Women in the Workplace Pt 1

Women in the workplace have a hard time as it is. Read enough books and articles and you see a theme developing of inequality, hidden biases, and other ways women sabotage themselves that keep women out of major leadership positions. I have been giving this topic a long think as my career goals have morphed and developed.

I am fortunate to work for a company that has few of these obstacles. However, all promotions are still subject to the human factor. The fact that in the end, somebody’s opinion will affect the final decision, and you better hope they like you enough to want to work closely with you.

Getting ahead as a woman requires a fine balance between ambition and emotional intelligence. It’s unfair that there are these hidden paths we have to navigate.

Do you see me now?

Everyone wants to be recognized for their work, they want to know that their efforts are seen. So when my friend Jem approached me last year and asked if I ever felt like my hard work went unnoticed, my gut reaction was to say no. But I paused and instead asked her what she meant because I felt she was really looking to vent.

She then explained that she felt she was working harder than all the other Team Leads in customer service. It just so happens that the other leads at that time were all men. She was the only woman on that team. She felt that she worked harder than all of them. That she was alone in picking up the slack. But the department manager, also male, either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

She explained that every time it was her day on duty, she completed all of the required tasks. Just so whoever was on the schedule after her wouldn’t have extra work. She noticed if one of the guys had been on duty the day before they were leaving tasks unfinished. Which she then had to take care of the following day. It was unfair.

I asked her if she felt she was being taken advantage of? Had she said something about it? Had she confronted the guys on her team and told them that she was tired of carrying their load for them?

No, she had not. And therein lies the problem.

Can’t be angry all the time

Jem talks a good game about being proactive and taking action. She is always making all kinds of promises in the monthly meetings. Yet, when push comes to shove, she prefers to be passive-aggressive when showing her displeasure. She had been walking around in a general funk hoping someone would notice. Being passive aggressive. Hoping someone else would ask her what was wrong. And that someone else would deal with getting the guys on the team back on track for her.

Well, that person wasn’t going to be me. If she wanted my help, she was going to have to come out and ask for it. Just because I can read between the lines doesn’t mean I am going to.

Eventually, things came to a head, and since she had not approached her teammates, or the department head to address the inequity on the team, when performance over all took a big hit and important deadlines were missed, the Department head took it out on all of them. Which made her feel even more dejected.

Pandemic adaptations

COVID brought some changes to the team.

I’ve been trying, albeit not too hard, to crack the code of how to break into upper management. What I have come to realize is that you can’t work so hard or be so good that people cannot envision you doing something different. You have to have potential.

And that’s where I’ve been trying to correct my mistake. It started with surreptitiously training my replacement. Secondly was lending myself to solve problems not specific to my department. For clarity, I am in Customer Service. It is the redheaded stepchild of many organizations. It is the least understood and the most important because, without it, all the product and warehouse space isn’t going to do a lick of good if people can’t pay for it, or get their product handed out.

Case and point: For some reason, the old manager’s solution to the post-COVID response was to restructure the department and reassign leadership responsibilities. What for? I get that he was trying to integrate one of the new leads into the department by giving her more responsibility, but he didn’t have to piss off the rest of them by showing this biased favoritism. Especially since the lead he was favoring had nothing to recommend her but her looks. She was younger, she was less experienced, and my only experience with her at work before she was promoted was that she was a fuckup in general. So imagine my surprise when she was selected to become the new lead on the team after one of the established ones departed to become a teacher.

Being a woman in the workplace

This knee-jerk ultimatum from the manager was not a good move as he approached the questions as to the move with the worst response “because I said so” attitude. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. So the leaders began to doubt him. They grew disgruntled when it turned out that the role she had been thrust into became super high profile in the post-COVID environment. The envy from Jem was palpable. Mostly because she felt betrayed as she had trained this new lead, and taken her under her wing before COVID hit. So to have her selected to what became a very important position because Jem was now summarily excluded from any communications or decisions from an area that had been hers pre-COVID. Jem was pissed. And pissed off Jem is a very petty Jem.

The role that Jem had been assigned, was now being ignored because she decided a better response was to sulk. And not a quiet sulk, a long protracted sulk which affected her, the coworkers that were assigned under her, and the entire store at the end of the day. To the point that when the entire organization was affected, upper management was looking for someone to blame, and her area was immediately scapegoated for 2 reasons:

1. She did not take ownership of her area to establish her leadership.
2. She actively didn’t give a fuck and everyone could tell, especially at the interdepartmental meetings that were held once a month to address issues and develop solutions to correct those issues, her area became the easiest to blame as she never attended the meetings, even though it had been made clear that their presence was highly encouraged (aka mandatory). Upper management LOVES those meetings. To ignore them is a death knoll on your upward mobility.

Establish your reliability

Once you have established your brand to be a reliable person, you will discover that when a crisis occurs in the future, it mitigates the finger pointing, and the assumption that you will not recover from this issue. You want to be seen as someone who gets a results and a bump in the road is exactly that. Something to get over and past.

If not, you will become the bump in the road.

It should not have mattered that she was not happy with the assignment she got. Fine, she wanted to sulk, okay. Sulk for a month tops, but then get the fuck over yourself and act like a grownup. She refused to conduct her business professionally and left that area to flounder. Never addressed training or gaps in the contingency plan. She hoarded knowledge, refused to forward emails to raise awareness. Where she should have been creating the perception that she was THE expert for this area, the only thing she did was create the perception that there was no leader for this area. Not a good move.

Develop your brand

Consistency is key. One of the most challenging traits to teach or adopt is how to follow-up. Why? Because it is exhausting and tedious. If it was easy, everyone would do it. But it is the one feature that can make you stand out heads and shoulders above the competition.

I know this to be true because it is the number one trait that is given to me as positive feedback as to why people see me as a reliable worker, and a leader.

Petty Officer Petty in charge of the Department of Petty Behavior reporting for duty should have been her catchphrase.

Be the bigger person

She liked to lord it over me that I was not a team lead, that I wasn’t on their level because I wasn’t copied on all the emails she got because she was on the leadership distribution list. Who knows what petty reasons she used to justify hoarding the info because that came back to bite her on the ass when she readily admitted to having prior knowledge of an issue that I had brought up at that interdepartmental meeting.

It looked doubly bad for her when she shared that she had known, read the email, and had sat on the information for over two weeks because she felt it didn’t concern me. The outcome of this choice was not positive as now the general thought about her was that if she sat on this information about her area, what other information is she hoarding? She isn’t trustworthy. She was perceived as hostile.

I don’t toot my own horn at work unless it is necessary. And lately, it has not been necessary. I believe that words are empty and actions speak louder than words. That philosophy has served me well since I began working for this organization as their values resonate with me, and are led by actions and not by empty platitudes.