In the Company of Women: Turning WorkPlace Conflicts into Powerful Alliances by Pat Heim, Susan K. Golant, Susan Murphy, Susan K. Golant, Susan Murphy

From Barnes & Noble

In their 20 years as consultants, authors Heim and Murphy gradually learned what gender studies have since confirmed: In the workplace, women frequently undermine one another. Real-world experience and recent research both show that when a goal comes into sight, men generally use direct action to attain it. Women, on the other hand, have been socialized to express aggressive actions through indirect means, such as shunning, stigmatizing, and gossiping. Such tendencies poison the work environment, reinforce "cat fight" stereotypes, and sabotage the efforts of women attempting to advance in male corporate environments. Offering straight-from-the-shoulder advice, the authors prescribe ways to turn conflict into alliance.

From the Publisher

If you have had feelings like those voiced above about your female colleagues, you are hardly alone. As Pat Heim and Susan Murphy have learned through twenty years of corporate consulting on gender differences, time and again professional women fail to support one another, and they even actively sabotage their female colleagues. While men will generally use direct action to attain a goal, women have been socialized to use indirect aggression to emotionally cripple those who are standing in their way. Even if the outcome is that no one gets what she wants!

The fact is, relationships can be either the best or the worst thing to happen to women at work. Studies show that women have a greater capacity than men to support and improve one another's professional performance -- with better results for all if their interaction is good, and worse results if it is not.

Presenting ground-breaking insights into the meaning of everyday behavior, In the Company of Women draws from the latest research on brain structure, evolution, and socialization to explain the unique challenges and positive opportunities that arise when women work with women.

A decade ago, in a male-dominated workplace, our primary concerns included surmounting communication differences between the sexes. By the year 2003, however, experts predict that women will own approximately fifty percent of American businesses. For the sake of our professional well-being, it has become imperative that we understand how women act differently among themselves when they are friends or enemies -- and use that information to reach new levels of excellence.

John Gray

In the Company of Women addresses how and why female workplace relations break down as well as how women can inspire each other to new levels of excellence

Patricia Schroeder

This book takes a critical look at the workplace relationships...and provides insight and tools that can help women become a strong, positive force in the workplace....

Lillian Vernon

This book will teach you how to build the relationships that will help put you over the top.

Susan Estrich

Powerful, eye-opening, smart reading.

Judy George

What a terrific and inspirational read!

Clair Raines

Every women who works should read this groundbreaking book.

Publishers Weekly

Now that women own nearly 50% of all businesses, the authors reason, women's worst enemies at work are just as likely to be other women. To support their thesis, which may offend some readers but will also generate attention, the authors both business consultants address differences between women's and men's behaviors. Declaring that women should be more conscious of their reaction if other women try to undermine a promotion or honor coming their way, they suggest, "that's the price we have to pay for the strong alliances we make with other women." This provocative, practical book deserves a wide readership. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Why Successful Women Lose Their Women Friends
As a woman rises through the corporate ranks, she encounters more and more resistance and attacks - but not from the people she might expect. It is neither the misogynist boss who believes that women belong at home nor male peers in the management ranks who resent the competition who are most likely to become a successful woman manager's enemy. It is, according to authors Pat Heim and Susan Murphy, other women.

"Without fail," write Heim and Murphy in their book, In the Company of Women, "in our twenty years of conducting conferences and workshops about gender differences in business, almost every participant we've encountered has acknowledged that women damage other women's career aspirations." The authors back their assertion with statistics; according to a recent American Management Association survey of 1,000 women, Heim and Murphy write, 95 percent reported that women had undermined them at some time in their career.

Indirect Intimidation
Although "catfight" is traditionally a chauvinistic term that describes a physical blow-up between two women, the authors use the term to describe the more common, indirect type of attack that women make on each other. While dogs lunge at each other, leaving each other wounded and bloody, cats use other means to intimidate an enemy: arching their backs, hissing at each other, baring fangs and claws, staring each other down, or making deep, threatening growls. Women will likewise use indirect but extremely hurtful and destructive attacks on other women, including gossip, spreading rumors and divulging secrets, publicly making insinuating or insulting comments,sabotaging another person's work, or purposefully snubbing and withdrawing friendship.

