WUNRN
CENTERED LEADERSHIP: HOW TALENTED
WOMEN THRIVE
An Approach to Leadership Can Help
Women Become
More Self-Confident and Effective
Business
McKinsey Quarterly
September
2008
Joanna Barsh, Susie Cranston, and Rebecca A. Craske
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 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 relationships, 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 literature and interviewed leading academics, we found strong echoes of
what our female leaders had been telling us.
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.
It starts
with happiness. Positive psychologists (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 kindness 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 professionals, it
translates into greater job satisfaction, higher productivity, lower turnover,
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 virtuous cycle. Finding
meaning in life helped some of the women leaders we interviewed take new paths
and accept the personal risks implicit in their goals.
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 meaningful 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
happier, 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.
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.2 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.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 throwing in the towel.
But work
doesn’t have to be exhausting. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a founder of positive
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 satisfaction from their work than those who
did not. Further, it energized rather than drained them.
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 conditions and situations that replenish your energy
and those that sap it. Self-awareness lets you deliberately incorporate
restorative elements into your day. It can also help you to space out your
energy-sapping tasks throughout the day, instead of bundling 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.
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, pessimists
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.
The
experience of Andrea Jung, the chairman 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 listened 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 improvement 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 specific plan and act on it.
You should also undertake 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.
People
with strong networks and good mentors enjoy more promotions, 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 vigorously 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 opportunities they merit and need
to develop.
Porat
explained how a managing director took a chance on her when she was a
second-year associate, asking her to present to a client’s board of directors. “The
consumer client wanted a woman to be present. I had never been in a boardroom,
let alone presented in a boardroom. ‘Sink or swim,’ he told me. ‘You’re in.’ I
still remember to this day a mistake I made and that it was, overall, a good
presentation. He took a real chance on me.”
One
surprising thing we learned as a result of talking with female leaders was that
they often fail to reciprocate and find expectations that they should do so
distasteful. A senior partner at McKinsey noted that men naturally understand
that you must “give before you get,” but women don’t. This tendency—which other
leaders have described to us as well—combined with the sometimes awkward sexual
politics, real or perceived, between senior men and younger women, makes it
harder for women to find sponsors.
Yet women
can learn reciprocity. To start, it’s important to assess your comfort level
with the people you know through work, as well as how influential they are
professionally. Most women we’ve worked with typically find that the colleagues
they are close to are not influential—and vice versa. Explicit planning and
some risk taking are needed to change this.
One approach
is to provide and ask for help on a regular basis. Finding ways to forge
connections through interests outside of work is another. Over and over, we
heard, “Make it personal,” in the sense that others will get along with you
more easily if they see your human side. You can express this in all kinds of
ways at work, without inappropriately blending your professional and personal
lives. The female leaders we interviewed acted on this insight both to find
sponsors and to build networks.
To read
more on connecting:
Catalyst, Creating Women’s Networks: A How-To
Guide for Women and Companies, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.
Monica
Higgins and Kathy Kram, “Reconceptualizing Mentoring at Work: A Developmental
Network Perspective,”
Academy of Management Review, 2001, Volume 26, Number 2, pp.
264–68.
Lois J.
Zachary, The Mentor’s Guide:
Facilitating Effective Learning Relationships, San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 2000.
Many
people think that hard work will eventually be noticed and rewarded. That can
indeed happen—but 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.
One senior
woman we interviewed told us how she learned to join in: “Every Monday, we had
a senior-management meeting. In the beginning, I just listened. I learned from
the guys because they were all there. And after a while I started to speak up.
You did the work, so you’ve got to talk about it. And I did.”
Women who
want to grow as leaders should also take ownership of their professional
development. Mary Ma, Lenovo’s former chief financial officer, said that she
drew inspiration from using the Japanese auto industry as a metaphor, reshaping
herself to become more competitive by identifying what she had to change and
then actually changing it. As Ma noted, she didn’t complain to her boss or to
her colleagues but rather looked inward to see how she could be a more
effective leader. Instead of waiting for someone to tell her what to do, she
took a systematic approach to self-improvement.
Engagement
is equally about risk taking. The women we interviewed accept risk as a part of
opportunity. Some have the confidence and courage to dive in; others use
analytic problem solving to assess risks and then proceed to action.
Psychologist Daniel Gilbert says his research indicates that people who make a
choice for risk and work with it, rather than avoid it, report a greater degree
of happiness than others do.
Shona Brown,
Google’s senior vice president of business operations, described how she
handles opportunities and the risks that accompany them. “I’ll use a skiing
analogy because I like to jump off cliffs,” she says. “But I generally jump off
cliffs from which I’m relatively confident I’m going to land—or if I don’t,
it’s not dangerous.” Brown said she enjoys risk. “I like to be at that point
where you’re about to jump. Your stomach is kind of going ‘woo’! It’s not so
simple that you’re sure you’ll succeed. But you’re not in a life-threatening
situation.”
Our
interviews have shown us that to embrace opportunity, people must often take
sharp detours and that the risks of unexpected changes commonly seem more
obvious than the benefits. Reaching out to others—not to avoid making decisions
yourself but to learn the best outcome from change can often help you see opportunities
in the right frame and decide whether to go for them.
To read
more on engaging:
Daniel
Gilbert, Stumbling On
Happiness, New York: Knopf, 2006.
Linda
Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women
Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation—and Positive Strategies for
Change, New York: Bantam, 2007.
Marshall
Rosenberg, Nonviolent
Communication: A Language of Life, Encinitas, CA: Puddledancer
Press, 2003.
Within
McKinsey and in the corporate world, our work on centered leadership continues
(see sidebar, “Initial results”). To
understand how men and women practice it across tenures, industries, and
regions, we are interviewing more female and male leaders and launching
large-scale surveys—again, with female and male respondents.
Our research
is exploring the hypothesis that today’s leaders can become even more effective
through the model of centered leadership: a shared purpose with deep meaning
for the people involved, explicit awareness and management of energy, positive
framing, strong informal and formal networks, and the collaborative creation of
opportunities. In time, we hope to help increase the number of female leaders
significantly by giving them the tools to build leadership skills for any
playing field.
McKinsey has
been hard at work for more than a decade developing female leaders. Centered
leadership is a simple yet powerful model that has infused tremendous energy
into our efforts. We are now beginning to see the power that comes from putting
all the pieces together. Since March, we’ve introduced the centered-leadership
model to a thousand women and half as many men in regional and global learning
programs. Work on building the skills at its core has unleashed collective and
individual energy. Some participants quickly reached out to people who might
sponsor them; others began to give their career focus greater meaning right
away by asking to be involved in new projects that reflect their specific
interests. Many of the women reported a tremendous increase in their energy and
motivation. Indeed, more than 100 of them signed onto an interest group to
compare notes about how they are applying centered leadership.
It’s early
days for centered leadership, but like a grassroots movement it is
proliferating organically. Interestingly, we initially rolled out these ideas
only to women but were immediately approached by many men who wanted “what the
women were having.”
Joanna
Barsh
is a director in McKinsey’s New York office.
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