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Assertiveness, dominance, competition, risk-taking: these are the hallmarks of traditional leadership models, and theyre overwhelmingly associated with men. From corporate boardrooms to political offices, the archetype of a strong leader has been built around commanding voices, hardliner decisions, and lone-wolf thinking. This framing isnt just outdated: its dangerous. The traits weve long sidelinedcompassion, collaboration, long-term thinking, humilityare no longer soft skills. Theyre survival skills. And theyre overwhelmingly found in what are often called feminine leadership styles. In fact, businesses with gender-diverse executive teams are 25% more likely to outperform financially, and companies led by women CEOs have historically delivered around 223% return on equity over 10 years, versus 130% for companies led by men. Alternatively, Gallup research indicates that employee performance can drop by up to 30% under authoritarian or top-down management. Its clear that aggressive leadership styles are not working, and that inclusive, emotionally intelligent leadership must be embraced by organizations that want to achieve greater success and longevity. But there are other leadership styles that are redefining what effective leadership looks like. Collaborative Leadership: Power With, Not Power Over Aggressive leadership thrives on control: the leader speaks, others listen. But in a world where the best solutions come from diverse voices and interdisciplinary teams, this model falls short. Collaboration isnt just a buzzwordits a prerequisite for success. Consider the turnaround of Korean Air in the 1990s. Plagued by fatal crashes, the airline discovered that junior crew members were too deferential to challenge their captainsa cultural deference to hierarchy that proved deadly. When Korean Air implemented training that encouraged teamwork and empowered all voices in the cockpit, its safety record transformed. In modern organizations, collaborative leaders flatten hierarchies and empower team members to think, speak, and lead. They listen more than they talk and make decisions informed by a wide range of perspectives. They know that authority doesnt mean having all the answersit means creating the conditions for the best answers to emerge. Purpose-Driven Leadership: Inspire, Dont Intimidate The traditional model of leadership motivates through pressure: meet your targets, or else. But this approach is a major driver of disengagement. According to Gallup, close to 80% of the global workforce is disengaged at work, costing businesses $8.8 trillion in lost productivity every year. Many are not just unmotivated: theyre working against their employers. Intimidation is costly, but leaders who inspire with purpose reverse that trend. Take Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, who focused not just on profits but on sustainability, health, and human well-being. Paul expanded the circles of connection and well-being, see circles in figure below. He ended quarterly earnings reportsan industry norm that drives short-termismand embedded social and environmental goals into the companys core strategy. The results? Unilever outperformed competitors and built one of the most admired brands in the world. Purpose-driven leaders dont lead with fear. They lead with vision. They make people care not just about what they do, but why they do it. In a generation of workers increasingly driven by values, this is your competitive edge. Emotionally Intelligent Leadership: Strength Through Empathy For decades, leaders were taught to leave emotion at the door, or at best at home. But the truth is, emotional intelligence is one of the most powerful tools a leader can have. The ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotionsboth your own and othersis essential for building trust, diffusing tension, and guiding teams through uncertainty. Nelson Mandela is perhaps the most powerful example of this. After 27 years in prison, he emerged not bitter or vengeful, but focused on reconciliation. His leadership brought South Africa back from the brink of civil warnot through force, but through empathy, humility, and vision. In business, emotionally intelligent leaders like Satya Nadella at Microsoft have reshaped company cultures by prioritizing learning, psychological safety, and inclusiveness. These leaders dont mistake kindness for weakness: they understand that people do their best work when they feel seen, heard, valued, and respected. The Future of Leadership Is Balance The traits that aggressive leaders dismiss as weaklistening, collaborating, empathizingare actually the ones that foster resilience, innovation, and long-term success. Masculine or feminine, theyre simply effective. And theyre precisely what todays challenges demand. The real question is whether leaders can meet the momentand the moment calls for balance of a wider range of leadership skills, our full human leadership potential. We need leaders who can be bold and humble, decisive and inclusive, confident and caring. For too long, leadership has rewarded those who speak the loudest and dominate the room. The future will reward those who can listen, connect, and bring people together. The age of aggressive leadership is over. The age of collaborative, purpose-driven, emotionally intelligent leadership has just begun. Ask yourself: What masculine and feminine leadership traits do I lead with? Are they balanced and effective to drive performance?
