Nora's Blog Leadership – The Individual Journey

When you offer a business opportunity to a man…. Is that different from offering the same opportunity to a woman?

A young woman I know told me quite excitedly about a new project that was posted at her company. The project manager was being hired from the outside and a team was to be created in the next 6 weeks to implement the project. We talked about what the jobs might be on the new team and whether she might want to throw her hat into the ring. It turns out that there was a lot of information she wanted to find out through back channels before she approached the decision-maker.

4 days later, I asked her what she had found out. Her natural pattern of connecting with her co-workers gave her the insight to know exactly who to approach to get the scoop on the new project. Further, she gathered all the information she could before putting herself on the line with a superior.

And then, she waited. She didn’t jauntily walk into the boss’ office and throw her hat in the ring. She kept looking for a moment when no one was around. By the end of the week, now 10 days after the project was announced, she still hadn’t said a word. With a little encouragement, she hung out until finally he was alone late Friday afternoon. Guess what, he had been waiting for her to seek him out.

I described this scenario to a Senior Partner at a top consulting firm. I asked him what he would think about this. He became very engaged in the conversation. It turns out his very large firm had held a seminar for management recently about gender differences, and one of the topics was how women respond to opportunity as compared to men. Men say “I’ll do it!” before they even know what it entails. Women will give him a list of reasons why they can’t take something on. In my friends’ experience, he thought the women just weren’t interested. Turns out, that was not true. When he asked them directly if they were interested in the job, they stopped and stared at him. Well, of course they were interested. They just needed to assess how they would do everything else they were responsible for as well.

Why is there such a gender difference? Maybe, it doesn’t even matter. As business leaders, we may just need to be aware and not misinterpret people’s reactions just because they are not our own.