Women As Leader 2

As in the previous article you read about women as leader , now read more about them.The new studies offer some clues about why the cultural mismatch between women and large companies persists and why it's so critical to keep women on board. What makes the new research more compelling than other such data is that it is based on results culled from executives' actual performance evaluations rather than on opinion surveys or experiments that simulate business situations.

Sometimes it may be difficult to have an idea .Because the participants had no idea that their evaluations would end up as part of a study on gender, the data are untainted, says Janet Irwin, a California management consultant who conducted one of the studies. ''We were startled by the results,'' she says.

Irwin and her colleagues discovered that women ranked higher than men on 28 of 31 measures. Irwin was stunned by women's consistently high ratings and how the scores defied conventional wisdom. Contrary to stereotypes, women outperformed men in all kinds of intellectual areas, such as producing high-quality work, recognizing trends, and generating new ideas and acting on them. ''Women's strengths are stronger than men's,'' says Irwin, ''and their weaknesses are not as pronounced.''

Several other studies showed similar patterns. Personnel Decisions International, a consulting firm in Minneapolis, looked at a huge sample--58,000 managers--and found that women outranked men in 20 of 23 areas. Larry Pfaff, a Michigan management consultant, examined evaluations from 2,482 executives from a variety of companies and found that women outperformed men on 17 of 20 measures.

Some of the researchers draw different conclusions, though, arguing that the research shows that women executives are equally effective as their male counterparts but not necessarily superior. While women score better, and the scores are statistically significant, says Susan Gebelein, executive vice-president of Personnel Decisions, those differences don't mean much in the real world. Why? Because the consulting firm has tested so many thousands of people, which can make minor differences appear more important than they really are. Women have always outscored men in such evaluations, says Gebelein, whose company began looking at gender differences in 1984. And they score highest at the most male-dominated companies because, she surmises, of the type of woman who succeeds in such environments--someone who must be superior in every way.

Robert Kabacoff, a vice-president at Management Research Group in Portland, Me., also wondered if women were getting higher test scores in these studies for reasons other than gender. They might have rated higher because they weren't being compared with men holding similar jobs, he suggests. Managers of human-resources departments often get rated higher on people skills than other supervisors, for instance. If the majority of female managers in a study work in human resources, vs. only a minority of males, the results may have more to do with job than gender.

MISUNDERSTOOD. To eliminate such potential distortions, Kabacoff conducted a differently designed study in 1998. He compared male and female managers who worked at the same companies, held similar jobs, were at the same management level, and had the same amount of supervisory experience. When he examined 1,800 supervisors in 22 management skills, he found that women outranked men on about half of the measures. Female managers were graded more effective by peers and subordinates, but bosses still judged men and women equally competent as leaders. ''Men and women seem to be doing roughly equally effective jobs, but they approach their jobs differently,'' says Kabacoff.

Certainly, many women managers are keenly aware that they inhabit a different reality at the office than men. Nancy Hawthorne, former chief financial officer at Continental Cablevision Inc., who is now a consultant, says she often felt her bosses ''wondered what the heck I was doing.'' At meetings, she often allowed subordinates to explain the details of ongoing projects. She felt her role was to delegate tasks to people around her to help them be more effective. ''I was being traffic cop and coach and facilitator,'' she said. ''I was always into building a department that hummed.''

And sometimes, women say, they were badgered about using the very skills the research found so valuable. Sandra Kiely, managing director and chief administrative officer at National City Investment Management Co. in Cleveland, recalls that one of her bosses at National City Bank warned that her management style would hurt her career. ''You should be looking out for yourself, not your people,'' he advised her.

Everyone knows that women have long excelled at teamwork, but getting results was one of the categories in which women earned their highest marks in these studies. Jackie Streeter, Apple Computer Inc.'s ( AAPL) vice-president for engineering, says she has repeatedly volunteered to shift dozens of employees out of her division because she felt they would better fit into a different department--a move that she says ''startled'' her male colleagues. ''It's not the size of your organization that counts but the size of the results you get,'' says Streeter, who has 350 people working for her.

