Hardball for Women — Learning How Power Works at the Office

Women work throughout the economy, including in jobs that were once closed to them or difficult to enter. The routes into those jobs and the ability to remain in them have changed over time.

That is clear in professions such as law and medicine, where qualification calls for years of training.

Getting into a profession and getting a senior role are different questions. The gap between the two is where this book begins.

The Assumptions behind Hardball for Women

Pat Heim and Susan K. Golant wrote the edition discussed here. The English title is Hardball for Women. The Korean edition’s title translates roughly as Dangerous Assumptions about Office Life. The English title tells you directly whom the authors had in mind.

Doing the work well is only part of what an organisation rewards. People also need to see what you did and know how to call on you. The authors group some common ways to become more visible under the informal rules of the office:

1. Know what authority you have and be willing to use it.
2. Learn how to work as part of the team, even when you could do your part alone.
3. Build relationships beyond the desk where the work happens.
4. Notice how colleagues compete and what they expect from one another.
5. Find out what you can take from criticism without letting it define your work.

Where Do People Learn the Rules?

The authors make broad comparisons between men and women in organisations. Some of their examples are easier to read now as observations about the settings they knew than as a description of how everyone behaves.

They look to childhood play to explain where people may first learn what to expect from a group.

What Organised Sport Teaches

A team sport gives a player roles, shared goals and feedback from a coach. Players practise competing while relying on the same teammates. The authors link those experiences to ways people learn to communicate and take direction at work.

What Playing House Can Teach

The book contrasts organised sport with playing house, a game in which children can invent the situation and work out the relationships as they go.

The authors emphasise what such a game offers in cooperation and agreement, with fewer of the explicit rules and external measures of winning that come with a sport.

Leadership and authority can work differently in a game where the players make the rules as they play.

The contrast gives the book one way to talk about results and relationships at work. Actual childhoods are less neatly divided than the example suggests.

The Office as a Playing Field

The workplace, in the book’s central metaphor, has owners, coaches, captains, stars and people waiting on the bench. It has written rules and things people learn only by seeing what gets called a foul.

Having played a game with a coach can make some of those conventions familiar. The authors argue that other employees may be expected to pick up the conventions after they arrive.

They want readers to notice the rules they can see and the ways a particular workplace decides whom to credit, trust or promote.

Strategies for a Workplace Built by Men

The book addresses what a woman can do when an organisation’s habits seem unfair to her.

It offers ways to claim authority and show results while keeping a leadership style that works for the person doing the leading.

The specific situations are more useful than the book’s broad comparisons. Its examples come from American workplaces, and a Korean reader may recognise some rules while having to translate others into a different office culture.

Book Information

Hardball for Women

Authors

Pat Heim and Susan K. Golant (edition reviewed)

Publication

10 January 2011 (Korean edition)

ISBN13

9788993178081

View the book on YES24

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