Stereotypes and Authentic Leadership

Typical woman! Typical man! Life would be too complex if we didn’t use stereotypes to slip everyone into pigeonholes. We have so much data coming at us all the time that we simplify through classification, without even knowing what we are doing. Much of the time we are falling prey to unconscious bias. Worse still, once the knee jerk response is made it is much harder to reformulate our thinking. Unaware of our own bias, we would strenuously deny many of these beliefs which are formed early and then endorsed and consolidated throughout our lives. Try this Harvard test on gender: Last week we launched our book Typical Woman! Its purpose was to challenge stereotypes applied to women but made us think about the wider question of authentic leadership. We have a lot of concerns about how stifling stereotypes (both male and female) are to our clients’ organisations. How authentic you are often depends on how authentic other people will let you be: stereotypes do people a real disservice. We know the old clichés – he is ambitious, emotion-free, decisive; she is good with people, sensitive and distracted by family. None of it tells the full story. Men often get stuck with the big, strong, brave epithets that lock them into pursuing plans they may not actually like and keeping going when they should get out of dodgy situations. The stereotyping of men often looks more attractive than the way women are treated but is just as restrictive, forcing a narrowness of thinking, collusion and perpetuating traditions because everyone complies. We know these descriptors rarely fit, but cause men and women to be perceived differently in the organisation. For example, you hear banker, mother of three with all the unconscious bias that it implies but you don’t hear banker, father of three, despite fathers caring deeply about their parental role. Through our work with senior clients, here are biases we have observed: We discovered that male bosses were much more emotionally intelligent when dealing with their female reports, knowing the stresses in their lives and handling them sensitively. In contrast they had little idea what the men were going through. As a result, men were still given career opportunities, while the women were protected from stress, given fewer challenges, resulting in missed opportunities and ultimately a more limited career.  Unwittingly, senior men were adopting a caring fatherly role towards female reports, overlooking their professional needs. The men were given little emotional support and were left to be brave about it all. Pressure on men is not just about career progression and earning power, it extends to expectations of manly behavior too: one city trader described the ribbing and unpleasantness he experienced when he took paternity leave following the birth of his child. Only his own extreme alpha maleness and great financial results saved him from caving in to the ritual hazing he received. In Typical Woman! we explore the idea that women are more likely to be heterogeneous, differing from each other in choices of motherhood, career, dress, style etc. (by comparison men are more homogeneous) As there are so few women at senior levels it can be very hard for a woman to find a role model with whom she can identify. It is also easy to set women against one another. Every woman is a potential role model – we need to mine the lessons and cherry pick the learning rather than discounting her as ‘not our type’. Perhaps we should be thinking next about the stereotypes that limit men’s behaviour and choices. Stereotypes are quick, easy and fatally flawed. They are just plain lazy. Click here to download a free copy of Typical Woman! We have not yet written Typical Man! but would welcome your ideas and suggestions…