Page 19 - Free Yourself From

2 It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor

hushed movie moments. Everyone looked up and stared at me. At
first, I wondered what was wrong with my appearance—did I have
toilet paper dragging from my shoe or, worse yet, hanging from
beneath my skirt? A glance down confirmed nothing was wrong; a
glance up confirmed that I was the only woman in a sea of Teamster
men.
The production manager waved me off with, “Good luck. See you at
six!” By 9 a.m., the shop steward had come by with the first griev-
ance against me. One of my quality control guys said he missed his
coffee break because of a defect in one of the parts he caught run-
ning off the line. He had not missed a coffee break in 10 years and
made it clear he wouldn’t miss another one again. Later, after going
through the third grievance procedure that morning, someone lit a
fire in a garbage can in my department. By the end of the day, I had
accumulated a record 25 grievances. Not much else could go wrong,
right?
That afternoon, I walked into my first management meeting. Sev-
enteen men in suits looked up. Seventeen mouths dropped open, and
seventeen pens fell from their hands. I placed my meticulously pre-
pared reports on the table in front of me, only to hear this: “Becky,
you take notes.”

That Which Doesn’t Kill You…

This experience was one of the greatest leadership development pro-
grams I could ever put myself in. At the tender age of 24, I had to
learn how to build a diverse spectrum of relationships, to effectively
manage the blue-collar men who were so different from me, and
to play the middleman in negotiations between the union and man-
agement staff. You can bet my social and emotional intelligence
were stretched daily—and I loved it. However, after three years and
my fifth promotion, I realized that I had reached a peak at GM.