Women Leaders: Can We Talk About Feelings?

by Shana Lawlor , Bonnie Halper and June Choi

There are so many reasons we are thankful to be women. It’s kind of a funny thing to say, we know. But take a moment and reflect on something. Have you ever been in a situation where you wondered if something would have gone differently if you were a man? Or if you would be further in your life or career if you were a man? We have. In fact, we know it’s not an uncommon topic of conversation among rising female leaders. So, why do we feel we’re at a disadvantage? A key challenge that we struggle with is how to harness and manage our emotions while leading. When we do let our feelings slip out or even use them strategically, we are judged for doing so. We also sometimes feel a lack of personal and professional support from other women at the top. We don’t claim to have all the answers to these challenges but we would like to share some guidance and action steps that might be helpful. It’s difficult to talk about and difficult for us to write about, but let’s dive in.

Harnessing and managing your emotions while leading?

This is a tricky topic for all three of us. At various times in our careers, we have run into judgment from men and women based upon how we’ve chosen to, or in some cases, chosen not to show our emotions in our professional careers as leaders and innovators. Let’s be real, though. There is a balance to be struck and it’s a daily struggle for all three of us, as it probably is for all women. It’s not uncommon for us to receive judgment from our colleagues, friends, family, and even strangers. What we’ve found to be important is how we acknowledge that judgment, harness our emotions to our advantage, and tame our vulnerabilities so we can move on more quickly.?

So, let’s start with this. It’s common knowledge that women make better leaders. In fact, women founders fail less, have higher valuations and exit faster than men. Every single woman founder should re-read the above two sentences again and again. They’re empowering.?

Next, let’s give ourselves some grace and acknowledge that our emotions are what make us human, relatable and enable us to build connections with others. It’s a skill that many men do not have and it’s acknowledged by researchers as a key component of what makes great leaders. We should own that.?

With that said, our emotions, the very thing researchers tell us make us great leaders, are also the root cause of why we feel insecure and vulnerable in many situations, all too often. And we’re sent mixed signals by society when we’re called:

• Too intense because we show our passion or enthusiasm for a project or idea;
• Rude because we’re asking hard questions or countering a colleague's statement;
• Aggressive because we’re ambitious, definitive, and focused.

Note that when men display those emotions or characteristics, different verbiage is used. For example, men might be described as ‘assertive’ while women would be called ‘bossy.’?

Essentially, we’ve been conditioned to think that if we act like robots, showing very little of our emotions and real lives, like our relationships, our kids, then we’ll succeed faster, go farther in our careers and achieve professional greatness. So, we clam-up when we want to show genuine excitement about something, temper our disappointment or anger when a colleague fails to perform or make a deadline and run to the bathroom if we feel like we’re going to cry. And then, we’re called ice queens.

What’s the balance? One word. Connection. Every single one of us, whether we are a colleague, investor, mentor, employer, family or friend, wants to feel a connection. It is the foundation of all relationships and the secret sauce that we suggest every woman focus on when trying to navigate the minefield of when to or when not to show emotion in a professional setting.

Connection is also heavily dependent on emotional intelligence that balances being vulnerable and showing emotion to others. So, we’re going to take what many may consider a leap here and encourage women to learn to strategically manage their emotions to their advantage in professional situations. The only true way to know if they benefit you or not is to test it. Then evaluate the outcome. What should be your measure of success? If you successfully fostered connection and felt good about what you achieved, then you’ve succeeded and you’re one step forward to becoming a better leader. If you haven’t, then it can be empowering to take a step back, learn from the interaction and simply say, ‘Yep, that happened’ and move on. Don’t dwell or try to keep fostering a connection that’s not there. Cut your losses quickly and move on, whether it’s with relationships or strategic efforts. It’s more important when leading that you nurture and leverage the relationships that value what you bring to the table as a great leader. Take it from us, adopting a test-and-learn strategy is incredibly freeing.

We’re also in an amazingly transformative time for workplace culture because of the pandemic, which woke up everyone to the true plight of working women. It gave us a window into our colleagues' home lives, including crying kids, family drama, and mental health challenges that many of us had not seen before. It gave us an opportunity to see how important it was to show our own emotions and process them with others in a productive way that fostered connection, built stronger teams and, in many cases, increased productivity. It also made us better and more confident leaders. So, let’s take advantage of it.??

