Relational aggression why women hurt each other | Kris Stewart | TEDxPenticton

I'm here today to talk to you about something that's really important to me; That issue is called

relational

aggression

or indirect

aggression

. In this particular case, I am talking about the type of communication that

women

do with

each

other

in the workplace, so this is simply about the type of things that happen in the workplace between

women

, I will tell you some stories to explain completely why this is so important to me and I think a lot of women here and maybe men will find this relevant to you as well. I love this Maxim by Elizabeth Holland, she was a very popular 19th century hairdresser, so I can basically tell you to support Maxim.

I can tell you that, that being the case, I have been a nurse for over 25 years. I'm pretty sure there's a saying in healthcare that nurses eat their babies. I've also heard in business circles that female managers feel mistreated by women in lower positions, isn't that interesting? Studies actually show that aggression between women in the workplace has increased by 50% in the last decade, so let's dig a little deeper into this and I really like Cheryl Sandberg's Ted um tedex talk, thanks Brian for putting that there, segways very well with what I have to do. Basically, today I'm going to delve a little deeper into the phenomenon that Cheryl Sandberg talks about.

I am sure that women are key in the modern workforce. As Cheryl mentioned, there are actually more women graduating from college than men. So why is there such an unequal representation of women in boardrooms and in jobs like CEO, CFO, those are on-site jobs, certainly, on-site jobs really elude many women? Let's look at this a little deeper. I'm going to share some stories. With you about 10 years ago I founded a high-profile company that attracted a lot of press attention. It was because of his political sensitivity. My business partner and I hired a young woman to do marketing for us.

She had ways of winning. She was excellent at her job. She was morbidly obese, but we overlooked it because she was great to be around. My business partner knew I had things under control, so he went off to play golf and I stayed there running the business, that was our agreement, which was working. that as time went by this young woman's work seemed to never end, I would talk about it with her and she would give me excuses that never seemed to make sense to me, but she was quite busy running this business, so I never really got to the bottom of it. , what I didn't know was that every time I asked her to do something, she would call my business partner on the phone and complain about the work I was giving her because he avoided saying, oh well, just don't do it, so let's call that undermine, so she didn't do it and I never got clear answers about that from her. um after a while, my business partner got tired of all the complaining.

I didn't know this at the time. time and as an evasive, what did he do? I knew he needed to fire someone to stop the problem. He didn't say goodbye to her. She fired me. Can you imagine my horror and dismay at being fired from the company I founded? This was like tearing the child apart. Outside of my womb, I actually fell into a deep depression. I couldn't even finish sentences for a year let alone work which was traumatizing and really changed my career path. I will tell you an

other

story after that happened. I thought well, I guess.

I need to know a little more about maybe how to better manage or better understand a workplace full of women. I did some research and then got a job as a vice president at a small private university. The CEO was a woman, she basically was. It is not like this? She didn't need to be there on site every day. What I did notice was that one of the older department heads was a key influence on the CEO. I made sure I knew what I knew about the social dynamics in a female workplace. that I was supposed to till the land and warm up relationships and build rapport and all that great stuff, so I washed the land and things were going great for two weeks and then things changed and I realized that the same department head he actually controlled the entire workplace.

It lasted six weeks, interesting. I will tell you a third and final story, so I gathered more information. I studied this phenomenon further and then began working as an interim clinical manager at a national brand home health company. There were other managers in the office, but none of them had healthcare experience except me, the managers there knew of my extensive healthcare experience, but when I tried to make changes to improve customer service or do Performance Management for an employee particularly troublesome who was committing all kinds of sins, my efforts were frustrated. I didn't really understand what was going on, but before I knew it, I looked through the personnel files of the nurses I was responsible for managing and discovered that they all made $2 a year. hour more than me.

I'm their manager and they make more than me anyway. I asked my manager for a salary meeting and briefly explained why I was always nice to deal with in the office because I knew you. I have to keep things pretty clean and calm so that everything is calm. I asked for a salary parody meeting and can anyone guess what happened? I got fired. What is at stake here in these three stories? My mom knows all these stories. She said: Well, I guess. They're jealous of you and I said I don't know mom, I'm not sure, I don't really know what's going on, I think I have it figured out, I'll propose it to you, I think it was a power imbalance, so let's see what this looks like.

I have located two investigators, Susan Murphy and Pat Heim. They both have doctorates. They have done fascinating research on this phenomenon. They have written a book titled "In the Company of Women, Why We Get Hurt." It's fascinating, it's from that book that I present most of my material to you today. Their research has shown that in all the hundreds of thousands of women they interviewed, women admit that there is a lot of conflict in the workplace. Women admit that they are messes and in fact admit that their worst enemy at work is not a man, it is a woman.

