Tag: Leadership

An omen for friendship

This past week, it felt like I was running on an empty tank and a faulty engine. I was slow to wake in the mornings and distracted myself with doomscrolling or mindless mobile games. Finishing tasks was an uphill battle. The air around me was heavy; I kept finding myself holding my breath for some reason. Sadness followed me around. By midweek, I pinpointed the source of my woe. I was anxious, grieving and lonely.

Before the week started, I had just finished writing an essay. It was a personal achievement of some sort. I hadn’t written a reflective essay for years. But the beauty of the act of writing also became my downfall. Writing is a medium of thinking and feeling, and I kept thinking about the problems I encapsulated in my essay and feeling anxious even after I finished writing it.

Amid this hum of anxiety, somehow, as I returned to work after the holidays, a sobering and long-overdue realization dawned on me: To be a responsible leader, I can’t expect friendship from my team. For someone who craves deep connection with the people I spend time with, and boy do I spend most of my hours with people I work with, this realization took some life force away from me.

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It’s Sunday evening, and I’ve found solace and lightness. I’ve been forcing myself this week to get out there and find the connections I crave so deeply, and the universe presented me with gifts.

An hour and a half drive to Depok to attend a lecture got me a hug from a friend and a coffee date. “Let’s catch up,” she says. My heart swelled when she marked the event in her calendar as self-care, family and friends.

A visit to the Palmerah area for a meeting turned into a reunion with a trusted mentor and an old friend. “You can lean on us; we don’t expect you to be anything but Odit”.

A video call with an old friend, back and forth update texts with another.

A cozy brunch at a friend’s apartment became another reunion event, which made me feel glad I fought my inclination to flake.

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This morning, after years of ignoring Maria Popova’s newsletter in my inbox, I opened it and read her writing about Simone de Beauvoir’s deep love for her friend Zaza. It sent me down a rabbit hole of The Marginalian, and I found she is publishing a deck of divination cards. It’s a fascinating project. She would use an old 19th-century ornithology book written by James Audubon, illustrated by his wife. Maria would read it at night before bed and in the morning would cut words into a divination.

Maria said she doesn’t believe in signs, but she believes in omens. I’m with her on that. As I was grieving unattainable friendships and strengthening the ones I have, I received her divination.

Reading her and discovering her Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days was an omen for me that I would fill my love cup with friendship, which I did and will continue to do.






Women make good leaders. Can more of them rise to the top?

As the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of female state leaders are managing this historical crisis in their respective countries better than their male counterparts.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s clear, direct and empathic communication style got the country to come together to contain the new coronavirus. German Chancellor Angela Merkel based her response on science and has been blunt on how COVID-19 will stay in our lives for a long time. Under the leadership of President Tsai Ing-wen, China’s neighbor Taiwan prioritized public health and managed to keep the number of cases below 500 and the death toll to seven people.

Meanwhile, strongmen such as presidents Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Joko “Jokowi” Widodo in Indonesia underestimated the coronavirus in its early stages, dragging their feet in taking action and downplaying the health risk of COVID-19 on the people in their countries.

Many scholars have argued that the world is safer and more humane where women are in charge. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman wrote in the Harvard Business Review that research shows women score higher than men in most leadership skills.

Women leaders not only show effective leadership capabilities that are IQ-based, such as having technical or professional expertise and the ability to analyze problems and come up with solutions; they also more commonly show behaviors that stem from high emotional intelligence, such as displaying high integrity and honesty, inspiring and motivating others, and collaborating and developing relationships — behaviors that build trust.

Yet despite this, when we look everywhere, few women are in decision-making positions. Nearly half of the world’s population is women. But in 2020, out of 193 states that are members of the United Nations, only 12 are led by women.

Around the world, legal discrimination against women, unfair social norms and attitudes, and the controlling of women’s bodies by patriarchal communities and governments continue to create structural barriers to gender equality.

For example, according to the UN’s Economic, Social and Cultural Organization, more girls than boys are not getting an education. And according to the World Bank, in 2019 less than half (47.7 percent) of all women participated in the labor force. Of those who have survived these hurdles, completing their education and securing jobs, many don’t rise to leadership positions.

In 2019, the world saw women holding only 29 percent of senior management roles in corporations. In addition to the gender inequalities in education and labor participation, women dropping off from the labor force after marriage and motherhood and low confidence among young women over their leadership capabilities contribute to this gender gap in leadership positions.

So what can those who are already in leadership positions do to make sure more women sit in the top positions? I am among few women who hold a top position in an organization.

I lead The Conversation Indonesia, a nonprofit media startup that shares expert knowledge to help the public make informed decisions.

Learning from my journey as a woman leader as well as from the experience of my female peers who are raising children, I believe leaders in the public, private and nonprofit sectors can provide at least three things to enable more women to reach senior positions in organizations.

First, create a work culture that promotes work-life balance. Organizations can provide a flexible work arrangement, allowing workers to decide where to work and, if possible, when they start and end their work hours. COVID-19 social restrictions show that many work tasks can be completed anywhere with an internet connection, making office attendance unnecessary.

Flexible work arrangements will not only support more women, who disproportionately take on the bulk of domestic duties in the family, to stay in the workforce; it will also provide opportunities for men to contribute more to domestic chores and parenting.

In urban areas like Jakarta, female labor force participation rates are highest in women between 25 and 29 years — reaching nearly 67 percent. But when women enter their 30s, the rate drops to 53.82 percent.

According to research by economist Diahhadi Setyonaluri 53 percent of women who have been married cite marriage, motherhood and family as reasons for their decisions to quit their jobs. Having to forgo long commutes and long hours at the office will help women avoid having to make the difficult decision of giving up their careers.

Second, sponsor competent women workers to take on projects that can build their leadership skills. A lifetime of being told to be dutiful often makes women reliable workers. But this might also stop them from believing that they deserve to take charge.

Many women often don’t apply for a position unless they convinced that they are 100 percent qualified. Meanwhile, men are more confident in trying out for higher positions even when they are underqualified. Zenger and Folkman’s research also compared how men and women assess their confidence. They found women under 25 have lower confidence than their male peers, and that this gap closes at 40.

Having someone believing in their abilities provides the initial boost for young women to increase their confidence.

Third, after identifying emerging women leaders, provide them with resources, such as mentorship, coaching and training, to improve their leadership skills. Some people show leadership traits from a young age, but for many people, it’s a learned skill acquired through experience.

Mentor them along the way and watch them learn from their mistakes. We have seen enough men without principles running the show.

We need more leaders with humility, self-awareness and empathy, traits commonly found in women. Imagine if more leaders — regardless of gender — exhibited these traits. Society would be better off as a whole.

*** 
Executive editor, The Conversation Indonesia and a 2019 Asia-Pacific Obama leader

This article was published in thejakartapost.com on Saturday, June 13, 2020, with the title “Women make good leaders. Can more of them rise to the top?”. Click to read: https://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2020/06/13/women-make-good-leaders-can-more-of-them-rise-to-the-top.html.