Tag: wholeness

  • 4 Ways To Explain the Unique Value of Women

    4 Ways To Explain the Unique Value of Women

    Many women don’t understand the real and tangible value women bring to the workplace.  For centuries we were led to believe that the all-male workplace functioned just fine without us.  The proof is in all of its accomplishments.

    Thanks to men, civilization has advanced technologically, industrially and philosophically.  All the tangible things in our lives and all the principles we live by are due to men!

    Collage of inventions, a bridge, space shuttle on top of a 747, vary large array antenna, the U.S. Capitol building, the cityscape scene, an aircraft carrier, an oil refinery, cell phone and calculator

    That sounds wonderful…until we look a little deeper.

    Behind the scenes is a messy, chaotic, frustrating and often destructive process. The truth is that the male-dominated workplace doesn’t function very well.

    Throughout my career, I discovered over and over again, the value of being a woman working with men.  My male colleagues needed my female ways of thinking and doing things.  Over the years I came up with a few analogies to remind myself of the value and power of my female ways.

    Analogy 1:  Swiss Cheese

    My first analogy describes how men really work.

    Men want us to believe all their work is solid and complete.

    A wedge of parmesan cheese.

    But it isn’t.

    In reality their work is Swiss cheese. There are holes in everything they do. 

    a wedge of Swiss cheese

    These holes are what create chaos, incomplete work, rework and unintended consequences. 

    Men are taught to be the one who brings the Big Cheese. As women, we’re told to compete with men to bring the Big Cheese. However, it’s very hard to compete with our male colleagues’ boldness and brashness. To them losing to a woman is unacceptable so they gang up on us.

    Early in my career I learned not to compete with them, even though I knew I had a better plan or could do the job better.

    I took a different strategy.

    I looked at their plan or job and compared it to mine. I was looking for all of their holes; all the things that wouldn’t work out right. I then focused on figuring out how to fill in their holes.

    So, when their work didn’t produce the expected results, I could stand up and be the one with all the solutions. I was the one who could fix things. This got me recognition. And when our performance soared, I got the credit.

    No one cared who started the project.

    They only cared about who delivered the results.

    Over time I discovered that men couldn’t fill in the holes themselves, no matter what they did or how hard they tried. I witnessed all my workplaces adopt management initiatives to improve performance.

    Eventually all of them failed.

    The holes could only be filled in by women’s Pink Zone traits – the way women think and work. 

    A wedge of Swiss cheese with all the holes filled in with pink circles

    When women fill the holes, we create wholeness. And wholeness is the only way to achieve the sustained superior results our workplace wants.

    Looking for and filling in Swiss cheese holes proved to be the most powerful tool I used in my workplaces. I transformed so many ideas, plans and practices and made enormous impacts. My male colleagues kept asking, “How does she do that?”

    My answer was, “I think like a woman.”

     Analogy 2:  Cupcakes and Cake Slices

    Since my work was always project-based, teamwork was very important.  But in men’s concept of teamwork, all parties aren’t of equal value.  There has to be an MVP.

    There are men who want to prove, “I can deliver this project!”  They give the rest of the team permission to back off and ride his coattails. Team members willingly sit back either because they’re relieved to escape responsibility or they believe they aren’t as valuable. So, they wait for the MVP to deliver that big, beautiful chocolate cake that they can all get a slice of.

    A cupcake decorated with white frosting and a candy pink flower with a lit candle on top

    But in the end, all he delivers is a cupcake that celebrates him.

    As women, we need to think of teamwork as a dessert bar where there are many different kinds of cake slices.  As women, we find it hard for us to choose just one cake. We want to bring a slice of every cake back to our table to sample. We want to appreciate each of them for their unique qualities.

    That is what teamwork is.

    Slices of a variety of cakes that then make one whole cake

    It requires everyone to come to the table, everyone to participate and everyone to emphasize their unique characteristics.

