I was recently part of a roundtable around empowering women in leadership positions in the corporate world. One of the participants started her talk by stating statistics around the number of women in executive roles and on boardrooms in corporations worldwide and what can be done to increase those numbers.
While listening to her, I drifted away, wondering if what is needed is only an increase in numbers.
I believe in women’s leadership capabilities; however, over the years, I observed how many women in corporate seeking recognition and promotion had to compromise their authentic leadership styles.
Vulnerability, intuition, collaboration, flexibility, flowing, nurturing, receiving, listening, and even being were mostly undesired attributes in a corporate masculine leadership style.
As Maureen Murdock puts it, women needed to accept a “Separation from feminine values, seeking recognition and success in a patriarchal culture.”
For a long time in corporate, a leader was rewarded for a behavior that is aggressive, decisive, directing, talkative, protective, competitive, controlling, end-result oriented, and focused on doing.
I am well aware that both men and women have access to all the qualities that are perceived as feminine and masculine. And, these different qualities may not be gender-related identity. I am open to the suggestion that the traditional roles that men and women played historically contributed largely to why women show more tendencies towards vulnerability, intuition, collaboration, flexibility, flowing, nurturing, receiving, and listening.
My excitement about having more women in leadership roles comes from a sense of equality but, more importantly, from what I see as a vast potential for changing our understating and practice of leadership which is directly relevant to organizational cultures.
It’s the quality of leadership that women can bring into organizations that will make a huge difference and not just the mere quantity of women.
Women have a historical chance to change corporations into a new type of organism. In times like this where old systems are collapsing, and new ones have the potential to form, a more human approach to corporations that brings more balance between the heart and the mind, the individual and the system, the impact and the profit, the collaboration and the achievement is most needed.
We need leaders that are social architects responsible for creating an environment where people collaborate, co-envision, co-create, and co-sense. We need leaders that create organizations that illustrate collective heroism instead of individual superheroes and superheroines.
The time is right for such a shift, and it’s up to women to decide if they want to be a continuation of a diminishing paradigm or if they want to be the courageous role models for both men and women to bring a new breed of leaders and organizations.
