Leadership Presence and Women Leaders
Today, I wanted to talk about women and leadership. Last time, we talked about a scary woman and I thought today women and leadership would be a good topic. From my experience, I see a lot of women stepping into their leadership potential, and stepping into their leadership presence is something that they sometimes struggle with.
Now we'll be talking about some of the things that make leadership presence and some of the reasons why I think women do struggle with it. I'm Dr. Jane Lewis and I've had over 20 years working in the field of leadership development. When I first started coaching, I was doing more personal coaching but I quickly moved into leadership coaching and executive coaching [we tended to call it but it was mostly about leadership]. I've been doing it a long time.
My PhD is in spirituality and leadership. I built a model of leadership based on some spiritual principles. I've spent a lot of time in the leadership arena studying leadership, teaching it, training people to be leaders, coaching them in their leadership journey.
Management as Part of Leadership
I've noticed a couple of things. One of the things I've noticed is that for men, it is so much easier [apparently, huge, sweeping generalization] to step into leadership roles, to own the fact that they might be in a leadership role than women do.
If a man is a manager and you talk about leadership to him, he will generally almost wear it like a coach, like a cloak. Well, of course, you're a manager, you're a leader. But a lot of the women that I've taught, trained, coached find it so much more difficult to take on that mantle of leadership. They are much more likely to go, “Me, leader?”. And scuttle off to the nearest rabbit hole. We shouldn't be doing that. We really shouldn't be doing that.
Certainly, when I was doing my MBA back in 1980-1981, we didn't really talk much about leadership. It was all about management because we reserved leadership for presidents, prime ministers, very senior politicians, for very senior people in the military or the church. That sort of thing. That's where leaders were. Everybody else was a manager. Fortunately, the conversation started to change over the years and it became that management is really a part of leadership. It's the doing of stuff, it is getting stuff done.
The conversation around leadership has definitely changed in the 40 years or so that I've been working in different organizations. But what hasn't changed as much as I would really love it to have changed is the way we as women experience ourselves as leaders, allow ourselves to be leaders and step into that leadership role. That's what I am talking about today.
Owning your Leadership Presence
One of the things about being a leader, apart from anything else, is owning the fact that you're a leader. Owning your right to be a leader is really important. Another piece that's important is what you might call leadership presence. What makes a leader? What distinguishes a leader from somebody who doesn't come across as a leader?
As I was going back across some of the old notes that I'd done for different training courses that I've run on the topic, there is one that we used to run in business schools, leading business schools around the UK. We would talk about executive presence. But for me, executive presence and leadership presence are part and parcel of the same story.
Leadership presence, that sense of this person has authority and authenticity. But how do you achieve authority and authenticity and what happens if you don't have the title leader or the name of leader in what you do? Because it's one thing to be a leader in an organization. But what about leaders in your community? Being a leader in your own family? Being a leader in a group? Because all these things are leadership roles.
Being a mother is a leadership role just as much as running a large organisation is a leadership role. Different kinds of leadership, slightly different skills but the role is still the same. There is still this need for leadership qualities from time to time, as a mother and as the leader of a large organisation.
Leadership presence in dimensions
Leadership presence really shows up in a couple of dimensions. One is in when you're speaking and one is when you're not speaking. How do you show up when you talk and how do you show up when you're silent?
People are just as observant of those times when you don't speak as they are of those times when you do speak. They show up in your words, and they show up in our body language. They show up in our tone of voice and the way the voice carries. In fact, it's interesting, as far as women are concerned.
For years, they wouldn't have women on the radio or they were very limited in the number of women that they would put on the radio in news casting and those kinds of roles. It was thought that the female voice was too shrill and that the female voice itself didn't have authority. In fact, in quite a lot of the leadership training courses that I've been involved in, one of the things that we do is work around voice and breathing so that you can learn how to bring in that authority through the voice.
Margaret Thatcher, who you may or may not remember, had a whole load of elocution lessons. If you listen to early videos and recordings of Margaret Thatcher, her voice was quite high and gradually she brought it down. It became more annunciated and articulated so that she had gravitas. Now, I exaggerate for effect but if you can learn how to breathe and work with your voice, it can have a huge impact in terms of executive or leadership presence.
