Since co-authoring Breaking The Glass Ceiling: Can Women Reach The Top Of America’s Largest Corporations? in1987 (paperback in 1994), we’ve seen great progress in the advancement of women in business.

Last week Katrin Bennhold noted in International Herald Tribune that breaking the glass ceiling is now happening, somewhat ironically, with the examples and initiatives of men. She writes of an ambiguous landscape in gender equity:

In the early 21st century, women in the developed world find themselves in a peculiar place. With boys failing in school and working-class men losing their jobs to the economic crisis, pundits predict not just The Death of Macho (Foreign Policy, September 2009) but The End of Men (The Atlantic, July/August 2010).

Reality is more nuanced. Women earn more doctorates, but less money. They are overtaking men in the work force, but still do most housework. They make the consumer decisions but run only 3 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

“In theory, we now have equal rights,” sighed one senior female executive at a French multinational, who tellingly requested anonymity for fear of riling the men at her company. “In practice, we still have babies.

In the Western world, motherhood remains the barrier to gender equality…MORE”

Bennhold suggest that the more women-focused adjustments of the first wave of workplace gender equity, such as maternity leave, are vital but also reinforce the role of women as primary caregivers…caregivers who don’t get leadership positions, despite their qualifications.

Some organizations are putting the mantle of nurturer on dads by stressing the importance of paternity leave and by putting more men in charge of gender diversity as a matter of building greater awareness of sexism among the sex that still makes the most money and gets the most promotions. While we’ve seen that blatant sexism is less prevalent than it once was, male leadership still hasn’t completely grasped the fact that high-performing women are often high-performing moms who can’t invest the same levels of extra-curricular time on their careers.

In coaching and learning interventions dealing with diversity, it’s time to marshal men to balance the workplace leadership as they get back in touch with their family responsibilities.

Giving the next generation strong father figures would not only help explode the glass ceiling, it might also be the best hope for those failing boys in school who lack male role models. MORE

Since Phil Hodgson and Executive Development Group partner Randy White published Relax, It’s Only Uncertainty in 2001, we have seen not only validation among the executives we work with, but also greater interest in the challenges of ambiguity in business.

At this week’s SIOP Annual Conference in Atlanta, Sandy Shullman and Randy were encouraged and delighted by the collaborative responses to the two half-day presentations. There appear to be some emerging perspectives on the subject as it relates to the practical applications of learning professionals. People in the field see a need to measure tolerance for ambiguity and the uncertainty that it brings in their quests for  potential leaders in their organizations.

It became apparent to us that this “aptitude for ambiguity” is indeed a trait sought by learning organizations like yours and a trait that can be developed.

As with most of our work, our study of ambiguity is a process that is informed and advanced by the questions learning executives bring. Presently, we are further developing our 360 assessment Ambiguity Architect®, so these kinds of mini-focus groups are invaluable. If your firm is interested in learning more about our work on ambiguity, please contact us via e-mail.

Dr. Randall P. White, Lecturer at Duke Corporate Education in London & Principal of Executive Development Group

Abstract
Reckless is an understatement. Barrelling forward with our greatest strength—growth at any cost—may have led to our greatest weakness as the US economy nose-dives. In our haste to deliver bottom line results, organisations have adopted a vetting process for leadership based on mining pre-existing strengths of individuals. This often succeeds with amazing short-term gains but just as often crashes in a cloud of conflict, miscalculations and, at times, questionable ethics.

To participate in this environment, individual managers have emboldened themselves with the get-rich-quick bravado of ‘find your strengths and put them to work’ like wildcat prospectors. Which leads to a topically apt analogy: the strengths movement has successfully framed leadership as a finite fossil fuel rather than a renewable agricultural resource. ‘Growing’ leaders, rather than ‘mining’ leaders, is a longer process, but it has been demonstrated to provide more effective leaders, better succession, less derailment and more engaged and fulfilled managers and executives.

