Every month on our site, Jo Miller, CEO of Women’s Leadership Coaching Inc., will answer your career and leadership questions. Please send your question to advice@anitaborg.org and it may be answered in an upcoming column. (All questions will remain anonymous.)

Question: Given that I have always worked in a male dominated industry (very often I am the only woman in the room, or one of very few), in an engineering capacity, how can I break into the male networks? It seems that people are just not treating me as one of the “guys”. With my most recent lay-off I get the opportunity to start from scratch, so I want to do it right from the beginning.

Jo Miller answers:

Viewing workplace coalitions as a “male network” or “boys’ club” will only disempower you. You’ll never be one of the boys, so why bother trying?

Resist the temptation to write it off as a boys’ club. Instead, you would gain a lot by understanding what drives and sustains all of the informal social networks around you.

When starting a new job, one of the most valuable exercises you can undertake is to understand those informal networks in your new workplace. Do this well in your first few months and you will find navigating the networks and office politics much easier.Act like a cultural anthropologist, closely observing the communication and relationships playing out around you in your new organization.
Aim to identify:

• Individuals who have formed strong one-to-one working relationships.
• Groups that have formed tight coalitions, where everyone works well together and looks out for one another.

Observe closely and you may discover that all not guys get along with all other guys. Often what may have appeared to be a male network includes some women, and excludes some men.
 

Try to figure out how these relationships and coalitions formed, and what the glue really is, that keeps these relationships and groups tight. For example, do they have a common academic background or interest? Did they work together for a previous organization or leader, or are they of a certain personality type?

Identify the key people of influence in your new workplace. If you make a point of cultivating good working relationships with them first, others in the group who respect those influencers may come to accept and respect you too.

Whether you decide you’ll attempt to break into the club or not, gathering this information will give cues as to how you can work most productively with those individuals and groups.
You may ultimately need to decide what’s more important: to be liked or to be respected. Having cordial, respectful, productive working relationships may be just effective as being treated as “one of the guys”.
 

Jo Miller is CEO of Women’s Leadership Coaching Inc. which offers women’s leadership seminars and coaching programs. To learn about how to become a person of influence, join Jo for a special session at the Grace Hopper Celebration in Tucson, AZ on September 30, 2009.

To read more of her career advice, visit the Ask Jo archives.
Copyright 2009, Women’s Leadership Coaching Inc.