Resiliency: Female leaderships Secret Sauce

What will end up mattering more to my career - ace'ing academic courses or mastering the art of bouncing back quickly when things go wrong?

When I finished Stanford undergrad last year, I, like many young people, focused my attention on things like finding a good job and building my professional skills.

But I just read a great new book that makes me think there's another place to look, a more important source of long-term career success: My personal resilience.

Authors and McKinsey consultants Joanna Barsh and Susie Cranston, have interviewed hundreds of successful women to figure out what really differentiates women who get what they want from their careers.

In "How Remarkable Women Lead," Barsh and Cranston focus on five factors that inspiring women leaders tend to have - and that we can all cultivate in ourselves:

1. Meaning - making the effort to find meaning in out jobs.
2. Framing - being able to re-frame difficult moments, to replace negative emotions with useful ones quickly.
3. Connecting - actively reaching out to others, building strong networks we can turn to for advice, camaraderie, and a sense of belonging.
4. Engaging - jumping into the fray, taking the risks that make us stronger.
5. Energizing - taking the time to take care of themselves through sleep and exercise so they don't burn out.

The authors say that what really sets great women leaders apart is not their wins, but their ability to respond positively to failure. Each female leader in the book recounts a balanced set of stories -- both highs and humbling lows -- that women of any age can relate to (rejection, lay offs and cancer).

What's remarkable about these women is how they have taught themselves to shake off disappointment and pick themselves up without losing too much focus, perspective or time. The reality is, setbacks, roadblocks and failures happen to everyone. And there are some simple things that help women leaders (and all of us) stay on track:

• Ample restorative time: sleep, exercise and anything else that works for you.
• Engaging with supportive family and friends, and pals at work who canget you out of your funk.
• Taking the time to diagnose what caused the set back: soliciting feedback no matter how painful : -)
• Focusing on next steps to get you going in the right directions.
• Pals at work who you can rely on to get you out of our funk.
• Taking control of your schedule to make blocks of time for important work (no email or phone!) with regular restorative intervals.
  

I loved this book because it's making me see a new way my friends and I can build the futures we want: sharing tips for getting up, not just sympathy when we're down.

So what do you do? How do you get up when things go wrong and life's showing you little mercy? What do you focus on to get psyched and going again? Please share!

- Mary Liz McCurdy

Guilt If I Do, Guilt If I Don't

When did going to the gym become something I feel guilty about doing?

My friend, Guilt, calculates the cost of me going to the gym (gym membership, nanny coverage, lost work productivity) and reminds me of all the things that are on hold or that I should be addressing while I work out. I ignore him and leave the house.

As I walk to the gym, Guilt starts mapping out the most efficient way to workout and shower so that I minimize the amount of time I am there. I often skip classes because when all is said and done, you are at the gym for almost a whole hour and a half. When I work out on my own I can get it all done in an hour. Guilt doesn't like it when I'm there for more than an hour.

I climb on to the elliptical, I strap on my headphones, and try to steer the channel to something "valuable" - maybe CNN? When my hand inevitably reaches to change the channel to any of a number of reruns of crime shows, Guilt starts a-buzzing, "Isn't it bad enough you aren't working/taking care of your children/supporting your husband?! You are doing something just for YOU?! And now you are actually watching trash TV on top of it?! You could be at LEAST using this time to read a business book!"

I take off my headphones and flip on my Kindle which is loaded with 10 books I really should read. The bouncing and reading aren't mixing. I flip it back off after 5 pages and put the headphones back on. Guilt is quieter because I tried but he's still there.

I finish my workout, run down the stairs, shower in 5 minutes and put my hair in a ponytail because I don't want Guilt yelling at me if I take too long to get ready. I leave - happy that I got it done but it's a tainted happiness. It's one laden with "yeah, butts".

I remember in my 20's, going to the gym was something I felt guilty about NOT doing. But now, with a career, two small children, and a husband who works full time, I often feel guilty when I am at the gym, or for that matter, doing anything just for me.

This isn't really my story anymore...I have learned that guilt is THE most unproductive motivator, if not actually demotivating. Guilt is a killer of all things good, and provides no positive outcomes. Guilt should be put out to pasture, pronto. But dozens of clients I've talked to over the years continue this internal struggle of knowing when it's not only okay but required that we put ourselves first. Career, physical health, passions - these are things that we all would bend over backwards to help our families prioritize. Now it's time for us to believe that we deserve equal priority, and we should ask for that from those who support and love us. And Guilt needs to go hang out with someone else.

