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The following article was published in the Charleston Post & Courier's Business Major, a featured monthly column in the Business Review Section on October 26, 1998. Gender-based management a hot issueBy DOROTHY P. MOORE Special to the Post and Courier The bookstore shelves bulge with sure-fire approaches to the puzzles of management, and new titles are constantly arriving. The steady market is an index of how prevalent and deep seated the problems are, and their importance to business owners and managers who need to do something about them. Mixed in with the clutter, hype, and faddish approaches that soon fade are some common sense nuggets. In 1990, for example, Sam Deep and Lyle Sussman, the authors of Smart Moves, published in Working Woman a list of eight basic management principles. Each draws on situations that everyone has experienced or observed: Parkinson's Law (activity expands to fill the time allotted to it), the Law of Effect (behaviors immediately rewarded increase in frequency, behaviors punished decrease), GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), the Peter Principle (people tend to be promoted beyond their competencies), Pareto's Law or the 80-20 rule (the significant people in any meeting usually constitute only a small part of the group), the Pygmalion Effect, [what we expect from others determines how we behave toward them), and Murphy's Law (if anything can go wrong, it will). This list, and others like it, vividly highlight what can be causing problems. Acquiring the management skills to deal with them is a bit more difficult. For women, considerable confusion arises from a relatively new idea, that there is a style of management particular to women. It first became popular with the publication of a 1990 article in the Harvard Business Review by Judy Rosener, then a professor of management at the University of California at Irvine. Entitled "Ways Women Lead," the article argued that women often did not have the same access to formal power and, therefore, had to rely on personal power, influence, and teamwork. Women employed an "interactive" style of leadership to get work accomplished, said Rosener, a style distinguished by the fact it encouraged participation by others, involved sharing power and information rather than hoarding it, and emphasized positive leadership skills which enhanced the value of others and getting people excited about their work by allowing them to participate in real decision-making. Rosener's article was immediately followed by fierce debates. One was between individuals celebrating the superiority of a feminine style of management and women wary because the very idea of a special style suggested that women are not inherently tough enough to hack it in corporate life or as entrepreneurs. Some women dismissed Rosener's revelations as being little more than good evidence that women do not have to follow male management models to be successful. Others, like business writer Nancy K. Austin, pointed to the dangers from emphasizing feminine styles when she noted that about half the "leadership seminars" for women she investigated were designed around the gender stereotype that before they can become leaders and mangers, women somehow needed to correct a batch of career derailing defects. It can be useful to remember that, to date, not a single research study has uncovered any gender-based differences between men and women in the desire for power, the drive to acquire it, management style, or the anxiety that comes from being in charge. Several streams of research do suggest there are culturally based differences in views about holding and exercising power that can affect how people act. This is where we get the stereotypes such as those that suggest that women managers have difficulty in the workplace because many men and women are raised to expect male authority and female compliance or that from childhood boys supposedly place value on autonomy and self-sufficiency while girls tend to be more relationship and group oriented. Most leaders and managers try to replace stereotypes with real information unless they hold deep-seated prejudices. In evaluating situations, then, it can be helpful to remember that, while broad cultural stereotypes abound, there is no reason to adopt them or feel constrained to act within them. Self-confidence and self-reliance, keys to good management, are not gender based. Certainly this has been true for female entrepreneurs and mangers, who historically have tended to come from the ranks of women who grew up where one was expected to be self-reliant. For example, in our study, one entrepreneur's physician stepfather advised her career development from occupational therapist to partnership in an 18-state corporation in the area of disability insurance. A woman entrepreneur who remembers how she acquired self-reliance points to two things that helped her. "One was my education and that I focused on women as a student and a scholar. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on `Aspects of the Female Success: New England Women Living in the 1870's.' And I graduated from college in 1961. And the reason I did that, I think, is because I was the child of a single parent. My father died when I was 11. I always wondered what would happen to me if I couldn't take care of myself." Still another entrepreneur felt so intensely the need to earn a living to support herself and her daughter that out of desperation alone she broke the pattern that had kept her down throughout her earlier life. Striking out on her own, she left her underpaid job in a printing company where she had to do everything and formed her own company. It is the strong sense of self-confidence that allows people to successfully employ different management styles. Darla Moore (no relative, unfortunately), profiled in a 1997 Fortune article as "The Toughest Babe in Business," demonstrated this long before she became famous for ousting corporate raider T. Boone Pickens from a company he had originally founded or later taking the lead on the board of directors of Columbia/HCA to oust the CEO when the health-care giant ran afoul of federal regulators investigating Medicare and Medicaid overcharges. On a smaller scale, Patricia Sayre, President of the Cincinnati firm Fiber-Seal applied a completely different but equally successful approach to her business. "I have this concept that this is my child no matter what he does. I can see this transfer to my employees." Explaining a different collaborative approach to employees that mixes contact and leadership, Susan O'Connor Brown of The Avalon Consulting Group, says, "I think that a team needs to be more than a group of individuals. We don't all have to have soul bonding, but you have to have a common level of purpose." Successful management techniques run the gamut from the fiercely hierarchical to the widely participatory. What works in any given situation depends on a number of complex factors. Among them is the style a new manager or entrepreneur brings to the event. For the women entrepreneurs in our study, a former corporate environment was their learning laboratory. In my next column I will relate some surprising lessons these entrepreneurs learned. In the meantime, you may wish to learn about books, web sources and other resources that are available on the latest techniques applied by women managers and owners. Susan Neilson, Business Reference Librarian, is hosting a special session for the local chapter of NAWBO at the Downtown Charleston County Library on October 29th at 6:30. Perhaps this is another opportunity for you to find out at an introductory meeting with a valuable focus whether the activities of this group would help your business profile. For more information about the valuable resource presentation call Susan at 805-6950 or just come. 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