Female leadership

Can a woman become a powerful leader without becoming “one of the guys”?

By Cristina Andersson

To avoid all (male) suspicion that I would be just another woman saying that “women must be given equal opportunities for leading positions”, I want to begin this article by saying that on gender equality Sweden and Finland are the top two countries in the entire world. It does not mean that the work is over but it means that here in Scandinavia we have the opportunities to enter any leading position in any field of business, politics, social services etc.

No matter the gender, the actual way of leadership can be male or female. To my experience many women adapt male behavioural patterns when climbing up the organizational ladder.

One of the many topics in the Globeforum in Stockholm was the question of Female Leadership in the Emerging Markets. In the roundtable seminars the topic was widely discussed with Nordic women as facilitators. One of my comments was “What do we Finnish and Swedish women really have to give to the women in the emerging markets when we are quite accustomed to holding leading positions and when many of us have become ‘one of the guys’ abandoning our natural female way of making things click. How can we help if we have been alienated from the problem?”

Law of attraction is a very popular term nowadays when the movie “The Secret” is conquering the world with it’s message of hope and positive thinking. Attraction is, to my understanding, the female force. Women are not by nature used to push things forward but to use different means to attract things to happen. For example, when we communicate we don’t go straight forward saying: “I want a cup of coffee” but rather “Oh, how tired I am, I could really use a cup of coffee” or “what a nice coffee shop that is….”. In order to achieve higher positions in the organization women are taught to become more straightforward in their communication, they are taught to say “bring me a cup of coffee, please”. This is of course time saving and efficient but the price is that the woman loses her natural female attractiveness and gains the attraction of power instead, and eventually becomes one of the guys.

Law of gravity might be used as a metaphor for male leadership. Men tend to send things forward with such kick and force that the one selected target is reached without deviations and attuning operations. The people around are seen more as pawns that can be ordered and moved in the “name of the task” than individuals that could be attracted to participate an inspirational challenge. Offering a big sum of money and bonuses is a male way to gain commitment while offering initial participation, inspiration, growth and learning is a female way to gain commitment – money must be self-evident.

Unfortunately, when the number of female leaders increase in the companies the systems are not developed to support, empower and promote female leadership. The systems remain “male” and women have learned that true appreciation and acceptance comes from reconciling ones self into the “male” system. Therefore the real change for female values, we might call those values here as “soft human values”, do not take place in the companies. I worked as a business consultant for a decade and saw many ‘womanly women’ give up their womanliness and become one of the guys, for the sake of survival and success in the company. The question is: “does this kind of mental castration bring true happiness and fullness of life and does it really create better workplaces and more successful companies?”

One more question: “If we are to learn tolerance and true appreciation of diversity, are we really doing it by making everybody fit the system? Are we really incapable of creating systems that allow people be themselves and give their best talent, true self-expression and natural creative force to serve the common good?”