Non-threatening leadership strategies – #7 If You See A Mistake

I used to be like this, favouring brevity over what I felt was a valuable waste of people’s time. But I constantly got accused of being “not nice” or “bitchy”. This was especially true in my Nortel days when I was one of two departmental managers and the other was a pretty, young Asian woman who played the cutesy card all the time. The thing was, people thought she was “stupid” or an “air head”, which was how they perceived her behaviour from acting “nice”. So how do you win? I spent many years not caring because it seemed like such a losing game before I figured out the strategy of how to balance the right amount of smart with the right amount of nice (and not too much of either).

To be fair, a lot of these strategies fall apart when you start talking about supervisor/employee relationships. In those situations, good managers will assume the non-threatening strategies because their job is to get their employees to receive credit for ideas and work (bad managers do the opposite). I had a very smart boss at Nortel who used to say, with no irony at all, “help me to understand what you mean, because my little pea-sized brain is having trouble”. This was his way of encouraging employees to have more confidence in speaking up for their own ideas. Good managers also use language of the “tell me what you think” style for the same reason.

So in actuality, in an attempt to “get along”, are women actually engaging in management behaviours? And wouldn’t that mean that women are likely to make better actual managers? Just thinking out loud here …

From: https://thecooperreview.com/non-threatening-leadership-strategies-for-women/