Since the start of my career, I have trained hundreds and hundreds of female managers. I have therefore had the opportunity on many occasions to observe the challenge of my students to find their place in the business world. For the past ten years or so, I have observed the importance of the network of business women in the development of leadership, and that’s good.
When I was one of the few management students 40 years ago, boys clubs from my CEGEP and my university overshadowed the women who chose this path, by excluding them from their “business projects” from the outset.
Now, management schools are largely filled by women.
However !
Recently, I visited the website of La Gouvernance au Feminine, an organization that gives voice to speakers who are exceptional by their background and their success, and which encourages women to sit on boards of directors. When I noticed the dominant place of English in their events (the description of a volunteer position offered exclusively in English – the more things change, the more the same), the polished aspect of the commentators, the Americanization style, I wondered if I was not witnessing the birth of girls club, copy and paste of the male model of conventional governance.
For decades, we have been glorifying reaching new heights. But do we dwell on the price that these women will agree to pay to succeed in this tour de force, or on the real influence they will have on strategic decisions, without even developing a critical mind of current fashions? governance and their deleterious effects on societies and States?
I would prefer that these women illustrate themselves in the way they break with “unsustainable” modes of governance, which do so much damage to our society, and that they promote new styles of management. This is where we need new models… and it’s urgent! Are they prepared for this role in CAs?
For several months, we have observed the collapse of certain high-level female executives, guilty or accomplices of the toxic climate of the organizations for which they are responsible. We see in some of them, as in men, a taste for power and domination that makes an organization a zone of war, distress and demobilization.
If women in power manage like men in power, if they value wealth rather than equality of opportunity, power at all costs, domination rather than collective intelligence, growth without social acceptability, we cannot are hardly more advanced, as women and as a society.
If this is not the case, then let’s put forward the genius and the creativity of their management, their management philosophy, their values and their contribution to society before the fact that she is a woman and before seeking parity in the CA for good looks!
The “feminized and standardized” model of business success is not for everyone. Women entrepreneurs and managers who have causes to defend, a human mission to fulfill, and whose motivations are elsewhere than to break the glass ceiling may find it inaccessible, far removed from their realities and their aspirations. It can even be counter-performing in terms of attractiveness, which is undoubtedly not the goal.
Advancing in the hierarchy, having ambition, dreaming of having the power to act is legitimate in itself, but it should not be the only model to be favored to illustrate success and to highlight the leadership of women in organizations and in society.
It is also time for women in business to challenge management models that no longer suit them, instead of seeking to appropriate them. It is time to offer women leaders more inclusive, more innovative alternative ideas, like the society we want to build, with courage and perseverance and, too often, in the shadow of the spotlight. We will then have a real place in the governance of our organizations when, instead of asking permission to speak, we speak loudly!