Through the Looking Glass...
Looking back at this old photograph from my engineering days, I can understand why I failed to see myself in a leadership role. In those days, I couldn’t see anyone in that whole company who I aspired to become. Without a role model, was it even possible for me to lead with authenticity?
The last year has given us a hard measure of our leaders: what methods work and which are less effective; on the global scales of human and economic life and death. Some have excelled while others dithered, delayed or denied, and their populations continue to pay for those errors with both their lives and their livelihoods. It’s noticeable that many of those who excelled are women.
Successful leaders during the Covid pandemic were quick to focus on the need to save lives. They listened patiently to the scientists and took courageous decisions on a grand scale. Rapid action led to demonstrable results, increasing the leader’s authority while also revealing their empathy. Their people could feel safe because someone was acting to protect them, so lock-down rules must have seemed like less of a burden.
We’ve seen that men in some parts of the world are capable of this kind of transformational leadership, but the immediate focus on life in the face of a complex, uncertain and rapidly-evolving crisis sits well within the library of feminine skills. Women have been shown to be successful leaders during 2020, better than many of their male counterparts and based on hard data.
As past participants on the GetSmarter Oxford Women’s Leadership Development Programme, I know that my readers are already attentive to this narrative. The downside is that, even as the window opens up on to how things can be better, a good many women are distracted from the view. You too might be focused on restoring the status you took for granted before remote working, home schooling, furlough and job losses impacted on women severely and disproportionately.
The mood during lock-down was to Build Back Better, yet the sense now is of a scramble back to how things used to be. We clapped for carers during the first wave of the virus, determined that a different set of people should be our heroes as we assigned new value to those who saved our lives. A dismal 1% pay offer for nurses in 2021 shows how little of that inspiration has translated into UK government policy. Don’t expect change any time soon, at least not from the transactional leaders who still hold power. Making bold moves will never become part of their skill-set unless it’s in their self-serving interests – or perhaps I’m being too cynical about politicians in general.
The assumption that true leaders look and act like men is surely the sticking point. Evidence reveals that transformational leaders, often women, have made their country’s experience of the pandemic much less tragic than that of their bombastic, populist, transactional and typically male peers, yet opinion polls show that populations still think of the latter as good leaders. There’s a disconnect: we make excuses for men who fail us, while denying women the credit which is their due.
Returning to that photo from my early career, you can probably see that I did my best to fit in, but the strategy failed as my career ambitions stumbled and fell away. Despair was on my face. I gave up on engineering a few years later. That was over two decades ago and truly I feel optimism now, because we know for sure that women who look and act like women can be great leaders. Please let’s cast off the assumption that leaders look like men, to show how women step up through times of serious change. Hear the call! There is so much that needs to be done.
About Karen Hands:
Karen Hands has been Head Tutor of the GetSmarter Oxford Women’s Leadership Development Programme since January 2020. She has been involved with the programme since the launch in September 2019 and has worked with over one thousand participants from all over the world in that time. Alongside this freelance work, Karen runs her own business, Say it Karen, helping women to speak with confidence and helping organisations to build a diverse talent pipeline.
She’s a former process engineer and delivered major environmental change in the chemical industry in the first part of her career, but became frustrated at her lack of voice in a male-dominated career path. Since then, she has worked for herself as a management consultant and leadership coach; and also in customer service, the voluntary sector and organisational development. She is currently Vice Chair of the Community Forest Trust in England, where she chairs the strategy and planning steering group.
