The Big Questions: Ask Yourself

• What’s my leadership paradigm? • What’s my biases? How do I act on it? • How is it working for me? • What is missing in my team? • We have created a perfect system that gives us

the results we got. • Shift to a new paradigm of Inclusive Leadership • What does this look like? • Do I/we have the commitment power? • Is my skin in the game?

The traditional form of leadership is heavy on masculine strengths

• Today’s leaders, need a larger repertoire.

• Feminine traits and values are an untapped form of competitive and strategic advantage.

• Research concludes that leaders need both masculine and feminine traits.

• Leaders must be competitive, confident and decisive (masculine strengths) – but also collaborative, empathetic, intuitive and vulnerable (feminine strengths).

Achievement does not equal respect if you are a woman

Your competence as a woman is secondary to your likability

How can individuals and organisations accelerate the closing of the corporate leadership gap?

• No matter how high women’s levels of preparation and aptitude for executive leadership roles, no matter how many women are promoted, if organisations fail to acknowledge and address the impact of stereotypic bias, they will lose out on top female talent.

• By creating a false dichotomy between men’s and women’s characteristics, stereotypes narrow the range of effective behaviours within the workplace overall.

• Gender stereotypes often intersect with other social stereotypes, such as race, disability, ethnicity, sexuality and class.

How do stereotypes hinder women’s advancement?

• These perceptions inhibit women’s advancement because

“taking-charge” skills and stereotypically masculine behaviours, such as assertiveness and competition, are often seen as prerequisites for top-level positions.

• To the extent that people still equate stereotypically masculine behaviours and traits with effective leadership, men are cast as “natural” leaders, while women constantly must prove that they can lead.

• Also, partly because of the perceived incongruity of women in leadership, gender stereotypes create different standards with which to evaluate women compared to men in similar positions.

Stereotypes create an invisible barrier to women’s advancement

• Stereotypes are often difficult to combat or even detect.

• Stereotypes’ prescriptive nature: people believe that men and women should behave in ways that are gender-consistent

• The prescriptive nature of gender stereotypes prevents change by making it difficult for women and men to go against norms that enable them to “fit in” for fear of social rejection and of all the negative consequences it might entail.

Stereotypical perceptions create several predicaments for women leaders

• All of which put women in a double bind. Women who lead are left with limited and unfavourable options no matter which way they go, no matter how they might choose to behave as leaders.

• Essentially, women leaders are “damned if they do and doomed if they don’t” meet gender-stereotypic expectations.

Three Predicaments

According to research data and personal experience, women leaders face:

1. Extreme Perceptions: Too Soft, Too Tough, and Never Just Right.

2. The High Competence Threshold: Women Leaders Face Higher Standards and Lower Rewards Than Men Leaders.

3. Competent but Disliked: Women Leaders are Perceived as Competent or Likable, but Rarely Both.

New research shows the way. Shift to what do good

leaders do, the masculine and the feminine.

• That traits classically considered feminine are essential

to effective leadership today. • So, sure, more women leaders would be great. But this

is not a story about women leaders. It's a story about good leaders. And our understanding of what good leaders do is.

• A survey found Two-thirds said the world would be a better place if men thought more like women.

• Topping the list of most desirable traits were patience, expressiveness, intuition, flexibility, empathy, and many other traits identified by respondents as feminine.

And testosterone is not collaboration's friend

• In the past 15 years or so, three factors have emerged to make a softer, more inclusive leadership style more attractive.

• Those factors are interdependence, cynicism, and the quest for sustainability.

Gender Strength Continuum

SHIFT • A new breed leader speaks of combining

power and love to succeed in a time when cooperation/collaboration is as important as ambition.

7 Traits of True Leaders

• Control is a mirage.

• The most effective leaders right now are women and men who embrace traits once considered feminine:

• Empathy. Vulnerability. Humility.

• Inclusiveness. Generosity.

• Balance. Patience.

What does the Inclusive Leader Do?

• The signals point to inclusion as the new paradigm, and the inclusive leader as someone who seeks out diverse perspectives to ensure that insights are profound and decisions robust.

• Diversity of thinking is gaining prominence as a disruptive force to break through the status quo.

