“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”– John F. Kennedy
Hyper-Masculinity in Business
A lot of leadership and management strategies that we currently use in business stem from what we have learnt from wars. And while a lot of these strategies have merit if adapted well, at the core of this is the stance of war, and hence the need to keep defeating an enemy. With this as the unconscious base of business leadership, we have created a hyper-masculine culture that is now difficult to sustain.
Ritu Menon of the Indian Express described hyper-masculinity as “imagined hurt, a readiness for violence and the abjuring of difference and diversity are its attributes”. The corporate world abounds with stories of cut-throat competition, ruthless hire-and-fire decisions, devious politics and insecurity.
What we now need to make leadership sustainable is an injection of the feminine approach. When we use the term masculine and feminine, it is important to note that we do not correlate it to men and women, but energies (physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual) that are accessible to all of us regardless of our biological sex. Our education system as well as our corporate rewards system has traditionally rewarded the masculine approach of winning over another, coming first, constant growth in terms of numbers, etc. While this does fuel growth in the short run, a complete omission of the feminine values of cyclicity, sustainability and ‘power with’ instead of ‘power over’, makes leadership lose its essence.
Conscious Leadership Development
Effective leadership development today calls for a balanced approach. The model below outlines the approach we recommend:
Leaders need to take a well-rounded stance that includes:
- Striving to create positive growth trends while keeping an eye on how sustainable the trends and decisions are
- Creating stretch targets for self and others while acknowledging the cyclical nature of business – it is natural for numbers and productivity to go down once in a while – that only underlines the humanity of people running the business
- Addressing the realities of the market while also keeping one’s mind open to outrageous possibilities that might be a game-changer, even as it is unknown and unfamiliar
- Adopting the problem-solving approach to act on short-term issues while imbibing the value of Appreciative Inquiry in the long run
- Management of resources in the present and leadership of self and others towards the future
For this to happen, leadership development in organizations needs to be addressed at two levels: systemic and individual. Eventually, the individual leader operates in the confines of a system. So no matter how evolved an individual is, if the system cannot hold the leader and embrace his/her value, addressing leadership development at the individual level is futile.
At the individual level, leaders usually flourish through coaching. It is a powerful modality aside from conventional learning mechanisms that helps them integrate learning into their being and act from a place of wholeness. It ensures that we cater to each individual’s resourcefulness in a bespoke manner.
At the systemic level, it is important, simultaneously with the efforts at the individual level, to explore what engagement measures, policies, processes and reward structures will nurture leaders and enable them to deploy what they learn. Both these levels of leadership development need to go hand in hand for the efforts to have positive return on expectations.
Author- Rukmini Iyer is a facilitator, coach and organizational transformation consultant. Conscious leadership (balancing the feminine and masculine) is at the heart of her work. Her consulting firm Exult! Solutions (www.exult-solutions.com) is based in Mumbai, India and works with clients across the globe. She is also a trained peacebuilder and actively works on engaging civilians in peacebuilding through peace circles and track two diplomacy projects.
