There’s a particular kind of compliment that women in leadership have learned to receive with a polite smile – and maybe an internalized eyeroll. You know the ones. “She’s so collaborative.” “She leads with empathy.” “Her style is much more… nurturing.”

It sounds like praise. I don’t doubt it’s meant as praise. But somewhere in the subtext, there’s a neat little box being built, and women are being gently placed inside it.

The female leadership style, as it tends to be described, includes emotional intelligence, empathy, collaboration, consensus-building. All genuinely valuable qualities, albeit ones that organizations spent decades actively dismissing as ‘soft skills.’ Then the world got complicated, businesses needed them, and suddenly all these less conventional skills were perceived as a female superpower. The archetypal rebrand, some might say.

Read more at: https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/the-myth-of-the-female-leadership-style