Women & Leadership

It was with great anticipation that I began reading the October 24th issue of Newsweek, a SPECIAL REPORT entitled, "How Women Lead". The cover article asks the question " As a growing number of female executives rise to the top, how will they change the culture of the workplace?"

Anticipation can be a heart-breaker.

I had hoped to read about women's leadership styles. I wanted to learn if there were specific characteristics that these women shared that set them apart. I wanted to hear if they created a different kind of culture within their own organizations. I wanted to know if business would be different if more women held leadership positions.

Instead, it was the same old same old: profiles about women and their thoughts on what it takes to be a success: Success is not leadership. Madonna is a success.

It was such a lost opportunity.  Instead, I read about Oprah, Karen Hughes,and a handful of other successful women.

We know Oprah has power and inspires the masses, but how does that translate into day to day leadership with the people who work with her day in and day out? You won't find out reading Newsweek.

What does her staff have to say about her leadership style? You won't find out in Newsweek either.

The article talks about women breaking the glass ceiling. Actually, I think women have broken the glass door. They've entered the workforce but the ceiling just has a few dents in it.

Most experts agree that the glass ceiling is not broken and will not break for a long time.  To insinuate that the ceiling is breaking just because there are a handful of women in leadership positions, misses the point. They are the exceptions.

While I enjoyed reading Astronomer's Vera Rubin's story , it was more about persistence rather than leadership. Rubin's work led to the discovery of dark matter.

"The chairman of the department said I really ought to present these results at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Philadelphia, but he added that, of course, I wouldn't be able to because my first child would be only a few weeks old. Then he said that because I wasn't a member, I wouldn't be able to put my name on the paper anyway so he could put his name on it and present it. So I said, oh no, I can give it. My talk was brief. I didn't know a soul. Afterward, there was much discussion about why the results couldn't be correct. I thought these were very cross astronomers."

As part of the Special Report, Newsweek looks at Xerox, a company that does have a impressive amount of women in top leadership positions. According to the article nearly 1/3 of all top managers at Xerox  are female. .

How does this affect the workplace?

"Around headquarters, there are subtle signs of what executives describe as Xerox's kinder culture. Instead of shaking hands, executives sometimes greet with hugs. Midlevel employees seem remarkably at ease among top officers. By most accounts, employees feel free to refuse to schedule 7:30 a.m. meetings because of day-care constraints. Under Xerox's evaluation system, behavior can count as much as performance: even high-achieving bosses who publicly berate subordinates or are insensitive to employees' personal lives can be quietly pushed aside. "We deal with problems, but we deal with them in the way a mother would deal with her children—we're gentler," says Burns. "It's more maternal."

The article did manage to get a bit snarky,

"When you listen to such happy talk, it'd be fun to hook each member of this mahogany row to a polygraph so she'd dish on what it's really like to work here. "

And this dig that according to the the National Association of Female Executives, seven companies are ranked as better places for women to work than Xerox.

If the Special Report disappointed, Anna Quindlen did not.

"There's always been the notion that if women ran the world it would be a kinder, softer, more peaceful place, plowshares instead of swords. Those fantasies haven't turned out to be entirely true. Ten of the 14 women in the Senate at the time voted in favor of the Iraq war resolution, and suicide bombing has become an equal-opportunity endeavor. The debate about whether there's a distinctly female style of leadership rages on. In her book "Closing the Leadership Gap," Marie Wilson, founder of the White House Project, quotes a female member of the clergy on the subject. "For over 200 years," said the Rev. Patricia Kitchen, "the United States has been steered by male leadership who tend to lead from a self-centered, self-preservation perspective." By contrast, "Women around the world are inclined to lead, their families and nations, from an other-centered perspective."

The report does include a section called 12 Leaders on Life Lessons but again, its the same old stuff. Nice advice:"be creative, be supportive," but that is advice that all genders receive.

My hope was to learn about the subtle and not so subtle differences that women leaders bring to the workplace. Instead I found out that Newsweek considers it leadership that women at Xerox are comfortable refusing to attend 7:30 a.m. meetings because of daycare conflicts ( how about not having 7:30 a.m. meetings), and that Karen Hughes took her son along on the presidential campaign trail. That may be nice, but what does that have to do with leadership?

Perhaps the real reason that Newsweek didn't answer the question they poised, "How will they change the culture of the workplace?" is that there is no answer to that question.