In my experience, it’s always how the Manager handles competition and confrontation. Males and females are still strongly socialized to handle them differently.
The worst women I’ve worked for would avoid confrontation until the situation would fester; the resolution would be ugly and painful and usually end in someone leaving.
The worst men I’ve worked for were always at least one level too narrow with their definition of ‘team’. Within the department, they always wanted to be the star; within the company, they wanted their department to have the best numbers; within the economy, they wanted their industry to get the most federal funding. And they would ignore someone else’s idea unless they could figure out a way to steal it.
OTOH, most women could use competition constructively, and most men were relaxed with correcting staff.
Giving instructions, assigning tasks fairly and appropriately, managing work flow, dealing with upper management and other departments, … eh, I haven’t seen much difference in the aggregate.
The last woman I worked for was over 20 years ago and I swore I’d never work for another woman again.
Since then, I’ve only interviewed with a woman manager but was very impressed with what I saw.
If we’re painting everyone with the Broad Generalization Brush (no pun intended), I believe women tend to be petty, back-biting, and unprofessional. I guess I just get along better in a room full of men than I do a room full of women.
This is true in my experience too.
The women who make it to board level are usually outstanding managers. The men at the same level, not so much. Both women and men make good middle level managers depending on the individual.But for dealing with freshmen or an inexperienced team women are much better.
Generally I also find that the reporting styles preferred by men is a short summary of the important issues, while women prefer to have more details. Also, women managers are less tolerant of easing off during slack times.
And my experience runs directly contrary to that. The women I’ve worked for have been anything but touchy-feely – unless you count getting your ass kicked (not quite literally, but close) to be “touch-feely”!
Unfortunately my experience with women managers has been universally negative:
The younger ones tended to be incompetant when it came to the technical aspects of our job. In fact, quite often they were managing teams that had no clear purpose or direction:
Me: "So what is our job?’
Lady Boss: “Well we are creating a “SWAT” team to build synergies between the projects teams and respond to critical issues.”
Me: “um…so what does that do exactly?”
Lady Boss: “Well, we are going to facilitate a number of client session to determine how effectively we are mapping to the best practices set by the PMO.”
Me: “yeah…when I show up to the office, what exactly should I be doing at my desk and how will you know when I’m done?”
I call this style of female manager the “cheerleader”. They are usually young (under 30-ish), attractive (in a sort of corporate way) and eager. Your performance will be measured by how well you “fit in” and support the team consensus. Actual accomplishments are secondary, just so long as you all “work together”.
The next style of female manager I’ve experienced I call the “schoolteacher”. Basically they are humorlessly cheerful, slightly older (30s or 40s) stickler for the letter of the corporate policy. Every decree or proclamation is delivered with the same stupid corporate smile. Results aren’t important. Following corporate beurocracy is.
And the final stage of female manager I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with is “The Shrew”. Basically a middle aged or old lady who is crazed from bitterness and has nothing else in her life besides the job. Their “management” style is erratic, inconsistant and often abusive.
OTOH, most of my male bosses have been idiots as well. Just in different ways.
To the (very limited) extent that I have seen any sex-determined management styles, I would have attributed them to the culture or education in which they grew up, not to any inherent difference in the sexes.
(It would be interesting to see how men and women are viewed differently in different cultures.)
The “nurturing” boss, the backbreaker, the Kommandant, the back-biter who will do anything to take credit and pass down blame, the project-directed boss, the administrator who is more worried about reporting the right things to management on the correct forms, the strategist, the fussy hen, the “don’t bring me bad news” jerk: I have seen every type in both sexes. To the extent that one type or another predominates, I have seen a slight pattern where they were educated in particular decades or whether they either went to school to be bosses or rose through the ranks.
I’ve only had one woman direct report boss with whom I had problems, but I’ve only had a couple of men bosses with whom I’ve had problems. The few absolute worst bosses I’ve seen also came in both sexes. (Fortunately for all concerened, I never had a direct report status with them.)
In my general experience, men were slightly better managers than women. However, there is probably some selection bias at work. For one thing, female managers who are unhappy have an easier time exiting corporate America. Also there is affirmative action. So on the one hand, I’ve seen incompetent women promoted to senior management positions because they were women. On the other hand, I’ve seen lots of miserable, bitter men in management positions who keep working to support their families.
I don’t think we can make a generalization on this that would do any good. Even if we could objectively show that one gender was 10 percent “better” on average, would society benefit from this knowledge? I think the opposite–companies would use this statistical difference to discriminate, the result being good people losing managerial positions to less-qualified people because of their gender.
With due respect to the SDMG credo, this is one question for which I would rather we all remain ignorant of the answer.
What difference between genders? There are few, if any, real differences. For example, in both math and verbal skills, the variations within each gender are much greater than the difference between genders, to the point where the difference between genders is negligible. But while there may be zero differences between genders, there are significantly different expectations of each gender.
I attended a talk awhile ago about women in leadership roles. The main message of the talk was that women who try to take a hard line in management (Sally do this, Matt do that, etc.) tend not to be accepted because they are not fitting the “feminine” stereotype. (They fit the stereotype of “bitch.”) For this reason, it is easier for women to manage using empowerment strategies, because then they can take the leadership role without stretching their gender role too far beyond people’s expectations. And in fact, empowerment leadership tends to have better results, so men are starting to adopt this model as well.
(For the record, I have zero experience in the corporate world. Also, I’m pretty sure that the speaker used different words to describe “hardline” and “empowerment” leadership, but I don’t remember what they were.)
More risk-taking?
Most studies tend to say the opposite and blame such things as men’s superior car accident causation on our recklessness.
Yep. I’d say the ideal manager wouldn’t be obviously male or female personality-wise (in as far as there is a “male” or “female” personality yadda yadda).
You kind of nailed it right there. Men and women are exposed to different environmental pressures, which cause them to develop differently. To claim that men and women are somehow immune to the effects of their environment is at the very least naive.
Did you ever have a stupid nothing fight with your girlfriend? Is there some reason to believe that the inexplicable personality traits women exhibit in personal life do not appear in the professional world?
I don’t know that either is necessarily better, but I’ve been happier and more productive under the women I’ve worked for. They’re more likely to tell you that you did a good job after a day from hell, and far less likely to give you a red-hot reaming over some trivial screw-up that’s already been corrected and wasn’t that big a deal even if it wasn’t corrected (or that had nothing to do with you in the first place.) It’s just a more pleasant environment, which fosters everybody watching each other’s backs, which helps ensure nothing falls through the cracks. And makes everybody much more willing to go above and beyond.
Men, otoh, have tended to make the workplace pure, unadulterated hell. Such a miserable, toxic, you’re-a-barely-competent-proto-simian sort of environment that people are far too busy counting down the minutes till they can escape to do anything above and beyond, or take up anybody else’s slack. For all their focus on the bottom line, it’s generally worse under them.
Let’s see, who makes a better manager: someone with a penis, or someone with a vagina? This is essentially what you’re asking and it’s insulting to both genders.
What next? Who makes a better manager: a straight person or a gay person? Followed up closely by, who makes a better manager: a Jew or a Catholic.
This is my experience as well. I have had some shitty female bosses, but women have always been better at knowing what they do, knowing who they work with, knowing when there’s a little problem and fixing it before it becomes a big problem, etc.
The question is more like: “Who makes a better manager: someone who was held more or talked to more as an infant? who was encouraged to play team sports, or to artistic play? Someone of whom society expects a strong competitive drive, or strong nurturing skills?”
In my experience the exact opposite is true. The biggest jerks I’ve ever encountered in management positions have all been women. The crude and blunt things that they’ve said are like nothing any man has ever said.
And I think the reason is because of a widespread myth to the contrary, spread by seminars such as the one you describe as well as numerous media outlets. I think this encourages ambitious women to act outside the bounds of normal parameters based on the notion that this is how men in such situations act, even though it’s not actually true.
IOW, most people have a natural sense of what the bounds of expected behaviour is, and are guided by this sense. Some women are encouraged not to be guided by their natural instinct, since they believe it has been imposed by their status as women, and to just be as forceful and aggresive as they can be, since this is supposedly what a man would do in such a situation. And what you get is a first class jerk.
Just a theory, of course. And I should add that some of these women seem to be getting the job done. Other people hate dealing with them, but the company bottom line doesn’t seem to be suffering.
We’ve covered the absurdity of generalizing about male and female behavior. We’ve covered the problem that how you manage depends on who you manage. But I haven’t seen anyone touch on a third level of absurdity, which is what you manage. The skills needed to manage a research team or other creative endeavor are far different than the skills needed to manage a platoon of soldiers soon to face the enemy. I’ve. seen managers of both sexes do well in and screw up stuff all types of projects and groups. So, I judge the question absurd.