We had such a nice reaction to our last piece on leadership that we did it again below with Cynthia Bainton. We think it is important to see the connections between “other lobe” thinking in various domains and hope you agree.
–Jim and Shwen
Relational Practice in Leadership – Lessons Learned from Gender Differences
By Cynthia Bainton and Jim Stellar
In our last piece on leadership posted on May 18th, Jim and I discussed the ability to form and promote teamwork. In this post, we would like to discuss what I (Cynthia) consider to be another leadership essential – relational practice, sometimes referred to as relational behavior. Relational practice is a network of assumptions, interpersonal skills, and collaborative work. Although it can be practiced by both men and women, it is associated with female-linked traits and the feminine or so-called soft side of organizational behavior. Captain Abrashoff, whom I described in our last blog (on 5/18), demonstrated relational behavior when he wrote letters to the parents of his crew members praising their sons and daughters’ achievements. The result of this practice was that the parents expressed to their children how proud they were of them. Although the practice could not be quantified in battle readiness terms, imagine how this raising of morale contributed to the overall performance of the Benfold. In her book Disappearing Acts , Joyce K. Fletcher writes extensively about relational practice and how it is routinely “disappeared” by organizations who label such behavior as “nice” or “kind” but refuse to recognize it as a legitimate contribution to the success of their business. She describes how women struggle to have their relational behavior activities count towards their promotions.
Within academic institutions, examples of relational behavior include advising students, mentoring colleagues, and serving on search committees. This brings us to a startling study by the Modern Language Association of America entitled “Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey.” Survey data obtained for the study showed that “On average it takes women from 1 to 3.5 years longer than men to attain the rank of professor. The discrepancy between women and men in terms of their advancement from associate professor to [full] professor is significant.” Hindrances to advancement were perceived by female survey respondents to be time spent on these types of relational practice activities instead of on research and writing. In other words, there was a clear institutional need for faculty to perform mentoring and service activities but when it came time for these faculty members to be promoted, women felt that such activities were not assigned the same value as research. We have to ask ourselves, if relational behavior activities have been demonstrated to improve working conditions for both male and female employees while at the same time raising an organization’s bottom line, how can the leaders of today afford not to practice it? How important is it for leaders to alter an American business culture still dominated by male norms in order for women to reach their full potential alongside their male colleagues?
I (Jim) want to raise one additional point to what Cynthia has laid out above and that is that the “Other Lobe of the Brain” thinking that has characterized this whole blog (which has largely focused so far on student learning in higher education) is also at work here and in the previous post on the potential warm impact of social media like Twitter. The essential premise of this blog is that the limbic system processing (what Pascal called “heart reasons” in the quote we cited in the “About” section) adds a kind of intelligence that is unlike cognitive processing and perhaps somewhat less accessible to conscious reflection. Hence it tends to get missed. Yet in higher education we know that experiences (undergraduate research, studying or interning abroad, working while in school on a cooperative education period, etc.) can be very powerful in shaping career decisions. This Limbic processing may also play an important role in more “logical areas” such as choosing between scientific theories or deciding how to play the pieces on a chess board without having to consciously examine every move (and the repercussions) of every piece before concentrating on a strategy. This could shade into areas of creativity and the use of multiple intelligences, but those are topics for future posts.
For now, we want to stop here and encourage you our readers to comment. The whole point of a blog is to get into conversation with our followers and while we greatly appreciate hearing from you on the street (and we do – thank you), please consider commenting here.
6 Responses to “Relational Practice in Leadership – Lessons Learned from Gender Differences”
Kathryn Rowan says:
Cynthia and Jim,
I enjoyed this post and think that you (Cynthia) make a good point about relational practice being most associated with (and most expected of) females vs males. Although there are many men out there who engage in relational practice and become excellent mentors, it is often the female professors and bosses that take their students/employees “under their wing” so to speak and reach out in a personal way. Most times, these professors/bosses are not rewarded in any tangible way for doing this work. Perhaps they receive a good personal feeling but do not receive any monetary or status benefit. A professor will not receive tenure for mentoring students, she will receive tenure for writing papers. Yet, for me, the benefit of having great mentors in college far outweighed the benefit of having professors who handed me papers of their published research. The mentors are truly the people who help shape the students into the professionals they become. I, personally, believe that professors should be rewarded equally for the time they spend mentoring and the time they spend writing papers/conducting research. More value should be placed on personal interactions with students.
