女性领导力

On the cover: Women and leadership 35 Women start careers in business and other professions with the same level of intelligence, education, and commitment as men. Yet comparatively few reach the top echelons. This gap matters not only because the familiar glass ceiling is unfair, but also because the world has an increasingly urgent need for more leaders. All men and women with the brains, the desire, and the perseverance to lead should be encouraged to fulfill their potential and leave their mark. With all this in mind, the McKinsey Leadership Project—an initiative to help professional women at McKinsey and elsewhere—set out four years ago to learn what drives and sustains successful female leaders. We wanted to help younger women navigate the paths to leadership and, at the same time, to learn how organizations could get the best out of this talented group. To that end, we have interviewed more than 85 women around the world (and a few good men) who are successful in diverse fields. Some lead 10,000 people or more, others 5 or even fewer. While the specifics of their lives vary, each one shares the goal of making a difference in the wider world. All were willing to discuss their personal experiences and to provide Centered leadership: How talented women thrive A new approach to leadership can help women become more self-confident and effective business leaders. Joanna Barsh, Susie Cranston, and Rebecca A. Craske Organization The McKinsey Quarterly 2008 Number 436 insights into what it takes to stay the leadership course. We have also studied the academic literature; consulted experts in leadership, psychology, organizational behavior, and biology; and sifted through the experiences of hundreds of colleagues at McKinsey. From the interviews and other research, we have distilled a leadership model comprising five broad and interrelated dimensions (exhibit): meaning, or finding your strengths and putting them to work in the service of an inspiring purpose; managing energy, or knowing where your energy comes from, where it goes, and what you can do to manage it; positive framing, or adopting a more constructive way to view your world, expand your horizons, and gain the resilience to move ahead even when bad things happen; connecting, or identifying who can help you grow, building stronger relation- ships, and increasing your sense of belonging; and engaging, or finding your voice, becoming self-reliant and confident by accepting opportunities and the inherent risks they bring, and collaborating with others. We call this model centered leadership. As the name implies, it’s about having a well of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual strength that drives personal achievement and, in turn, inspires others to follow. What’s particularly exciting is that we are starting to discover ways women can actively build the skills to become more self-confident and effective leaders. Centered leadership also works for men, though we have found that the model resonates particularly well with women because we have built it on a foundation of research into their specific needs and experiences. Centered leadership emphasizes the role of positive emotions. A few characteristics particularly distinguish women from their male counterparts in the workplace. First, women can more often opt out of it than men can. Second, their double burden—motherhood and management—drains energy in a particularly challenging way. Third, they tend to experience emotional ups and downs more often and more intensely than most men do. Given these potentially negative emotions, centered leadership consciously draws on positive psychology, a discipline that seeks to identify what makes healthy people thrive. Although none of the women we interviewed articulated her ideas in precisely those terms, when we dived into the litera- ture and interviewed leading academics, we found strong echoes of what our female leaders had been telling us. On the cover: Women and leadership 37 Positive framing Engaging Meaning Self-awareness Learned optimism Moving on Happiness Signature strengths Purpose Minimizing depletion Restoration Flow Impact: Resilience Belonging Presence Voice Ownership Risk taking Adaptability Your personal and professional context Preconditions: Connecting Network design Sponsorship Reciprocity Inclusiveness Managing energy Intelligence Tolerance for change Desire to lead Communication skills e x h i b i t Five dimensions of leadership e x h i b i t Five dimensions of leadership The McKinsey Quarterly 2008 Number 438 Signature strengths Meaning is the motivation that moves us. It enables people to discover what interests them and to push them- selves to the limit. It makes the heart beat faster, provides energy, and inspires passion. Without meaning, work is a slog between weekends. With meaning, any job can become a calling. It starts with happiness. Positive psycholo- gists (including Tal Ben-Shahar, Jonathan Haidt, and Martin Seligman) have defined a progression of happiness that leads from pleasure to engagement to meaning. Researchers have demonstrated, for example, that an ice cream break provides only short-lived pleasure; in contrast, the satisfaction derived from an act of kind- ness or gratitude lasts much longer. Katharine Graham, the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 enterprise (the Washington Post Company), famously said, “To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?” Why is meaning important for leaders? Studies have shown that among profes- sionals, it translates into greater job satis- faction, higher productivity, lower turn- over, and increased loyalty.1 The benefits also include feelings of transcendence— in other words, contributing to something bigger than yourself generates a deeper sense of meaning, thereby creating a virtu- ous cycle. Finding meaning in life helped some of the female leaders we interviewed take new paths and accept the personal risks implicit in their goals. Meaning Positive framing Engaging Meaning Self-awareness Learned optimism Moving on Happiness Signature strengths Purpose Minimizing depletion Restoration Flow Impact: Resilience Belonging Presence Voice Ownership Risk taking Adaptability Your personal and professional