Bitch and Ho

I’ve had my hair up all day; I took it down and gave myself a Helena Bonham Carter moment. To complete the look, it would require a week long bender in addition to the mad hair. Seriously!

I was talking to someone I work with today about another co worker (whom for the purposes of this discourse, we’ll call Sue). I was telling “Jane” how, in a previous meeting in which Jane and I were both participants, Sue had stormed in, changed the direction of the project, ignored all the work we’d done so far in favor of her own deliverables. She had an issue that was a sub issue of the project that I owned. I was reasonably certain that her questions were betraying her lack of knowledge on the subject. After all, I’d been working on it for six weeks and I wasn’t sure I actually understood it either! I told Jane that my first thought was “why is she being such a bitch?” Jane confessed that she’d had a similar thought; which prompted me to ask her why she thought that our mutual response to a female expressing a dominant position was to describe her as a bitch? In a man, such behavior would be seen as taking leadership. We would all fall happily in line and execute whatever madness was being proposed. Yet when women do it, we look at each other – even women – and go “wow, what a bitch”. Why?

Sue and I had discussions of our own today. Her stance on her portion of the project work is so much different than mine. We are sharing resources, our issues are similar but not quite identical, and so it would be in our best mutual interests to collaborate. But are we? No. We both agreed today that it was nothing personal, but she had an objective, and I had an objective, and they weren’t complementary. In fact, unless cloning is invented, what we are both pushing for is going to be impossible. Her response to me? “I don’t care”. When I pointed out to her that she was responding to the wrong email thread (as in wrong topic) with what was essentially a threat, she said “don’t care”. I nicely asked (really, I’m not being sarcastic here) her to at least try and let me help. After all, I know this backwards and forwards, and the internal resources she is using belong to my department. She essentially said that she didn’t care, and that she was going to set up her own meetings, her own dashboards, her own timelines and if my resources couldn’t come to her meetings because they were tied up doing work on my project, she was immediately going to escalate to our VP.

This is not the way I like to do business.

As an employee, no matter where I’m working, I manage by building peer relationships. I get to know my folks, and the people I work with, and know a bit about their lives. For instance, I can tell you that Jane (who doesn’t work for my company but is a contractor of sorts) has two older Golden Retrievers, has two children, is married and is five years older than I am. Therefore, when I talk to Jane, I know we have common ground (dogs). Additionally, as women in IT we understand that the rules are different. We’re used to being a bit of a minority, so we tend to stick together. Women want to form relationships and manage work through those relationships. Men just want to manage. The thing is, I know the real life details of most of my team members. I try to encourage everyone to reach their goals – whether work goals or private goals. Keeping chatter strictly work based isn’t the way that I’m going to build a team and promote harmony. As a manager of people, I think that if I understand peoples lives, their troubles and their concerns, I will always make accommodations for folks and I will always be understanding. My team is comfortable enough with me to tell me that I look like shit, and to get my ass home and in the bed! That’s what I want! And I want my staff to know that if they have a problem with me, or they want to look for a new internal job, or they just need to vent, I’ve got their back.

I think, in this instance, the better thing to do would have been for all three of us to sit down and map out a plan for delivering pieces of EACH project over time. That way, it doesn’t look like Sue isn’t accomplishing anything (her main concern), and allows me to knock out some critical but not critical path items, and Jane no longer has to develop a cloning device ala that wretched Hugh Jackman magician movie. Instead, Sue leveraged her relationship to the VP (I have one too, but mine is not as tight) to make threats that are ultimately ineffective. As I was communicating the status of my issue, our VP came to me and told me to “make it work” – whatever that meant.

Can you tell I had a great day?

Back to the bitch thing….why did I do that? Why was my immediate reaction to Sue’s action and tone to call her a bitch? Because it was different stance than mine? Because it conflicted with my goals? Because in our ultra competitive environment it is Sue or me? You know, women in IT are a minority still. I’ve been with my employer for five years, and for a long time I was the only woman in IT at my site. For the curious, that’s a ratio of 21 to 1. So I’m used to the power plays, the name calling, the swearing, the yelling and the bad behavior. For those of you that aren’t a drone in Corporate America, real offices are more like a cross between “Office Space” and “The Office” and “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” (or whatever that one with Tina Turner was). My employer especially encourages, solely through their employee ranking strategy, people to be high achievers by whatever method possible. So…people rise to mediocratic greatness by flinging others under the bus. I refuse to play that game – it goes against my nature.

So, dear readers, why did I think of Sue as a bitch? Any other female workers out there have an opinion? Any men have an opinion?