Workplace Relationship Dynamics

New Rules for Women, available at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982056982/): One day, during a routine coaching session, a female client who is a sales rep complained bitterly about an experience she had just had with a woman customer. She was deeply hurt and upset and felt personally betrayed. She explained that her customer, someone she had worked with for a long time, had decided to change vendors and was no longer employing her company—or her. And the worst part of it was that my client found out about the change from someone else—not from her customer. When she told me the story and said, “Who does she think she is? I thought she was my friend,” she also said, “I would have expected this from a man but not from a woman!” I thought, “Really? She’s a customer. Doesn’t this happen in business all the time?” I wondered where this expectation of personal loyalty from women, but not from men, came from. Then I realized that this sense of disappointment and personal betrayal in the workplace context was familiar—that I had heard versions of this disappointment from my women clients many times before. I got curious about where these expectations were coming from and how the workplace context might contribute to the experience of disappointment—and the seeds of my research were sown. What my research has found is that women carry their egalitarian friendship rules, or relational expectations (also known as “relational images”), into the workplace, where they clash with the hierarchical norms that dominate most workplace cultures. This clash sets us up to be disappointed by each other in ways that can feel personal and can daman age our relationships. This finding gives us an angle on understanding the source and causes of women’s disappointment with each other. It provides a lens that opens up a new way of seeing women’s relational dynamics at work and sheds light on a new pathway to understanding and change.]]>