Allies are different from friends in that your relationship with them always serves a specific purpose. You are trying to accomplish something and your ally has a motive in helping you; there’s a principle of mutual self-interest at work. The relationship is strategic; its purpose is to leverage power. You don’t need to have a lot in common with an ally — you don’t even necessarily need to enjoy one another’s company — but you do need to trust one another.

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.

In order for this to change, women must take the initiative. They can’t wait for organizations to start valuing what women see. Women themselves must build a market for what they offer by teaching their companies to recognize the power and value of the female vision. In this way they can create the change they seek.

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.

Our daily actions have real power when they serve the purpose of our larger vision, providing a link between what we are doing now, at this present moment, and what we most profoundly want to achieve in the world. Being clear about this connection — being able to articulate how our actions serve our larger vision — gives us a sense of purpose and inspiration and provides us with a yardstick against which to measure our decisions.

Aligning our actions with our larger vision can be challenging for women working in organizations. As we’ve seen, traditional assumptions about what’s “worth it” in the workplace do not necessarily compel women’s deepest engagement. Nor are women’s strategic perceptions always recognized. Our Satisfaction Survey, along with the other research make clear that women tend to locate meaning in social relationships rather than in competitive rankings. So it’s not surprising that organizational goals and mission statements focused on numerical measures often strike women as hollow.

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.

What does this mean?

It means that the women we spoke with did not perceive the tradeoffs their companies were asking them to make — in terms of time, stress, lifestyle, relationships — to be adequately compensated by the rewards offered in return. It does not mean that the women were unwilling to sacrifice their time or to live with the adrenaline rush we all experience when we’re overextended or thrillingly involved in our work. It does mean that these women did not find their company’s traditional reward system sufficiently compelling.

Over the last two decades, there has been increasing recognition that the structure of work was designed to reflect the realities of an all-male workforce whose constituents had few, if any, domestic responsibilities beyond supporting their families. But there has been little thought given to whether the rewards of work might also reflect male priorities. Our research suggests a fundamental mismatch between what the marketplace assumes people will value in their work and what women (not all women, but enough to make a difference) most deeply value. This occurs because organizations still offer reward, recognize achievement, build incentive, and decide promotion using definitions of worth that reflect an all-male industrial leadership culture.

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.

One of the benefits of being a continual learner is that we are constantly overtaken by ah-hah moments that serve to not only whack us on the side of the head, but also hold lessons that can have universal application for anyone in leadership. The following are but some of the principles gleaned as our group drove along the highest roads in the world and wound up in the regions of Lahual and Spiti which are often closed to the outside world for seven frozen months. They come from trekking with tribesmen herding sheep and goats at elevations up to 16,000 feet and from crossing white water rivers on foot and encountering the Dalia Lama in a remote monastery near the China/Tibet border.

Watch for patterns. Different trees grow at different elevations.

The apple trees of the Kulu Valley could no more have survived at Rohtang Pass then a trout could swim at the North Pole.  The natural world allows for adaptation but only to a point. As leaders, we must know where we belong, what adaptations we can make, and then how to help those around us find the best match for their growth and abilities.

Ankit Sood, our wise guide, demonstrated this principle during the trek. As the journey became more difficult, he voiced his concern in such a way that it allowed all of us to gracefully examine our skill levels. Four of our party self-selected to not continue when the trekking became more difficult and demanding on both a physical and emotional level.  That’s wisdom and courage on display. Had they continued, it might have caused harm to themselves as well as to the rest of the group. Ankit, as our leader, paved the way for that decision yet was also prepared to take them to a lower elevation had they insisted on continuing.

A leader gives the follower a chance to evaluate his own performance but is also prepared to make the difficult decision of transferring or terminating an employee. When an employee is not able to do the job at hand, it damages the morale and the performance of a team if that employee is left to struggle in work that does not match competency or innate potential.

Expect the unexpected and deal with it.

Change is one thing. The unexpected adversity or opportunity is something else. Great leaders live in the present moment and make decisions based upon what is before them.. As we climbed higher into Spiti, the Himalayan cold semi-desert region that has been described as one of the highest, most remote and inhospitable places on the planet, Ankit learned that the Dalia Lama would be teaching at a monastery in the village of Nako. To venture to Nako meant changing plans on a dime, jumping through mounds of bureaucratic paperwork, and going through time-consuming checkpoints. However the chance to see a world leader in a special setting was an unexpected opportunity not to be missed.

The same is true in the business world. Had 3M ignored an engineer’s idea that a less-than-sticky glue could be useful, the world would never have known Post-It-Notes(tm).  Had Larry Page and Sergey Brin not paid attention to the unexpected response to their simple search engine methodology, the word “Google” would not have become a common word in our vocabulary.

