In a business meeting recently with a former colleague who is now the CEO of a small company with a very high percentage of female employees, I was surprised by an unusual request from her for a more "female-friendly" management development program. She admitted that so far, her lady managers found it difficult to follow and thus relate to management practices learned from various management training programs. Elaborating further, she thinks that the main causal factor could be that most these management ideas and solutions are gender biased as they were mostly written from a male perspective!
It had never cross my mind of such a possibility as I've always thought that management concepts and principles are gender-neutral. Frankly, in my many years of experience in management development involving both male and female participants, this is the first time that I come across such an unconventional perception. I guess there's always a first time for anything.
Upon reflection, I think the lady CEO could possibly be wrong with respect to management ideas and practices being male-centric. However, she may be right in a way those management practices were presented for learning purpose when one or more of the following five situations happened:
1. Unsuitable case examples used for discussion.
2. Inappropriate simulation exercises were selected for role playing.
3. Ineffective facilitation to enable the participants to contextualize learning at workplace.
4. Languages and symbols used failed to connect to the female psyche and therefore resulted in ineffective communication.
5. Inability of the trainer/facilitator to contextualize training content to suit the needs of the participants .
I believe that it is the failure of training design and delivery that resulted in the inability of the participants to apply what they have learned back at their workplace irrespective of gender and profession.
Just thinking out aloud - would a female trainer/facilitator done any better in the given situation/s above?
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I am not an expert in women, but I would like to make some guesses. Firstly I think women are more focus on getting the relationship right first, whereas men tend to focus on getting the job done first. A "thoughtful worker" is a good worker - that's their mantra I guess. Sometimes women are construed as being petty - based on their perception that everything is equally important, but men tend to focus on bottom line. Gossip is an organizational "check and balance" tool. Anyway, we cant generalize as Western women are very different from Malay women and Chinese women.
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