Episode 154: Straight Talk + Empathy - Women, Men, and Leadership in Crisis
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…what some of the best leaders during this pandemic have in common…
“They get results, they don’t dominate screens to build their brands. They’re not in it for themselves, they’re on the ground getting the system fixed so that people stop dying.”
And many of this group are women…
“Maybe a pandemic will be the trigger or factor that makes people realize we can’t just have a bunch of over-confident, narcissistic, egomaniac males in power when they’re clueless.”
Women, men, and leadership in crisis, coming up on The Broad Experience.
So for a few weeks now news stories have been popping up ON this theme: countries that are doing better with the coronavirus are often led by women. And by ‘better’ I mean getting a handle on the virus early and suffering relatively few deaths. Countries usually cited in these pieces include Taiwan, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Germany, and New Zealand.
A couple of the articles that have come out in this topic recently were written by two former guests on this show, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. Avivah runs Twenty First, a firm that helps organizations achieve more gender balance. She’s a Canadian now based in the UK after years of living in Paris.
Tomas is Argentinian by birth, he is chief talent scientist for Manpower Group, also a psychologist and author of the book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?
Avivah, Tomas and I are of course all working from home in our separate locations. The three of us got together online last week.
Ashley: So Avivah, in your piece you come across as being really gung-ho about women being superior leaders during this particular crisis, the pandemic. What stands out to you in particular?
Avivah: I actually wouldn’t exactly frame it that way. What I find very interesting about any crisis in general is that it’s very revelatory. It reveals countries, companies, couples, as they are, and who can step up into a difficult situation and who falls back or out. I kept getting and reading more and more news stories about all these different women all over the world doing innovative, interesting, new things that were in such stark contrast to some of the worst examples of leadership that we’re seeing right now, which were mostly male. So it’s not that there are not good forms of male leadership but some of the emerging women leaders are offering a new tone and some really, really inspiring leadership, and I think that’s just a wonderful thing to keep in mind as we all go to our voting booths in the next few years.
Ashley: Well yes, you end your piece by saying, we need to vote for more of this. But can I just ask you to pick a couple of women leaders and talk about how they stand out?
Avivah: Well I’d say everyone’s talking about Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, she’s young, she’s fresh, she’s new, she’s a mother, she’s had a baby in power, and in this particular crisis she’s been unbelievably clear, truthful, decisive, powerful, and empathetic and loving. And I think it’s that combination of things that we don’t see that much of. The combination of power and what I termed ‘love’.
And here I’m just gonna break in and play a tiny clip from a Facebook live talk Jacinda Ardern did from home in late March, talking to New Zealanders about the virus…she apologized for her casual clothing, said she’d just put her daughter to bed…then began talking about the virus and what New Zealanders needed to do to combat the spread. She reassured them…
Jacinda Ardern: “…all the efforts that we’re putting in should show if we follow the rules…till then do check in on your neighbors, especially check in on those who are elderly, give them a call, see what their needs are, and if you can go and grab their essentials… pop them on the front door for them…remember, the way we can keep them safe is by keeping our distance…”
Avivah: I think especially in political leaders, you get the sense they’re motivated either by love or by hate…and there are some that are creating very divisive currents in the face of this current fear, and other leaders are really attaching themselves to love. So I think Jacinda Ardern was one, Angela Merkel in Germany was another, very clear, very careful, very both compassionate and absolutely decisive in the face of the crisis they were facing. So some of the strengths that I wanted to bring out about these women are typically masculine strengths – straight talking truth tellers, very decisive and a very strong use of technology to help them – all the testing, tracking, social media assistance are three stereotypically male leadership qualities that all these women have used very powerfully.
Ashley: Tomas what do you think. When I read your piece on this topic I read you as being a little more tentative on this subject of women being better leaders during this time. What do you think?
