woensdag, februari 16, 2011

Leadership and gender

For years leadership has been a hot topic. As a buzzword 'innovation' has taken over. I never thought the word 'NEW' would be old someday. But today NEW is not good enough any more. It has to be innovative.
Meanwhile the leadership issue itself has not been resolved. Not by far. Not in the real world and not even in our minds. That is a problem.

Problems are the only things that totally automatically stay with you wherever you go. And there are still a lot of leadership issues to be solved if we want new more effective ways of working and collaborating to emerge succesfully. (For now I'll just skip discussing the buzzword 'emergence'.)

This morning I received an email from the great Marjolein Hins owner of the Dutch company Qsearch. About a seminar on the modernization of the executive assistant. Clearly targeted at females. Despite decades of emancipation, it's mostly women serving man. There is even a saying stating "Behind every great man ther is a great woman." And today, contrarily to my younger self, I am convinced this is the natural way. Simply because we are defined this way biologically. Statistically women are far superior in handling the nitty gritty processes, while  most men function better in chasing challenging goals. So trying to change this natural bias is waste of energy. I already lost an enormous amount of energy fighting natural patterns.

1 opmerking:

Harry van der Velde zei

Een beroep op de natuur is geen sterk argument. Je doet toch ook wat aan je biologisch bepaalde slechte ogen? Of gooi die bril en die lensjes weg. En als je naar Zaandam wilt, ga je toch ook niet lopen? So ... doe er wat aan en leg het probleem niet bij de natuur. Natuurlijk natuur. Maar dat is geen lot. Meer een kans voor een klein leermomentje. M.i ligt de uitdaging meer in de noodzaak tot bescheidenheid: we kunnen de wereld alleen in heel kleine stapjes veranderen en alleen op de plek waar je staat. Welterusten en xxx. Zussie