Twenty-five years ago, the role of manager was all about creating stability through planning, organising and controlling. Managers worked from a psychological contract of loyalty with employees.

The early 90’s brought leadership into prominence because management alone did not seem to be driving enough change and innovation.

In our view, Leadership and Management today are different yet complementary—both inextricably linked as they drive towards the same outcomes: results, business performance and sustainability.

So what is the difference? You’ll find good answers at www.marcusbuckingham.com and here’s a quick summary.

Management is about driving productivity within the organization. A manager’s focus needs to be on how to turn the talent of each individual into performance.

Effective managers daily ask themselves:

• Do the people for whom I am accountable have the opportunity to do what they do best every single day they are at work?
• Does each person know specifically what’s expected of them in their role?
• Is every person committed to delivering quality outcomes?

Leadership on the other hand is about being able to reach every person in the organisation in ways that engage their hearts and minds to want to take action that supports moving the company towards a better future. To achieve this requires the ability to envision a tangible and believable future, and be able to lead change and innovation.

The challenge for leaders today is setting a definitive direction amid a sea of rapid change, ambiguity and uncertainty.

Three questions a leader needs to ask are:

• Who do we serve and what certainty do we have that we are serving them in ways that meet their needs?
• What are our core strengths and are we doing everything to fully capitalise on them?
• What is our core score and does every person in our company know the part they have to play in contributing to our score?

Much continues to be written about leadership. But spare a thought for management. Both are necessary for business sustainability. Businesses today needs the leader’s vision to guide change and innovation but little happens without the skill of managersto drive productivity to execute and deliver the required outcomes.

What’s the right leadership /management balance for you in your role?

One of the profound differences between adult males and females emanates from two emotional systems that work simultaneously:

• The temporal-parietal junction system (TPJ) and
• The mirror-neuron system (MNS)

In males, the TPJ strengthens the ability to cognitively and analytically find a solution, an ability called ‘cognitive empathy’. Once a solution is found, the male cortex flashes with excitement: victory! The TPJ keeps a firm boundary between the emotions of ‘the self’ and ‘the other’. The MNS, which governs emotional empathy, activates only fleetingly in men, which causes them to miss emotional cues like tone of voice and facial expressions.

Females use and rely more on the MNS. This strengthens their emotional empathy and enables them to be acutely aware of the emotional responses of others. Females are able to read non-verbal cues for emotional nuances, such as others’ facial expressions, minute muscle movements and breathing. They are acutely aware of incongruities between what is said and tone of voice. As a result, females can identify and anticipate feelings in others and quickly develop emotional congruence with other females. The female brain stays in the MNS longer than a male brain, which causes a woman to want and need to spend more time talking about her emotions.

At Viventé, we see these neurohormonal differences play out frequently in issues of management and leadership. For example, in our Mentoring Programs for Women, male and female mentors approach their mentoring role very differently. Male mentors are often confused to discover that what women mentees really want is to talk through their challenges and feelings before they arrive at a solution, which is generally their own. Yet this behaviour is perfectly consistent with the ‘nature’ of the female neurohormonal system.

Does this perspective give you insight into the difference in leadership behaviours described in our previous blog posts, “What do Women in Leadership add?” and “How do Women in Leadership add Sustainability?” Or do you think differences in style between men and women in leadership are better explained by socialization and society’s expectations of gender and of social role?

Viventé has been setting up and conducting mentoring programs for women in leadership for the past seven years. While mentoring offers an obvious way for female mentees to advance, the side benefits for their male mentors can be significant.  Through the open and confidential conversations that happen between mentor and mentee as she works through the barriers to her advancement, the mentor begins to get closer to what is really happening as he learns from his mentee.  What he learns can then impact his own business unit or organistion.

Success in using mentoring to engage men in the agenda comes when a contemporary approach to mentoring is adopted; it is not about cloning the female leaders to be like men.

Mentoring is a small step, but it starts to move the needle.

But there’s likely to be an unintended downside. In too many cases, it proves not to be an achievement at all. That’s because, outnumbered, the lone woman tends to be ignored by men and the dominant cultural paradigm continues to prevail. Further, it is her gender rather than her competence that is noticed.

No matter how compelling the reasons, it’s important not to divide your small number of women leaders among many teams in the interests of introducing diversity to them all. The key is to ensure a critical mass of women as role models in executive positions to head off problems that come with tokenism. The women’s competence will be noticed and will count rather than their identities as women.

Often in our work, we hear executives genuinely and proudly describe their values of meritocracy as evidenced in their performance criteria, how they select for roles and how they manage their talent pool.

