#Leadership & Learning: Have You Learned Anything Recently?

What have you learned recently? No, I don’t mean reflecting on life’s lessons. I mean what hard skill or idea have you picked up recently and used? If you aren’t constantly renewing your knowledge and skills, you rapidly become the old fogey in the room. Good leaders are not old fogeys, no matter what their age. Staying in touch with the most recent knowledge, skills and technologies help us articulate new visions that weren’t possible even a few years ago.

Contrary to popular opinion, university professors do not have the “summer off”. But we are privileged in that we can choose what we work on during the summer. My summer is usually a blend of learning, reading, presenting, writing, researching, developing new courses and revising existing courses. So this week I went to a two-day workshop on course development and revision at our university’s centre on teaching and learning. And yes, developing a course involves a lot more than grabbing a text-book and thinking about what assignments could make a student want to jump off a bridge.

As usual, I grabbed two gems from this workshop. First, I learned the importance of explicitly linking objectives, class activities and assessment together. So if you want a learning objective that the student be able to write an effective marketing recommendation, you should probably have an activity in class teaching them how to write an effective recommendation, and then measure that recommendation in a graded assignment. Second, I loved something called the “graphic syllabus”. Essentially a graphic syllabus is a visual representation of how the topics, skills and assessments all work together in your course outline.

What made me a good teacher ten years ago will not make me a good teacher today. We know more about what good teaching is today, we have more tools available, and students expectations have changed with new technology and different life experiences.

What made you a good manager or leader ten years ago may not work today. Our biggest challenges are to “unlearn” old lessons, to make room for new lessons. Have you learned anything new in the past six month? Are your knowledge, skills and abilities becoming irrelevant? Have you invested in learning recently? maybe it’s time.

Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man?

There is a leadership gap. Women don’t hold as many leadership positions as men. According to Alice Eagly, only 2% of Fortune 500 CEO positions are held by women.There is no clear cause (although there are a whole lot of possible causes). The barriers to women in leadership are cultural, organizational and individual. We hold beliefs about the appropriate behaviour of men and women that limit women. We hold beliefs about ourselves. Organizations develop structures and systems that reward men and limit women. And yes, women make choices that create their own limitations.

Many of the cultural barriers to women’s leadership are derived from implicit beliefs about the appropriateness of certain behaviours that are critical to leadership. For example, powerful women are believed to be unsuited for leadership when they talk more than average, whereas powerful men are believed to be more competent and more suited for leadership. When women get angry in the workplace they are judged as out of control and incompetent, whereas angry men are judged as more competent. Keep in mind that we are not aware of these judgments. In fact if you asked explicitly these same observers would tell you that “of course women make good leaders”. The judgment happens unconsciously.

The comments I received on these more detailed posts were interesting. They highlight the conundrum we face as leaders – do we accept social norms and change our behaviour to more appropriate “female” behaviour, or do we try to enlighten or change the way that culture and organizations see women?

This choice has very real consequences for many women. If we accept social norms, we may achieve some organizational success and acquire lower level leadership positions.  However, it is unlikely that we will break through to more senior leadership positions, as they call for more traditional male behaviour, which women are judged as inappropriate and out of control.

If we choose to behave in a more masculine way, more talkative, engaged and action oriented we can, perhaps, be at the vanguard of changing the way both men and women think about what is “appropriate” behaviour by each of the stereotypes. This choice means that we’re investing in long-term gain for all women.  It likely means that attainment of even moderate leadership roles might be beyond the reach of this less traditional female.

Many women used to say that you need to behave like a man to achieve leadership roles. In fact, the research suggests that you will be judged incompetent if you behave like a woman, (although people will like you), and judged angry, incompetent and unsuited for leadership if you behave like a man. So even if we could “behave like a man”, as Henry Higgins suggested in My Fair Lady, the result is not likely the acquisition of a leadership position.

So what’s a girl to do? Pick the pragmatic “behave like a girl” option, achieve moderate success and enjoy being liked? Or pick the more idealistic option to try to change how people see these stereotypes, fight through the challenges, take the risk that you might accomplish more, or you might be relegated to the category of “loose cannon”.  That answer is personal to each individual.  Maybe the question should be “Why Should a Woman be More Like a Man?”

