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I know their weakness...ugust is a special month for me because it reminds me to look back over my long career in the media and relish the unremitting joy of having women as bosses.
Women in business are fantastic, particularly when they’re on top.
Perhaps I should rephrase that: women in business are fantastic, particularly when they’re in charge.
And I speak with a measure of authority (that’s ‘authority’ as in ‘specialist’, not ‘authority’ as in ‘position to inflict unmitigated misery on others’) because I’m lucky enough to have been answerable to no fewer than four women in my career.
Each boss has been completely different in character and management style, but they have all had, dare I say, one ‘weakness’ that has made them typically ‘woman’.
My first boss was a dragon – a fire-breathing entity that cruised the corridors of the radio station like a giant Klingon battleship bristling with phasers set on ‘vaporize’. Anybody foolish enough to get in her way would immediately be dematerialised by the lasers in her eyes and then reassembled, particle by particle, in some far-off dimension.
If there’s one thing she taught me, it was to hide from authority.
The Battleship ruled all that she surveyed and would counter any challenge with a shake of her fist and a face that radiated a hurricane-force fury that would level anything or anyone in its midst.
But then I found the chink in her defence shield – a small spot hidden away that was less ‘battleship’ and more ‘matron’. It was her appeal to mother those around her.
Instead of running from her, I ran towards her and continually asked her opinion on everything. I appealed to her experience and her desire to be in charge of her charge, just like a mother hen and her chicks. I managed to do this by manipulating a weakness as a woman.
My second boss was a powerhouse – a larger-than-life legend of the industry who had earned her stripes the hard way: by taking on men in a variety of bruising encounters at a time when the only way a woman could prove her worth in business was to bloody a couple of noses; and to do so while still in high heels. In fact, the best way was to bloody a couple of noses with the high heels.
She walked the talk, which in radio — particularly talk radio – carried much weight. No one messed with her and everyone respected her.
But the Powerhouse was also a wife and a mother, and living proof that women in business could perfect the art of balancing a love for family and a passion for work.
She could march into a room, immediately seize everyone’s attention, invigorate and inspire those around her; then just as quickly disappear, leaving everyone with a sense that ‘something’ had just happened, but they weren’t sure what – maybe the birth of a supernova or something.
She personified the energy of the media and was unrelenting in delivery. But I knew her one weakness that was ‘woman’.
My third boss was grace personified. A woman who had worked her way through the ranks of sales and showed me how income and cost-to-company were part of everything I did. I learnt that everything I did had consequences and that, in the nicest possible way, parts of my anatomy were under threat of being mashed by a very large hammer if I ever messed up things. I quickly learnt the value of keeping my wits about me, and my legs crossed.
Unlike the Powerhouse, Grace was gentler in her approach and management style, but no less formidable in impact.
Like Horatio Cane in CSI Miami, she’d ask you a question, all the time knowing full well what the answer would be. Unless, of course, if I had an answer she wasn’t expecting; because I knew her one soft spot – her weakness that was ‘woman’.
My fourth boss is not in the past tense; because she is my current boss, and has been for the last 20-odd years. She’s my wife, and a highly successful businesswoman and legend in her own right.
‘Legend’ because like all successful women in business, she can do that one thing that men can’t: that whole ‘bend space-time’ thing. I’ve seen her run late for a meeting, then stop to strap on a stiletto heel, deliver a roundhouse kick to the fabric of space-time so that it hesitates just enough to allow her to dab on some lipstick before strutting into a boardroom.
But like all my other bosses, my wife has that one weakness that typifies women: the inability to resist my telltale irrepressible charm and sparkling personality, which melts their hearts and turns their knees into jelly.
My wife has just told me stop being silly now. Yes, boss.
