To create the conditions in which women’s vision can flourish, organizations must learn to value diverse ways of knowing, encourage mindfulness, support webs of inclusion, and respect the power of empathy.
Organizations need to become more proficient at acknowledging diverse ways of knowing rather than continuing to privilege what can be quantified and empirically supported. We do not mean to suggest that intuitive ways of knowing should be preferred to rational analysis — an inversion of the present practice. Rather, the full spectrum of cognition — the rich complexity of means by which humans come to know — must be recognized as having potential value. This requires abandoning the common practice of asking anyone who makes a suggestion to immediately back it up with numbers. Instead, people should be encouraged to share insights that may still be in process or that may contradict expectations.
Even insights that are ultimately discarded can have value by leading to other fresh ideas, whereas overfocusing on numerical models forestalls this.Problems arise when an organization continually tries to run the numbers to make a model work instead of stepping outside the problem to consider whether the accepted model or practice applies.
Women’s capacity for broad-spectrum as opposed to focused noticing can make them particularly adept at reading signals in the environment and at putting them together in unexpected ways. Companies that recognize this can reap solid benefits.
This post was excerpted from The Female Vision, published by Berrett-Kohler Publishers, June 2010.
Sally Helgesen is the author of five books, including the classic best-seller, The Female Advantage, celebrating its 20th year in print, and The Web of Inclusion, described by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books on leadership ever published. She is an international speaker and groundbreaking thinker on leadership and organizations.
Julie Johnson, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, is considered to be one of America’s most experienced and well respected coaches. She has coached hundreds of senior executives in blue chip companies and has worked with many of the most successful women in the Fortune 500. Her work has been published in the Harvard Business Review as well as in the noted book, Coaching for Leadership.