So look, I think it’s a very nuanced issue. So on the one hand I think we need to start by asking why is this question interesting, why are we asking whether women are doing a better job managing the pandemic or not? I think there are 2 potential motivations for asking these questions: one is what I would consider a more legitimate motive which is to find out what’s working so other leaders ,male or female, can emulate it and help their countries or help their people. Since no one knows what the solutions are or ultimately what will be very effective since we’re hitting a moving target, that’s a very important question. The second one is the old war between the genders, oh let’s see so we can reach a conclusion of whether men are better than women or vice versa. The main reason I object to that question is because we know the answer already – and we’re not going to answer with ten or 15 women in a sample of 195 men. The question I’ve been asked a lot during this pandemic is do we need a different type of leader now, should we throw away our old leadership models because this is an unprecedented circumstance, and when I think about the attributes we need to lead effectively in a crisis, I agree with the list Avivah provided in her article, but I’d sum it up by saying we need leaders to be intelligent, ethical, empathetic, so that’s the love part, and humble, so yes I’d say we do need a new type of leader…because mostly we don’t have that in our leaders and now the emperor has no clothes because leaders are under scrutiny like never before…and people even though they want to trust their governments and politicians because they’re desperate, they see there’s a lot of incompetence in the world of political leadership, and that’s not so much the case among female leaders.
Ashley: I want to stick with you – when I met with you last year we talked about Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, and you said, no one is gonna want to make a movie about Angele Merkel…but she has this understated quiet competence…her background as a scientist is what’s really come to the fore in this current crisis. She’s telling it like it is, people seem to believe her and she has a background in science…
Tomas: Yup, I think what’s interesting about her now is that she’s in that rare small group of female heads of state…but also she’s arguably she’s the best performing head of state if you look at statistics…
Avivah: Probably one of the longest serving!
Tomas: Right, so it’s not like she can be accused of inheriting a good system…also if you look at style, very tough, short, concise, fact-based communication, very different not just from Trump but Andrew Cuomo who spends an hour a day talking to us about his mum and recipes for pasta, and his popularity ratings are up despite the dismal performance of New York, and probably Angela Merkel doesn’t have what she deserves, right? We forget about it. I’ve seen a McKinsey study saying oh, Germany has so many intensive care beds, they’re doing very well…well so do many other countries…and I think what you could rightly ask is whether the causal relationship is inverted, and whether a country that has a certain level of education, resources, equality and rationality is more likely to elect people like Merkel to begin with. That I’m open to and we’re not saying that these leaders were thrown out of the blue and came out of nowhere, same with Jacinda in New Zealand, or in the case of Finland, there are certain conditions that enable more equality, more gender equality and more competence in leadership as well, and by the way they’re part of the same syndrome I think.
Ashley: Avivah?
Avivah: Well I think political systems are a lot like corporate systems and national political systems are more or less male dominated by hyper masculinized, aggressive, assertive…look what goes on in the UK – these very small chambers where they really perfect the art of yelling at eachother all day long, I mean that is not going ever to attract a really large group of highly talented women who today are in huge demand in every well paying company in the globe. So talent goes where it’s wanted and that’s one of the tragedies of the current political context is they don’t want women at a time in history where women represent some of the best brains and majority of the educated population in an ever expanding number of countries around the planet. So we’re actually removing 60 percent of the talent from our political talent pools and recruiting from an ever shrinking minority which will never guarantee the best. And the more it becomes this hyper male aggressive stereotypical type of place, like certain sectors of the business world, the more it will alienate good men as well. Because this is not an issue about gender, it’s about where does smart talent go whether it’s male or female and what type of culture does it want to work in and everybody wants to work in smart places with gender balance as a norm, and there aren’t these extremes of femininity and masculinity in these completely outdated, backward looking traditions.
Ashley: Tomas, it’s interesting you talk about AC…I was going to bring up Andrew Cuomo as someone whose popularity has really increased and someone who is displaying…some of what are often seen as stereotypical feminine qualities as well. I have to admit I haven’t been watching him regularly so I didn’t know about the pasta recipes.
Tomas: Well, so I think he’s a very interesting phenomenon and he’s become a phenomenon right now and he’s achieved cult-like status, at least in the US, and his briefing has been celebrated very widely. And I hope by the way I’m able to comment on this and other political leaders in a fairly a-political way which is what I try to do. I’m aware that’s not easy to do or the perception is that I am not being objective. But I want to make a few remarks on him…there’s no question his popularity rose a lot since the crisis started… and there’s no question New York, the state, is not performing well with the pandemic. How is it possible that this guy so popular? Well I think there are a lot of competing explanations which make a lot of sense. First, his style is the opposite to Donald Trump’s style though they’re both charismatic white males. One is all about bad news, tough love, fact-based, consistent, and logical – and the other is at the opposite end of the spectrum.
