Do Women Really Lack Vision? - Building Gender Balanced Business

• A finding by the INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra that some executives think women lack what they called vision is leading some women to take action.

• The study by the professor of organizational behavior at the French school was based on responses by nearly 3,000 male and female executives plus 22,000 of their supervisors, peers and subordinates. Vision was the sole quality where women were found deficient, and even then only by some groups of the respondents.

• But if perception is reality — and while we won’t argue the effect, we certainly dispute the validity of the perception — some women are attacking the perception while others are working on the perceived reality.

• Glyn Aeppel, chief investment officer of the global hotel developer André Balazs Properties, told Forbes that she was concerned that too much focus on minutiae, her self-described forte at the company, may have obscured her wide-frame view as an executive. She wanted to step back to plan forward—the “vision thing.” Long-range strategizing toward overarching goals needed to be her priority.

• Beth Brooke, global vice chair of Ernst & Young, instead questions the view of “vision”. “Women tend to walk all the way around a problem,” she says, which means they tend to work collaboratively and listen to diverse points of view before drawing conclusions — an inclusive approach that leads to them being tagged as lacking vision.

• Olivia Fox Cabane, an executive coach argues many women have a lower level of self-confidence. “If you look across the globe, women tend to beat themselves up more than men do,” she says. “In order to be a visionary leader, you need self-confidence. Otherwise, you’ve got brilliant people with low levels of impact.”

The Forbes article