context Preconditions: Connecting Network design Sponsorship Reciprocity Inclusiveness Managing energy Intelligence Tolerance for change Desire to lead Communication skills e x h i b i t Five dimensions of leadership On the cover: Women and leadership 39 Signature strengths Shelly Lazarus, the chairman and CEO of the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, described how she “just followed [her] heart, doing the things that [she] loved to do.” This sense of meaning inspired her, early in her career, to jump from Clairol to Ogilvy. Lazarus commented that everyone she knew thought that her decision to go from the client side to the agency side was a strategic move. But “it wasn’t really like that,” she says. “I just loved the interaction with the agency because that was the moment I could see where the ideas came to life.” People seeking to define what is meaning- ful can start, as one interviewee put it, by “being honest with yourself about what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing.” Building these signature strengths into everyday activities at work makes you hap- pier, in part by making these activities more meaningful. Although there is no simple formula for matching your strengths to any single industry or function, you can look for patterns in jobs that have and haven’t worked out and talk with others about your experiences. The connection between signature strengths and work can change because priorities do; sometimes, for example, a job is better than a calling, especially for young mothers. Our interviews show that this ebb and flow is natural and that the key to success is being aware of the shifts—and making conscious choices about them— in the context of bigger goals, personal or professional. To read more on meaning: Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, New York: Free Press, 2004. Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want, New York: Penguin, 2007. ‘To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?’ PurposeHappiness 1 Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, New York: Free Press, 2004. The McKinsey Quarterly 2008 Number 440 Actively managing energy levels is crucial to leaders. Today’s executives work hard: 60 percent of senior execu- tives toil more than 50 hours a week, and 10 percent more than 80 hours a week.2 What’s more, many women come home from work only to sign onto a “second shift”— 92 percent of them still manage all house- hold tasks, such as meal preparation and child care.3 We’ve found that work–life balance is a myth—so the only hope women have is to balance their energy flows. This means basing your priorities on the activities that energize you, both at work and at home, and actively managing your resources to avoid dipping into reserves. Burnout is a reality for men and women alike, but for women who can opt out, so too is throw- ing in the towel. But work doesn’t have to be exhausting. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a founder of posi- tive psychology, studied thousands of people, from sculptors to factory workers. He found that those who frequently experienced what he called “flow”—a sense of being so engaged by activities that you don’t notice the passage of time—were more productive and derived greater satis- faction from their work than those who did not. Further, it energized rather than drained them. Managing energy Positive framing Engaging Meaning Self-awareness Learned optimism Moving on Happiness Signature strengths Purpose Minimizing depletion Restoration Flow Impact: Resilience Belonging Presence Voice Ownership Risk taking Adaptability Your personal and professional context Preconditions: Connecting Network design Sponsorship Reciprocity Inclusiveness Managing energy Intelligence Tolerance for change Desire to lead Communication skills e x h i b i t Five dimensions of leadership On the cover: Women and leadership 41 Zia Mody, a top litigator in India, described how she gained energy from a life that most people would see as exhausting. Even when her three daughters were young, she put in 16-hour days to prepare her cases. A woman among thousands of men at court, she lit up as she told us, “I love it! I love winning. I love being in court. . . . It excites me—I cannot tell you how much.” One useful tactic is to identify the condi- tions and situations that replenish your energy and those that sap it. Self-awareness lets you deliberately incorporate restora- tive elements into your day. It can also help you to space out your energy-sapping tasks throughout the day, instead of bun- dling them all into a single morning or afternoon. A particularly useful tip, we have found, is to give yourself time during the day to focus without distractions such as blinking lights and buzzing phones. Your productivity will benefit several times over. To read more on managing energy: Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. Edy Greenblatt, “Work/Life Balance: Wisdom or Whining,” Organizational Dynamics, 2002, Volume 31, Number 2, pp. 177–93. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal, New York: Free Press, 2003. Minimizing depletion ‘Flow’—a sense of being so engaged by activities that you don’t notice the passage of time RestorationFlow 2 Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce, “Extreme jobs: The dangerous allure of the 70-hour workweek,” Harvard Business Review, 2006, Volume 84, Number 12, pp. 49–59. 