Pull Up a Seat at the Table for Another Woman

We love phrases like ‘all things being equal’ and ‘level playing field.’? Let’s be honest: all things are not equal, and there is no level playing field. Women are perceived differently, and they’re judged differently and more stringently. By both men and women.

It’s hard enough competing in what is clearly still a man’s world, and while more women are rising to top positions in funds and in the board rooms, that ladder is still a more fundamentally difficult slog for women to climb.

Men still hold a majority of the power/sit in top positions, and while women are being included more these days, there are a finite number of positions open to women, and there are many women out there vying for those spots. So how do you compete? Getting angry, frustrated, upset or depressed isn’t helpful, so time for us to step up and concentrate on actions that we can take and behaviors that we can change.

First, we need to take a lesson from history and keep in mind (and we slightly paraphrase) that what people cannot remember, they are doomed to repeat. Men built an old boys’ network. They weren’t all old boys, necessarily: just boys who knew how to build an infrastructure to help foster and elevate other men.??

We start by cultivating allies, rather than view women as potential competition. Historically, women have always competed against each other. We’ve been socialized that way since basically the earliest days of grade school. The only effective way to change the ratio is to change the game. In other words, stop allowing yourself to be attacked based on your gender – meaning by other women, too, and maybe in this case, especially women. Women judge other women based on a variety of factors: which of us is prettier, younger, more experienced, have a better job, are more successful in their professional or private lives, better dressed/doesn’t this woman own a mirror? Or, all of the above.

We need to stop competing against and instead start fostering other women via networks we start to build, by cultivating other women, with supportive men as allies and finding ways to help each other. The idea is to help other amazing women up the ladder, not to kick the ladder away once you’ve gotten to that higher rung.

There’s an old parable that illustrates this concept brilliantly.

A newly deceased person is met at the pearly gates by Saint Peter, who is there to give the new arrival a choice between heaven and hell. Of course, they’re going to take a tour of both first. Saint Peter accompanies the newcomer to hell, which, surprisingly, is drenched in sunlight and filled with gorgeous, lush foliage. Saint Peter leads the new arrival to the banquet hall, where the residents are. There’s an amazing feast laid out, but the residents are shockingly emaciated. The newcomer then notices that everyone’s arms have been replaced by long forks and spoons – without bendable elbows, so while the feast is there, the residents are all struggling to get the food and bring it to their mouths, to no avail. Without bendable elbows there’s no way they can feed themselves, so everyone is starving and miserable.

Saint Peter next brings the deceased to heaven, which surprisingly, is identical to hell – sun-filled and rife with lush foliage. They enter the food hall, where the same amazing feast is laid out before the inhabitants, who, again, have long forks and spoons in place of their appendages, and again, are unable to bend their elbows, as they don’t exist.? Yet the room is filled with joy. Everyone is well-fed and are happily chattering away with each other.

“I don’t understand,” the new arrival said. “The two are identical. Yet why is it that everyone here looks so happy and well-fed?”

“In heaven,” Saint Peter explained,” people extend their arms across the table and feed each other.”

When women have climbed up to that next rung on the ladder and spot another woman not far behind them, it’s important that we not kick the ladder away, but rather, extend a hand and help the next woman to rise as well. That’s how we all get more opportunities and truly change the ratio in our favor.

Wouldn’t that be heaven!?

How We Can Help Each Other Rise

We’ve talked about how to harness emotions to lead.

We’ve talked about how we need to help each other succeed.

Now let’s talk detailed tactics. Because to succeed, it’s never enough to just understand, talk about or even agree on the problem. We have to actually break through the problems by attacking them with targeted actions.

Take ownership of your emotions.

