The traits that define ‘great’ leadership need to be de–gendered: empathy, humility and vulnerability are among the qualities required now.
As we head towards a new year, the working world feels as if it is slowly emerging from close to two years of turmoil. But it’s definitely not a return to normal: the 2021 Edelman Trust barometer identifies “a failing trust ecosystem leaving the four institutions – business, government, NGOs and media – in an environment of information bankruptcy”. It makes for sobering reading. The pandemic has heightened the urgency of addressing problems across so many aspects of society: from healthcare to education, poverty to climate change, misinformation to discrimination and racism. The list goes on.
Trust in business may be at its lowest in nearly a decade but, nonetheless, CEOs are expected to fill the gaps left by governments, taking the lead on tackling these issues and making themselves visibly accountable for doing so, not just to their employees and shareholders, but to the public too. All of which makes the job of any CEO today both more complex and more urgent.
These challenges aren’t likely to go away in the post pandemic world. If the Edelman study tells us anything, it’s that we need leaders who understand how to rebuild trust, rather than assuming it is naturally bestowed on those in authority and power. And I think that argues for a very different set of leadership attributes from those we have typically valued and rewarded. These comprise empathy, vulnerability, humility, integrity and collaboration (see box).
Full disclosure, I write this as President of WACL (Women in Advertising and Communications Leadership), a UK-based non-profit with a mission to accelerate gender equality for the benefit of all. And yes, many of the female leaders I know display the traits I have outlined, but they are in no way exclusive to women. Just as leadership traits such as decisiveness, ambition, strategic focus and confidence have been more associated with men (even though many female leaders exemplify them), there is a danger that a call for more empathy, integrity, vulnerability and humility, could be oversimplified as a call for more “female” qualities.
And there’s the rub: leadership remains a concept that is too often associated with characteristics that are inherently gendered. If we want to develop diverse leadership teams made up of the people most capable of leading for change, we need to start by de-gendering the traits that define what “great” looks like.
Currently our biases about leadership capability trump reality. The data tells us that women are rated more highly than men on the vast majority of key characteristics associated with good leadership, and yet they remain woefully underrepresented in those roles.