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Why “Women’s Leadership” is for Everyone
and how to get there…
A few weeks ago I sat down with Denise Harrington to explore why what we’ve called “women’s leadership” for the last several decades might just be for everyone. Fundamentally, what makes a good leader isn’t the body they are in or identity they elect. As more people who were socialized to be caring, empathetic, and community-minded have entered the workforce, however, a broader range of “leadership skills” have been on display.
In our decades of work working with leaders all across the globe, we’ve found again and again that integrating traits like empathy, collaboration, and relationship-building with more traditionally masculine styles creates more balanced, innovative leadership, for everyone. These are not “women’s leadership skills,” they are ways of leading and supporting humans that have historically been more associated with women.
In our conversation, Denise shared some amazing insights from her decades of experience in women’s leadership development. She explained how women often lead in a more relational way compared to the traditional command-and-control model that has been associated with men, and therefore with what “good leadership” looks like.
We acknowledged that while we were generalizing gender differences to some extent, what we were really discussing was…
