Nice Girls Get Even

Your career comes down to chocolate, it seems. "Unless you're Betty Crocker, there shouldn't be home-baked cookies, M&M's, jelly beans or other food on your desk," advised Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office (Warner Business), a hit career guide of a few years back. Equating feeding with nourishing and deriding it as "a stereotypically female attribute," author Lois Frankel, a career coach, advised women to leave their girlishness in the parking lot and arrive for work as gender-neutral adults. She cites such tough-minded women, not girls, as Meg Whitman and Anne Mulcahy, the CEOs, respectively, of eBay and Xerox. Girls, she wrote witheringly, are "nice to be around and they're nice to have around--sort of like pets." In case anyone missed the message: "Quit bein' a girl!" Frankel commanded.

But caustic Carly Fiorina got canned from Hewlett-Packard, didn't she? So here comes a vastly different philosophy for corporate women that tells them to enjoy being a girl; they can still boss the boys effectively. "Offer a sweet," counsels The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness (Doubleday). "Keep a stash of fun-sized candy bars on your desk or nearby. When the people who come to see you seem tense, tired, or cranky, pop open your drawer and pass out the Snickers. (Note: Extra credit for homemade cookies.)"

So who are you going to be: Betty the B or Betty Crocker? What's at stake is the definition of appropriate behavior for women in the workplace. The emergence of The Power of Nice philosophy signals that traditional female attributes such as niceness, cooperation and intuition are finding their place as respected attributes. Reason: the greatly increased presence of women in the workplace is inevitably exerting its influence on the alpha-male behavior that once ruled. The number of women in the workforce has more than doubled since 1970, chipping away at the "tough girls get the executive suite" ideal, at least in the attitudes of influential corporate career coaches and advice authors.

Just as the starchy, bow-tied, dress-for-success suit is an artifact of an earlier age, The Power of Nice argues that the bossy broad that early self-help authors championed is outdated. Nice is the new mean, insist co-authors Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval. They bravely--and persuasively--endorse a more traditional feminine style. Says Koval: "The business world has developed in a male culture, where the worst thing that a man could say to another man is, 'You're a wimp. You're not tough enough.' As women came into business, a lot of them felt they had to emulate that. No one stopped to think that you could do it a different way."

While paying due respect to talent and toughness, the authors argue that it is often the small kindnesses--the smiles, gestures, compliments and favors--that take women to the top, women such as eBay's Whitman and of course Xerox's Mulcahy. Yes, both authors claim these women for their teams.