Not all corporations have eschewed longitudinal development and executive education. So we don’t need so much a return to psychologically supported, self-awareness-based development, but rather a broader application of it.

The full article, bibliography, and list of proactive suggestions is printed in Business Leadership Review.

Research shows that women have a natural knack for leading through uncertainty, said Dr. Sandra L. Shullman, Executive Development Coach.

Read the full story in this month’s Monitor Psychology

Wanted: Leaders equipped for today’s trials
To become an effective leader in today’s volatile job market, tap your strengths—and learn some new ones.

By Tori DeAngelis

With today’s rapid globalization, changing technology and the turbulent economy, leaders must excel at dealing with change and ambiguity, said veteran leadership trainer Sandra Shullman, PhD, at the Aug. 12 APA Committee on Women in Psychology Leadership Institute for Women in Psychology.

“The rate and pace of change is extraordinarily high,” said Shullman. “It’s why so many leaders both in business and academia are staying up late at night, because it’s often unclear exactly which direction things are going.”

Fortunately for women, the leadership styles in vogue are ones that research shows women both prefer and are more effective for them, noted Shullman, a managing partner with the Columbus, Ohio, office of the Executive Development Group, an international leadership development and consulting firm.

Shullman advised the women to:

• Take a democratic rather than autocratic approach. Sometimes called a “transformational” leadership style, through this approach, leaders delegate some power and autonomy to employees and encourage their independence and creativity.

• Foster active, ongoing learning for both employees and leaders. Such learning is critical in getting up to speed with today’s global markets or with technology, she said.

• Learn through experience. Research shows that great leaders learn 70 percent of their leadership skills on the job, 20 percent from mentors and role models and 10 percent from coursework. That may be a hard concept for people in academia to accept, Shullman added, but they need to overcome the tendency to overthink, so they can act.

• Exploit your personal style. Good interpersonal skills are a mark of effective leaders. In particular, good leaders can read and respond to the emotional needs of a situation, she noted. “When 99 percent of the people in a group you’re leading are angry and you reflect that anger, you’re perceived as an effective leader,” she said. “If 99 percent of the group aren’t angry and you’re reflecting anger, you may be seen as out of touch with your group.”

• Be a “good enough” leader. Research shows that if leaders have 10 major leadership areas they need to attend to, great leaders do two or three of them extraordinarily well and seven or eight “well enough,” said Shullman. If you’re a whiz in your field and a clear, courageous decision-maker, for example, you don’t also have to be a top-notch organizer or an ace strategist.

Being less than 100 percent perfect “is a hard concept, especially for women,” said Shullman. “We tend to use our best area as the standard for all other things, so sometimes we don’t try new things.”

• Embrace challenge. How much you learn is directly related to the size of the challenges you face. Good leaders admit their mistakes and learn from them, she said. “Many of us keep our memories of failure like they should be preserved in a museum somewhere,” she said. Instead, solve the problem first and figure out what may have caused it later.

• Work on your behavior. Good tools are available to help you learn and work with your leadership style, including an inventory called the FIRO-B (Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-B), which participants took before arriving at the institute. The scale taps leaders’ expressed and desired needs for affection, control and inclusion and how those play out in leadership behavior preferences.

“Ultimately, people respond to how you act,” Shullman said, “and you can learn to work with your behavior.”

• Take time to learn. “You can’t teach people to be wonderful leaders in eight sessions,” said Shullman. Research also shows it’s better to focus on one or two things you can really sink your teeth into.

• Know your strengths and weaknesses. Work on your weaknesses to get them off of people’s radar. Work on your strengths “because that is what you could be known for,” Shullman said.

• No woman is an island. Research shows that people who share goals with valued colleagues are more likely to achieve them than those who don’t.

“Whether you go to a leadership training institute for one week, six weeks or six months,” Shullman said, “sharing your goal with significant colleagues at work is what seems to matter in terms of whether you do anything with what you’ve learned.”