Rebecca Rodskog is a Change Management Coach and Consultant, an Actress, Speaker and Writer. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two children. www.rodskog.com

Debunking the 24/7 workday

I've spent a good part of my career as impaired as a drunk. You have too if, like me, your nightly sleep averages less than 5 hours. According to medical research, this makes you the cognitive equal of someone DWI.

"OK, I'll be careful driving," I want to argue, "my caffeine-fueled brain works fine!" Apparently not. Looking at the judgment of sleep-starved medical interns, error rates jump as much as 6 times. We have a hard time taking a sober look at this when, as Harvard Business Review points out, our work culture glorifies sleepless machismo in the way "we once glorified people who could hold their alcohol."

As we bid farewell to the dog-days of summer, those few August weeks when America's passion for the 24/7 life wanes ever so slightly, let's ask why we plunge so readily into our post-Labor-Day norm: meeting-packed days, harried emails, texting, around-the-clock availability for work, little rest. Today's headlines might make us think twice: On scores of global competitiveness, Sweden now outranks the US while later this month the new "Wall Street" film opens with the title "Money Never Sleeps." Maybe it should.

We office workers log more hours than any prior generation because we can (thanks to technology) and because we assume we must (thanks to global competition). These days, if you want to be a go-to person, you want to be seen as always-on. Besides, a strong work ethic is a great thing, right? That's what we tell ourselves.

But is working as many hours as we can the same as being productive?

"Available 24/7!" said the email from my hairdresser. Now, I've never known anyone who, at 2AM, absolutely had to have a trim. So why "24/7"? Because this language is current code for "I'm serious. I'll put you first. Choose me." Good PR, perhaps. But what's the customer benefit? How straight would your 2AM haircut be? In fact, this meme has real costs which we increasingly see in both anecdote and research.

"I realized I couldn't have a real management job anymore. I couldn't handle the calls after midnight," a woman named Ann told me. She worked for a boss who dialed her number whenever he had something to say. Sending a message or waiting until morning - these were things he just didn't like to do. Perhaps Ann's boss was un-reformable. But Ann hadn't even tried to change things by acquainting her boss with voice-mail or looking for a management job at a more stable firm.

In her bones, Ann, like too many of us, believed her boss was in the right. She thought that to be a good employee, she had to take the call, wherever, whenever it came.

Early in my career, I was dumb enough to sign up for the jobs more enlightened people side-stepped. I spent my early 30s managing global portfolio trades. Days started at 4AM and nights were peppered with foreign voices calling to say "your client is going to be mad because ..." someone screwed up in London, Frankfurt, or Singapore. About to crack (from brain-cell depletion and spousal pleading), I switched to a gig with more standard waking hours, but with plenty of ways to work and travel all the time. I learned that any job can be 24/7 if you believe that's the only path to glory. And I did.

Until one day a management guru (on my employer's dime) told me this: "If you can't get your job done in 10 hours a day, there's something wrong with you or there's something wrong with your job."

So many of us define our self-worth by how hard we work, we have trouble disentangling our egos and even asking if there might be a better way. When we've pushed ourselves to be good students, get good jobs and deliver results, it's hard to hear that our more-more-more approach may not be the right one. For many, being asked to examine how we work feels like being asked to be mediocre.

Our 24/7 dogma, and the reaction to it, generates two clashing extremes: Total Buy-In (Ann's view) and it's opposite, the complete (largely female) rejection of 24/7 and sense that we should be able to work any hours we want. Interviewing male managers for our book Getting to 50/50, we heard a lot of complaints about women being unrealistic about hours - particularly after having kids. We too were speechless when female graduates of fancy medical schools told us it should be OK to take whole summers off and high-paid executives said their employers shouldn't blink if they do school pickup at 3:00 every day for years. Polarized views lead nowhere and keep us from building lots of sensible things like good after-school programs (so we know kids are happy while we're at work) and efficient office norms (so we can think straight when we get home).

Thomas Edison's view that genius, or just good work, is 99% perspiration is largely right. What we need is a more sensible dialog about the best way to perspire. Management expert Tony Schwartz's new book Why The Way We're Working Isn't Working, takes on the fallacy that "human beings operate most productively in the same one-dimensional way computers do: continuously, at high speeds, for long periods of time, running multiple programs at the same time."