The price that women pay for these attacks is not only a personal price; as executives and companies witness these kinds of experiences they are less willing to promote women. Women, essentially, are hurting the advancement of women.

Why Attack?
If the personal and professional price for these attacks are so high, why do women continue to target other women?

The first explanation presented by the authors is what they call the Power Dead-Even Rule. There are three essential elements to a woman's happiness, the authors write: relationships, power and self-esteem. In order for a relationship to be strong, power and self-esteem must be equally balanced. If one woman gains more power or self-esteem, the relationship with the other woman is damaged.

The Invisible Rule
Although invisible, the authors insist that most women live by this unspoken rule. For example, women will often take steps to balance the power and self-esteem with a friend and colleague whenever an imbalance threatens. Imagine, for example, that Sandra compliments a colleague, Martha, for her great new suit. "This old thing?" Martha might say. "I got it on sale." By complimenting her colleague on the new suit, Sandra increased Martha's power and self-esteem. Martha immediately brought the power and self-esteem back into balance by denigrating her suit.

With promotions, however, the Power Dead-Even Rule is unambiguously broken. One woman has more power (and usually self-esteem) than another. And even - or perhaps, especially - if the women were friends or colleagues beforehand, the imbalance of power damages the relationship.

The authors offer scientific and cultural explanations for the Power Dead-Even Rule. Little girls' games, for example, are often win-win. If you're playing jump-rope, the worst that can happen is that you lose your turn, which will come back around again. In boys' games, whether it's sports or cowboys, there are winners and losers - and somebody has to lose. Little boys are taught to accept that not everything is even.

Why Soundview Likes This Book
Explaining the causes of conflicts between women is only the first half of this well-researched and authoritative book. In the second half, the authors address how women colleagues can work and compete together constructively, how to be an effective female executive and how to build dream teams of women.

In the Company of Women is an important book for both career women - who will discover in these pages that they are not alone in feeling targeted by other women - and company executives trying to better understand and resolve the source of conflicts in their management teams. Copyright (c) 2002 Soundview Executive Book Summaries

What People Are Saying

Patricia Schroeder
"One of the most important lessons I learned in Congress is how powerful the unified voice of women can be. As more and more women take on positions of power in the corporate world, the positive female-to-female dynamic becomes an even more essential component to their success. This book takes a critical look at the workplace relationships that we all deal with and provides insight and tools that can help women become a strong, positive force in the workplace by creating alliances out of conflict."
— Patricia Schroeder, Former Member of Congress, President & CEO Association of American Publishers

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

It has become almost axiomatic that women live in a web of relationships. We have developed a great facility for relatedness, and we need these connections in order to maintain our sense of personal well-being. Jean Baker Miller, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Boston University of Medicine, explains that for women, "all growth occurs within emotional connections, not separate from them...To feel 'more related to another person' means to feel one's self enhanced, not threatened. It does not feel like a loss of a part of one's self; instead it becomes a step toward more pleasure and effectiveness."

Relationships are such a critical element in the world of women that they are also central to our dealings in the business world. At the office we also tend to think relationally and work along relational, not hierarchical, lines (we'll get into this more in chapters 3, 4, and 5). Women often define career success by their ability to create affiliation with others and develop relationships in the work setting: "In my time at the Acme Company, my boss became my best friend, and ten years later, she's still my best friend." Organizational psychologist Carol Gallagher has found that the ability to maintain positive relationships was among the four critical success factors in the careers of the two hundred high-ranking senior executive women she studied. "The ability to develop relationships is imperative in crossing the threshold to the next level," she writes in Going to the Top. One of her interviewees explained, "On a scale of one to ten, I would give relationships a ten...I don't think you can get ahead without them."

