Learning from Women and Other Professions

I read with interest Victoria Pynchon's article from Forbes, Women's Negotiation "Problem" May Be Power, Not Gender.  Pynchon argues that despite that dramatic increase in the number of women attending business and law schools, the fields of business and law are still largely dominated by men.  I think that's largely true.  She explains what she calls the "Old Negotiation Normal": 

Because women came so late to the game of commerce, most broken business deals I litigated during my twenty-five year legal career were negotiated by businessmen, drafted by male lawyers, and breached by male managers and executives. The agreements were reached in competitive distributive bargaining sessions. They were drafted in adversarial settings. And too often they were breached because the party that squeezed the last dime out of his opponent got a little karmic payment in the courtroom.

The solution? Pynchon asks, "what if women's styles are the new normal and men's begin to be labeled uncooperative, disruptive, self-centered and privileged?"  I would add some modifiers to the proposed solution, and note that the styles referenced are traditionally viewed as male or female, but obviously aren't solely used by one gender or the other.  

Not all fields are dominated by men.  Public relations, for example, is a field that has a number of women in leadership positions.  I worked in public relations for two agencies before law school, and my bosses were female, my clients were female, and many of my co-workers were female. (And I worked in the video game industry.)  The management style was, I think, more collaborative than it was as compared to my life in law practice, but I can also say my PR experience was not any less competitive, deadline driven, or quality focused than my law practice.  

In fact, working in a PR agency was great experience for legal practice (as I tend to think many jobs are). My PR background also informs my teaching, both in terms of how I teach, and how I communicate about what life in practice can and should be. Of course, I needed my legal knowledge base to do my job as a lawyer, but I had already managed a million-dollar client budget, worked with clients who had the option to find someone new, worked with support staff and outside vendors, and understood the difficulty of balancing financial restraints of clients with the expectations of those clients.  

The main thing I learned was that I needed to train those who worked for me, not just finish client work. So, when my account executive drafted a press release or part of a PR plan, I needed to mark it up, and give it back so that he would know what I wanted (and the client wanted).  My inclination was to clean it up, fix it, and send it out.  What happens when you do that?  You tend to get the same quality of work every time, because you are accepting it. By training the people who worked for me, I could get the client a better product, in two ways: (1)  account executive hourly rates are lower than account supervisor rate and (2)  I could focus on account-supervisor-level work, and not account-executive-level work.  

I traditionally think of that as good client service, and delivering quality work product at appropriate value.  I suppose that style of working, and thinking about work, could be deemed "women's style." Either way, count me in. 

--JPF