While I couldn't live without my many multi-tasking devices - they save me from missed meetings, tight deadlines, lost dogs, etc. I have to force myself to heed the data. It says that our brains really do only one thing at once. Sure, I can tell myself I'm a parallel processor, responding to a crisis on email while, simultaneously, writing up next-week's presentation. But the facts say something different: I would get both tasks completed faster if I finished one and then focused fully on the other, 25% faster actually.

What's clear is that blind belief in 24/7 is turning us into inebriated slow-pokes. What's less clear is how to stop it. How do we change habits and structure our teams to improve our return on time?

In one study, Harvard Business School's Leslie Perlow looked at programmers producing code that was substantially the same in China, India and Hungary. What the teams in these three countries shared was this: certainty that its own cocktail of process and hours was vital to producing high-quality work. But Perlow found there were vastly different ways to complete the same work. One team averaged 60+ hours per week to produce the same results that another team produced - at equivalent quality and profit - in 40 hours per week.

Perlow's two decades of research spans several continents and a range of intense fields like engineering, finance and consulting. In a US study, Perlow found that "those who work hardest do not necessarily contribute the most to the corporation's productivity, and, in fact, that often no one benefits from this behavior, not even the corporation." Working round the clock generates bugs in the code, management gaffes, and firedrills that put both individuals and their employers in peril.

In a recent article, Perlow describes four years of work at Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The management consulting giant ran time-use tests on real-time assignments to see if it was possible to produce top-quality work without 24/7 culture. One BCG team mandated that each consultant, on an important project with a new client, work only four days a week. Another required consultants to unplug and abstain from work (no email, no cell phone) after 6pm. Turns out, if you know you're required to switch off, you think much harder while you're on. And team members quickly figure out how to communicate to colleagues what they need to know so dropped balls are avoided. Teamwork, sharing and passing information, improves by necessity. Having to articulate what we are doing is a great discipline.

What Perlow and others keep finding is that success does not require 24/7. What it does require is more rigor in how we manage ourselves, using supremely simple tools:

·Clear goals. "The most effective firms focus on a limited number of well-defined objectives," says Adrian Ott author of The 24-Hour Customer. For example, a popular case study, shows how the down-and-out Lehman Brothers equity research team ( #15 in the industry ) rose from the ashes. How? In 1987, a metrics-driven manager, Jack Rivkin took over and lead the team to #1 in three years. Rivkin told his team exactly what he wanted from them: to focus all their energy on high-quality analysis - and specific steps to get there. The team was evaluated on a score card measuring all relevant, quantifiable activity: number of calls, written reports, client visits. And there were no secrets. The numbers were out there for everyone in the department to see.

·Good process. Time-diary research, where workers record what they're doing hour-to-hour, reveals a lot. Even at well-run companies, high-performing knowledge workers say big chunks of their day, sometimes half of it, are wasted on ill-planned meetings and cleaning up after snafus. Studies show that declaring "quiet time" (protected hours to get vital thinking work done), encouraging collaboration and overlap produce world-class results more profitably. "We need to replace 24/7 with 80/20," says Sasha Grinshpun, an executive coach who works with firms like Google and IBM. "If we understand where we can add the most value, we can focus on the 20% of our work that generates 80% of the results."

·The Zero-Baloney Standard. "Nanny cam most managers," an executive suggested, "and they'd have a hard time explaining where their time goes, even to themselves." For most of us, metrics-driven leaders and time-off by fiat are hard to come by. But is there something we can all do to give 24/7 a sanity check? Welcome the auditors - let them examine the ledger of "to do's" and test what's really valuable versus baloney. A partner at a global accounting firm told us how she and her spouse vet each other's calendars once a week. They talk through which meetings/dinners/golf games are truly critical and triage the rest. Our best friend, our spouse, our kids: they all have opinions about how we spend our time, if we only stop to listen.

So when voices chide "close laptop" (my daughter), "smartphone off" (my son), "go to sleep" (my husband), I need to give them license to steer me away from the shoals, past the siren song, of 24/7. Sailing somewhere between Gordon Gekko and Sweden will likely prove a better course for all of us.

Visit the Washington Post for this piece and more from the entire column.

Too Few Women In Tech? How We Can Improve Diversity.

Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch just came out with an article about women in Silicon Valley with a fairly controversial headline: Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Blaming the Men. He argues that women really don’t want to be entrepreneurs, there aren’t very many women entrepreneurs, and therefore it is unfair to blame him for not having more women speakers at his conferences. Basically he states that he tries very hard to have women speakers and venture capitalists try very hard to fund women entrepreneurs, but they cannot find them.