People accuse Trump of politicizing the crisis, but so has Cuomo. Cuomo has turned himself into the Trump anti -hero and immediately everyone who dislikes Trump in the country loves Cuomo, no matter what. And then I think Cuomo much like other politicians exploits what politicians do very well, which is when things aren’t going well, it’s not my fault, I inherited a broken system and there is not enough hospital capacity, tor here’s a lot of density etc. etc. and when they’re going well, it’s because of what I did. It’s not exclusive to Cuomo but it’s something that is typical in politicians ,by the way especially male politicians, we don’t see it that often in women either. But the analysis I’d like to do at the end of this is how did countries do when they focused on style…and on the other hand substance - so charisma or confidence on one side, and substance and competence on the other.
Ashley: Avivah I have to ask you about Boris Johnson. You’re in my home country so you’ve been living through the pandemic over there.
Well, I think he falls into one of these camps, the counter point to everything we’ve been saying, what’s emerging from all these women we’ve been admiring…is not what we have seen in the UK, it was not decisive, he did not speak the truth, all the original flubbing around we’re not gonna do anything, we’re not gonna lock down, we’re gonna have this whole idea of herd immunity which freaked a lot of people out, what does that mean, are we just gonna let people die, I think there was a tremendous amount of fear and then there was inconsistency in the government…the whole issue of being decisive doesn’t exist. we don’t have enough PPE, the machines, ventilators haven’t arrived, been built, I think the NHS is in borderline crisis, the frontline people haven’t been protected, it’s a not very happy story and it hasn’t been very well managed. And it hasn’t been done with any degree of love or empathy by any of the poor figures who are standing, all male usually at the end of every day – to try and explain the hundreds of deaths a day. There isn’t a lot of love or holding of the population to make them feel in any way they can trust this team. It’s not like trust levels were high before this but I think now they’re gonna be hard to recuperate, and that’s a dangerous place to be.
Ashley: I was rather hoping that he’d come out of this with a different approach…after his own hospital stay and brush with this disease…
Avivah: The strangest thing is his popularity only rose because he was sick…it is interesting to see how popularity levels…so I think it’s funny to see Cuomo who I would suggest is tapping into the stereotypically feminine playbook by talking about his mother all the time and his pasta recipes, and he goes on and on and on chatting, I mean if a woman were doing that she’d be absolutely lambasted…and then on the other hand why is Boris Johnson ticking up? Because he was sick. How’s that for a leadership criteria?
Tomas: It’s a great point, Avivah, and I think on Cuomo, clearly he is seen as empathetic and he’s seen as kind and caring which is traditionally a more feminine quality but it’s quite interesting that we are now more welcoming of that trait in men, and also that maybe because the bar is so low and leaders offer so little, you have one leader who has mastered that one trait and we don’t care about anything else, you know, results or politicizing or even a clear degree of narcissism you can see there, he’ll be a great talk show host, right, there all the time, I think people are satisfied just with love, right, showing love, and again that goes back to being forced to trust a leader when things are really tough and bad because they have no other alternative.
Ashley: Yeah, and I would say for some of us at least it’s like a breath of fresh air after the leadership we’ve been seeing nationally – it’s like you’re running into the arms of this person who is such a contrast to the head of the federal government.
Tomas: I agree but that’s what I meant when I said the bar is very low. And also it’s very cultural. To the average Dane, Finn or German, to see Cuomo doing jokes and briefings every day while the state is collapsing is unthinkable, it’s unthinkable, but it works in New York.
Ashley: I was gonna say some of what you were talking about with Cuomo that strikes me as very American, an American audience responds well to that, but you’re right, so many other cultures wouldn’t.
Tomas: Which is important as well because if you could have the luxury of a controlled experiment and switch people around…you probably couldn’t judge their effectiveness as they’re so inherent to the culture they’re in. the style part of it is very context specific I think…whether you have people who are high performing or low performing there’s a stylistic element that’s very cultural.
Avivah: Well and I’d just like to add that what these two US leaders Trump and Cuomo share is they’re both after image – they’re both crafting image and popularity in their own areas and they’re using the tools to do that, whatever it takes. I don’t think those are leadership skills, I think those are political skills in keeping and holding power. And that’s a very different motivation I would suggest to what I was pointing to, among the women and the men who have managed their countries much, much better is they get results, they don’t take up air space, they don’t dominate screens to build their brands, they’re not in it for themselves, they’re on the ground getting the system fixed so that people stop dying. We are all gonna end up being able to judge these leaders on very clear data.