Women As Leader

In past it was very difficult to imagine that a women can also work like men. But today there are many fields in which women are working side by side.Twenty-five years after women first started pouring into the labor force--and trying to be more like men in every way, from wearing power suits to picking up golf clubs--new research is showing that men ought to be the ones doing more of the imitating. In fact, after years of analyzing what makes leaders most effective and figuring out who's got the Right Stuff, management gurus now know how to boost the odds of getting a great executive: Hire a female.

That's the essential finding of a growing number of comprehensive management studies conducted by consultants across the country for companies ranging from high-tech to manufacturing to consumer services. By and large, the studies show that women executives, when rated by their peers, underlings, and bosses, score higher than their male counterparts on a wide variety of measures--from producing high-quality work to goal-setting to mentoring employees. Using elaborate performance evaluations of execs, researchers found that women got higher ratings than men on almost every skill measured. Ironically, the researchers weren't looking to ferret out gender differences. They accidentally stumbled on the findings when they were compiling hundreds of routine performance evaluations and then analyzing the results.

The gender differences were often small, and men sometimes earned higher marks in some critical areas, such as strategic ability and technical analysis. But overall, female executives were judged more effective than their male counterparts. ''Women are scoring higher on almost everything we look at,'' says Shirley Ross, an industrial psychologist who helped oversee a study performed by Hagberg Consulting Group in Foster City, Calif. Hagberg conducts in-depth performance evaluations of senior managers for its diverse clients, including technology, health care, financial-service, and consumer-goods companies. Of the 425 high-level executives evaluated, each by about 25 people, women execs won higher ratings on 42 of the 52 skills measured.
The growing body of new research comes at a time when talent-hungry recruiters are scrambling to find execs who can retain workers and who can excel in the smaller bureaucracies of New Economy companies. Women think through decisions better than men, are more collaborative, and seek less personal glory, says the head of IBM's Global Services Div., Douglas Elix, who hired two managers within this year--both women. Instead of being motivated by self-interest, women are more driven by ''what they can do for the company,'' Elix says. Adds Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, author of the 20-year-old management classic, Men and Women of the Corporation: ''Women get high ratings on exactly those skills needed to succeed in the global Information Age, where teamwork and partnering are so important.''

It's no surprise, then, that some executives say they're beginning to develop a new hiring bias. If forced to choose between equally qualified male and female candidates for a top-level job, they say they often pick the woman--not because of affirmative action or any particular desire to give the female a chance but because they believe she will do a better job. ''I would rather hire a woman,'' says Anu Shukla, who sold her Internet marketing-software company Rubric Inc. earlier this year for $390 million. ''I know I'm going to get a certain quality of work, I know I'm going to get a certain dedication,'' she says, quickly adding that she's fully aware that not all women execs excel. Similarly, Brent Clark, CEO of Grand Rapids-based Pell Inc., the nation's largest foot-care chain, says he would choose a woman over a man, too. Women are more stable, he says, less turf-conscious, and better at ''all sorts of intangibles that can help an organization.''

But if women are so great, why aren't more of them running the big companies? Thousands of talented women now graduate from business schools and hold substantive middle-management jobs at major corporations--45% of all managerial posts are held by females, according to the Labor Dept. Yet only two of the nation's 500 biggest companies have female CEOs: Hewlett-Packard Co.'s ( HWP) Carly Fiorina and Avon Products' ( AVP) Andrea Jung. And of the 1,000 largest corporations, only six are run by women.

