Women’s role in transforming leadership

Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president for people operations, believes most people who are proving to be great leaders and are constantly succeeding at his company are people who possess a particular set of skills. According to him, these people “tend to be those with a lot of soft skills: leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability, and loving to learn and re-learn.”

He also emphasizes on the idea of emergent leadership rather than the traditional form of leadership. Bock says his company doesn’t care if an employee was the President of a club or how long it took her/him to get there. They look for leaders who take an initiative to step forward and take responsibility and aren’t hesitant to step back when someone else has a better idea.

Sally Helgesen, an author, speaker, and leadership development consultant, feels this emergent form of collaborating and non-hierarchical leadership has come into the picture since women entered the workforce. The first published book that recognized the female way of leading was ‘The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership’ (1990), which bought to notice the soft-skills that women bring to the table.

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Helgesen, however, points out that in 1990 these skills were seen as a weakness. It was a time when aggressive men who “got the job done”, no matter how nasty. She adds that this has drastically changed as more women have entered the workforce, “How we understand leadership has evolved—the concept has become less about showing you’re in charge and more about orchestrating others and bringing out the best gifts everyone has to offer. This shift has coincided precisely with the growing influence of women in organizations.”

The changes that women have bought in the workforce haven’t just transformed the way leadership is perceived by top companies, but has also transformed and evolved these companies.

ORIGINAL SOURCE: Strategy-Business

http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/How-Women-Leaders-Have-Transformed-Management?gko=9e1ad