‘We can transcend the binary’: Develop the best of male and female leadership traits in everyone

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Consultant Jennifer Kenny believes that what we currently recognize as leadership is half of what we are capable of. After years of research and facilitating workshops, she believes we are missing out on the enhanced results that can be delivered by teams taking advantage of the best of masculine and feminine leadership traits.
She stresses it’s not a case of a binary divide, men versus women. She has a long list of leadership traits common to men that are advantageous, but also a list of their traits better abandoned. Similarly for traits more common to women: Some are healthy, others unhealthy.
“We want to use the best of men’s and women’s leadership styles and to transcend the simplistic binary – so both men and women can express both our masculine and feminine leadership,” she writes in 100% Capacity: The End of Gender Balance as We Know It.
Healthy leadership characteristics create growth for the organization as well as individuals, teams and departments. Unhealthy leadership qualities, on the other hand, can lead to distrust, victimization, blame, sandbagging, hiding mistakes, reduced innovation, low engagement and poorer performance.
Not all men or women are the same, of course – there is a spectrum in which our own personal styles reside. But she says men tend to show up in the world intent on action, providing, protecting and competing. They generally want accomplishment, logic, planning (to gain predictability), belonging and honouring – keeping agreements, fulfilling obligations and being dutiful. All valuable.
Women generally are inclined toward receiving, perceiving, accepting and relating. They want harmony, context, respect and inclusion. They create beauty, abundance, newness and balance. Again, that helps us and our organizations.
But we don’t benefit in the workplace from these traits associated with masculine behaviour: Aggression, warlike-instincts, greed, scarcity, the desire to be top dog in a hierarchy, bullying, controlling, lying, blaming, arrogance, desire for power over others and the insistence on being right. Also unhelpful are unhealthy feminine business incompetencies she cites: Anxiety, complaining, wailing, manipulating, disparaging, apologizing, hyper-feeling and the tendency to take sides and stir up strife.
So, double your capacity by adopting the best of both and jettisoning the unhealthy. Move past stereotypes and instincts that trace back to childhood and develop yourself more fully.
She shows how this can turn out positively with respect to decision-making. Gender-balanced teams bring a wider range of perspectives and experiences to the table, which leads to more thorough and accurate problem-solving. Women are more likely to seek additional information before making a decision, as part of their collaborative, consensual approach.
“Although decisions made by women leaders result in better companywide outcomes, men were found to be more confident in their decision-making abilities than women. Overall, we can see how leveraging 100-per-cent capacity leadership in the workplace can create a more dynamic and innovative environment that leads to better decision-making and improved business outcomes,” she writes.
Similarly, studies have found companies fare better with gender-balanced leadership in six other critical areas: Innovation, risk management, customer experience, employee engagement, operations and strategy. Indeed, one study found companies in the bottom quartile of financial performance saw the greatest improvement on that measure when they increased gender diversity on their leadership teams.
Initiatives to improve gender balance have generally focused on basic matters – what Ms. Kenny calls corporate hygiene – such as equal pay, accommodations for work-life balance, women’s leadership networks and high-potential women’s leadership programs. But she argues more can be attained by going beyond gender balance to recognize and encourage new, broader leadership capabilities. Everyone would be measured on the full spectrum of leadership traits and qualities.
This requires, in effect, changing the language of leadership because it has traditionally revolved around traits associated with men. Now that we understand men and women tend to lead differently – and can see from studies the value women add – we can stop pigeonholing ourselves in one approach or the other and combine them. “We can transcend the binary and explore and engage as we seek what is most effective for ourselves, our customers and our colleagues,” she says.
At the core, she argues are four traits: Focus and action, traditionally masculine, and perception and interconnection, more historically associated with women. The type of work we have been trained to value as strong leadership is most closely associated with the masculine style – the focus is on a thing and the approach is action. “The work most associated with feminine leadership styles is not quite so visible,” she says. “Sitting quietly and making sense does not look like anything is happening. The interconnections, or spaces between things and people, are also invisible. This can make women’s leadership difficult to spot and understand.”
But their perception and interaction skills lead to all-important synthesis and a better ability for organizations and teams to navigate the current context. More importantly, combining perception and interaction with focus and action makes leaders more capable of dealing with all that they face. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote that “in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female.”
It’s time for companies and managers to heed that prescription.
Cannonballs
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.