The more critical the effort, the more teamwork is required.

The rivers of the western Himalayas cascade from melting glaciers. At night, when the glaciers freeze, water level is reduced.  The timing of a crossing is critical as water rises along with the sun. Rocks and debris swirl into tumultuous rapids. Crossing alone can be suicidal. We created a human chain, grasping each other by wrists (not hands) and alternated smaller team members with larger ones.  We succeeded, cold and battered, but safe.

How often do we encounter the leader or employee who insists on “going it alone” in a critical situation?  To ask for help is perceived as a weakness. Yet, it is the strength of collective brains and maybe even brawn that can produce a better result. Equally important is knowing how to optimize the varying strengths of team members for the best results. The adage of  “strength in numbers” bears consideration.

Action is the antidote for anxiety.

We made it in time to cross the dangerous river that had already claimed six lives. But other members of our expedition crew were not so lucky. Rounding up packhorses had slowed their pace. In horror we watched these men attempt three times to cross, spinning against rapids and almost drowning. There was no choice but to stay on the granite rocks and wait until early morning.

I could see the anxiety in the eyes of our leader. While we hiked ahead to make camp, he devised a plan. With another team member, he filled a waterproof barrel with food, warmer clothes and a small tent. He hurled a rope to the stranded crew and together they created a pulley system for retrieving the barrel. While everyone was still concerned, taking action provided some comfort. Hand wringing never accomplishes anything. Action gives a level of control over what, at face valuable, might seem uncontrollable. A leader helps people take that action.

Everyone deserves to be welcomed home.

When the stranded crew appeared over the horizon at daybreak, we cheered, sang and welcomed them “home”. Their faces glowed with a sense that we weren’t just customers to serve, managers to follow, but rather individuals who cared for their well being.  They redoubled their efforts to work for us in the days that followed.

There’s universality in wanting to be welcomed and cheered.

Whether in the remote regions of India or the meeting rooms of Wall Street, employees deserve to feel that someone has seen their effort, their hard work and their long hours. The degree of engagement and retention might increase exponentially if leaders welcomed them “home”.

Gratitude transcends latitudes

Regardless of nationality or geography, humans everywhere respond to expressions of gratitude Not only do we seek a place where we are welcomed, but our spirits rise when others let us know that we matter. The more personal the expression, the deeper is the human connection.

While it is customary to pool monies and give a bonus to the trekking crew, our expedition wanted to extend a more intimate thank-you. After all, these men had put our well being ahead of their own.  They paid attention to our personal needs, even found a way to bake a cake at 15,000 feet when they discovered that two of us had birthdays.

Our solution was to gift them with personal items we knew could be used by themselves or their families. My new Timberland boots, thermal jacket and ski hat went into the box along with my husband’s favorite space-aged parka. Our party left gloves, socks, medicines, thermals, and even unopened bags of trail mix and jerky brought from home. We gave money to have everything cleaned and restored if need be.

When gratitude comes from the heart, is personal, unexpected, and out-of-the-ordinary, amazing linkages are created. The gifts demonstrated that we had observed their life, their needs, and responded appropriately. Spontaneous appreciation that recognizes the uniqueness of an individual beats standardized reward programs any day.

As for our band of intrepid explorers, my expedition partners who were strangers until we gathered at Chicago O’Hare for the fifteen-hour flight to New Delhi, we’ll continue our relationships that were forged with shared experiences. You might say we have created a new company through collaboration, cooperation, and consideration. That’s not a bad final lesson to carry into our respective places of work.

In A Whole New Mind, author Daniel Pink describes why the changing nature of work has made relationships more important. He notes that the industrial and information ages valued analytic skills and the ability to follow the kind of predefined rules that are enshrined in procedural manuals or software code. Attention to these rules enabled people in organizations to wring value from the production of replicable products.

Pink shows how our present “conceptual age” locates value in creativity, which is enhanced when empathy and collaboration are present. He therefore predicts that an ability to read and interpret “the subtleties of human interaction” will emerge as the key leadership competency in the years ahead. Recognizing this should give women greater confidence in the value of their capacity for broad-spectrum notice. This fundamental component of the female vision should serve them well in the years ahead.

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.

Building Block Number One:  Add context to your content

Every word we utter, every gesture we make take its nuance and meaning from the context of the moment.  Consider context to be the background or the stage setting for what is being spoken.  Small wonder that Congress recoiled with the Big Three Automakers arrived in individual corporate jets to ask for money.  The context made their mode of travel ludicrous.

