Leadership Personality Contest: How Do You Rate?

Contributed by Dr. Sylvia Lafair, Award Winning Author and Workplace Relationship Expert

Performance reviews often send the same shudders through us that we remember from getting report cards in school. Old concerns and doubts cast big shadows. There is, for most super achievers a moment of nail biting, finger tapping, and stomach growling.

When you are ready to get the results of your 360 Feedback session, how do you respond? What are your internal criteria for judging your own self; that is in your own self-worth? Here is some interesting data.

Research done with male and female leaders who did self-report rating on specific competencies and leadership areas showed fascinating results. Can you guess who rated themselves higher, men or women? I’ll leave that for you to ponder for a moment.

The Research

Let me give you the areas and then please do a quick scan for yourself. On a scale from 1-5, the typical 5 being highest, 1 lowest, see how you see yourself in: interpersonal relationships, verbal communication, oral presentation, delegation, conflict management, team building, problem solving, decisiveness, judgment, and leadership.

Now, the results: men rated themselves higher than their female counterparts on all scales. What is really interesting is that when rated by others, the woman out rated the men on every scale (Nowack 1998). Other research (Rosener and Jordan 2007) shows that women definitely lead differently than men. Women use more participative leadership methods (Eagly, Johansen-Schmidt and Van Engen 2003) and yet, another review of 80 studies found that men and women show little difference in effectiveness (Eagly, Karu and Makhijani 1995).

So, what’s up?

It seems that the measures we are using still have to be adjusted for the different ways that men and women view themselves. This is not a bad thing, just something that says we are not there yet.

There appears to still be a barrier in the workplace, especially at higher executive levels where we women lose our footing, still not sure we measure up. There is a confidence issue. In our work with women executives we see a pattern that shows up time and again. It is from personal reporting rather than statistics; yet, it seems to hold true for most female leaders.

If we track it back it appears that we pick up our basic behavior patterns about the nature of work from our mothers. It was not until quite recently that a generation of daughters is growing up watching successful mothers in the workplace. Give some thought to what messages you received from your mother when you were four, or ten, or fourteen. Were you told you could soar, or were your cautioned not to rock the boat?

I have suggested that those who go through our leadership program, take some time to diagram the successes and failures they had when growing up and see where a cautionary “be careful” finger was wagged at them.

Getting Beyond the Double Bind

Here are some fascinating, albeit frustrating thoughts that continue to follow us today. There is still an old assumption that women cannot be both feminine and competent. This is the double bind that we are either “tough or caring.” We are still being judged as “too” aggressive, abrasive, or intrusive”. The flip side is “not strong enough, decisive enough, or clear enough.”

We walk a fine line and while this can be seen as unfair, it also strengthens us to meet the challenges of today’s workplace. In my book “GUTSY: How Women Leaders Make Change” I suggest that finding a new way to explore being both competent and feminine shows up in the courage to redefine both competency and femininity. I suggest that we do not have to give up one to have the other.

We are now creating new norms with more of the workplace belonging to women. It is up to us to help changes take place by replacing old, stale language with words that elevate both females and their male colleagues. Here are a few examples of how to rate performance and use words that connect us as a species rather than separate and judge unfairly.

How do you rate yourself as being self-reliant, independent, accountable, collaborative, trust-worthy, fearless, passionate, and wise? These are gender neutral words and words that gutsy women can use over and over to bring our performance reviews and ways of looking at each other into this new era.

The best part of the research I indicated earlier is that when women can align their own self-worth with the way others see them, there is truly no stopping them. Then every day, every meeting is time for an Oscar, a trophy for making the workplace a more user friendly, more trustworthy, more collegial place for everyone to grow and succeed.