Female Supremacy Articles - Page 12

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5 Ways Women Make Better Leaders

By Jo Miller, Women's Leadership Coach

As a young recruiting consultant in Australia, my first job was working for a female boss. She took any criticism, even constructive criticism, as a personal attack on her position of power, and would wait weeks before launching a counter-attack on an unsuspecting subordinate. The experience was so unsettling it almost discouraged me from wanting to become a manager, and made me think twice before accepting the next job working for a woman. My former boss, like many women, felt it was necessary to be tough to compete in a man's world.

Given this background, I was somewhat skeptical to learn about the ways that a woman's style of leadership differs from that of a man. It has often been said that women are better with the soft skills of management, like listening and communicating, while men excel at the hard skills such as analysis and decision-making. Conventional wisdom holds that a feminine leadership style would employ empathy rather than aggression, foster team-building instead of competition, and lead by consensus rather than by directing.

In the late '80s and early '90s, management books coached women to break through glass ceilings by acting more like men. Corporate women were advised to wear shoulder pads and use sports and military analogies to "play hardball" and "divide and conquer." But it was never proven that acting like men made women more adept leaders.