Managing Leadership^®

It is no exaggeration to suggest that one of the three greatest challenges facing management today (do you know what the other two are?) is discovering and mainstreaming effective methods for uniting the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of women and work. It must be said, after all, that many continue to think of these as two distinctly different worlds. Despite all the progress achieved, the idea of women at work – even to women – remains a fundamentally contradictory notion, especially at upper levels of management.

As we have noted here before, women tend to leave the workforce for a variety of reasons, ranging from a sense that, in one way or another, they don’t fit in – or don’t care to, to a peculiarity in the way women generally identify and assess risk in the context of how they want to live their lives. Indeed, a recent item in Business Week cites a study demonstrating that fewer than 2 in 5 of women MBA graduates of 15-25 years ago are still working full-time.

This situation is not a demonstration of reality inevitably reflecting the natural order of things. It is a demonstration of our enduring inability in this area – as in so many others – to reflect the new order of things in modern institutions. Aside from the expected array of individual abilities, women as a group have natural strengths – reinforced by experience – that the profession of management is largely deficient in. Management needs to correct this shortcoming, and, today, we have a multitude of means for doing so.

In the past few days we’ve discussed various ways managers should learn to adjust their perceptual and procedural modes of thinking. Focus and perspective. Control and decentralization. Direction and market-based management. Unless you are an irreclaimable administrative Luddite, you will be able to acknowledge that we need to get better at using our entire organizations to accomplish our organizational goals, and to replenish our continuing ability to do so. If we cannot make women a natural part, a major focus, a significant driver of these processes, we risk proving unequal to the managerial challenges of this century.

The Business Week item referenced above offers reviews of four books on this topic, discussing how some companies are finding ways to integrate the worlds of women and work, how residual but relentless resistance to this integration persists, and how women can deal with all of this to effectively manage their careers. While the books appear to be marketed principally to women, all managers should visit the article and select one or more to add to their professional reading list.

This subject possibly cannot receive too much attention. We need to learn more about the issues, their meaning, and how to address them. All of us should make room on our near-term reading schedules for at least one of these books, or another dealing with this subject, and then meet back here to exchange views.

—

Please don’t forget to subscribe, so you won’t miss future posts on this and other important issues in management!

Technorati Tags: women and work, Business Week, women MBA graduates, Management, market-based management, organizational goals, professional reading, Women in Management