The
Organization Man and Woman
I was
struck, yet unsurprised, by a new survey featured in the Financial Times showing
that women view “workplace culture” as the biggest impediment to their careers
by a significant margin. Although work–life balance continues to monopolize
public discussion, the number of female respondents reporting that a workplace
designed by and for male advancement was the primary barrier to their own
advancement was nearly double that citing the difficulty of balancing work and
family. Of course, the two barriers are fundamentally linked.
What do we mean when we talk about workplace
culture? It’s primarily a set of expectations, values, and behaviors that shape
how people organize their work, build professional relationships, and structure
their time. And although the Cambridge survey, conducted by Dame Barbara
Stocking, president of Murray Edwards College at Cambridge University and
former CEO of Oxfam Great Britain, does not specify how a workplace “designed
by men, for men” hinders women, looking at expectations concerning time
presents an irresistible place to start.
It’s
always struck me as profoundly ironic that women began entering the workplace
in significant numbers and achieving positions of authority and influence
at precisely the historical moment when work was becoming
unusually time-consuming and intense — the late 1980s. We all know the reasons:
Portable technologies that spread work out 24/7; the constant learning curve
required to keep up with these ever-changing tools; the imperative of global
competition, which affects even local businesses; and the need for incessant
innovation that’s the defining characteristic of a knowledge-based economy.
These conditions have nothing to do with
gender. Yet given that research shows women continuing to bear more
responsibility at home than men, it also means the toll of pressure is often
greater for women. And because this intense culture has been established for so
long, people tend to assume that work has always been a pressure cooker, at
least for those seeking significant achievement.
But it
hasn’t always been this way. One has only to reread, as I did recently, The Organization
Man, William H. Whyte’s classic 1956 study
of young executives in big companies (what we might today call high potentials)
to see how dramatically our work culture has shifted. The lives of the men
Whyte profiled are barely recognizable to us. Mostly suburbanites, they catch a
leisurely 8:40 a.m. train into the city, participate in meetings, dictate notes
to their secretaries, enjoy collegial lunches out at restaurants, and usually
arrive home before 5:30, after having a cocktail or two aboard the train. Their
evenings seem centered on playing catch with the kids and an early dinner
followed by a bit of lawn care or a snooze in front of the television.
With
the exception of “traveling salesmen,” who mostly use their cars to visit
clients, Whyte’s strivers rarely travel for work. When they do, it’s a festive
novelty along the lines of Don Draper and Roger Sterling’s joyous escape to
California sunshine in Mad Men. There is nothing like the
continual stresses experienced by today’s road warriors, male and female, who
must routinely tear out of the house at 4:30 a.m. to catch an early flight and
then stay up until 2 a.m. in their hotels answering emails.
Although undoubtedly conformist and
unquestionably misogynistic, daily life in these 1950s-era organizations seems
a paradise in contrast to today — a paradise that women almost entirely missed
out on. This is particularly striking because women often bring values to the
workplace that are out of sync with what contemporary organizations routinely
expect people to value.
Monetary reward has always been the carrot
assumed to motivate people at work, whereas fear is often the unacknowledged
stick. This bargain lies at the heart of workplace culture as it developed on
what we might call the male watch: The belief that if financial rewards are
sufficient, people will willingly trade whatever is asked in terms of time and
quality of life. But women often seem skeptical about the terms of the bargain,
which may be one reason women’s progress at senior levels has been slow.
I was first tipped off about this when
interviewing several dozen women who had left high-level and high-reward jobs.
Over and over, these women told me that their jobs “were just not worth it,”
even though the positions they’d left were perceived to have high worth in the
marketplace in terms of the money and status they conferred. The consistent
language I heard from the women I spoke with suggested a slightly different set
of values might be at play. And because the actual values of these women had
not been factored into how their organizations calculated motivation and
reward, they did not view these jobs as unquestionably desirable.
To get
to the bottom of this mismatch, Julie Johnson, an executive coach, and I ran
out a good-sized data study that later became part of the research for our
book, The
Female Vision. Because we viewed satisfaction as a
yardstick that could be useful in measuring what people find truly motivating,
we sought to identify similarities and differences in how men and women
perceive, define, and pursue satisfaction at work.
We found many overlaps between what men and
women found satisfying: Leading successful teams, motivating others, building
relationships, the chance to exercise their skills and talents to the fullest.
Yet we also found some significant differences. For example, the women surveyed
tended to take satisfaction in meeting their own benchmarks for success rather
than measuring their achievements against those of others, which made them less
responsive to status as a motivation.
In
addition, women tended to assign value to their work based on the quality of
their daily experience rather than where the job might be leading in the
future. The quality of their experience was embedded in their freedom to
cultivate strong relationships on the job and to exert some control over their
pace — not every day, but certainly over time. The texture of
every day mattered, rather than whether the job served as a stepping-stone; if
they had a consistently poor daily experience, they didn’t place as high a
value on the job.
This
may help explain what the women in the survey cited in the Financial
Times were getting at when they reported feeling stymied in a
workplace designed by men for male advancement. In essence, they were
describing a culture in which people “don’t have a life” and view money and
status as worth any amount of sacrifice are most likely to get ahead. Setting
aside the unthinking misogyny that prevailed in 1956, these are women who might
well have flourished in the culture described by William H. Whyte.
Although
nobody advocates turning back the clock a half-century, there are surely ways
companies can respond to women’s desire for work they can enjoy on a daily
basis. And because evidence
suggests that many millennials of both genders,
as well as a growing number of men who want to be more present for their
families, also share these values, the need to recalibrate will undoubtedly
become more pressing.
What might companies do in response? They
might look at the extent to which technology has redefined non-urgent tasks as
urgent. They might give people more scope to set their own policies with regard
to time and technology. They might push back against disruptive upgrades and
continual restructurings that suck up time and reduce motivation. They might
question the utility of performance objectives that make people’s lives hell
and erode their relationships with customers. They might rethink the allocation
of assets to address the wild imbalance between ramping up motivation and
mitigating stress.
These are just a few ideas. Companies that
want to take a serious look at their culture will surely identify many others.
And they can make a start by recognizing that globalization and digital
technologies have pushed them to adopt practices that make little sense absent
the assumption that talented people will sacrifice anything so long as the
financial and status rewards are great enough. It’s an implicit trade-off that
big portions of the workforce no longer find “worth it.”
Sally
Helgesen
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/The-Organization-Man-and-Woman?gko=e0eb0&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20161011&utm_campaign=resp
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