RESOURCES

Women, Men, Gender, Power and Business

Presented by Nancy Miriam Hawley and Jeffrey R. McIntyre

For the Spring meeting of the
New England Chapter of
The Family Firm Institute
May 13, 2004

We want the men to think about questions they have of the women, and we want the women to think about the questions they have of the men regarding your experience in business. Here are some questions to consider:

How do you as a man or a woman think about, experience or feel about the following in the workplace?

The balance and integration of work, profession, and family.

Hierarchy and authority, power and control in meetings and conversations - Who gets to speak in meetings; who gets acknowledged, who has difficulty getting acknowledged? What role does gender play in these dynamics?

Collaboration, cooperation, and competition with colleagues. How are women and men similar and different in their ways of collaborating and competing?

Language and communication, verbal and non-verbal. When does each gender communicate with body language, facial expression, voice tone, words and vocabulary—spoken language?

Charm, flirtation, and sexual innuendo in interactions. How do men and women use dress to communicate? Who pays more attention to dress? When?

Ambition, competency, and accomplishment for self and for the business. Which gender is smarter? In what ways?

Generating tasks, measuring results, and making agreements to get things done for the business?

We want to invite you to continue the attitude of inquiry that began in the last exercise about ourselves as women and men and our ways of communicating. We want to invite you to step out of the safe cocoon of your complacency or conclusions you may have drawn about the opposite gender. We submit, for this hour, that this attitude of honesty and of inquiry will support us to move beyond our limiting beliefs about each other into a deeper appreciation and understanding of each other.

Let's talk about what limits our beliefs. We are going to describe a way we listen and relate to each other that I believe is a source of suffering between men and women in general and certainly in business. It is our habitual ways of listening, placing our past into our future as a way to make the future "familiar."

		We have to make a commitment with discipline and effort to break out of the resignation and resentment of our «he always» and «she never» ways of thinking. I submit that it may take as much effort to become aware of and break free of these well-developed limitations as it does to climb Mt. Everest or run the Boston Marathon.
		There are two metaphors we think about when we consider our usual ways of listening to each other. One metaphor is the root or old Latin meaning of the word "family". Being a family therapist of thirty years and working with family businesses, and being a lover of irony, I love the root meaning of the word—to be familial in ancient Latin culture was to be owned by the patron—everyone was a slave, the women, the children, and the servants. The way we translate this into our modern life is that we are willingly enslaved to our familiar or habitual ways of listening and speaking, referring to it as "our" or "their" nature.
		The second metaphor is the metaphor from the 80s and early computer games. These are our PAC man and PAC woman ways of relating in our listening.
		This way of listening captures how intimately and intricately aggressive-defensive or distracted we are in our listening and relating even when we have a pretense of attentiveness or charm, the well-schooled social graces. We are usually listening defensively, ready to pounce, especially in difficult or demanding conversations.
		We also have to pay attention to what comes out of our mouths when we speak and what we focus on in another's speaking. As men, based on training in gender-biased ways to thinking, when women use the ubiquitous "we," as Deborah Tannen points out, we may hear somebody who doesn't want to take responsibility for her thinking or her actions. We may disregard or dismiss her contribution based on our bias to this one word. A whole salary bonus may be dropped because of language.
		We also have to pay attention to what comes out of our mouths when we speak and what we focus on in another's speaking. As men, based on training in gender-biased ways to thinking, when women use the ubiquitous "we," as Deborah Tannen points out, we may hear somebody who doesn't want to take responsibility for her thinking or her actions. We may disregard or dismiss her contribution based on our bias to this one word. A whole salary bonus may be dropped because of language.
		A moment about the idea of attention: We know we don't have much control over anything in life, really. There are three areas, however, where we do have immense power. We are in charge of who we are Being in situations, what we communicate, and how we behave—our integrity. We are in charge of what we pay attention to, and how we pay attention to it.
		We are inviting you to develop a whole new bandwidth of attention to how you live in your gender-role consciousness, your gender-role behavior, and your gender-based language about people of the opposite gender and people of your same gender.
		Language is important because how we shape others—in our language, in our discourse, our stories, our jokes, our off-handed, informal comments, in our network of conversations—is how we shape ourselves.
		Ken Blanchard writes in the introduction to one of the books in our bibliography, Susan Scott's Fierce Conversations, "The notion that our lives succeed or fail one conversation at a time is at once commonsensical and revolutionary . . . While no single conversation is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a career, a business, a marriage, or a life, any single conversation can. The conversation is the relationship."

It is important to understand that all language, all the ways we speak and listen, all the ways we behave based on our agreements, based on our conversations and the relationships that emerge from those conversations, either advance or retard our businesses. As Deborah Tannen points out both in her Harvard Business Review article and in her book, our gender biased listening and ways of rewarding certain kinds of speaking and behavior interferes with our businesses in ways we barely understand.

Most of our listening, when examined carefully, is dress rehearsal for responding, for speaking. More often than not our speaking grows out of our having not listened, which leads directly to conflict, or as the Harvard Group so nicely puts it, «difficult conversations.»

