Getting Into the Heads of Leaders by Stephen Long

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Does Gender Matter?

As we're heading into 2009 it appears that females leaders are finally becoming accepted--it's about time. Whether it's Hilary Clinton, Condoleeza Rice or Margaret Thatcher, it's clear that female leadership is here to stay. I’m always looking to learn more about women and how they approach and respond to leadership.The power of estrogen is not confined to politics either. Look around and you'll see female leaders everywhere and it's only going to continue to grow. 57% of all college graduates are women and more than half of National Merit Scholars are females.

I read an article in Fortune (http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/09/news/economy/women.power.fortune/index.h...) about how women are redefining the issue of power. The author, Anne Fisher, argued that the traditional male style of leadership doesn’t appeal to women. The command & control style is not only rejected by most women, but I find that most men reject it also.

The article details a concept called “the Thin Pink Line” where women executives carefully balance the perceptions of followers that they may be either too bitchy or too girly. Women walk a fine line, but many people make the mistake of assigning the responsibility to women only. Why do only female leaders have to adhere to this balancing act? The fact is that both men and women executives have to create the balance between establishing high expectations and holding people their people to those standards of performance while also creating a safe, nurturing, and supportive environment. Both men and women face the same challenges.

The Thin Pink Line is not really a line at all—it’s a continuum of leadership behaviors ranging from one extreme to the other. Depending on the situation and the intrinsic qualities of their workforce, the leader makes choices of how to act. Those choices determine the degree to which people follow the leader.

Developing leadership depends on building fundamental skills while recognizing individual nuances. What works for one executive probably won’t work for another. General skills such as strategic thinking, decision-making and judgment, and team building are required for every leader, but tapping into each executive’s unique strengths is just as important, if not more so. Effective leaders don’t try to be anybody else—they are just themselves, they’re authentic while setting performance targets and providing their people with the resources to achieve those goals. It’s less a matter of gender and more a matter of competence.

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Executive Temperament

Recently, an article was published in Time Magazine discussing the importance of temperament of the two presidential candidates http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1850921,00.html. I found the article intriguing in two respects. First, how likely is the electorate able to assess the temperament of politicians and second, how aware are business professionals aware of their own temperament?

Temperament is character personified under duress. It reveals a leader’s ability to manage themselves in a crisis. It’s simply impossible to manage a crisis situation effectively if a leader is unable to manage themselves effectively first. Temperament is at the heart of “Executive Presence.”

Assessing your temperament and the temperament of others examines the totality of the person. Nancy Gibbs, the author of the Time Magazine article quoted Mark Twain—“Every man is a moon.” There is a bright side and dark side to each person, but temperament isn’t defined in terms of black and white extremes. It’s true for each positive quality there is a corresponding negative quality, but a range exists between the two choices. Can “composure” be interpreted as “unassertive?” Can “urgency” be perceived as “frantic?” It all depends on how one perceives the situation and how the leader expresses his or her character in that situation. It’s at that point temperament is revealed. The fact is temperament is somewhere between the two extremes. It comes down to having the right blend of the two extremes in a specific situation to do the right thing.

How a leader processes information, both intellectually and emotionally, determines how a leader eventually acts. The more you know about yourself and the more you know about your leaders’ temperament, the better able you’ll be able to predict behavior. The key question for every executive is, “are your emotions dictating your decisions or are your decisions dictating your emotions?” It’s fine to use calmness or outbursts to bring about a response from a group of followers. It’s a sign of inconsistency when leaders are unaware of how their emotions not only how they act personally, but also how their people act collectively. Temperament is about judgment—the combination of the brain and the heart.