By Mary Bacica

Taking an organizational ‘selfie’ can be a risky proposition, particularly when you are asking for honest expression from everyone involved. However, its value is indisputable.

Turning the Focus Inwards
As researchers, we traditionally turn our focus outward to better understand what is really happening in a particular market, with a group of customers or in a specific area of the country. However, for this issue of PeopleTalk, Sentis Research took the opportunity to turn that focus inward and take a look at perceptions of leadership and gender within our own organization.

With both a female and male managing partner—Julie Winram and Adam DiPaula—with broadly similar experience in the research industry, we had the perfect testing-ground to delve into the differences between female and male leadership. Moreover, with a group of employees all part of the Millennial generation, the temptation to ‘look under our own hood’ became overpowering.

With many questions going in, we focused on four primaries:

• How does generation play into perceptions of leadership and gender? Are Millennials more gender-agnostic than their older counterparts?
• What makes a good “leader”?
• What, if anything, distinguishes a female leader from a male leader?
• Does gender play into leadership perceptions and how?

How Does Generation Play into Perceptions of Leadership and Gender?
Our research took the form of a focus group with our employees. To loosen everyone up we started with an exercise—draw a picture of a leader in as much detail as possible and give this leader a name.

At the completion of the exercise one thing was abundantly clear—no one at Sentis missed a higher calling as an artist as all but one employee drew a stick person. However, artistic abilities aside, most employees drew pictures and chose names for leaders that were male. A few female employees specifically chose gender-neutral names (e.g. Cory, Sam), but the rest were definitely men.

Another exercise—to name a well-known BC business leader—elicited a similar result. Male business leaders were rattled off fairly easily, but our group of Millennials had to reach a bit deeper to think of a female BC business leader and ended-up fortifying the list with a few female politicians.

When we finally introduced the subject of gender and leadership, our Millennials were clear that gender didn’t matter and that it is a leader’s qualities, personality and vision that distinguishes him or her, not their gender.

Even among forward-thinking Millennials, who express support for gender neutrality in leadership, the stereo-typical, male leader persona still sub-consciously resonates.

What Makes Good a Leader?
According to our group of Millennials, it includes a lot of things. There are the predictable qualities—confidence, charisma, intelligence, inspirational, sees the big picture—as well as some less common qualities, such as being a good follower when they need to be and someone who is able to put trust in their team and step away at times.

Another key aspect of good leadership is communication, but this was implicitly, not explicitly stated by employees. Anecdotal explanations continually touched on the communication between leaders and their followers, yet no one yelled out “a good communicator!” Instead our employees chatted about humour and how it is integrated into the workday, how they have interacted with past managers, bosses, etc.

Communication is so important it is a non-verbalized ‘given’—akin to asking people why they choose a particular airline and no one mentioning ‘safety record.’ It has to be there or nothing else matters.

What Distinguishes a Female Leader From a Male Leader?
It is very difficult to separate gender from personalities, so we let our employees talk quite a bit about the different personalities of our two leaders at Sentis—so we could get past that and actually start understanding real, if any, gender differences.

One key difference seems to be the level of direction provided by female leaders – they tend to be more specific when tasking employees with a project or undertaking. This seems to be related to risk-taking. The general sense among our employees is that female leaders are more apt to want to control what they can control, while male leaders are more willing to ‘let go of the strings and let things fly’; they are more willing to take a risk.

The only other clearly defining characteristic that emerged from our session was that our employees felt female leaders are more apt to share their thoughts about the business and what is going on.

Does Gender Play into Leadership Perceptions and How?
Yes, but in a way we didn’t originally consider. The part we were missing in our original question was the gender of the employee being asked. Gender matters on both sides as female employees feel they interact somewhat differently with male leaders than they do with female leaders; male employees feel the same way.

The main interaction difference seems to centre around the ‘comfort level’ of communicating with someone of the same gender. While all our employees felt they could speak openly with either our two leaders, they admitted that they do communicate in a slightly different way with each.

For example, our female employees felt they were more likely to share family updates and anecdotes with a female leader than a male leader. If being a business leader is not challenging enough, leaders have to be sensitive to the personalities and to the gender of those who report to them.

A Caveat in Closing
Is our group of employees reflective of other employees at other organizations? Would such an experiment work in other workplaces? The honest answer is we are not sure.

While the value of the feedback and insights acquired is indisputable, our organizational ‘selfie’ experiment comes with a pair of caveats—expect the unexpected and do not count on easy answers. Following up and working through the issues raised must also be considered key to the process.

What emerged with surety from our experience is that business leaders of both sexes have a range of challenges to navigate every day—and being a female business leader does not make the role any easier.

Mary Bacica, CMRP, VP is an integral member of the employee research team at Sentis Research.

(PeopleTalk Fall 2014)