Do Women Exemplify MLA Leadership?

“The most important task of an organization’s leader is to anticipate crisis. Perhaps not to avert it, but to anticipate it…You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, that has high morale, and also has been through a crisis, knows how to behave, trusts itself, and where people trust one another.”
— Peter Drucker, 1990

COVID 19 has certainly presented the world with a crisis to test heads of state, governors, and other leaders in the public and private sector. Researchers have been studying how various leaders have responded to the pandemic, with some focusing on the effective responses of national leaders who are women. Iceland, Taiwan, Germany, New Zealand, and Denmark are a few of the countries whose female heads of state managed to contain the virus early on and limit the financial and health impacts on their citizens.

Since women began to be more visible in positions of leadership about twenty years ago, much has been written about the “female leadership style.” It is interesting to note that many of the qualities attributed to women leaders appear not only to work particularly well in times of crisis, but also line up with Drucker’s concept of leadership as part of the practice of Management as a Liberal Art (MLA).

Recent literature on women leaders points to connections between the way women lead and the leadership skills Drucker emphasized as part of MLA. Consultants Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman used their own database of more than 60,000 reviews of business leaders to see how those leaders were evaluated before and after a crisis. They found that women rated more positively in 13 of 19 competencies for overall leadership effectiveness, and that this gender gap grew during a crisis. In other words, women tend to perform better during a crisis (https://hbr.org/2019/06/research-women-score-higher-than-men-in-most-leadership-skills).

What exactly are the skills that seem to be most effective in a crisis? They are not the skills that traditional models of leadership emphasize. The military-style, dominant, authoritarian model of the executive is not, in fact, the leader that is most effective in times of crisis. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox analyzed seven women leaders and their responses to COVID 19 and found that these heads of state modeled an “attractive alternative way of wielding power.” Their key leadership qualities? Truth, decisiveness, use of technology, and love/empathy. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany (and a trained scientist), was transparent about the dangers of the virus from the beginning and emphasized testing and technology (https://www.forbes.com/sites/avivahwittenbergcox/2020/04/13/what-do-countries-with-the-best-coronavirus-reponses-have-in-common-women-leaders/?sh=2a2f96903dec).

Other researchers and authors point to women’s use of empathy, team building, people development, and role modeling as part of their leadership practice. In “7 Leadership Lessons Men Can Learn From Women,” Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Cindy Gallop argue that, rather than training women to be more assertive and self-promoting, we should learn from women’s leadership strengths. These include knowing one’s strengths and also one’s limitations (and how others on a team can better contribute), putting others before yourself, and transforming and elevating others. In the words of the authors, “Academic studies show that women are more likely to lead through inspiration, transforming people’s attitudes and beliefs, and aligning people with meaning and purpose” (https://hbr.org/2020/04/7-leadership-lessons-men-can-learn-from-women).

What did Drucker have to say about leadership? He did not write about different leadership styles between men and women. But he did articulate the important qualities of leaders who practice MLA:

They have clear values that are in line with the organization and its mission. They model these values in their behavior and how they uphold the organization’s higher purpose, providing clarity and truth so that everyone in the organization understands that they are part of a larger vision.
They value trust. They understand that trust in their leadership and authority must be earned, and that they must place trust in those in the organization (who also have a responsibility to earn that trust). Leadership cannot operate under MLA without a climate of trust.
Leaders feel an enormous sense of responsibility for both the mission of the organization and to support those being led. Leadership is not about power and authority but serving and bringing out the best in those who are part of the organization.

The traditional models of charismatic leadership, control and corrective action, and individualistic decision-making may work in some situations. But increasingly, research is showing us that the non-traditional, female-gendered models of leadership that emphasize Drucker’s MLA values of servant leadership, transparency and trust, empathy and concern for bringing out the best in those led, and clarity of values and mission are valuable in times of crisis. As Drucker said, we cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but we can build an organization ready to face it. And, as we celebrate Women’s History Month, it is perhaps time to finally acknowledge that women do not have to emulate men to be powerful leaders.

