Woman Leadership: Time to Reclaim the Feminine in Business

Note to the Women Leaders:

We've lost the feminine, and I am not talking crinolines and pinafores and blonde ringlets.

When it comes to leadership, what we are lacking in our mechanistic, masculine business worldview is empathy, actions, beliefs and perspectives that we can apply to ourselves as well as to those we are leading.

It's not anyone's fault that we are leading like men, but we are all doing it. That focus is what we have learned from our many years in corporations and businesses of all sizes.

But it's time to bring the feminine into business.

Are you old enough to remember when Jane Pauley hit the airwaves as a news anchor? I remember my response as being very mixed because I wasn't accustomed to seeing a woman anchor or hearing a feminine voice.

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That shock to the system is what happens when the new raises its clean, shiny face and announces "I'm here!" We women are that new aspect of business, and we are in a very real sense even new to ourselves because we have tried for so long to adhere to the masculine norms: Don't be too emotional - Leave empathy out of it - Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps! There is only so masculine any of us can be, including men! If we are to be as beautifully balanced and as naturally powerful as our humanness would allow us, we need the masculine and the feminine.

Our primary responsibility is to dare to bring into business, daily, actions borne of such things as empathy, collaboration-minus-ego, and the balance of allowing and doing.

As we do this, our internal "appropriateness" regulators will go a little crazy, because we're breaking with a tradition that does not support actual best practices for either human being or business.

So, our equally critical responsibility is to sit with the discomfort internally, and address the external discomfort with discernment until the social scales tip and we become part of the "new normal".

Fortunately, we are up to the task of learning how to perform this generally untried juggling act. We've got this.

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