On "Leaning" and Winning

November 25, 2019

I’ve had the pleasure recently of working with two different groups of executive women who absolutely knew their worth. The problem was, knowing their worth wasn’t translating into satisfaction or fairness at work.

These were women from real estate and finance, two of the most male-dominated industries there are. Many had faced well-known obstacles—watching a lesser-qualified man get the promotion they deserved, being the top performer and seeing the bonus go to others, being outright disinvited from meetings for no apparent reason. And yet they knew they were excellent leaders. And they believed they were excellent leaders because they were women.

They were right.

But their response to their challenging workplace situations—which was to declare that we should teach men to appreciate women’s leadership style and adopt said style—was misguided.

This is an urge we’ve been hearing a lot about lately. Ruth Whippman’s viral The New York Times op-ed, "Enough Leaning In. Let's Tell Men to Lead Out.", raised a chorus of “Hell, yeah!” from female executives everywhere. I agree wholeheartedly with Whippman’s call for parents of boys to raise them to be respectful of women and to embrace women’s empathetic tendencies. I also agree that as a culture, “maleness” continues to be our standard—to our detriment. Equality with men shouldn’t mean that women have to act like men. And yet, here we are.

But the solution to our still-misogynist workplaces is not to demand that men “lean out” and become more like women. Why? Well, to put it simply, because they’re not going to.

Is this fair? No, it’s not fair. But shaking one’s fist at the problem and demanding that men—who still control the levers of power in the professional world—start leading like women is naïve. And shortsighted.

Equality with men isn’t the end game. It’s the start of a new game. Let me explain.

Men and women are different. And they communicate and navigate power in opposite ways. As world-renowned linguist and Georgetown University professor Deborah Tannen, Ph.D, has been proving through her research for the past 40 years, men (and boys) use language to negotiate status while women (and girls) use language to negotiate relationships. This is why a woman’s selfless and collaboration-oriented overture to a man at work may result in her being undermined and out-played. Women and men are simply playing two different games, and the game that rules the workplace (and politics, and academia, and every other hierarchical sphere) is what I call the Male Power Game. Men have owned the public space since the beginning of time, so it’s no wonder that male ways of thinking and acting rule this space. And there is zero incentive for those who are masterful at the male power game to change their ways.

So what do we do? We learn how to play the male power game. You don’t take a cross-country road trip without learning how to drive. You don’t perform surgery without knowing about anatomy. And yet, as women, we have been stepping into the workplace completely unprepared for years. Does this mean we have to “act like men?” No. It means that we have to learn to play their game in order to gain access to the levers of power. If you don’t think this is possible, I give you two words: Kamala Harris. Wait, two more: Ginni Rometty. Ok, just a few more: Indra Nooyi. I could go on. Once there is a critical mass of women in decision-making roles, decision-making priorities will naturally change, as research shows, because women will be making those decisions. And leadership will start looking different, because women will be leading. And that’s how we change the game.

So let’s keep our eyes on the long game, stop bemoaning the unfairness of it all, and be strategic. “Leaning in” to a game that wasn’t created with us in mind was never going to be enough anyway. We have to jump in, master the male power game, and start winning.