Walk like a man? No, no. If women really want to get ahead at work, they need to think like a man. At the very least, they'd better understand what goes through men's minds, says Shaunti Feldhahn, author of The Male Factor: The Unwritten Rules, Misperceptions, and Secret Beliefs of Men in the Workplace.
Why is it important for women to understand how men think?
There is kind of an internal male culture, like an internal mental culture, and an internal female culture. The problem comes when we don't understand what the other culture is privately thinking. There are still many fields that are very male-dominated, and the way upward tends to have male gatekeepers. And so there's much more impact on us as women if we don't understand that internal male culture than if they don't understand us.
Is there a magic bullet, one thing above all others, that unlocks all the secrets of the guy brain?
It's not so much a magic bullet as it is an overarching mental change that I think we as women need to do. We have to get used to the idea that there are certain things that men, like women, are privately thinking and perceiving and expecting that are just different from us. And by definition, if we don't look for it, we're going to miss it.
One of those big differences in thinking is the way men and women perceive emotion in the workplace. Do women need to put their emotions in check at work?
Men assume that the presence of emotion means you're not thinking, because the male brain is not wired to be able to process those emotions and those thoughts together at the same time as easily, so you kind of have to shut down emotion in order to think clearly. Women can be processing a strong emotion and thinking clearly at the same time. Our brains are actually wired specifically to do that.
Men, you say, want people to "get to the point." Doesn't everyone?
Yes and no, actually. In any professional environment, you want a straight answer. The difference is, as a woman, I want to tell a story first. Women actually process their thoughts externally more often than men do. We have to learn that when we have a male boss, especially, it's easier for him to think about what we're saying and follow it if we give him the bottom line up front.
The phrase "suck it up" comes up a lot in the workplace and in your book. Do women have a hard time sucking it up?
I think we have just the same ability to knuckle down, suck it up, man up, whatever you want the phrase to be. The difference is that our world is our whole life together: personal and work intermingled. So we don't have necessarily this rigid segregation. When we're sucking it up, we're very aware of how that's impacting everything in our life.
Is there a danger that, in seeing men and women as wired differently, a man can write a woman's behaviour off as the result of wiring - or vice versa?
That's actually one of the things I think is a danger. I think men already do that because they do not understand the reason why a woman said or did something in a certain way. There is a tendency for men, if they are perplexed by something a woman did or said, to say, "Well, she's just being random. It's that part of a woman that I will never understand or is understandable." That kind of thinking lends itself to some of these stereotypes about women that are just incorrect and that I think hold us back.
As more women become managers, what's the magic bullet to help men understand them?
Assume she has a reason for every single thing that she's doing and saying, that you can understand her, that you can manage her well, or work with her well, or work under her well if you understood some of these things that are currently not in your brain.
Dave McGinn