Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman

An honest and practical handbook that reveals important insights into relationships between men and women and work, Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman , is a must-read for every woman who wants to leverage her power in the workplace. Women make up almost half of today's labor force, but in corporate America they don't share half of the power. Only four of the Fortune 500 company CEOs are women, and it's only been in the last few years that even half of the Fortune 500 companies have more than one female officer. A major reason for this? Most women were never taught how to play the game of business. Throughout her career in the super-competitive, male-dominated media industry, Gail Evans, one of the country's most powerful executives, has met innumerable women who tell her that they feel lost in the workplace, almost as if they were playing a game without knowing the directions. In this book, she reveals the secrets to the playbook of success and teaches women at all levels of the organization--from assistant to vice president--how to play the game of business to their advantage. Men know the rules because they wrote them, but women often feel shut out of the process because they don't know when to speak up, when to ask for responsibility, what to say at an interview, and a lot of other key moves that can make or break a career. Sharing with humor and candor her years of lessons from corporate life, Gail Evans gives readers practical tools for making the right decisions at work. Among the rules you will learn are: • How to Keep Score at Work • When to Take a Risk • How to Deal with the Imposter Syndrome • Ten Vocabulary Words That Mean Different Things to Men and Women • Why Men Can be Ugly, and You Can't • When to Quit Your Job

Praise for Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman:

"[This] book is perfect for any woman looking for a step-by-step guide to becoming just as ruthless–and successful–as her boss."
--USA Today

"It's…The Rules for women on the corporate ladder, a no-nonsense look at what isn’t fair and how to get beyond it."
--Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service

"Gail Evans…has put together a practical, honest, often humorous playbook for career success that every woman (and a few men) should read… Read the book. Learn how to play the game, and win. Men shouldn’t be the only ones having fun."
--Press & Sun

Auteur
An executive vice president at CNN, Gail Evans oversees the network's talk shows (Burden of Proof, CNN & Co, Crossfire, Both Sides with Jesse Jackson, Evans & Novak, Capital Gang, and Talk Back Live), the booking and research department, and recruiting and talent development. Evans's programs have received numerous awards, including a Commendation Award from American Women in Radio and Television; the Breakthrough Award for Women, Men, and Media; and several Emmy nominations. She lives in Atlanta.

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THE OBJECT OF THE GAME

Action is the antidote to despair. Joan Baez, folk singer and activist

As the young man in my business class asked, isn't the object of the game to win?

But what is winning? Does it mean being the most powerful CEO? Does it mean being the one with the biggest bank account? Or is it the person who's the most feared?

For me, the object of the game is simply to feel great about what you do. That's the most important directive of all--because that's how you end up feeling fulfilled, and that's how you win.

I know for a fact that I have been successful because I've always loved my jobs. And believe me, these haven't all been well-paid positions in glamour industries--I've done everything from run the addressograph machine to fetch the coffee. But no matter what I've done, I've always been able to enjoy myself doing it.

For instance, when my kids were little, I took several years off to take care of them. To earn a little income along the way, I found a part-time job as a sales representative for a clothing company at Atlanta's semiannual merchandise mart. I then created a game out of it, seeing how much I could sell to stores even if they didn't need the line. I couldn't have done this forever, but while it lasted, it was fun. And I bought all my children's clothes (as well as mine) wholesale.

Similarly, not everything I've done on Capitol Hill or at CNN sounded exciting when it was originally proposed. But I've usually managed to make it so. For example, at one point my boss announced that I was going to revamp CNN's intern program. This came at a time when two of my children were already in college, and the last thing I wanted was to worry about other college-age kids. But I made the job challenging by taking on more responsibility than I had been offered, which turned out to involve recruitment and talent development. I gave my job so much visibility that when the new vice president of that area was announced, she was told to report to me.

So the ultimate winner in the game of business is not necessarily the person with the most power or the most money or the most fame. Rather, it's the person who loves his or her work. I know many miserable people with important titles. But I don't know anyone who loves her job who's miserable. It's that simple.

There's more: If you can love your business life, you'll be playing the game the way the guys do. They don't run out on the football field or stride into an important meeting wishing they were elsewhere. They are enthusiastic, eager to have an opportunity to satisfy their competitive urges.

Loving what you do is self-empowering. It makes you more brilliant, it gives you the ability to become a visionary, it helps you become the best businesswoman you can be. You improve your chances of rising to the top.

For some men, of course, loving the game is synonymous with material success. It's a basic cause-and-effect paradigm: If they get to the top and they get rich, they love it.

Women aren't as likely to love success as an isolated entity. We want to love our entire life. And that's fine. Unlike men, we don't tend to compartmentalize the various aspects of daily existence (see Chapter 5: Think Small). So it's hard to feel upbeat when we take a job that isn't intrinsically interesting--even if we see the possibility of success somewhere down the road.

Why do women have such a hard time understanding the importance of loving our work? My sense is that in our society, women are raised to feel comfortable in the role of nurturer, the ones who make things better for everyone else. We don't get permission along the way to love ourselves, or to love what we do, outside of our caretaker's role. Only in the last few decades have we learned that we can be the center of our own lives. And that means we, too, can start loving our jobs with the same enthusiasm as those guys who rush out onto the sports field and into the boardroom.

When you have a new baby, changing her diapers isn't drudgery, because it's not the diaper you're changing, it's the baby. You want to do everything you can for her. But when she's three years old, the focus shifts to the diaper, not the baby; so you toilet train her.

Likewise, in an office, you can teach yourself to do any job you're given and be okay with it. But ultimately, if you don't feel good about your job, you'll just be going through the motions, which means that you're turning off that button that I call possibility.

You can't play any game well if you don't enjoy playing it.

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FOUR GROUND RULES

I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore. Georgia O'Keeffe, artist

A few years ago I asked the students in my business course at Emory to interview successful executives, both men and women. Their assignment was to uncover the qualities of good leaders and wr…