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E-Commerce
Every weekday morning, across the country, parents fall into the same routine. A line of SUVs and minivans snakes around the school. Engines idle as mothers and fathers inch forward, phones in one hand, coffee in the other. Kids sit in the back seat scrolling on their own phones, waiting for their turn to be unloaded by a staff member in a reflective vest. One by one, the doors open, backpacks are lifted, and the vehicle pulls away. The factory-like process is orderly, efficient, and utterly dehumanizing. The school drop-off ritual is a powerful curriculum, teaching kids that they are packages to be delivered and picked up, and that they require constant adult supervision. In 1969, about 48% of children walked or biked to school. By 2009, that number had dropped to just 13%, according to Walk, Bike & Roll to School statistics. Today, the figure hovers around 11%, largely unchanged for a decade, per Rutgers University. Even among children who live within a mile of school, walking or biking has fallen from nearly 90% in 1969 to just 35% in 2009. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}} Whats going on? The shift didnt happen because children stopped being born with legs or because they stopped wanting independence. Schools were moved to the edges of town, often on cheap land surrounded by parking lots and wide arterial roads. Roads were engineered to maximize long-distance automobile throughput and minimize short-distance walking and cycling. Parents were persuaded that it was unsafe to let kids walk or bike, even though most child fatalities happen while they are passengers in vehicles. Logistics management Line up, inch forward, unload. It looks like logistics management because it is logistics management. We have turned the beginning of a school day into a miniature supply-chain operation. This logistical worldview carries profound consequences. Physical health: Walking and biking to school once provided children with reliable daily exercise. Today, U.S. teenagers walk about 5 miles less per week than teens did in the 1990s, The Wall Street Journal reports, and rates of childhood obesity have tripled since the 1970s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mental health: Independent mobility builds confidence. A child who can walk to school learns to navigate space, manage risk, and take pride in independence. A child chauffeured twice a day learns dependence, passivity, and helplessness. Safety paradox: Parents believe driving is a safe way to get around, but an average of three children are killed and another 445 injured every day in traffic crashes, National Highway Transportation Administration’s traffic safety data shows. Packages dont talk back, dont take detours, dont linger to climb a tree, don’t stop to pet a dog, and don’t notice the smell of honeysuckle on the way to class. Car dependency trains kids to be passive and dependent cogs in a machine. The irony is that the very efficiency parents cravefaster lines and predictable behaviorincreases congestion, frustration, and risk to everyone on the roads. The alternatives We dont need a time machine in order to reintroduce childhood independence to our culture: Walking school buses are groups of kids who walk together, accompanied by one or two adults. This approach offers safety in numbers while teaching kids independence. Bike buses or bike trains do the same with cycling, helping to normalize two-wheeled commutes for kids. School siting reform could reanchor school construction back in neighborhoods, instead of exiling buildings to distant parcels accessible only by car. The morning line is more than a nuisance; its a ritual of indoctrination. Every inch forward in that queue trains children to see themselves as cargo, delivered by others, rather than as capable individuals navigating their world. But if we flip the script, if we give kids back some autonomy, the benefits ripple outward. Parents reclaim sanity. Communities reclaim healthier, calmer streets. And children reclaim one important thing the car line strips away: freedom. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}}
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E-Commerce
