If Women Ruled The World, Would Business Be Any Better Off?
Susan notes: Lynn Harris authored the recently published and already highly popular book Unwritten Rules: What Women Need To Know About Leading In Today's Organisations.
She also pens a great blog on women and leadership issues. Her newest post makes a whole lot of sense to me...
There have been several recent articles extolling the virtues of women and fantasizing about how great the world would be if only we replaced male leaders with women.
In a scathing piece entitled A Nope for Pope, acid-tongued New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd suggests replacing the Pope with a nun, thus producing a "Nope."
A Washington Post article claims that the recent U.S. health care bill passed only because a woman (Nancy Pelosi) is now in a strong position of leadership as Speaker of the House.
And recently, New York Magazine asked What If Women Ran Wall Street?
It’s tempting to believe that female power would fix all our problems, from the Catholic Church to Wall Street, but in reality good leadership has nothing to do with gender. It’s not about women being better leaders than men, or visa versa, and it’s not helpful when the media frames it in this way.
What we need at the top of organizations is balanced leadership. Instead of 80-90% of organizations being led by men, we need leadership to be shared equally between men and women so that we have a much larger pool of talent from which to draw, and so that we benefit from diverse thinking and behavior.
I am passionately in favor of a world where men and women work together to lead more effectively. But glorifying women leaders and demonizing males will not get us there.
What do you think?
Unwritten Rules Keep Women From Plum Corporate Posts
Better Learn the Unwritten Rules If You Want To Succeed In A Man’s World!