The Feminine Edge

Women bring unique values to the workplace – values that often make them feel like they’re swimming against the cultural stream. In recent generations, the path to success required that women bury their natural instincts in order to progress in a male dominated, dog-eat-dog world.

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.

Many of our grandmothers’ grandmothers’ grandmothers lived in thriving matriarchal societies where womens’ wisdom was sacrosanct and men were regarded as partners in leadership. Over millennia though, we’ve compromised yin conce
s for feelings, family, community and civility. 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. At this point, our predominantly yang cultural charge has sparked international economic failure.

As businesses around the world falter on the foundation of yang oriented, profit-at-any-cost ethics, the more feminine priorities for well-being, relationship, and compassion are critical. 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.

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 authors like Riane Eisler and Margaret Wheatley, and to socially responsible business models like The Body Shops and Ben & Jerry’s, and thanks to values oriented politicians like Barrack Obama. Most especially, 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.

New leadership styles are emerging that capitalize on emotions and inklings, and that trust the chaos of the creative process. The yin edge is in trusting that during yang challenges, it pays off to have dedicated the un-billable yin hours to knowing one another a little better or to personal development. It’s 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 client, Linda, a high-ranking executive in one of the world’s largest public relations firms, has 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.

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, when Linda thinks about work on her time off, her thoughts are reactive, defensive, even self-doubting – often wondering about other job options. There’s no question that a yang oriented system carries a significant cost in human capital but it’s very hard to quantify and track. Because yang values have prevailed for so long, it will take generations to develop better indicators for measuring yin contributions.

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.

The edge that we walk 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 yin edge.

It’s in bringing women’s wisdom forward. It means trusting that the voice of wisdom comes through the heart and head.