Now, I can tell you that in my 17 years of working in Silicon Valley, I have never talked to a venture capitalist that has said they are looking for female entrepreneurs to fund. But I have spoken to conference organizers looking for female speakers. I actually agree that they are probably unfairly criticized, but I don’t think it is because there aren’t enough female potential speakers. I think that woman might be much more selective about where they go speak. If you are a female entrepreneur, and a mom, and you are asked to speak at a conference, a balancing act occurs in your head. Is this conference worthwhile? Is it worthwhile enough to give up an evening with my children? Or a few days with my kids if it requires travel? Perhaps this balancing act means that women are less likely to say “yes” to a boondoggle, or a conference that might be fun but is unlikely to bring them more clients or additional funding. I don’t know if this is the reason it is hard to find speakers, but I suspect that it is one part of the equation.

I asked my friend Robbie, a Silicon Valley marketing whiz/consultant, for her thoughts on Michael’s column and here was her response. What do you think?

I think the reason Tech Crunch and the other event organizers have a hard time getting women entrepreneurs to participate in their programs is that there is a relatively small number of big name women entrepreneurs and they are in high demand. The real issue is why there are so few successful women entrepreneurs.

While most VCs would love to invest in more qualified woman-run companies, they tend to work the networks of people they already know, who are mostly male, and rely in great part on personal references to identify and qualify companies. In addition, the timing for founding companies is tricky for women, who often find themselves choosing between starting a family or starting a company. While men are increasingly involved in childrearing and household management, the reality is that the bulk of these responsibilities still falls with women—even those who are highly qualified engineers and MBAs.

What can we do about this discrepancy?

Men in power positions such as Mr. Arrington need to continue to keep the doors open, and look hard for entrepreneurs who don’t look like everyone else. Women need to be more thoughtful about their career aspirations earlier on, and braver about taking risks. And couples need to share the responsibilities at home, so both men and women can have equal opportunities to create the new businesses, jobs and technologies that make Silicon Valley such an exciting place to be.

-Joanna Strober

Washington Post- Leadership's next frontier: Changing how we use our words and bodies

"In Japan, we say there are three genders: Men, women, and American women," joked the head of our Tokyo office. It was 1992 and he was trying to inoculate me for my first week of Japanese business meetings - against any worry that I might be held to local female standards: being deferential toward men (not good at that), speaking in a soft, high voice (ditto), serving tea (spills likely). I laughed, thankful that he was giving me license to be myself - and thankful that I was a member of the third sex, American women, unburdened by the gender codes of traditional societies.

This summer, The Daily Show's "women" kerfuffle reset my blithe sense that we're so much freer of cultural baggage. Top female ex-staffers said they'd felt "ignored and dismissed" and the knee-jerk debate about sexism ensued. Is there a more useful way to look at these all-too-common rows?

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers offers one alternate frame. The book shows how the weight of culture can bring down even planes. Cultures laden with hierarchy, it turns out, have bad crash records because junior officers feel unable to voice concerns. Korean Airlines (KAL) was the worst - stunning the world with a string of crashes because their flight crews could not speak up. From the black boxes of doomed planes, Gladwell reveals an alarming truth. Social norms can be insidious, costly - and sometimes stronger than the will to live.

How did KAL fix this problem? They changed the language of the cockpit - to English. By changing the words spoken, KAL re-set the tone in the cockpit and gave subordinates a way to make themselves heard.

While U.S. women have cast off many a mental girdle, we've held onto social standards that cause a lot of trouble. With the help of the guys around us, we continue to act out norms that generate unhappiness between men and women - and make it harder for us to work together.

After many late nights, I'd flown cross country as the junior member of a restructuring team. Our client was a bank on the verge of collapse and our job was to save it. In the meeting, my boss glowered. The bank's leaders argued among themselves rather than responding to our analysis. When it was my turn to speak, I tried to ease the tension by putting context around our numbers and using a warm tone. The bank's CEO ignored what I was saying to instead squabble with a board member next to me - for 10 minutes. Yielding to the will of the client, I sat back and attempted a patient smile.

"You lost control of the meeting," my boss said gruffly on the way to the airport. "You should have looked the CEO in the eye and said, 'You're wrong! You're missing the point.' Worse, you were wordy and you smiled at him, like it was OK that he interrupted you." I didn't recall my boss saying anything so bold and wasn't sure how effective I, the team minion, would have been with a stare-down. But my boss made me think: Why all the words and why had I smiled?

