Balanced Leadership - Building Gender Balanced Business

BY LINDA TARR-WHELAN

We are missing leaders with a different mix of skills to meet the fast-paced changing global realities in business, finance and politics – and provide mid-course corrections to the “customary “practices of today’s insiders who have brought businesses and countries down an unsustainable path.

Balanced leadership is the answer
Just men at the top or the one-at-a-time progression of women upward toward a new leadership mix are not enough. Balanced leadership is the answer with at least a critical mass of women (the 30% Solution) at power tables to be both heard and heeded.

I wrote Women Lead the Way: Your Guide to Stepping Up to Leadership and Changing the World (Berrett-Koehler, 2009) to speed up progress and gain the powerful advantages of balanced leadership to the economy, families and the society.

Leadership style for a better world
Extensive research and experience has shown that balanced leadership does open opportunity for more women to move upward and generates new policies and practices regarding family and work. And it does much more.

The World Bank, the World Economic Forum and the Economist all tell us plainly, the economy as if women mattered — womenomics — is the future.

The case for more women in leadership is strong: greater profitability for companies, a more robust economy, and a potentially more compassionate society and vibrant democracy.

The need for change
The cost of inaction is a heavy one. The talent pipeline in a knowledge economy requires higher levels of education: women are the majority of college graduates. Thoughtful women-led solutions to address tough societal problems remain marginalized as “women’s issues.”

Women bring the leadership skills needed for sustained success; rooted in collaboration, partnerships, relationships and desperately needed longer-horizon thinking.

In a varied career which has taken me from nursing to the international arena and crossed all three sectors, I’ve met incredible women. I heard the same story over and over: top jobs continue to be largely closed to women.

To change what is decided we must change who makes the decisions. My book lays out the practical tools for women to lead the way – with like-minded men – to tap this reservoir of creativity, talent, and entrepreneurial energy now held back by out-worn policies, unnecessary and counterproductive barriers and a powerful set of myths and stereotypes.

Former Ambassador Linda Tarr-Whelan is a Demos Distinguished Senior Fellow and Director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative. Her book Women Lead the Way: Your Guide to Stepping up to Leadership and Changing the World, will be published in 2009. She served as Ambassador to the UN Commission on the Status of Women in the Clinton Administration and as Deputy Assistant to President Jimmy Carter for Women’s Concerns in the White House.

Named as one of the 50 most powerful women in Washington by Ladies Home Journal, she was Administrative Director of the New York State Department of Labor, Policy Director for AFSCME, AFL-CIO, Government Relations Director and Chief Lobbyist for the National Education Association, President/CEO of the Center for Policy Alternatives, and with her husband, the Managing Partner of Tarr-Whelan & Associates, Inc, an international management consultancy.

Linda began her career as a nurse and holds a BSN from Johns Hopkins, an MS from the University of Maryland, and honorary PhDs from Chatham University in Pittsburgh and Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.