The Loudest Duck by Laura A. Liswood

Author:Laura A. Liswood [Liswood, Laura A.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2009-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

GETTING OUT OF YOUR OWN COMFORT ZONE

Managers aren’t the only ones responsible for what happens inside an organization or company, individuals can’t expect their bosses to handle everything. At some point, employees have to take it upon themselves to get out of their comfort zones and learn to adjust to a company’s style, but not in a manner that merely shows compliance. There are varieties of ways for people to handle situations and become more flexible in approaching the workplace.

For example, if someone is transferred from America to Japan, he or she will benefit from toning down the squeaky wheel habit, since it will otherwise stand out and possibly offend (if not outright irritate) their new colleagues. On the other hand, the Japanese colleague who moves to the London office may need to tell Grandma to go home while learning to speak up a little more. I am not talking about style compliance, or taking on precisely the style of the other. This isn’t ultimately effective, and it can be exhausting and unproductive to try to alter your behavior simply to mimic that of others. That said, for a person to progress in a diverse environment, they might need to find the skills to adapt slightly—to stretch a bit to their surroundings and obtain new tools and approaches, not just the ones Grandma taught them. The more tools we have, the better off we are at work.

A high-level female manager at Goldman Sachs once told me that she listens carefully to the kind of information that men and women leave for her on her voice mail. The men often identify the problem, explain what the team did about it, and then they tend to give some detail about their individual role in the solution. The women tell the manager what the problem was, what the team did about it, and usually don’t include their specific role in the solution. While this particular manager notices this subtle but important difference, many others might not be so astute. Of course, this wasn’t the case for all women or all men, but it was a dynamic this manager found repeated often. She was aware of how that subtle difference could magnify into unconscious performance perception.

Sociologist Pepper Schwartz says that these are more than gender issues—they are power issues. Schwartz points out that even in a room full of women, some will be more vocal than others, some will take credit for their contributions to a team effort, and others will defer to the group. “The fact that men interrupt more than women isn’t because women are socialized to be less aggressive, even though that is true,” says Schwartz. “The fact is that if you come to an all women’s group, some women interrupt more than others. And the ones that interrupt are generally the dominant women. So, it’s a power trait.”

In U.S.-based corporations, we often see this power dynamic play out clearly across gender lines. A COO relayed to me that his office was on the top floor of a building, and that the corridor for his office was a dead end.

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