Competition and Collaboration

This weekend I saw "Easy A." I really enjoyed it - great lines, good acting, and just fun to watch. Made me wince as I remembered high school and the way we treated each other. When does this competition start among girls and why are we still dealing with it as adults? Or do we just move from the overt viciousness of high school to more sophisticated, covert competition as professionals?

I have wonderful relationships with my women colleagues. They are smart, talented, and great to work with. I enjoy working with them and we like to spend time together outside work too. But I have the luxury of picking my team and the people I work with. And I have often thought that having an exclusively female team might also have something to do with the dynamics.

Last weekend I listened to a group of women discuss how poorly their women leaders were dressed at a big-wig presentation and how distressed they were with the way they represented the company. I wondered if any of them had provided feedback with the women in question. It is disheartening to hear professional adult women speaking about their leaders in such a negative way.

Recently, we spent quite a bit of time coaching one of my recent women clients to have direct conversations and provide feedback when she repeatedly moved into speaking negatively about her women peers/leaders. It was a recurring pattern in this organization - quite a few women were in direct competition and were completely unsupportive of each other. The result was a lack of trust, cliques, and people "in" and people "out". A lot like high school.

I'm always surprised at the stories I hear about women who are reluctant to support other women, who are not pulling women along with them, or who are afraid of how it might look if they support women too much. And I love the stories of where it is working.

I have a friend who has repeatedly built strong and successful teams by promoting and coaching women. By putting them into stretch roles, giving them opportunities to fail, and consistently speaking positively about them. This happens to be a man. How can he be so good at this while so many women are lousy at it?