• It’s ok to feel what you feel. It’s ok to feel what you feel. That’s not a typo; we are repeating it because women often don’t fully embrace our feelings. All emotions are part of the cannon that makes us human. At the beginning of this article, we talked about how to use our strong feminine capabilities of being more in tune with our emotions to be able to connect to others and apply it to being better leaders. Don’t ignore your emotions: they’re a barometer of what’s going on/how you’re being treated. You need to deal with whatever situation is at hand.
• We need to also own even the negative emotions like anger, shame, jealousy. Often, when women are angry, it manifests as crying. This might happen more with women because we are not comfortable with and don’t have practice accepting our negative emotions. Or maybe we’ve even been punished for showing emotions like anger. It’s not ‘feminine’, so it’s unattractive, not an emotion girls are supposed to show. But we need to own these negative emotions too, so we can control and use them to our advantage.
• Then the trick is to harness the energy of negative emotions by owning it, and re-channeling into something productive for you. Don’t hold on to it. Don’t try to get revenge which might give you some immediate satisfaction, but will eat you up little by little over time without you even noticing it. If you can more productively redirect the negative emotional energy, you will gain benefits from it that you can build on, eventually paying you back repeatedly. We know of women who were screwed by colleagues, had people go behind their backs, been slandered. Often women let this behavior go because we don’t want potential conflict, focus too much on the emotional aspects wanting to understand ‘why’ people did that, try to talk with people to get to a ‘are we ok point’, or use silence as a means of taking the ‘high ground’. Instead, move toward action. How can you use the energy from the myriad of difficult feelings you are experiencing to channel that into action to take back a client/customer, put you in a better/different position, go out and find a better partner?

Help other women; let’s feed each other.

• Men make warm introductions for each other. And not just among peers, but also make introductions for promising, interesting people who might be able to help them later. They know this expands their networks. They also know this develops a network of favors or connections that might work in their favor when they need it.
• Women often work from the opposite perspective, holding off on introductions for fear it might make them look bad. Or that it might rob them of their own opportunities and positions. Often these motivations are unconscious, because they may sometimes actually be true to some extent. But we need to operate from a generous attitude of connectedness in order to succeed and lay the foundation for the future - ours, our daughters’, and our granddaughters’. We need to build a much larger network of successful women so we are not a rarity in the room, and thereby have a larger group of other women supporting us.
• Bring someone with you. It’s always more fun to be at a ‘party’, networking event, with friends. Make lots of new friends by bringing someone along - and don’t discount bringing along someone who may be ‘lower on the ladder’. By doing so, we can make the ‘party’ more inclusive, more accepting of us, a more comfortable place to be. And with more than one of you ‘working the room,’ your chances increase of meeting someone who might prove helpful to you, whom you might have otherwise missed. We have not yet reached the inflection point we need to break down the historically institutionalized systems to support our successes.
• Promote each other. In these times where the gospel we hear all the time on how to succeed is all about promoting oneself, promoting others may seem a scary thing to do. However, we have to. We just don’t have the numbers at the highest levels. There’s also a lot of ‘helping’ each other lip service that is really self-serving and superficial. It is such a rare quality these days that when you do promote others graciously, genuinely, wisely, it will stand out and make you memorable.

Give other women the benefit of doubt.

• As we’ve mentioned before, we’ve often gotten the harshest judgments from other women. We’ve even heard other men remark on this. You don't know what's happening in her shoes. She may have had a very bad experience she can’t talk about. She may have been butting up against the against-women-biased institutionalized challenges we all face, but perhaps worse because of her color, her socio-economic class, age, etc. Bend over backwards to consciously give fellow women less judgment than you might a man. Because we all need that.

Also examine if maybe some of the judgments you are projecting at others might just be issues you are trying not to face within yourself.

Laud each other's efforts and accomplishments, publicly.

• But make it really genuine. There are some who seem to have built a business out of cheerleading women without actually helping other women. We’ve all met someone like this, so don’t be that person. You don’t have to overdo it. Honor others where it’s deserved, in a way that is not draining for you.
• Also try to put your whole heart into this. It can sometimes be hard, because we are sometimes jealous of the achievements of others, wondering why it hasn’t happened to us. First, it’s ok to be jealous - acknowledge it as an example for you to strive for. Redirect it into applause for others, when appropriate. As you build your networks in the room, soon it will be your turn to be applauded.

There are so many institutionalized barriers to women’s success. It’s sometimes hard to remain positive, especially when you’re faced with other barriers including race, socio-economic privilege, sex/gender and age. Yet keep in mind that the landscape and the world often change in ripples, especially when it comes to societal change. Each of us can contribute to the ripple effects that will shape a better world for us, like water cutting through rock. Let’s get out there and make waves - and do it with feeling.