Ashley: One thing that jumped out at me from a piece I read in WaPo by Harvard Kennedy School lecturer…women have less runway to screw up…she was citing that as potentially one of the reasons women were proving so focused and effective is they knew they could not screw up…
Tomas: Well that might be true but it’s not a major contributing factor to the performance of women…it’s far deeper than that, I think, look in many instances even if we end up seeing that the strong performance of female leaders perpetuates and sustains until in the end so it’s clear even to people who don’t wanna see it, that women did better than men – even then you could argue that’s a consequence of sexism in the system because to get to these positions women have to be better, smarter, more qualified to begin with. The fact that then they’re under more scrutiny and the stakes are higher and if they fail they will make things harder for millions of women who aspire to leadership elsewhere, that might be true but I think it’s a minor and trivial matter. It’s not a major contributing factor to gender differences in performance in my view.
Avivah: And I’ll pile on top of that, I think it’s such a strong characteristic, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, particularly the two we live in, the US and the UK, where women are SO uncomfortable and men too by the way with the idea we can talk about differences between man and women. Oh my God, it’s just like, oh no, you’ve got to say especially if you’re a woman, that there are no differences at all etc. etc. which whether it’s nature or nurture nobody’s going to argue very long that men and women aren’t socialized in dramatically different ways that creates different skills and behaviors. That doesn’t necessarily make us innately different. But it might make us innately skilled for leadership in the 21st century, which I think is true, one. And two, why wouldn’t we want to use what is today the majority of the brains on the planet to be more represented on the political stage. Today there are 545 million people who have a female political leader running their countries. That is only 7% of the population. Women are 60% of university graduates globally. That gap between the 60% of what we want running organizations and countries and the 7% we’ve currently managed to get there is our human potential – that is what we can hope to have in the future, better leaders because they’ll be more gender balanced, because the world today is more gender balanced – it’s got nothing to do with any kind of war between men and women, that men are better, women are better, that’s such a reduction of the conversation, is men and women need to be in power representationally to their percentage and skills, and we’re completely failing that measure and that’s why we’re all suffering from lousy leadership.
Tomas: And I would add Ashley that if it is true that women are under higher pressure because we are tougher, and stricter, and more demanding with female heads of states and we don’t allow them to fail, I’m fine with that, but let’s apply that same standard to men, so the issue is not that we hold them accountable there’s a lot of pressure on female heads of state, that’s OK, after all they have a big job and they’re responsible for a lot of lives. The problem is men might feel if they do a bad job it doesn’t matter, they get another job or they go on the speaking circuit.
Which has been known to happen.
As we got towards the end of the conversation I asked my guests if either of them had a question for the other. They did, and I’m including Avivah’s question and Tomas’s answer because they’re specifically related to our topic today.
Avivah: So Tomas, my question for you is, do you think this will fundamentally change people’s vision of female leadership, now that we’ve gone through such an insane crisis…will we trust and elect more women?
Tomas: So I think it will help drive incremental progress forward. I don’t think it will dramatically change things and that all the chauvinists in the world will wake up being feminists tomorrow once we have the final data on this…it could be the new kind of symbolic case study equivalent to…people still talk about Churchill as an example of situational factors that determine a different type of leader because he was an unemployable drunk and basically he became a key figure in WWII, maybe a pandemic will be the trigger or factor that makes people realize we can’t just have a bunch of over confident narcissistic egomaniac males in power when they’re clueless, maybe that will be it, and I hope so.
Avivah: Or really smart and dangerous autocrats, that’s our choice right now.
Tomas: Yeah, exactly.
Avivah: I’d vote for women, I don’t know why most men wouldn’t.
Ashley: That might be a whole ‘nother podcast, Avivah.
Thanks to Avivah and Tomas for being my guests on this show.
You can hear more from Tomas in episode 148, that’s called So Many Incompetent Leaders. And Avivah’s last appearances were in episodes 120 and 121.
I will post links to my guests’ articles and a few others on the topic of female leadership in the pandemic under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.
If you have a comment you can leave one on the website or you can email me at ashley at thebroadexperience.com.
Thanks to all those of you who’ve supported the show with a donation and especially to those of you who donate something to The Broad Experience each month. I truly appreciate it. This show is now 8 years old and I would never have got here without you.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte, thanks for listening – see you next time.