If Astronaut Neil Armstrong had said, “One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind”  while standing on the 16th hole of Pebble Beach with a #3 wood in his hand, that statement would have been destined for locker room chatter rather than heard as a defining moment in placing the U.S. on the moon.  Context is everything.

While this is a rather silly scenario, speakers face an audience with a background that brings them together.  To connect with an audience,  a speaker must state the context for the gathering, the context for the message.  If President Obama had failed to summarize the concern, anger, and frustration of the average American as a preamble to his major addresses given during the long election process, he might very well have never been chosen to lead this nation.   When a speaker sets the stage by providing a context for his words, the audience settles in to listen, believing “Ah. He understands what I am going through.”

Often, the speaker can put into words what the audience has been experiencing yet is unable-for political or personal reasons-to express. In one keynote address, I summarized the anxiety and uncertainty the group faced with an unprecedented spinoff.  Being able to put a humorous twist by way of an analogy also got the group laughing and nodding.   Now, we can get down to business!

Building Block Number Two:  Remember facts tell but emotion sells.

Statistics, flow charts, and diagrams belong in handouts. What brings data to life is the emotion behind the information.  If Martin Luther King had given his “I have a dream speech” but recited all the facts and figures behind segregation, the audience would have gone to sleep. Instead, he painted a picture and portrayed his own emotion about seeing races sitting beside each other.  You saw and felt his intensity.

If you think this only belongs in political or religious arenas, think again.  Rita Davenport, president of one of the most profitable direct sales organizations in the world, Arbonne,  never addresses her audience in terms of dollars and cents.  She talks about individuals and what happened in their lives as a result of having their own business. I’ve watched this petite and very funny woman bring crowds to their feet because she captured the emotion of success-not the facts.

Imagine the buy-in when an executive stands up, relays her story about what it is like to be a female executive in an 98% male organization. Facts about organizational life?  Yes.  But also plenty of emotion that captures the attention of everyone at the conference.  Big stuff.

Building Block Number Three: Share what’s behind the curtain.

In The Wizard of Oz, the little wizard created a persona that was basically a sham. He projected a larger-than-life image on a curtain that both awed and scared the folks in the Emerald City.

He thought that in order to lead others, he had to be something he was not. In the end, the curtain was pulled away and we saw him manipulating an image of himself.  In truth, by ripping aside the curtain, the wizard turned out to be a wise man with keen powers of observation and the “audience” of Dorothy and her friends ended up listening to him.

What was an incident of fiction is exactly what Pine and Gilmore, authors of The Authentic Economy, insist is the exactly what consumers and employees are looking for: authentic people!  We’re tired of phony baloneys.  We’re tired of slick and silly. We’re tired of speakers who act as if they have all the answers and then behave off stage in a manner totally opposite to their presentation. We are hungry for REAL people.

If a presenter can build in personal examples of failure and success, or emotional high and lows-as fitting the topic-the audience also relaxes into a listening mode. One of the best-and shortest speeches-I ever heard would have had 300 people up in a standing ovation were it not for the fact we were held fast by seatbelts.

United Flight 1180 left Denver for New Orleans. Denver was snowbound.  De-icing was easy. New Orleans — another matter as huge thunderstorms kept rolling in from the Gulf of Mexico.  Diversion after diversion. All the while, the pilot kept us updated on our progress.  We learned that he had been a pilot in Vietnam. And when he finally announced after many futile attempts to land, “I am an old pilot. Not a bold pilot,” the cabin erupted in cheers.  He shared what was behind the curtain and in the end, we knew he didn’t like the situation any more than we did.

Building Block Number Four: Practice storytelling instead of telling.

“Man cannot live without story any more than he can live without bread.”  – Dr. Warren Bennis

Since ancient times when humanity gathered around a fire ring, painted on cave walls, marked tombs, or wrote on hides and papyrus, we’ve been enamored by the stories these drawings tell.  The drawings captured what our ear can no longer hear.

All of human history has, at some point, been summarized through stories that reveal everything from creation mythology to Biblical lessons to exploits in outer space.

We just plain love story. We like detail, action, and words what SHOW us what happens rather than TELLS us what happens.  In coaching executives for presentations, our challenge is to constantly ask, “What story would show this point?”  When I want to make a point about the potential downfall of knee jerk reactions, I tell the story (and act out) cutting down the WRONG fire alarm from the ceiling. I wiped out a perfectly good piece of equipment because I did not stop to THINK!

That story captures the imagination, makes the point, and becomes memorable because it also shares what’s behind the curtain. We’ve all made the too-fast-dumb move.  So now, we also have an emotional response as well!

By incorporating these four building blocks into a presentation, you’ll not only be heard but remembered.  This makes you stand out from the herd.  And that’s no bull!

