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What my male colleagues could learn from me
- Le geek c’est chic -
90% of Le Geek’s past and present colleagues are men. As a result, she has plenty of time to observe the male approach to work and business and how it differs from her own. Last week she shared her insights on ‘what she could learn from her male colleagues.‘ This week she offers a few lessons on what her male counterparts can learn from her.
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Your ego is not your friend:
Lesson: 'Listen like you mean it'
I have lost count of the number of times that male colleagues have acted against their own best interests in order to salve their ego. A typical example is where the Micromanager would accompany me to a meeting where I was doing a technical presentation. He, or some other attendee at the meeting, would invariably bring up some subject which bore little to no relationship to the task at hand but which he knew something about. It was impossible for the person in question to sit through an entire meeting without displaying his knowledge – even when that knowledge contributed nothing to the meeting and actually implied that he had not followed the presentation.
I once worked for a start-up where we had a CEO I will call the Egomaniac. My role in the company was a technical one and even though the Egomaniac knew less about software than cats know about skiing, he constantly challenged me on various technical points. He could not bear to have anyone, in particular a woman, being more of an expert than he was on any aspect of his business. This tendency even extended to something as innocuous as computer games. We had a Nintendo Wii in the office and used to play tennis at lunchtime. I got quite good and my colleagues would get much more upset about losing to me than to any of my other male colleagues. They saw “losing to a girl” as more of a blow to their masculinity than losing to a guy. I actually used this to my advantage as the more worried they were about losing, the more mistakes they made.
In contrast, I think more about getting the job done than about making myself look good. The point is don’t let your ego drive you into bad decisions.
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Listen like you mean it:
Modern management theory implies that you should consult your minions on matters which affect them. In my experience, most male managers only pay lip service to this idea. So they will ask for opinions, listen to the opinions and then implement whatever they had already decided to do.
Don’t waste our time asking for ideas if you have no intention of taking them into consideration. If you are going to be a dictator, at least be honest about it.
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Style does not exclude substance:
My engineering office is often is wasteland of sandals with socks, company T-shirts and clashing items of clothing. It is sometimes actually painful to contemplate this vista every day. There is a severe divide between technical and commercial staff on this score. The sales team are often well turned out but this style is (often justifiably) viewed with suspicion by the technical staff as a smokescreen designed to distract from their lack of substance. In contrast, the technical team wear their casual attire as almost a badge of honour and mark of honesty.
Somehow I manage to look reasonably good while knowing what I am talking about. Style makes the world more beautiful… so I really wish my male colleagues would make more of an effort.
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