Free Knowing Your Value by Mika Brzezinski Page B

Except I am not Joe, and this was not me: my eyes were open a bit too wide; my heart was beating fast, my body shook. My voice rose into the upper register. Higher pitched. Pushing it.
    Somehow we ended up standing next to his door, and I was six inches from his face saying something like, “How could you let me be in this position? Seriously Phil, seriously! You need to fix this!” I jabbed him below his left shoulder. Phil jabbed me right back.
    I thought, “ Whoa! This is just plain weird. ” Phil looked truly alarmed. Our jabs were like awkward pokes.
    I wish I could erase this entire scene from my memory, and his. The whole thing was a bad idea. Needless to say, I didn’t walk out with a raise. While Joe and many other men could pull this off, I wasn’t believable in any way.

    Instead, after I left his office, Phil picked up the phone, called Joe and Chris Licht, and asked each of them the same thing: “Motherf—cker, is she crazy?”
    That might have been a fair question.

    “We ‘bro,’ it gets out, and that’s it.”
    —DONNY DEUTSCH

    A New York Magazine profile on Donny Deutsch and life at his ad agency described an argument between Deutsch and one of his male employees: “We were screaming. Our noses were touching. Then we started laughing.”
    I ask Deutsch about that episode, and he explains to me, “We ‘bro,’ it gets out, and that’s it.”
    So why, I ask incredulously, didn’t that work for me?
    “Because it was a side Phil wasn’t used to seeing. He was threatened, and he didn’t know how to handle it,” Deutsch answers. “If a women punches you, you don’t know what to do. You can’t hit a woman back. If she punches you, you think, ‘What’s wrong with her?’ ”
    Harvard professor Hannah Riley Bowles says another reason my tack did not work is simply that I didn’t have the same relationship with Phil that Joe has. “It’s generally the case that people tend to know better and hang around with and be closer to people who are like them. Right?” she reasons. “So the implication of that in a male-dominated industry
is that guys will tend to be very well connected with guys. Their social network and their work network will tend to be overwhelmingly male.” Research done by Herminia Ibarra at INSEAD Business School found that men are more likely to be connected to more senior male executives by virtue of the fact that they’re both male. By contrast, women tend to have both male and female colleagues in their work networks, but their networks of close friends are likely to be mostly women and friends from outside of work. “So if you have someone who is a friend and a colleague, you can speak to them and relate to them in ways that you cannot with someone with whom you have a more distant, or just really collegial, relationship,” Bowles tells me. She says the difference is that in a male-dominated industry, men typically develop both work ties and friendship ties at work, and “You can communicate differently with someone with whom you have work and friendship ties than with whom you just have work ties.”

    “Authenticity is a huge deal.”
    —JACK WELCH

    I decide to ask former CEO of General Electric, business guru Jack Welch why he thinks my approach backfired so badly. He argues that women make a mistake when they try to mimic what they see men do. “Authenticity is a huge deal,” he said, for both women and men. “Men are jerks
when they’re not themselves ... I mean authenticity is a killer, and women sometimes don’t behave as themselves,” he says.
    For most women, an aggressive verbal style is just out of character. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz may be the exception. Known for her fearless leadership style as well as her willingness to use foul language, she says, “Well, I mean, listen, this business that goes on about my ‘salty language’ ... come on, there are men who could run my language into the ground and nobody cares. Yes, I am an outspoken