Researching Getting to 50/50, I learned that women speak an average of 21,000 words a day while men use a mere 7,000. (My husband says I'm above average and should shield him from my verbal tsunami; but studies say female verbal supremacy is really a form of deference - that we feel obliged to explain ourselves more than men do). Data also shows we women more often tilt our heads and smile encouragingly because we've been socialized to think this is the polite thing to do. And we wait patiently for our turn to speak. And don't retaliate when interrupted.

So when women say they don't feel heard, should we tell them to act more like men? Or should men drop the dominance bit - and learn to like listening? Both would help. Men and women need to get on the same page about what's "normal," so we work together more constructively.

It's not generational, either. Talking with a panel of current business school students, a female lecturer said "You know, I make a big effort to call on women in my class. But it seems like the guys still dominate the conversation. Why is that?" The female students had an interesting take: It's not that the women are too quiet, it's that the men are too noisy. "Guys in our class feel free to express an opinion when they haven't read the case. They have no shame. Women think that's irresponsible and don't speak unless they have something valuable to say."

When a graduate school professor was asked why there weren't more female speakers in his classes, he had a simple answer: "Well, men bang down my door to come present their ideas. Women seem to be waiting to be asked."

To get beyond mere anecdotes, check out The OpEd Project, an effort committed to closing one specific gender gap: Men submit eight times more newspaper opinion pieces than women do. Sitting in an OpEd Project seminar, I saw women who are tenured professors, leaders in business, medicine and law reveal an extreme inability to utter a simple sentence: "I am an expert in X because Y" as in "I am an expert in cloning because I invented some of the first successful techniques." "It's so male to do that!" a highly accomplished woman said. "It sounds like you are putting yourself forward."

Catherine Orenstein, the group's founder, says this is common among the thousands of people who've gone through her program - that even world-renown women experience discomfort applying the word "expert" to themselves in a way men don't.

Korean Airlines imported a new language to fix its cockpit culture problems. Changing language - the one that divides men and women - can go a long way to fix glitches in gender culture too. To start, let's think twice about common phrases that widen male/female gaps, instead of shrinking them.

"She's aggressive." Before I worked for her, this is how a guy friend described one of my favorite bosses. The woman, I learned, was indeed vocal - and incredibly kind. I've since heard experts say there's one trait that defines successful women in business: they're louder. So no matter how uncomfortable it makes people, let's encourage as much volume in our daughters as we do in our sons.

"My wife stays home; it's better that way." I once hired a lawyer to review an employment contract. Unprompted he cautioned me: "You don't really want this job, do you? When both parents have demanding jobs, kids don't do well." While I was paying for this inaccurate advice (real facts here), many women tell us they get it for free - often from well-intentioned co-workers. No matter what you believe about kids, if you wouldn't urge a man to back away from a job, please don't suggest it to a woman.

"My husband can't multi-task." "Learned incompetence" is debilitating for all of us. When we use words that excuse a man from knowing how to handle household chores and children (or a woman from knowing how to handle an oil change, the TV remote or money), we set ourselves up for collisions that could be avoided.

And every time we apply a common language to men and women, we nudge the culture, inch by inch, away from double standards.

But, there's a silent language that we can each change instantly - if we know it exists. At Stanford Graduate School of Business, leadership professor Deborah Gruenfeld teaches a course called "Acting with Power," where students learn to look for and use non-verbal cues of high and low status. Guess what? Most high-power behaviors, like claiming space, bold gestures, and interrupting, are typically seen as "male." Acts of "playing low", including keeping limbs close to the body, glancing away and nodding encouragement, are often thought of as "female."

Gruenfeld points out that, when it comes to having influence, the quality of the argument is often less important than the status of its proponent. And status is signaled in milliseconds by each of us when we walk in a room. So who gets heard is also a function of the language our bodies convey. "The students in my classes come in feeling trapped by the ways they have learned to play gender roles," she says. "But they learn very quickly that what feels natural is just over-learned, and that different work roles call for different kinds of physical actions, regardless of gender. To succeed in a hierarchy, you need to be able to play both high and low. There are real benefits to both."

As we try to find a lingua franca both genders can use, new research offers some norm-shifting ideas. Whether you're a man or woman, putting your body in positions that speak power makes you feel good. See yourself as the executive in the boardroom who "crests the table with his feet, fingers interlaced behind his back, elbows pointing outwards" and amazing things happen. Your testosterone (confidence) rises, cortisol (stress) falls, you're more likely to take risk and feel "in charge." Who doesn't like that? So let's encourage our girls to put their feet up - and make changing the language both comfortable and fun.

