16 Dec l.e.a.d.e.r-ship

I was recently treated to a very protracted Multi-Directional Leadership talk by Dr. James Anthony of the University of Washington. His assertion was that “anyone can be a leader” – you are not necessarily born a leader, you become one. I eyed him a bit warily at this… i make a great leader of keeping dishes clean at dinner parties. I am a great leader in baking and cooking too much when i’m nervous (just ask the slightly plumper cohort of Vicky Lawson’s 2008 writing seminar). Here is what i took away:

L-isten to what is being said, what is not being said
E-ncourage: what conditions can you create to encourage success?
A-dapt: how do you handle change?
D-istribute: what can you delegate? to whom? how can you let others lead?
E-valuate: create a culture of assessment and evaluation – what’s working, what’s not?
R-ally: how do you recognize and motivate others?

We were then asked to work with partners to find our two strongest leadership qualities, a mutual quality, and a quality we could work on. Unhesitatingly, i chose listen and encourage for strong. My partner and i could not find a mutual one – for which i was rather pleased because that means we’d make a great team. And my weakest is distribute. I only tell these because as i sat there, i realized that i had unwittingly  pegged myself as the caring, warm, listening, attentive, feminine leader (see comment above about cooking and washing dishes as coping mechanisms).

It is not unknown that women who exhibit “feminine” qualities are less likely to be taken seriously as leaders and even will have a harder time being hired, as Gabriella Montell’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed tells.

According to a new study published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Psychology, letters that describe candidates in “communal” or cooperative terms—e.g., “agreeable,” “helpful,” “nurturing,”—are less highly regarded by search committees (hat tip: The Juggle) than are active terms. And, of course, the cooperative terms are most often used to describe female candidates, while active terms—like “confident,” “aggressive,” and “independent”—which are more highly regarded by search committees, are typically reserved for male candidates, the researchers at Rice University and the University of Houston found in their examination of 624 recommendation letters for 194 applicants for eight university faculty jobs.

I raised my hand in the workshop. I couldn’t help myself. I know he wasn’t prepared or that anyone else in the room had even thought about the gendering of leadership. Maybe i knew i should keep my mouth shut. These leadership qualities, the ones i have, i pointed out, are a veritable death knell to my entire career. How do we have these qualities without being pegged as too “female,” without losing our job prospects?

Suffice to say, he didn’t have an answer. His response was something to do with needing to work on some strengths in some work places and others in others. Each place will require a different set of leadership skills.

Yes, correct – but graduate school and the academy require the two that i have most strongly, pretty much through the entirety of my career (if i’m going to be at all supportive of my colleagues and students), and certainly requires all the others (if i’m ever going to lead research teams, deal with the ever increasing cuts to higher ed, etc.). So what good is that advice?

What good are any leadership skills if i can’t get a job? What is frustrating about this is that we women are still hearing about all the things that we do “wrong” and yet are not being given any tools to do them “right.” Wait – no – that’s the wrong approach to take. We are begin taught to be leaders who are comfortable in our skills sets, but the leadership is not being taught / asked to recognize the worth of those qualities.

So what i was left with was a bad taste for this l.e.a.d.e.r. rubric. Apparently it was written for men – or women who want to go into more “feminized” work places where things like Listening and Encouraging are taken as worthwhile leadership qualities. It simply reinscribed a whole set of assumptions about leadership even as it purported to encompass all forms. I’m not saying that the rubric is wrong per se, so much as i question its completeness. As with any subject, nibbling things down into neat little compartments without problematizing them for their shortcomings is misleading, at best, and detrimental at worst.