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What I learnt from my male colleagues
- Le geek c’est chic -
90% of my past and present colleagues (I work in IT) are men. As a result, I have had plenty of time to observe the male approach to work and business and how it differs from my own. Here are a few useful lessons I could learn from my male counterparts.
Just Say No (CC: donnamarijne)
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World domination is allowed:
A former boss, the Micromanager was brought in a few years ago to take charge of my business unit. While academically intelligent, he turned out to be an inexperienced manager with no knowledge of sales or negotiation. Unfortunately, all of the above were part of his remit. He learnt on the job and eventually became quite good.
We had been looking for someone to fill this role for some time. It never occurred to me to apply because my role was mainly technical and this one spanned both the business and technical sides of the business. However, observing my new boss I realised that I could probably do the job better than he did. The moral of the story is think bigger and don’t be afraid to take on something you haven’t done before. Men are often much better at this as they assume they can do something until they are proved wrong.
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Stop planning and just do something:
I was in charge of a development team some years ago whose task was to build a new product. While I assigned lots of research tasks to help us choose the optimal technologies for the project, the developers got more and more frustrated. They didn’t want to research - they wanted to build something. In the end my boss overruled me and got one of the developers to do a “quick and dirty” prototype. This ended up mutating over time into the product itself.
Now I think my boss made the right decision. Sometimes it is better to just start doing something (anything) concrete rather than endlessly planning the optimal project.
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Just say no… and don’t feel guilty about it:
A colleague of mine - let’s call him Alphageek - had his first child a few years ago. Since then he never stays late or travels for work unless it is really an emergency. While a woman in the same situation would constantly feel guilty about not working more hours, Alphageek does an excellent job within office hours, reads up on new technology during the commute and then sees no reason to sacrifice his family time in order to do any more. What is even more interesting is that he also is rarely asked to do any of the above.
Another colleague, the self-promoting Don Con, was a contractor who occasionally travelled for work. He always insisted on getting flights within office hours (no matter how expensive) so he didn’t end up using personal time for travel. While I always felt the need to come up with a “valid”, i.e. preferably work-related, reason why I couldn’t travel, he just said no and that was the end of it. He also made full use of his expense account for “entertainment expenses” when he did travel….but that’s another story.
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[...] What I learnt from my male colleagues - verschillen tussen mannen en vrouwen op de werkvloer. [...]