Women in business – possessing maybe the most important leadership skill of them all

One of the single most important skills needed by women in leadership these days is the ability to juggle the multiple roles we play. We have to be mother, wife, care giver, lover, businesswoman and provider, and we are expected to be excellent at all of it, all of the time. This balance is perennially absorbing. Whereas men have traditionally, for millennia, been able to “just go out into the world”, women have for equal lengths of time been coping with multiple roles.

But is it possible that we struggle deeply with this sense of balance because we are struggling with the consequences of internalised oppression that still, to this day, causes us in many ways to try to be more like men, in order to achieve a sense of success?

I don’t think the ways that this happen are necessarily that obvious and certainly may not be conscious. So consciously we may be embracing our feminine, and celebrating our womanhood. But even the fact that we need to consciously do that, suggests that we are recovering still from a sense of the value of the feminine having been systematically diminished and devalued over a long period of time, together with all the explicit manifestations of that. It is like we are splitting ourselves into a million tiny pieces to meet the needs of boss, team, colleagues, family and friends, for less money mostly than a man doing the same job would get paid, and for less appreciation of what it takes to do that job as well as a man.

This brings me to something I call “The Thinking Environment”. It looks at the question “how can we reliably and effectively produce the conditions that enable people to think well for themselves?” because it recognises the validity of the observation that everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first.

And one of the really exciting things to come out of working with the Thinking Environment for me, is the understanding that there is a consequence that has occurred in women both as a result of their innate, inherent nurturing and care taking capacity, but also because of their gender conditioning, that makes them usually, easily, brilliant at offering these behavioural conditions to others so that people around them do well, are able to think well, are able to be effective, are able to feel empowered and good about themselves. What tends to interfere with this inherent skill in women is often when we are trying to be more like men.

This skill has got to be one of the finest leadership skills in the world today. Why is that?

The modern day world of work is fast paced, the rate of change is exponential and relentless, and there is a lot of stress borne of having to meet constant change and the consequent lack of a comfort zone. In other words, a world that needs all the support it can get to make it more humane and bearable.

Enter women! If we accept that the quality of what people do depends on the quality of the thinking they do first, and we recognise that both as an inherent and a conditioned skill, women are particularly good at creating this kind of thinking environment for others, then it stands to reason that one of the things women have to offer, naturally and elegantly, is a skill that can make one of the, if not the single biggest, difference to people who are having to deal with conditions we just talked about, conditions of change, stress and anxiety and a need to be able to be really effective in constantly changing circumstances.

And if we recognise that this hugely valuable skill is something that we both do naturally well, and can easily improve on, then we start to see that there is something inherently valuable in our being more like women in the world of work, than in trying to be like men. And if we can see and value that inherent sense of ourselves and our value as women I think that could go a long way towards producing an internalised sense of balance within, that we can carry with us wherever we go.

[*Motivational speaker Trisha Lord was invited to address a Futuregrowth Asset Management Women’s Month breakfast event in Cape Town last month. Ms Lord has been engaged in a combination of coaching, consulting, training and facilitating individuals and groups for the past 22 years. This is an edited extract from her address.]