CNN’s Jack Cafferty took to the television airwaves with a controversial question disguised as news. It recounted his blog post called “Do women make better bosses?” While not necessarily news, the article makes some interesting points about leadership. While discussing “bosses,” it incorporated comments about effective leadership traits such as:
Being a good adviser, mentor and rational thinker,
Being collaborative and democratic,
Being more encouraging and less bossy,
Being direct – communicating with “straight talk,”
Taking risks,
Exercising autonomy and independence,
And eliminating behaviors that employees dislike, described as loving to hear yourself talk, engaging in sports talk before getting down to business, giving harsh or evasive feedback, belittling, or needing to prove your own superiority.
I thought it interesting that these points (reinforced by quite a number of blog comments) are really gender neutral. They, and many others, are behaviors that both women and men can engage in that better support people to do their work. They are traits of the enlightened leader – the person, male or female, who can truly guide people to do their best and be productive in a positive atmosphere. That sort of leadership makes both working in and doing business with such enterprises smooth and easy rather than complicated and uncomfortable, the former profitable and the latter expensive.
The article identified warmth and sensitivity to what others needed as “feminine traits” that research (authority not cited) allegedly showed was exhibited less by good managers than more masculine traits. But that didn’t say anything about whether women or men were better leaders. As enlightened leaders know, feminine and masculine traits can be exhibited in their own way by either gender.
And research or not, when did being warm, caring, approachable or sensitive to what people need in the workplace become detrimental to getting the job done? Maybe those “good managers” would do well to develop such leadership characteristics, and become even better managers.
What do you think?