Whenever I hear that the reason women haven’t yet scaled the heights of the corporate world due to the apparent absence of visible ambition, I assume that the media must be a very different industry to the rest.
Ever since I was an idealistic young journalist with a list of highly ambitious career goals to tick off, I have been surrounded by women just like me. Whenever a senior member of the team would leave (more often than not to accept a promotion elsewhere or back herself scaling new heights in a foreign country), there would be dozens of female hands in the air to replace her. A year after I graduated from Uni I was employed as a journalist at News Limited’s then Sydney afternoon newspaper The Daily Mirror. It was clear that it would be tough for a young woman to rise through the ranks with any speed so I didn’t hesitate to move to women’s magazines where I was sure that I could. I had no trouble leaning in. And that was 1988.
A recent poll conducted by the Center for American Progress in conjunction with US ELLE magazine found that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s call for women to start leaning in was in fact unnecessary. Women are already leaning in.
According to a Daily Beast article, US ELLE editor-in-chief Robbie Myers said of the results: “Women report they are leaning in and staying forward, and they’re seeking raises and promotions.”
The poll revealed exactly what I had witnessed during the 25 years that I have been managing teams: women are stepping forward for promotions and they are making themselves known through networking opportunities. So why aren’t women progressing to the top as rapidly and in the same volume as men if we are leaning in and have been for some time? According to the survey respondents it’s because women are still perceived as not being tough enough. It comes back to management style. And that is certainly my experience.
For decades we have been told that leaders need to have greater empathy. Any management school course on managing people will teach you that collegiate managers and democratic leaders achieve greater team outcomes than autocratic leaders. And yet there is still a natural unconscious bias towards managers who flex a bit of muscle and grandstand to get the job done. Male managers have been historically more likely to behave like this.
My first job as a manager was as editor of Dolly. After an initial restructuring and rebuilding of the team that magazine ran like a well-oiled machine for the five years that I was in charge. My style was collegiate. I had a talented team that I had mostly hand-picked and I let them work within and right up against the boundaries. The magazine’s direction and culture was set by me but we brainstormed together to get the winning ideas that lifted our sales and profit. Clearly in any blue sky session there are many more ideas than can fit into one edition of a magazine and that was my job: to choose the best of the best ideas to run with. It worked for us. I had an older male manager who assumed the magazine was run by committee because he never saw me pulling team members into line or screaming at anyone, and also because I would often credit my team when he pointed to an idea that he found particularly engaging. It surprised me that he assumed I wasn’t actually leading the team, but back then I didn’t think anything of it.
These days that kind of assumption would demonstrate a disconnect from the reality of what makes for successful business outcomes. But assumptions like that are still made by leaders who lack an understanding of the effectiveness of that leadership style. Female managers on the whole may not act tough in the workplace but that doesn’t mean we don’t have things firmly under control. But it does explain why the (mostly) men who are currently choosing the next group of leaders still see women as not tough enough.
It’s a frustrating circle of misperception that will only end when the old-fashioned style of autocratic chest-beating leadership dies out with the retirement of the (mostly) men and (some specific cases of) women. It’s coming.