Cynthia says:
Kathryn,
Thanks for your comment on the value of mentoring to you personally. From a business standpoint, students are an educational institute’s clients. Successful businesses understand and resond to what their clients want. However, since students do not often choose to go to a particular institution because they desire mentoring but rather realize its value after they receive it, it is challenging to get institutions to reward faculty for performing this vital function. I think we are making a good effort, though, by discussing it in this blog and by alumni sharing with their educational institutions their experiences being mentored. Students do choose to attend a particular institution if they are looking for experiential education and so we also make headway by emphasizing how closely experiential education and mentoring are connected.
Cynthia says:
Ashley,
I was glad to read your question on intuition because in addition to being an item on my leadership essentials list, it is absolutely part of the makeup of emotional intelligence. Interestingly, one of my professors at Simmons School of Management (a women only business school) devoted a whole class to the discussion of intuition while I never encountered a discussion of it in any of my classes in Northeastern’s MBA Program (a co-ed program).
I agree with you that society justifies women’s listening to and acting upon their intuition based upon their need to care for their children. At the same time society conditions men to ignore their intuition, seeing it as a female-linked trait. Society teaches men to base their actions on visible facts. Intuition is based on information that tends to be invisible to others (more on that in another blog). Although I think men and women have equal capacity for intuition, women have had more opportunity to openly practice it and thus to develop their emotional intelligence.
Vanessa says:
Could it be related to the fact the interpersonal perception, specifically with regards to the perception of emotion and other nonverbal cues, is a skill that women have over men? In other words, women are better at picking these cues up from other people, and therefore more adept at interpersonal communication? I’m not sure exactly how this relates… but I smell something of the limbic system and the fact the women are better at nonverbal perception.
Maybe the answer lies in situations where faculty members are able to benefit professionally from a mentoring relationship, such as when an undergraduate assists in the publication of a manuscript, or even the running of a study? I guess what I’m saying is that mentoring and academic/professional advances do not always have to be separate. Especially in the case of thesis mentoring, directed studies, research assistants, etc.
Jim Stellar says:
Vanessa (all),
Great conversation.
I certainly have observed that, in general, women seem to have a more, what one friend called, “socially situatated cognition” than men and it is well known (really your field) that women are more sensitive to non-verbal cues. I do think this difference can lead to the formation of better leadership in team building. As Dean, I found that teams provided a superior way to get people to throw themselves into a task and feed back ideas about new projects or how to fix ongoing projects. I even occasionally got a comment that I had something of a feminine management style, which I always took as a compliment given the importance I placed on teams in the College.
Now how this leadership issue relates to male vs female cognition in social situations is a fascinating question about which I know little. I would like to someday see the overlap between fMRI revealed brain areas in leadership and those that are involved in neuroeconomics where “other lobe” decisions are made about what is important or valuable about an interaction, plan, theory, even data set.
Wouldn’t it be great to actually have a neuroscience of mentoring along with one for experiential education? However, there is no reason right now without such data we can not do a better job of rewarding faculty who engage in this important activity – and we do know it is important.
-Jim
Cynthia says:
All,
We wanted to bring to your attention a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Is Having More Than 2 Children an Unspoken Taboo?”, that further underscores the impact that female associated behavior, in this case raising families, has had on the ability of academic women to advance their careers. In relation to our leadership theme, this article raises the issues of work/life balance and double standards for various groups of employees (men/women, parents/non-parents). How does the good leader address these?
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i41/41b01601.htm