Response Magic 
When
I met Lynne Doughtie this week, I was struck by how different it felt sitting
with her than with any male chief executive I had met over the years.
Six
weeks ago, Ms. Doughtie was elected United States Chairwoman and Chief Executive
of KPMG.
When
she takes over the role on July 1, she will become the first woman to serve in
both of those roles for a Big Four accounting firm.
Cathy
Engelbert was chosen as chief executive of Deloitte in February.
In
my short time with Ms. Doughtie, I found her to be warm, open, gracious and
introspective – in short, qualities more traditionally associated with women.
I
felt relaxed, comfortable and unhurried talking with her, in part because she
seemed more focused on having a conversation than on announcing or positioning
herself.
By
making this observation, I’m reinforcing a stereotype about women — and by
implication a parallel stereotype about men, and especially male leaders, as
dominant, aggressive and certain. So be it.
For
all the exceptions, these stereotypes feel true more often than they do not.
What
seems undeniable is that we need more leaders who make people feel the way Ms.
Doughtie made me feel.
I
say that for a simple reason. The better leaders make us feel – including about
ourselves — the better we are likely to perform.
In
the most interesting research I have come across comparing male and female
leaders, the consulting firm Zenger
Folkman studied 16,000 of them – two-thirds men, one-third women – as
well as their managers, subordinates and peers.
Women
rated better than men on 12 out of 16 competencies.
These
included “takes initiative,” “drives for results” and “stretches for results,”
all traditional measures of effective leadership.
They
also included every one of the more human competencies — “practices
self-development,” “develops others,” “motivates and inspires others,” “builds
relationships” and “collaboration and teamwork.”
These
leadership qualities are more critical than ever in a highly networked,
fast-moving, interdependent global economy.
Traditionally,
they have been valued far below more technical skills.
“Women
do tend to be collaborative, and that is important in a world and a work force
that is changing so fast,” Ms. Doughtie told me. “The challenge in most
organizations is to innovate and adapt. An autocratic style doesn’t serve that.
You need different perspectives at the table from diverse backgrounds.”
Interestingly,
the female leaders in the Zenger Folkman study were rated about equal with the
men when it came to solving problems and analyzing issues.
The
only competencies in which men rated higher than women were technical
expertise, innovation and a strategic perspective about the outside world and
other groups.
In another study, the organization Catalyst found
that companies with the highest representation of women in top management
consistently experienced better financial performance than the group of
companies with the lowest.
Despite
such findings, the number of women in top leadership
roles remains depressingly low and slow to change.
Women
make up more than half of the work force, but they still represent less than 5
percent of the chief executives of the largest companies, and about 15 percent
of senior executives.
Only
two dozen presidents among the world’s 196 countries are
women.
Nearly
50 percent of those attending law school today are women, but only 20 percent of
the partners at law firms are women.
The
most obvious obstacle to the rise of women in leadership roles is the degree to
which male-dominated corporate cultures still reward long work hours.
As
Prof. Robin J. Ely of Harvard Business School and her colleagues reported
recently, men often feel compelled to sacrifice their families to advance their
careers, while many women feel that the cost to their families is too great to
pay.
Even
when women choose to pursue their careers, organizations continue to devalue or
undervalue the range of leadership skills they often bring to the table.
In
addition, as Sheryl Sandberg has pointed out, women often unwittingly undermine
themselves.
The
event at which I met Ms. Doughtie this week was a conference on women’s
leadership tied to a Ladies Professional Golf Association tournament, both
sponsored by KPMG.
Ms.
Doughtie’s talk was a summary of the findings in a
study that the firm
commissioned about women’s attitudes toward leadership.
Nearly
two-thirds of the 3,000 professional and college-age women in the KPMG study
expressed a desire to someday become senior leaders.
Only
40 percent were consistently able to envision themselves as leaders.
While
men often overvalue their strengths, women too frequently undervalue theirs.
Call
it a continuing confidence gap.
Eighty-six
percent of the women surveyed were taught be “nice to others” growing up and to
do well in school, but less than 50 percent were taught leadership lessons.
Two-thirds
said they were cautious about sharing their point of view at work or taking
steps to become leaders.
Ms.
Doughtie’s early advantage was having a role model in her own mother, a
successful businesswomen who ran a family trucking business, among others.
“I
had role models all along the way who gave me confidence,” she said.
One
was John Veihmeyer, KPMG’s global chairman, who grew up with five sisters, each
of whom excelled academically and professionally.
Mr.
Veihmeyer pushed to name Ms. Doughtie the managing partner of KPMG’s United
States advisory business 10 years ago, when others felt she was too young for
such responsibility.
Two-thirds
of the women in the KPMG study felt they had learned their most important
lessons about leadership from other women, and 82 percent of working women in
the study believed that networking with female leaders would help them advance
their careers.
Even
so, four out of five women did not feel comfortable asking for mentors.
Ms.
Doughtie will now have an opportunity to influence substantially the culture of
a company that employs thousands of young women (and men).
One
way is by constantly retelling her story and by building a network of mentors
for young women, both to help them navigate their career paths and encourage
them to believe more in themselves.
Receiving
praise from mentors and leaders, for example, was the single biggest factor
influencing women’s perceptions of themselves in the study, more even than
receiving raises and promotions.
At
a broader level, my hope is that Ms. Doughtie — and Ms. Engelbert, who is also
the mother of two children — will draw on her experiences to create more
humane, flexible and sustainable work environments in a profession long known
for relentlessly brutal working hours.
