We had such a nice reaction to our last piece on leadership that we did it again below with Cynthia Bainton.  We think it is important to see the connections between “other lobe” thinking in various domains and hope you agree.

-Jim and Shwen

 

 

 

Relational Practice in Leadership – Lessons Learned from Gender Differences

 

By Cynthia Bainton and Jim Stellar

 

In our last piece on leadership posted on May 18th, Jim and I discussed the ability to form and promote teamwork.  In this post, we would like to discuss what I (Cynthia) consider to be another leadership essential - relational practice, sometimes referred to as relational behavior.  Relational practice is a network of assumptions, interpersonal skills, and collaborative work. Although it can be practiced by both men and women, it is associated with female-linked traits and the feminine or so-called soft side of organizational behavior.  Captain Abrashoff, whom I described in our last blog (on 5/18), demonstrated relational behavior when he wrote letters to the parents of his crew members praising their sons and daughters’ achievements.  The result of this practice was that the parents expressed to their children how proud they were of them. Although the practice could not be quantified in battle readiness terms, imagine how this raising of morale contributed to the overall performance of the Benfold.  In her book Disappearing Acts , Joyce K. Fletcher writes extensively about relational practice and how it is routinely “disappeared” by organizations who label such behavior as “nice” or “kind” but refuse to recognize it as a legitimate contribution to the success of their business.  She describes how women struggle to have their relational behavior activities count towards their promotions. 

 

Within academic institutions, examples of relational behavior include advising students, mentoring colleagues, and serving on search committees.  This brings us to a startling study by the Modern Language Association of America entitled “Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey.”  Survey data obtained for the study showed that “On average it takes women from 1 to 3.5 years longer than men to attain the rank of professor.  The discrepancy between women and men in terms of their advancement from associate professor to [full] professor is significant.”  Hindrances to advancement were perceived by female survey respondents to be time spent on these types of relational practice activities instead of on research and writing.  In other words, there was a clear institutional need for faculty to perform mentoring and service activities but when it came time for these faculty members to be promoted, women felt that such activities were not assigned the same value as research.  We have to ask ourselves, if relational behavior activities have been demonstrated to improve working conditions for both male and female employees while at the same time raising an organization’s bottom line, how can the leaders of today afford not to practice it?  How important is it for leaders to alter an American business culture still dominated by male norms in order for women to reach their full potential alongside their male colleagues?

 

I (Jim) want to raise one additional point to what Cynthia has laid out above and that is that the “Other Lobe of the Brain” thinking that has characterized this whole blog (which has largely focused so far on student learning in higher education) is also at work here and in the previous post on the potential warm impact of social media like Twitter.  The essential premise of this blog is that the limbic system processing (what Pascal called “heart reasons” in the quote we cited in the “About” section) adds a kind of intelligence that is unlike cognitive processing and perhaps somewhat less accessible to conscious reflection.  Hence it tends to get missed.  Yet in higher education we know that experiences (undergraduate research, studying or interning abroad, working while in school on a cooperative education period, etc.) can be very powerful in shaping career decisions.  This Limbic processing may also play an important role in more “logical areas” such as choosing between scientific theories or deciding how to play the pieces on a chess board without having to consciously examine every move (and the repercussions) of every piece before concentrating on a strategy.  This could shade into areas of creativity and the use of multiple intelligences, but those are topics for future posts.

 

For now, we want to stop here and encourage you our readers to comment.  The whole point of a blog is to get into conversation with our followers and while we greatly appreciate hearing from you on the street (and we do – thank you), please consider commenting here.