My entire career has been anchored by strong female leadership. Pre-college, my acceptance to Penn State was assured by an early association with the school’s Women in Engineering program. Even though I didn’t stick with that degree choice, leadership was something that I naturally gravitated toward – I was president of our local student educators association, active in student government and the campus honors fraternity, a peer mentor under the mathematics department, and a student ambassador. My job in the campus advising center meant I was one of the first people students met when they came for orientation. And for each of those activities, the advisors and supervisors in charge were all women.
This pattern continued after I graduated. When I started at our campus, the entire local directorial board and about half of the managers were female; this was a trend that would continue for most of my tenure. Since starting there, I’ve had a succession of female bosses helping to shape and hone my skills, and every single one of them has been amazing because every single one of them had completely different management and leadership styles. One was very soft-spoken and preferred to gather as much information in advance as possible before addressing a situation – she taught me how to soft-ball questions and pay attention to the finer details of a response. Another was a lot more reactionary and taught me when to fight with more immediacy and when to take a step back – that sometimes, a hot temper properly used is not a bad thing. Yet another showed me the value of finding the balance between reasonable accommodations and not being taken advantage of, and my current boss is like that capstone professor who gives the assignments that tie all those skills together before letting me off into the world on my own. There’s a saying that a man’s life is the sum of his experiences, and that’s certainly accurate in this case – when I look at my work over the past year in particular, especially with management by proxy of my starter minions1, I see little shades of each of those mentors come out in how I handle different situations. It makes me proud to carry on that tradition and be that influence on someone else.
But, like in all jobs, sometimes one stumbles across an odd week, which is where I found myself a few days ago. It started on Tuesday with some rando barging into my office like he owned the place, ignoring me completely as he went past my desk to the coffee bar, and then started screaming at me because there wasn’t coffee made. Mind you, I don’t work at Starbucks, I don’t drink coffee myself, and this wasn’t a student or even someone asking about becoming a student. Just some weirdo who then continued his tirade about how women in the workplace were lazy (presumably because I wasn’t offering to make him coffee), then proceeded to berate me for not being able to explain to him why none of the other businesses in the building would give him coffee either (my response? “Well, sir, we aren’t coffee shops. Now please leave.”).
The second bit came later in the week when a contractor apologized to me for not realizing earlier that I was the site contact for a particular project. Somehow “Jen is the point person for this project, you need to talk with her about X, Y, and Z” and “No, I run operations for the campus, you need to come to me if you have questions about X, Y, or Z” were a little ambiguous, I guess. But what made it odd was his explanation of “I’m just not used to having lady bosses.” This raised two immediate questions in my mind:
1. This is 2015, how have you not had lady bosses? Even if the boss gender proportion were slanted toward men, I find it hard to believe there are so few women hiring contractors that the mere thought of such an occurrence is rejected as heresy.
2. Even if the above were accurate, why on earth would you feel the need to tell me that? Is this some roundabout way of saying I’m now accepted into the pack? I’d never felt over the previous two weeks like I was being disrespected, so the final exchange was puzzling. I didn’t get the sense he meant anything malicious by it – if anything, he seemed embarrassed- but again, why bring it up?
So two different scenarios, two very different reactions. The first had me kick someone out and tell them in no uncertain terms not to return; the second, just a silent, raised eyebrow and direct eye contact, which I’m sure didn’t help the guy’s embarrassment. They weren’t the only options at my disposal, but they were the ones that made the most sense to me – be kinder than needed, but don’t back down. Don’t apologize for things for things that don’t require apology, whether it’s a lack of coffee for an uninvited guest or a habit of wearing skirts while you’re kicking ass. Never, ever forget that you’re the one in control, and act accordingly. And when something under your responsibility is off kilter, you do what you need to do to set it right.
Like a boss.
*****
1Yes, they know I call them that.
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