Leadership as a mindset
The fourth piece is your mindset because quite honestly, if your mindset isn't there, then there's something about your energy that leaks. When we think I'm not a leader, I can't be a leader or how could I call myself a leader inside our heads, there's something about that energy that leaks out and people sniff it, they scent it, they feel it. They feel that energy.
We need to develop that leadership mindset and the leadership energy, that ability to step into your authenticity, that ability to step into your authority, to step into your gravitas. Now, I'm never sure about the word gravitas because gravitas sounds terribly serious to me and I'm not always a serious person. I can be very serious but I think playfulness is actually a lovely, lovely attribute in a leader.
Gravitas always feels a bit heavy. But that authority and that authenticity, developing the mindset and the energy that you run in your body and the way you think of yourself makes a difference. What you say to yourself as a leader, I am a leader, makes such a difference. As I said at the beginning, men, [huge generalization] seem to find it much easier to step easily into that place. It's almost like men expect to be allowed to be in authority. They are entitled to be in authority whereas women, we assume that we're not entitled to take on authority.
Leadership is connection
Another aspect of leadership is connection. Potentially, this is somewhere where women have a huge advantage. Women, just because of the way we are, the way we're wired biologically, we're good at connection. We're good at looking for people, looking to people, even taking care of people. That can be really powerful in a leadership role. How funny that we play down that skill that women have and yet it's something that we tend to be good at doing, making connections, building connections.
Leadership in Posture
There's a woman called Amy Cuddy who's done some quite interesting stuff on postures- leadership postures and authority postures. Some of which has been questioned but there is something about the making of your body, and allowing it to be larger does prompt hormonal changes in the body.
According to Cuddy, some of the open postures actually will cause the testosterone to flow in both men and women. Of course, we all know that testosterone is at the root of aggressions and drive and can be very useful for confidence because so much of this is about confidence, and leadership presence. When you've got the confidence, when you've got the belief, it's so much easier to come across as a strong leader.
Lead and Speak Up!
We as women are just as capable as guys of being leaders, of taking on the authority and standing in our own power and our own authenticity. But one of the things we as women do is we are much less likely to own our leadership, own our skills, our experience and our knowledge.
For a lot of women, and I see this so much in some of the communities that I'm in, owning your own knowledge, speaking of your own experience is regarded as bragging, it's wrong in some way. And yet how would you possibly know that I have over 20 years of experience as a leadership trainer, and teacher, and coach if I didn't tell you unless you'd been one of my clients or you'd been one of my colleagues in this work. You wouldn't know. Unless I tell you, how can I expect you to know all these things about me?
But as women, we assume that if we play the game and if we do it right and if we're good girls, then sooner or later somebody will recognise us without us necessarily stepping up and saying this is who I am, this is what I can do, this is what I know.
Now, go ahead, hire me, take me on. Use my skills and experience. There are a lot of things that go against us as leaders in terms of how we've been trained as kids and sadly, it's improved but there's still a long, long way to go.
There is something about the way we've grown up, which tends to make us take non-leadership positions or a non-leadership role or not own our own leadership but there's nothing that stops us from being authentic. There's nothing that stops us from having authority in those areas where we have knowledge, and we have experience.
There's nothing that stops us connecting when we want to connect in our silent moments just as much as in our speaking moments.
The Soft Power of a Leader
Man spread it. Yes, man spreading, it gets the testosterone going. It's pretty horrible to watch but it's a big body. Men do seem to upsell themselves more easily than women. Again, huge, sweeping generalisation. But I've worked with so many men and women and there is a pattern out there. It's our job, I think, as women to do everything we possibly can to undermine that pattern, to show that it's not that we become men, it's not even that we have to act like men.
We have to do it from our own power, our own soft power. But time to do it and time to own that we are leaders, we can be leaders, we have a right to be leaders and it doesn't even have to be in a very large organisation or a very large business. It can be in family, community, group, wherever we are.
We have a right to step up as leaders when we feel so inclined. Women just tend to get on with it. It's true. Get it done, let's be practical about it. The men always shout about what they do. Well, if you don't shout about what you do, then how is anybody going to know what it is you're doing? We do that assumption thing.
