. It is what I learned in the Air Force and like others who have served in the military, this version of teamwork becomes part of who we are. We know that by collectively working together for an objective larger than ourselves we will always excel.
So, don’t take it for granted like I did that you and your company are working from the same definition of teamwork. Look around your company and see if they only use teamwork when competing. You may have to teach them how to have teamwork without competition. And if you have former military members in your office, they will gladly help you.
The empowered woman uses teamwork to improve performance and instill pride and self-confidence in her team.
I started this website to teach other women the concepts I successfully used in my career. Little did I know that I preparing myself for my biggest challenge yet into the male-dominated workplace.
I want to share this experience because I was in such an extreme condition and yet I dramatically changed the company in one year. I will not lie and say it was easy because it wasn’t – this was the hardest I’ve ever worked. Work consumed my life. But my experience demonstrates the capabilities of women when they are empowered to apply themselves. I am now in awe of what is in us to achieve.
This article long so read it when you have a good half hour. I dealt with a lot in my job and this article discusses only about 25% of the issues. I included music clips – the songs I associated with the issues and sang over and over again in my head to maintain my sense of humor. And as you will see, I needed my sense of humor!
I was recruited to be the General Manager of a construction company (I will call it DSC) because of my experience creating a process-driven workplace. I was a little wary about the job. Just because an employer says he wants a process-driven company, doesn’t mean he really understands what a process-driven company is.
Because this company was not in the U.S and not American, I wanted to make sure it was solid. I was assured the company which was part of a larger group of privately owned companies was profitable, functioning well and in a market full of opportunity. So, I looked forward to what I saw as an adventure.
My Job Won’t Be Hard!
Upon my arrival my boss welcomed me with a card showing a tranquil dirt road ascending a gently-sloped grassy hill. To him, this expressed the extent of the difficulty I would encounter in my new job.
That was my first hint. This is construction and there is no such thing as smooth roads. I suspected that dirt road was a bit bumpier than depicted. But, no problem, there’s a reason I drive a Jeep not a BMW.
By noon on my fourth day, I knew DSC had serious financial issues. Neither DSC nor the corporate financial department understood or used the basic principles of construction financial management. I thought back to a construction financial course I took many years ago and realized I was in the worst case scenario. DSC was projecting revenue it could not justify and didn’t know its outstanding costs. There was no way to know DSC’s true financial position.
Then as I do with every company I work for, I applied the Dollars to Doughnuts Concept. I discovered DSC had no idea how to make money in construction because there was no project management. This meant the entire middle section of the concept was missing. While a gap between the top and bottom section is common, within this corporation, they weren’t even aligned. The corporate level didn’t know what DSC did as a business, how they functioned or how they should function. And since no one within DSC had any project management training, they didn’t know how they were supposed to function either.
Dollars To Doughnuts ConceptDSC Version of Dollars to Doughnuts Concept
I thought about the four quadrants of knowledge. This corporation was in the “we don’t know what we don’t know” quadrant.
Or in layman’s terms – this is the blind leading the blind.
That gentle grassy hill just got very steep and rocky. I had to teach everyone the most basic fundamental principles of the construction business and how to integrate them into construction management processes.
My first DSC Theme Song
I didn’t need my Jeep, I needed a rock crawling Rubicon Jeep with a 5” lift!
During my first two weeks, I had a steady stream of people from the corporate staff and our sister companies inform me that DSC’s fundamental problem was a lack of accountability. I found this ironic because in the management meeting, anytime someone was questioned, they deflected by bringing up something DSC was doing wrong. I made a HUGE mental note of this. It seemed everyone liked that DSC wasn’t functioning because they used DSC to avoid their own accountability. That meant possible trouble in the future. Once I get DSC on track, how will they react when they can’t deflect onto DSC and have to address their internal performance issues?
By the end of that second week I realized a lack of accountability was merely a symptom of DSC’s real fundamental problem – Autonomy. DSC valued autonomy above all else. Each person did what they wanted, when they wanted, how they wanted. And they fiercely protected their right to do so!
