Women at Work

Since I’m generalizing….

I’m the CEO of a company that employs about 150 people, 97% of them are women.   After 15 years as a chief executive, I observe no evidence whatsoever that women get along with each other better than men — and the women are the first to point this out.

I do see talented women managers who bring collaborative skills to the table — more such skills than men.   But they need them more — with each other.

I hope this doesn’t sound like I look down on women.   The best managers I’ve ever known are women, and I learn from them every day.

Gender in the Workspace

I’m generalizing.

Managers need to understand that women need more physical space than men do.  Especially for jobs that do not anchor the worker to one spot on the floor, but require her to move about.

It’s the invisible bubble of personal space we’re talking about, of course.   I’m not saying the female bubble is bigger — rather, the membrane around the female bubble is much less permeable.   Women don’t tolerate other people in their space as much as men.   I should say, men don’t care as much.

But it isn’t that.   It’s the reflection of that;  women hate to get in other people’s space.   This actually troubles them as much as the converse.   Hence, the constant apologies and kow-towing (sorry, ladies, this is how it looks from the male perspective.)

You men….haven’t you been puzzled by walking down a hall at work, and a female co-worker steps aside with an “I’m sorry” which actually slightly irritated you, because you wouldn’t have been bothered if she had just blown past you?

That’s the difference I’m talking about.  (Women also tend to concede at 4 way stop intersections.)

Whether we oppress this onto them or they come out of the womb like this is not my concern.  It’s just a practical observation:

Male managers who have the responsibility for a floorplan need to check it with females in a mock-up of the actual space before you ok the plan.   Especially if the architect is male.

Corporate Entropies

The first step downward loses all that is distinctly human.   So the person, experiencing entropy, deteriorates first into a machine.  So also, any organization of persons deteriorates, first, into a bureaucracy.  And often intentionally.

Bureaucratic features in an organization are usually the result of attempts to elevate outcomes by standardizing procedures.  If you’ve been any kind of manager, you know how necessary this feels as you try to cope with the idiocy of lazy workers.  You must — must! — build a machine.   Just make sure you give the workers who want to remain human an approved pathway  to subvert your own machine.

A stray thought about laziness:  most laziness in a service company is not in the form of a reluctance to work.  It is, rather, in the form of a reluctance to treat customers like humans.  The lazy people on the front lines of your company will actually LOVE to work by doing all the impersonal processes that constitute their jobs.  When they have to step outside the machine to make an encounter truly human, that takes more energy in 5 minutes than the previous 7 hours 55 minutes took.

So, when I wrote “lazy” you may have thought it an odd word choice, but “lazy” is actually the accurate term for “hiding behind policy and procedure”.