Thriving As A Woman In a Male-Dominated Industry: Lucia Kanter St Amour of Pactum Factum On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman In a Male-Dominated Industry

An Interview With Kelly Reeves

Learn their playbook, but don’t copy it: you might think they can’t or won’t pushback if you use their own strategies on them. They can and will, and will resent you even more. Know their strategies, and then figure out how to parlay them into your authentic style. Not being authentic will backfire. Be you. Not them.

In the United States, fields such as Aircraft piloting, Agriculture, Architecture, Construction, Finance, and Information technology, are still male-dominated industries. For a woman who is working in a male-dominated environment, what exactly does it take to thrive and succeed? In this interview series, we are talking to successful women who work in a Male-Dominated Industry who can share their stories and experiences about navigating work and life as strong women in a male-dominated industry. As a part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Lucia Kanter St. Amour.

Lucia Kanter St. Amour is a former golf industry CEO, Vice President Emerita for UN Women, attorney, and globally renowned negotiation expert and author. She teaches women how to harness their everyday negotiation superpowers to land a dream job, get their kids to eat their peas, and be the most powerful person in the room. As the author of “For the Forces of Good: The Superpower of Everyday Negotiation,” Lucia wants more women to know that negotiation isn’t just for business. It’s everybody’s business.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood “backstory”?

I was the physically awkward kid with the eye patch due to a lazy eye, speeding away from the bullies on my second-hand bicycle growing up in my small midwest town. I went from a place with no commerce or public transit to UC Berkeley for college. It was a total culture shock, and I flunked one of my classes first semester. Law school was never the plan for me, either. I didn’t think I was smart enough or “good” enough. I nearly dropped out my first year because it was “too hard” and there were too many meanies, but a professor convinced me to stay. It’s pretty incredible what can happen when you keep showing up each day.

Fast forward more than two decades and I became the president/CEO of a very male dominated sports organization, following 94 years of men in that position. By that time, I’d cultivated rather an illustrious career where I often found myself the only woman in the room. That position ended up being a highly organized and prolonged group bullying campaign that actually put me in danger, and that I just couldn’t seem to turn around because I was outnumbered by a motivated group with too much comfort and time on their hands. It really gave me pause. It’s the reason I dedicate a full chapter of my book, “For the Forces of Good: The Superpower of Everyday Negotiation,” (a.k.a. the Little Black Dress of negotiation) to negotiating with bullies.

Over 25+ years, I came to specialize in negotiation, which is still a very male dominated sphere, eventually becoming one of the few women global experts and authors in the general marketplace on the topic.

Can you tell us the story about what led you to this particular career path?

Honestly, it was stellar mentoring that led me here. I wouldn’t have even applied to law school had it not been for a few very compelling mentors who I continue to be close with today. Mentoring is terribly important. It can change lives.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Oh, there are too many stories to share, including being held hostage at gunpoint in Russia, and I’d be hard pressed to select one as most interesting. One vivid and early experience was a meeting with the Longshoremen’s union with a senior partner when I was a fledgling attorney fresh out of law school. I was the only woman in the room among a bunch of tough guys with no necks. One of them wondered aloud “who invited the president of the lollipop guild,” and they all got a good chuckle out of it. Then he pointed to a chair in the corner and told me to sit there (I was literally excluded from the table). It was so huge for my petite frame, my feet didn’t quite touch the floor and it seemed to swallow me. I looked and felt ridiculous. Having been told I was invisible and to stay that way, I leveraged the tools I did have at my disposal: listening and observing. Those very tools led me to noticing something that day that no one else in the room noticed (because they were too busy talking), which utterly transformed the course of the negotiation.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. Listening. It’s actually how to be the most powerful person in the room, and I just shared a story about that. Listening and observing are portable, analog skills. I have learned to listen to people like they have never been listened to before. It is transformative, and you learn way more by listening than talking. Talking and “speaking your truth” is so overrated. We have two ears and one mouth and should be using them in that proportion.
2. Failing and improving — publicly. When I was recruited to be CEO of a golf organization, I needed to be able to golf. I started learning at age 46. I was hitting practice balls at the range, but also knew I had to play the course. That meant whiffing the ball and hitting it sideways — in front of other people. Over and over again. My score at the end of my first round of golf was 144. Four short years later, my score was a 73 and I was playing in ProAms and was invited by PGA Magazine as an ambassador for a golf trip to Hawaii. I was willing to go out there and suck at something (often as the only woman in the foursome) in order to hone a new skill and keep up with the Big Boys — until I got so good at it, that I was often a better player than many of the men (who still felt no compunction in offering me unsolicited swing advice, mind you). Negotiation is no different. You don’t get the washboard abs (that is, negotiation prowess) by sitting on the sofa, scarfing chips and watching the HIIT video. Gotta get on the floor and start doing the plank twists. Every. Single. Day. Practice, practice, practice. Be willing to suck at it at first and for longer than you’d prefer. You don’t become a negotiator by attending an expensive weekend workshop anymore than you become a golfer by buying the clubs, the shoes, and the cute skirt. You become one by doing it all the time, getting it wrong (in low stakes, familiar contexts at first), and learning each time.
3. Incurable curiosity and not needing to be the smartest guy in the room. How boring and lonely does that sound? No thank you. Look, I’m a learning junkie, and I’m genuinely curious about people. I’m constantly asking questions and LISTENING to the answers, showing real interest in other people and their stories, and learning new things. I’m not a know-it-all. I’ll openly ask, “What does that mean?” when I don’t understand terminology (and men, in my experience, just love to bandy about the lingo!). Because if I don’t understand it, others don’t understand it. I’m not the only one and I know I’m not stupid. So, I ask. If someone wants to think I’m dumb because of that and underestimate me, they can be my guest. My life hack is to surround myself with people smarter than I am so that it will rub off on me and I can always be learning.

