What if Female Leadership were the norm?
I do not mean, here, female leaders precisely.
The fact of Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert (who, this morning, looks as though she has been re-elected) and Kari Lake demonstrate that women in leadership positions alone will not save us.
But female leadership might. Which is to say this is about terminology, not about gender.
Because when Simon Sinek says leaders eat last and takes his chief example from The Marines he is, by the terms I suggest we adopt, arguing for the feminine: Service over status and status through sacrifice.
When David Marquet learns from his time as a submarine captain that leaders either “take control or give control” and that “it is not about success, it is about significance” he puts what gets done together over an individual’s prominence.
“‘I don’t know’ are the most important words a leader can say,” says Marquet.
Would not the world be a better place for all genders if more leaders said, “I don’t know?” Would not leaders themselves be more relaxed? Less full of pretense and fear about their own imposter syndrome?
Sinek and Marquet just happen to be men who state in their own way what Brene Brown says best when she defines a leader “as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.”
Courage, always central to leadership and life, sits differently in the mode of leadership Brown defines than in the one we still tolerate far too often.
Cowardly leadership is often selfish and too often fakes having all the answers instead of doing that super brave thing of saying: I don’t know.
Such leadership often revels in the cruelty it evokes rather than the potential it develops and, again, can be practiced by any gender. Margaret Thatcher was an especially able practitioner of this cowardly, male, leadership.
From now on we must promote those who put themselves last, give control, and want to develop others.
You may say I am just equating “bad” with male, “good” with female, and then substituting in the words that help make my argument. And?
Perception, language, and presumption go a long way toward making reality. Don Draper and Steve Jobs are Ron DeSantis get a head start, because we default to the idea that a leader is a dude rather than a dudette. They fit the mold we cast with our definitions and language and if this does not earn them their positions, it certainly helps and certainly gives them a pass on their jerkiness as well.
So let’s have a new default about what courage is, leadership too.
Because a new reality demands new definitions the corresponding language that helps us make new assumptions.
I expect my boss to be a woman, but a man who leads via the feminine will be fine too.