Gandhi for Gals – the Beauty of Thick Skin

New on my firm's trading floor, I was glad to know at least one person. Derek had been a year ahead of me in college and was now a junior T-Bill trader. One day, I walked up behind Derek's desk to ask a question. His head was turning from side to side checking the multiple screens in front of him. Suddenly, he shouted an expletive. Expletives continued to erupt for the next several seconds. Derek's boss walked up, less worried about the money being lost than something else. "Derek, don't talk like that in front of a lady," he said. The boss was 30. I was stunned.

On trading floors, like navy ships, colorful speech is standard. I was accustomed to bad language: it was a vice I suffered too. Letting off steam with a few foul words came quite naturally to me and seemed harmless. Derek's boss didn't know that I, for good or ill, shared more with Rahm Emanuel than Scarlett O'Hara when it came to cursing. "It's an honest mistake," I heard myself saying, "but I am NOT a lady!"

While a true statement (I flunk Miss Manners daily, on many counts), my response looked nutty. The boss was only trying to be kind. But I was so mad, I couldn't help myself.

I've huffed and puffed about many things I should have blown off. So I could only nod when I heard this wisdom from an executive recruiter for C-suites and board seats: "Thick skin. That's what more women need."

But not just one layer. To get to the top, women likely need three.

Let's start by shedding the soft veneer we're encouraged to grow as girls - for something more battle-ready. This month on Harvard Business Review's site, management expert Jeff Pfeffer points out that women won't get equal power until they project equal toughness.

"We've ruined her," said a male friend about his tween daughter. He explained that while he and his wife bred a love of grit in their sons (rolling in mud, staring down bullies), they had indulged their daughter in little-girl-ness. Her nose was always wiped, her clothes never dirty. When the playground was rough, her parents would come to school and sort things out. "She spends hours crying about wisecracks, what's she going to do when someone yells at her at work!"

I assured my friend that most girls find their inner-street-fighter soon enough; that like many of us, raised to value niceness, she'd learn its drawbacks and find the ability to push back or laugh it off (though I'm still learning). In the name of kindness, we should nurture as much "tough guy" in our daughters as we do in our sons.

Girls also need a layer that boys don't - added protection to be successful outsiders, until we finally get comfortable with females wielding power as overtly as men do. Not long after I snapped at Derek's boss, I was assigned a mentor. This woman was the rarest of breeds, a female proprietary trader, Wall Street 1988. She took me to drinks and said, "You're going to be lonely. But you'll succeed if you want to." At the time, this wasn't particularly motivational. But the words stayed with me because they were true. And, unless progress accelerates, they will still be true when my daughter goes to work in 15 years.

While a lack of gal-pals is survivable, the second thick-skin layer is about more than warding off loneliness.I've always hung out with guys as much as women, so it never occurred to me that spending my career in mostly-male places could be a problem.

But when you're the only one of your kind in the room, there are no standard expectations - no one knows what they want from you. I got advice on all the many things I shouldn't be. "Young women should not be funny" - when I tried to ape (perhaps poorly) witty male superiors. "Try to be less squeaky and talk slower," was my colleague's brotherly prompt as we walked into client meetings. "Cut the 'professor' voice," said a favorite guy friend, when I carried on about topics I knew well. All good feedback. But how to be is hard to navigate when you're stuck zig-zagging between male and female norms.

As one of two women at an off-site, I watched my only female peer present to the group. Her approach to striking the right tone was to remove all affect from her voice. Predictably, no one listened. I got up to speak next but had forgotten to breathe. My fear of being a female flop rose so high I almost fell over. I clung to podium, painfully plodding, and jokeless. I've since learned to find the humor in these moments - and now know others share my sweaty palms.

Researching Getting to 50/50, we found this issue has been well-studied. Columbia professor Claude Steele recently conducted a study showing that even female engineers (no strangers to being outnumbered by men), have higher heart rates, temperature and distraction when they are less than 25% of the room. Make the room gender-neutral and group results improve - women perform well and men perform no worse.

This isn't an argument for quotas in engineering or anywhere else. It is simply to point out that some environments will enhance our chances of success while others won't. Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, a creator of the Implicit Association Test, offers even more usable advice. If you can't fix your workplace, if you can't recruit your way to a more gender-neutral team, find other ways to surround yourself with evidence that you are not alone. To escape the cultural swamp, the one in our minds, Banaji puts famous women scientists on her screen saver and fills her office with reminders that human greatness is not bounded by sex or color.