What do you think male-oriented organizations can do to enhance their recruiting efforts to attract more women?

Organizations need to start tracking caregiver status of their employees. 75% of care work is performed by women and U.S. companies are losing $35 billion per year by not tracking them, and implementing programs and policies to support them. Honestly, you’re just tanking your bottom line. Research has demonstrated this over and over again. And take a look at the composition of your board of directors and your department heads. Are you creating realistic pathways to bring along women in your organization? There is serious bank to be made by taking women seriously.

Based on your opinion and experience, what are the “Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman In a Male-Dominated Industry?”

(1) MacGyver it: use what’s at your disposal (see corner of room example with the Longshoremen: listening and observing as super stealth tools, and totally analog and portable — just like your favorite lip gloss)

(2) Find a support network: of similarly situated colleagues, mentors and allies (real ones, not quiet ones who whisper in your ear in the background, but won’t stand right up next to and in front of you) and check in with them regularly.

(3) Create adjacent programs, not replacement ones: Don’t come into an organization and point out all the things they’re doing wrong and declare that they need to change. In my golf CEO job, I found, as just one of many examples, that only the men were sent surveys and ballots for voting (which determined staffing, budgeting and programming), not the women; only the men were sent financial statements, not the women. That’s obviously prehistoric behavior. But I got clobbered when I stridently attempted to start over fresh.

(4) Learn their playbook, but don’t copy it: you might think they can’t or won’t pushback if you use their own strategies on them. They can and will, and will resent you even more. Know their strategies, and then figure out how to parlay them into your authentic style. Not being authentic will backfire. Be you. Not them.

(5) Shed your need for approval and people-pleasing: this one’s a biggie for a lot of women. Don’t take things personally or worry too much about being liked. Ouch. I know. Also, Learn the difference between a “tough” decision (that focuses on YOU as the leader and how you feel about it) and an “unpopular” decision (focuses outward on the organization’s members). When ruffled, wait. Let some time pass — even 20 minutes will make a difference. While you’re at it, curtail the prefatory language from your speech (those little things we tend to do to apologize or delegitimize what we’re about to say). Just say it. You can accomplish communication with a combination of authority and humility, without apologizing for it or openly inviting your audience to invalidate it.

If you had a close woman friend who came to you with a choice of entering a field that is male-dominated or female-dominated, what would you advise her? Would you advise a woman friend to start a career in a field or industry that’s traditionally been mostly men? Can you explain what you mean?

Frankly, I’d advise any woman these days to choose a career that A.I. won’t (at least foreseeably) take over, and that will make her indispensable — whether it’s male dominated or not. With the climate crises and the depletion of cheap and abundant energy, which is the key ingredient that led to the precipitous advancements of women’s participation in the economy, society and education during the Anthropocene, women need to choose fields that will make their participation necessary as energy resources dwindle: aerospace; chemistry, epidemiology and creating new antibiotics; renewable agriculture; sustainable architecture and construction; solutions to food insecurity. To understand more about what I mean, read my essay, “Indispensable.”

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.