UNREWARDED. For one thing, there's still a pipeline problem: Most women get stuck in jobs that involve human resources or public relations--posts that rarely lead to the top. At the same time, female managers' strengths have long been undervalued, and their contributions in the workplace have gone largely unnoticed and unrewarded. Companies are now saying they want the skills women typically bring to the job, but such rhetoric doesn't always translate into reality. Some businesses view women only as workhorses, well-suited for demanding careers in middle management but not for prime jobs. These undercurrents of bias in Corporate America infuriate many women, who then bail out rather than navigate unsupportive terrain. ''They're doing the work, but they don't make it to the top,'' says Lyn Andrews, president of WebMD Health, a consumer unit of WebMD Corp. ( HLTH) in New York. Many start their own companies, while others seek a different work/family balance than many corporations offer. There are now more than 9 million women-owned businesses in the U.S., double the number 12 years ago. In future it may be very large.
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Sport and Business Connected

Your life is not a bed of roses. At some point in our lives we have all been coached through something for example in an athletic event, the birth of a child, coping with the loss of a loved one, shaving for the first time, or learning how to type.

All of these activities require some form of coaching. Whether it is athletically based or teaching a life lesson, instructors are essential to life. After all, that is what sport and life consist of--setting goals and achieving them.

During conversations with business professionals and professors, I learned that there were five areas that, with incorporation, could efficiently improve employee output. These areas were Teamwork, Communication, Creativity, Time Management, and Leadership. Each was as important as the others and all were dependent on one another. In today's growing global economy, we could very well be coaching our current and future employees to adapt to their changing environment and so better serve the goal(s) of their company.

Teamwork is becoming a lost concept in today's capitalistic approach to accomplishing goals. Human nature compels us to take care of ourselves primarily and make sure that we survive , a characteristic that has crept into the business approach to success.

This natural desire combined with the preference of many professionals to work independently eliminates group discussion, the introduction of multiple opinions, and ultimately prevent the best solution from being utilized.

With the help of team work one can achieve even harder goal.

One person cannot efficiently perform a task without some direction. Coaches are trained to get people to cooperate and to evaluate individual strengths and assign group tasks in order to accomplish the team goal.

Coaches will also put each person in the role that will best prepare him to make the goal achievable. The best teams will be those whose players will do anything for the teammates beside them on game day.

If their biggest fear is letting their teammates down, the coach can consider himself successful. The players have learned the value of teamwork. This concept will remain with them for the rest of their lives.

TEAMWORK:

How can we teach this? In my four years of collegiate experience, I structured the activities outside of football, such as obstacle courses, team bowling, community service, etc., where the players must use all their skills to accomplish a common goal and communicate the best ways to foster togetherness.

These activities enable the players to interact with one another off the field and take care of each other on game day. Management can use the same techniques with their employees. Make the employees see that they are all part of the same family.

Communication accompanies the concept of teamwork. Without it, there is no teamwork, and in order for a business to build it, it must coach its employees to communicate with one another, even use hand signals to communicate everyone's responsibility.

For instance, a quarterback may tap his helmet to let the wide receiver know that he is going to throw him the ball. In response, the wide receiver may tap his helmet to let the quarterback understand what he is supposed to do.

The point is that both players are communicating despite the obstacles and the coach is facilitating the communication.

Co-workers have to overcome obstacles such as distance, difference in personal or business background, language barriers, etc, so they can accomplish the goal of the company.

Sometimes people think that it is impossible to do this task , but one if determined , he can achieve his target.

Coaches are using hand signals to help their teams overcome the screaming crowds by the communication of basic information. The smallest changes in a routine or creative effort are often accepted as a miracle.

For example, Bob Stoops, the football coach at Oklahoma, allows his offensive and defensive linemen to go out for passes or field kicks. He also organizes touch football games in which everyone is allowed to run, throw, or catch the ball.

This may not seem like a novel concept, but when offensive or defensive linemen are allowed to experience these aspects of the game it involves them more in the total team goal.

Stoops is using a creative and constructive (fun) way to condition his players and break up the monotony of the long season.

Business coaches can use this same type of creativity by planning softball leagues, picnics, cooking classes, or encouraging employees to express their ideas on company management. Anyone who wants to learn how to run his business more efficiently can call upon those who are involved in the day-to-day operation of the company.

Like Coach Stoops, we are trying to rejuvenate the attitudes of company employees. Our aim is to convey work as not just a place to collect a paycheck, but as an area in which employees can come to express their creativity, share ideas with one another, and build a bond that will carry over after work is finished.