How would you have handled this?

[Kimmie1913]

Originally posted by Steeltrap
Good morning all.

As promised, I did bring Having It All? into my office today to post about the corporate space idea. It's on page 41, BTW, for those who have the book.

Eventually, I (Chambers) learned the importance of creating what one executive in the Catalyst study calls a "corporate space;" a place where I could be personable, without necessarily getting personal.
It's a idea that many black women resist.
"I've had people in my office that have said, 'I ain't gonna do that s***. I'm good at what I do, but I'm not going to sit down and have a cup of coffee with them,'" one senior executive told Catalyst. "They say, 'I am not going to chitchat about what I did over the weekend with them.' I say, if you don't they're going to make up stories.
"Don't look it as an infringement on your private space. Create your corporate space. You create a corporate space by giving them the image you want them to have, not necessarily what reality is."

Catalyst is a national nonprofit group that studies women in business. The study that Ms. Chambers refers to on page 40 of Having It All? was published in 1999 and it examined women of color in corporate management.

I think the corporate space idea is dead on. The reality is we always want to be judge by the content of our character but we are judged more by the quality of our working relationships. We are penalized far too frequently for the lack of relationships with coworkers than I think we admit to our selves. It is not always about sucking up but when you have to fairly competitive choices, people are going to go with who they feel like they know, who they feel trusts them a little by letting them in. We as Black women want to go to work do our job and leave and that is not what will get you to the top.

I have a corporate space at work. I eat lunch with the Black women here who are my friends some of the time and with the white women who are my work associates at others. They know some of my hobbies and here some of the things I do on the weekend. My friends here know more. They rest get enough for them to feel like they know me with out me having to really let them know me. It is enough to sustain a non-work related conversation and it makes a big difference.