The Female Leader. Sonja Becker
own organization and do business than today. Programs like the series “Sex and the City” have contributed considerably to a paradigm shift. Suddenly women have stopped focusing on men, and prefer to turn on their own axis. What happens next when the compass is pointed in a new direction cannot be predicted – only experienced. That is curiosity.
During the course of life curiosity is mostly repressed. Disillusionment, disappointment and above all the need for security dissuade the majority of people from putting their “calling” in the foreground or from making it the goal of their lives. If you are doing what you have always wanted to do, or if you have now decided to do it - congratulations! This book is a manual for all those who dare to take the step out into the wide prairie of independent entrepreneurship. And their numbers are increasing - especially among women.
Liberty, otherness, fraternity
C
an’t live with you, can’t live without you: Relationships are indicators of human energy. Love is the highest form of energy – what doesn’t one do out of love? The powerful energy that love unleashes may indicate the strength of that. This can be introduced as the curiosity factor, which will continually drive us on the way through this book, before everything becomes familiar.
Men and women often cannot live together and under no circumstances without each other. Their differences are their capital. That has always been case throughout evolution. Only the roles were divided differently.
In business the formula for a successful future lies in different qualities. Our thesis is that the most successful teams are those with an equal number of men and women with the capability of celebrating their differences, and using them for a common strategy.
Men and women meet on the same level in business and management. After the end of “battle of the sexes” and the entry of women into business they are genuinely emancipated and bring a breath of fresh air into entrepreneurship.
There is a new energy between man and woman. For the first time they are forgetting their preconceived notions of the opposite sex. They are becoming curious about one another. Countless books have been written in the last few years about the charming differences between the perspectives of men and of women – and celebrated. Daily business included.
In fact there is little that women don’t do or look at completely differently from men. The “little differences” is one of the most exciting and entertaining themes of our time. Women are no longer “on the advance”. They have arrived. On the boardroom floor in business, as the head of a company as well as in politics, female influence is highly valued.
The integrating capabilities of women, in areas such as relationship management for example, are decisive elements in an economy in which service plays the most important part.
Never before has it been possible for women to combine their careers with standard family life to that degree. Whereas in former times the woman found herself in a dilemma between the kitchen, children and career, now she can combine all the things that are dear and precious to her owing to the phenomenal amenities of telecommunication through the cell phone or the internet. This is the first generation for which the type of “Womanagement” is possible. Men and women are no longer fixed in their gender roles. Now things are shared in a brotherly and sisterly manner.
Service - why right now?
T
he information and media age lies just as far behind us as the industrial age. Since the beginning of the new millennium and its historical beginning on September 11, 2001, the service economy has superseded the old capitalist power structure, as it served capital more than people.
While the old economic tanker grindingly held its course, purging itself through redundancies, so that no employee could be sure of keeping their position, a parallel economy developed which was based on self-employment and which produced new answers, new capital and new careers with brilliant ideas and innovations in the service sector.
In Germany, the “desert of service”, especially, many a stretch of waste land has yet to be turned into an oasis. Parallel to this is the drive towards self-determination, freedom and the development of personal interests and capabilities. Even the government tends to encourage people to pursue their own interests and to develop their own business ideas and become self-employed. More and more people are discovering that the greatest potential lies in themselves: their entire personal talent lies there to be capitalized on. When women found and lead a business, they can for the first time employ their feminine talents within this service economy.
In a ten year study Danish researchers discovered that businesses which had more women in management worked more profitably. “In fact women manage differently”, commentated the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” (5. June 1005, p. 39), “Although women lull their male competitors into a sense of security through their calmness and reticence in the beginning, when it comes down to it they negotiate tenaciously and ruthlessly with their eye on the goal. (…) The management techniques of women, who on the whole rely on intuition rather than reflection, also go far beyond seemingly friendly listening.
“In contrast to all the traditional management tools women create a closer relationship with their employees though their prevailingly highly intuitive way of leadership,” says Lammers, a female headhunter. “They create bonds which makes the employees obliged to them. (…) That is why they are so valuable.”
A further study in England compared masculine and feminine styles of leadership and came to the conclusion that, “Women managed in a much more informal way, involved employees more in decision-making and inspired them. Moreover, women in management positions forgot less quickly what it feels like to be an employee.” “The employees admired their female bosses for it,” summed up Inge Kloepfer of the FAS. “This type of bonding is a much subtler way of exercising power and influence than the pressure of hierarchies.”
The old and the new service economy
S
ervice has a new definition. “Service” does not simply mean provision of services. The German postal service, the Deutsche Post, is a classic example of a company that provides a service. But what would happen if in the near future it lost its monopoly on the delivery of letters?
They would have competition that would terrify them: perhaps postal workers who would not only deliver letters, but collect the post, sell stamps and through other services save the trip to the increasingly meager post office and replace postboxes – to mention only a few ideas that the Deutsche Post won’t look at. It is a service-impeder, a service provider that no longer provides a service, or a logistics enterprise that no longer cares about private communication - whichever way you want to look at it. In any case nothing is more tedious and cumbersome than sending a letter in the age of the email. Before the long march to the post box there are stamps to obtain, the five digit post code that nobody can remember to be looked up, and paper and envelopes to be procured.
A recent development: if the envelope does not stick properly, or if the seal of the package doesn’t hold, one is politely enforced to purchase string or adhesive tape in the local “Shop” to do what the post office worker used to do as a matter of course. Good luck to anyone who looks for redress.
The “new service” means: to put yourself completely in the situation of others and to recognize their requirements and their sources of curiosity, in order to create a product and offer it to the right people.
Women are better suited to this service economy than men, because they are better trained for historical and cultural reasons. In the history of evolution, men’s hands were full with hunting and gathering, while women concerned themselves with order in the domestic and familial structure. Apart from the Amazons and the female Pharaohs, in the history of mankind they were rarely the “rulers” who reigned over the private court, the people and the empire. Men were the hunters, the warriors, protectors and proprietors; women the ones who kept everything together. But this “deprivation” was compensated for by other capabilities. Women