A Competitive Edge: COVID-19 is Transforming the Way We Think about Female Leadership - by Sukhi Suresh
Picture 1, Source: The Guardian
During these unprecedented times, we are witnessing a change in our perceptions about what constitutes a powerful leadership strategy. Countries with female leaders have suffered six times fewer confirmed deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic compared with nations led by men. Leading with empathy, speed and decisiveness has proven to be a successful and effective strategy. Research shows that during times of hardship, people value stereotypically feminine attributes, including emotional sensitivity and cooperation.
The superior performance reflects these well-established gender differences in leadership potentials, with the corporate world filled with examples of this ‘think crisis-think female’ bias. For instance, through her six-month long 20% pay cut for senior government leaders, Jacinda Arden’s empathetic rationality has highlighted the effectiveness of connecting with others through uncertain and challenging times.
Despite leadership successes, women continue to be othered in relation to their male counterparts and are reduced to having only care qualities. Rather than reinforcing gender binaries which in turn perpetuate women’s difference to men, we need to redefine a feminine symbolic of leadership to ensure that they don’t purely represent a care function. As Borgerson (2018, p. 3) notes, ‘caring characteristics and caring interactions when embodied by women at work, and in everyday life, appear to undermine positive perceptions of female agency, reinforcing a general underestimation of female potential.”
The question now lies in how we can harness this crisis and the actions taken to mould our future. We have to be able to learn from these experiences to shape new expectations and avoid jumping back to the status quo. In our post-COVID world, we may be saying our goodbyes to our preference for tough and bold leadership styles to welcome a more balanced one based on greater levels of trust and humility.
Learning from these values displayed, organizations should aim to incorporate them to determine the ways we recover. This strategy is by no means limited to women and approaching similar crises might aid other leaders both in the present and future to foster an environment of innovation and creativity. While this black-swan event will redefine the way, we choose leaders and core leadership values, it is equally vital that female leadership isn’t only defined by its care function. We should embrace the fact that female leaders can both display empathy and humility while being bold and decisive in their nature. By valuing the diversity of leadership styles, organizations will become more resilient and adaptable in their nature to survive these volatile, highly competitive economic environments.
by Sukhi Suresh
References:
Borgerson, J. (2018). Caring and power in female leadership: A philosophical approach. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Chamorro-Premuzic, T. and Wittenberg-Cox, A. (2020). Will the Pandemic Reshape Notions of Female Leadership? [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2020/06/will-the-pandemic-reshape-notions-of-female-leadership.
Saïd Business School. (n.d.). Leading with empathy in the pandemic. [online] Available at: https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/oxford-answers/leading-empathy-pandemic.
Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (n.d.). Are Women Better At Managing The Covid19 Pandemic? [online] Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomaspremuzic/2020/04/10/are-female-leaders-better-at-managing-the-covid19-pandemic/?sh=6326d26028d4[Accessed 26 Nov. 2020].
Pullen, A. and Vachhani, S.J. (2020). Feminist Ethics and Women Leaders: From Difference to Intercorporeality. Journal of Business Ethics. Available at:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-020-04526-0
HBS Working Knowledge. (2020). Are Candor, Humility, and Trust Making a Comeback? [online] Available at: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/are-candor-humility-and-trust-making-a-comeback[Accessed 26 Nov. 2020].