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No Doubts: Women Are Better Managers
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This interview with Carol Smith, senior vice president and chief brand officer for the Elle Group, the media company, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Carol Smith, senior vice president and chief brand officer at the Elle Group, the media company, views women as the best bosses and mentors, but says men don't take problems as personally.
Q. What is the most important lesson you’ve learned about leadership?
A. The importance of winning over employees as opposed to bossing employees. I learned that lesson very, very early — in sixth grade.
Q. Tell me about that.
A. In sixth grade, I was head of the project to create a mural for the graduating class to hang in the auditorium. That’s a big deal. And I got a clipboard, I remember, and then I had all this power and I started bossing everyone around. And within days it was apparent that I was going to have a mutiny on my hands, and I was fired from the mural. They took my clipboard away. It was a lesson I learned very early in life about the difference between being the boss and being bossy. I often tell people, “Ah, that’s a sixth-grade clipboard problem here.”
I feel I’m a leader without ever really thinking I’m a leader, which is to say that I know when I walk into a room of employees, I command a presence, but I’m always feeling like I’m part of the gang. I don’t instantly sit at the head of the table. I sit in the middle of the table, always. I don’t want to sit at the head of the table. I want to be part of the process and part of the decision.
In the end I think that if you win people over, they’ll follow you. And of course you need other qualities, like honesty, decisiveness and the ability to confront. I’m a really good confronter.
Q. What do you mean by “confronter?”
A. I have been in this career for many years and I have seen, and this is a generalization, that women are better list-makers. They will do their to-do list. They will prioritize their to-do list. They will get through their to-do list. Maybe it’s because we do shopping lists. And if we have a problem — again, as a generalization — we will confront the problem and deal with it head-on.
I think that has really made me good at managing people, because I think they always know that they’re going to get a real answer.
Q. Can you elaborate?
A. When you’re about to give someone a bad review, they pretty much know it. They might not know they know it, but they know it. Do I always start out with a positive? Yeah. But if there isn’t any positive, I’m not going to try to find it if there isn’t anything. I will always give them my point of view and my side, and I will always keep the door open to hear their side, and I will always end with, “Here’s what you have to do to correct it.”
Confrontation — meaning, “You didn’t do a good job. That presentation was bad. It didn’t work, and here’s why it didn’t work” — is so much better than walking away from a sales call saying, “Great. Got to get back to the office, O.K.?” It’s better for everyone and I’ve never understood why people won’t do it.
Q. It sounds as if you’ve thought a lot about men versus women as managers.
A. I have, I have.
Q. Please share.
A. Hands down women are better. There’s no contest.
Q. Why?
A. In my experience, female bosses tend to be better managers, better advisers, mentors, rational thinkers. Men love to hear themselves talk. I’m so generalizing. I know I am. But in a couple of places I’ve worked, I would often say, “Call me 15 minutes after the meeting starts and then I’ll come,” because I will have missed all the football. I will have missed all the “what I did on the golf course.” I will miss the four jokes, and I can get into the meeting when it’s starting.
Men also, they’re definitely better on the “whatever” side. Things tend to roll off their back. We women take things very personally. We’re constantly playing things over in our head — “What did that mean when they said that?” — when they mean nothing. And I’m certainly not immune to this. So there’s a downside to women.
Q. Any others?
A. No. Although I will say that working for all women is just as bad as working for all men. I hate an office where there aren’t men and women together. I hate it, hate it, hate it. Men and women together is the best.
Q. If women are better managers, how come there aren’t more women in the corner offices of corporate America?
A. I ask you that. I think we’d be better presidents. I mean, we’ve got a really good one right now, but I find it so puzzling. I swear I don’t know.
Q. What have you tried to do less of over time?
A. Less of the, “I want to know who did that. Who decided to give that rate to that person?” I want less of that self-righteousness. I have a little bit of that and I think I’d like to have less of that — the, “You see? I told you so.” That’s definitely something I should work on.
I would love to do more — it’s corny, but it’s true — management by walking around. It really makes a difference. I know it does. And we all get caught up with being with our own little group. We all have our comfort zone.
