Spelling Out Women's Natural Managerial Skills - Building Gender Balanced Business

• The management consultant James Adonis outlines major attributes that he deems feminine and highly successful, and then associates such strengths to individual successful women from business and elsewhere.

• Noting the growing importance of “people focused” as opposed to “task focused” management and then citing studies showing how women outperform men in such leadership, Adonis describes the brunt of his article as the “fluffy stuff.”

• “Women are masters at fluffy stuff. The loving, the nurturing, the touching – hearts, that is. … [F]ocus on the general female attributes that men could learn from.”

• Warning: sweeping generalisations ahead! But that does not mean we should ignore his insights.

• Adonis first cites Indira Gandhi, and her advice that modern Ieadership “means getting along with people”, as instruction on how to use peer-to-peer loyalty as the (successful) replacement for fast-eroding employee loyalty to companies. “To women, getting personal isn’t about the holes of golf they play with their colleagues, but the wholes of life they discover within their employees.”

• To foster such loyalty takes empathy, and Adonis cites Mother Teresa to say, “Women are better at caring than men. Compassion, empathy, sensitivity — it’s all second nature to them. … Where women offer sympathy, men offer solutions.

• Rewarding such loyalty involves praise, and here Adonis gushes about women. “It is their highest priority … women are always on the lookout to catch an employee doing something right.” His example is Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, who said she worked to “make heroes out of the employees who personify what you want to see in the organisation”.

• Women’s “realness” is described as “[w]omen don’t hide behind a macho facade as do many men … They articulate their values and live by them.” His example is Margaret Thatcher, though with little explanation.

• Different priorities and a need for balance are exemplified by Adonis by the cosmetics mogul Mary Kay Ash, whose mantra he quotes as “God first, family second, career third”, saying Ash “didn’t want any of her employees sacrificing their work-life balance just for a pay cheque”. Women’s focus on flexibility, he says, helps them help employees achieve balance instead of burning out.

Adonis’s column in The Sydney Morning Herald