Will women leaders change the future of management?

April 20, 2022

It’s well known that office temperatures are mostly set at levels that suit men better than women. It sounds trivial. Yet, “it’s a powerful metaphor for our organisations [sic]. We organise around what suits men and their competitive advantages, and they have no idea it’s masculine. They just think it’s normal.”

—Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, chief executive of gender balance consultancy 20-first

The gist:

The “template laid down by and for very different people and conditions more than half a century ago has started to chafe.” Work demographics have been shifting over the past few decades, and as Wittenberg-Cox, notes, “Performance has by no means suffered as a result.”

Stats:

• “Individually, the new recruits are beginning to outscore their male counterparts in both “hard” and “soft” leadership skills.”

• “At corporate level, studies show that opening up management ranks to those other than the male and white improves rather than harms performance.”

Decades before this demographic shift, Mary Parker Follett, “an early proponent of what we would now call a ‘whole systems’ view of business,” promoted the concept of “the ‘law of the situation.’ It says that “rather than making people obey orders, the job of managers was ‘to devise methods by which we can best discover the order integral to a particular situation.’”

This is in contrast to a model of leadership based on “fear and command and control as the way you get things done,” says Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, a “specialist in teams and organisational [sic] learning” and is more associated with male team leadership.

In today’s world, where ingenuity, collaboration and the ability to respond quickly to unexpected events count more than force, that’s a liability.

—Amy Edmondson

In “the different world that is emerging, ‘the order integral to the situation’ involves a fresh gender balance, being met again by the transformed managerial workforce,” that includes more and more women.

For Lynda Gratton, “professor of management practice at London Business School and author of the newly published Redesigning Work,” Covid and the Great Resignation, is “a telling indicator that now ‘everything is in play,’” and that “all this should have been done ages ago.”

Wittenberg-Cox sees “women and gender-balance as the canary in the coal mine,” and concludes that she “always thought that the 20th century saw the rise of women, and the 21st century will be about whether men accept that rise or backlash against it.”

Connect with the Financial Times post here.