WOMEN AS LEADERS, PART I

by Kathy Reiffenstein

For years, women in business have tried to be more like men. Men have traditionally held the power positions and it only made sense that the way to achieve that same standing was to imitate the leadership traits of our male counterparts.

In this endeavour, women have tried to overcome or mask many of their innate characteristics like being collaborative, sensitive to others and relationship-focused in favour of a more aggressive, less caring, bottom line oriented approach to leadership.

POSITIVES RATHER THAN NEGATIVES

But a number of recent research studies suggest that these very “female” traits we’ve tried to hide are actually positives rather than negatives for today’s leaders.

The studies show that women executives, when rated by their peers, subordinates and bosses, score higher than their male counterparts on a wide variety of measures--from producing high-quality work to goal-setting to mentoring employees.

Another study, conducted by Princeton, New Jersey-based management consulting firm, Caliper, and Aurora, a London-based brand marketing organization, determined that,

“Women leaders are more assertive and persuasive, have a stronger need to get things done and are more willing to take risks than male leaders. They are more empathetic and flexible, as well as stronger in interpersonal skills than their male counterparts.”

So what does this mean for women as they climb the corporate ladder and navigate the male-dominated ranks of senior management?

The key take-away is that we women are particularly well-suited to leverage our relational and interpersonal skills to excel in our area of competency while, at the same time, building and enhancing our network of colleagues and influencers.

According to Douglas Elix, former head of IBM's Global Services Division, women are more thoughtful than men in considering the various aspects of a decision, more collaborative and more willing to share the glory. Women are motivated less by self-interest and more by ''what they can do for the company,'' Elix says. Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, author of the 20-year-old management classic, Men and Women of the Corporation, also sees women as having key strengths:

''Women get high ratings on exactly those skills needed to succeed in the global Information Age, where teamwork and partnering are so important.''

So with all these extremely relevant leadership skills, why aren’t more women rising to senior management ranks? Why are the steps of the corporate ladder so steep and why does there still appear to be a glass ceiling once we near the top?

Could it be that, in spite of having the ability, we lack the confidence to leverage those feminine skills to their fullest extent?

In the next post, we’ll look at the confidence issue and explore specific ways we can employ the strengths we have as women.