"Men love to hear themselves talk" and other insights from the Old Grey Lady.
In a reprise of Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comments, the New York Times has settled the age-old debate about who makes better office managers. "No Doubts: Women are Better Managers" announces the July 26 headline.
To resolve the galloping debate, the NYT editors summoned Carol Smith, Senior Vice President for the Elle Group. In case you haven't made the acquaintance, the Elle Group woos new members with the breathless claim it will "enrich your life, pamper your body, nurture your spirit, accelerate your business, and celebrate your soul." Sorry, no men allowed.
Ms. Smith is possessed of an uncanny, indeed unfathomable acumen such that she is able to dispense with the usual accoutrements of objective inquiry, so no need to do an employee survey or commission a national poll. It's what they call a woman's intuition.
Here's Ms. Smith at her most lucid: "In my experience, female bosses tend to be better managers, better advisers, mentors, rational thinkers." Why? Because "Men love to hear themselves talk."
(In my time hanging around the office water cooler, female workers do far more conversing than men. But who am I to doubt Ms. Smith's firm grasp on reality?)
Oh, and women are terrific list-makers. "They will do their to-do list. They will prioritize their to-do list. They will get through their to-do list," Smith compulsively writes.
That's right guys, forget that aspiration of getting an MBA, all you need to do is pull out pencil and paper and start making lists!
"Hands down women are better. There's no contest," Smith zestfully concludes. And lest she come across as a smug know-it-all, "I want less of that self-righteousness," she avers.
I hate to differ with the erudite pronouncements of Ms. Smith, but my experience has been of a different ilk. I well recall a female co-worker who whispered to me in the hallway, "I can't stand working for women!" Her female supervisor micromanaged and publicly berated her for every shortcoming, imagined and real, to the point she had to go to the union with a harassment complaint.
My personal you-won't-believe-this story involved an office where women outnumbered men three to one. My supervisor, a female, had hand-picked all the women. On good-hair days, she would refer to her staff as "my dysfunctional family." On bad days, staff would hole up in their offices, waiting for the storm to blow over. She was eventually forced into retirement by senior management. And yes, she was good at making lists.
What do polls of female employees show?
Three years ago the publishing company Vault did a Gender Issues in the Workplace Survey. The results shocked many: Only 9% of women said they preferred to work for a woman, while three times that number, 28%, preferred a male boss. The majority of respondents had no preference. One woman explained, "Men are generally more decisive, quicker, and focused in their decisions. Women approach work with more emotion than men."
A similar survey by Harper's Bazaar queried 500 English professional women working in finance, media, and healthcare. A majority – 60% — of these high-status women stated their preference for male bosses. 7 out of 10 admitted they would be delighted to see a female colleague fail, and 86% said they would flirt with a male co-worker if it would boost their job prospects.
Maybe the Sisterhood isn't all it's been made out to be.
When men of an earlier era engaged in such unabashed buffoonery, they were derided as chauvinist Neanderthals. So thank goodness we have Carol Smith's screwball humor to relieve the workday tedium for the rest of us.
Who is the best manager? The one that gets the job done. Making lists is good for those in repetitive non-challenging positions but don’t ask the compulsive list maker to take an intuitive leap that provides an order of magnitude improvement to processes.
Management styles are varied and a good manager varies the style to fit the need. For me I detest micromanagement by me or of me.
Want great results expect a great deal from your employees but expect more of yourself. Even workers that hate the manager that expects “too much” admits that more gets done when more is expected.
Some leaders are born but most are made.
Here’s a link to the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/business/26corner.html?_r=1
Carey,
I haven’t read your article through as yet in order to give the author a fair hearing. Here are my independent observations regarding the NYT piece.
1. To emphasize the point of his article (as expressed by its title), the author chose “Carol Smith, a senior vice-president … at Elle … [who] views women as the best bosses and mentors, but says men don’t take problems as personally” as his subject. This is a woman executive in an organization targeting a purely female audience, employing mostly women, and with a long history of feminism. Shouldn’t the reporter have chosen someone less obviously feminist and with a background in grading the managerial performance of others regarding the relative merits of women as managers. This is a little like asking a starlet what she thinks of acting as a calling and her own proficiency at it. Wouldn’t it make more sense to ask her director?
