Post-Vision - Building Gender Balanced Business

Leaders, home-owners and newspaper readers around the world are struggling to see and measure the size and impact of the economic tsunami heading our way. The result is a global holding of breath. Like the stillness before the storm, companies are cutting employees, employees are cutting spending, and those with nothing to cut are feeling the pinch.

Leading economists admit that they have no tools to manage this crisis. Globalisation and billions of interactions make this a lesson in blindness. The first reaction seems to be wait, see and cut.

Time for women to step up
This is the time for women to step up. A new world is waiting to be born. Women are, as usual, helpful in the birthing process. And it takes male and female complementarities to ensure the baby is born healthy…

The temptation is to find a miraculous leader, a knight in shining armour, to part the waters, hold back the demons, bring us out of this mess. People are yearning for a leader with a vision, and the strength to get the troops to line up behind him. This is the dream behind Obama’s success (despite his reluctance to specify a precise vision). Overwhelming, impossible expectations, sure to end in a disappointment commensurate with the unrealistic level of hope projected on a single president. Corporate leaders feel a similar pressure.

Old patriarchs would dearly love to return to the global power balances of yesteryear, with guns and oil as carrot and stick. They are like the sad couple down the street, the rich, brutish husband with the cowed wife and kids. Some may be tempted by the familiarity of the model… but even in some of these families, change is in the offing. Witness the recent announcement that Saudi King Abdullah has appointed a woman to a ministerial post for the first time.

The image that comes to mind is the world as a huge pregnant woman, sweating and straining and breaking at the seams. Something big, something new is about to emerge, and we have no idea at all what it may look like. Some would desperately like to take control, get out their knives, time a cesarean. Get this thing organized and the family back to 6pm dinner.

But the world does not need surgeons right now. It needs midwives and supportive spouses. It needs people who will facilitate a safe and relaxed context for the new world to emerge, unscathed and naked into a new millennium. People who remind us to breathe, to be patient and strong. At ease with the pain, the pushing and the pleasures of the unknown. We need soft voices and trusting hearts, who work together for a common purpose: the health of an emerging global humanity.

Dump the vision thing
An article in January’s Harvard Business Review entitled Women and the Vision Thing, explained that women weren’t making it in the business world because they lacked the only quality where men outperformed them: vision. (Women were perceived to outperform men on 9 out of 10 of the other leadership competencies).

Women don’t arrive with answers, designed around their own truths. They are more modest than that. They still ask questions, are comfortable with ignorance – their own and other people’s. They are more interested in connectedness than power, in conversation than competition, in complexity than clarity. Or, as Serge Thill, a European coach, puts it: “Men are good at playing by the rules of the game. Women don’t think it’s a game.” This is precisely the approach we need in these uncharted times.

OK, the games may be fun. The skills they’ve built are essential. Progress has been made. And maybe it’s time to collectively call it game over. It’s time to grow up and have a conversation… with both halves of the human whole.

Together, women and men can achieve things unseen until now. True partnership in power between the genders could be revolutionary and paradigm-shifting.

A better and more connected world
Together, it could lead to that most joyous of events. We could give birth to a millennium that will be deeply global and deeply interdependent. If ever there was time for new metaphors this is it. The global family has yet to be recognized, the rules are yet to be defined. An official marriage ceremony would be nice, to start. Who will eat and at what time? Who will do the dishes, and who will take out the garbage? Who will clean up the garden and who will get fuel for the car? Who will set the rules, and will they be loved or feared?

“When we become more aware of the dynamic whole, we also become more aware of what is emerging” say the authors of Presence, Human Presence and the Field of the Future, Peter Senge among them.

We would argue that at this precise moment in history, it is time to admit that we cannot see. And time to learn to collectively listen instead. To each other, and to the world about to be born. So bring vision, if you have any. Then add sense and sensibility.