Women in Leadership - Benefits
Women constitute half of the working-age population in the world. Companies led by women seem to have traditionally fared better than their counterparts during times of financial crisis. A study carried out by Pew Research Center on women and leadership suggests that there is little difference between men and women in key leadership traits such as the ability to innovate and intelligence, while many observe that they are even better than men when it comes to being compassionate and organized.
Benefits of women leadership in different sectors are manifold and they are as significant as those from male leadership. Women leadership is found to be good for financial health of an organization. Organizations having females as board members show significantly better financial performance than those having low female representation.
Better financial health of the organization leads to better job opportunities, higher productivity, and more growth and development. Various studies have found that women are equipped with better relationship building skills. They are also found to be good at inspiring and motivating others.
Women Unify Diverse Groups
Women as such symbolize unity and cooperation. They are pivotal to the survival of a family – a basic social organization. This quality of unifying diverse minds in a family is an essential feature of successful leadership. A true leader acts as a unifying force to bind the team or the group of followers together and successfully leads them to achieve the goal. Women possess such quality substantially and this makes them great leaders.
Diversity refers to the existence of different people with different interests, characteristics, and attitudes. A woman leader sees diversity as an advantage to secure a balanced and unique relationship in a group. She continues to lead by unifying diverse interests, attitudes and desires inherent in a group. The idea of diversity also includes respect and acceptance. It means understanding every person is unique and identifying their individual distinctions.
Self-owned qualities like compassion, patience to listen to others, giving due importance to personal development of the followers, democratic approach to solve intrigues and above all womanly consideration of fellow human beings make women a preferred choice for leadership amidst diverse groups. These qualities help the women leaders bind diverse groups together for larger interest and for the realization of the ultimate goals.
Women Improve Interpersonal Relationships
To be a successful professional or a successful leader in this age of science and information technology, communication skills are an absolute necessity. An organization functions smoothly, if there is effective interpersonal, interdepartmental, and external communication system. Within the organization, both upward and downward communication needs to be operating to facilitate effective and timely communication among the employees and departments of the organization.
In matters of building relationships, female leaders are consistently rated higher than their male counterparts. Being skilled at building in-house relationship, women are also quite likely to do well at building outside relationship; for instance, creating new clients or negotiating difficult contracts for the company they lead.
Women fare brilliantly when it comes to communication at personal level. They are quite deft at communicating with others and score higher than men on this front. Ability to communicate with people is a fundamental need to become a successful leader. Women possess this skill naturally.
Women tend to be better listeners than men and this makes them an effective communicator. Good communicators are excellent listeners. Effective communication skills begin with listening. Women are comparatively better at both listening and communicating.
Women Value Accountability
Accountability is also an important leadership quality. Women seldom ignore their accountability on any issue. It is seen that women are more accountable than men. Accountability may not help in motivating others, but is highly inspiring.
A leader who understands the value of accountability never puts the onus of any loss or blunder on the individual members of a team. The leader rather shoulders the responsibility. It motivates the team members to undertake any assignment without any compunction and fear.
Women understand the value of accountability more than the rest. While leading a family, they often come forward to shoulder the accountability for any disruption with an intention to keep the family bonding intact. They contribute largely towards forging unity and cohesion among family members. Such quality of women, when put into practice while leading an organization, a society or a country, works miraculously.
It is often seen that women leaders have increasing number of followers since they start leading people. They never let down their followers and as a matter of fact, people follow them willingly.
Women Embrace Collaboration
Collaboration or being collaborative is defined to be mostly a feminine characteristic. Collaboration is to act willingly together with other members to attain a common pursuit. This makes leaders rise in their career graph because popular support remains with them as long as they are collaborative.
Women leaders have the ability to collaborate with colleagues, clients and employees across teams, functions, and departments because to be collaborative is innate with them. Many studies have agreed that women are more cooperative than men.
A paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (a non-profit organization based in Massachusetts, the USA) agrees on the fact that women are more attracted to cooperation than men. Men, often overestimate their capabilities, while downplaying those of their colleagues. Women, on the other hand, are a better judge of their abilities and therefore are not averse to suggestions and help from their team members. In short, women make better team players than men.
Women are transformational leaders in general. They understand the individual needs and aspiration of team members and interact with them on a personalized note. This personalized approach of women leaders bind the team members more strongly and they work with dedication towards realizing the goal.
Apart from the above-mentioned benefits, women leaders possess the tendency to look on the positive side of the events or conditions and continue to remain optimistic throughout. Being optimistic, women leaders on many occasions come out with favorable outcome. Optimism leads to development of confidence. At the core of confidence lies faith and trust. Women leaders show more self-confidence and have faith in the followers for good. This helps them win the willing support of the followers which in turn help them achieve success.