Who discovered the lightbulb? If you answered “Thomas Edison,” you’re not aloneand you’re also not quite right. Despite conventional wisdom that associates great inventions with lone geniuses, breakthrough inventions are team efforts. Incandescent light bulbs existed before Edison was born. His patent built on prior versions of the light bulb, aiming to make it practical and affordable. Even then, it wasnt a solo achievementEdison collaborated with a team of skilled collaborators, known as the Muckers, whose contributions have largely faded from memory. Yet it was Edisons name on the patent, and thats the version of history that stuck. Were suckers for lone genius narratives like Edisonsthe brilliant scientist, the fearless military general, or the savvy CEO. The version of history we glean from popular books, movies, and the internet attributes greatness to single individuals. But individual greatness is rarely the whole story. Research shows that teams are the main creators of new knowledge across most industries. New ideas dont emerge fully formed from the mind of a single personit takes collaboration and teamwork to develop them to their full potential. In reality, the engine behind sustained successwhether in science, business, or governmentisnt a singular mind. Its a well-designed team. The illusion of individual success We tend to over-attribute both success and failure to individuals. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error: we explain peoples behavior by their traits, rather than their context. If a product flops, we blame the CEO. If a startup takes off, the founder is a genius. We rarely ask about the teams that surround them. It gets worse. Even inside groups, people regularly overestimate their own contributions to collective endeavors. In one study, researchers asked each team member to estimate what percent of the groups success they were responsible for. The total? A whopping 235%. Thats a lot more than 100%! Our individualistic tendencies lead us to build groups and organizations around the wrong assumptions. If you believe success comes from star individuals, you hire stars and hope for fireworks. But for complex problemsand most of our work now is complexit takes more knowledge and skill than any individual has to solve it. Thats why we need to put the conditions in place for individuals to combine and build on what each alone can bring. What good teams do differently In my research, Ive found that high-performing teams arent built through charisma, happy accidents, or trust falls. Theyre designed for success. There are four key elements of group structure that maximize your chances of creativity: Composition: Many teams are composed haphazardly, based on whos available and office politics. But the best teams are small (i.e., three to seven members) and have a task-appropriate, diverse mix of knowledge and skills. Goals: Its hard to achieve a common goal when members have different ideas about where theyre headed. Thats why clear, measurable, vivid goals are a critical antecedent for building teams that can outperform individuals. For instance, innovation at NASA spiked when John F. Kennedy swapped the vague goal of, advance science by exploring the solar system, to the vivid goal to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Task design: Teams can bring ideas to life when they have well-designed tasks that require a variety of skills, give members autonomy over how to conduct their work, and allow members to see progress toward their goals. For creative work, poorly designed tasks are repetitive and control the process, like a manufacturing assembly line. Well-designed tasks give teams whole pieces of work and the freedom to explore, such as the design firm IDEOs effort to redesign the shopping cart to better fit the needs of users. Norms: Too often, groups are places where members fall into bad habits. In many organizations, workers are used to sitting passively in meetings. They worry that experimentation and suggesting new ideas will be scornedor even punished. But the most innovative teams actively fight these norms. Leaders actively encourage members to share their ideas, experiment, and learn from one another. And the battle against norms toward conformity and the status quo never ends. IDEO, for instance, plasters reminders of these norms on the walls of their buildingsthings like defer judgement, encourage wild ideas, and build on the ideas of others. The real edge We live in an era that celebrates ideas: TED Talks, startup pitches, visionary founders. But ideas dont execute themselves. And many great ideas die in bad teams. The reverse is also true: A good team can turn a mediocre idea into something extraordinary. Not because theyre smarter, but because theyre structured to think together better. The great innovations and businesses of today were never built by a solitary lone genius. For all the credit Steve Jobs gets, he couldnt have built Apple and its collaborative innovation engine without the help of his cofounders and teammates. As you dig deeper into stories of great innovations, you almost always find a great team just under the surface. The next time youre tempted to credit a lone genius, remember the people behind the curtain. The collaborators, the editors, the dissenters: the ones who made the idea betteror made it real. Good ideas matter. But good teams matter more.
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E-Commerce
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