    Analogy 3:  Women Hold Up Half the Sky

     

    A marble statue of Atlas holding up the world

    Atlas holds up the world all by himself. He doesn’t need the help of anyone, especially a woman. We’re taught that the workplace is the same. Superior men accomplish great things and don’t need the help of women.

    The foundation for this belief is the Doctrine of Two Spheres. It says men naturally inhabit the Public Sphere and women the Private Sphere. This of course, harkens back to the old stereotypes that see male traits as superior to female traits.

    The concept of the Doctrine of Two Spheres. On the left a man is standing in a circle with a blue outline and an office building in a background. On the right is a woman standing in a circle with a pink outline and a house in the background. The two spheres are separated by a chasm.

    Consequently, for women to have any value in the workplace, we must adopt male traits and compete with men. Women must take a piece of work away from men or men have to surrender it to us. This is how we will achieve equality.

    However, there is another concept:

    Duality

    Duality refers to two contrasting elements that coexist. They don’t exist in competition or in conflict but rather in a complementary relationship. I think of the value of women in duality with men through the Chinese proverb that says:

    Women hold up half the sky.

    But given our indoctrination as to the nature of men and women, we still see them as distinct and separate. We also want an empirical measurement to ensure there is equality.

    A man on the left half standing in front of a picture of a blue sky and a woman on the right half standing in front of a pink sky

    However, that isn’t Duality.

    In Duality, men and women aren’t separate.

    They are opposing forces who interact and work together in harmony.

    A variation of the yin- yang symbol with one half being the sun and one half being the sky

    This means women don’t have to compete with men. We don’t have to take from men and men can’t take from us. We are inherently equal.

    We each have our own half of the sky – our own way of thinking and acting. We need each other to perform our duty of holding up the sky. Most importantly, the sky isn’t complete and whole unless we lift up our half.

    This brings me to my final analogy.

    Analogy 4:  Yin and Yang.

    I use Yin (pink)and Yang (blue)to represent women and men as two complementary halves of the whole.  They are connected opposites who continually interact and influence each other, creating a dynamic environment. 

    Yin and yang symbol where instead of black and white, the colors are pink and blue representing how men and women interact in harmony with each other.

     In this symbol we often miss noticing Yin and Yang are not represented as a solid color. Yin has Yang’s blue qualities and Yang has Yin’s pink qualities. This is because women and men aren’t different species. We share human qualities.

    As individual men and women, the size of our complementary qualities can vary. Some of us have more, some of us less. How much we express also varies by our situation and environment.

    Yin and Yang are not static within themselves or together.

    As connected opposites they both influence and respond to each other. They work in harmony where neither is stronger or weaker than the other. In their dynamic relationship, they continuously balance each other and create balance within their environment.

    More importantly, their harmonious, balanced interaction creates Wholeness.

    Wholeness is where we find sustained, superior performance.

    When men and women interact, work together and influence each other, we become comfortable expressing our complementary traits. We change each other, so we are no longer solidly Pink and Blue.

    Even though we remain predominantly Yin or Yang, we transform into our own unique shade of Purple.   

    We find, balance, harmony and Wholeness within ourselves.

    Yin and yang symbol where instead of black and white, the colors are two shades of purple representing how when men and women interact they change each other and find wholeness within themselves.

    Empowered Women Know They Are One Half Of The Whole

    To learn more, watch these YouTube videoes:

  • Seeing and Believing In the Equality of Women

    What value do women, bring to the workplace?

    For centuries the accepted answer was “None.”  Even today most of us can still only give a vague answer.  We hear that companies with more women perform better but we can’t specifically state why that is.  Without a clear answer, women don’t know how to leverage themselves at work and companies don’t have an incentive to proclaim “We need to hire and promote more women!”

    The reason we can’t define the value of women is because we are still influenced by old ideas.  Most notably is the Doctrine of Two Spheres, which most of us probably never heard of even though we know its effects.

    The Doctrine of Two Spheres states that men and women, due to their biological makeup naturally inhabit two distinct and separate spheres.  According to the doctrine men naturally have traits suited for the public sphere (politics, law, business, commerce, academia and finance) while women naturally have traits suited for the private sphere (domesticity, child rearing and religious and charitable work).  This doctrine determined that male traits set a superior standard in the workplace and female traits are of little to no value.