Now, it's at that pinnacle - big power, money or fame - where women need a third shielding layer, like chainmail. What do I have in mind? How about Sarah Palin. I agree with Palin on very little, but her raw ambition makes me smile. As does her ability to walk right through flack - untouched by bi-partisan detractors and inconvenient facts. Let's get that super-strength body armor on the many talented women who lack it.

Jane, a neurosurgeon, was an expert in her field and held a big position at a major teaching hospital. She got pregnant at 40. Her male colleagues thought she'd lost her mind - that child creation and brain surgery didn't mix. She took six weeks off to recover from the birth and returned to the hospital game to resume her full schedule. But her boss had a different plan. "Your colleagues had extra work while you were out, you need to pay them back. I'm doubling your call schedule until that happens." You could see his point - her peers needed a break and she had caused the problem. But was this the optimal approach? With a six-week-old baby, feeling betrayed at work, Jane quit. What if she'd had Sarah's skin? She might have done a Mama Grizzly, bear hugged her boss and assured him she'd pay the time back - in a year, when she could see straight.

Women don't need a child to need the chainmail layer, just a man-sized set of dreams. The dean at a major professional school said, "It awes me how the knives come out. When a woman here is poised to beat out a male peer for a big job, some men will say things that just aren't true, it makes them uncomfortable that a woman could win."

Who wants to believe this? I don't. But then you start to see little things that say it might still be so. In liberal northern California, I watched my son's soccer game, in a league divided by age and gender. One parent said, "hey, wouldn't it be fun to have the boys play the girls?" Another replied, "yeah, but look at the girls, they're more focused - they'll clobber these guys. And some dads just won't deal well if their sons loose to girls." (Check out data collected by the National Science Foundation on the resistance we still have to seeing women as winners.)

What's the cure? Keep at it - think Gandhi for gals. A small man with a very thick skin moved minds (re-moved an empire) by helping people like him stand up for themselves, in the right way - again, and again, and again.

Leadership expert Jean Kahwajy tells women to "assume people are doing the best that they can." The trick Kahwajy says is learning to "receive," to hear what you don't want to hear and react in a positive way. So you have the energy to stand up for yourself - and for others.

"The senior guys I work for didn't want to promote Lynn to run a simple, local business," said a female executive who'd built her career (and sturdy shell) working at a big company. "They said Lynn didn't have enough experience to be in charge. But, weeks before, they'd made a man named Jack the leader of a complex, global business that he knew nothing about. So I said, 'Hmm, I'm trying to follow the logic here. Is it just that Jack is much smarter than Lynn?' The guys stopped, laughed, and gave Lynn her promotion."

With a strong hull, you feel safe to act on Gandhi's maxim: "An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching."

Hand a Congressman a Baby! --The Washington Post

In my early banking career, I oscillated between all-nighters and cross-country red-eyes. Not fun. But I enjoyed the delusion that these rookie years were the worst of it, that I was building life-long skills and endurance to face any test ahead. Then came kids.

Sensing my pre-child naivete, a few kind souls tried to open my eyes: "You won't have time to take a shower," said a friend who'd dodged bullets as a reporter and finished medical school with two infants. "Very tired, all the time, for years," my dad recalled, about starting out as a parent -- worrisome coming from a guy who'd survived foster care and World War II.

Still, I clung to that belief that it couldn't be that bad. Until a few months into working parenthood. Then, driving the highway to work one morning, exhausted after a string of bad nights, I had a weird cop fantasy: I imagined that a kindly patrolman pulled me over to give me a ticket - and an order: "Park your car, ma'am. Take a nap."

Last week, Vice President Biden's Middle Class Task Force reframed the problems of working parents "not as women's issues" but as "issues of middle class economic security." Great start.

Biden and Attorney General Holder vowed to collect better data on the working parent pay gap and better educate the public about laws to protect workers with kid duties. But can policy alone do the trick?

Only 25% of families have a parent taking care of things at home full-time. Why aren't the rest of us - the 75% of us responsible for both jobs and kids -- getting things fixed faster? Half the workforce is female. And eight-in-ten women become mothers. So primary care for children impacts at least 40% of workers at some point in their lives - and the majority if we acknowledge that many men are primary parents too.

