The 4 leadership traits of women that too many businesses overlook - Women's Agenda

The 4 leadership traits of women that too many businesses overlook

The number of female leaders is slowly increasing. Despite this, much work is still to be done for different styles of leadership to be valued, other than what has worked in the past.

Businesses need to understand and appreciate that women can be highly effective leaders and offer a number of traits that can have a significant impact on business success.

As the business world continues to increase in complexity, so too does the role of leaders. We are breaking from paternal bureaucratic forms of organisations to high involvement, empowered partnership and collaborative learning business environments. The leadership skills needed to deal with these changes are far more nuanced and multi-dimensional than they were in the past.

Embracing diversity and utilising a generally untapped leadership source that offers critical strengths necessary for managing complexity and growing demands of stakeholders will become critical for the organisations of tomorrow.

Women bring a plethora of leadership qualities modern leaders need, such as:

  1. Empathy

    Women are generally good at putting themselves in the shoes of others and understanding different points of view, traits that are beneficial for good leadership. This is also a leadership style most preferred by peers and subordinates. By genuinely understanding and caring about the opinions of others, women tend to be more persuasive and more successful at bringing others around to their point of view while still making people feel understood, valued and supported.

  2. Building and maintaining relationships

    Good people skills are critical for effective leadership. They allow you to interpret situations accurately, take information in from different perspectives and see the bigger picture. Being good at maintaining relationships means better cohesion, enhanced communication and better cooperation with stakeholders inside and outside the organisation. The outcomes of this are better productivity and business success. Being good at relationships is about getting to know people, what drives them and their values. This helps you build trust, which in turn reinforces the commitment from employees to achieving business goals.

  3. Openness

    Being open means encouraging honest dialogue and emotive discussions. A good leader doesn’t just focus on the technical mastery and outputs of their teams, they should also strive to help their teams to discuss their fears, uncertainties and promote self-awareness. They encourage introspection and understand the powerful connection between how people feel and how they perform. Female leaders are also generally good at fostering discussions facilitating contributions from all team members and focus on merging all ideas into a common solution. This type of process is effective for unlocking innovation.

  4. Collaboration

    Women are generally inclusive leaders. They tend to be non-hierarchical in their relationships and evaluation of ideas and information. They tend to be driven by making the best decision for the organisation, rather than by having their idea favoured. They are more willing to work together, to share ideas, to talk through decisions and to seek feedback. Such big picture thinking is a powerful leadership trait that pulls together the collective strength of a business rather than relying on the ideas of a few senior executives or one CEO.

Of course, these traits are not only exclusive to women. They’re areas any leader, male or female, can possess or seek to improve.

As business complexities continue to increase, we need new styles of leadership to evolve. Part of this starts with encouraging gender diversity within organisations and particularly within senior management.

Women make great leaders and we need more of them with the courage to step forward, fully own their strengths and lead with confidence.

 

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