Challenges for Women in Leadership.

The Dalai Lama, at the Vancouver Peace Summit in 2009, said that "The world will be saved by the western woman."

This is a pretty big thing to live up to though women leaders have always been influential – partly because of their supposed rarity value in the past which is thankfully not so current these days. But what has brought them to the fore has been the crise économique of the last few years. If you look at the way the banking and financial structures have suffered over the last couple of years (especially in US and UK) and those structures have been developed and run primarily by men, you can see why women leaders are being taken far more seriously than ever before and hence the famous quote from the Dalai Lama himself !

What makes women leaders special

Any individual who takes on the role of leading is actually special but it could be argued that all of us are, in our own way, leaders –of families, teams, bosses, friends, communities, companies and so on. So are women leaders really special ? What makes women leaders special is what makes women different. 3 keys aspects of this are :

• Employing a less competitive-more collaborative approach
• Having a genuine desire to listen to others and work with them to resolve problems
• Being prepared to be role models of effective leadership and ‘walk their talk’

But do they pay a price ?

I work with senior executive women and find that there are a number of common issues that women at the top face. But first, remember that any woman who reaches the top of her profession (or very near it) has already displayed considerable talent and application just to get there ; top women are highly intelligent, extremely capable human beings, very skilled and good at their jobs.

But here are some common challenges I have been told about :

• Isolation as they are often the only one or one of the few and they receive little support, though they give a lot of support to women who are coming up through the organisation
• Underselling of themselves, their talents and achievements when compared to their male counterparts
• A discomfort in leadership in male dominated hierarchies as they sometimes force themselves to be the type of leader their organisation expects rather than the type of leader they really want to be
• A recurring lack of confidence -yes, even those women at the top who face board rooms full of men on a regular basis admit that deep inside they sometimes feel intimidated and uncomfortable
• An acknowledgement that whatever they do and however far they rise within the organisation, they are never somehow quite accepted because of course they are not ‘one of the boys’; they don’t want to be ‘one of the boys’ either so they live with this constant paradox

How we can help our women leaders ‘save the world’?

The women I know don’t want special concessions or special measures to assist them; they are quite capable of helping themselves as they have had to do during their corporate or entrepreneurial climb. They are usually very organised too as those with families and partners and other responsibilities outside work, make sure that all is in order as far as possible with potential conflicts anticipated. The household organisation is still their province in most cases even if they don’t do it themselves, though some have ‘house husbands’. But it is all too obvious that whether it is nature or nurture factors that have meant all of us ordinary women experience crises of confidence, so do these top women. At base there is a lack of self-belief and a lack of confidence and the inner game that blocks us going forward are present in even the most eminent of women.

When will this ever change?

www.movingforwardyourway.com

*I’m attending the Women’s International Networking conference in Paris this month which is on the theme of leadership, so I expect to bring lots of information back to share on the subject. Watch this space!