Today I saw a friend posted some jolly good advice on Facebook, but the one that caught my attention is:
#1: Watch football — most of the time you will be the only woman in a meeting room so if you know a bit about football, you won’t feel isolated when the men talk about it
It seems to be quite a good advice at first. Each of us women must have been in that situation at least once or many times when someone started mentioning football and you just wished that didn’t happen or they would run out of football updates very soon. Oh boy, they always lasted for a long time! As life is always challenging, if you work in banking like my friend or oil & gas like myself, you will find yourself in an all male meetings room more often than you’d like.
I love the World Cup and I can talk for hours about the World Cup or about THAT match (I’m a Brazil fan). I watch the Euro Cup too, since regional competition offers some great rivalry vibe. The best thing about these 2 tournaments is that between them they appear every 2 years and require only 1 month of dedication each then you get your life back for other activities (albeit with some post event blue). Beyond that, I doubt I would have either the time or interest to follow anything else. Following the 4 Tennis Grand Slams is already a challenge, let alone follow up on season after season of football.
So the question is do we really need to watch football to make sure we can join in our bosses’ conversations?? I think not. So I offered an answer to my friend’s advice:
Another good way is to work towards the day when the men have to listen to and talk about what you want to talk about, aka tennis, movies, operas, fashion, money, relationship etc.
Why not, right? But my friend’s response to me was ‘… sadly, because many leaders are still men, until that day comes we have to talk about football.’
I wish I had asked the football question to many women I have recently interviewed for the PwC gender issue report Igniting Change: Building the pipeline of female leaders in energy. There was however a good advice that stuck with me from a senior executive lady whom I really like from Shell:
(Not direct quote) A key to success is that you need to know the unspoken rules of the game and learn how to play them. It’s also about the soft stuff, not just the hard skills.
Whether knowing football is one of the ‘soft stuff’ or not I would endeavour to ask them when we next meet. However, I think, if you don’t like football that much, don’t fret. It is not the only way to get you to the top. And here’s why:
Time is precious, so use it well — It would be much more time & energy efficient to read / watch what you really like, than waste it on watching a bit of football and forcing your memory so that you can have 1 or 2 comments with colleagues.
Better to be yourself — It would be also more influential/impactful to talk about something you really care or know about, rather fake your interest or knowledge and leave no meaningful impression.
Football is not the only way — Your boss/colleague will have other interests that you can click with: family, politics, music, theatre, books, skiing etc. so there are plenty connections to be made here.
So be strong and go conquer ladies!