Author Discussions: Lead Like a Girl

In this edition of Author DiscussionsMcKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with former marketing executive Dalia Feldheim about his new book, Dare to Lead Like a Girl: How to Survive and Thrive in the Corporate Jungle (Rowman & Littlefield, June 2022). At Procter & Gamble, Feldheim led the viral Always #LikeAGirl campaign. Today, she is delivering the same message to business leaders, who she believes would benefit from integrating more collaboration, empathy and intuition into their leadership style. An edited version of the conversation follows.

What is the meaning of the title of the book?

The book is essentially a challenge for all leaders – women and men alike – to connect to their more feminine traits, like passion, emotion and relationships at work and the importance of bringing them to work, today. more than ever. before.

In 2014, we created the Always #LikeAGirl campaign for Procter & Gamble. Our goal with this ad was to reclaim the phrase “like a girl” to mean “be proud of who you are.” I believe it is time to reclaim the phrase once again, this time in the world of leadership.

There is no male brain or female brain; we all have within us masculine traits and feminine traits. Things like emotion at work, teamwork, intuition, these are positive feminine traits. Positive masculine traits are things like direction and logic. The problem we see is that the business world is collapsing into what they call the “wounded masculine” – a world of competition around collaboration and power over people, versus power with people.

The title of my book is a provocation to call on all leaders, male and female, to push back on this reality and dare to lead more like a girl, which means to alternate between these positive masculine and positive feminine traits. It is a challenge for all of us to connect with these innate feminine traits that we all have within us.

How can leaders adopt more feminine leadership traits?

harvard business review did some research in 2012 to try to understand why there aren’t more women in leadership roles. Aren’t women as efficient as men? In 2012, they discovered that women were just as effective as men. They repeated the same research in 2019 and found that women performed better than men in 17 out of 19 leadership traits. I summarize these traits in my book in what I call the “5P model”.

The first one P is for passion and purpose. Purpose is when we align our strengths, areas of passion, and what the world needs.

The second P is for perspective. It’s around the growth mindset; it’s about stopping and asking for directions; it’s about admitting mistakes. The number one driver of a successful organization is psychological safety, and the number one driver of psychological safety is if the leader admits mistakes. Perspective is about the leader’s ability to step back and view failures as opportunities for growth.

The third P is something I call “power-up”, or physical well-being. We see burnout left, right, and center because we don’t take the time to put our oxygen masks on ourselves before caring for others.

Our last two are probably the most important. The fourth P it’s the people. We know that becoming a leader is very different from being a manager. You don’t run the business; you manage the people who run the business. The people trait is about how you manage relationships, how you get to know your employees as human beings, and how you foster deep connections because the main driver of happiness is relationships. The number one factor in happiness at work is if you have a best friend at work, so the human trait is essential.

The last – and the essence of it – is positivity. Positivity is not about being happy-happy all the time. It’s about giving yourself permission to be human. This is something I call “emotional bravery,” which goes far beyond emotional intelligence: it allows emotions and empathy to come out. We are seeing a huge drop in empathy among college students today compared to 30 years ago because we are all behind digital screens. The role of the leader is to create empathy.

What does it mean to be politically savvy at work?

Personally, I remember thinking, “Politics is the worst. I kept saying, “I don’t do politics. I will do my work, and my work will speak for itself. I think a lot of women think politics is negative, but I want to help women understand that politics just means being strategic and smart about how you go about getting results.

I would walk into meetings and create this great sale, not realizing that the decision had already been made on the golf course or long before because of alliances and discussions. Especially when I was in Suite C and was the only female in a group of males, that’s something I had to remember. I had to become more politically savvy, which basically means understanding the piece and the dynamics. It doesn’t mean losing your integrity, it just means being smart about things, creating alliances.

There is a great model or analogy of how different animals can both read the room and maintain their integrity; the owl is raised in understanding of the piece but also in integrity. How can we be owls rather than sheep, for example, who don’t understand the play but can have great integrity? Another animal, the fox, has high understanding of the piece but low integrity, and the donkey is weak in both.

This model has helped me understand how we can reframe politics by being strategic and smart about how we get results. Women score lower on this because they think it’s something they don’t want to engage in. But that’s the reality when we get to leadership positions, so you better learn how to do politics smart while keeping your integrity.

Why did you write this book now?

The reason I was prompted to write the book is my own experience. For 17 years I was in a state of flux and felt what it feels like to work with a company that truly values ​​you as a human being. Then I worked with an extremely controlling and denigrating boss, and saw how my performance went down because I was so busy defending myself. Unfortunately, what happened to me is far too common in the workplace today.

Gallup shows that 85% of employees are unhappy at work, and 20% of employees are so unhappy that they make others unhappy – these are toxic employees. One in four employees also suffer from acute anxiety, but that was before the COVID-19 pandemic. We see the COVID-19 crisis accelerating all of this significantly. People have had time to reflect on where they are and what is important to them in life, and the result is the Great Resignation.

The number one factor in the Great Resignation is toxic environments, so we’re finding that our previous models aren’t working for us. In the midst of this crisis, it’s actually those more feminine traits – like intuition and empathy – that become critical. How to manage a remote team if you have no empathy? It gets more and more complicated.

I’m optimistic, and I think we can turn things around. When I talk about happiness at work, I have CEOs who tell me, “Oh, Dalia, that’s fluffy. Then I show them the data. Unhappiness at work is costing us $7 trillion in stress-related illnesses, absenteeism, and more. However, we can turn around.

Isn’t that resilient enough now?

We have learned that we can teach ourselves to become more resilient, more empathetic. Crisis is a great opportunity for growth, and post-traumatic growth is different from resilience. Resilience is when you are able to bounce back. Post-traumatic growth is when you’re able to grow from your traumas, and I think the pandemic has been a great opportunity for that.

In Chinese, the word “crisis” means “danger” but also “opportunity”. It’s the same in Hebrew – the word for “crisis” is actually the last stage before birth. I think we are at an important inflection point. The questions are, what do we want to do about it? How focused are we on strength? Are leaders able to identify their team’s strengths and put their strengths to work?

Only 30% of employees know their strengths and only 17% bring them to work every day. Yet employees who focus on their strengths are twice as likely to succeed. How do we as leaders make sure we put the right people in the right seats on the bus? It’s about strengths, seeing new opportunities, perspectives and a growth mindset.

We have all had a lesson in resilience. We’ve all seen that it’s OK to not be well, that we can see hope, and that we can be grateful and focus on what we have and what we can control. This is such a critical inflection point. If we all take the time to make sure we don’t go back into the grind, but rather assimilate those learnings and reflect on them, we could have a nice inflection point.

“Courage” is probably the most misunderstood word. People perceive it to mean making decisions that others haven’t made, but “courage” actually comes from the French word Korea, which means “heart”. Courageous leaders lead from the heart. It is the premise of Dare to lead like a girl.