“Older and more experienced women must shift the style of the past and serve as the role models we searched for early in our own careers.”

The Queen Bee

Today I heard another vicious story about the “older” woman at work.  You know her; she’s the woman who thinks of Miranda Priestly as a role model.  Miranda, played flawlessly by Meryl Streep in the movie “The Devil Wears Prada”, runs a boot camp for her younger employees.  Her approach combines a demeaning and imperious attitude with a thinly veiled disdain for her attractive, younger and certainly more technologically competent, employees. I guess these women, described by my younger colleagues as the “old babes”, didn’t get the memo — the “Queen Bee” is dead.

Hostility will derail even the most competent woman executive. So, note to any QBs out there: the young, smart and competent women in your organization will out tech you at the first opportunity. The men, too. Then they will leave you and your company as soon as the next decent offer comes along. Your peers, male and female alike, will lose respect for you, roll their eyes at your behavior and call you nasty names. So, let’s make a deal and bury this ridiculous women’s leadership style today.

The term “Queen Bee” was coined by academics to describe a woman who, as the first and only woman in in her company to enter the “C” suite receives some perverse pleasure in making other women, particularly the younger women (and men too if she can get away with it) feel inferior, stupid and not tough enough to make it to the top. I’m sure you’ve met someone like this or, poor you, worked for her.  She thinks being tough will show others what a strong leader she is, and she’s wrong. Her obsession with toughness only reveals how threatened and insecure she is.

I wonder if this wasn’t a factor in Hillary’s stymied bid to become president. She was competent, smart and experienced, but she also exuded entitlement. Barack, she thought, well, he didn’t understand and yikes, he hadn’t earned it!  She thought her role as the first “twofer” with Bill in the White House gave her clear path to the big job. When I saw her drinking shots with the guys in Pennsylvania I knew it was over. We don’t need to prove we can drink with them. We need to prove we can think like them and deliver results. She is doing a great job as secretary of state but her attitude killed her chances.

And, it can kill yours, too.

Many among the first wave of educated women entering the workforce after the excitement of the sixties and the women’s liberation movement faced blatant discrimination and harassment. Every professional woman over fifty can tell some powerful war stories. It was hard. It took guts and a strong stomach. But, that’s old news. Well, not completely, we still face subtle discrimination practices for sure but there has been progress. Older and more experienced women must shift the style of the past and serve as the role models we searched for early in our own careers.

I work with both women and men in executive roles. A few years ago I worked with a woman who was sincerely confused about how she should act in her new role as a member of the senior executive team.  The only other woman (who had been the one and only for ten years) took my client aside to give her some advice. “Learn how to play golf, drink whiskey during the off site card games, and keep ‘being a woman’ to a minimum.” Be very tough if you want to gain respect, she told my client. “Oh, and make sure you only wear only designer outfits if you want credibility.”

My client, the mother of two, has considerable work experience and an Ivy League MBA. She was a disciplined athlete but not a golfer, and while she was open to learning, she wondered if the advice wasn’t just silly. She had no intention of adopting an overly tough style but she did want to deliver results and she was, as she pointed out, a woman, and so stood very little chance of never being seen as one. She liked being a woman. She was confident as a woman, and not at all interested in being seen more like a man. She had after all, not simply joined the senior executive team, but had assumed the role of president. He stepped into her new post with some trepidation, but she was competent, smart, results driven, and ultimately did very well.  In the end she told me that she thought the advice she had been given was old fashioned, irrelevant, and reflected poorly on the “older” woman who had given it.

Another client I worked with, an Australian medical doctor and a vice president in the medical industry, attended a workshop given by a woman consultant. This consult told the assembled women they should never bring a pen and paper to a meeting with them. If they did, she told them, they’d be perceived as not smart enough to remember what happens at a meeting and find themselves in the role of secretary. My client was shocked. “Is this true in the U.S.?” she asked me.

“Actually, no,” I replied. “It may have been true in 1970. Would you describe this consultant for me, please?”

“Well,” my client told me, “she was sort of mature.”

In today’s workplace, the amount of information is a blinding windfall. No one can remember everything and most people at this workshop were busy texting anyway. As it happened, the president of my client’s company was also in the group. He told me he thought the workshop was insulting, that he was embarrassed by the presentation. That consultant never worked for his company again.

So Queen Bees everywhere, no matter what age, beware. You are in trouble if you think you reign supreme. Your attitude matters. Fix it or you will become irrelevant and isolated. Sure, your experience is a part of your life-and-work story and yes, you should honor it. But it is only a part of your story and today the business world is full of women who know how to work with other women and who expect partnership not patronizing. Today, 50% of the students at your former business school are women. This is true of your medical or law school, too.

Women in our workforce today expect equity. They have learned how to work in collaboration and partnership with both genders. While they may want your wisdom, your stories and your support, they certainly do not want your disdain. They won’t learn from you if you act threatened, and you’re really losing out if you can’t learn from them. The final scene in “The Devil Wears Prada” has Miranda looking wistfully at her protégé, knowing that for herself it’s too late. It’s not too late for you. You don’t have to be a Queen Bee to be a leader. You can very easily find yourself on the inside of this amazing circle of Gen X and Gen Y women, educated, open, competent and talented, and a very happy member of the hive.

Want to change things?

mcgrath@resourcesforleadership.com.