How do you know if someone is a good leader? What makes you decide to follow them? Evidently, it’s how we perceive their competence and their warmth.
Competence is the cognitive side of the equation – is this person capable and confident? Do they have the means to make things happen? Warmth is the emotive side – do I like this person? Do I believe this person supports me? Do I trust this person?
This seems too simple. And then we remember the perception piece of this model – ah-ha. Now we layer in the cues we use – consciously or subconsciously – to inform our perception of someone’s leadership. Now I have a checklist of things to do (those cues I mentioned) to be perceived as a good leader, right? Sort of. It’s a starting point.
The real insight here is that all of these leadership cues are contextual based on the culture, demographics, situation – everything, really. The context that is most relevant to my identity right now is that I am a woman. And because I am a woman, I know that I am expected to demonstrate more warmth than my colleagues who identify as men.
According to a study reported in the Harvard Business Review, “For women, but not for men, influence was closely tied to perceptions of warmth — how caring and prosocial they seemed…For example, often without making it explicit, performance appraisals contain nearly twice the amount of language about being nice and warm for women than for men. Our results imply that while self-confident men might pass the bar more easily, self-confident women will not unless they show a higher level of warmth.” (Source: Is the Confidence Gap Between Men and Women a Myth?)
With this information, do I use it to build my influence and then challenge this expectation? Do I challenge this expectation from the start and risk social or political capital? I don’t think there’s a right answer here. But I want people to be aware that this challenge exists for women – and by extension, similar misalignments of expectations exist for other identity groups as well.
Daily Learnings 