How would you have handled this?

[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.