Leadership Unfiltered: Why Gender Shouldn’t Define A Boss

Recently as I bid adieu to an assignment and moved on, one of the refrains I heard from the team members was, "Ma’am you made us forget that there was a lady in charge.” Bemused I decided to take it as a compliment but it did trigger some reflections on what it means to be a leader and what it means to be a leader who also happens to be a woman.

Women as bosses is a complicated story. If you are assertive and direct then you are labelled arrogant and abrasive and if you are convivial and polite then you are labelled ineffective and soft. There is no such tightrope walking for men. A Boss is a boss, period. He may be good, bad or average but he is never judged for being a man. But gender is always the elephant in the room for the lady.

But more about that later. The moot point is what makes one a leader in the first place. As one moves up the career path you discover your strengths, you observe others not simply to learn from what they did right but also from what they did not seemingly do right. You vividly remember the instance when a junior was rapped for a presentation which went south but never got credit for the account she managed to land for the agency. You still remember the crestfallen face of that harried young mother who was snapped at for reaching 15 minutes late. You watch how your seniors behave, your team leaders and you keep looking up to the holy grail, people who lead your organization. Amidst all this humdrum of professional life our work style keeps evolving. 

As time passes gradually one realises that the difficult part is not how to work and deliver but how to work in tandem with others. Professional life throws us in with people who are mostly not like us and are in fact at several intersecting points with our competitors. Nonetheless, they are the ones with whom one has to work to get the job done. The greater realisation is that more than working with people, the real skill lies in making people work with each other without dissonance or too much of it.

Leadership Unfiltered: Why Gender Shouldn’t Define A Boss

What makes one a leader is having that elusive skill set; the ability, maturity and equanimity to coalesce people together and move your team like pieces on a chess board. As time passes one also learns to play this game of chess and to visualize the bigger picture. Along the way one discovers that values like hard work, fairness, empathy and willingness to learn are gender-neutral. 

One does not have to do any tightrope walking to prove that one can be a good leader despite being a woman. You simply need to change the narrative. Being passionate about work but being dispassionate while taking the final call is a good starting point. Individuals and teams sense and appreciate that and once the path is set people simply forget who you are-man or a woman…you are just their leader. 

The next challenge, to my understanding, is motivation. We humans are sums of a complicated whole. Work is but one part of our life, a significant part but still only a part of life. So how does one motivate the team to stay focussed and deliver amidst all the other noise in their life? That’s a leader’s role and calling.

Team leaders who happen to be women lead by example. By the time we troop into the workplace a day’s work has already been done at home, organising school runs, meals, tackling unexpected emergencies and handling the myriad other humdrum of running a household. But then you push aside all the noise and focus on the task at hand once you switch into the work mode. People notice and follow.

Another realization is that people don't always work only for the known incentives, money, recognition and moving ahead. In the professional life. There’s an unknown X factor which truly propels the team forward. People gravitate towards a greater sense of purpose, the awareness of doing something meaningful, of being part of something larger than the mundane and the ordinary. That’s where the leader comes in.

Women as leaders are exceptionally good at this part of the game. Women play a multitude of roles. They are the anchors of their families. They dream, plan and strategise for everyone around them. They are facilitators. These are invaluable skill sets which they also bring to the professional realm and teams they lead.

Organizations and workplaces thus benefit immensely by mentoring and promoting women as leaders. They bring with them a lifetime of experience, wealth of knowledge and a perspective uniquely their own. Being a woman is a journey in itself and when a woman is ready to lead, give her that seat on the table. It’s not the empowerment of women but empowerment of society itself.

Views expressed by the author are their own.