Learn to Lead Like a Woman
The world can benefit from developing a respect for the particular style of feminine leadership and come to understand how critical it is. Some of the world’s most lauded leaders, people like Steve Jobs and Donald Trump, are known for their aggressive, hair-trigger, dominating, controlling, and even abusive leadership styles. Respected in fact, even though they degrade and demoralize their employees, which arguably does not bring out employees’ productivity, let alone their passion. They also encourage these sorts of behaviors in others.
If you think about most business schools and capitalist business culture, they are run on principles of competition, leadership, domination and control. Results must be ‘driven’ and market position won by any means possible. The Art of War is the tome on many leaders’ desks. Competitors are enemies and must be treated with suspicion and aggressive techniques that guarantee control of a space. Often customers are also the enemy because after they have been sold something, everything else they require (service, support, etc.) is overhead. These principles also trickle through the scientific, technology, and engineering spaces, which can benefit greatly from more feminine influence.
The feminine approach is more subtle and values cooperation, creativity, and communication. And no, you don’t have to be a woman to adopt feminine leadership principles. The feminine leader might have a strong voice and a firm hand, but she is also more likely to listen and empathize, both with her internal constituencies and her external ones. She may seem to be slower to decide because she takes many data points and opinions into account. She might also take educated risks, not purely based on data (which can be misleading), but based on intuition and her accumulated wisdom. The feminine leader is also more likely to take a long-view approach, rather than merely focusing on short-term gain.
From Qualities of Women Leaders:
- Women leaders are more persuasive than their male counterparts.
- When feeling the sting of rejection, women leaders learn from adversity and carry on with an “I’ll show you” attitude.
- Women leaders demonstrate an inclusive, team-building leadership style of problem solving and decision making.
- Women leaders are more likely to ignore rules and take risks.
These approaches may be seen as weaknesses in industries obsessed with warp-speed time to market and technological bravado. The tech industry, for example, has a very strong culture brought to it by the majority of men who work in it and think the way they have been taught is the Way for all time: strength and supremacy rule, flexibility and understanding are weaknesses that hold up the process of dominate and control.
To give you one example: why do so few tech companies conduct systematic research into customer needs and wants so they can build tech that fits them? It’s because they think they themselves know best: they know what people want, will build it, and people can adapt; must adapt, in fact. They can make people love their products and services, and will find new people to buy when they’ve disappointed their current customers. This is wasteful and counter-productive.
Women insist on acknowledging that the world is full of human beings. We know that customers, constituents, and competitors alike can be co-creators with us. We don’t slap, we guide and inspire. We look at the big picture and integrate many points of view. We rally, but we seldom dictate. We enroll others in our efforts by offering real insight and value and responding to all we encounter with empathy and an open mind.
But until the natural proclivities to listen, nurture, create, and grow are considered integral to good business, we’ll still be left without a seat at the table. Unless, that is, we learn to act like the men in business seem to aspire to. The Huffington Post notes that women who play competitive team sports are more likely to succeed in business: Does This Get Women Into The C-Suite? This is ultimately about culture and whether business culture is willing to commit to diversity in all things, including leadership.
Many industries needs to make room for female leadership by valuing it first. Then they need to reach out to all of us who feel like traditional business culture doesn’t want or need us. At the very least, diversity is the leading cause of innovation, and everyone says they need more of that.
Domination as a leadership style is becoming less and less popular. There is a new growing appreciation of…those traits that women use to keep families together and to organize volunteers to unite and make change in the shared life of communities. These newly admired leadership qualities of shared leadership; nurturance and doing good for others are today not only sought after but also indeed needed to make a difference in the world….A feminine way of leading includes helping the world to understand and be principled about values that really matter. — Dr. Musimbi Kanyoro, the World YWCA Secretary General.
In short, we women leaders can be warriors, but we prefer to be muses. We also embrace diversity, because we know diverse and divergent thinking is the key to understanding our audience and target markets, as well as the key to being inspired to build ever-more useful things.
Update: Why I wrote How to Lead Like a Woman
There are cultural differences, for sure, in how we all respond when challenged. I, for one, struggle with overt aggression and assertiveness, as I have PTSD and I was taught from a very young age not to fight back. Fighting escalated the situations and it wasn’t safe for me. I wish I were someone who felt safer asserting my boundaries, but instead I do what I can. Which is to go meta, and to try to identify problems of culture.
I wrote that piece because I have spent 25 years in the tech industry (now a freelancer), which is dominated by what I referred to as ‘masculine’ approaches to business. Very few women are able to crack the silicon ceiling, because of a lack of respect for how we choose to work and a lack of awareness that there is another way. I also see this happening in other corporate and governmental milieus. I think ‘male’ culture is privileged, because men vastly outnumber women in STEM-related settings. Women therefore try to conform to the established culture, but it means many missed opportunities to mentor them into leadership roles they can excel at.
I, for one, have a gentle heart and a gentle, guiding hand. I get very stressed and unproductive in environments where people go into attack mode on a regular basis. We need to nurture one another if we want to reach our full collective potential.
This is also about Trump and the culture he is bringing with him, based on hatred, intolerance, exploitation, and bullying. He is lauded for being an extraordinary businessman, but all I see is ignorance, dishonesty, exploitation, and abuse. Steve Jobs is also worshipped, even though he was himself a horrible leader who hurt people working for him day in and day out.
It terrifies me to see how this all will play out. If Trump’s approach is a model for how business should be run (which his supporters think is how the country should be run), we are in deep trouble. Even if he doesn’t manage to trigger World War III.
About Lisa Galarneau, Ph.D: I am a socio-cultural anthropologist, futurist, US Army veteran, and mother. I have worked in the tech industry for 25 years. I am also the founder of the Planetary Liberation Front — A Revolution of Mind. We’re looking for contributors, so please contact me if you’re interested! Or join us on Facebook!
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