Q. Any other comfort zones you’ve worked to get out of?
A. I’m most proud of the fact that I got out of being afraid of giving speeches. You have to be out there and you have to be up there, and you have to be the leader. It was something I needed to overcome. I did everything. I was the oldest person at Dale Carnegie. I could have had private lessons in my office. But I wanted to go there.
Q. Looking back, do you feel there was a moment or experience that set your career on a different trajectory?
A. I started working at 16. I worked all through college. Work brought me success and money and freedom, and then more success and more money and more freedom.
I failed a few times. I failed to get into the college of my choice. I failed to get into law school. And they were big failures for me, but I found the more I worked, the better I did, without ever having a goal. I didn’t have a goal. I wanted to be a lawyer and I didn’t get to be a lawyer, but all of a sudden I woke up one day and I was in publishing, and I knew what I was doing.
As I look back, I think that sometimes you can’t have the five-year plan for yourself. If you’re doing something well, you tend to keep doing it. That’s how you fall into careers.
Q. Do you have tricks for managing your time?
A. I come to work almost every Sunday for at least four hours to go through my e-mail. I did it when it was a real in-box, and I would go through it and write notes to everyone and then hand them out on Monday, and now I do it with e-mail. I’m glad I come in on Sunday. It’s the quiet time. I get things out of the way. I’m reacting, but I’m thinking as I do it, constantly going through things. So when I come in on Monday, it’s like my vacation day. I’ve gotten my e-mail down to under 30.
Q. Any other time management techniques?
A. I don’t waste time. If you want to chat, if you want to gossip, I’ll gossip with anyone, I’ll hang out. But when I’m working, I’m working. When you sit here in my office, we work. Men don’t do that as well as women do, either. All of sudden they’re on football. All of a sudden they’re showing videos of their son’s soccer game. Then they’re telling a couple of jokes. I’m not good at jokes during meetings. I’m very focused. I’m very singularly directed.
Q. Let’s talk about hiring.
A. I am living by something I read in Cathie Black’s book [“Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life)”] which I sort of instinctively knew — that you’ve got to meet someone three times, and one of them better be over a meal.
You learn so much in a meal. It’s like a little microcosm of life. How they order, what they order. How are they going to give instructions to a waiter? Are they sending back the meal eight times? Can they keep the conversation going, especially if you’re hiring someone who is in sales? Are they asking smart questions?
Throughout a meal, the personality comes out, I think. Are you going to connect with us? Are you going to be part of the team, or are you going to be one of these independent players who wants to take all the credit? Are you good with assistants? Those are things you can find out in some subtle ways when you eat with someone.
Q. Any other tips on hiring?
A. Don’t hire somebody you don’t like. There is always a strong internal pressure to give a job to a person who has all the right credentials and says all the right things, even if something about her sends up little signals of alarm. They may be slight, but in my experience it is a great mistake to ignore them. Every time I went against my instincts and gave a job to someone who, though clearly capable, made me feel uneasy during the interview, it has ended badly.
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- Reply whiney
- Advantages, Yes, but Also a Double Standard
Alice Eagly is chairman of the department of social psychology at Northwestern University.
As a researcher on managerial behavior, I have read hundreds of studies that have compared women and men as managers. When we summarize all of that research, some differences do show up, although only “on the average.”
As with all averages, there are many exceptions. But here’s what we know from research:
Women are less ‘bossy,’ probably because people dislike bossy women even more than bossy men.
First, as Carol Smith illustrates, women are less “bossy,” probably because people dislike bossy women even more than bossy men. As a result, female managers are more collaborative and democratic than male managers. Second, compared with men, women use a more positive approach by encouraging and urging others rather than a negative approach of scolding and reprimanding them. Third, women attend more to the individuals they work with, by mentoring them and taking their particular situations into account.
Finally, there is the matter of getting the job done efficiently. Most managers, male and female, get their work done in a timely way, but some do not. When you find one of those barely functioning managers — that is, someone who avoids solving problems and just doesn’t get the job done, that person is more likely to be a man than a woman. Why? Perhaps because a woman would be fired or demoted more quickly for poor managing.
