The Feminine Edge of Success

Written by Dr. Joni Carley

At this unique time in history, we must capitalize on our natural inclinations toward partnership versus dominator leadership styles.

• it’s a unique time to place higher value on the feminine voice of wisdom
• it’s about balance and equanimity, not gender
• the only constant is change and change is best negotiated with a robust balance of multiple perspectives

Women bring unique values to the workplace – values that often make them feel like they’re swimming against the cultural stream. It’s helpful, though, to remove the charge of gender from the conversation by using “yin” and “yang” instead of “female” and “male.” Yin is more feminine, more intuitive, more process driven, and tends toward partnership. Yang is more masculine, more concrete, more results driven, and tends toward domination. Like the symbol has a spot of yin in the yang and vice versa, we all have both in us. The path to success has traditionally required that women bury their natural instincts in order to progress in a male dominated, dog-eat-dog, overly yang world.

Many of our grandmothers’ grandmothers’ grandmothers lived in thriving matriarchal societies where women’s wisdom was sacrosanct and both genders were regarded as partners in leadership. Over millennia though, we’ve compromised yin priorities for feelings, family, community and civility. Women were told to leave their emotions at home. Dismissing yin reactions is like dismissing half of the charge in an electrical current - yin represents a negative charge and yang represents a positive charge. Neither is right and both are necessary for a good spark - our predominantly yang cultural charge has sparked horrendous social and economic failure along with glorious successes in technological and other gains.

As businesses around the world falter on the foundation of yang oriented, profit-at-any-cost ethics, the more yin priorities for well-being, relationship, and compassion are more critical than ever. Native Americans used sign language to communicate between tribes. The symbol for wisdom was to touch heart and head and then bring hands together. Wise leaders understand how to harness both the yin and the yang, the values and the numbers, the hearts and the minds.

Leadership is fundamentally a series of decisions. The more balanced perspective, the better the decisions. The problem is, in a culture where women only got the vote a few generations ago and where they are still not paid equal wages for equal work, we’re all indoctrinated over-valuing the yang way as the right way – which compromises access to the more yin, highly reliable inner GPS.

This is a unique moment in history for bringing more yin, feminine, values into balance. The data's now in: holistically healthy workplaces have more sustainable bottom lines and far better retention. A balanced culture asks not only yang-oriented questions like: What profits? At what costs? It also asks yin questions like: What kind of lives? At what value?

The workplace paradigm is shifting thanks to the women and yin-friendly male leaders who have had the courage and tenacity to trust their tears, intuition, joys, relationships, passion, hearts, minds, and values. Thanks to values-driven business and thought leaders who have paved the way, we’re beginning to get a sense of a misplaced cultural fulcrum that’s tipped us too much toward yang understandings of success. There is now excellent data on the value of establishing the true centeredness that can best unleash the unique spark of a well-balanced organization.

New leadership styles are emerging that capitalize on emotions and inklings, and that trust the chaos of the creative process. The yin/feminine edge is in trusting that in the face of challenge, it pays off to have dedicated yin hours to knowing one another a little better or to personal development. Ultimate success comes from cultivating a wide range of intelligences, and creating conducive spaces for accessing inner and creative voices. Making way for the yin develops a highly reliable internal organizational GPS.

My coaching client, Linda, a high-ranking executive in one of the world’s largest public relations firms, had an immediate boss who plays old school, yang politics by withholding information, pulling rank, and demoralizing people – common methods for maintaining a yang/dominator system. Team members are reduced to tears, beers and personal recovery conversations to manage their roles in the dominator equation.

When a project doesn’t require that she work directly with her boss, Linda’s decisions align more with universal values than rank considerations. She sleeps better, she complains less, works better with others, and exhibits high levels of passion and creativity in her work. In her time off, she’s jazzed and thinking proactively about work. Communications flow. Her work with me is adds value to her company.

But during periods when her boss is leading projects, Linda requires recovery time after meetings, her attitude tanks, she feels unheard, she’s exhausted and starts to notice physical symptoms. In the yang dominated phases, Linda’s work with me focuses on survival, reactivity, defensiveness, even self-doubting – often wondering about other job options. In that mode, we aren’t in a position to use coaching to add value but rather to do our best to maintain value in the face of depletion.

In her yin phases, we’re swimming; the yang phases, we’re fixing wounds. Linda is in an extreme balancing act because of an extreme personality and a dysfunctional culture that supports its dominance. Most balancing acts are subtler but there’s no question that a yang oriented system carries a significant cost in human capital and lost energy or entropy. Because yang values have prevailed for so long, it’s important that organizational development tools and executive leadership development account for yin contributions for the costs for yang domination.

Linda’s at the edge of the pendulum swing. She has vision for a new leadership style but knows she can be fired if she challenges old ways too much. She naturally thinks in terms of a yin, triple bottom line: people, profits and the planet. But she makes a living in a yang, bottom line culture: quarterly earnings. She sees that if her office had a better balance of yin and yang, they could deliver better services to clients and have a better time doing it. Linda and many thousands of other women are moving the pendulum by re-establishing the place at the table for our ancestral voice of wisdom. And they’re joined by visionary men.

The edge that we walk at this moment in our evolution is exhilarating, exasperating, frustrating and promising. No longer can we afford to measure success only with yang indicators like numbers on balance sheets. Just like the moment that suffrage broke through, today's issues are an opportunity for women's voices to lead us beyond long established norms. The frontier of leadership today is the feminine, yin edge.

Dr. Joni Carley, an expert in values-driven leadership, is co-author of “Stepping Stones for Success, vo. 1” with Deepak Chopra and Jack Canfield. She coaches and consults with business and civic leaders and uses her methodologies in ongoing work at the United Nations. For a complimentary  MP3 on values-driven leadership: http://www.leaderfuledge.com