Women's workplace bonds can be powerful alliances

Think about how you played as a child. What was the point behind your games?

Were you drawn to activities that pitted you against competitors, or did you enjoy acting out adult scenarios? Did you play in large groups, or with one or two close friends?

These early preferences can tell us something about how we work.

“Games teach children important lessons about how to behave ‘appropriately’ when they become adults,” write Pat Heim and Susan Murphy in their book In the Company of Women: Turning Workplace Conflict Into Powerful Alliances.

Girls and boys play differently when they’re growing up, and experts say these disparities are reflected in the different approaches men and women bring to life on the job.

Girls tend to prefer cooperative games that focus on relationships, like “house,” while boys engage more often in competitive, goal-oriented games like football or cops and robbers. Girls are more likely to play in pairs; boys vie with a field of opponents.

In the workplace, then, many women put a premium on their one-on-one relationships, while men tend to focus more on attaining status in the company’s hierarchy.

“Most women value relationships very, very much and it’s really central to the female culture,” Murphy says. Of course, there are many exceptions to these broad trends, but the patterns we see can help us understand how we relate to one another at work.

Working together

Women’s relationship-based perspective has advantages. Collaboration and teamwork are important career skills, and they seem to come easily to many women.

“Women are more likely than men to think about joining together to solve problems on the job,” says Karen Nussbaum, director of the Working Women's Department of the AFL-CIO.

Nussbaum found 83% of women say it is more effective to join together to get a job done than to work on your own.

Bringing people together and building consensus are “extremely powerful strategies,” Nussbaum says, especially if this cooperation does not prevent women from breaking with popular opinion when necessary.

“There are times when you do have to be willing to take a step that others aren’t willing to take,” Nussbaum says.

Managing relationships

Heim and Murphy say women’s interpersonal relationships have a great impact on their work performance—which can be good or bad.

When everyone’s getting along, the harmony can have an extremely positive impact on productivity. But when a personal conflict arises, women’s performance on the job tends to suffer more than men’s, making relationship management an extremely important skill for women.

Being upfront about conflict is important, especially since women are socialized to keep negative feelings to themselves. Open communication is especially essential when two women are pitted against one another. Some women may not be as accustomed to competition, and can sometimes take it personally.

If two women are in contention for a promotion, for example, they might sit down and discuss how to prevent competition from creating bad feelings.

Another key, Heim and Murphy say, is to downplay differences in status. “The biggest thing that women need to understand and to manage well is their power with other women,” Heim says.

Heim and Murphy say women should take a direct, aggressive stand with men but soften their approach with other women.

A female manager, for instance, might phrase the same request differently when addressing a male or female subordinate. With a man, she could say, “Get me that report ASAP,” while with a woman she might change her approach to: “When do you think you can get that to me?”

Both subordinates will receive the message as a command, and are likely to respond better if it's tailored to his hierarchical perspective or her cooperative approach.

Not everyone agrees that paying attention to gender differences is important for women, though. “I think that we’re moved off the track by this stuff,” Nussbaum says.

“Authority comes from actual leadership and fair discipline,” she says. “You can chat about accessories and still give fair discipline.”

Forming strong ties can help women work through inevitable obstacles they will face throughout their careers. Here’s why:

“Women are more often the object of competitive attacks by men,” says Deborah Tannen, Georgetown University professor of linguistics and author of Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work.

“Where a woman might be busily doing her job, doing the best she can, a man might be surveying the competition and thinking about who he can knock out of the way,” she says.

But by finding allies in co-workers and especially superiors, women can safeguard themselves against such attacks.

“You need protectors,” Tannen says. “You need alliances not only at your level but with people above, who have more power than you.”

Despite the strides women have made in the workforce, we still come back to “the same old issue of children and childcare,” says Nancy Evans, editor-in-chief of iVillage. “That is the one way where we are not equal. Guys do not have to think about it like we do.”

Working together, women can share advice, information and strategies to invent new solutions to this unresolved issue. By talking through their struggles to balance career aspirations with family life, women can brainstorm individualized approaches to address each other's specific scenarios.

Tannen describes a common scenario: A female worker introduces an idea in a meeting and it’s ignored. Later, a male colleague suggests the same idea and it’s praised, except now the idea is his.

“Almost all women in high positions have experienced this,” she says.

By forming alliances, women can promote each other and demand the recognition they deserve.

Tannen's advice: “It’s very hard to say, ‘Hey that was my idea.’ But it’s very easy to say, ‘Hey, that was Sally’s idea. Didn’t Sally say that?’”