Women managers balance the yin and yang of good communication skills
Posted on May 4, 2011 by Baxter Dickson
Have you seen The White House Report Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being? It got a lot of media coverage during International Women’s Day in March and I found it to be fascinating reading.
Here’s a fact from it that may change the world…or just your career: Women now hold 51% of management jobs. The most important factor seems to be education level, with a higher percentage of women holding college degrees (36%) than men.
But is that all there is to it? I don’t think so. I submit that women are learning what were traditionally considered to be male traits (the yang) at the same time they’re beginning to leverage skills that seem to come more naturally to women (the yin).
Let’s start with the male yang.
Own the room.
Take an open stance (or sit up tall at the conference room table), breathe deep, smile. Be comfortable. Research shows that the person who appears most comfortable in any group will be perceived as the leader.
Speak your mind.
If there’s a tendency to hold back or couch your opinion in words that soften it, you’ve not joined today’s sisterhood. I think. I know. I see. Back up your opinion with facts, of course. Being wrong isn’t the worst sin; doing nothing is.
Don’t be afraid to be tough.
Women must tap into the confidence that goes with their higher level of education. The more you know, the more able you are to set down a well-reasoned plan and persuasively defend it. Have the confidence to hold others accountable for living up to it.
And the yin?
Embrace the trust factor.
Management Today and the Institute of Leadership and Management conduct an annual Index of Leadership Trust survey in England. In their two most recent annual studies, women CEOs rated higher on trust than their male counterparts. The two key drivers? Workers had more confidence in their female boss’s ability to do their job and also rated them higher for being honest and principled.
Work to understand the day-to-day challenges of your team.
That seems to be an important component of trust, the British study found. It’s not just the stereotypical view of women’s empathy at work here. Penny Valk, the CEO of the Institute of Leadership and Management, says it’s something more. “We know that women are not likely to put themselves forward for new roles unless they feel 95% capable, whereas men will happily do so at 65%, so what happens is that when women are promoted, they are very familiar with the tasks their people are doing.”
Women integrate. Men focus.
According to psychologist Helen E. Fisher in Enlightened Power, How Women are Transforming the Practice of Leadership, women gather bits of information to create a bigger, more holistic picture of a situation before making a decision. Men, on the other hand, tend to gather as much information as women, but analyze in a more linear path. This big-picture thinking may help women deal more successfully with ambiguity in business.
The bottom line?
Neither gender has a lock on excellence. It’s time we learn from each other. In fact, maybe our new age of he-said/she-said helps explain another one of the facts in The White House women’s report. The gap is closing between male and female pay – from 62% in 1979 to 80% today. Let’s see if we can’t learn to even it up.
Image by MAMJODH
