Ever find that voice inside your head urging you to declare: ‘But I AM different’? For you are right. You are different. We are all essentially different from each other. The question is “what do we do with difference”. What would happen if we celebrated that difference. Your difference as an individual and your difference as a woman.
Because we are different. Different in a good way. Different in a way that the world needs and that we should honour. Susan Pinker, in an interview about her new book, The Sexual Paradox, said “most men are hardwired to compete for supremacy in the workplace. Women are not. Most want a balanced life of work, family, friends and community because their biology has evolved that way.” She is also irritated by finding herself in the midst of a controversy about gender difference that wasn’t her goal. As we all do when we find ourselves in this “controversy”, she is quick to point out that she is talking about general tendencies. “Science tells us nothing about the individual.” She has written a book about what she sees “happening in science and that’s separate from how I think the world should be. I call this the is-ought gap. I’m looking at what is. I’m not really saying what ought to be.”
My own experience bears this out. Many people, women and men, get very uncomfortable in conversations about gender difference. Many seek a safer ground in the sciences, history, or psychology, looking from a distance with hard data to back up their position. Many offer a defense, an example of someone that “doesn’t fit.” Many don’t say anything at all preferring to go underground with their own views either in confusion or to avoid the controversy. One thing I am sure of is that there are as many explanations for why this conversation makes us uncomfortable as there are readers.
And yet this doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding why we continue to comment on the differences between the genders. Because we do. We notice. As human beings we notice. We may not know how to explain it. We have years of cultural conditioning that confuses what we notice with what we think should be and still we continue to notice. And because we notice we owe it to ourselves to explore, to acknowledge the talents born from difference and to allow what is born of that difference to contribute fully to our families, communities, workplaces, nations in a way that will profoundly change the way we live our lives.
When we do our best work as leaders, male or female, we don’t imitate others. We bring our full and unique selves to the challenge. Susan and I have spent 100s of hours in conversations and course rooms with professional women, all seeking to make a difference in their personal and professional lives, to learn the skills to make their unique contribution more valuable and known, in keeping with their values and life purposes.
What do I notice about how women achieve these results – in a different way. Three things:
1. Women actively seek out and encourage the participation of others, working with difference as an inherently valuable source of organizational innovation and creativity.
2. Women emphasize the relationship. Experience and knowledge are communicated throughout the organization via trust-based relationships.
3. Women are very willing to share power and information. The feminine disposition is to work through democratic processes, in networks, supporting others. These processes dictate the method in which we influence and engage those around us.
For the last dozen years, business thought leaders have been proclaiming the need for a new kind of leadership, one which embraces these concepts and more.
Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science, promotes the value of a new paradigm by advocating for complex systems to deal with change and discontinuity that plague our organizational plans. Her rationale? “Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.”
Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, (1990) is the proponent of a “new” view of leadership that centers on creating learning organizations to respond to the complexity of organizational circumstances today. In his view, leaders are “designers, stewards and teachers.” The functions of designers are rarely visible yet no one has a more sweeping influence. As a steward, the leader uses stories to provide a single set of integrating ideas that give meaning to the work of all. The leader as teacher is about fostering learning for everyone.
And what we know intellectually is still hard to do. Yet, slowly, all around us the business landscape is changing. The norms are changing and the success of accomplished women in business is a powerful force for this change. Women are bringing a tremendous range of important skills and perspectives to this transformation.
This isn’t saying how it “ought to be.” This is encouraging all of us to notice. Notice what is possible when we question the norm, allow room for a new view of the people, the events and the moment we find ourselves in. Today. What is there to notice, to see differently. The longer we stay entrenched in our old ways the further we move away from what we all care about. The workplace today is crying out for leadership that will help it survive and succeed in the face of fast paced change and discontinuity, multi-generations and a dependence on innovation and creativity to answer the challenges presented everyday.
What do you see? We would love to hear your comments. This is the first in what we hope to be a lively dialogue on all the ideas, issues and opportunities surrounding our world as professional women.
