Knowing Your Value (9 page)

In his twenty years as CEO of General Electric, the parent company of NBC, Jack Welch was credited with turning that company into one of America’s largest and most valuable. His management skills are legendary, and earned him a reputation as one of America’s toughest bosses. If his managers weren’t producing, they no longer had a job.

I present Welch with the theory I’d heard from other interviewees, that executives love hiring women because women work harder and aren’t always asking for things like bigger offices and more money, and they don’t spend a lot of
time drawing attention to themselves and self-promoting. Does he agree?

Welch takes the contrarian point of view: “I think the distinction in many ways is a phony distinction. A players, really great managers and leaders, are almost gender-neutral. When you get a good woman leader, she is every bit as good as a man and has many of the same characteristics. One thing I would say is that certain industries are much more amenable to women leaders and they all will be eventually ... But good leaders are gender-neutral.”

Welch believes that truly great executives don’t even have to take their gender into consideration. “They’re comfortable with their gender, male or female. They’re not going to mask one or the other,” he says.

Or could it be that truly great female executives navigate gender differences so instinctively and effectively that the men don’t notice?

Donald Trump is another American business legend. Chairman and president of the Trump Organization, his real estate development firm, as well as the founder of Trump Entertainment Resorts, Trump is also the tremendously popular host and executive producer of the NBC reality show
The Apprentice
.

So, does Trump agree with the theory that women executives work harder than men? Trump says that twenty years ago one could make that argument, but not today: “Some of the best people I’ve ever hired were women,” he says. He put a woman in charge of the construction of Trump
Tower, as well as the construction of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York, at a time when women in the construction field probably felt they had to try harder in order to prove themselves, he tells me.

“Now I think twenty years ago there was a big difference. There was a theory that women had an inferiority complex when it came to the workplace, right?” Trump says. But that theory doesn’t necessarily hold true anymore, because “now when they’re really good, they know they’re really good.”

Could it be that everyone who works for Trump is equally aggressive simply because he hires aggressive people?

“If they’re stars I generally find they’re aggressive and it doesn’t matter whether they’re women or men. I hire people who are A types and once they reach a certain level of success, the way they will negotiate with you or talk to you becomes very much the same.”

So what makes them successful? What breaks the mold?

Trump says simply, “They have to have drive. Look, you have to start off with the brain. If you don’t have the brainpower, the game is over. So let’s assume we’re dealing with all intelligent people. The one thing that I’ve seen that separates the really successful people from the people that don’t quite get there is the drive. It’s that never-ending drive. I went to the Wharton School of Finance, that’s the best [business] school, and we had the smartest guys there. I can tell you there were guys in my class who were really smart who never made it because they didn’t have the drive.”

While I certainly agree with both Welch and Trump that women are equally capable, I have to believe that women bring different abilities and sensibilities to their work, and in many cases that works to their advantage, and to their companies’ advantage. Gender research is ongoing, but anecdotal evidence is a powerful thing. All the other women—and men—I spoke with pointed to the fact that women are simply more collaborative.

“Surrounding myself with women is a real key to my success,” Donny Deutsch tells me. Of course he said that! If you’ve seen Deutsch on
Morning Joe
, you know that we have an ongoing on-air joke about his attitude toward women. He even bought me a pair of $800 shoes to “buy back” my favor after insulting me on air with sarcastic remarks that some regarded as borderline misogynistic. But Deutsch has valuable contributions to make to this conversation. The chairman of a multibillion-dollar advertising agency, he has big money to match his big personality and fancy wardrobe. The man
thinks
big, and he explains how I can too.

“Give me a man and a woman of the same talent, and I will take the woman every single time,” he says.

Why? He tells me to take a look at advertising: “If you watch little girls in a Saturday morning TV commercial for a Barbie, game, or anything, it’s always the same: it’s three or four girls sitting around a kitchen table playing together collaboratively—that’s the commercial. If you watch a commercial for a little boys’ game or toy, at the end one boy always raises his fists: ‘
I won!
’ I think in many ways senior women executives are superior in that for them it’s not a zero-sum game. They want to work collaboratively, they want to support, they want to be part of the team. It’s not as much how big is my paycheck, how big is my office ...”

His is a mixed message: on one hand, Deutsch says, yes women may want to be liked, and yes, they do the invisible jobs; that’s why he likes women, that’s why they are valuable employees. But it is the next words out of his mouth that explain why women so often end up with much of the work and little of the glory: “What I have also found is that—once again, this is not a rule either, there are exceptions to it—but for that very reason sometimes men have made better CEOs because that charge-the-hill aggression, that ‘what’s in it for me,’ the very thing that makes it harder to manage them is what makes them better in the top spot.”

I tell Deutsch that there are feminists who are not going to like what he says.

“I’m the ultimate feminist,” he fires back. “Eight out of my ten senior partners are women. This is a company I built; the CEO is a woman, the CFO is a woman ... I’m just saying that some of the time the things that make women more
successful in the most senior positions can also work against them.”

Although I don’t like hearing it, I appreciate Deutsch’s honesty. And he’s certainly right: women need to get better at charging the hill. I hear essentially the same message from everyone I speak with. Deutsch is simply being generous enough to tell the truth: either we own our value and get to the top, or we can work hard and let the men take the credit.

Most everyone also agreed that women just work harder. Certainly
I
was working as hard as my cohost, and harder than all the other men around me, though I was getting nowhere.

“It’s the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers thing,” Ilene H. Lang says after I recount my story. “Women do the same steps as men, but they do them backwards and in high heels. That’s what women have to go through to show that they’re as good as men. They have to work harder, they take much longer to be promoted, and they have to prove themselves over and over again.”

My friend and frequent
Morning Joe
guest Susie Essman may be better known as Susie Green, the foul-mouthed ballbreaking character she plays on the critically acclaimed HBO
series
Curb Your Enthusiasm
. But Essman isn’t anything like her alter ego Green, who tells her husband to go F himself if she doesn’t get what she wants; the real Essman says that despite her success, she is nagged by the feeling that she has to keep proving herself.

Essman has spent most of her career as a stand-up comic. “Talk about a boys’ club!” she says of the 1980s New York City comedy circuit. Essman says because the clubs hired mostly men, women had a hard time getting on stage at all, let alone at a decent hour. Women, she says, were often relegated to performing in the wee hours of the morning.

“I always felt like I had to be so much better, and in a way that did me a favor,” Essman tells me. “Instead of saying, ‘Oh, they’re not going to give me a good spot in the clubs because I’m a female,’ I was going to be so good they couldn’t deny me.

“Was it fair? No. But life isn’t fair,” Essman says. “I remember that my dad, who was a physician, told me, ‘Whenever you go to the doctor, go to a female doctor because they have to work so much harder to get where they are that they’re probably better.’ ”

My favorite senator, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, has spent decades proving herself in the male-dominated world of American politics. When I ask which areas of the economy could benefit from a greater number of women, she tells me, “It is my observation that the women who have done well have been hyperprepared. Being prepared means completely understanding what you’re doing. I’ve always
had the feeling someone is going to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘What are you doing here?’ So I wanted to be prepared when they did; I wanted to know the answer. And if there’s anything that the Wall Street meltdown showed us, it’s that a lot of people were engaging in complex financial interactions that they didn’t completely understand. My observation is, perhaps if there were more women on board saying, ‘Wait a minute, are we sure we understand what this actually is?’, then maybe it might have slowed down the train.”