In-House Counsel, Women's Issues

The Road Not Taken: Play Your Game

Play your game and do your job, not the janitor’s or the receptionist’s jobs -- and other workplace advice from in-house columnist Celeste Harrison Forst.

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Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, Facebook COO and Wharton professor, respectively, have written another editorial about women at work in the New York Times. Their February 6, 2015 piece is about women taking on tasks that help the team, but don’t help women as individuals. They assert that women like to help and nurture, whereas men are “ambitious and results-oriented,” and their contributions deserve to be rewarded when they provide help to the team. Conversely, when women don’t help “the team,” they are seen as selfish, whereas men who don’t help are merely busy. When men do help, they do so publicly with visible behaviors like showing up at optional meetings, whereas women “engage more privately in time consuming activities.”

Sandberg and Grant give examples of female professionals taking meeting notes, fetching drinks, answering phones, bringing in cupcakes, and mentoring others as the sort of silent efforts that go unappreciated by the organization. The result of those unnoticed and unrewarded efforts is that significantly more women burn out from their work than men. Sandberg and Grant suggest by way of a solution that organizations track acts of helping and assign communal tasks evenly instead of relying on volunteers.

The charm of a corporate chore-chart notwithstanding, I submit there is a simpler solution to this problem. In the words of the great Herb Brooks to his 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team: “Play your game.” Sandberg and Grant observe that women who don’t visibly help the team are frequently penalized, but in the same article, they imply that these unappreciated chores women often take on are not mandated by their superiors. Generally, this is true. Professionals are not hired for jobs so that they can also run bake sales, clean up after colleagues, answer phones, or fetch drinks. So? Make that real. Play your game and do your job, not the janitor’s or the receptionist’s jobs.

But what about the penalty a woman faces for not playing housewife while doing her real job? Sandberg and Grant give no advice to women on this front, but I will. If you find yourself washing your colleagues’ dishes, answering their phones, setting up their meetings, fetching their drinks, and planning all the birthdays – stop it. Remove yourself from the situation if you can. Close your office door, or work in another location; create a barrier of some sort. If your colleagues are slobs, don’t clean up after them. If the phone rings, let it ring. If Mark in finance asks you to make copies for him, let him know he is welcome to pick up the documents from you and copy them himself. Some people may be irritated by this — of course they will; they had a maid and now you are telling them no. It is okay to set boundaries so you can, as Sandberg and Grant say, “secure your own oxygen mask first.” You may be seen as selfish. You may, according to Sandberg and Grant, be less likely to get a raise or a promotion, but you will be able to survive working without exhausting yourself. Play your game and tell your colleagues they can get their own coffee.

With all that said, I want to add a significant caveat: If these “soft” tasks move a tangible project forward, then either do them or delegate them. This goes for in-house lawyers particularly; we are frequently seen as an obstacle to other divisions’ ability to meet their goals. A smart in-house lawyer will make certain his or her colleagues know that he or she is a team player willing to do what needs to be done to support the other teams within the greater organization.

I appreciate that Sandberg and Grant are identifying these issues and sparking discussions on the matter. But I don’t agree with their position that these are gender-specific issues. I think this is more a question of of takers versus givers. There are always people looking to take advantage of others if they can, and it is up to each of us to let the world know how far our boundaries extend. If you are a giver by nature, you have to be mindful of how far you stretch yourself. You have to stop yourself from offering to do the tasks that nobody else wants to do and that no one will really appreciate. It doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman, there will always be someone out there trying to see how much she can take from you or get you to do for him or her. A corporate chore-chart won’t protect you from that, but your own backbone can.

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Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at C.harrisonforst@gmail.com.

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