Its excessive value for autonomy made DSC an extreme male-dominated company. DSC was so deep into the Blue Zone that it didn’t know there were other colors in the rainbow! Even the women were pure blue.
To understand DSC’s and the corporation’s culture you have to go back in time at least 60 years and forget all management concepts that have been developed since. (This job involved time travel too!)
I pulled out some old articles written in the 1980’s that discussed old management styles to refresh my memory. I read: “People choose which competencies to develop based upon their self-image. They develop an idea of what it means to be a manager and act accordingly.” I remembered one of my first articles, Understanding Why Being a Manager Is So Important discussed this passage and I pulled that out too.
DSC is a unionized company (yes, I hear the collective U.S. groan) and most of the current supervisors had been with the company for decades. They remember the days before professionals were needed, when their senior union supervisors ran all the work. Now that they were the supervisors, they wanted the same status and autonomy their predecessors enjoyed. They believed, and were corporately empowered to believe, that when it came to doing “the work” they alone could make all decisions. There was no need for management or technical professionals such as project managers, quality managers, estimators, schedulers or even engineers for design.
The union members had a pre-industrial revolution era concept of how to do work. (Now we are really going back in time to the days before building codes! Scary but true.) They believed in the master craftsman that independently decided how to construct the project and directed the trades in what to do. As a worker moved up vertically from foreman to general foreman to superintendent , he grew in status based upon his expertise. And because they didn’t have any horizontal perspective, the higher a supervisor was in the vertical hierarchy, the greater his autonomy – there were fewer people he had to answer to. At DSC Autonomy = Status. Listening to them I often thought of teenagers, anxious to achieve adult status at 18, and no longer be answerable to mom and dad.
The Autonomy of DSC Divisions
The DSC org chart depicted these beliefs. DSC did not have a central office and each division operated from client sites or various corporate offices. Each DSC division was its own independent company working an assigned territory and reported only to me. They did not trespass onto each other’s territory. There were no shared resources – they did not share personnel, tools, vehicles or equipment. Trade workers worked for a specific superintendent and were not allowed to work for another.
I continuously hired project managers and other professionals in an attempt to fill in the middle management ranks and delegate my massive workload. But every manager I hired created more work than he relieved. The reason – each and every one of them got pulled deep into the Blue Zone and continuously engaged in intense arguments with the union workforce. The union workforce did not want a middle management layer to erode the status they waited decades to attain.
I spent my days (Sundays and holidays were the most frequent) breaking up arguments and averting physical fights, leaving me to do my work late into the night. One night while working with Mad Men playing in the background I heard:
Don’t fight with the Pig in the mud.
You get dirty.
And the Pig loves it.
I replayed the scene several times – that described DSC! I made up signs and plastered that saying everywhere. But every male manager still wound up in the mud. They ALL also wound up at the hospital with stress related ailments. Eventually they all left.
Status was important at the corporate level too. Going back to my old reference article, a passage read “It suited the self-images of the managers that they were superior, the brains for others who could only supply the brawn.” This fit the corporate culture! Most of the corporate staff was located in another larger city where “higher quality people” could be found. The town and area DSC operated in was industrial, “dirty” and a blue collar working town, (think Hunger Games, District 13) not a desirable place for professionals. Our physical separation enhanced the distinction in status between blue collar and professional.
The corporate staff did the strategic planning – the highest level of thinking. It wasn’t until my last couple of weeks that I understood that as a general manager I was under/inferior to the corporate staff. In this hierarchy they did not need my input. According to them, they were responsible to audit and evaluate (critique) DSC performance.
It always seemed odd to me that I didn’t discuss what DSC was working on with anyone. In management meetings the corporate staff gave detailed reports but the operating company GM’s (those of us who actually produced revenue) had only 5 minutes once a month to list our top projects. But if you understand that the corporate staff didn’t believe they needed our input to do their jobs to support us, it makes perfect illogical sense.
As I was writing this article I came across another passage I marked back then: “To managers employees were considered expendable, factors of employment, no different from machines. Managers demanded an allegiance they did not return. Workers responded by developing an allegiance to their unions.”
