Sarah Cooper, a Google employee turned comedy writer and stand-up comedian, hit viral pay dirt with her blog post: “Nine non-threatening leadership strategies for women”.
“In this fast-paced business world,” she wrote, “female leaders need to make sure they’re not perceived as pushy, aggressive or competent. One way to do that is to alter your leadership style to account for the (sometimes) fragile male ego.”
The post, published two years ago and accompanied by her own illustrations, outlined the way women at work contort themselves when they try to balance being aggressive with being invisible. It contained humorous tips, such as: “When sharing your ideas, overconfidence is a killer. You don’t want your male co-workers to think you’re getting all uppity. Instead, downplay your ideas as just ‘thinking out loud’, ‘throwing something out there’, or sharing something ‘dumb’, ‘random’ or ‘crazy’.”
The post was viewed more than 3m times, shared hundreds of thousands of times and republished in 15 different publications. Ms Cooper received lots of “positive reactions from the people who knew it was a joke, negative reactions from people who didn’t realise it [was a joke]”.
Such observations, as with her widely read Financial Times column (“ Six things working women should pretend they can’t do)”, are rooted in her own corporate experience.
“Women say things that are direct — they are told they are too abrasive,” says Ms Cooper. “I got that feedback in the corporate world. I thought, ‘what does it mean to be non-threatening?’ I thought I would turn it on its head to show how to be passive aggressive and not step on anyone’s toes.
Her book, How to be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings: Non-threatening Leadership Strategies for Women, published on October 30, riffs on the theme.
She describes it as “the non-threatening leadership guide women must follow if we are to be taken seriously in the workplace. And by ‘seriously’, of course, I mean ‘not seriously’, which is how we should always strive to be taken. And by ‘strive’, of course, I mean ‘accept’.”
She sets exercises in the style of pop business books, such as how to reduce your expectations so that you will not be disappointed. She offers instruction manual-style illustrations showing how men and women saying the same thing are perceived. For example, if a man says he has four kids the implication is that he “needs a promotion so he can take care of his family”. And a woman? “Can’t be promoted, needs to take care of her family.”
Before Ms Cooper was a comedian she worked in user design at Yahoo! and Google (she likes to tell people that she has a career at Google to fall back on if comedy does not work out).
At work, she was told that she needed to be “more sensitive to [software engineers’] feelings. I was being too flippant about how they were feeling. A man wouldn’t have been told you need to be more sensitive.”
Comments have been made to her in her career, she says, that would not have been said to a “white man”. If she was asked to do a presentation, someone would quip that she was chosen because she was a black woman and had ticked the diversity box. “I didn’t take it super-personally. Looking back I should have spoken up.” There was never one big slight, rather “several little things over the years”.
Even before the book is published, she says she has received angry emails about the title, which she tries to shrug off. “I don’t want to spend my energy on people who don’t like me.”
It was an earlier blog post “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings” that changed Ms Cooper’s career. In it, she suggested tips like repeating the last thing the engineer said but slowly, asking “Will this scale?” no matter what the idea is, and pacing around the room.
Viewed more than 5m times, it brought her to the attention of a wider audience, an agent and publisher — in the process, it convinced the moonlighting comedian that she could make a go of comedy as a career, so she ditched her day job at Google.
Underneath the humour is a biting message about the contradictory rules on how to dress or act at work that women must follow. “You may as well do what you want to do,” concludes Ms Cooper.
Humour can be both a “wall to protect yourself . . . a way of defusing a situation”. Yet “satire makes people learn something more than being lectured”.
The book is not just for women, but men too. “It can be intimidating if you are the only woman in a room; men should appreciate it. If you are a man who is in a leadership position, you have a lot of power to make sure that women and people of colour feel their perspectives and views are important and valid.”
The workplace is a rich seam of comedy, she says. “I was always observing my co-workers. In meetings everyone is super-tense and wants to impress each other. It’s a weird, passive aggressive environment.”
Office culture Ms Cooper describes as “weird”.
“It’s a giant show. It’s all in the hopes of creating a team that will make money for the company but they want it to be that we love each other. And I would totally hang out with you if you weren’t at work.”
“You do have to put on a show to get ahead. I laugh easily to put other people at ease. I was good at pretending. Even if I wasn’t excited about a meeting, I could fake it.”
Like many other comedians before her, the more time she spends out of corporate life the less inspiration it provides. The closest most successful stand-ups get to work is the comedy industry. “That’s all they have.”
In future projects, Ms Cooper would like to explore balancing relationships, children and work. While she does not have children, she has heard enough mothers describe never getting it right. They either spend “all day at work wishing [they] were at home with the kids, or all day at home wishing [they] were at work”.
‘How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings’ is published on October 30
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