Feminine Leadership
Are you tired of the old masculine model of leadership? Top-down, hierarchical, rigid and devoid of humanity? Do you believe strength can be shown in more nuanced ways than power games and domination of others? Do you believe that cooperation, nurturing qualities, and empathy should define leadership today? Do you believe the time has come for women to step up to the plate and lead our world? Or perhaps you are a man who wants to find a better way of being in the world, that can be at once a powerful leader but also more supportive and empowering of the women leaders in your life?
Whether you are male or female, we all need to understand how to cultivate our feminine leadership capabilities and to bring both ourselves and our world back into a more unified harmony that honours the strength and potential of both men and women.
Our world needs new ways of thinking about leadership. The old school, top-down, hierarchical and command and control ways of leading just don’t stack up anymore. And, they are utterly exhausting for us as leaders.
We need to embrace more feminine styles of leadership. Yes, we need more empathetic, nurturing, a greater understanding of the collective good over short-term and self-interested thinking, and for our workplaces to be supportive places for individuals to collectively flourish. But feminine leadership is more than this. Feminine leadership is also the ability to deal with complexity, to see the bigger picture without getting caught too much in the details, the capacity to have a larger view of the world and not just what is right in front of you. It is to have a long-term vision and the capacity to enroll others in that vision, taking them on a journey far beyond what you thought was possible.
Feminine leadership is something that both men and women need to learn and feel comfortable demonstrating.
Our world is in need of a rebalance – and men are increasingly feeling this too. Both men and women are yearning for lives with more balance, a greater sense of depth and meaning, a role in caring responsibilities, and both personal and professional opportunities to allow their own humanity to flourish.
Our founder, Caroline Watson, is the very embodiment of feminine leadership, someone who leads with care and compassion and with a larger view of the world and what we most need. She is also happily married to an enlightened husband with whom she has a real partnership, both personally and professionally. Caroline knows first hand the challenges of what it means to be a woman in leadership, but she also has a nuanced understanding of the complexities of relationships between men and women across all cultures, and how we best need to balance the realities of how men and women express both masculine and feminine qualities.
Caroline’s own authenticity in sharing her journey in understanding her own leadership, and how to work in partnership with men, creates space for you to have a more authentic engagement with the reality of lives for men and women today and how this more nuanced understanding can be harnessed for more effective working relationships.
Our world is crying out for a healthier relationship between men and women, to dismantle the old ways of hierarchy that never really served either men or women.
Never before has it been more important for men and women to redefine their roles in society, and to work in partnership with each other to empower the potential of both. It calls for a new level of leadership.
Our world needs it, our workplaces need it, our homes and families need it, and our marriage and partnerships need it too.
The skills you will gain
Cultivating the feminine
For too long, women have been made to feel that they need to ‘act more like a man’ in order to succeed in the business or political world. But all that is changing as we begin to realise our world needs more of the empathetic, nurturing and capacity for complexity that is the hallmark of feminine leadership
Our world in balance
Feminine leadership is about enhancing the very best of feminine qualities with a renewed way of thinking about what it is we want to take from the masculine paradigm - and what needs to be discarded. It’s about a subtle shift in understanding what true leadership is and bringing our world into greater harmony
Managing complexity
It’s often a joke but it’s often true that women are able to manage complexity far more easily than men. An ability to see the nuance in a situation, to realise it’s not always black and white, and to be comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty in times of great change.
Resilience
Historically, women have been much more able to weather the great changes of our times, willing and able to move forward into the future, instead of clinging to the past. We need this freshness of thinking to inform the way both men and women make decisions
Being a better carer
Changing demographics, with more women in the workplace, and an ageing population, means that both men and women need to negotiate professional and personal spheres with greater subtlety. Critically, we also need to see a more caring and compassionate world.
Communication and partnership is key
For our world to function better, we need true partnership, whether that’s with men and women directly, or in healthier patterns of collaboration, not competition. We also need to avoid swinging between extremes, neither the aggressivity of the masculine paradigm nor the passivity of the feminine.
As with all of our programmes, we bring creative and participatory tools to develop a more empathetic understanding of the situation, rather than a purely intellectual approach. This might mean doing a role play that encourages women to ask for a pay rise; or a ‘role reversal’ empathy exercise that allows both women and men to more meaningfully understand each other’s perspective, curating our lives as ‘gardens’ not ‘rocket launches’ to create more harmonious working patterns for us all. We might use the techniques an actor uses to help both men and women communicate in more assertive ways, neither men nor women reverting to the extremes of aggressivity or passivity that serve neither sex.
Feminine Leadership
Bringing our world into greater harmony and balance, for both men and women
Programme Description
A bespoke programme for both men and women to cultivate the feminine and understand the right relationship between masculine and feminine paradigms in our world right now. We focus on the skills that both men and women need to master to have that greater balance in our personal and professional lives and to ask of ourselves how this rebalancing could have a profound impact in our world.
Includes
12 monthly Masterclasses on the topic of feminine leadership, lead by the Centre’s founder, Caroline Watson
Possibility to integrate relevant modules from our ‘Mosaic’ template for leadership development
Access to online learning programmes for the duration
Pre- and post-programme design and support for implementation
Additional video content
Membership to our exclusive network of ‘higher order’ leaders who have also been through the programme.
Key Outcomes
Greater capacity for both men and women to harness the strengths of feminine and masculine leadership
Empowered communication skills that seek for something else beyond the extremes of stereotypes of male aggressivity and female passivity
More nuanced conversations about managing complexity and our tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty
Greater sensitivity to the strengths our partnerships can bring us
Practical tools for managing caring responsibilities and work-life balance in a relationship
Time Commitment
36 hrs facilitator led learning
+ 6 hrs one-2-one coaching
+ 30 hrs e-learning
Participant Profile
Male and female leaders
Type of Delivery / Location
Hybrid online & offline learning; we offer opportunities for women-only groups, men-only groups, as well as mixed groups
Group Size
5 -20
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