Habitual ways of being plus the PAC woman or man defensiveness equals the deep and often unconscious anxiety that we are hearing our father, our mother, our sisters or our brothers in another's speaking instead of our business associate. Or, in the case of family businesses, we actually are having to continue to listen to our family members and hear them with an adult voice—rather than as a snotty, spoiled, bratty yucky brother or sister, or belligerent and domineering father or controlling mother—making genuine, authentic listening difficult to imagine.

How do we develop a genuine curiosity and inquiry rather than a predictable way of listening based on our story (ies) about the other gender, or our history of relationships with people of the «other» gender? One action we can take, at any moment in time, in any place, with any one, is quite simple and direct: Breathing clearly and deeply to calm ourselves down and clear our minds, to get focused to listen more attentively, is a gift of generous spirit we can give each other every hour of every day, even in heat of pressing business decisions and actions.

Listening carefully and openly, speaking consciously and intentionally, becoming aware of stereotypes by which we dismiss each other and each other's language are crucial to creating the relationships that make agreements that accomplish our business and financial goals. Again, Tannen brilliantly describes how we block each other from access to power based on our language and how we listen to each other.

Let's distinguish listening from speaking: let's talk about types of speaking:

		There is decisive, direct, command and control (with appropriate military and athletic images; typical corporate boy talk.)
		There is relational, process, feeling-based conversation - concern for how everyone is doing in the process, and that contributions are being acknowledged - leans towards consensus in decision making. (Often considered soft talk which is code for corporate girl talk.)
		Of course, these are all true and they are all stereotypes. There are command and control women and there are consensus-building men. The challenge is to begin to understand and appreciate the differences in language and the speed and biochemistry of listening and speaking. We're not interested in creating the perfect business man or women this evening . . . or ever for that matter. We are vitally interested in creating effective ways of working together that add value to everyone's business.

Let's distinguish listening from hearing: There is a big difference, too, between listening and hearing. Listening is something we do with our ears; hearing is something we do with our minds and hearts. BOTH listening and hearing are in service to attention. We can be in charge of what we pay attention to and how we pay attention to someone or something.

When we begin to understand the different ways men and women speak—not only based in gender but in race and ethnic backgrounds as well as gender—we have the possibility of getting to powerful ways of relating and listening, making agreements which accomplish the purposes of our work: What contributes to this end is a skill that requires as much training, practice, and repetition as any golf swing or backhand return in tennis—we call it:

Empathetic, Contribution-based Listening and Speaking

We train ourselves to clear our minds regularly, practice mindfulness with our breath and with visualization—listen to, hear, and imagine what somebody is saying to us as if their reality is occurring in our reality. We then begin to listen for the gold in their speaking, we begin to hear what they are attempting to contribute to the work at hand. Because we are listening from an open place, an empathetic place, truly making an effort to hear what they are saying, our actions lining up with our words—which is the essence of integrity—we are walking our talk. From this place of integrity, we can accurately acknowledge what somebody has said. We can make clear agreements. We can have disagreements. We can have a great conversation or a difficult conversation. We can have conversations that have intensity and edge to them because we know there is a fundamental trust that what we are saying is being given serious consideration. We know our speaking will be received as a contribution.

To do this kind of listening, we have to be willing to «mature-up», or grow-up our ways of listening from the usual adolescent ways we listen in gender conversations, or the dominance/submission ways we listen. We have to listen to the other person as an adult. It has been said, «Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.» We would say that growth is inevitable; «maturing ourselves up» is optional. We may grow older but we may not grow wiser unless we work at it. We choose to «mature-up»—our experience of ourselves, our language, our listening and our speaking. Not because it is the polite or the politically correct thing to do but because it makes our relationships and our lives more enjoyable. We'll have satisfying and life-enhancing exchanges with those we know, work with, come to understand, and even grow to love.

In fact, we are suggesting that emotional, relational, and organizational intelligence and maturity are no longer optional. We must acknowledge everyone's contributions if we want to ensure business success.

We are currently interviewing successful couples who are in business as copreneurial couples—couples who create their own privately held companies together (which is quite different from mom and pop shops), co-executive couples—who are executives in different businesses, or co-professional couples—who are in the same or different professions, like a medical doctor and a psychologist. How do they do all that and successfully manage their family life and their intimacy as a couple? Here's what we've heard so far:

		All couples have worked in conventional corporate life—mostly for major, multi-national corporations.
		They left large private or public companies because they wanted a more adult and responsible environment where listening, speaking, and acting congruently with their values mattered.
		They wanted committed high quality relationships. They became clear that the companies could not or would not support those needs. They wanted to control their time and the means of their production as any entrepreneur does.
		They have a lot of energy and creativity for building successful businesses. Resilience, persistence, endurance, «failure-is-not-an-option» attitudes are woven into the fabric of their souls.
		They are creatively challenged by all challenges, and work out how to manage the time to handle them. They are aware of their impact on each other.
		They are best friends, committed to complete cooperation and communication. They are committed to their relationship working in the same way they are committed to their business working.
		Commitment and integrity are core values. This commitment allows them to resolve conflicts, have difficult conversations with respect, even when they are extremely irritated with each other.
		They have a great work ethic and a great play ethic—they create vacations when they want to and are committed to enjoying life as well as living life well.

Please let us know if you would like to be considered as candidates for an interview. We welcome your participation in our research.