So, are women better managers than men? In terms of their day-to-day actions, women managers should have advantages. But the answer is really not so simple because managers do well only if people accept their authority.
In roles that have been held mainly by men, women’s competence is often questioned. In these situations, women managers can face a double standard. They have to be extra-competent to be recognized as effective. Where women managers are more common, this type of bias is less likely to prevail.
- Reply whiney
- Belittling Other Women
Leora Tanenbaum is author of “Catfight: Rivalries Among Women: From Diets to Dating, From the Boardroom to the Delivery Room.”
Yes, countless female managers are great at making lists and sure, lots of men love to hear the sound of their own voices — endlessly. But none of this behavior matters if it’s accompanied with a denial of the continued existence of sexism in the workplace.
Many women who make it to senior management feel a need to prove their own superiority.
Consider: Women are routinely undervalued and assumed to lack competence. Successful men don’t have to worry about when and if to become parents; successful women do. Men earn more and are promoted more.
Troublingly, many individual women who make it to senior management refuse to acknowledge these very real conditions. They position themselves as uniquely and unusually qualified, implicitly belittling other women in a move to prove their own superiority.
Upon becoming president and C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard in 1999, Carly Fiorina immediately distanced herself from her corporate sisters. Fiorina announced that “there is not a glass ceiling…. My gender is interesting but really not the subject of the story here.” Whether or not Fiorina was a superior CEO because she was a woman is certainly debatable — she was forced out in 2005 — and she was succeeded by another woman, Patricia Dunn, who was accused of spying on the company’s board members.
The best managers, female or male, are those who admit that the corporate structure favors men and who recognize their responsibility to help others follow in their footsteps.
- Reply whiney
- More Emotional, for Better or Sometimes Worse
Joanna Barsh is a director in the New York office of McKinsey and Company and co-author of “How Remarkable Women Lead,” to be published in September.
We’ve been researching remarkable women leaders for the past five years. Indeed, we’ve now interviewed well over 100 women and a few good men. We’ve also developed a research survey that almost 2,000 men and women have responded to from around the world.
In a word, women have an edge over men in terms of what we call centered leadership. Women tend to look for meaning more than men at work (no surprise, men go for pay and status more often).
Women are natural relationship builders, but in general they take fewer risks than men.
Women also bring emotion to the workplace, and when those emotions are positive — that is quite powerful. Psychologists tell us that women experience emotions more at the extremes than men.
That’s why many women do replay negative events over and over.
But female optimists are a different story. Whereas many men rush off in any direction when adversity strikes, optimist women diagnose the situation, make a plan and then act. Are pessimists doomed to the cycle of spiraling down? Not at all. Positive psychologists teach learned optimism, and we can all take a lesson there.
Then there is connecting. Women are natural relationship-builders. But the debate rages as to whether men or women are better at networking. Our own work suggests women hold back, more reluctant to use reciprocity to build “transactional” relationships. That said, the research shows women are more inclusive and build consensus to reach decisions — something that may be increasingly important for large, complex and changing companies today.
When it comes to engaging, men are risk-takers. The women who have made their way to the top have also taken risk — it is the best way to develop at an accelerated pace. In general, we have found that many women don’t. We wait until we have all the necessary skills or the full answer.
Our model ends on energizing, because most women still do more of the household work. Energizing is critical for leaders — both to sustain one’s own path and also to infuse energy into the organization. One area where women can improve is to stop (yes) multitasking when our full attention is required. When you attempt to facilitate a phone conference while doing email, your brain switches between tasks, and you lose focus and energy.
When men and women assessed their own centered leadership practices, it turned out that women scored higher on almost all factors by a marginal amount. We haven’t got enough data to validate that finding, but there’s room for thought.
Are these the right attributes to gauge leadership? We believe they are even more important in today’s marketplace.
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- Women Are More Effective Mind Readers
Susan Pinker is a psychologist and columnist for the Globe and Mail in Canada. She is the author of “The Sexual Paradox,” about the roots of sex differences in the classroom and the workplace.
