Corporate management: How do you manage men - as a woman?
Women lead differently - obviously, such differences are not always accurate in business management. Even if talented women, admired and appreciated, first they need to get into the leadership position without the resentment and side glances of female and male colleagues at work.
(Image: Fotolia_nd3000)
Does the management of female managers come across differently? According to current studies, it is clear that women do not want to go all the way to the top at all; they avoid rivalries. In 2015, the German evolutionary biologist Axel Meyer from the University of Konstanz summarized the studies on psychological gender differences as follows:
"Women statistically have more extensive vocabularies, better linguistic expression, more empathy, faster comprehension, better imagination, better emotion recognition, higher social sensitivity, and better fine motor skills.
Men have more pronounced aggressiveness, better spatial-visual skills, more assertiveness, can systematize better, read maps better, comprehend mental/3-D rotations better, and find contours better in a larger design." - However, the so-called Gaussian distribution curve applies here, he said. There are talented character types in both sexes.
Men rather narcissistic
Ulrich Kutschera, a world-renowned physiologist and visiting scientist at Stanford University, also confirmed this study situation in 2016: The image of narcissistic personality disorder apparently occurs in 80 percent of men. Men change their profile pictures on professional social media platforms like XING much more often.
If you let the different characteristics of the sexes go at each other unfiltered in your mind's eye, you might imagine why women are less likely to be found in top management:
The family orientation of women (which is biologically intended) certainly plays a role here. The only interesting aspect is that almost all the women you meet in various management positions fundamentally reject a statutory women's quota. Who wants to be a quota woman? That is second-class management and cannot be a qualitative solution.
Authenticity through CRM
Women and men alike must be allowed to preserve their psychological authenticity. On the other hand, an unreflected, ideologically poisoned orientation towards emancipation leads nowhere. Women do not want to represent male bosses - nor do they need men who adorn themselves with female attributes - in order to be able to make a career.
For example, today's Crew Resource Management (CRM) in commercial aviation and its transfer to the management floors opens up a scientifically based, proven, people-friendly, efficient and error-minimized set of rules for managers, with which both genders can combine their different abilities in a complex world.
"Real" teams open up new possibilities for effective, performance-oriented job sharing, even in high management positions. This is not only very beneficial for the desire to balance family and career. These "real" teams are not only highly superior to "so-called" teams in terms of performance and efficiency, they also work much less stressfully and smoothly, regardless of how the genders are distributed.
The main thing is that leaders never give up their respective positive sides.
Female pilots work with thousands of times fewer errors than other colleagues. At the same time, they are only human and no more stress-resistant than a manager in a company or a doctor in a clinic.
You can find out more about Crew Resource Management (CRM) here:
