The value women place on relationships has increasing marketplace value. Changes in the nature of technology have made relationships — with customers, clients, suppliers, competitors, shareholders, and the community as well as within the organization itself — a far more vital resource for organizations than in years past. Twenty years ago, relationships were considered the soft stuff, dismissed as the province of “human resource weenies” by those who valued strategic toughness. Today, they are more likely to be seen as essential to innovation, teamwork, customer satisfaction, talent retention, and the transmission of embodied wisdom. Continue reading » »

Why do women place so much value on relationships?

Recent advances in neuroscience suggest some answers. A UCLA lab team using functional MRIs found that humans register the social pain of isolation and rejection in the same areas of the brain and with the same intensity as they register physical pain. Further investigation revealed that women experience social pain more acutely than men and in more parts of the brain simultaneously. Another study using similar methodology revealed that the hippocampus, which constitutes the major memory center in the brain, is more active in women when they are interacting with others. This makes women more likely to remember the details of emotional exchanges and personal conversations. Continue reading » »

What accounts for differences in how men and women notice? Why have we evolved in complementary ways? Are divergencesonly the result of socialization, or of something more fundamental? Recent evidence from the fields of cognitive and social psychology suggests that our different noticing styles have a biological as well as a cultural basis. For example, functional MRIs reveal that men (on average) have more “grey matter” in their brains than women, while women have more “white matter” than men. Continue reading » »

Women’s career decisions are more likely to be motivated by what psychologist Steven Pinker calls “intrinsic rewards” — those they find personally meaningful — than by money or status. Family concerns may play a part in their decisions to stay with or leave a job because family is part of how women perceive intrinsic rewards. But the primary driver for women is the desire to do work that they feel matters. Our own research on differences in how men and women perceive, define, and pursue satisfaction at work, presented in chapter 5, supports and reinforces this view.

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.

The “female brain drain,” as it is popularly known, presents particular problems at senior and leadership levels. When women fill the ranks but don’t make it to the top, those who hold less senior positions are likely to become discouraged about their prospects within the company. A paucity of senior women also strengthens the impression that the organization is run by an old boys network. This in turn creates negative perceptions among female clients and customers, who increas-ingly prefer to do business with companies they view as women-friendly. For all these reasons, companies that lose top women tend to get caught in a self-reinforcing cycle: women leave, which makes more women consider leaving. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Up until the mid-1990s, expectations for women as leaders were very high. Women flooded business and professional schools and began surpassing men in educational achievement in almost every field except engineering. Women also began starting their own businesses at a higher rate than men. These demographic trends put pressure on organizations to invest resources in developing and promoting women, and many made a commitment to do so. The effort received an impetus when several influential studies documented a correlation between the number of women in senior positions and superior overall performance.

Yet even as the case for developing women leaders grew stronger, women’s progress as leaders slowed. Continue reading » »