Women seem to prevent other women from advancing and being happy in the working world. So what does all this look like? phrase indirect aggression, also known as

relational

aggression, that's where the phrase comes from, at least they brought it to the surface, so what does it look like, what does it look like, now some of you may be able to relate to this, takes the form of gossip. publicly implying comments public humiliation divulging SE secrets sabotaging undermining raise your hand if that sounds familiar to anyone here I've seen it all I've experienced it all myself and I bet many of you have too, that's what it looks like.

You might want to wonder how this all starts off so well. These researchers through their studies discovered that this phenomenon actually has its roots in the socialization of girls. It's not that interesting. What they discovered was that when girls get together to play, they try. to make sure that

each

of their playmates has the same things as the others, everyone has the same amount of candy and cookies, everyone has the same quality of costume clothing, everyone is treated with kindness and courtesy, they don't want no one feels excluded. it needs to be addressed and included in other words, I want the playing field to be level.

The playing field is level. Let's fast forward 20 years. Do you see? You see those same girls in a workplace trying to keep the playing field level. Maybe they won't. They don't realize what they're doing, but that's what's at stake here, so what they're doing is undermining the gossip, sabotaging, and maybe they don't realize what they're doing, but that's trying to maintain the playing field. level what is the effect, do you know that the effect is not exclusively for women, the effect is also for men in those women's lives, so this can affect families, this can affect marriages, so no it is restricted only to women directly, they are women, yes, indirectly, their partners and their families, so it can have a devastating effect, it can result in reduced profitability, higher employee turnover, it can erode the absence of self of a woman, her self-esteem, it can have disastrous consequences, it can limit her career, um, certainly, in my In this case, I feel that my career was a little limited in certain areas, so it can have disastrous consequences and in caring In health, what's really important is sharing information, so this may even have an effect on whether or not women share information with each other. others in healthcare, that's pretty important and in other areas too, so what do we do about it?

Well, I challenge you to come up with four solutions. The first is your goal as a woman in an all-female workforce. Your goal is to treat relationships. As a goal, your goal is to establish warm, harmonious, and mutually satisfying relationships with the women you work with, one by one. So how do you go about getting to know them? You have conversations to establish a good relationship. You do small favors every day for those women around you. workforce that is important to you, a second thing you can do is use women's language. Has anyone heard that term women talk about?

I had never done it before reading this book. Women's language is really about softening the message you are giving to your colleague. Dude, how do we soften the message? We added something to the front of that sentence and we added something to the end, so what you're going to add to the front is something like this, however, it doesn't really make sense or I'm sorry to bother. you with this, but okay, there's some front-end stuff in the back, it could be things like you know, okay or that's right, those things soften the message that women hear, they need men to wear a very direct communication style, it's very efficient, it's very clear, it's very clear, I grew up with men and boys.

I know all about that. If you use that efficient clip style to communicate with women, you will create dissension and guaranteed conflict, so you use women's language. The third thing is to create your stack, what the heck is a stack? A stack of tokens is actually a stack of Goodwill Bitcoins, so to speak, what you're doing is doing small everyday favors and interacting pleasantly with the women you work with. It could be something like giving genuine compliments to a woman who has demonstrated great business acumen or her dress must be genuine, so when you do small favors and perhaps give compliments that are genuine, you are increasing your stack of chips, the women do mentally. math all the time maybe you don't know that about us women do mental calculations keep track of the stack of chips maybe they don't know it but they do it if you're a woman and you need a favor done for you or you need some support from other women At your workplace, you'll want to make sure you have a large stack built up, so above all, avoid a ship deficit.

The fourth most important thing is to honor power, even in death. Rule now, what is that basically? When you talk to a woman, if you are a woman and you are talking to another woman or to a work group, you want to make sure that you have the same amount of power and self-esteem as that person or that group. keeps the power dead, even remember that women are all about keeping the playing field level, this is how you do it, if you are a woman, you will give the impression that you have the same power and self-esteem as that woman or work group and that will help solve I love this quote from Margaret.

Basically, what she is arguing here is that it only takes a small group of people to achieve social change. So, may I suggest to you that starting today, as a woman, you can create social change and great socialization? trans transformation in your workplace by becoming part of a girl gang a good girl gang, this means a powerful group of women who support each other and celebrate each other's successes and celebrate each other's needs and are affectionate I challenge you as a woman from today onwards that You are the epitome of affection, thank you.