Recently I found this article on the NY Times website regarding the relationships that many women have in the workplace. Like the author, I’ve always felt uncomfortable when it was happening to me. I’ve always gone into new work environments with the goal of treating everyone with trust and kindness first. It is a terrible feeling trying to work productively with someone and finding out that they are more interested in being a bully or establishing a pecking order. Some of these women would do the same thing to both their male and female coworkers, but most of them decided to wage a crusade against other women.
One of the worst cases that I dealt with was a senior technical lead that I worked with a number of years ago. At the time I was a manager that led a group that was parallel to the group she worked in – but on another product. We were supposed to learn from what they were doing and potentially reuse as much software as possible. Things went downhill faster than I could have imagined – within 2 weeks of my starting at the company my questions were met with crossed arms and dirty looks. I am inquisitive – and I asked a lot of questions about the rationale they used to make decisions to better understand the product. She took all of my inquiries as a criticism or a judgment. There was nothing further than the truth. As time went on, she stonewalled my team and other teams on the project as well. She refused to listen to any suggestions and blocked any plans of action that did not align exactly with what she had specified. Over time her behavior became renowned at the company, and eventually she was let go. She was the quintessential bully.
The other type of female adversary that I have encountered is the woman who is extraordinarily protective of her team. She treats them like children and any time a problem comes up with an employee she acts like a threatened mother bear. These women are very difficult to work with when it comes to stack ranking team members across an organization. It is impossible for every one of their employees to be high achievers but they will fight for every single one regardless if it is appropriate or not.
I still find these types of circumstances hard to talk about. I always look back and wonder what I could have done differently. Thankfully where I am now I have wonderful women coworkers. It has been such a refreshing change.
