Managing women in business. Treat them differently than men?

• Author: WIESNER, PAT
• Position: Brief Article - Column

NO! NOT IF YOU ARE TREATING MEN RIGHT.

One of the very best jobs in the publishing business is selling, selling advertising. I'll bet that it is similar in most other businesses. You're sort of your own boss, you manage a territory, your success or failure is easily measurable, and best of all, in publishing you get to mix it up with the advertising and marketing people in the world, the people who make things happen.

When I started as a salesman for Cahners Publishing in Chicago in the early '60s, some things were a little different than they are today. We had to wear a dark suit and shoes, a white shirt, dark tie and wear a hat. And carry an umbrella. There were absolutely no female salesmen. The only women in the business were secretaries, and there were plenty of them. Sales was certainly a sort of men's club.

Today, considering the entire publishing industry, my guess would be that fully 80% of the total sales force is women. How did this happen? Well, it's a good place to start in business because the only thing that matters is results. Besides, women are more naturally suited to it because success is directly related to a genuine concern for solving your customers' problems.

In any case, the fact is that there are many bright, aggressive and hardworking women moving up in our companies. Do they require a different kind of management?

I think you can count on some trouble if your answer to this question is "yes." The main job of management is to create a "team" and then get extraordinary, cohesive and supportive work out of the team. A true sense of team is a wonderful thing to watch and even more wonderful to participate in. The elusive "all for one and one for all" feeling is powerful but fragile. It focuses, in a coherent fashion, the combined energy of many people on one set of problems. The work of the group exceeds the sum of the capabilities of its individual members.

A team works when the individual relationships are in balance and in the background. Every...