Menopause Barbie in Corporate America
A Word to the Unwise
Attention, Dilbertian managers and Machiavellian princes! Somewhere in your organization lurks the archetype of Xena the Warrior Princess, exercising her powers. Relax! She’s on the same team as you, and she shares your goals. Even if she’s on the opposing team, you should be glad she’s there because she’ll make sure that negotiations result in a mutual win.
She has read Princessa, and said to herself, “Oh, so that’s why my own ‘secret strategies’ have always worked for me although I found them in no previous directions on how to swim with the sharks, win at the art of war, or be a highly effective person.” She has relaxed and allowed the laws of interpersonal power physics to work for her. A war between enemies is a no-win situation that consumes much fuel but produces too little light. Opponents who can be shown a more beneficial goal than the one they originally held become collaborators in a process that produces great amounts of light compared to the fuel invested. Thus, she achieves much with little (apparent) effort. You rely upon her. You fear her. You may resent her. She knows all that. Don’t worry. She’s too busy to destroy you. She'll make everyone rich if you stay out of her way - and richer if you join with her.
Rosie the Riveter Now Has More Powerful Tools
We embody (and en-soul) corporate America’s best hope and worst nightmare - women old enough to possess wisdom and young enough to have the energy to act on it. Feminist? Women’s rights? The gender-specific causes, the labels each of us may choose matter not. In the workplace, only human rights provide a broad enough canvas for the true picture - the rights of men and women to the dignity of their work and to the rewards for their creative ideas as well as their labor.
Dilbert illustrates a daily example of human rights violations in the work place, regardless of gender. The humor strikes us from the exaggeration, the archetypal characters. Men and women alike, we know that every day’s Dilbert shows us the truth of our life at work in the vast majority of companies. Our laughter buffers the pain of that truth. Our sense of humor saves us from many types of devastating pain. In the workplace, the daily persistent battering at our dignity, at our sense of self-esteem, builds up calluses on our sensitivity, as writing daily with a pen builds a callus on the middle finger’s first joint. (A metaphor you can pursue for yourself.)
You Can Be a Team Player Only If You're Allowed in the Locker Room
Flaunt your callused fingers as you may (or as you may fantasize), you still show up on time for the daily grind. You attend meetings, and arrive on time. You act as a team player. You practice the seven habits of highly effective people. You are a responsible member of the corporate family. Still, you recognize the dysfunctional nature of this family. You work for personally abusive managers, or under systemically abusive policies. As a salaried (exempt) employee, you donate as much as twenty hours a week beyond the standard forty – more if you count the hours of commuting from the neighborhood in which you can afford to live, to the office (near which you cannot afford to live). You make this contribution to corporate well-being in the blind faith that the corporation is contributing equally to your well-being through the benefits it provides. By now, probably, personal experience has forced you to think again.
Take health insurance – please. Most companies provide access to some form of health maintenance organization; some provide a cafeteria of health insurance options from which you can choose, but only the HMOs fall within your budget. And the HMOs decreasingly provide full coverage for the very kind of care whose support formed their original charter: health maintenance, disease prevention.
Take mammograms – please, really. Personal story: Many years ago, my then-employer’s HMO that required the least employee contribution for premiums and lowest co-pays for treatment and prescriptions fully covered the cost of annual mammograms for women forty years old and up. This coverage included several of the area’s most respected hospital-related MRI services providing the annual, non-critical mammogram. Suddenly, one year, only a more limited list of MRI providers were covered at all for the annual health maintenance mammo – and those had old, poorly maintained equipment. (Their own employees were upset with the state of the equipment.) The better providers remained on the list for critical care only.
That meant that if old equipment whose output was read by over-worked, underpaid radiologists (whose competence levels did not permit them to practice at the best hospitals) failed to reveal a tumor early on, when shorter-term less expensive care could affect a cure, you could then receive coverage at one of the higher quality institutions for critical care – when it would cost more, take longer, and deprive the company of more of your productivity. Oh, and you have a lower chance of survival because of the later detection. Does this approach really save the HMO or the company money? No. Does it put your life at greater risk? Yes. A lose-lose situation, and still they do it.
There are those who say that if the MRI was for testicular cancer, no such limitation would occur. Be that as it may, this HMO policy demonstrated that the HMO knew that women care enough about their own health care to go pay full price themselves at reliable MRI providers. And those women who simply could not afford that, well, how important a member of society can they be? I changed HMOs instead – but the search for adequate coverage within my budget delayed my MRI six months until my company’s next annual insurance selection period, and the new HMO had higher co-pays. Them that have, get. I had what I had, and I got what I could. This constitutes a wealth and class issue, where perception clouds the bottom line reality. A false corporate economy based on a false assumption.
Menopause Barbie sees the law of gravity inexorably apply to her body – breasts, face, upper arms, lower tush. Looks blur, but the mind sharpens. So does the tongue and the wit. Sure, we know that old saw that you attract more flies with honey. I ask you, who wants to attract flies? Besides, vinegar is not the only alternative to sugar. Truth works. Examples work. Proposing solutions works. Numbers of workers armed with truth and examples and solutions proposals work best. Size does count in these matters. If you want to make a change in corporate policy, or at least in the corporate insurance policy, organize an e-mail campaign to the Benefits executive. A high enough volume on the same subject will get the attention of the administrator who screens the exec’s e-mails, so that the exec gets at least a report on the topic and number of emails – and he or she may get the greater message, too, after reading a few of the individual messages.
. . . So Let's Redecorate That Locker Room
Gravity works on us – a law of physics we can’t repeal. Laws of economics and power work, too. We can make those work for us – and all the habitual misconceptions in the world can’t repeal them, either. Let's re-invent those laws, repeal the laws that don't work, enact new laws that do. Got any ideas? Talk to me!
© 2006 Kate Diamond
posted by Kate Diamond @ 1:11 PM
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