I caught up with a good friend of mine over the weekend, who has been having trouble at work lately. He is highly valued in his company, and works long hard hours getting the results that even his senior manager never achieved. Currently, he works in an office with five women. His direct manager is also a woman, and she is currently overseas on a two-month holiday. Apparently she got this position due to her close relationship with the CEO. Since obtaining the managerial position, she has played a key role in selecting new staff, and was responsible for choosing all members of the sisterhood that my friend now finds himself stuck with.

My friend lamented that the women in the office have gradually turned against him since he started there almost 5 years ago. He explained that one of the women felt threatened by his direct, results-driven approach, and how he sometimes commented on the fact that she often engages in a lot of idle chit-chat instead of working. At the time he first raised this issue, she was on on-boarder, and my friend was his direct supervisor. Since he started commenting on this woman’s apparently poor work ethic, she has gradually poisoned the other women in the office against him.

My friend expressed frustration at the fact that he often has to attend weekly meetings with the others in the office, and that these meetings usually involved no productive actions. He said that he will often come prepared with a brief agenda of things to discuss, while the others in the team basically engage in small talk and gossip. To survive, my friend has been finding excuses to leave the meetings early, so that he can get on with his work, smash his KPI’s, and contribute to the success of the company.

He is currently looking into other small business opportunities, and I said to him quite bluntly: “If you can make a living for yourself, do it”. He agreed 100%, and is striving now to build up a business idea on the side so that he can leave this workplace. He isn’t too concerned about the future thankfully, as he own several properties overseas, and somehow he has managed to keep these assets a secret from his wife who he married close to 10 years ago. Unlike a lot of men, he actually married ‘up’, so hopefully if there is ever a divorce, he stands less to lose. He has also said that he doesn’t want to have kids, as this would place him in a vulnerable position in terms of extra commitment and lack of mobility to travel or start a business.

In short, my friend is starting to realize that at this point in his life, he doesn’t want to have to deal with workplace gossip and female drama. He wants to work for himself, and be away from workplaces where female employees have an overall poor work ethic and shame him for wanting to be successful. The moral of the story: if you can work for yourself and make a living, do it.