An increasingly heard claim is that women are better leaders than men.What this really means is that leaders with stereotypical feminine traits might be better than those with classic masculine traits, whether men or women.The foundation for this claim is that women are more collaborative while men are more competitive.There is no doubt that collaboration is vital for success in business today.In addition, work is much more complex.We are now in an era of knowledge work where people want to have their say, not just be told what to do.Organizations have many more vocal stakeholders telling them how to behave - government, environmental lobbyists, shareholders, customers, employee groups, etc.This calls for leaders with better relationship building skills.The ability to collaborate and foster joint ownership is now at a premium.Then there is the greater need to nurture talent, with the emphasis on ''nurture''.It is not that men can't do these things, but that such skills are more feminine than masculine.Of course, there are collaborative men and competitive women in leadership roles, but this is why the discussion needs to be framed around masculine and feminine traits.That is, some women have masculine traits and vice versa.In any case, it is clear that the cultures of many organizations are becoming more feminine.All the talk over the past 20 years about cultivating better team work and showing more consideration for employees shows how feminine organizational cultures are becoming and rightly so.But there is an important point that this debate is overlooking.Everything I have read about how and why women might be better leaders than men focuses exclusively on what happens within organizations.But what about the competitive environment that private sector businesses operate in? To beat competitors, leaders need to foster a strong competitive streak throughout the business and they need to have an unquenchable thirst to win themselves.CEO's need to keep a constant eye on their competitors and be searching continuously for new ways of outflanking them.The public sector is also under pressure to offer better value for money, but they do not have competitors, at least not to the same extent as the private sector.Compare how you would have to behave as a leader if you were taking a group of boy scouts on a field trip versus coaching a high school sports team.In the latter case you need to foster a very strong competitive streak in all your players.What this means is that we cannot dispense with the masculine competitive drive if we expect to survive in any modern business arena.The inference then is that we need to strike the right balance between feminine collaborativeness and masculine competitiveness.Here is one suggestion that might help achieve such a balance. Male (or female) leaders with a masculine bent need to learn how to channel their competitive urges externally and learn how to be more collaborative internally.This means moving from being an individual goal scorer to being a coach, hence winning through others rather than on your own merit.By ''goal scorer'' versus coach I mean the drive to offer your own solutions to issues rather than to ask the sorts of questions that would draw solutions out of others.The masculine tendency is to identify with the role of solution-generator, someone who uses analytical, rational skills to develop better answers to tough questions than anyone else and to be self-reliant in doing so - a very masculine focus.So, the drive to win is essential, it just needs to be externally focused.The bottom line is that this issue is more about organizational culture than it is about the relative numbers of men and women in senior executive roles.With cultures that are excessively masculine, the drive to win can be self-defeating.In sports, it is not a problem.But business today calls for a much more intense level of collaboration.Stimulating knowledge workers to think more creatively and then melding diverse inputs into a coherent whole calls for strong facilitation and collaboration skills.Overly competitive cultures are fine if the only task is to execute fast and efficiently.But where you need to facilitate creative thinking, too much pressure can be counterproductive.So, the challenge is to create cultures that combine the best of our competitive instincts with our ability to foster collaboration.Women might be better leaders in the public sector but we need more androgynous leaders in business.
I was in a seminar once, one of those get rich through real estate programs, where a speaker made the comment "blah.Only Dead Fish Go With The Flow.Blah." Obviously, he was motivating, or baiting depends on how you view it, to overcome their fears of doing something most people won't and join their organization and buy their products.For some reason that statement stuck in the recesses of my mind which surfaced suddenly during a meeting where there was a difference of opinion being expressed between two associates.Difference of opinion is definitely an understatement as they appeared ready to come to blows, which I was all for as I didn't care for either one.A small smile etched across my face as I pondered the effectiveness of the imaginary the statement projected and wondered how it might be applied to developing leadership qualities.The connotations of being compared to a dead fish are all negative, "he had a dead fish handshake." Since nobody wants that stigma attached to them, the only acceptable action was to buy their product and walk out of the room with dignity.However, as far as enhancing leadership qualities the exact opposite was true.This call for action relied on a normally intelligent person throwing caution and logic to the wind and proceeding on blind faith.A good leader will never discard logic and caution when dealing with important matters.He/She may be posed with a "lesser of two evils" decision, but they would never proceed forward blindly hoping the best would happen.It also portrayed swimming up river, against the flow of general consensus, as being the obvious path a brave leader would take.In face of enormous odds, they'd challenge the decision vigorously and unyielding.Living to the beat of a different drum is nothing new, Edison, Ford, Rockefeller all faced and conquered the status quoi and became extremely rich and famous.They, however, didn't buck normal trend without a thought out rational plan of why and how they were going to swim up stream.In fact, one of Henry Ford's most famous quotes was something like "I don't have to be the smartest man in a particular subject, I hire the smartest man in that particular subject.".So what does all this mean, is there something to be learned from situation? Most certainly.To become a better leader a person must not fear assuming a different position that most people consider correct.However, this lack of fear is not the result of the person being courageous to a fault, the lack of fear is created by the person's intense research of the subject, immolating people who are great mentors and weighing the facts, swims upstream against the current.His/Her motives are not to be cantankerous, flighty or argument, but rather to guide and motivate the others in a direction they firmly believe is the correct path to take.