No doubts: Some sex differences exist, and there’s new evidence to prove it. Women are often better communicators because their brains are more networked for language. The majority of women are better at “mind-reading,” than most men; they can read the emotions written on people’s faces more quickly and easily, a talent jump-started by the vast swaths of neural real estate dedicated to processing emotions in the female brain, and boosted by jolts of oxytocin at critical moments in their lives. (Amazingly, oxytocin, a hormone circulating in greater quantities in women, squirted up a man’s nostril boosts his mind-reading skills, too.)
While women may be more empathetic than men, individual female managers who have climbed the ladder may not be.
And the thicker corpus callosum connecting women’s two hemispheres provides a swifter superhighway for processing social messages, such as reading the morale of a group, or the mood of a colleague. And there are measurable sex differences in empathy, as President Obama suggested when he nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. There are more women who are champions at imagining what other people are thinking and feeling, and more men who struggle mightily with this skill.
But is this profile true of all women, and does it mean women make better managers? The answer is no, and no.
First, all scientific evidence is based on statistical averages; an individual’s unique qualities are always blended into the group’s. So, even if men are taller than women, on average, variation means that there will always be some women who are taller than some men. And just as women are more empathic, on average, there are certainly men who are softer, and better empathizers than some women.
The readers’ complaints about difficult female managers that appear under the interview with Carol Smith make that clear: aggression is certainly more common among men, but for many reasons, the women who rise up the ranks may be on the more competitive and aggressive side — and their subordinates often feel it — especially the women who work with them.
Competition within each sex is more fierce than it is between the sexes, and one study shows that women report less stress if the boss is a man.
One reason is that competition within each sex is more fierce than it is between the sexes, and within-sex tension increases when resources are tight, as they are in this recession. One study published in 2008 by two sociologists at the University of Toronto, Scott Schieman and Taralyn McMullen, reinforces that maxim. When the scientists looked at physical and mental distress among 1,000 American employees working in a variety of jobs, they found that men worked best with gender-mixed managers: one male, one female. Women, however, worked best with one male manager — reporting fewer headaches, backaches anxiety, and difficulties concentrating than they did when they worked for a woman.
Which shows that Carol Smith is wrong about her blanket statement about women being better managers. But she’s right about something else. Whether we’re talking about mentoring, managing or office politics, the research is clear: “Men and women together are the best.”
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- A Female Specialty: Feedback
Sharon Meers is co-author of “Getting to 50/50,” about working couples, and a former managing director at Goldman Sachs. She and her husband created the Partnership for Parity at Stanford Business School and the Dual-Career Initiative at Harvard University.
The best thing about female managers? They get you paid more. Women bosses tend to fight harder for their subordinates, according to negotiation research, getting better raises for their teams.
I’ve worked for many great men. But, in my experience, female managers are a special breed. We won’t know for decades if the differences are due more to nature or nurture but they are largely good — and stem from the fact that senior women are still outsiders.
Harvard Business School research says star women are more likely than male stars to remain persistently high performers. Why? Women don’t get the same access to mentors and networks and have to build muscle that men don’t. Star women have to innovate to outperform — building stronger client ties, finding outside advisers, seeking opportunities with results that can be measured objectively.
Women often take an alternative approach to leading teams — encouraging more open discussion, cultivating talent and sharing credit. Feedback is the place where women bosses may add the most value.
Straight talk from a boss at Goldman Sachs.
After seven years at Goldman, I got my first female manager — and more straight talk than in my entire career. She minced no words when I messed up, but she also made it clear she was on my side: my advocate. That powerful combination — candor and trust — inspired her team to accept and act on feedback in a way I hadn’t seen before.
In hundreds of interviews of workers and bosses for our book, we repeatedly heard employees complain about the feedback style of male bosses (everything from excessively harsh to evasive). Male bosses were no more satisfied: Many are now so unsure what’s O.K. in the workplace, they fear female workers’ crying or complaints to HR.
So here’s the real question: How to make the positive qualities we see in female managers more common in men — and more useful to all? A new report from Catalyst shows how companies win when we escape the idea that men and women are so different and work harder to get on the same page — so that men and women bring out the best in each other sharing the same C-suite.