    Back in the 20th century when women first went into the workplace to work on par with men, we didn’t question the validity of the doctrine.  We didn’t declare women’s equality by saying “Female traits are just as important to workplace success as male traits!”  Instead we sought women’s equality on the basis of equal rights and equal opportunity – giving women the right and the opportunity to go into the workplace and achieve the superior standard set by men.

    Without the declaration that female traits are just as valuable as male traits, a woman couldn’t work on par with men by acting like a woman.  To be equal she had to be perceived as being the same as a man.  She had to leave her female traits behind in the private sphere and adopt male traits for the workplace.  She could have the body of a woman but she had to think and act like a man.

    Many, many women still think this way.

    The consequences of this have been enormous for women.  We perpetuated the perception that men are superior and women inferior in the workplace.  We made women choose between their femininity and having a career and financial security on par with men.

    This choice keeps women out of many industries, jobs and professions, especially the highest paying.  It is a major contributor to the wage gap.  It leads women to conclude that they can have a career but they can never go as far or achieve as much as their male colleagues.  It is a significant reason why women aren’t advancing in the workplace.

    This is why any effort to advance women has to start with throwing the Doctrine of Two Spheres in the trash can.  We have to stop comparing women to men, stop telling women to copy men and stop believing that the way men do things in the workplace is the best and right way.  We have to stop believing women will obtain equality when we measure up to the standards set by men.

    This is how I began my engineering career.  Like many women, when I started my career I had high expectations of my all-male workplace.  However, it took me only a few days to say, “What the Hell?  I thought you guys knew what you were doing!”

    All around me I saw was chaos, crisis management, stress and lots of inefficiency.  Any concerns I had about measuring up to my male colleagues immediately vanished.  I saw lots of things that I needed to fix if my workplace was to meet my standards.

    I quickly realized that the way my male colleagues worked always felt incomplete – it was as if there were a lot of “things missing” in everything they did.  At the time I couldn’t quite articulate what was “missing” so I began using the term “Swiss cheese” to describe how they “functioned” and “completed” tasks.

    To fix my workplaces I didn’t copy my male colleagues or compete in their discussions.  Instead I listened for and looked for what they weren’t saying or doing.  I looked for the Swiss cheese holes.  Then I asserted myself and filled in the holes.  Filling in the holes felt obvious and completely natural.

    It also made our performance soar.  It made me wonder why millions and millions of men armed with their superior traits never figured out how to fill in the holes like I did.  We had the same education and experience.  There was only one difference between us – I was a woman.

    Could it be that as a woman I brought unique and valuable traits to the workplace that men couldn’t?

    After many years and many workplaces I concluded the answer was – Yes!

    I discovered that it was the combination and interaction of male and female traits that made workplace performance soar.

    To understand how this works we only have to look to the Yin and Yang concept we are already familiar with.

    Unlike the Doctrine of Two Spheres which divides male and female into two static and separate spheres, Yin and Yang are connected opposites.

    Yin and Yang continually interact and influence each other.  Neither is superior or inferior.  Each controls the other and both need the other to create a harmonious whole. 

    Yin and Yang allows men and women to be different but still remain full equals. 

    But it is really the concept that men and women together create wholeness  that is really important.

    This is what I picked up on when I began working.

    My male-dominated workplaces weren’t whole.  They were full of Swiss cheese holes because they didn’t have any women.

    I came along and provided the missing other half.  By asserting my female ways of thinking and doing things I made my workplaces whole.

    The significance of this is enormous to all workplaces and companies.

    It  means they are all under-performing.

    This is especially true for all those heavily male-dominated STEM industries who work from the premise that male traits are the right traits for their industry.  But watch the movie Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.  Listen to how many times the word “chaos” is used and how often the men talk about their stress and frustration.  This occurred because they were working with only one half of the whole.