No wonder I marked it – that is DSC and the corporation in a nutshell!! I often thought to myself: Welcome to the 1950’s!!
At the corporate level, they were obsessed with returning DSC to its past glory days of being the local contractor who successfully competed with the big out-of-town general contractors. For decades DSC successfully grew without any project management or professional support! But that was 10+ years ago and a very different business climate.
The Corporate Theme Song That I Sang Several Times a Week!
Back then it was simple – Clients’ big oil money flowed like water. DSC did their work on a time and material basis – they went out, did the work, made whatever changes to the scope they wanted and got paid for every dime. This was construction project and financial management at its absolute simplest.
But then the environment changed dramatically in 2009. Oil money no longer flowed like water – oil companies competed for investors who expected higher returns, forcing them to crank down tight on budgets. DSC’s simple environment suddenly got complex – safety, construction management, quality management and financial controls were now required. But DSC didn’t evolve; it didn’t learn how to operate in its new complex construction market.
Complexity is the ultimate enemy of Autonomy and it beat the crap out of DSC! The complexity of construction project management put DSC on life support but without financial management, no one even realized it! By my third month I realized DSC would not survive another year without drastic and immediate changes.
DSC, who used billable rates established in its contracts, was losing money on every man-hour worked. Their billable rates were so far out of date they did not cover their costs. I “joked’ that their project manager rate was $20/hr. lower than the rates I used 12 years ago!
Because no one understood contracts, no one read the contracts so no one knew the contracts allowed for an annual adjustment of overhead costs. (I thought: ever hear of inflation?) Their oldest contract hadn’t updated overhead costs and non-union wages in 9 years! Even worse, that contract was about to quadruple in work. Do the math: lose $7 per man-hour for 60 men working 10 hours per day, 365 days a year! (7*60*10*365 = $1,533,000) Ouch!
Luckily the time to increase rates was upon us. I recalculated rates and increased the rates as much as each of our Clients allowed (It gave me something to do every night from 11:00 pm to 3:00 am for two weeks) I also restructured the profit calculations to capture more profit. They collected $2.50/hr. profit on regular time rates of $54/hr., overtime rates of $80/hr.and double time rates of $106/hr. I was shocked – $2.50 profit on costs of $106! I told them that was just plain Un-American!!
Rates were only one issue – DSC was hemorrhaging money everywhere. Another root problem was the women’s lack of clout. At DSC “the girls” as they were called didn’t carry the job title of Project Administrators as they do in most construction companies. They were Administrative Assistants. DSC hired girls with a clerical backgrounds believing the girls simply filled out forms in Excel and administratively cleaned up after “the guys.”
But their responsibilities weren’t that simple any more. Project Administrators are the first line of defense in protecting the financial integrity of projects. They watch over the financial and contractual processes and for this reason, good construction companies empower Project Administrators. Without any clout the girls at DSC couldn’t resolve issues. The filled out their Excel forms the best they could, then built walls for autonomy and to protect themselves from accountability for the incomplete work.
Without communication and teamwork issues remained unresolved. The associated costs mounted into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then because the issues seemed too complex to resolve, the costs were routinely written off.
Early on, I hired a phenomenal young woman to help me clean up the mess. She quit after 3 weeks and confided in me why. She worked with one of the men before (he recommended her to me) and didn’t want to work under him again. She felt that with her college degree and her experience she shouldn’t be “his girl” who cleaned up the mess he made of projects. She was burnt out from doing that with her previous employer and she knew she deserved more professionally. Because she was close friends with this man, she didn’t want to get into a power struggle as she asserted herself and ruin their friendship.
I felt bad for her because she was so capable but like the women of DSC she was pure Blue and that is what she really struggled with. She acted like a man thinking that is what she needed in order to get ahead but no matter what she would always be “his girl” and personal administrative assistant. (I always got a kick out of listening to her cuss up a storm while her little Prada handbag sat daintily on my desk.)
Her story emphasized just how deeply male-dominated the culture was. After she left, I really had to think about my strategy to move DSC to the Purple Zone.
