THE MANAGERIAL WOMAN

Typically this woman graduates with a liberal arts degree. She has done well in languages, literature, history, psychology or sociology, music or art. She leaves college not at all sure what a skill is. Many women like her go to a secretarial school to acquire something they can tell themselves is a skill because there is a demand for it, it is tangible, it can be used. She does so too but she is lucky enough to find a job as an administrative assistant in a staff department. She types for herself but not for others. Slowly she finds her feet and begins to realize that there are skills that she can learn, and she can learn them on the job. As she becomes more competent her sense of security increases. She can learn those skills, she can use them effectively. As time passes she finds that their effective use contributes to her sense of security in another way. The men with whom she works begin to see her as someone who, in spite of the fact that she's a woman, is extremely good at her job. In a real way she begins to develop a sense of legitimacy, of having a right to do the job she does, both in her оwn mind and, as she sees their reactions, in the minds of others.

Throughout this process she tends to have made no long-term career commitment.( она склонна не строить долгосрочных карьерных планов) Her commitment has been to current performance and to reveal on-the-job competence. She is not sure for how long she will work or whether she will work at all if she gets married. Given the lack of a longer-range objective, her concentration on the here and now is understandable. She wants to make the present as worthwhile as she can. She signs up for courses that add to her expertise. She reads manuals and professional journals.

Several years later her competence earns her a supervisory position. At that point she has invested a great deal in the skills she has acquired and they in turn have contributed heavily to her sense of who she is. It is difficult for her to accept that other people, those she now supervises, will make the same investment, and in reality a number of them don't. Her way of coping with this is to pick up the pieces for them, to do the extra work herself. She becomes a true working supervisor. She is responsible for all of her old assignments, the supervision of subordinates and the added work involved in ensuring that nothing leaves her small department unless it is perfect. To ensure this she often prefers to do the job herself. Her supervisory style is a close one, she is a scrupulous checker, a dotter of i’s and a crosser of t's.(Её стиль наставлений очень своеобразен, она буквоед и привыкла расставлять все точки над и)

It is not a style which breeds initiative nor does it lend itself to delegating responsibility. She sends a very clear message — she trusts and relies on herself alone. Her friends tend to be from outside of the organization and her contacts within it tend to be formal and task-oriented. If she remains in this position until her early thirties the chances are that she will decide she has a career, or at the very least that she will continue to work over the long-term. The problem is that her style has now been formed. It is a close, non-delegative style, heavily dependent on self for performance and on formal structure and rules to define both job and performance.

This style was not formed consciously, she never thought about it in terms of whether it was helpful in advancing her position or not. Bosses came and went. Depending on how competent they were, she had often to do part of their job as well. They rated her an «outstanding supervisor», aware that if she left they would probably have had to replace her with at least two people. At the same time they rated her as «probably terminal in present position». The style she developed and never thought of changing stamped «lacking in management potential» all over her, and this at a point when possibly for the first time she began to think seriously of a long-term career. Yet why should she have thought of changing her behavior? For what reason? Superiors praised the scrupulous accuracy (скрупулёзную точность) of the work she was responsible for. Raises were forthcoming. She wasn't looking ahead to anything specific. Getting the job done competently had often been more than enough to cope with.

For many, many women this is the extraordinarily painful dilemma of the transition to middle management. The style they develop in order to survive along the path to middle management, both psychologically and tactically is a style that makes them the fabled outstanding supervisor. But it lacks a strategic dimension, a long-term objective. As a consequence they fail to build flexibility into it, they do not measure present cost against future benefit. They do not recognize the cues that signal a need for a change in style. They concentrate on task, skill and job performance and ignore the critically important behavioral variables.

Our hypothetical woman tends to arrive at the transition point to middle management an in-depth specialist and a close supervisor of other specialists. Yet she is a woman in her mid-thirties with another thirty years ahead of her. She is bright and she is competent.

For men behavior is a variable along the path to middle management, their own behavior and the behavior of others. However implicit, however unconscious, the assumption that they will have to work for most of their lives gives men an objective: to make the best of it that they can — which is widely interpreted as career advancement. Typically a man comes to his first management job not even conscious of the psychological preparation for it that he has undergone since he was a small boy. Typically too his high school and college years have given him mathematical skills or a background in economics or business, together with a clear recognition of competitive striving as a inherent factor in achievement.

To him, his first job is the beginning of an apprenticeship. His expectation that once he has mastered it he will move on is a comparatively modest expectation, for countless men have done it before him. Why not he? The central issue really lies in finding the most effective way, and while his judgment of what is effective may be good or poor, at a minimum he will try.

If he is a college graduate recruited into a fast track training program he is given considerable visibility as he moves about the company. If he enters a small department in finance or marketing, or if he is hired as an assistant foreman in a manufacturing plant, his environment is considerably more limited, but his assumption that he is not going to be there for the rest of his life determines his behavior.

Learn and move on. Act so that people will see you as having the ability to move on. Try to influence the people who can help you move on. Be needed by those people, become necessary to them. Try to identify what they want and don't want. Broaden your information base from what you need to do the job to include the people who can help you leave it. Who are they — good, bad, indifferent? On whom should you focus your efforts? Find out — and try to make sure you don't pick a loser. Do job changes make sense at this point — do they promise more, more quickly? Transfers, moves to other companies? Find out — and try to pick a winner whichever way you go.

At the transition point her great fear is to be cut off from what she knows from the comforting familiarity of an area she has mastered in depth from the very basis of her sense of legitimacy and security, only to confront new and quite different problems, new and quite different people, in a setting where she may now be the only woman in such a position.

His great fear is that he may be entering a backwater, cut off from the people who helped him. Can he put a team together? Will he find capable subordinates? What will his peers be like? Will his new boss be a man from whom he can learn — who has influence enough to help him advance?

