Female leaders bring skills, different perspectives, and innovative ideas to the table, which fosters future-focused, more resilient companies.
Andrea Heuston, an Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) member of the US West Bridge chapter, is a podcast host, speaker coach to leaders of Fortune 100 companies, a best-selling author, and CEO of Artitudes, a full-service creative firm specializing in storytelling, speaker coaching, executive presentations, branding and visual marketing. We asked Andrea why women make outstanding leaders:
At age 27, I had a business meeting that changed my career.
Three years after leaping into entrepreneurship, I was hired as a consultant for a large tech company in Seattle. In theory, I should have felt like a “star” arriving to make an impact for a major brand. Yet in reality, as I walked down a long hallway to the conference room, all I felt was fear.
Why?
I knew an executive team of seasoned business leaders waiting for me, all substantially older than me–and all men. And although they had hired me, I wondered over and over, on a loop, like a bad song you can’t get out of your head:
Why would they listen to me? Who am I, anyway?
As I approached the door, I took a deep breath and straightened my suit (yes, those were the days of wearing suits). I walked in and at that very moment, despite being the only woman in that room, I discovered who I was:
A leader.
Today, it’s no secret that gender equality in the workplace leads to better outcomes. While the gap between men and women in leadership roles is decreasing, a huge disparity still remains.
Research points to numerous reasons to include women on corporate boards (and it’s hard to argue with science). A 2015 McKinsey report found that gender diversity on executive teams directly correlated with stronger financial performance, and companies with more than one woman on their board outperform those with none.
But, why? So many reasons, but I’m going to focus on five of them today.
1. Empathy
In the business world, empathy is historically regarded as a soft skill most often assigned to women. Despite its stigma, female leaders have time and again wielded it to their advantage and proven its benefits.
According to a University of Cambridge study, women generally outscore men on “cognitive empathy.” In simpler terms, women are better at putting themselves in others’ shoes.
In the workplace, female leaders tend to leverage cognitive empathy to influence others and build trust, which creates productive teams and psychologically safe cultures.
Empathy increases the effectiveness of leadership and the quality of relationships with employees, which, in turn, benefits an organization as a whole.
2. Strong communication
Apart from clarifying strategic paths forward, a leader must be a master of understanding needs–those of customers, stakeholders, and teams.
Excellent leaders know how to strike a balance between handing out the necessary performance requirements while giving a team enough freedom to generate creative solutions. A leader builds a map but leaves enough room for a team to explore the route.
Women leaders are particularly capable of finding that balance. The best women leaders know that listening is a key part of communication: Rarely the loudest in a room, women are compelled to find new ways of being heard. With communication as a key tool, women leaders have a unique ability to spark clarity rather than confusion.
3. Bolstering cooperation
A vital part of leadership is the ability to help diverse people work together to achieve a goal.
Female leaders promote cooperation, partly because of their historic societal roles and partly because of natural instincts to contribute to their community.
They recognize that those around them want to be intellectually stimulated, energized by their environment, and recognized for their performance. As women leaders build relationships with colleagues and employees, they are able to understand how to help them develop as a team.
By understanding what unique strengths individual employees bring, female leaders foster cooperation and collaboration under a common vision in a unique way. When women collaborate to achieve a shared goal, the sky is truly the limit.
4. Problem-solving
Every leader faces problems each and every day.
When it comes to problem-solving, female leaders rank higher than male leaders, according to Harvard Business Review. Perhaps that’s because men and women evaluate problems differently.
Scientifically, when men solve problems, they tend to use one hemisphere of their brain. When women solve problems, they interconnect between hemispheres, engaging different parts of their brains.
The result: a multi-faceted approach that allows women to tackle problems with a wide range of tools. Unexpected and progressive solutions are likely to emerge.
5. Innovation
Female leaders create a top-down effect that infuses innovation throughout an organization.
One recent study looked at 341 Norwegian firms and found that female leadership was significantly related to organizational innovation. Evidence suggested that organizations with women leaders are more innovative thanks to the impact they have on culture.
Women do things differently, try new strategies, and break up ruts–all of which are necessary in both good times and trying times.
Female leaders bring skills, different perspectives, and innovative ideas to the table, but these three things combined help create future-focused, more resilient companies.
Sociologically and biologically, women have an advantage–and these five reasons are fundamental behaviors that drive the success of every leader, regardless of gender. When it comes to the role of women leaders operating in collaboration, the words of Ginni Rometty, the first female CEO of IBM, come to mind: “Your value will be not what you know; it will be what you share.”
The thriving workplaces of tomorrow will see both female and male leaders learning from each other’s skill sets. But in order for that to happen, we must continue to strive for a world where more women take the helm.
Not entirely unlike the 27-year-old version of me stepping into an all-male conference room, women must first discover who they are at their core: leaders.
How These Companies Made the Inc. 5000 List Again and Again
They fine-tuned their approach to fast growth by thinking deeper about customers, overemphasizing culture, prioritizing objectives, and embracing an entrepreneurial spirit.
Elisabete Miranda, President of CQ Fluency.
