From caregiver to catalyst: the shift that can help unleash the potential of women in leadership
Women in leadership are often celebrated for their empathy, emotional intelligence, and ability to build community. How is it then that these same traits that help propel women to leadership roles and become catalysts of change are the same qualities that tend to weigh down their impact and potential and push them further into caregiver roles in the workplace. What can other leaders, team members, and organizations do about it?
What we know so far
It’s no secret that women in leadership positions generally find themselves with harsher critics than their male counterparts. When we add the impacts of race, ethnicity, ability, accented English +++ to gender, we discover an emerging group of women in leadership with a whole new set of cards stacked against them. These women are too often finding themselves having to defend their decisions and having their credibility questioned much more frequently than their peers. Not only is the path to leadership usually unpaved and hard to find for racialized, newcomer, or other minority women, but when they get there, they face new barriers to realizing their potential.
What we have yet to fully understand
The concept of “office housekeeping” has been floating around in the corporate sphere for some time - the tendency to assign office tasks like arranging events, and cleaning up, to women. With this awareness, more leaders and organizations are doing their part to re-balance the load of this work between genders. What we have yet to explore much more closely, is the hidden expectations women in leadership face from their direct reports and peers to play a caregiving role to team members over and above the very likely caregiving responsibilities their bear in their personal lives.
When we add role context to the mix, the challenge for women in leadership becomes even more acute. Women tend to be better represented in fields such as Human Resources, Communications, Healthcare, Social Services, and Non-Profit or Social Impact organizations - where the context of the work inherently suggests a certain level of concern for people and humanity. For women rising to leadership ranks in these fields, especially racialized and other minority women, the existing challenges of being a woman in leadership and the hidden expectations of caregiving are compounded by the context of the work itself which come with emotional labour and leading with empathy despite operating in complex and often systemically under-resourced environments.
The impact of bias + hidden caregiving expectations
When women are faced with the compounded effects of gender plus other aspects of their identity, along with expectations that come with the context of their work, the tension between accountability and empathy becomes much more apparent. These women in leadership roles are often faced with doubts about their credibility from their leaders, peers, and often direct reports as well, and are challenged with trying to “prove themselves” as a leader while faced with hidden expectations of being empathetic, compassionate, and often taking on emotional caregiving for their teams. This perfect storm of challenges forces many women especially racialized women to have to walk a tight rope between holding team members accountable and being liked, as well as taking on emotional caregiving duties for their teams.
With cards stacked against them on all sides and the additional expectation of being an emotional caregiver by virtue of their job context and gender, we’re seeing an emerging cohort of women leaders especially in social services, non-profits, and lines of work such as human resources, communications, and others where biases are seriously eroding potential for women who are capable and motivated but are weighed down by expectations of emotional caregiving at work and questioned credibility.
For this emerging cohort of women leaders, the risk of mental health challenges and severe burnout cannot be overstated. These are women often over-working to help show their gratitude for the opportunities they’ve been given, prove to whoever hired them that this was a “good bet” they made, and achieve the results they were hired for but are weighed down by challenges holding their teams accountable, having to explain every decision and justify their merit at every turn.
Teams and organizations perpetuating this cycle risk losing the very diversity that will strengthen their resilience and sustainability in the future, and risk misattributing low team performance to leadership effectiveness when that might not have been the driving factor - it was the biases and hidden expectations preventing leadership effectiveness.
What can team members, leaders, and organizations do?
The best place to start is by checking, double checking, and triple checking biases.
For team members, take a moment to reflect on expectations you’ve had of women leaders you’ve worked with compared to men. Did you find yourself more easily frustrated when they held you accountable? Did you feel more permission to unload emotions to women leaders compared to men? Have you expressed your feedback about team decisions equally to men and women leaders? When assessing the effectiveness of your manager, are your expectations fair and free of hidden expectations?
For leaders, when providing feedback and coaching to people leaders, do you start with an assumption of merit and is this consistent across your team? Do you criticize the actions and decisions of any people leaders more harshly than others? Do you observe how your people leaders are treated by staff and intervene when necessary to help maintain the credibility your leadership team in the eyes of your staff?
For organizations, are leadership qualities defined and free of biases that may hold back women and especially racialized and other minority women? Are leadership qualities and the expectations of leadership clear to all staff so that they know to expect their leadership to hold teams accountable to success of the organization?
What we need
For true inclusion and equity to take flight and achieve the positive impact it can have, we need to be able to realize the full potential of our team members. For women in leadership, especially racialized, newcomers, those living with disabilities or others, assessing leadership effectiveness may come with a lot of other hidden variables that are silently weighing down these women and further narrowing the path to leadership for other women.
What we need is for organizations, leaders, and individual team members to help women in leadership move from caregivers to the catalysts they were hired to be. Especially for women in social services, social impact, non-profit and fields that come with expectations of more empathy and compassion such as Human Resources, Communications, and others, leaders and team members must watch for imbalances in expectations of leaders in these areas and where gender norms may be having a silent but seriously damaging impact.
In closing
Helping women and especially women who represent the diversity of thought and experience that reflect our society, move into and succeed in leadership is vital to building a sustainable and inclusive economy. What we’ve explored here is a mix of our own observations with some of what’s been written about in the existing literature. What we have yet to fully understand is how gender and other intersecting identities not only show up in the workplace, but intersect with the context of work and leadership effectiveness. What we hope to achieve is more awareness of these compounding challenges and help more organizations achieve the full potential of their diverse leadership teams and pave the way for more inclusion and equity in leadership in the future.