Managing Leadership^®

As we saw in yesterday’s book review, a variety of demographic forces are driving businesses – and organizations of all sorts – to break down the invisible barriers to women in the workplace. Indeed, the very definition of traditional work needs to be redefined. Sylvia Ann Hewlett‘s fine book does an impressive job of making these arguments, and includes intelligent examples of working solutions, into the bargain.

As we noted, however, what it doesn’t do is make the case for women in the workplace – especially in its managerial ranks – on the basis of their novel abilities. It’s all well and good to argue for their right to be there, but that doesn’t go far enough. The shortcomings of the male dominated work environment aren’t merely that it has created a complex web of overt and subconcious barriers to women. Of far more fundamental importance, it has denied us the special talents women bring to management at all levels.

Let’s start by touching on the innovative thinking of perhaps the most brilliant management thinker of them all: Mary Parker Follett. She instructed managers not to spend a lot of time developing the so-called leadership personality, but rather to “learn your job.” She did believe in certain exceptional individual leadership qualities, but her focus was always on the best ways to get an organization to execute.

Follett never forgot that this was what management theory was designed to accomplish, and her focus, unshackled by constraining habits of thought, allowed her to draw in non-traditional perspectives to the effort, and to easily dismiss traditional perspectives that failed to serve it.

Now, decades later, and due largely to factors and remedies noted by Hewlett, business around the world is about to enter a generations-long period of growth in effectiveness and productivity specifically because women managers are entering the ranks and are beginning to reach senior management in meaningful numbers. But the real key to their contribution is their generally unique, relative to men, superior focus (this area is plagued with generalizations, each fraught with exceptions, but which are nevertheless meaningful).

Men can often lose the forest for the trees – I have seen it happen countless times. Women, on the other hand, rarely mistake procedure for purpose. The problem is that, since men have dominated business for so long, they radiate certainty like charismatic chaff, redirecting attention and deflecting criticism.

In such an overwhelmingly uniform environment women can be unsure of the veracity of their critiques of their male colleagues’ contributions, and perhaps hesitate to confidently draw the proper conclusions and to take the necessary corrective actions.

We hear a lot about the so-called character, vision, and passion aspects of leadership. I think an argument can be made that a lot of that really springs from the irrelevant vanity of men. On the other hand, when women are found in the very top ranks, their right to be there is often validated with anecdotes about how they can swear and swap locker-room stories with the best of their male counterparts.

That probably says all that’s needed about an exclusively male take on leadership. I think it is more important for women to give business a second chance at benefiting from Follett’s admonition that managers should learn their jobs.

With this in mind, deriving from the general female superiority in focus – especially long-term focus – and their resistance to being distracted by irrelevant detail, women can also be more innovative than men – natural “out of the box” thinkers. The reason, of course, is that all that matters to them is the result, not excessively fussy attention to procedure. Again, there are exceptions to these generalizations, and the situation is also complicated by the general isolation of women in the still male-dominated workplace.

But when you can separate out the multitude of confounding factors, you’ll find that there is a general trend for women to focus on purpose, and men on procedure. We men are good at the latter, and our ability to create structures in which we can work meaningfully without, or with minimal, regard for personal relationships has developed the human ability for collaboration into a monumental evolutionary capability. But sometimes we forget why we’ve built them.

Women rarely forget. In fact, it often appears to be the only thing that matters for them. As a result, we often think they don’t get it as they express puzzlement over (or, worse, disinterest in) our intentness about the intricate structures and procedures we have woven into our organizations. But the truth is, in cases like this, it is typically we that don’t get it.

Focus on the overriding, larger purpose; that’s about as generalist as you can get. Welcome to the corner office.

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Please be sure to see all the posts in this series:

1. Women at work
2. Book Review: Off-Ramps and On-Ramps
3. Why a women’s place is in the corner office
4. Forest for the trees
5. Roundup: Women at work

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