2. Ms Smith admits from the start her own managerial acumen came about through painful mistakes learned early. “In sixth grade, I was head of the project to create a mural … I had all this power and I started bossing everyone around. And within days it was apparent that I was going to have a mutiny on my hands, and I was fired from the mural. They took my clipboard away. It was a lesson I learned very early in life about the difference between being the boss and being bossy.” That was a lesson most of us who manage go through at some point. Yet, how does this illustrate women learn these lessons better or that they are endowed with greater managerial talent such that they make fewer mistakes?
3. Ms Smith next utterance is “I feel I’m a leader without ever really thinking I’m a leader, which is to say that I know when I walk into a room of employees, I command a presence, but I’m always feeling like I’m part of the gang” sounds naïve and more than a little arrogant. She ‘knows’ she has ‘command presence’ but is also “part of the gang”. Apart from the obvious that she doesn’t think about her leadership role enough, my experience of managing others is you can’t be both the boss and ‘just one of the girls’. If you are fantasizing you’ve managed both, your mastery is slipping and your employees are getting a bit too familiar. Being the boss doesn’t mean you can’t be friendly, share a joke, or take a friendly interest in them, but it does mean there is a subtle difference and that difference should be respected by both sides. However and to be fair, maybe that’s something you can get away with running a media operation you’d never try at a major industrial plant or running major construction projects.
4. Where Smith says “I don’t instantly sit at the head of the table. I sit in the middle of the table, always. I don’t want to sit at the head of the table. I want to be part of the process and part of the decision” she admits to surrendering some of her authority and reveals some non-adaptability. There are times to sit at the head of the table and times to mix things up based on the purpose of the meeting. If this is a meeting to air grievances, I’d agree the thing to do is sit in the middle or at a round table. If this is a meeting to hear problems and assign tasks, and you know you’ll be the one delegating, sit at the head. It sounds to me like Smith has not quite accepted being the boss, and wants to remain one of the girls. This is a common transitional issue.
5. “…if you win people over, they’ll follow you. And, of course you need other qualities, like honesty, decisiveness and the ability to confront. I’m a really good confronter”, tells me this is someone who treats managing others mainly as a public-relations exercise. People follow a leader for two reasons a) because they’ve demonstrated competence or b) they feign competence well enough that others assume they are with disastrous results. Leadership is a skill with which to motivate others, but is of no value unless you know where you are taking them. I have found confrontation grossly overrated. The ability to confront others can be useful if you can carry it off, but isn’t really necessary and rather like swatting flies with a sledgehammer. Most of us aren’t that good at successful confrontation and learn to avoid it. Seems to me Ms Smith still has some of the ‘bossy’ attitude she’s coping with.
6. When asked what she means by “confronter” she gives an unsatisfactory answer which the interviewer then has to rephrase to get a better one; this despite she says “…made me good at managing people, because I think they always know that they’re going to get a real answer” [a non-sequiteur]. Her example of a confrontation is really one of bearer-of-bad-news, and there was no confrontation; or, if there was one, she doesn’t give us the details. Confrontation means there is some push-back from the employee.
7. When asked why she thinks women make better managers, her answer boils down to ‘men waste time at meetings on small-talk’. Obviously, she hasn’t sat in at the meetings I’ve been party to where women discuss bargain fashions. Wait a minute, that ‘is’ all they talk about at Elle meetings!
8. The rest is pretty repetitious with the same unequal nonsequiteurs regarding men’s versus women’s office-chatter. Her grammar could use a little work also (maybe from not spending enough time at that ‘small-talk’).
Okay, Carey, I read your article and see we came to mostly the same conclusions. The NYT article starts with an outrageously obnoxious premise, then says a great deal that actually disproves it while saying nothing that supports it. Despite which, the author seems certain he successfully made his point, and I have no doubt his readers agree.