Management Perspectives

If I ask you to think of words you associate with leadership and management characteristics, what would you say? Strong, powerful, decisive, determined, assertive, aggressive, forceful, competitive, visionary, inspiring, winner, brave. What about words for male characteristics? Perhaps words like strong, decisive, determined, assertive, aggressive, competitive, winner, brave, bold. The paradigms of a historically male dominated world will of course have ingrained concepts of leadership that are to do with power, risk taking, and strength. The huge correlation between traditionally male traits and leadership traits is therefore to be expected. Finally, what words do you think of for female characteristics? Words like, gentle, nurturing, caring, collaborative, kind, accommodating, empathic, and supportive?

The issue
So, here is the reason why it is hard for a woman in management and leadership roles to be both liked and respected. If you are displaying what society thinks of as typical leadership traits, you may be ticking the boxes of what we want from a leader but you are also contravening all the societal norms of what we want, expect, and perhaps demand from a woman.

New Zealand’s female Prime Minister, Jacinda Arderns, summarised this well when she said, “One of the criticisms I’ve faced over the years is that I’m not aggressive enough or assertive enough, or maybe somehow, because I’m empathetic, I’m weak.”

Societal norms and paradigms
Cultural norms and expectations are very deeply ingrained in societal DNA. We grow up with messages from parents, grandparents, schoolteachers, and religious or community leaders that tell us how to live, what is good and bad, how to be a man, how to be a woman, and so on. These messages have been passed on through generations and are conveyed from our earliest years, and so often repeated that they are just absorbed into our minds and become our subconscious ‘hardwiring’. Mostly, we just accept those messages. And much of that continues to tell us that a ‘good’ woman needs to be all those traditional characteristics of gentle, nurturing, caring, collaborative, dutiful, kind, etc. Clearly, paradigms and ways of thinking do change over time, but they do so at a glacial pace. It is called prescriptive bias. It is a form of unconscious bias, meaning that it is not an active, calculated, judgement or discrimination. This is why many women in the workplace are still being judged against very outdated, yet pervasive norms, and why it is so hard to be both liked and respected as a manager.

To be successful in management, you need to stand out, to be heard, and to speak out. To be a leader or manager you have to be visible; to be determined and demonstrably confident.

You have to speak up and articulate views and ideas that are strong and assertive in order to persuade and lead. But if you do this, you risk not matching societal norms and therefore actually being perceived as less ‘likeable’. It may be that people will judge you as competent, but end up not liking you for that competence.

The double bind
Women face this double bind situation whenever they speak publicly. It is illustrated clearly when you look at how the same behaviours are often perceived and labelled differently depending on who is talking!
- A woman is bossy – A man has leadership skill
- A woman is aggressive – A man is assertive
- A woman is nagging – A man is persistent
- A woman is stubborn – A man is determined
- A woman is hysterical – A man passionate
- A woman is pushy – A man is ambitious

Supporting data
Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, cites an experiment conducted at Columbia Business School and New York University. They selected the CV of a successful, real-life female entrepreneur. The woman’s real name was Heidi Rosen, so Heidi was placed on one set of identical CVs, and a man’s name, Howard, on another. Half of a group of business school students read one CV, and the other half the other. The result was remarkable. The students rated Heidi and Howard as equally competent.

However, Howard was judged to be likeable and a good colleague. Heidi, however, was seen as aggressive, selfish, and not someone who would be a team player, or someone who they would like to work with. Essentially, less likeable.

But does being liked matter?
It is much harder to influence people if they do not like you. Robert Chaildini, who wrote a seminal book on influencing, lists liking as one of the seven keys to influencing others. Building rapport, getting in sync with others, and having them feel they warm up to you, is critical to them being open to what you have to say. In politics, a rational policy platform and operational competence are not enough to get people to vote for you. They have got to like you.

Why the likeability paradox needs to be addressed
It can cause women to instinctively understand this likeability ‘penalty’, fear being disliked, and therefore have it reduce their desire to speak up. It can cause women to routinely and significantly self-edit and always feel the need to soften what they say and how they say it. This constant self-editing is exhausting and ineffective. It can cause you not to be heard or taken as seriously as a corresponding man would. It can lead to frustration and even anger, feeling ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’, which can lead to them becoming combative in the way they speak. This, in turn, can bring down yet more negative judgement upon them.

How dou you deal with it?
If you chose to seek to navigate the issues, you will need to try and find a way to strike a balance and walk the tightrope between competence and likeability.

Traditionally, the way successful women have overcome the likeability issues is to work harder, much harder, at working relationships. Whereas a man could get away with walking past his PAs desk, dropping a report on it, and saying straightforwardly, “Can I have this for Monday please?” The equivalent behaviour in a woman would be considered brusque, abrupt, and uncaring. Instead the dialogue would probably go something like, “Hi how was your weekend/ game/kid?..” and after a suitable length of exchange, “I really need this for Monday; I’d be really grateful if you could have it for me by then?.” One could argue, however, that this is something worth spending time on.

Alternatively, you can choose to challenge the unconscious bias rather than trying to navigate round it. This might involve calling it out when you hear male colleagues making biased statements about female colleagues’ likeability. It may be, like Jacinda Ardern, creating a new management paradigm that balances strength and compassion and talks overtly about how you seek to combine both in a new model of leadership/management. Or it could mean that you double down on being criticised and almost revel in the concept of being a ‘difficult woman’, making something of a joke about it, as British Prime Minister Theresa May did.

It is a far from a level playing field for women in the workplace, but the key to improving it is to recognise issues like the likeability paradox and developing ways to deal with it.