3 Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007. The McKinsey Quarterly 2008 Number 442 The frames people use to view the world and process experiences can make a critical difference to professional outcomes. Many studies suggest that optimists see life more realistically than pessimists do, a frame of mind that can be crucial to making the right business decisions. That insight may be particularly critical for women, who are twice as likely to become depressed, according to one study.4 Optimists, research shows, are not afraid to frame the world as it actually is—they are confident that they can manage its challenges and move their teams quickly to action. By contrast, pessi- mists are more likely to feel helpless and to get stuck in downward spirals that lead to energy-depleting rumination. Martin Seligman, a psychologist who was an early proponent of positive psychology, found, for example, that optimists are better able to deal with the news that they have cancer. Confident that they can handle the prognosis, they immediately start to gather facts and dive into treatment plans; pessimists, on the other hand, become paralyzed with fear. Seligman also shows that optimism can be learned—an important insight that underlies positive framing. Positive framing and positive thinking, we would emphasize, are two different notions. The latter tries to replace adversity with positive beliefs. The former accepts the facts of adversity and counters them with action. Talking yourself into a view contrary to the facts has a temporary effect at best. Learned optimismPositive framing Positive framing Engaging Meaning Self-awareness Learned optimism Moving on Happiness Signature strengths Purpose Minimizing depletion Restoration Flow Impact: Resilience Belonging Presence Voice Ownership Risk taking Adaptability Your personal and professional context Preconditions: Connecting Network design Sponsorship Reciprocity Inclusiveness Managing energy Intelligence Tolerance for change Desire to lead Communication skills e x h i b i t Five dimensions of leadership On the cover: Women and leadership 43 The experience of Andrea Jung, the chair- man and CEO of Avon, suggests how useful positive framing can be. In late 2005, Jung recalls, she found her company in a decline that temporary factors could not explain. Recognizing that she was the leader who had created the strategies and the team responsible for the downturn, she lis- tened to the counsel of her executive coach and promptly “fired herself” on a Friday night. The following Monday, Andrea showed up at work as the “new” turnaround CEO. She proved herself to be a “glass half full” optimist, and the recovery plan her management team adopted after a quick diagnosis led to a steady improve- ment and a return to growth. No matter how pessimistic you are by nature, you can learn to view situations as optimists do. The key is self-awareness. If a meeting goes badly, for example, you should limit your thoughts about it to its temporary and specific impact and keep them impersonal. It helps to talk with trusted colleagues about the reasons for the poor meeting and ways to do better next time. These discussions should take place quickly enough for you to make a speci- fic plan and act on it. You should also under- take some activity that will restore both your energy and your faith in yourself— perhaps having a hard workout, going out with friends, or spending time with your children. To read more on positive framing: Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, New York: Basic Books, 2006. Martin E. P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, New York: Pocket Books, 1998. Learned optimismNo matter how pessimistic you are by nature, you can learn to view situations as optimists do Moving onSelf-awareness 4 See Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain, New York: Morgan Road Books, 2006. The McKinsey Quarterly 2008 Number 444 People with strong networks and good mentors enjoy more pro- motions, higher pay, and greater career satisfaction.5 They feel a sense of belonging, which makes their lives meaningful. As Mark Hunter and Herminia Ibarra have noted in the Harvard Business Review, what differentiates a leader from a manager “is the ability to figure out where to go and to enlist the people and groups necessary to get there.”6 Yet not all networks are equal. Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist who studies social belonging and rejection, believes that men tend to build broader, shallower networks than women do and that the networks of men give them a wider range of resources for gaining knowledge and professional opportunities.7 This theory is a matter of substantial debate among academics. Our experience with hundreds of women at McKinsey, however, offers additional evidence that women’s networks tend to be narrower but deeper than men’s. The experience of Dame Stella Rimington, who in the late 1960s joined MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence organization, offers an example of the power of broad networks to get things done. Rimington, later the agency’s director general, says that “women were definitely second-class citizens” in those days. They weren’t allowed to do fieldwork, for example, yet “many of the women were completely indistinguishable from the men: they had the same kind of education.” She continues: “So we women—there were quite a few of us by then—we sort of ganged up and did a kind of round-robin thing and said, ‘Why is it that we have a completely different career than men who are exactly like us?’ And for the first time, the powers that be started to scratch their heads because they suddenly had to find an answer. . . . And in the end, of course, they decided that they would have to promote a few women.” She later concluded that “no one of us would have asked that question on her own. We were supporting each other, and there was power in the many.” The leaders we interviewed also talked about the importance of having individual relationships with senior colleagues willing to go beyond the role of mentor— someone willing to stick out his or her own neck to create opportunity for or help a protégée. Such a person is what Ruth Porat, a vice chairwoman at Morgan Stanley, called a “sponsor.” A number of studies have shown that women who promote their own interests vigor- ously are seen as aggressive, uncooperative, and selfish. An equal number of studies show that the failure of women to promote their own interests results in a lack of female leaders. Until one of these conditions changes, sponsors, we believe, are the key to helping women gain access to oppor- tunities they merit and need to develop. Connecting Positive framing Engaging Meaning Self-awareness Learned optimism Moving on Happiness Signature strengths Purpose Minimizing depletion Restoration Flow Impact: Resilience Belonging Presence Voice Ownership Risk taking Adaptability Your personal and professional context Preconditions: Connecting Network design Sponsorship Reciprocity Inclusiveness Managing energy Intellig