Women as Leaders

The late, great Susan B. Anthony said "The day will come when men will recognize woman as his peer, not only at the fireside, but in councils of the nation. Then, and not until then, will there be the perfect comradeship, the ideal union between the sexes that shall result in the highest development of the race." This being said, when it comes to leadership, does gender matter? Are women better leaders than men?

Belinda Honaker with PICK instructors during a recital

Ten short years ago, a woman named Belinda started a simple organization to help children in her community. Her passion was to help make a difference in the lives of children and to do so in as many as possible while she was alive and able to do so. While this was heavy on her heart, she found that other people in her community didn't feel as strongly about the matter as she did, which caused obstacles along her way. As a woman, she felt weak and powerless when approaching government and county officials for help with funding. She was determined to reach her goals and in order to do so, she did not give up but instead did whatever it took to make her dreams a reality. 

Now, Belinda is a member of the school board in our county and has managed to build and operate a community center, provide assisted living homes, start an official BINGO club,  develop after school programs for the children, along with many others such as  the development of a one of a kind after school music program called PICK, which stands for "Playing Instruments Changes Kids". She is now one of the most important members of our community and I am very proud to call her my mother.

This goes to show that Susan B. Anthony was correct when making her assumption years ago. Today, you will find that there are more women leaders in the world now than ever before. You might ask the question if there is a difference between the way women lead compared to the way men lead. A recent study showed that men and women were equally effective overall in their leadership skills, but women and men were more effective in leadership roles that were seen to be congruent with their gender.

Team Leadership

Leadership can be achieved effectively through teams and in fact it may be the most important element in whether teams succeed or fail according to some researchers. Hill's model for team leadership is shown below. The first box, labeled leadership decisions, suggests that the decisions you make as a leader directly affects team effectiveness through internal and external actions that some leaders may take or decide not to take. This may be broken down even further into task, relational, and environmental factors that may be taken into effect if considering internal or external actions.

As described in Hill's model, leadership decisions and actions result in team effectiveness. Teams can be successful through leaders who are committed to people and are willing to serve and give support to members of the team. Team leaders should continually push for improvement and must know when it is appropriate to change the coach or team members.

As a leader of a volleyball team, I have to be able to lead my team to victory and know what appropriate coaching tactics are necessary and when to enforce them. For example, our team recently traveled to play in a tournament where the prize of winning was a scholarship. This was very important to my team and we knew we would have to work hard as a team in order to achieve our goal. Throughout the entire game, as a leader, I knew when my team needed pushed or when they needed encouragement where as, if I had of just yelled at my team the whole game, we may not have been as successful. By following Hill's model for team leadership,when our team was down by 4 at the end of the game, I took action by making the decision to take my best player out of the game who was having an off night. This task based decision ensured that I was focused on the goal and did what I had to do in order to achieve it. Because of the decisions I made as the leader of my team, we were able to achieve our goal and we walked away with the desired scholarship.