Stepping Up

Image Credit: www.lowes.com



Written by Devika Brendon
Published in Ceylon Today

Each working week, in the boardrooms of companies in Colombo's CBD, and designated conference rooms in City hotels, WIM workshops and mentoring forums and seminars are taking place. What is WIM? The title stands for 'Women In Management', an organisation founded and directed by the dynamic and down-to-earth Ms. Sulochana Segera, to assist women in their professional development in corporate and public roles in Sri Lanka.

Earlier this year, a series of events were organised by WIM, centering on issues raised by International Women's Day and its focus on empowering women in their professional lives in developing contemporary Sri Lanka. They were diverse, practical, and interesting, and the presenters were frank and open about their own professional experiences.

The topics of the recent workshops included: 'Playing High And Playing Low', focusing on developing the ambient awareness a team leader needs in order to support and encourage her co-workers; being authentic and self-aware as a base for connecting more effectively with others; and 'Leadership By Design'.

Each of these mentoring seminars took place over a simple and welcome) buffet breakfast, so that the participants could attend, take notes, and then proceed to the subsequent events in their daily working schedules. The attendees worked in banks, in the Human Resources sections of companies, in executive and administrative positions in diverse firms.

As a teacher of English, I have been struck by the idioms used in professional corporate life: 'stepping up to the plate', for example, and 'wanting a seat at the table'. These semantic fields and lexical sets evoke a sense of being at a banquet, of taking one's place in a public and dignified gathering place.

There was a generic corporate culture prevalent in the 'Top Tier' law firms in Australia in the late 1990s, which I witnessed first-hand. The partners were all male, and vied for the offices with the best views of the City on the top floors of the building. The administrative staff were all female, and clustered in open-plan, centralised partitioned desks to make them accessible to their superiors at all times.

When the company invited 'All Staff' to lunches, kaleidoscopic arrays of sandwiches were laid out on sumptuous platters. The partners were invited to approach the table first. After they had filled their plates, and moved off, the administrative echelons came in and surveyed the tables, picking and choosing from the remnants, putting together their lunches from what was left, and returning back to their designated work stations, because they literally had no seat at the executive table.

It was like watching an animal documentary film on 'Wildlife' Channel! The corridors of power and the typing pools of powerlessness. It was clear that the 'support staff' and their 'soft skillsets' were routinely undervalued, in that context, because the partners and the executives brought in the money, aggressively and combatively and publicly, and the support staff's work was not overt. By definition, it was 'behind the scenes': the conversations, the dialogues, the building of communication and professional co-operation, to co-operate to achieve deadlines, to create and sustain the infrastructure. To keep the household running, so to speak, while the warriors went to war.

Many of the attendees at the WIM mentoring sessions, and all the presenters, are balancing the demands of businesses and professional careers with the responsibilities of managing partners and children, and often extended families, in their personal lives. The younger women are facing the challenges of constructing their lives, often concurrently doing full-time work & part-time study, in such a way that, when opportunities arise to expand their roles and enhance their skills, they will make informed and ultimately personally empowering choices.

Mentoring is a vital structural component in the construction of any field of activity. It is through working with and learning from more experienced colleagues, those who have survived and thrived in circumstances we have yet to engage with, that we can observe the skills we need to develop & put into practice ourselves, to make our pathways straighter and smoother.

The presenters of the workshops and seminars all emphasised the significant skills and advantages that being women bring to participants in professional life. Management language terms these 'soft skills' (which I, of course, find fascinating.) Who defined these as 'soft'? Are they termed 'soft' because they are subtle, indirect & persuasive rather than aggressive, associated with intuition and empathy, with 'EQ' or emotional intelligence, rather than 'IQ' or 'hard' rational intellect (traditionally seen as the 'masculine' sphere)?

What the presenters highlighted was the collaborative and non-competitive focus of these skillsets. The traditional 'corporate ladder' is, as the metaphor implies, envisioned as a vertical hierarchy - people start at the base, at entry level, and seek to 'climb the ladder'. It is a rigid model of progress, aimed at incremental acquisition of status, based on monetary reward and harsh punishment, with designated gatekeepers at each level, comprising tasks to be competitively performed, and performance evaluations, scrutinies and appraisals to be undergone. It is an obstacle course.

In fact, the whole structure can be likened to the board game 'Snakes and Ladders'. Do you remember playing this when you were a kid? You climb the ladder, and progress, and as you move towards your goal, you must take care not to slide down a snake, retrograding and retarding your forward trajectory.

The difference between the game and the reality, though, is that 'Snakes and Ladders' is a game of chance, and the player's progress determined by the roll of dice. In contrast, our career path is one that can be planned, and designed. And these mentoring sessions show us how to do this: to start planning, to factor in clear-cut goals, to bring forward our whole armoury of skills: hard and soft, rational and intuitive, to be able to progress in a meaningful, creative and fulfilling way towards achieving our personal aspirations.

The masculine model of success, which has dominated boardrooms and conference rooms for centuries, appears to me to have been limited by the exclusive focus on logic and rationality, and the adoption of duellistic and adversarial mindsets at all levels of the hierarchical ladder.

The emergence of this more feminine complementary perspective will have a welcome and balancing effect, and make the corporate culture far more inviting and accessible to all.