Is woman the future (of leadership) for man?

Where will men be in all this? Tomorrow’s organisations will more diversified, more horizontal, with a broader mix. How will men find their way in this new environment? Four questions for a reappraisal.

Why must men question themselves?

Whatever the sphere, it means making an effort to adapt to a change of environment. Or you’re in for a shock. “Some managers may have behaved in a toxic way,” says Joanne Kennedy, Chief of Staff at Sanofi R&D. “In my company, despite their high-performance, managers have been dismissed for bad behaviour that jeopardised team commitment.” At a time when organisations are reinventing themselves, “men need to work on themselves,” says Florence Dupré, Global Healthcare Officer at La Poste Groupe. “For example, why don’t they offer business positions to women more easily?”

Karine Lair, CEO of Oasys Dirigeants, notes that things have already started “to move” nonetheless. She is seeing “much more participative approaches; a humility some managers didn’t have before; the disappearance of a former paternalism, and fewer clones in the phenomenon of co-optation.” She adds that “the ones who support gender equality initiatives are always the CEOs, and they are often men.”

Is there a need for training courses specifically designed for men?

Support for women managers (coaching, training, etc.) is now standard practice in big companies. Some programmes are mixed-gender. Adecco’s internal network “Adelles” is one of these. The one set up 15 years ago by Delphine Henry, the current Engie Home Service Deputy CEO, is now mixed. And Florence Dupré “encourages all men” to take a training course to “break the bias.”

But should there also be training courses designed for men, as there are for women? This is not a provocative question. Like women, men have specific issues to discuss. Like women, they might feel freer to approach them first in single-sex committees. “Men need support too,” says Lily Lu, Human Resources Director at Hilton Worldwide. “They also need to be well looked after.”

What would men stand to gain?

What emerges is an acceptance of their fragility. This is the key to authentic leadership (see elsewhere): allowing yourself to be the real you, breaking away from the old automatic reactions, getting rid of gendered attitudes. This change seems necessary to achieve a “friendly environment,” to quote Béatrice Chavanel, VP Diversity and Inclusion at Renault Group, and a more fluid organisation: Karine Lair would have found it unthinkable “ten years ago, to see men leaving meetings at 5 pm to pick up their children from nursery school.”

Do men need masculine models of authenticity?

Women managers stress the importance of role models to identify with a successful figure and truly appropriate this idea of success. So do men also need to be inspired by model behaviours to achieve authentic leadership? Karine Lair cites the example of Christian Streiff, former CEO of Airbus and PSA Peugeot Citroën, who talks about his burn-out and stroke in his book J’étais un homme pressé (“I was a man in a hurry”), freely adapted for the screen by director Hervé Mimran with Fabrice Luchini in the lead role: “He becomes authentic, acknowledges his faults, and admits that he has reached the end of his tether and can no longer be a boss.”

Men need support too.

Lily Lu, Hilton Worldwide