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A Tribute to Charles Handy (1932-2024)

By Karen Linkletter Ph.D. • January 6, 2025

On December 13, 2024, we lost a seminal management philosopher and theorist: Charles Handy. Like Peter Drucker, Handy was a social thinker and management theorist who emphasized the human side of work as more important than profits and valued individual growth and development in organizations. Handy was born in Ireland and studied at Oxford. In 1956, he went to work for Shell, working in Borneo, where he met his future wife, Elizabeth Hill. Disillusioned by corporate life, Handy left Shell in 1962 to study management at MIT in their executive program. Inspired by their humanistic approach, he returned to London in 1967 to start the London Business School. Handy knew Drucker and was a regular keynote speaker at the Global Drucker Forum in Vienna. The two men had much in common in terms of their approaches to management and social theory. Like Drucker, Handy became an author (although, unlike Drucker, Handy was a corporate executive before he turned to writing). Handy wrote not just on business but also society, serving as much as a social ecologist as Drucker was. In his pivotal book, The Age of Unreason (1989), Handy argued for the disruption of discontinuity – resulting in a new world of business, education, and work that was highly unpredictable. He rejected shareholder capitalism and saw the organization as a place for human purpose and fulfillment, based on trust. Like Drucker, Handy advocated federalism in organizations, disseminating authority and responsibility to the lowest possible levels. He also saw “the future that had already happened.” Handy coined the term “portfolio life,” where knowledge workers would increasingly work remotely and for multiple organizations. In the 1980s, he posited that society consisted of “shamrock organizations”: those that had three integrated leaves: full-time employees, outside contractors, and temporary workers. Handy thus foresaw the new “gig economy” and increasingly autonomy of knowledge work. Finally, like Drucker, Handy had a life partner who not only supported his career but was an independent woman with her own interests. Liz Handy, like Doris Drucker, was an entrepreneur who ran an interior design business, and later was a professional photographer and Charles’s business agent. Minglo Shao, founder of CIAM, remembers Handy as a warm man who made several important contributions to what we see as the fundamentals of Management as a Liberal Art. We are thankful for Handy’s contributions to management theory and social thought, and for his legacy at the Global Drucker Forum in the form of the Charles and Elizabeth Handy Lecture Series.

Treasures from the Charles Handy Drucker Forum legacy

By Richard and Ilse Straub with the Drucker Forum Team • December 29, 2024

For 15 years, Charles Handy did us the enormous honor of choosing the Drucker Forum as a privileged platform for delivering his message to the world, and particularly to the younger generation in which he had such faith. Following up on our initial announcement of Charles’ passing Charles Handy (1932–2024) , we are honored to share a selection of his key contributions to the Forum with our wider community. Charles’ brilliant keynotes at the Drucker Forum have become legendary. Normally accessible only to members of the Drucker Society, from today they are available as recordings to the wider public for a period of 30 days. At the first centennial Forum in 2009, Charles talked about his debt to Peter Drucker while outlining his own fundamental management concepts that he had developed over the years. Two years later, he touched on the ideas of Adam Smith and demonstrated how much more to them there was than the celebrated “invisible hand” of self-interest. In his landmark closing address in 2017, pursuing a thread developed in his 2015 book The Second Curve, he called for a management reformation that would turn it into a tool for the common good – thus drawing the first contours of what we would announce six years later as the Next Management . We took to heart his exhortation not to wait for great leaders but “to start small fires in the darkness, until they spread and the whole world is alight with a better vision of what we could do with our businesses”. Management’s "second curve" will be the focus of the “Charles and Elizabeth Handy Lecture Series” in 2025. Following the loss of his beloved wife Elizabeth in 2018 and a severe stroke, Charles was much reduced in mobility in his last years – but not in his determination to continue spreading his message of hope to the world. He couldn’t participate in person in the Drucker Forum 2022, but he participated in a moving online interview with his son Scott, who directed young actors in a short performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by Beckett to illustrate some points. Charles also contributed valued digital articles for our blog and for Drucker Forum partners. Even during the most difficult period of his life he continued to write and develop his ideas in weekly columns for the Idler magazine. This entailed first memorizing the article, then dictating it and finally reviewing it by having someone it re-read to him – a remarkable feat of memory and determination. The article is a jewel and most appropriate for Christmas and the season of self-reflection. Have a wonderful Christmas, happy holidays and a healthy and prosperous New Year.