”One of Insead’s top management programmes is The Challenge of Leadership. It is aimed at those in CEO or top management positions. When we did this programme in 2013, our professor, Manfred Kets de Vries, was telling us how hard it is to find female executives. He wanted to have a gender-balanced group. We were 4 women that year, out of 21 participants. I often talk to my professor and he always says that the situation hasn’t changed: not enough women in top management positions.

A study done about 3 years ago by the World Bank showed that the majority of purchasing decisions in Romania were made by women. Globally, 80% of purchasing decisions belong to women. The customers of organisations are therefore mostly women.
Also, globally, 60% of highly educated young people are women.
In organisations, at entry-level, we find good gender diversity. But the higher up the hierarchy we go, the more we see that this diversity is not present in most cases.
I wonder how many female presidents you can appoint? How many are Premiers?
We can’t lose count, that’s true.

At high levels, decisions are made by a group of people who accept you there if you are like them. A woman will be accepted if she behaves more masculinely.
Maybe it’s human to have loopholes and choose in our own image. ‘This is how things are done here, this is how we are’ are statements that lead to the path of least resistance, which avoids diversity of any kind. If we are honest with ourselves, we have all had such statements.

As an anecdote, I remember about 20 years ago, I realised that two-thirds of my firm colleagues were born between 20 January and 20 February (like me). I didn’t ask the date of birth, I wasn’t paying attention to that aspect. When we had to get gifts for each colleague, we realized we were in a recruiting error. Without realising, we make these mistakes, we think we are rational but most of the time we make decisions intuitively, emotionally, then justify them rationally. We choose people like ourselves, if we are not careful.

But we can’t go on like this. Soon, 50% of the workforce will be made up of millennials. This generation will not stay in organisations where they are not treated equally, where there is no diversity and inclusion. When I refer to gender diversity, I mean not just women, but all 50+ genders identified 2-3 years ago.
Millennials will leave, and then the organization will have retention issues.

What is the problem, really? It’s good to get it right. I don’t think it’s about setting gender quotas, promoting, or picking someone at any cost. How we ask the questions, how we frame the problem, will also determine the solutions we find.
Instead of wanting to develop women, to coach them, to make them behave like men, instead of wondering why women don’t get to the top of organisations, what their problem is, we’d rather look at it from another angle. That might be: what is the problem in organisations that they fail to attract and promote what is now the majority of talented and highly educated people on the planet?
It’s also not okay that we still have various women’s organizations talking amongst themselves about how women should be supported. These roads don’t lead very far. We are going around in the same circles.
Rethinking should be at the level of the organisation’s strategy, supported by the CEO. This strategy should be about educating and supporting leaders to build gender-balanced organizations.

Why now more than ever?

  • Because, as I said, women represent 60% of the highly educated talent pool globally;
  • Because they are the majority in the purchasing decision;
  • Because in the last two years, more than ever, it has become imperative to rethink the concept of leadership.

Professor Manfred Kets de Vries of Insead Business School talks about the need for ‘quality-driven leaders’. He uses an acronym to name this leadership model: the 7 Cs model. These 7 Cs are:
Complexity – the ability to take a systemic, long-term view. These leaders are visionaries, hope merchants, but they also have the ability to look realistically at the situations they face.

Confidence, self-belief – this confidence helps them in making decisions.

Compassion – leaders who demonstrate compassion approach those they lead with humility, respect, appreciation, empathy. These leaders have emotional intelligence and the capacity for self-analysis.

Caring – this means they care about whatever they do, they engage passionately in all activities.

The courage to make difficult decisions, to take on board their views. They have moral values and integrity.

Critical thinking – they have a deep understanding of what they do and know how to persuade others when necessary. Critical thinking involves a deliberate and clear-headed decision about whether to accept, reject or suspend our judgment about an assertion and how confidently we accept, reject or suspend our judgment or decision. (Moore, Brooke Noel & Parker, Richard).

Communication – have the ability to argue their ideas clearly, concisely, with impact, but also to communicate as often as necessary, especially in crisis situations.

In the context of the last couple of years, compassion may become increasingly important.
A recent Harvard Business Review article differentiated between sympathy, empathy and compassion. Overt sympathy would, according to the article, sound like this: ‘I feel for you’; Empathy: ‘I feel with you’. Compassion, however, sounds different: ‘I’m here for you’.


The right leaders now and for the near future have the ability and willingness to be there for the people on their team, they have the ability to listen to understand them.


Women generally have an advantage in this situation, generally speaking.
Women are set up for the ethics of care – they take care of the home, the children, the team, what is around them. It is situational logic. Women have high emotional intelligence, empathy, the ability to put themselves in another person’s shoes and understand their intention. 80% of health professionals worldwide are women. This is no accident.
Unfortunately, however, an equally large percentage of the management of these systems is male.
Men have a Kantian logic, based on universally valid principles applied to concrete situations.

I don’t know if the last couple of years have made the emphasis even greater in this area of empathy and compassion. On a declarative level this is true. But we would do well not to neglect the impact that the pandemic, with all the uncertainty, fear, ambiguity, with which it has come, has had on women. They have been in charge not only of their team, but also of their family, then their own updating, their company’s objectives, their involvement in society.
All of this made many women leaders hypersensitive. Perhaps this is less visible in men.

Sure, the world has worked this way before, some will say. Yes, but a lot has changed. Advances in technology will continue to revolutionise the way people relate to organisations. New and future generations will have different expectations of organisations than employees have traditionally had.

As the book says: what got you here doesn’t get you further. On the contrary, it doesn’t even keep you here. So there is a need to rethink the concept of diversity, gender balance, and to have on the strategic agenda building the balanced, diverse and inclusive organisation. Easy to say, hard to implement, but because habit is second nature. I trust that leaders will always question the way they do things, exercise critical thinking, and stand, in a bit of King Janus’s imitation, with one face facing the future and the other not facing the past but firmly anchored in the present.”

via: Revista Cariere