Her perception of the problems facing her is centered on herself, on her own capacity or lack of it. It is an inward preoccupation which dulls her ability to assess other people objectively. She tends to see them in terms of the impact they have on her own sense of adequacy.

His perception of the problems facing him is centered on the people around him, on their abilities. It is an outward preoccupation which sharpens his awareness of who those people are and what they want — and the one tends to condition whether he will give them the other.

Her problems feed upon each other. Where before, her expertise was proof of her right to be where she was, she feels she must prove that right all over again both to herself and to the men around her. And she must do it at a more complex level of responsibility, at a time when she is supremely conscious that she lacks mastery of the job she must do.

Driven by the old anxiety over legitimacy — the need justify to herself and others that in spite of the fact she's a woman she knows the job and can handle it — and with few examples of other women who have ever done it to give her confidence, she retreats into herself. She avoids asking questions for fear they might indicate ignorance of the aspects of the job she feels she should know. This blocks her ability to learn. Anxiety invests every gap in knowledge and experience with the same importance and she drives herself to work on her own time at understanding every detail-relevant or not-while she copes, as she must, with the day-to-day pressures of the job. The apparent confidence and self-assuredness of the men around her, however unreal, make her situation seem even worse.

A third-level manager in a Bell System company gave us a description of this painful process a year after her promotion to district management.

«I was promoted after the consent Decree. All of the companies had to promote a certain number of women and I guess I was one of them. I think I deserved the promotion but I sometimes wonder whether I would have rotten in without the decree.»

«I came out of the Traffic Department. This is where all the operators are and it's really a women's department. Men used to come into it as management trainees. The women trained them. And then the men managed us - sometimes the very same men we'd trained.»

«I came up the operators' route all the way to group chief and then chief operator. My promotion to district manager (third level) was one of the first for women.»

«I'll never forget what those early months were like. I really had no management experience. I only knew vaguely what the other departments were responsible for and I didn't know whom to ask or what to ask. The worst thing was wondering whether my counterparts — who were all men — believed I'd got the job simply because of EEOC*. I know some of them did, and at the beginning I couldn't even make myself ask a question in case it turned out to be a question I should have known the answer to. I was really afraid to have that happen. I could hear their minds clicking: 'Third level and doesn't even know the job.'»

«My first district meeting was a total disaster. There I was, the only woman, a district manager, traffic. There they were. They knew each other. Most of them had years of district experience. They came from the tough departments where there were no women — Plant, Network, Engineering, as well as the others.»

«Most of the meeting went straight over my head. They got into a very technical discussion at one point. I didn't know what most of the equipment was or what it was supposed to do. I didn't know the technical systems definitions and they didn't bother to spell them out. They used letters. E.S.S. is a simple one — Electronic Switching Systems.»

«By the end of the meeting I had a column of letters and I spent night after night with the manuals trying to figure them out. I didn't dare ask anyone. It sounds silly now — but it wasn't then. I nearly quit. If it hadn't been for my husband I would have quit. I remember one set of letters that nearly finished me. P.O.T.S. I looked it up in every manual. I went through literally hundreds of pages trying to find a reference. I finally got to know one of the district guys and a couple of months later I asked him. He laughed. He said it meant 'Plain Old Telephone Service.'»

It is difficult to forget that woman, the anxiety she felt and the obsessive way in which she tried to deal with it. Anxiety of the same kind drives the younger woman in search of psychological security and organizational legitimacy to overinvestment in specialization. When she finds it, the seal that reads «Yes, you belong. Yes, you have a right to be here. Yes, in spite of the fact that you're a woman, you can do this job» is a tough one to give up.

When it is given up at the middle management transition point the risks begin all over again and the psychological stakes are higher. The security of solid technical competence in a specific area is no longer enough. One can no longer rely on and trust oneself alone. The learning system changes, the system of implementation changes, and in the nature of the relationships that men traditionally establish with each other lies the key to both. Godfathers look after godsons. For women who were daughters, not sons, such relationships are laden with difficulty.

At one level, because you're a woman you feel you must know the job to justify even being there; at another level, because you're a woman there are far greater risks attached to developing the relationships which help you learn.

The Bell System manager who said «If it hadn't been for my husband I would have quit» was almost certainly addressing this last issue. Whatever she faced as a woman on the job, her husband reinforced her as a person who was a woman and who could hold that job. Single women are far more vulnerable.

Given all of this, is there any answer? If there is, does it help women or does it merely certify that the difficulties are real?

We think that there is an answer, and that it does both. In acknowledging the difficulties, in explaining why they exist, it gives women a perspective of central importance. Women who thought that individually and alone they were the singular source of the problems they faced in «masculine» jobs, careers, roles and settings can see that to one degree or another all women share these problems because a common heritage of beliefs and assumptions shapes our concept of ourselves. If we are ever to change those that cripple our ability to achieve, then it is critically important to understand how and why they came to exist - beginning at the very beginning with the concept of femininity and the ways in which its formation differs from the psychological development of men.

Notes to the text :

In most Bell companies there are only seven levels of management, from first management job to president. Third or district level is the first true middle management level as we have defined it.

On January 18, 1973, American Telephone & Telegraph representing its twenty-two subsidiary companies entered into a landmark settlement with the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Under the terms of a consent Decree, AT&T agreed to pay $15 million in restitution to an estimated fifteen thousand women and minorities who had allegedly been discriminated against in job assignments, pay and promotions; another $23 million a year in pay raises; and to establish goals and timetables for the hiring and promotion of women and minorities into its management ranks. In return, the EEOC and the Department of Labor agreed to withdraw the various charges leveled against the corporation. AT&T is the nation's largest private employer.

EEOC — Equal Employment Opportunity commission