As I moved up in companies I saw what great gamers men were. It’s how they thought. They viewed work as just another playing field, with men and women running around on it. It was one grand competition. I swear every morning, before they even put their feet on the floor they were thinking: who dies today? Maybe I’m overstating that a little bit, but not by much. For women, we’re at an extreme disadvantage against men if we can’t figure out how to compete against them to win.
The trouble is, our current generation of women didn’t get all the wisdom wrapped up in playing games, as men did. That’s changing now due to Title Nine, but for most of us, we didn’t learn how repetitions of winning and losing could help us as we grew into adulthood. Instead, we grew up role-playing with our Barbies, and talking.
We did a lot of talking. Still do. A Boston Consulting Group study revealed that women talk about 20,000 words a day, and men about 7,000. Whew, that’s a lot of sentence structure for our brains to be engaged in every day. Meanwhile, men are over in their offices thinking about the next conquest.
Are we really less competitive than men? I don’t believe that. I wasn’t, and my competitive nature–which I enthusiastically embraced–was one way I advanced into senior roles. But for many women I’ve met and mentored, they’re generally uncomfortable expressing their competitive spirits outwardly. We’re great at self-mastery, which is competing against ourselves to do our best work, but others? That involves beating them, which could mean confrontation and most certainly means another person losing. Women are filled with compassion, and winning requires dispassion.
How can we fix this? I’m working on a book about this very thing. Business game-playing is easy to learn, if you’re willing to practice. That’s what my book’s about, showing you how to be a great gamer so you can advance in your career.
And no, I’m not trying to make women become more like men. It’s like learning a new language. Once you learn, say, French, it doesn’t mean you lose your ability to speak English. The same goes with gamesmanship. It’s just a new skill set that makes the workplace richer for you.
Because let’s face it: Barbie can’t help us now.
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