I already began separating people into two groups – those that were willing to grow and learn (“Roundies”) and those that weren’t. The ones who weren’t willing to grow, I started calling “Flatties”. They believed the world was flat and that if we sailed too far in the direction I was taking DSC, we would fall off the edge of the earth into the abyss. When I discussed new processes, you could see genuine fear in their eyes! Their fear of the unknown, of losing autonomy and of having to acknowledge what they didn’t know would always prevent them from reaching the brave new world of the Purple Zone.
My Second DSC Theme Song.
The Flatties resisted change with everything in them. One woman was anointed as the head of the resistance movement. Her tactic was to resist until you gave up in complete frustration and backed down. In construction men often resolve conflict this way – he who backs down first loses. I was fascinated that a woman was so effective in this technique with the men. I secretly liked her for this and hoped she would become a “Roundie”.
Unlike the men who engaged her in the Blue Zone and failed, I engaged her from the Purple Zone. No threats, no hostility. I gave her a firm explanation of why procedures were changing and expressed my excitement as to how much better everything will be! (In the new world is it sunny, warm and we drink mojitos all day!) As she resisted, hoping to wear me down, I didn’t budge and maintained my chipper attitude. I responded to each and every email she sent – I could not allow her to have the last word. I kept responding and it took hours, if not all day or two days, until she gave up. The Flatties were no match for the American Dream Team! (That’s what the Flatties called the Americans in the company)
Over several months, most of the Flatties eventually left on their own. A lot of people were scared about the Flatties leaving because they were perceived to have the power and knowledge base – if they left then DSC would immediately fall apart. I’ve heard that same fear mongering many times and always found that once the bad apples leave, the good people who were pushed into the back corner step forward and flourish. And this is what happened at DSC. (Baby and Johnny tore it up on Kellerman’s dancefloor!)
I will admit that I was surprised how much so many people blossomed. They literally became different people!
With a lot of the resistance gone, I concentrated on closing out hundreds of projects with hundreds of unresolved problems. I gathered “the girls” from all of the divisions together to create a cleanup team. Some of the girls hated each other threatening to quit if they had to work with each other. To turn DSC around I had to start with the women and get them to the Purple Zone first.
I never imagined I would have to lead women from the Blue Zone and train them how to work in the Purple Zone. I encouraged and empowered their female traits and praised their use of their female traits. Soon, they all started talking and chatting away – the girls became women and a team. I used our clean-up process to train them on project change management. I encouraged them in their role as the protectors of project financial integrity. I expected them to speak up whenever they saw something wrong. They now had the clout to stand up to the men and correct them when they didn’t follow processes.
My New DSC Theme Song
And the men responded as most good construction men do – they loved the support! There was no fighting in the mud!
Empowered Purple women led the men to the Purple Zone. Hallelujah! At times the women ventured into the Pink Zone and I was surprised by how Pink some of these formerly Blue women could be. It was actually refreshing to see women be natural and true to whom they really are.
About the time we started the clean-up process I hired a new cost analyst. He was phenomenal. He knew construction financial management, he understood processes and he worked in the Purple Zone! He didn’t get dragged into the Blue Zone and fight in the mud. He took an enormous burden off of me and he was an amazing asset in growing DSC.
Mid-way through the clean-up process, we finally moved into the new central office. Standardizing processes was about to become so much easier! With everyone in one room the DSC divisions were finally forced to work together. To prevent problems, I assigned the cubicles. When everyone got situated I realized a huge mistake on my part or maybe it was just a glaring reminder that this was still a male-dominated organization. The office had rows of cubicles, two of which I considered the core rows – one with the Estimating/Planning staff and one with the administrative. In other words, one row of all women and one row of all men.
(As The Woman In The Room, I hung my head in shame!)
I had to fix this! There was one woman in particular I wanted to move over to the Estimating row. I had mentored her for months because she was in a non-traditional role. When hired, she was treated and paid like an administrative assistant and her real abilities were ignored. (I will write more about her in a separate article) I wanted her to work closely with a young man in the Estimating row because they had opposite professional weaknesses and strengths and they needed to learn from each other. Over the next few months a couple men left, and I moved her. That was the beginning of the real transition. I hired a planner – another young woman. Then, another project coordinator, also a young woman. The row was now this beautiful mix of 3 men and 3 women. Purple!!