    Workplace that function in wholeness, achieve greater performance while also reducing stress, frustration, chaos and inefficiency.  That is the beauty of working in wholeness.

    So let’s answer the original question: What value do women, bring to the workplace?

    Women make the workplace WHOLE. 

    This is why  workplaces with more women  perform better.

    Empowered Women Understand They are One Half of the Whole and Essential to Every Workplace

     

    To learn more about the value of women in the workplace and how we create wholeness, checkout my book. 

     

     

     

     

     

  • Change For Women Won’t Come From the Top Down

    www/123rf.com – 36093924

    There is an old fallacy that change happens from the top down.

    It says that in order for a company to institute a new initiative the first must-do step is: Get CEO buy-in!  The CEO then gets the buy-in of senior management.  Senior management then directs the initiative down to middle management who carries it out through the workforce.

    But if you’ve ever worked for a medium or large company you probably learned a different response to any big announcement of a new initiative: “Yay, I’ll believe it when I see it.”

    Many initiatives never make it down to the workforce level.  And the few that do often fade out with few if any lasting remnants of their existence.  The common excuse, “We didn’t have enough buy-in.”

    But the real reason they fade is because they are clumsily tacked onto existing work.  They aren’t integrated into the existing operating, managing and reporting systems.  Therefore, they don’t feel natural and easy.  When we become over-worked or stressed the best solution is to lob off the work that doesn’t fit.

    When it comes to advancing women in the workplace, we’ve been trying to use this same top-down approach for 40 years.  A women’s organization approaches a CEO and in the tradition of all new initiatives, has him sign a document or make a video declaring the company will now work towards gender equality.  It’s great PR – for both parties – but the results are minimal – just like they were with every previous management initiative.

    So why do women still use the top-down approach to advance women?

    Because we still believe too much in the myth of the hierarchal power and not enough in our own inherent power.

    In reality change happens from within and amongst people.  It comes from interaction and open and honest communication.  So, any woman in any role has more power to affect changes in attitude, behavior and culture than the CEO.

    As women we can create change by positively asserting ourselves and making change safe.  People are often afraid of change because they fear they will be negatively impacted.  When we negate their fears and replace them with positive experiences, the change is embraced.

    This is why in my efforts to advance women I focus on the positive changes and meaningful outcomes any woman can create in her workplace:

    • Improved performance, efficiency and profitability
    • Achievement and pride in daily accomplishments
    • Less stress, frustration, chaos and health issues

    These changes happen because when women assert themselves, we transform the workplace.  We make our workplace Whole. 

    We’ve all heard narratives about how women “bring balance” to male-dominated workplace.  But balance is an incomplete portrayal of the power of women. It still implies that men take more initiative and drive performance while women only curb and prevent them from being total bulls in the china shop.

    Balance doesn’t imply full equality.

    Wholeness does.   

    To understand Wholeness, we only have to look at the Yin-Yang concept we are all familiar with.

    Yin and Yang are equal halves of the whole.  They are dynamic.  They continually interact and influence each other in an easy and natural manner, making their interaction feel right.  Neither is superior or inferior, each controls the other and both need the other to create a harmonious Whole.

    If we think about Yang working all by itself as it does in many of our workplaces, we realize its performance limitations.  Working by itself Yang can’t roll all the way over and revolve.  Not even the CEO with all of his mighty hierarchal power can make Yang to revolve on his own.

    Nor can the CEO make Yin to assert herself and influence Yang.  Yin has to decide to do that on her own.  That is the power of her equality – she must be the one who recognizes and accepts that she is one half of the whole.  She must be the one who steps into and exercises her full equal power.

    The changes women want have always been women’s to make.  We just haven’t seen our power to do so because we have always been misled into believing in the power of the hierarchy.  And even though the male-dominated workplace knows this is a myth it keeps quiet because it wants to hide the fact that the hierarchy can’t create  change and doesn’t even know how.

    Changes in the workplace and the advancement of women will happen, but only when women accept that men and women really are equal and choose to exercise their equality.

    Empowered Women Create the Change They Want

     

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