Growth matters for businesses, but continuous growth can be a challenge–and a champion maker.
The Inc. 5000 list highlights the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. Of the companies on the 2022 list, 2,907 honorees have appeared more than once. But a noteworthy group have multiple Inc. 5000 accolades to their names, with some making the list as many as 16 times.
So, what are their secrets to sustaining above-average growth? Three of these leaders spoke withInc. about how they keep the top line expanding:
Sniff out evolving customer needs
Listening to customers–that is, really listening–can guide both the initial idea for your company and its evolution, strengthening your reach and supporting future growth. Lucie Voves–founder and CEO of the diploma and award frame manufacturer Church Hill Classics in Monroe, Connecticut–started her company by selling framed artwork of her alma mater, Dartmouth College. But as more customers started asking her to frame their diplomas, she pivoted. Her company has now appeared on the Inc. 5000 list 12 times and achieved annual revenue of $24 million.
As your company grows, more opportunities could arise to help you better serve customers–and if you are listening, you can capitalize on them. At the Hackensack, New Jersey-based language service provider CQ Fluency, one of the company’s health insurance clients said they needed faster translations on a particularly time-sensitive type of letter. The CQ Fluency team solved the issue and then reached out to their other health insurance clients to see if they could benefit from a similar solution. In doing so, they discovered a wider need.
CEO Elisabete Miranda says CQ Fluency’s business with health insurance clients increased 40 percent between 2021 and 2022 after improving this service and offering it widely to the client base.
The key lesson, she says, is to stay “customer obsessed.” If you don’t take the opportunity to listen, you might miss the opportunity to grow. “Making sure you are talking to your clients and finding solutions that are out of the box–that pays off,” Miranda says. This year, CQ Fluency is forecasting $75 million in revenue. After landing on the Inc. 5000 list nine consecutive times, it’s aiming for double digits.
Pay attention to personalities
No company is complete without a strong team, but the leaders who spoke with Inc. say that CEOs should take a hands-on role in building a culture that supports continuous growth. At CQ Fluency, for instance, Miranda personally interviews every employee the company hires to ensure that they are a fit.
For Teddy Fong, CEO of the children’s furniture business Million Dollar Baby Co., culture is a more intentional focus than even the business strategy. He attributes the company’s growth to this attention–appearing on the Inc. 5000 list nine times and achieving $189 million in revenue last year.
One way Million Dollar Baby achieves this focus: For the past five years, the company has required that every employee take a DiSC Personality Test, and Fong says that breaking down those results with the team helps promote more productive conversations and working relationships. In addition, the company conducts an anonymous engagement survey twice every year, following up on those results with team meetings and actionable takeaways.
Fong also recommends that leaders pay close attention to Glassdoor reviews–and where employee and leadership understandings may differ–to constantly improve company culture. “I think too often, CEOs give too much credit to themselves about this brilliant strategy or this vision that they had, but at the end of the day, it’s this environment,” Fong says.
Narrow your focus on the best opportunities
Prioritizing your top goals is crucial to keep growing, according to the leaders. “We’ve been most successful when we had the clearest and most directed objectives,” Voves says. For instance, during the pandemic, Voves and her team added a second shift to keep people at a safer social distance. This required more training resources that could have been used elsewhere, but Voves said it paid off to ensure safety of the workforce and continued output–two crucial priorities for that time.
Aligning with these clear objectives can sometimes lead to some difficult choices, but ones that can pay off, as Fong experienced. Five years ago, he felt pressured to move Million Dollar Baby toward direct-to-consumer offerings to take advantage of a higher-margin business. Instead, he decided to keep the company focusedon its strengths as a wholesaler to ensure it executed to its fullest capacity.
“One of the things that we always tell our teams is: ‘You’re going to have 10 opportunities all the time. How do you not move those 10 an inch, but instead focus on three and do them all the way?'” Fong says.
Never lose that entrepreneurial spirit
Despite the best-laid plans, your company may still face daunting challenges. In these moments, it’s crucial to embrace what Voves calls your company’s “entrepreneurial spirit.” At least three times, Voves says her company needed to take a major pivot–the Great Recession and the pandemic being two memorable examples.
But she says innovating out of these challenges and thinking like a founder helped her figure out how to head in a new direction, and even compete against larger outfits. “I think that our entrepreneurial spark and the flexibility of our management team has been an important part of why the company’s been able to continue to grow over such a long period of time,” Voves says.
For instance, during Covid, Church Hill Classics changed its marketing approach to reach those college seniors who would not be graduating on campus. Church Hill Classics started new initiatives, partnering with a cap-and-gown company to pitch virtual graduation marketing ideas to colleges and universities–focusing on the emotional aspect to celebrate senior class members. It also created a social media road map for college bookstores to help them share the products online. Meanwhile, DTC business skyrocketed with the company’s own marketing initiatives.
During the 18-month period after the onset of the pandemic, Voves said business increased 50 percent.
Fostering this entrepreneurial spirit means being flexible and feeding the instinct to innovate, Voves says: “What worked yesterday or five years ago is not what works today.”