My hunch is this: Compelling demographics aren't moving enough of us to action because we are flummoxed: Why and how should working parents change the workplace? Standing in the way of finding even basic solutions -- think paid leave, daycare, child sick days -- are a set of hazardous thoughts, sometimes unspoken, often emotional, that are hard to resist. I've fallen prey to at least three myself:

1.The underestimation: "Babies can't be that hard" (afflicting non- and pre-parents).

2.The overestimation: "Babies are infinitely hard," (suffered by new parents in the manic early years).

3.The exasperation: "A baby? Now?" (the look in the eyes of many bosses and co-workers, saying that having a baby is not convenient - ever).

First, it would help if we accurately talked about what it takes to bring new people into the world. While our children are a source of unspeakable joy, the process of raising them is not. "I'm so glad you'll have time to relax and bond with your baby," a non-parent said to me before my first maternity leave - the grittiness of 12-hours of daily breastfeeding and other post-partum charms invisible to both of us then.

Now we know: babies are just a wild amount of work, from the hurricane of infancy to croup and ear infections to pre-verbal tests of will and whining. After our first child recovered from hand-foot-and-mouth disease (which covered him in tiny painful blisters, making eating impossible and crying endless), my husband asked me: "Do you think the stork could deliver babies at age two?"

Second, let's admit inaccuracy can swing in the other direction -- that we parents can get a little nutty in the name of protecting our kids As a 20-something, I raised my eyebrows at overly fussy parents and vowed I'd be much more easy-going. Hah.

When a nurse hands you an infant and it's clear that you are actually responsible for another life, you find yourself succumbing to all sorts of scary ideas. There are plenty of bona fide threats to children, but the intensity of early parenthood can make it hard to draw the line between prudence and paranoia. I imagined an invisible army of microbes perpetually menacing my baby; I double sterilized bottles and used Purell in ways its makers never intended. My husband obsessed over SIDS, despite baby bumpers and doctor's assurances. He would get up at night to make sure our kids were still breathing.

As individuals, working parents can do a lot to help themselves - talking early and often about what's needed (and not) to raise the next generation. It's the third kind of hazardous thought - the workplace impulse to see kids as irksome - that Mr. Biden can help with most.

It's tough for me to confess, but the first time I saw a pregnant peer where I worked, the only words that came to mind were: "Why is she having a baby?" Child creation just didn't seem in the spirit of a hard-charging workplace.

Sadly, my sentiment then remains in the workplace today. Writing our book, Getting to 50/50, we learned how this view (that being a primary parent is incompatible with serious work) plays out in many venues today - including board rooms.

"What is she thinking?" a board member asked in a meeting a few years ago when he heard that a founder of the soon-to-be-public company was going on maternity leave. "She's thinking that she's 39," responded the only woman the room.

The board wrangled over whether the decision to reproduce meant the founder would be less focused on her job. Anticipating the worst, the board decided to re-allocate some of her pay to other executives - who weren't under suspicion for losing their edge to kids.

Research by Stanford professor Shelley Correll shows how all of us (men and women) list toward the belief that motherhood (aka primary parenthood) permanently drains commitment and competence from talented women. When a father of small kids is late or looks dazed in a meeting, we're more willing to assume it's an aberration, a passing phase, and he'll snap back to top form because he values his job. We give him the benefit of the doubt. Do we give women the same?

Biden's task force can do a lot to address the woeful miseducation of many people at the top. While only the minority of families have a parent at home, the majority of people who make the rules and set the tone at work come from these households.

In fact, the a Council on Contemporary Families paper recently pointed out that the mismatch between family cultures of . executives and the rest of the workforce is the largest blocker of sensible workplace policy.

Leaders with spouses at home need to stop assuming that this is normal - or necessarily desirable. Research shows that kids do at least as well when both parents work. Executives should also read the growing pool of business school research that further upends traditional thought: It says we get statistically higher results if we tell everyone (not just parents) to go home for dinner. That replacing 24/7 machismo with time out of the office yields better teamwork, better thinking and better output, according to the Harvard Business Review).

After spending a weekend with his kids alone, one male executive told me, "If every man in Congress had to do this, we'd have some very different laws." So let's give Mr. Biden a hand and do our part advancing the ball.

The next time a politician kisses a baby, let's tell him to hang on to the tyke for the weekend. And let's think of everyone we know who somehow missed the course in mano-a-mano kid management - our dads, brothers, uncles, buddies - and get them a multi-day childcare gig (solo flight, no helping hands allowed). Education can do a lot to turn dangerous thoughts into useful ones - and nothing teaches faster than a little baby bootcamp.