The administrative row had a vacant cubicle so one of the superintendents used it when he came to work in the office. After a few more movements, the entire office was a wonderful Purple Zone workspace!
The project management process chart we developed together was printed large and hung on the wall. We had a small conference room where I met with the project coordination staff to review projects. My cost analyst met with the admin staff regularly to ensure DSC financials were on track. I designed a new organizational structure that addressed the realities of the limited labor pool and the DSC skill level. We were beginning to function.
For the first time in several years DSC was profitable! Our new work made good margins because we were following our processes and people were empowered to speak up when they questioned something. We started to come together as a team and one project administrator arranged pot luck lunches for celebration. We still had a very long way to go but we were moving in the right direction. I was so proud of my purple team!
Remember how I said that the corporate staff liked that DSC functioned poorly because they used DSC to deflect issues from themselves? For a few months, I was quietly saying that the time was coming when DSC would start functioning and that the corporate departments would also have to improve their performance. That time arrived.
I don’t remember what triggered it, but I came up with a somewhat tongue in cheek theme for DSC: DSC- Not Quite the F*ck Ups We Used To Be!
The multimillion dollar question was whether or not the corporate departments could accept the new emerging DSC. Were they willing to admit to their “opportunities for improvement” and take action to improve their performance too? Or would their pride stop them?
Department 1 had always been difficult to work with. I reported to HR several time that Dept. 1 management and personnel were demeaning to DSC employees. There was one project administrator in particular they openly denigrated in public and she got to listen to it on a regular basis. It was cruel. During our conference calls I felt like answering their questions with “because we’re stupid, that’s why.” After the calls, I could see the hurt on the faces of my team.
Dept. 1 was developing a new system for DSC which was several months behind schedule and plagued with issues. Dept. 1 said it was the fault of my administrative supervisor. But the underlying issue was that Dept. 1 didn’t understand how DSC operated and went forward with designing the system without a process map. The first system we reviewed had the process backwards.
The system highlighted the new complexity of our work. Completing the system took a long time not because the DSC admin supervisor was being…I will say it…a Bitch…but because Dept. 1 didn’t consider all of the administrative components outside of DSC that had to be integrated into the system. The problem was not a person; it was not understanding the complexity of the process.
As we moved to another issue with Dept. 1, DSC and a sister company proposed the standard industry process which was simple and easy. Dept. 1 rejected the process and instead came up with a cumbersome process that still didn’t do what we needed. It created a new mess! I will admit that I called their process “stupid” because it was. I told them we would be humiliated if anyone in the real world knew this is how we handled the problem.
In our next meeting to figure out how to make this process work, Dept. 1 came up with an even more complex system that required extensive system reprogramming. (WTF? They haven’t even gotten the other project right yet.) So, my Cost Analyst asked our boss if our initial solution was open for discussion. The response was ugly. (On the upside we learned our quiet and polite Cost Analyst had some brass huevos!)
Even as DSC greatly improved its performance we did not gain Dept. 1’s respect. They always reminded me of the "smart" kids in school who always had to brown nose the teacher for attention.
Department 2 whose support was critical to DSC projects refused to work with us. Even though they worked under DSC contracts, they proclaimed their complete autonomy and that DSC could not direct any Dept. 2 actions. Even my requests for support were met with “we will take it under advisement.” DSC managers and supervisors complained constantly that Dept. 2 personnel did nothing all day and never went out to the projects.
In construction, conflict between Dept. 2 and construction personnel is common but it is usually because Construction feels Dept. 2 is being too zealous in its duties. This was the first time I ever encountered Construction complaining that Dept. 2 was not being zealous enough.
