2015 Update: After reading this article below, take a peak at my updated article, “The ALL Gender Solution,” which you can find here.
I refuse to allow the dtkunplugged digital presence to digress into a place of complaints absent solution, so I won’t go into how long I’ve been creating a blended leadership model to serve us well as we face the global realities of the 21st Century.
However, it was in early 2013 when I started to hear my words return poignant echoes, with significant reach. And it has been gratifying to see the conversation finally getting out of the “yes, but” phase and into this “yes, and” phase, where progress can be made.
While some may still be stuck in very old thinking and argue to the contrary, men and women are different. We have different wiring and different innate strengths, but the blending of the best of each will can only create something that’s better than the sum of the parts.
This blended leadership model — which is an important part of what I call the Two-Gender Solution — has always been my objective in the work I do both individually and corporately. It’s what I believe will ultimately generate the best results all around.
This new, men/women inclusive conversation is critical and it requires an inclusive vision from the top, especially in male-dominated industries and sectors. But, while engaging/recruiting evolved men in power is certainly key to initiating change, change will continue to be slow… Unless…
We rightfully have trained a lot of attention on how we can better socialize our daughters to prepare them to assume their share of the seats of power but there’s another side to the equation: we now have to focus on how we socialize our sons. While historically men have enjoyed certain professional advantages, society affords women and girls much more emotional latitude. Modeling and valuing EQ among males at their earliest stages of development can go a long way toward balancing the gender equation.
In my mind, we can no longer afford silo-d thinking; these times demand we have the best thinking which can only come from an inclusive “two-gender solution.”