The Centered Leadership model, expressly for women
Fri 29 January 2010
, Joanna Barsh, Susie Cranston, Rebecca A. Craske, McKinsey
Centered leadership is one of the few leadership models specifically intended for women leaders who are aiming for the top. The model for self confident and effective women in charge is based on five broad and interrelated dimensions: meaning, managing energy, positive framing, connecting, and engaging.
In their McKinsey Quarterly article Joanna Barsh, Susie Cranston, and Rebecca A. Craske say their model emphasizes the role of positive emotions. This, they argue, is something that clearly sets women in the workplace apart from men. There are three reasons why Barsh, Cranston and Craske have come up with a leadership model expressly for women. “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,” they state.
Meaning moves us
Meaning, the McKinsey ladies say, is about finding your strengths and putting them to work in the service of an inspiring purpose. “Meaning is the motivation that moves us. It enables people to discover what interests them and to push themselves 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.”
Managing energy is crucial
The second dimension is managing energy, which boils down to knowing where your energy comes from, where it goes, and what you can do to manage it. “Actively managing energy levels is crucial to leaders. Today’s executives work hard: 60 percent of the senior executives toil more than 50 hours a week, and 10 percent more than 80 hours a week. What’s more, many women come home from work only to sign onto a ‘second shift’ - 92 percent of them still manage all household tasks, such as meal preparation and child care.”
Expand your horizons
Positive framing is adopting a more constructive way to view your world, expand your horizons, and gain the resilience to move ahead even when bad things happen. “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. 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, pessimists are more likely to feel helpless and to get stuck in downward spirals that lead to energy-depleting rumination.”
Enjoy more promotions
Identifying who can help you grow, building stronger relationships, and increasing your sense of belonging, is what connecting is all about. “People with strong networks and good mentors enjoy more promotions, higher pay, and greater career satisfaction. 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.’ 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. 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.”
Becoming confident
The fifth dimension, on which centered leadership is based, is engaging. It’s finding your voice, becoming self-reliant and confident by accepting opportunities and the inherent risks they bring, and collaborating with others. “Many people think that hard work will eventually be noticed and rewarded. That can indeed happen - but it usually doesn’t. Women, our interviewees repeatedly told us, need to ‘create their own luck.’ To engage with opportunities by taking ownership of them, you must first find your own voice, literally. Julie Daum, a prominent Spencer Stuart recruiter who specializes in board placements, told us that even senior women on boards still lose out by not speaking up: they hang back if they think that they have nothing new to say or that their ideas fall short of profound.”
Joanna Barsh is a director in McKinsey’s New York office, where Rebecca Craske is an associate principal; and Susie Cranston is a consultant in the San Francisco office. Read the whole article here.
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