Women: Refuse to “Play the Game” at Your Peril
May 21, 2019
I have been working with a young woman in one of my client companies, mentoring her and encouraging her to take more charge of her role. She’s learning how to go from being a “doer” to a manager, by speaking up and trusting her instincts. As a woman, I know how to talk to her, and I know that beneath her self-deprecating exterior is a brilliant, powerful woman.
Enter her new boss, a man who wants to make a name for himself, and is driven to succeed. What this means for my young friend is that he is not interested in her potential. He’s interested in what she can do for him right now. Over the first few months in his role, he has observed in her a tendency to acquiesce, and so over time he has stopped including her in strategic discussions.
The change was subtle, not sudden, and one day she woke up and realized she’d been sidelined. She hadn’t seen it coming (He’s an affable guy), and now she found herself in a hole she didn’t know how to dig herself out of. She needed to re-establish the credibility with her boss that she had clearly lost.
This happens to women every day in the workplace, and it can easily be avoided by knowing how to recognize and play what I call the male power game. When you don’t know how this game works, you make yourself vulnerable to manipulation, and can find yourself being dismissed, undermined, and overlooked.
To understand how the game is played, think of a ladder—the proverbial “corporate ladder.” In the “male power game,” every one of us sits somewhere on that ladder, either up or down. The game is to gain more “positional power” by moving up. Here’s the rub: there’s only so much power to go around, so in order for you to be “up” someone else has to be “down.”
World-renowned linguist Dr. Deborah Tannen has found that positioning oneself “up” in conversation is quite natural for men (or “male communicators,” be they women or men). In her research over many decades, Dr. Tannen has observed boys on the playground, and consistently finds them jockeying for position through claims of superiority (“I can kick the ball onto the roof!” “Well, I can kick the ball to the moon!”). She finds the same to be true when observing men in the workplace.
Women, however, don’t always find this sort of jockeying for position comfortable. As Tannen has observed, the tendency of women (or “female communicators”) is to save face for others, and focus on making sure everyone feels included. This is why a woman might compliment someone else before tooting her own horn.
What happens when a woman doesn’t know how to play the male power game? Well, if she says something self-depreciating, a male communicator can jump on it, and use it to position her down while positioning himself up. Or perhaps she’s not comfortable with the confrontation that jockeying for position tends to create. So she resists challenging others’ ideas in meetings, and doesn’t stand up to her boss.
Women aren’t doing anything wrong in these cases. In fact, they’re being modest, thoughtful people. The problem is, you can’t win the male power game this way. And the male power game is what is played in the workplace, whether we like it or not.
If you have ever felt sidelined in the workplace but didn’t know why, this is probably the cause. And you can regain your footing. You simply need to be ready to say what you think, ask for what you want, and speak up about your talents and successes. You don’t move up the ladder by waiting for permission. You move up the ladder by positioning yourself up.
As for my young friend, I’m coaching her to get back in the game. She’s doing great—inserting herself back into strategic discussions and speaking to her boss as the expert she is. It’s a new way of being that will take some time for her to master, but once she does, she’ll find herself rising in the organization as the powerful force she is, eventually able to make her contribution on her own terms.