Build Inclusive Teams

• At the heart of a team’s success stands the inclusive leader.

• One who is aware of unconscious biases and open to understanding diverse perspectives to help navigate the challenges facing the team.

The Hero No More

• An inclusive leader is one who also understands that the new paradigm is less about the leader as the hero and more about the leader as an agent who develops, inspires and enables others, a synergist that sparks the team to head in the direction that it needs to go in.

The Inclusive Leader create results that matter to the people they serve

• A person who actively creates a workplace in which diverse talent is fostered, whatever the packaging, and in which diverse teams operate to their maximum potential.

• And a person who understands the link between diversity, inclusion and higher institutional performance.

The Team

• Manage conflict by creating an environment of psychological safety • This means that a team (or an organisation) is considered safe for

interpersonal risk-taking and no member feels he or she will be rejected, embarrassed or punished for speaking up. Such conditions activate positive psychological processes such as empathy, self-disclosure and group trust which are critical for collaboration and performance.

• Additionally, an inclusive leader will provide the framework for team members to become mindful of their individual biases and more curious about others.

• And when these factors combine, namely a greater individual awareness, a collective identity and an inclusive framework, teams have the potential to act as a self-correcting system and thus capitalise on our ability to spot bias more quickly in others than in ourselves.

• Instead of neglecting or rejecting the dissonant point of view, a mature team welcomes difference as enabling high performance.

Inclusive Team Meetings

Deal with 3 main Challenges:

1. First speaker advantage

2. The loudest voice roars

3. Bias to groupthink

Ingozi Watch Out!

• Research consistently demonstrates that visible leadership commitment, behaviours and symbols speak loudly as employees and consumers look towards leaders to decipher what the organisation really stands for.

• And the messages seem to say that diversity programs are designed to generate PR and or political pandering rather than results.

• Simply put, leaders may have good intentions but these are undermined when their non-inclusive behaviours reinforce the status quo.

Shaping Culture: Taking a whole of business perspective

• What happens when you are not there?

• Creating an inclusive culture through the efforts of senior management is necessary but not sufficient.

• You’ve got to put the structures in place to create the right environment.

• Must have a framework, processes, structures that can work beside your leadership to create a participatory and inclusive environment.

Key Indicator

• How come our legislation and policies on equity espouse a desired outcome and our reality does not reflect this intent?

• Do senior managers have gender and disability equity as a KPI?

• How are they being held accountable and or rewarded for diversity and inclusion efforts?

• When diversity and inclusion are considered as “business as usual”

The mathematical impact over time

• The figures becomes more sensitive the closer you get to achieving the targets because the different groups are not equally distributed in the dataset. As an example one more black male can positively impact on the target for black males but the secondary impact on Indian females might be very negative as the one represents 70% of the data while the other only represents 1% of the data.

• The solution thus lays in the feeder source. We need to assess the need in lets say 2020 when most baby boomers will be retiring, today’s X generation will be top management and the today’s Y generation will be entering the middle management fraternity.

• The approach is that if we want to manage EE including gender the feeder source must be correct. It is thus about the Y generation and the born frees.

Focus on X,Y and Born Frees

• This approach will prevent the continuous tweaking of the EE figures and plans and move the issue to a strategic level whereby the feeder source is managed and

• secondly the pro-active development of each level in preparation of the next level in other words preparing the X generation for top management, the Y generation for middle management and the Born Frees for the specialist level.

• Even if we achieve the ideal now it will soon be outdated as the future workforce and the skills necessary will be very different to what we now have.

• EE and gender thus needs a new modern approach.

Change the game!

• The potential to become and stay a high performance organisation will go unrealised in the absence of inclusive leaders and inclusive teams.

• It is a combination of diversity and inclusion that changes the game.

My life’s mission has been shaped by the politics of inclusion.

Success Coaching/Team Coaching

Leadership Training

High-Performance Teamwork

Diversity & Inclusive Leadership

Disability & Gender: Mitigating unconscious bias and

Implicit Prejudice

Mentoring

Institutional Transformation & Change Management

Strategy Development and Execution

2015/11/04 Presenter: Shanaaz Majiet

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