Part of the conflict was due to the different pay structure between Dept. 2 personnel and DSC’s union personnel. During a typical work cycle, union personnel were paid for 15 hours more, even though they worked the same number of hours. This angered Dept. 2 personnel so they weren’t anxious to be proactive in their duties and they had very high turnover. Dept. 2’s solution was to hire women for the job because they won’t argue over pay like men do. (Yes, you read that right!)
Two years earlier, Dept. 2’s lack of diligence caused DSC’s largest client to shut down all work. Even after this Dept. 2 only did the minimum required to get DSC back to work. They did not continue to grow their functional expertise. Their current Sr. Manager, a self-proclaimed Intellectual, stayed at the 30,000 ft. level, and only associated with Dept. 2 through his manager – he didn’t associate with the working class.
The Dept. 2 Manager did not believe in the new stringent industry principles for this function and often thwarted them. (The cause for so many arguments with DSC management). His attitude put DSC, its personnel and our clients at risk. Until his attitude changed and Dept. 2 became champions for their function, clients would continue to limit DSC work on their sites. The bottom line is that DSC could not grow until Dept. 2 got their sh*t together!
Elevating issues to our mutual boss did not help DSC. Dept. 2 had one responsibility that DSC complained for years that Dept. 2 was not doing. For six months I followed up monthly directly with the Dept. 2 Sr. Manager and Manager requesting the reports. I was always promised them but never got them. I finally went to our boss to ask for his help. The Dept. 2 Manager was standing right outside the boss’s office so our boss asked if the reports were being done. The Manager replied that they were. End of story.
Our boss was very young for his position and inexperienced in industrial construction; he was more suited to the scope of work of one of our sister companies. One of his flaws is that he couldn’t deal well with problems. So, he just always wanted to hear that everything was fine. If you told him all was good, gave him the thumbs up, he didn’t dig any deeper. Managers used that to their advantage – an autonomy preservation techinique.
In early August DSC had an issue (yes we screwed up) that required Dept. 2’s support. At first Dept. 2 didn’t even respond. When they did they made mistakes, then more mistakes which upset the Client and gave DSC a big black eye. The Client requested Dept. 2 to produce the same reports I had been requesting. It took days and when Dept. 2 produced the reports they were incomplete and filled with obvious errors. Now the Client was extremely upset and the stuff hit the fan! This was the same Client who shut down work two years earlier because of Dept. 2. So there was a lot of stuff hitting an industrial sized fan!
Our boss realized he had been misled by Dept. 2.
DSC personnel were embarrassed and hurt that after all of our progress, Dept. 2 could bring us down. Our mistake was recoverable but Dept. 2’s errors…maybe not. August became a miserable month – it seemed like everything fell apart and that it was all beyond our control.
Complexity was once again, crushing DSC. Even though DSC could internally make vast improvements we were not autonomous. We relied on corporate departments to do their functions well so they could support our work. They failed us.
Internally, I questioned if we fighting a losing battle to save DSC. My gut told me that I had taken DSC as far as I could.
DSC’s future hinged on whether or not the corporate functions could learn from their mistakes and now admit that they needed to improve their performance too.
Because my boss wasn't experienced in the industrial application of Dept. 2's function, I explained to him how my previous employers exceled in this area – they got "Religion!” Our client has "Religion." Our Client is waiting for us to be born again!! We need to let them know that we have seen the errors of our ways! We will confess our sins, we will atone and go forward into the shiny light and glory! Are you with me brother? Let me have an “Amen!!” Sing it! Do you feel it?!
Can I get that Amen?! Nope. My boss is agnostic.
The first week of September we forged forward anxious to get back on track. Later that week, my boss walked into the DSC office, looked right down my beautiful Purple rows and tells me he doesn’t like it. (Somebody wants to asserts himself.)
The next week I briefly met with him and he says he doesn’t like my organizational structure. He wants to go back to the old hierarchal structure that he and my predecessor designed. (You mean the structure that failed and had managers fighting in the mud?)
