Woman health tips for :What Women Can Teach You About Real Strength

What Women Can Teach You About Real Strength

At a major U. S. retail chain a few years ago, the CEO launched a "Win at Retail" (or "WAR") campaign designed to boost sales. His strategy was to show employees a video with actual battle footage. This was at a company that sold satin panties, deep-plunge bras, and other items designed to make women "feel sexy, sophisticated, and forever young." 

At another company, in the pinkies-up world of tea drinking, the story goes that sales reps at a retreat received wooden mallets and empty tins of a rival's product. Then, on cue, they used the mallets to smash the tins flat. For target practice, the urinals in the men's room were equipped with the rival's cardboard tea mats. 

Does it ever occur to these guys that sometimes it might work better to not act like such a guy? Or at least that it might make sense to be a stealth guy, cleverly disguised by day as a mild-mannered, semirational member of the community? In the modern workplace, the best way for a man to succeed might actually be to suppress his caveman and try to think like a woman instead. 

It's not about acting like a woman. People respond badly to what psychologists call "gender rule violations." Nor is anyone suggesting that women always make ideal employees. They can be just as stupid as men can be. On becoming CEO at Yahoo early this year, for instance, Carol Bartz reportedly threatened to "drop-kick to f--king Mars" anyone caught leaking company information. (Her staff promptly leaked the quote.) 

But the case for learning a few basic skills from the so-called weaker sex is simple: Women are succeeding in a time when men generally aren't. Four out of five jobs lost in the current recession belonged to men. (It's been dubbed the "he-cession.") Male-dominated construction and manufacturing sectors are taking the hardest hits. 

Even in white-collar industries, men often look more expendable than women. "Women work a little harder," says one male boss in market research. "They're more loyal and they stick with things a lot longer." And, not least, they're frequently paid less. "So if I'm going to fire somebody, I'll fire Fred, not Fanny." Thus for the first time ever, women might become a majority in the U.S. workplace. 

The political zeitgeist also favors women. One business magazine recently offered a predictable list of ideal qualities for a chief financial offi- cer, and then added, "Oh, yes, and the company might be better off if it chooses a woman." Research suggests that investors trust women to scrutinize potential deals more carefully, and that they take points away from men for being overconfident. And in financially struggling Iceland, the women who run one of that nation's only investment firms still turning a profit recently blamed the country's economic collapse on "typical" aggressive, indiscriminate, high-risk, "male" behavior. 

You could complain that women are out to get men. But that's like whining that the girl next door is really mean. You could also just give up and refuse to play the game, an increasingly common response among men in their prime. (According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 9.4 percent of men ages 30 to 54 were out of the workforce entirely in 2008, up from just 3.4 percent in the 1960s.) Women have been learning from men's examples in the workplace for decades, with notable success. Now it's men's turn to learn from women's examples. 

Thinking like a woman isn't as emasculating as pop psychologists would have you believe it is. This isn't Mars and Venus. According to the "gender similarities hypothesis," it's more like men are from Minneapolis and women are from St. Paul. Janet S. Hyde, Ph.D., a University of Wisconsin psychologist and the author of the hypothesis, says that not only are most of our supposed gender differences small, but they show up only on average when studying large samples of people. So women may have a moderate advantage when it comes to decoding nonverbal cues like facial expressions and body language. "But there's also terrific overlap," Hyde notes. "You can't assume that every woman is good at decoding nonverbal cues, or that every man is bad at it." You also shouldn't assume that a particular skill is the exclusive property of one sex. 

The differences are often just a matter of practice. For instance, boys learn early to place high values on playing hard, being picked for the team, giving and taking orders, paying attention to the hierarchy, and keeping score—all useful skills on the job. But they often have less practice, says Hyde, at taking other peoples' thoughts and feelings into account. Then they find themselves in business, and it turns out, says Whitney Johnson, an investment executive, that they need the very skills they've been taught their entire lives to reject—skills like being inclusive, working collaboratively, and bringing along underlings who need help. 

Women make good models for learning these neglected social skills because of one gender difference that's real: Women are 8 percent shorter than men on average. Being physically less imposing has given them a critical advantage in a workplace where brute force no longer carries much weight. Women have had to rely all along on smarter and more social ways of being strong. So how can men dodge the next he-cession? How do we salvage our careers, our sense of self-worth, and, not incidentally, the status of our relationships at home?

It Wouldn't Kill You to Smile 

Women are better at smiling than men are. They have significantly thicker zygomaticus majors, those essential smile muscles running from the eyes down to the corners of the mouth. This extra muscle may be genetic, because women have evolved to keep peace in family groups. Or it may just be that women smile more because they spend so much of the day trying to make men calm down and cooperate. Men, on the other hand, specialize in expressions of anger. Being big and bad is our default mode. But face it, we're no longer out on the savanna defending the tribe. So try smiling at people in the hallway for a change. It's not weakness, it's self-confidence. 

But as with other lessons from the opposite sex, also beware of the gender rules. If a man smiles too much, or at the wrong time—in the middle of a serious argument, say—he risks looking weak. Candidate Barack Obama's easy smile and laid-back demeanor during last year's presidential primaries was one reason political consultant James Carville joked that Obama needed to borrow a cojone from Hillary Clinton. Characteristically, the candidate shrugged off the slight and kept his focus on the job. He also recognized that being friendly didn't detract from his masculinity, any more than acting like a mad dog made Carville more of a man. (And yes, you can borrow Hillary's cojones. There might be a strategic advantage in letting Madam Secretary tango with, say, North Korea's "dear leader," Kim Jong Il.)