Opinion: A new dawn

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox explains why now is the ideal time for women leaders to emerge.

When there is no visibility, what do you do with vision? Leaders, home-owners and newspaper readers around the world are struggling to see and measure the size and impact of the economic tsunami heading our way. The result is a global holding of the breath. Like the calm before the storm, companies are cutting employees, employees are cutting spending, and those with nothing to cut are feeling the pinch.
Leading economists admit that they have no tools to manage this crisis. Globalisation and billions of interactions make this a lesson in blindness. The first reaction seems to be wait, see and cut.
This is the time for women to step up. A new world is waiting to be born. And women are, as usual, needed in the birthing process. The temptation is to find a miraculous leader, a knight in shining armour, to part the waters, hold back the demons, bring us out of this mess. People are yearning for a leader with a vision, and the strength to get the troops to line up behind it. This is the dream behind the US President Barack Obama’s success (despite his reluctance to specify a precise vision). Almost impossible expectations, sure to end in a disappointment commensurate with the unrealistic level of hope projected on a single president. Corporate leaders feel a similar pressure.
Old patriarchs would dearly love to return to the global power balances of yester year, with guns and oil as carrot and stick. Some may be tempted by the familiarity of the model, but change is in the offing, as the announcement in February 2009 that Saudi King Abdullah has appointed a woman to a ministerial post for the first time, would seem to prove.
An appropriate analogy for the current climate would be to view the world as a pregnant woman. Something big, something new is about to emerge, and we have no idea at all what it may look like. Some would desperately like to take control, get organised and time a cesarean.
But the world does not need surgeons right now. It needs midwives. It needs people who will facilitate a safe and relaxed context for the new world to emerge, unscathed and naked into a new millennium. People who remind us to breathe, to be patient and strong. At ease with the pain, the pushing and the pleasures of the unknown. We need soft voices and trusting hearts, who work together for a common purpose: the health of an emerging global humanity.

Dump the vision thing
An article in January’s Harvard Business Review entitled Women and The Vision Thing, explained that women weren’t making it in the business world because they lacked the only quality where men outperformed them: vision. (Women were perceived to outperform men on eight out of ten of the other leadership competencies). And yet, I would argue that this is precisely why women are a valuable asset to a business. Women do not arrive with answers, entirely designed around themselves. They are more modest than that. But they still ask questions, are comfortable with ignorance – their own and other people’s. They are more interested in connectedness than power, in conversation than competition, in complexity than clarity. Or, as Serge Thill, a European human communications coach, explains: “Men are good at playing by the rules of the game. Women don’t think it’s a game.”
The game may be fun. But maybe it’s time to call the children in from the playground and get them to grow up? If ever there was time for maternal metaphors this is it. For, in these uncharted times, the global family has yet to be recognized, the new rules are yet to be defined. An official marriage ceremony would be nice, to start. Who will eat and at what time? Who will do the dishes, and who will take out the rubbish? Who will set the rules, and will they be loved or feared?
“When we become more aware of the dynamic whole, we also become more aware of what is emerging” write Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers in the organisational learning guide Presence, Human Presence and the Field of the Future.
One could argue that at this precise moment in history, it is time to admit that we cannot see the future. And time to learn to collectively listen instead. To each other, and to the world about to be born. So forget vision. Sense and sensibility may be this century’s first words.

Avivah Whittenberg-Cox is the managing partner of the European gender consultancy 20-first, co-author of Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of our next Economic Revolution and the founder and honorary president of the European Professional Women’s Network. She can be contacted at avivah@20-first.com