Call me naïve. But, up until that meeting, I thought the DSC I was fixing was the screwed up company my boss inherited. I thought I was helping him out. But I was wrong. I was correcting the DSC he created. He created the overly-empowered union members who fought with managers. He created and encouraged the gap and misalignment between the operating companies and the corporate office. He believed in and reinforced the vertical hierarchy. He believed in Autonomy – he had Autonomy Religion!! He was the one entrenched in the Blue Zone.
He never wanted the process-driven company he hired me to create. Our early conversations were not about a process-driven company but always about how soon I could fire two individuals. Get rid of them and the Glory Days return! All this time he and I were on different pages!
Nonetheless, I kept getting things back on track. DSC still hoped that our relationship with Dept. 2 would change dramatically. After our boss realized they lied to him about producing the reports, we thought he would finally listen to us and we would get the support we needed.
I invited my boss and the Dept. 2 management to a meeting with my staff. The meeting went very poorly. In the spin, DSC got blamed for the Dept. 2 not being able to produce the reports. (Wait a second! If you are saying that DSC prevented Dept. 2 from doing the reports, then you just admitted that Dept. 2 abdicated their job! Do you get that? No.) My staff pushed back like I had never seen them push back before. They asked direct questions but got NO answers.
After the meeting, it was the first time I heard my staff openly blame my boss and say he was part of the problem. Before the meeting, my boss said he wanted to build a bridge between DSC and Dept. 2 but in the meeting he burnt that bridge down.
The next time I met with my boss and Dept. 2 accusations were launched at me. I understood how my managers had felt, being enticed to get into the mud for a fight. I kept my responses short and direct, I was not going to get dragged into the Blue Zone. I felt like I was supposed to submit to the corporate staff, accept their abuse and DSC’s lowly position in the vertical hierarchy.
Sorry guys. It just ain’t in my nature to be submissive and you know that! !n this case everything in me screamed not to submit. This is the wonderful thing about being a woman – you pick up on so many signals that men will tell you are not real, but they are! My instincts told me not to trust them. Something’s up.
My boss and Dept. 2 had to avoid all personal accountability to the Client for the way Dept. 2 messed up in August. If the Client believed the accountability was at the corporate level, (as it really) then there would be huge ramifications to the entire corporation.
So, right from the beginning they openly made DSC the scape goat (and I suspect me directly). But that in turn had even bigger consequences which I don’t think they understood. I knew that being the scapegoat placed me in a precarious situation. Any issue in the future could result in legal consequences to me personally. I do not want to wind up in court in a foreign country. I could not submit. No job was worth that.
I was dismissed.
I was told “There were many complaints about you,” making it sound like everyone in all the companies complained about me. From his tone I was supposed to interpret that I was a horrible person. (Sorry I need to wave the Bullshit flag! I understand that you may want to hurt me but I know who I am, what I have accomplished and what my team thinks of me.)
I will always remember my body language when I asked the question – I was very relaxed like a friend just told me a funny story. I was even smiling. So, "People in DSC complained about me?”
Pause and stuttering. “No. The complaints all came from Dept.2 personnel.” Then it was something about “not being on their team.”
I didn’t say anything else because I knew it would do no good. He was coached to say nothing else.
In a male-dominated, hierarchal, status-driven organization, the person on top gets to decide who will be held accountable for anything that goes wrong. It is the opposite of ‘the buck stops here.” It is the opposite of process driven company. In a company like this, that values autonomy, an individual’s independent actions are to blame for problem. One of my fellow GM’s described our boss’s management style as- fire the right person and problems go away; hire a new person and all is wonderful again, until it isn’t.
So, after working 100 hours per week for weeks and on end, the inevitable question is: Was it all worth it?
Yes! Because I learned that the concepts I discuss really do work, even in the most screwed up, archaic, male-dominated company! I now have enormous confidence in myself and my concepts. This experience put all of the concepts of The Woman in the Room in one environment and I saw how powerful they are! I know everything in my career has built to this moment and I know my mission is to empower women to lead the male-dominated workplace.
And one more thing – God bless America! I am so glad to be home!
I can’t believe I haven’t written about this yet because out of all the topics I can think of, this is the topic I deal with the most – people using company cell phones, computers, office, desks and file cabinets as if they are their own personal property.