With more axons, women’s brains have more points of integration and connection, which enables their mental activities to take place in the left and right hemispheres at the same time. This is the primary physiological reason that women are more likely to bring rightbrain resources such as intuitive knowing to left-brain situations.

For women, logic and intuition are less divided. Brain imaging also reveals that human beings process information through the cerebral cortex, which is larger in females, has more inputs, and develops at an earlier stage of life. Because this part of the brain regulates memory and emotion, women’s perceptions are more likely to be influenced by their feelings. For women, subjectivity is an integral neural aspect of perception. Women’s ability to process information is therefore strengthened when their feelings are activated.

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.

This preference for intrinsic rewards lies at the heart of the conundrum about why talented women leave. The problem can’t be fixed tactically — by offering mentoring programs or flextime, for example — although such accommodations are important. The question of purpose, of what an organization is trying to achieve in the world, must also be addressed. This requires integrating what women see and value into how the organization conceives its purpose.

In the end, this focus on what matters is what makes the female vision so important. Many companies in the last decade got caught in the trap of defining value and purpose in ever more narrow terms. This proved to be bad for people, bad for organizations, and bad for the world. To reverse the trend, what women see needs to be incorporated at the strategic level.

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.

Now more than ever, managers at all levels of the organization need to do that which separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom: TALK!

Here’s why:

(1) In the absence of information, we connect the dots in the most pathological way possible.

(2) E-mail works fine for data but when emotions are involved, only face-to-face really carries the day

(3) There’s a huge benefit when people gather to share ideas, brainstorm new procedures, learn more about team members, have questions answered, or explore ways to streamline work loads.

(4) Smart companies will use this downtime to cross train, to coach for performance and career development, and involve employees in corporate decisions.

(5) Diverse perspectives are critical for innovation and these are best gleaned through conversation.

Bottom Line:  The organization will have a solid, committed employee base, poised to move into front position when the turnaround comes. But this will only happen if TALK becomes the preferred vehicle of communication.

Eileen McDargh, since founding McDargh Communications in 1980, has helped organizations and individuals transform the life of their business and the business of their life through conversations that matter and connections that count. She is the author ofWork for a Living & Still Be Free to Live, the first noted book on work/life balance; as well as The Resilient Spirit, Talk Ain’t Cheap…It’s Priceless, and Gifts from the Mountain: Simple Truths for Life’s Complexities, which won the Benjamin Franklin Gold Award in 2008.

Executive Excellence magazine continually ranks her as one of the top 50 thought leaders in self-leadership development. Global Gurus International, a British-based provider of resources for leadership, communication and sales training, also named her as one of the World’s Top 30 Leadership Professionals following a global survey of 22,000 business professionals.As a business author and commentator, she has appeared on network news, on radio programs and in business journals and in major metropolitan newspapers.

Yet even as the case for developing women leaders grew stronger, women’s progress as leaders slowed. Researchers proposed various theories to explain this trend. Perhaps the problem was the lack of female mentors or the persistence of rigid career paths that didn’t take women’s multiple responsibilities into account. Maybe not enough women chose to work in operations or in line positions rather than staff jobs such as human resources or communications. Maybe women were too reluctant to accept global assignments. Maybe women should start playing golf. Or maybe women had gotten into the pipeline too late; now that more women were filling the pipeline, the problem would end up solving itself.

The stall in women’s progress has been surprising because the shift to a knowledge-based economy seemed to support women’s talents, skills, and capabilities. The need for companies to connect directly with customers and clients should have supported women’s skill at building relationships. The trend toward more weblike organizations should have supported women’s comfort level with leading from the center rather than the top. The spread of technologies that facilitated, even demanded, direct communication should have supported the female propensity to keep in touch and work well in collabora-tive settings. Women’s vaunted intuition should have been a plus in organizations traversing uncharted waters and increasingly reliant on innovation. Greater diversity in the workforce should have speeded women’s rise.

Yet, although these trends did give women an edge, other aspects of the new environment worked against them. For one thing, it was ironic that women had come into the workforce in significant numbers at precisely the same time that work was becoming more demanding and more intense. As the global economy ramped up during the long boom of the 1990s and the amount of capital available for mergers and acquisitions soared, organizations came under constant pressure to do more with less, and required people to work longer and harder. The successive economic slowdowns of the first decade in the new century only added to the pressure. Evolving technologies also provided the means for people to work anytime anywhere, creating 24/7 expectations while eroding industrial-era protective barriers between work and home. For example, until the start of the 1990s, most good jobs required around fifty hours a week, constant business travel was uncommon except for those in sales, and no one was expected to field calls during a child’s soccer game. As work became more invasive, many of those who had a choice began to rethink their ambitions.

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.