The Longest Climb

How powerful womenget to the top.

By Lisa Mainiero, published on November 01, 1994

Bear in mind that the women were taking the time to be mentors while shouldering an enormous workload. Managing a sense of balance in their lives as executive, mentor, and family member was a vexing issue for them. In general though, most were happy with their lives and the choices they made. They had been ambitious, worked long, hard hours and "made it" in their companies. But there were personal trade-offs that they had difficulty articulating.

The compromises they made may have been in personal relationships, but, as a group, these women didn't come close to the stereotype of lonely, barren woman at the top. About a third were married to their original mates; another third had been divorced or were remarried; a little over 10 percent were single; and the remainder wouldn't comment. Of those who were married, more than 60 percent had children, though a third made reference to stepchildren.

Family life, for those who chose to have kids, is a tug of war. As one woman put it: "Recently I had a son. Now I am more emotionally torn than ever before. We have a great nanny, but it's hard to leave him." She had recently been to France for a week on a business trip. "There I was, sitting on the French Riviera in one of the best hotels in the world, and all I wanted to do was go home."

They all had the resources for child care, and some had husbands with flexible jobs who picked up the slack at home. So they structured their lives to allow for their careers, but they weren't happy having to spend time away from their families. A few told me they wouldn't want the same for their daughters.

For some of the single women, their major regret was not taking the time out to get married and have children. But I heard others who echoed the woman who said, "I'm glad I didn't have kids. I wasn't cut out to be a mother. I was cut out to do this."

Now at the top, reflecting back on choices they made behind their office and bedroom doors, these women still resoundingly deny that politics had anything to do with their ascension. But all along, they were performing political acts, even though they didn't realize it or wouldn't label them that way. Take the woman who drove an hour and a half to talk to her colleague at home--that was nothing short of a political act. Yet if she were to read this, she would flatly deny it and say she was simply communicating.

Maybe what these women have done is redefine politics as another word for simply dealing with others in the workplace. In American corporate culture, politics implies back stabbing and game playing. But with the recent infusion of women, politics has come to mean the art of communication what women do best. They have mastered communication overtly by being open, direct, and honest and covertly by slipping behind the scenes and developing a personal rapport. Creating relationships with people who work for them and with them proved just as important as interacting with those above.

In the words of one woman, "When I hear the term, 'corporate politics,' I think about human interrelations." This was how many of the women really felt. They would agree with an assertion made by organizational psychologist Abraham Zaleznik--that superior business performance requires managers to overcome their concern about politicking so they can realize and speak the truth about their firms.

But what sealed their success was an awareness of the culture surrounding them. These women achieved prominence by learning a very subtle, but key, business lesson--how to walk a tightrope between the norms of a culture and a critique of it. Corporate culture has slowly folded the criticisms into its seams and is struggling to create an evolving management vanguard--one that is more open, honest, and blind to gender.