The maintenance of relationships in the workplace is also far more important to women than to men. In Susan's doctoral research into twenty-one career values (such as risk taking, economic security, and altruism) across three generations of men and women (Gen-Xers, baby boomers, and mature workers), she found that no matter what the age, the importance of social interactions in the workplace is the most significant difference between the genders. Social relationships were also significantly more important to women than to men, ranking fourth out of the twenty-one values. Susan's research and dozens of other studies have proven that women value both social interactions and friendships significantly more than men do. They consider interpersonal relations important in their career development. They derive meaning in their lives predominantly through these interpersonal relationships and by observing and learning from others as well as their own life experiences.

Because of our focus on relationships, women are more likely to judge and care about people based on their innate qualities rather than their position in the corporate hierarchy. Consequently, female executives are more likely to adopt a collaborative leadership style, to share information and involve others in the decision-making process. We need our colleagues to make our work fulfilling and enjoyable, but also so we ourselves can be maximally productive. We therefore are more likely to pay attention to and address emotional issues at work. We often make concerted efforts to get along with our female colleagues. We share feelings and use heartfelt empathy to help assuage upset feelings or mitigate a difficult situation.

Women who have met with success in terms of concrete achievements but not what's called "affiliative success" often feel empty, lonely, and isolated. Susan consults in the financial industry with the senior women at a Fortune 100 company and was surprised to discover that what many of the female executives there want is not tactical advice such as "If Fred does this, and I respond in this way, what do you think will happen?" but empathy. During their consultations, the women pour their hearts out about the pain they feel, often from the other women in the company. For instance, two women had quit in Cynthia's department, and she believed their action was due to the way in which she had treated them. She spent almost an hour agonizing over how bad she felt, until finally Susan said, "Why don't you ask them why they left?"

The following week, Cynthia told Susan that she had phoned the women, and they both told her they had quit for other reasons. Whether or not her former employees were telling the truth, this executive certainly felt a lot better, believing her relationships had been preserved.

Because relationships are so important to women, it is all the more painful when they deteriorate. We will explore how this happens more fully in chapter 2.

Power is the ability to get things done. It is extremely important: without power you would find it impossible to reach your personal and professional goals. In 1959, psychologists John French and Bertram Raven at UCLA identified six kinds of power that both genders utilize inside and outside the workplace:

*Reward power: the ability to give something to someone. You can reward another with a promotion, gifts, or praise. You have something that she wants.

*Coercive power: the ability to punish someone, to demote her or otherwise harm her career progress. Derogatory comments can also fall under this category.

*Legitimate power: power conferred on you by the organization. You are given the title of vice president or appointed manager of the department or leader of the team.

* Expert power: power derived from your unique abilities or skills. You're the only person in the office who knows how to fix the computers, or perhaps you have expertise in managing the boss.

*Referent power: power based on your personal affection for or identification with another person or group. People do as you ask simply because they like and trust you. You have referent power over a friend who wants to please you.

* Associative power: power derived from whom you know and how you associate with them rather than what you know (expert power). You gain power by dropping names.

Power exists in relation to someone or something else but never in a vacuum. It can be a double-edged sword, especially for women in the workplace, because it's much more straightforward for men to wield power on the job than for women. When men take command of a situation, they're perceived as resolute and authoritative. They are focused on winning and will often take charge. These can be positive, even comforting, attributes in a crisis. We might respect a powerful man, especially if he can provide structure and direction to a group during a time of confusion.

But women are in a more precarious position when they try to appear powerful. Unfortunately, power and friendship don't easily mix among women; acting as if you have power can skew female relationships. Friendship implies giving to another person and sharing, whereas power can result in your taking from the other person or directing her activity. To women, these do not feel like friendly actions. In fact, these behaviors could be perceived with downright hostility. Consequently, if you exert your power on the other women at the office in the same way that men do, you can easily provoke a catfight.