Managing Leadership^®

Running a business – either as a manager or an entrepreneur – is an inherently risky endeavor. Whether the issue is your career, your reputation, or your financial well-being, many women, according to an insightful assessment of the subject by Kristi Hedges in a recent article on Entrepreneur.com, take an approach to risk that has the consequence of limiting the business achievements they might otherwise attain.

Ms. Hedges is concerned that the cause of this aversion may stem from a misplaced effort to preserve a work-life balance. As she points out, however, taking the next step in growing your business – or your career – often gives you greater resources and control over that balance than you might otherwise have.

It is the small business owner that is harassed by the need to personally cover all the competing demands of running the enterprise; the owner of a larger business generally has the resources and staff to address these, freeing her to focus on strategic issues, her personal value-adding (rather than administrative and other extraneous) activities – and the work-life balance. If you run a larger business, you might dispute that, but just think back a bit: you’ll remember. The same general principle applies to advancing your managerial career.

Pursuing one’s ambitions for work, Ms. Hedges argues, often supports one’s ambitions for life. In a recent WSJ column, Carol Hymowitz makes a similar point. She tells the story of a family whose four daughters have all risen to the very top levels of management in American business. Both of their parents taught them the value of large goals, hard work, and the peculiar sort of collaboration that is necessary in a business enterprise; in particular, their mother taught them that ambition is an inherent part of true femininity.

As striking as the story of these remarkable sisters is, there are many such examples out there. Nevertheless, the statistics, such as those reported by Ms. Hedges, do seem to reflect a distinct difference in the way women and men view risk and ambition.

However, it’s probably not a good idea to assume that we understand what this means. It may actually do little more than reveal important features of the differing strengths men and women bring to management. We are hardly well served – especially in today’s world – by assuming that those of men are the appropriate and necessary ones, and that those of women have little to offer, leaving us to harangue women about how they need to adopt more masculine attitudes and thinking in business.

While this subject admits of many exceptions, the generalizations remain useful – it is the conclusions we – all of us, men and women – draw from them that may not be. In my experience, they typically are not. The tendency of women to subsume personal ambition into larger goals doesn’t reflect a lack of ambition – just a form of it that may be more suited to the fiduciary environment of business today. There are many potential benefits for an organization to gain from such a form of ambition; we will take them up in future essays.

—

And please be sure to catch those future essays on this important topic by subscribing now!

Technorati Tags: manager, entrepreneur, Kristi Hedges, work-life balance, small business, strategic issues, Carol Hymowitz, WSJ, Entrepreneur.com