#Leadership & Power: Good Girls Don’t Talk

Find “your voice”, “speak your mind”, if I hear this advice to women one more time, I think I’m going to scream. Why? Because at least for high powered women, speaking your mind may result in backlash.

A recent study by Victoria Brescoll suggests that a high powered female CEO who was perceived to talk more than the average CEO was ranked by both male and female observers as less competent and less “suitable for leadership” than a male CEO who spoke for an equal amount of time. It also showed that male CEOs who were less talkative than average was seen as less competent and less suitable for leadership than a more talkative male CEO.

Powerful women reported reducing their volubility (or the amount of time they spoke in a group), because they feared backlash. And that backlash is real, if the study is accurate. Less powerful women did not reduce their contributions, however, their contributions were different than those of men.  Women were more interested in developing and maintaining relationships with others in the group, while men were more interested in establishing dominance.

Here is the unfortunate result of this research. It suggests the double bind that women experience in leadership roles. In order to be perceived as powerful and competent, they must act in a way that is inconsistent with power.  So if leaders talk, and powerful leaders talk more, but women aren’t allowed to talk, then they can not acquire power.  You get my drift.

This makes me sad, frustrated and angry all at once.  As an extroverted, talkative person, I hate this. But I can’t change it. I can only be aware of it. And I can work with my students to help them understand this double standard. If both men and women can see how their gender role expectations influence their judgements of both men and women, the possibility exists that we can reduce the impact of these judgements in the future. Maybe. Meantime, I’m going to be a bit more judicious in encouraging my female students to “find their voice”.

Source: Brescoll, Victoria L. “Who Takes the Floor and Why: Gender, Power, and Volubility in Organizations.” Administrative Science Quarterly 56, no. 4 (December 1, 2011): 622–641.

#Leadership: Emotions, Anger and Gender

Men can get angry at work, but women can’t. Really. A recent study from Victoria Brescoll and Eric Luis Uhlmann supports this fact.

Adult men and women were shown videotapes of both men and women who were being interviewed for a job. In the interviews they described a situation in which they lost a major client to a colleague. The interviewee was either sad or angry as a result of this situation.

Angry men were assigned more status, salary and competence than sad men by both men and women observing the interviews. The angry men were also assigned more status, salary and competence than the angry women.

Respondents were asked whether the anger was due to the person (“she/he became angry because of his/her personality” or “she/he is an angry person”) or if it was due to the situation (“she/he became angry because of the situation” or “her/his colleague’s behaviour caused her/his anger”).  Participants were more likely to believe that women’s anger was due to her personality, while men’s anger was due to the situation.Thus, women were incompetent and out of control when angry, while men were competent and justified in their anger.

So does it matter what occupational rank the woman holds? Rank (e.g. CEO as compared to trainee) did not change participants assessment that angry women were less competent, deserved a lower salary or had lower status.  If anything, higher ranking women who expressed anger were judged more harshly in terms of competence.

If women provided a reason for her anger, she received  higher status, was attributed a higher salary, but it did not “influence perceptions of her competence” as compared to a women who did not provide a reason for her anger. She was still perceived as being less competent than an angry man.

Interestingly, if a man provided a reason for his anger, his attributed status and salary were LOWER than a man who did not provide a reason for his anger. In other words, we don’t expect men to explain or justify their anger.

The authors suggest that these results fit with the theory of “emotional display rules”. In other words, there are certain emotions that men are allowed to display, and certain emotions that women are allowed to display. If these rules are violated, both men and women seem to be judged harshly. Men are not allowed to be sad, or to apologize.  Women are not allowed to be angry.

As sad as this makes me, this is what it is. It’s way beyond my pay grade to try to change eons of history. It means that, whether I like it or not, this is the world in which I live. While I want to bemoan the unfairness of it all, to quote my dad, “life is not fair”.

Source:

Brescoll, Victoria L., and Eric Luis Uhlmann. “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead? Status Conferral, Gender, and Expression of Emotion in the Workplace.” Psychological Science (Wiley-Blackwell) 19, no. 3 (March 2008): 268–275.