Yet are these decisions based on data or on perceptions and opinions?  Who decides who is in the talent pool and who is not? And hence who benefits from development opportunities and enriching job experiences? 

Our experience at Viventé has shown the importance of taking a good hard look at the systemic issues at play in your organisation, rather than deciding too quickly that it is the women themselves who are not ‘making it’.

Part of the answer lies in the fact that, while women do tend to keep up with their contacts and facilitate new ones, the purpose of their networks remains primarily social and
it is mostly with other women. Time and again, women tell us they’re not comfortable ‘asking for something’ if they feel they don’t have anything to give in return.  So they don’t leverage the power of their networks for their advancement.

The benefit comes when women learn to invest in those contacts who are likely to be of value to them in building an advocacy base.  Learn more about this critical skill from the Viventé Pathways2Leadership™: Networking and Connecting Module.

In the eagerness to get started, a diversity manager is often appointed; however, the key element
of success too often is missed: the executive team must actively sponsor the effort with a level of commitment sufficient to work though the inevitable
bumps in the road. Here’s a typical pattern:

• An HR executive, manager or diversity manager downloads the Australian Chief Executive Women’s CEO Toolkit: http://www.cew.org.au/cew-programs/ceo-kit/ceo-toolkit/.
• The manager follows the recommendations in the kit to assess the current level of gender diversity, establish a goal level, and build a business case for achieving that goal.
• Executive enthusiasm ensues. The leadership understands the imperative, the scope of the
  required changes and the resolve needed to achieve them.
• However, as they start to put the strategies in place, they discover they still don’t know how to create the change they want.

When Viventé is called in to help, we typically find the bumps in the road are turning up in two areas:

• The personal skills and resilience of the women to realise their career potential
  to leadership roles, and
• The degree to which the culture supports them with policies of flexibility, the balance of
  task vs. people orientation, constructive leadership styles and leaders’
  commitment to advocate and sponsor individual women.

We’ve been successful in helping organisations overcome these challenges, but we play a role in only a small but critical part of the story. To learn more, please download our white
paper, “How to Optimise the Benefits of Women in Leadership.”

One day, Viventé’s Peter Ivett attended a meeting with a client in an industry sector that traditionally is skewed towards males. As they discussed different aspects of corporate culture, the client brought up the issue of Women in Leadership.

This caught Peter somewhat by surprise. In this organisation, he had not encountered many women in senior roles.

Peter was advised that the client began looking at the issue using the Australian Chief Executive Women’s CEO Toolkit  and assessed the six measures it recommends.

The executive team had recognised the benefits they were missing, and become concerned at their lack of female leadership and poor retention record.

One of the executives said, “Yes, in our industry you might not expect to find many women, but we’ve seen the potential benefits, and are ready to ask ‘Why not?’”

Now the executives are totally on board and actively pursuing sustainable solutions, and the most effective methods to support women in leadership.

If you need help understanding whether there’s gender equity issue in your organisation, please review the Australian Chief Executive Women’s CEO Toolkit . Once you understand the imperative, call Viventé.

Two forces are intensifying the scrutiny placed on companies’ performance regarding gender equity:

•  The new ASX requirement for publicly listed companies in Australia to “adopt and disclose a diversity policy that includes measurable objectives relating to gender” and
•  The recently-announced government reforms to the Equal Opportunity for Women in Work Agency in Australia Reporting.

This new transparency is turning gender diversity into a critical influencer that shapes the perception of the business brand in the consumer and employment markets. Many companies are rushing to implement new practices in hopes of improving that perception.

But how deep does their commitment go? When your board and executive team face this issue, they must ask, “Is this only about risk and compliance or do we truly intend to realise the business benefits of better engagement of female talent?”

Commitment makes the difference. Businesses that intend to realise the benefits are much more likely to do so. Businesses that set a simple goal of compliance are almost certain to fall short of the results they seek.

If you’re not yet aware of the significant business benefits of gender diversity, please click to pick up the Australian Chief Executive Women’s CEO Toolkit , which will help you establish an effective business case, strategies and metrics for your organisation. In our experience, boards and executive teams quickly commit once they discover the imperative of women in leadership.

Those committed to strengthening their sustainability find they must measure their performance against criteria in addition to short-term financial performance.

When they approach critical measures of leadership style, they discover that male and female executives in Australia offer significantly different leadership advantages. Recent research shows the masculine tending to strengthen short-term performance, with the feminine tending to strengthen the long term.

The truth is, your company needs both styles to develop sustainability. Sustainable companies need leadership that balances the short and long term, that is both task and people oriented.

It is up to the company’s top executives to drive the balance of leadership style. Are you actively creating the balance you want or are you leaving its development to chance? When you’re ready to take charge, give Viventé a call.