Bring personal power and mental health back into your life.Take full control of your monkey mind, especially when it heads off into a fog, mist or bog because worry and anxious thinking has taken over.Research by Martin Seligman (the bees knees when it comes to research into depression and pessimism) has shown that in order to avoid depression in the long-term, there is a need to change the explanation the mind gives itself about events.As Tim Beck (originator of CBT) observed "The personal paradigm of the patient when he is in a depressed state produces a distorted view of himself and his world." Both Beck's and Seligman's research has shown that a change in perception is very achievable, and that the results of this change meant that it is possible to avoid getting depressed again.The way the mind perceives and interprets experiences, then, predicts who is going to get depressed, who will stay depressed, and who will relapse after therapy.Changing your thinking style from pessimism to optimism relieves depression, and reduces the likelihood of relapse.In fact, the likelihood of an optimist getting depression is slim.Look around, and see if you can find a depressed optimist.The problem is 'in here', not 'out there' A person with depression must also be trained to realize that the problem isn't about what is happening 'out there', but rather what is happening in their inner world.[Of course, as often happens, the problem is 'in here' because the depressed person is beating up on and turning their anger on themselves, then both the origin of the problem and its solution both lie in inner reality.] William Glasser uses the term 'external control psychology' to describe the process most people use of trying to change the behaviours of others, rather than recognizing that feelings are determined by thoughts and perspectives we have chosen to entertain.Research has demonstrated that taking responsibility for one's own thinking, and learning how to alter it, can be an effective cure for even severe depression.Being 'realistic' is not necessarily helpful Interestingly, depressed people seem to see life events more realistically than optimists, but optimists, even if their thinking is less linked to observable reality, have a better life and cope with their unrealistic positive perspectives more usefully.When people are depressing, one of the things they do is give up on their dreams.They throw out whatever they had been planning and hoping for, seeing these ideas as unrealistic.However, the dreams are just as valid as they always were.In this state though, it is difficult to evaluate those dreams rationally, and to collect the evidence as to their potential.So while pessimistic thinking may be more realistic than optimistic thinking, it is nonetheless unhelpful when persisted with.Focusing on the positive possibilities your life could hold is healthier than obsessing about how bad it is right now.Train yourself to view life and yourself differently Depressed people, though, can be trained to view themselves and life differently, even when a crisis looms.Of course, this is quite a shift from the problem and feeling avoidance techniques that most people naturally slip into when not feeling good about life.As Scott Peck wrote in The Road Less Traveled, "Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, attempt to avoid problems.".There are plenty of stories of people who have risen above their circumstances because of the perspectives they took, and their willingness to look squarely and honestly at how their inner self was coping with a painful situation.Consider the predicament of Victor Frankl who was standing naked, stripped of his clothes, in a cell in a concentration camp when he realized that despite his circumstances, the Nazis had no control over his mind, and that how he chose to think was entirely his own choice.Frankl defined spirituality, as a result of his insight, as 'the meaning that we attach to the experiences in our lives'.He also noticed that the perspectives taken by his fellow prisoners largely determined how well they coped with prison life, and which ones survived the ordeal.Take some simple steps to later old habits The steps that are usually used to target unhelpful thinking include the following.You don't have to see a therapist to begin the process of thinking differently, but a well trained professional will certainly increase your chances of success.Those steps, then, are..I) monitor your automatic thoughts; ii) recognise that those thoughts then generate other thoughts, emotions, and particular behaviours; iii) recognise that the negative thoughts produced a low mood, which in turn causes unwanted thinking; iv) learn to evaluate the distorted thinking you find, and replace this with more realistic and positive thinking, and v) talk to others about your concerns so that they are not left to prey on your mind, vi) use problem-solving rather than ruminant thinking to alter or eliminate behaviours that you would prefer to drop.Try the quiz at the end of this same article posted on http.//www.Jefferysaunders.Com.It will help you assess how depression or anxiety prone your thinking habits tend to be.
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