Are Women Really Better Managers?

Workforce Management
July 29, 2009

Although I’ve worked for many more men than women over the course of my career, it’s hard for me to make a flat statement that one sex is clearly better at managing and leading than the other.
The men I have worked for have run the gamut from bullying and boorish to smart and sensitive, with every shade in between. In fact, I find it much easier to rank my many male bosses on a good-to-bad scale because they seem to fall into such a ranking fairly easily.
That’s not the case with the women I’ve reported to. Although I had a great personal and professional connection with every one of them, their strengths and weaknesses always seemed to be very polarized. Or to put it another way, the things my female bosses were good at they were REALLY good at, while they things they weren’t so good at could drive you to despair.
For example, although I have had at least one bullying male boss who was always glowering and ready to get violent, I’ve never had a guy I was working for ever actually resort to a physical attack. It was a female boss—one who I still today admire as one of the best managers I ever worked for—who actually balled up a newspaper while screaming at me and fired it at my head. This happened on more than one occasion when she was unhappy with my staff’s work.

Posted by John Hollon on July 29th, 2009 at 8:08am in Workforce Trends, Talent Management, Management Skills Permalink


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