The Likeability Trap
How to Break Free and Succeed as You Are
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Be nice, but not too nice. Be successful, but not too successful. Just be likeable. Whatever that means?
Women are stuck in an impossible bind. At work, strong women are criticized for being cold, and warm women are seen as pushovers. An award-winning journalist examines this fundamental paradox and empowers readers to let go of old rules and reimagine leadership rather than reinventing themselves.
Consider that even competent women must appear likeable to successfully negotiate a salary, ask for a promotion, or take credit for a job well done—and that studies show these actions usually make them less likeable. And this minefield is doubly loaded when likeability intersects with race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and parental status.
Relying on extensive research and interviews, and carefully examined personal experience, The Likeability Trap delivers an essential examination of the pressure put on women to be amiable at work, home, and in the public sphere, and explores the price women pay for internalizing those demands. Rather than advising readers to make themselves likeable, Menendez empowers them to examine how they perceive themselves and others and explores how the concept of likeability is riddled with cultural biases. Our demands for likeability, she argues, hinder everyone’s progress and power.
Inspiring, thoughtful and often funny, The Likeability Trap proposes surprising, practical solutions for confronting the cultural patterns holding us back, encourages us to value unique talents and styles instead of muting them, and to remember that while likeability is part of the game, it will not break you.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Menendez, a journalist and the cohost of PBS's Amanpour and Company, issues a friend-to-friend wake-up call for pathological approval seekers. A recovering people-pleaser who cared far too much about what people thought of her and knew it was holding her back Menendez argues that too many women are too invested in their own likability. Meanwhile, women who are "brazenly themselves" saw the detriment to their own careers. So what's a working woman to do? Learn to navigate, Menendez recommends, walking readers through challenges like the quandary of being seen as either likable but not ambitious, or ambitious but not likable. This nebulous quality, she notes, has historically played a pernicious role as a socially acceptable way of sugarcoating bias. Menendez asserts that women are increasingly angry about encountering such bias, and she has suggestions about what they and their organizations can do in response. The description of the problem is perfect; some of the ideas for addressing it, less so notably, an emphasis on finding "sponsors" (not mentors) to promote one's work, which some readers might find disempowering. But the chatty, friendly, heart-to-heart tone will be a comfort and an encouragement to women hampered by their desire to be both liked and successful.